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🎙️ In this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast Does Europe … Buckle up, kids — it’s a Eurotrip of geopolitical drama, awkward shoutouts, Tesla trauma, and non-alcoholic beer slander. Lieven joins from the safety of his Belgian treehouse (fine, it’s his home office, but let’s pretend), while Joel parties with O'Douls and Chad tries to pronounce révolution  without pulling a muscle. They tackle the big questions: What happens if NATO invades itself? Is Salesforce slowly eating Adecco’s lunch... with a spork? Why are Teslas getting spit on in Belgium? And who let JD Vance’s wife handle Greenland diplomacy? Also: shoutouts to teenage chatbot prodigies, stern warnings from wine-drinking Europeans, and the existential dread of American isolationism... all delivered with the subtlety of a Jack Daniels tariff and the grace of a Ronaldo dive. Oh, and if you thought France demanding the Statue of Liberty back was peak satire — think again. Listen now, before someone sanctions your earbuds.🎧 We out! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:39.722) Yeah. Three guys who could single-handedly solve the demographic crisis in Europe. Hey boys and girls, you are listening to the Chad and cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your cohost Joel partying like "Le Pen" Cheesman. Chad (00:53.761) This is Chad. Viva rev, I can't even fucking say it. Revolution. So wash. Revolution. Joel (00:58.672) Have a nice day home. Lieven (01:02.924) And I'm leaving. My government warned me against your government. Joel (01:08.664) And on this episode, Europe gets trumped and Elond, Adecco feels the sales force and factorial says no espionage here. Let's do this. Chad (01:24.529) even I don't know how you I don't know how you put up coming on a podcast with two Americans with everything that's happening. Everything that's happening. Joel (01:29.52) He's in the bunker in the tree house. That's how he does it. He's in the tree house drinking Duval. That's how you cope in Belgium. Lieven (01:36.526) Actually, I'm just in my home office drinking beer without alcohol, which is kind of... Chad (01:43.477) That's a big thing now, especially with the kids. The kids, they like the alcohol-free beer, and that is something that a Gen Xer just cannot understand. I don't know. Joel (01:47.002) Kids like it. Lieven (01:53.71) No. Joel (01:53.922) I will admit that, we've come a long way from O duels. Remember the O duels Chad, like that was the only non-alcoholic and then I Heineken came out with one, they, they are, I do, I do partake occasionally at my age. I'll do the non-alcoholic and they, taste, they taste pretty good. Yeah. I go to soccer again. I go to, I go to the future ball with a non-alcoholic beer and I party and I party, baby. party, speaking of which isn't, isn't there some European football tournament going on? Chad (01:58.316) yes, yes, so bad, so bad, yes. Lieven (02:01.933) Chad (02:08.001) It's soccer games. Yeah, it's soccer games. Lieven (02:16.334) you Joel (02:23.716) Like a UEFA or something, right? okay. My bad. My bad. was wondering if Belgium was in or belt. Yeah. If they were in it or not, if he's getting ready for game time, short answer. No. Chad (02:25.723) There is, that's my shout out. me, you push up, push up. Short answer. No. but yes, there, there, there is, there is a giant green elephant in the room that I would, I would like to, I would like to talk about. So can you go ahead and roll that beautiful beam footage? Yes. Lieven (02:28.898) this month. Joel (02:44.496) Okay, the green elephant in the room. Enjoy everybody. Chad (03:48.587) Now he goes on and on and on of all these reasons why. JD Vance is like, Denmark's not treating you well, Greenland. And he didn't, we didn't even go to the, to the healthcare and education part. Right. So, as we talk about leaving, do you like skiing? Joel (03:50.778) Leaven's like, things are rough in Denmark. Geez, that's horrible. They got no benefits there compared to us. Joel (04:11.652) Not in Greenland. Lieven (04:11.886) Actually I'm leaving this Sunday again. Chad (04:14.785) The European lifestyle, as he'd said, your body's not broken down in your like mid sixties or seventies before you can actually enjoy retirement. You can enjoy it every single year, about six weeks out of the year. So that, that to me was fairly poignant. What, what do you think? Yeah. Joel (04:32.889) What's your take on the whole Greenland thing, Leaven? Lieven (04:36.11) This movie was rather enjoyable, but I also heard the comment of some people from Greenland and South saying, just like the Americans treated their Native Americans that good. And we don't think it would be an improvement to be part of America the way you treat minorities and one after the other. And they definitely do not want to be part of America. They want to be independent from Denmark to a certain extent, but they do not want to be part of America. Chad (05:02.721) Mm-hmm. Lieven (05:04.738) So I think if Trump is serious, serious and taking it, you have to take it by force. then I think some, mean, if he actually wants to land troops there, Denmark is going to react and Europe is going to react. is something I can't imagine. Joel (05:10.064) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:19.984) What are the NATO rules if a NATO country invades another NATO country? How does that work? What happens with Article 5? Lieven (05:25.388) I was thinking about the same thing, Chad (05:27.777) And you know, article five has only been used once and that was, yeah, 9-11. That was when all the European, all the other NATO countries came to help our asses. Right? It's never been used before. So, I mean, it just, yeah, it's, I think if they did use it, it would have to be for Greenland, that's for sure. Joel (05:31.952) 9-11. Joel (05:46.864) thought it was, wasn't it weird to send JD's wife? I didn't get that at all. I didn't understand. Was that just a charm offensive? It's, yeah, well, yeah, it's weird. It's all weird. Chad (05:55.625) No clue. No. Yeah. Yeah. was weird, weird, wild stuff. And we won't even get, we won't even get into the Canadian stuff. So let's, let's hit shout outs. Lieven (05:55.918) It didn't work. Joel (06:03.866) Weird, wild stuff. Alright. Chad (06:10.803) And Leaven has a special one. Leaven has a special shout out. Joel (06:13.646) He does a familial shout out. Lieven (06:14.592) Yeah, indeed. My shout out goes to my 14 year old son, Jan Julius van Ibenuizen, who created an AI chatbot. Jan Julius. Jan Julius, yes. It's two words with, so what's it called? A colon in between, a dash, hyphen, I don't know. Whatever. But they're twins actually. Joel (06:23.298) Say that again. What's his name? Jen Julius. Is that two words? Two words or one? Chad (06:26.529) Jan Julius. Sounds Roman like a Roman emperor. Jan Julius. Mm-hmm. Yep. Hyphen. Yep. Yep. Joel (06:37.05) Little hyphen. Lieven (06:44.128) They're twins. we have Ottojan and Jan Julius. And since I'm a marketeer, I needed to come up with some kind of an explanation. So they have one part, one part the same, which is the Jan part, Ottojan, Jan Julius. Because they used to be one and then they split up. And you know how it goes with twins. OK. Anyways, anyways, this is not why I give me shout outs. It's because one of those twins, Jan Julius. Joel (06:49.9) Orange Julius is next. Chad (06:50.16) huh. Chad (07:02.816) Mm-hmm. Lieven (07:10.476) He created a chat bot, which is actually so good that House of HR has used it to put it on their homepage. So if you go to www.houseofhr.com Joel (07:16.633) What? Lieven (07:21.792) And I'm going to repeat this www.houseofhr.com. On the bottom right, you can actually open the chat bot, which was created by a 14 year old. I know so many companies have chat bots and that's not rocket science, but he did something which I really liked. He scraped all the jobs from our companies, added them to the bots and had the bot study on them, them index them. And now you can use natural language to find a job. Like I've been working in construction for 20 years and all my back hurts. Do you have something which might suit me? Joel (07:24.752) haha Chad (07:27.381) huh. Lieven (07:51.842) but which is less fatiguing, something like that. And then the bot will actually know what you mean and give you the right jobs. Or you can ask something about legislation to Belgian labor law and it will know about it because it's an open AI base. So it knows everything. That's cool. It's actually a good bot. And I said, thank you so much, Jean-Julius. This will have a great impact on my bonus. That's why I gave him a shout out. He gets a shout out. I get a bonus. Chad (08:04.65) Nice. Joel (08:13.977) I love it. Chad (08:17.729) Uhhh... Joel (08:18.394) Well, don't tell zip, don't tell zip recruiter cause they'll want to like fire, Phil and make Julius the new, zip recruiter chat bot at that rate. Lieven (08:24.046) We sell it to all interested companies as long as you're not a competitor from House of HR. Joel (08:32.848) There you go. you're a vendor interested in a chatbot, hit up Leaven today for that family connection. Maybe some Chad and Cheese discount coupon. Who knows? Lieven (08:37.004) Yeah. Lieven (08:41.922) But of course, if you are an American company, you will have to charge some import taxes, but it will still be a bargain. It will still be a bargain. No worries. Joel (08:46.32) Ha Joel (08:50.842) Very nice, very nice. Chad (08:51.539) Alright... Go ahead, Cheeseman. Joel (08:55.28) All right. Speaking of failed job boards, let's talk about ad Zuna former, former sponsor of the Chad cheese podcast. Zip recruiter. Isn't the only one feeling the pain of a worsening economy ad Zuna, the UK based job aggregator also doing business in the U S I think that's their second biggest market experienced a ready for this 33 % drop in revenue for fiscal year of 2024. That's a lot of beer that could buy. they attributed it to a turbulent macro economic environment and reduced recruitment advertising activity. even blamed Ukraine and Russia for part of their lack of, of, of results. The good news is they did implement cost controls. That's Latin for firing people usually, but, they weren't, they weren't specific on that. And they increased some of their cash reserves in light of probably those. reduced, uh, head count, uh, cost controls that they did. Uh, in November, you'll remember adzuna required France based social media recruitment advertising company, CESA S E I Z A no, no, no word yet. If CESA is going to break them back from the Rubicon or not. That's a little Caesar joke. Everybody. don't know if anybody got it, but yeah, shout out to add Zuna. Hopefully, hopefully better times are ahead this year. Chad (10:09.824) Didn't have a Caesar Chad (10:21.505) I think it's interesting that they're blaming Ukraine and Russia when to be quite frank, I think the biggest impact that they've seen, this is a rumor kids, but I've heard on the waves from sources that the biggest impact has been no hiring from our government. And they have some government contracts that literally have just gone silent. So all that revenue, when you're cutting heads, we're not hiring, guess what? Joel (10:29.808) Mm-hmm. Joel (10:46.542) Mm-hmm. Chad (10:49.225) Organizations like Adzuna who actually service the, U S government are going to take a shot too. Joel (10:54.476) And we don't speak bad about the government, everybody. Don't speak ill of the government. Otherwise, those contracts will never come around. Chad (10:59.87) So hence, hence that not being said in that. So, go ahead and let's get to my shout out that, Cheeseman almost, almost ruined. shout out to the Iberian Peninsula who is representing during the UEFA Nations League. That's right. Portugal and Spain will be repping the Iberian Peninsula against Germany and France in the semi-finals. Next match is. The big Portuguese, next matches, next matches are scheduled for the June 5th with Germany facing my beloved Portuguese and June 4th, June 5th with the France facing Spain. I already got planned out where I'm going to be in my favorite bar in Portugal. Long live Euro Chad kids, long live Euro Chad. Joel (11:32.452) Lot of fans. Joel (11:46.128) Mm-hmm. Joel (11:53.872) Which brings me to events. I want to know when Eurochad is coming back. Because we've been dealing with American Chad for a while, and I'm a little bit over it, frankly. Chad (12:01.876) I've got to deal with it 24 seven. So Jesus man. Uh, and so does Julie. Uh, yeah. So we're going to be an unleash in early May. And then after that, we're going to be ejecting back to, uh, to Europe for probably three or four months. And while we're over there, we will enjoy some rec fest. you going to rec fest in, Nebworth? Joel (12:16.656) Mm-hmm. Lieven (12:23.766) I think I'm in holidays. That's the problem with Europe of course, we're constantly in holidays. Chad (12:25.663) good for you. You'll be skiing. You'll be in the app out somewhere. I'm sure. Lieven (12:33.856) I guess. What is it exactly? I know us on holidays, but I don't know which holiday. yeah, we're gone, we're gone. I won't be skiing then, but... Chad (12:37.138) early July. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (12:37.584) July 11th, something like that, July 10th, 11th. Chad (12:42.026) You Joel (12:43.376) Viva la Euro chat. Who's favored to win that thing at this point? Chad (12:48.833) Oh, right. mean, Spain, Spain is the, uh, the current champs. Uh, Portugal has won it before. I believe Germany's won it before. Um, but, uh, I mean, and it's a very, fairly young tournament. Uh, but yeah, I don't know who's favored right now, but, uh, France. Yeah. Yep. We're all just playing. Yep. France and Spain. mean, these are four pretty damn good, uh, pretty damn good teams. Germany's really shit the bed over the last. Joel (12:54.18) Yep. Joel (13:05.217) Is Ronaldo still? Is Ronaldo playing? Yeah. Joel (13:13.402) Yeah. Chad (13:17.678) a few years but seems like they're playing pretty strong in this tournament. Joel (13:23.126) And is Bruno on Portugal? Okay. My kid loves Bruno Fernandez, the captain of the Reds, captain of the Reds. That's that's man you for the Americans. I'm so I'm so cultured. I'm so cultured. All right, kids. Speaking of cultured, let's talk some Trump and Elon, shall we? here's a sampling of some of the headlines, from this week in America. ready? Tesla sales tank. Chad (13:26.027) yeah. Fernandes. for Dandesh. You Chad (13:38.337) I can tell. Joel (13:52.374) in Europe as rival offerings and Musk blowback hit demand. StopElon.EU was launched in protests of Elon's anti-EU propaganda. France is calling for Trump's America to return the Statue of Liberty. I'm not sure how that would work. US tells European companies to comply with Donald Trump's anti-diversity order. Chad (13:57.409) Hmm. Joel (14:16.964) Not sure how we can force that. There's not a tariff I can think of. Trump brings European wineries to their knees even before tariffs hit. Portugal issues travel warnings for US and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Chad, what's your take on all the Trump Elon headlines from the past week? Chad (14:38.113) Yeah, I think pretty much half of Europe have actually had travel warnings out. Europe is about $155 billion per year for US tourism, kids. that's not a good look. That's not a good look on us. And also remember when we used talk about wineries and stuff like that, Trump doesn't drink. So he doesn't understand the actual impact. Right. And during the last Trump tariff from 2018 to 2021, Brown Foreman based in Louisville, Kentucky, an American based family controlled publicly traded company and one of the largest in the spirits and wines business. So back in 2018, they decided to absorb the cost of the tariffs. They're going to try to try to make it work. But they ended up with annual expenses of $80 million that they paid on those tariffs to be able to keep. The price is the same in Europe because they wanted to ensure that Europeans continued to get their spirits, especially the Jack Daniels and whatnot. Melissa Gordon, the CEO of MGX Beverage Company said today's distillers employ about 25,000 people. And that doesn't even include the individuals who work in the world of ingredients, packaging, sales, logistics, those types of things. So there are tens of thousands, if not more at risk. in the United States alone over these crazy fucking tariffs. And then at the end of the day, talked about idiot boy, frigging Tesla boy. Tesla quarterly sales were down 41.1 % in France, 55.3 % in Sweden, 12 % in Norway, 55.3 % in Denmark, and 49.7 % in the Netherlands. And all of this without tariffs. Joel (16:16.867) Elon. Chad (16:35.989) This is just, this is just bad optics. This is just shit that makes him look obviously bad where they don't want us to, to buy his car. So this is to me, it's all over the place. I, again, I don't want it to be crazy. I want it to be boring. Can we go back to boring? Can we go back to boring? Joel (16:39.268) Mm-hmm. Joel (16:54.797) Yep. Lieven (16:58.4) Yeah, boring was good. We like boring. Yeah, predictable. Yeah, like a stable growth of 7%. A stable growth of 7 % of my investments were perfect. And now suddenly it's tanking all because of... well. Chad (17:01.993) I like, I liked it better than this. I don't like inflation. Like stable. He was, he said he was a stable G. What's that? Joel (17:03.992) I like predictable. I like predictable. Yeah. Chad (17:16.607) Yes! Joel (17:21.424) Trump doesn't drink, but he does play golf, which is why maybe you're not hearing a lot of Scottish, tariff talk. God help, God help me if the Scotch tariff goes through. That's not good for me. good news though, LinkedIn, LinkedIn opened up an office in Dublin. So things are looking good. Kids, things are looking up. Don't get too, don't get too sad about all this. Lieven (17:25.528) Nah. Lieven (17:33.358) I could smuggle. Chad (17:42.293) killing me here. Joel (17:47.76) Emmanuel Macron recently gave a really good speech, leaving, it was probably big news there. Basically he said that Europe can no longer live on the quote dividends of peace, which basically means the dividend piece after World War II, where America kind of was this nice cover military spin, cetera. Macron saying that's over. He also said that, Europe was going to have to have a major rearmament. Chad (18:17.419) Mm-hmm. Joel (18:18.192) So go to your history books and go learn about Europe in around 1914. And you may be looking at what is coming to Europe. Globalization is under attack. You look at the Syria or a signal gate here in the U S where we're talking about military plans. I'm sure, leaving, you saw this story over in Europe. One of more, one of the more telling things about that whole conversation was the disdain for Europe. There were talks about. Chad (18:38.667) Yeah. Joel (18:45.9) I can't believe we're bailing out Europe again. Lieven (18:48.716) We were shocked really when I read that. Joel (18:52.014) That was the headline. I'm in Europe, if I'm in Europe, the headline for me is the administration of the United States hates us. And it was all there in black and white. So for better, for worse, like Europe's kind of on their own going forward. And I, I appreciate Macron and what's coming out of Germany, in terms of military spending, but we're, to me, we're headed to a place in Europe that is really unstable, really volatile. Lieven (18:59.822) It was a man. Joel (19:21.966) Russia, Ukraine, Putin's been talking about removing the West from Europe for 25 years. That's a huge threat. I still think China is a major threat. think Trump is like, we want out of the European business. We need to focus on Asia. We need to put everything to Asia, which leaves Europe alone in some respects. Now he hasn't said we're out of NATO. He hasn't totally gone out of the game. But if I'm Europe right now, I'm looking at these headlines. And I know it's fun to say like, statue of Liberty, want it, we want it back. And like, that's fun to say, but I think we're, I think we're headed for really dangerous times in Europe. I think the largest military in, in greater Europe is Turkey, which is kind of on the south side near Russia. Poland is spending a lot on, on defense. Germany will of course, their nuclear weapons, assume. So I, I'd love to hear from leaving on this cause he lives this every day. And I know that he's a. historical thinker like that. everything that I see points to a deglobalization, you're kind of on your own now. We're leaving this space. There's going to be a void. We have $34 trillion in debt we have to take care of. And that's just the reality. Whether Europe steps up, I guess we're going to find out if I'm right. Levi, I'd love to know your thoughts because you live in this on a regular basis and I know you have an appreciation for history. Lieven (20:51.146) Mm-hmm. And we still appreciate America saving our SS twice, but, I hoped for a chart time. Anyways, the way America let us down. Wasn't necessary. mean, it totally makes sense that you have, your hands full with China and that Europe needs to stand up for itself or whatever. But, the way Trump did is. It was necessary. mean, he could also just have told us, careful because within five years you'll be on your own. have to reschedule our troops and we have to refocus everything. But he just told Russia, now is the time because in the next four years, Europe doesn't have any supports to expect. Something like that. That's not a way to keep Europe safe. Actually, things are changing very fast now. Germany for the first time gave up on its anti-debt policy. They're actually going to borrow lots of money to invest in military. So there will be a new, what's it called in English? In Dutch we say wap en wetloop, when they all buy weapons against each other. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. So this is going to cost tons of money, money which could have been spent on so much better ways. So the whole world is now going to... Chad (21:52.705) Mm-hmm. Joel (22:05.838) Rearmament? Chad (22:08.008) yeah, rearm, yeah. Lieven (22:16.782) re-enarm itself? Why? Because some stupid people thought this was necessary. It's not. mean, in Europe, if you would have asked us five years ago or three years ago, is Russia a threat? We would have said, of course not. Terrorism is a threat and maybe some fanatics are a threat and maybe the Middle East could be a threat. Iran and North Korea, but not Russia. But suddenly everything has changed. And now with the United States backing out, Joel (22:35.568) Mm-hmm. Joel (22:41.241) Mm-hmm. Lieven (22:47.306) There's actually, it's actually again a possibility that, that they want to take, go back to like the Soviet States, like, Eastern Europe should be part again of the ex Soviet Union of Russia. So we are actually starting to, not going to say be afraid, but it's actually becoming a possibility, which was out of the question a few years ago. Okay. So we don't like Trump. That's clear. Joel (22:56.356) Mm-hmm. Joel (23:13.168) Thank Chad (23:13.867) Yeah. Lieven (23:17.166) And I think now I hope they call it the coalition of the welling. think France, it's still a pretty big country. You have Germany, you have England and UK. And like you said, Turkey, I'm not sure if you can trust those, but it's a different mentality. Poland, definitely they're strong, probably the strongest in the whole of Europe because of their constant awareness of Russia being around. You have the Baltics, which are Chad (23:28.417) Mm-hmm. Joel (23:35.3) Mm-hmm. Chad (23:44.065) Mm-hmm. Joel (23:44.112) Mm-hmm. Lieven (23:45.814) very small but pretty brave I think, the Nordics also. I don't think Europe is an easy target even without the United States and they're going to invest a lot and they're going to do it very fast. But it wasn't necessary. This is such a waste of everything. Chad (24:03.233) Yeah. I think it's interesting real quick though, that's, mean, Russia's never been known for their, their technology. Let's just say that, right? They've never been known to have the best weapons in the world. They just had a lot of them, right? They just produced a lot. It was always about the numbers. They could overwhelm you with the numbers. It wasn't just about throwing a million soldiers at you. was all these, all these T, know, 74 tanks or Joel (24:03.3) Yeah. What are your, what are you? Joel (24:20.538) Just the most, Chad (24:32.768) 47 tanks. That's the thing is that France, Sweden, the UK, Germany, they're actually some damn good weapons systems that they've created tanks, airplanes, the Eurofighter over the years. So I don't think again, remember Russia is still three years into the fight with Ukraine. Do we think that they're going to try to spread throughout the rest of Europe? No, but I would love to see boots on the ground from European countries in Ukraine to just snuff this out really quick. I do think though, and this is a rebalancing to some effect, where there was an over reliance on the US, period. There just was an over military reliance on the US. There were no contingencies in place, obviously. Lieven (25:22.574) Sure. Chad (25:29.045) Those contingencies need to be put in place and there needs to be a rebalancing. We over here in the US need to have better healthcare and better education, which is what you guys have had for years. So hopefully we can get some rebalancing. I just don't think that this was the way to go at it. Isolationism is a great way to lose intelligence, lose allies and lose wars. Lieven (25:40.27) Hmm. Lieven (25:53.154) And China is going to be the big winner because they are being so nice to Europe right now. And Europe is easily charmed today. look at the sales of Tesla. They tanked 50%. And it's not because of the electric vehicles sales is down. BYD is going up extremely. My wife has a Tesla. We want to sell it, but nobody wants to buy it. Chad (25:55.401) They are. There's a vacuum. Chad (26:04.33) Yeah. Lieven (26:18.24) If you drive a Tesla in Western Europe, and maybe I can only speak for Belgium and the Netherlands where I'm often, people spit on it. The cars are getting vandalized, which is totally not okay because my wife, for example, we bought a Tesla when Elon was still a very innovative, in my opinion, even nice guy. liked him. Yeah. But suddenly he became the arm stretching fascist, but he's weird. Chad (26:29.814) Right. Joel (26:30.096) Yeah. Joel (26:36.078) Normal dude. Chad (26:37.185) Not a kook, yeah. Chad (26:46.175) I think that's the best example though. really do. You take a look at Tesla, it had a great trajectory. And now everything that's happening, mean, China's getting, I mean, they're filling the vacuum. Lieven (26:59.15) And they're not just copying anymore. China used to be copying everything and now they're running ahead. Their cars are actually better today. Their electric vehicles are better than Tesla. They will be self-driving before Tesla is, I mean, on a global scale. Okay. So, and of course, and this is maybe getting back to our own business in Western Europe, companies are refusing Teslas as a company car. Chad (27:03.115) No. Lieven (27:28.45) So they are now saying this is not an ethical choice. we take it away from our company cars list. I know in the United States it's different, but definitely in Belgium, a company car is part of your salary. It's something because it's less taxed than the labor. So it's an easy way to give your employees a nice gift. You can get a company car. More than, I think, two-thirds of the white-collar people have a company car. So it used to be a lot of Tesla. Chad (27:40.427) Mm-hmm. Lieven (27:56.994) And now companies are selling hundreds of Tesla at once because they don't want to be associated with that company anymore. No, of course. Yeah, but it's actually happening. So I don't care. It's not like we'll have a problem with that, but we want a different car. We don't want to drive that Tesla anymore. Chad (28:01.277) is why you can't sell yours because they're flooding the market. Joel (28:14.128) Livan, there a sense of, I mean, you guys have enjoyed benefits, whether it's retirement age and sort of, is there a fear that if you're spending all on defense, there won't be money? Economically, is the continent worried? Can we afford the benefits and the luxuries that we've had previously if we're spending more money on tanks or not so much? Lieven (28:37.076) The biggest losers will be companies like, sorry, countries in Africa, because the money we used to give to, I'm not sure if I should be calling it charity, but you know, development of foreign countries, this is going where they'll be getting the money. You can't sell it to our people that we're going to make healthcare more expensive. We can't cut down on education even more than we already did, in our opinion. But This culture and development of foreign countries is where we'll get some money. It won't be enough. So definitely pensions are being looked at right now because people are getting older and they live longer and they get far too much. So there was a big strike in Belgium yesterday because the government wants to put a break on the pensions for the government workers. So, and they get a lot really. So... Joel (29:36.218) I expect more of that. Lieven (29:37.738) Yeah, and we'll have some difficult times for sure. Chad (29:40.895) We take a look at a lot of the European countries are their nixing contracts with us countries for buying military, military armaments or vehicles or what have you. That's going to go back to France and Germany and all the countries that are doing that, which I mean, again, the money is going to be spent in Europe as opposed to going across the pond. It's going to create jobs. it's going to do some, some, some really good things, I think for Europe. Lieven (29:56.29) Definitely. Joel (30:01.306) Mm-hmm. Chad (30:10.209) in, in the, in the next few years, I mean, just, just in quick, quick response to what's happening again, still on your borders there in Ukraine. Lieven (30:17.294) And it's not only. Joel (30:18.788) Yeah. The guy making the Volkswagen can now make tanks and artillery. Yeah. Chad (30:22.57) Yeah. Lieven (30:22.636) Yeah, it's going to happen, but it's not only on military, a very stupid example. I got, I got five calls a day from mostly American companies trying to sell house of HR some technical shit. Yeah. Yeah, whatever. And, I always, refuse and always nice. And now I actually can say, I'm sorry, given the way your government is treating us, we cannot be sure that's the. Joel (30:36.57) software. Lieven (30:51.516) that we have a relationship on the long-term. will not invest in software. are from an American company. You must understand that. And they all react very shocked. But for me, it's kind of a joke. was going to, wasn't going to buy it anyway, but people start to react like that. Why would we trust American companies? What if Trump comes up with something else after the import taxes? What if he wants to, to text some digital solutions, whatever. So people are getting anxious. So. Chad (30:55.009) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:17.402) Yeah. Lieven (31:19.636) looking local and buying european will become a thing again Joel (31:24.004) I get it. I get it. Lieven (31:26.798) And if we can flip them the bird we will. Chad (31:27.073) Big breath big breath Lieven (31:35.262) Nasty, nasty. well. And by the way, I know something about recruitment. I've been in the business for over 20 years, but my father was a wine merchant. So I've been drinking wines for over 35 years. When I was 12, I went to Bordeaux with my father to taste wine and to select, yes. So I grew up with wine and the whole wine taxing thing. Chad (31:39.179) waiting for a. Chad (31:50.507) Okay. Chad (31:56.371) nice. Lieven (32:04.632) We don't like it either, because we used to send our very expensive wine to the United States, or the really inferior wine. What does he expect from us to drink it ourselves? No way. I will just, yeah. No, no, but it's a problem. If you touch Frenchman's wine. Chad (32:16.797) yeah, no, no. Joel (32:22.658) Okay, I'm gonna take us to the break and then we'll come out. Chad (32:26.337) Okay. Lieven (32:26.914) Okay. Joel (32:29.646) All right. So much going on. let's take a quick break guys. If you haven't, subscribed to our podcast, please do so and leave us a review while you're there on your favorite podcast platform of choice. Joel (32:45.626) All right, Chad, have you seen the new Salesforce ads with Matthew McConaughey? Chad (32:54.177) I don't think I have. I don't think I have. No, I have not. That's for sure, yeah. Joel (32:55.504) about AI anyway with Woody Harrelson. No, when he tries on the outfit. Well, you need to watch more TV, my friend, get off the tick tock and watch some, watch some old school TV. Anyway, stop, stop, stop the sex Chad for God's sakes. anyway, Salesforce is in the news in our space, this week in, in Europe, the Deco group and Salesforce are launching a new company. Chad (33:05.953) Stop taking those walks and enjoying the nice fresh air. Joel (33:24.57) To help businesses integrate human and digital talent, the company will leverage data workforce insights and Salesforce's agent force to enable strategic workforce planning and management. The goal is to create a comprehensive suite of capabilities for data-driven decision-making, simulation, recommendation, and oversight of integrated human and digital labor workforces. Chad, your thoughts on this new company that has yet to be named, I might add. Chad (33:56.193) Feels like a Trojan horse. mean, is there, is there a threat that Salesforce will learn what's necessary and then either just acquire a Deco or kick them out or kick them to the curb? I mean, I understand this is a new company, but why hold onto the old baggage of a Deco and traditional staffing when they are not going to make the pivot that they need to make. And if they learn from they, Salesforce learned from a Deco. Joel (34:16.24) Mm-hmm. Chad (34:26.017) Much like we've seen the Chinese learn from VW on how to make cars and now they're killing it in the car industry. Why wouldn't you just turn that around? I mean, not to mention you've got that, but then you also have, you know, the, the direct hiring companies building their own agents on platforms like paradox fountain, gems, smart recruiters, and many others. Then you have the other threat. of EOR companies like Rippling and Deal who are poised to transition into staffing and employee lifecycle platforms. This seems to be a vital thing that a Deco needs to do, but they feel like that the Titanic. There's no way that they can turn away from the iceberg. I don't see them turning into a digital company and I don't know why Salesforce would carry their baggage for them. just doesn't, other than the data. But then after they have that, what the hell do need them for? Joel (35:20.132) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (35:28.89) So Deco is the second largest global staffing firm. So this is kind of a big deal. This isn't a little bitty company, you know, taking a new initiative and Salesforce of course is a, a very large software company, that's global. Levin is particularly interested in, in this move and, and, interested to hear what he has to say, but these are two really big companies getting together and creating a new company, a new organization. think that's really, really interesting. Salesforce is also partnered with Deloitte. Chad (35:32.481) No, it is big. Joel (35:58.62) for, so I assume sort of a similar initiative. So Salesforce has figured out like this whole digital workforce thing is going to be a reality and we want to be on the forefront of that. So we're going to go partner with as many staffing companies as possible. It sounds weird to say, could I hire an, a Deco to, provide me with digital employees? It's not that nuts. Like, Hey, Chad (36:26.453) No. Joel (36:27.266) I need a team of digital marketers. need to post shit on social. Like to me, this is a move to the future. It's a bet on the future to say like, there will be companies that need workers, but they don't want human workers. They want a digital workforce. And we want to be a solution that they can go to and say like, well, we have these people you can hire. But if you don't like that, we have this digital workforce that you can hire. And if it's not going to be us that disrupts us, it's going to be somebody else. So I like the move. I agree with you, Chad. There's no record of a Deco killing it with acquisitions and innovation and digital shit. So the, you know, the jury's still out on whether or not this works. But in theory, for the second largest staffing company to partner with Salesforce, to create a solution where companies can have digital workers like Sign me up for that. That sounds like something that a lot of companies are going to be interested in. Chad (37:25.035) But Salesforce doesn't need them though. That's the thing that I don't get because they've got agentic already built into their system and how many hundreds of thousands of companies do they already have in their platform? So I mean, that's the thing is I don't know why they understand. That's why I need leaving to weigh in. Why does Salesforce need a Deco right now? Or will they be shedding them along the way? Lieven (37:47.34) Well, maybe, and I think probably because Adecco is paying the biggest part of it. But I think HR has a very specific domain and HR has their own suppliers and people and employees are part of HR's responsibility. So I think it does make sense for Salesforce. They have IT as a client mostly, and maybe some marketing, but they don't get in touch with HR. They don't know human resources that good, Adecco does. Chad (38:10.059) Mm-hmm. Lieven (38:16.608) If they team up, Salesforce has the technical knowledge and Adecco has the clients and they can come up with a proposition. Makes sense. But problem is. Chad (38:22.112) Mm-hmm. Lieven (38:29.174) Stuffing is a complex business. If you hire human beings and you have to sell those humans to other human beings, it's complex. It doesn't have to be that way with technology. You can't copy humans. You have to find them. You have to hire the right person. You have to sell the right person to your client. It's difficult, but you can very easily copy software. So if you get one perfect digital marketeer, and with digital, mean really a robots marketeer, you can copy that robots. Chad (38:40.779) Right. Chad (38:47.509) Mm-hmm. Joel (38:57.232) Mm-hmm. Lieven (38:58.734) in 10 minutes, 100 times. So why would you have to use a staffing company which is specialized in mass? Because Adaco is offering massive solutions of massive employees. They put 300 people at work in one company. This isn't Adaco's way of thinking. But I think they were doing an exercise, which we at House of HR used to do a few years ago. We had an exercise, how can we kill accent jobs? Chad (39:05.601) huh. Lieven (39:25.9) I became up with now jobs at a platform, the digital platform, hiring and matching people totally without human interference. And I think they did the same thing, something like that, a strategic exercise. How is AI going to impact the world of work and how can we react? Okay, we are into staffing. We're into putting the best person at the best place. We're into talent and maybe they say, maybe talent doesn't have necessarily has to be human. Talent can be technology as well. Chad (39:32.799) Mm-hmm. Chad (39:48.971) Mm-hmm. Lieven (39:55.426) So we're going to provide both hybrid teams consisting of both humans and technology robots. And that's a good way of thinking. But I think if people can get rid of clients, can get rid of article, they will get rid of article because they always think it's too expensive. Why do they have to make money on the people we put at work? And okay, they have some trouble finding them and make sense, but they won't accept it with those technical. Joel (40:00.333) Mm-hmm. Joel (40:17.732) Mm-hmm. Lieven (40:24.718) profiles, I think. So I think this is not going to last very long, even though I love the idea. And I definitely believe that hybrid teams are the future. And if we deliver humans, why couldn't we be delivering digital employees? Problem is the clients will be able to develop them themselves. If my 14-year-old can develop a chatbot and some basic agentics, he will be able to do the same when he's 21, but to a much better scale. So this is only going to get easier to copy and to develop. Joel (40:54.02) Yeah. I mean, the other, the other angle of that is, you know, Salesforce owns Slack and we know that, we know that people hate having multiple tabs open with multiple solutions. if they can, if they can integrate this thing into Slack where your digital workers are within Slack and you manage them in Slack, like everything else at your company, like that would be, that would be kind of a killer to the idea of like, well, anyone can do it. Cause not anyone has Slack. Like there's, aren't many. Chad (41:13.057) That should be too easy. Yeah. Chad (41:22.113) That's good for you. Joel (41:22.608) platforms like that. I think there are some unique qualities to this that aren't easy to replicate. Lieven (41:26.531) Thanks. Chad (41:28.455) Here's the thing that gets me though, is that HR is always slow to adopt, right? Salesforce already has connections with the CRO, the CFO, the CMO, and the CTO. So if I can start to talk to my CRO about, look, why don't we put these agents in place to be able to make your Salesforce faster, more productive, more efficient. As matter of fact, you'll probably need less salespeople. That's where you're going to sell it. Lieven (41:38.029) Hmm. Chad (41:56.533) You're not going to sell it to the HR person. They've got those contacts already. So to me, again, this, this, marriage just doesn't make much sense unless it's a data play upfront. It's a Trojan horse. They kick a Deco to the curb. And the next thing you know, they're selling this shit direct to departments. Joel (42:11.397) Yeah. Joel (42:16.43) I do agree with that Salesforce is a potential wolf and sheep's clothing on this one for sure. But love the commercials Salesforce love, love the commercials. All right. Keeping, keeping within Spain. That is a Spain Jersey, right? Portugal, Portugal. It's a Spain colors. All right. The golden, the golden red. There's no green. I Of course, Chad gets the custom, the custom fucha ball Jersey. Chad (42:19.391) Yeah. Fuck yeah. Chad (42:25.825) I'm gonna go look it up. I'm gonna go look it up. Shit. Chad (42:35.051) This is Portugal. Ronaldo. This is a custom, so it's, it's off. It's off. Joel (42:46.672) Well, anyway, Barcelona based factorial has secured $120 million in non diluted funding, sorry, diluted funding to boost sales and marketing, to be repaid for, from new customer profits. That's usually Latin for we're coming to America, everybody, amid HR industry drama. Hello deal. Hello. Rippling lawsuit, factorial aims to grow. Chad (42:49.557) Ahem. Chad (43:10.07) Mm-hmm. Joel (43:14.298) Drama free. We'll see how that goes in case you missed it. Factorial raised 120 million back in 2022 at a $1 billion valuation, which means we get to play the unicorn sound bite. We don't get to do it often anymore. Chad, your thoughts on the factorial news this week out of Barcelona. Lieven (43:26.498) That's been a long time. Chad (43:30.113) We don't get to do this often. We used to. Lieven (43:31.777) No. Chad (43:40.897) Yes, 419 million in total funding from Crunchbase. So backstory to the listeners, just in case you don't know, Rippling is suing competitor Deal for corporate espionage. Yes, we're talking about toilets, cell phones. can't, you can't, all of this happening in Ireland. Anyway, it's, it's, it's not a great look for either brand, especially when you have an ass clown like Parker Conrad running one of them. Anyways, is Joel (43:58.266) Banana in the tailpipe, everything. Chad (44:09.535) the rippling deal drama too much for the market. I mean, we actually heard when we were at transform, some companies were saying, wait, you know, we have them both. talking to them, but we're kind of, we're going to put them at arm's length right now. Is this the perfect opportunity for a company like Factorio to rock up some of that market share from these two of the fastest growing unicorns in the market rippling and deal? Is this factorials chance? To actually get there and crunch base is predicting that factorial gets acquired, not IPO. So all of that makes for a wonderful story. Now it'd have to be one of the, one of the bigger, one of the bigger acronym companies, ADP, SAP, Salesforce. Anyways. Joel (44:46.554) Hello. Did their crystal ball say who was going to buy factorial? Joel (44:56.272) Salesforce. Salesforce. So this, it's an interesting story. these guys came out of COVID. They had a free version, which would apparently went bonkers. they, went to a pay. Yeah. Cause there was like, need to like hire remotely and manage these people remotely. So they had this free service. So all these SMBs signed up. now they have a paid version, obviously 13,000 businesses. They've grown six fold, in the last year. And I agree that, that the deal. Chad (45:07.915) Mm-hmm. Chad (45:13.249) 60,000 users. Chad (45:18.047) Yeah. Joel (45:33.336) rippling drama creates an opportunity for them, but I'm not sure they even need it. I, I think this, I think this market is shuffling pretty nicely. I mean, if you're looking at job sites, you could almost sort of say rippling and dealer or monster and career builder of old and, and factorial is like Craigslist and all the small guys, all the SMBs there, they're all Craigslist made a lot of money, dude. Don't, don't, Chad (45:51.435) Mm-hmm. Chad (45:57.864) it's so good. Joel (46:02.788) Don't punk on indeed or punk on Craigslist. But if they can crack the global SMB market, they don't need to be the enterprise level deal rippling solutions provider. They can have a really nice lane in that space. I generally hate SMBs, but when you talk about a global opportunity, I hate SMBs a lot less than I do now. So I think that factorial is in a really great spot. Chad (46:02.881) No, I I know. I know, I don't know. Yeah, no, no, yeah. Lieven (46:06.392) Mm-hmm. Joel (46:31.95) I mean, dealer rippling could be like, if rippling goes public, get some cash, they could come in and get factorial and provide SMB services and integrate that with rippling deal could probably do the same thing. So I think this is a really exciting space to watch. Aside from Trumpism and tariffs and global conflict, the global marketplace for work is really interesting. It'll be fun to watch over the coming years. Leave on your thoughts. Lieven (47:01.614) I disagree with you on the SME, like or not liking. I love SMEs. I think each it's for an SME, it's much easier to grow than for a huge company. So, it's a fact. mean, it's just you, you don't lose time with those. I see that at Hours of HR, we used to be very small company. Now we're medium sized and we are 3.8 billion, something like that. Yes, I know. know. Joel (47:04.581) Yes. Chad (47:12.693) Tell me about that, tell me about that. Joel (47:28.556) stop. stop. We're just a mom and pop organization in Brussels. Lieven (47:31.214) When I started, it was only 400 million. Anyways, but, um, but it's, we are still a collection. can't say it like that, but of 52 very well organized small companies. And it's much more fun being part of a small company than of a huge enterprise in my opinion. And they are going much faster and they can change direction much faster. And for me. Chad (47:47.265) Mm-hmm. Lieven (47:58.476) It's easier to make a small company big than to keep a big company big because communication lines are getting longer and more difficult and to be innovative in a big company is very frustrating. You have to sell your great idea to your boss and the boss probably will steal it if it's actually great and try to sell it to his boss, cetera. It's frustrating. So, Amis don't have these problems, they have other problems by the way, but in these troubled times, it's very good to have 13,000 as Amis as a client. I think it's much better than having 1000 large companies because if you lose a few, it's less troublesome. So I think they're doing the right thing and 13,000 companies plan starting at $8 per user per month. You might make some revenue and you can only grow because those small companies probably will grow faster, will add more users and they won't like changing software because it's just too big of a hassle. So I think if this was a buyer-sell, I would probably buy them. Joel (49:00.122) Levin likes it small. Lieven (49:02.326) Yeah, if it can grow Joel, if it can grow. Joel (49:04.048) But, but, oh, it, yeah, it can grow. Uh, loves the small businesses, but he loves the big dad jokes, which brings us to this episode's dad joke with a European vibe. What do you get when you cross a Spaniard and an Iranian? What do you get when you cross a Spaniard and an Iranian? Chad (49:08.799) He's a grower, not a shower. The dad joke. Joel (49:34.411) Oil of Olay. Lieven (49:36.718) Yes Joel, thank you so much. We out. Joel (49:39.264) We out! Chad (49:40.395) We out.

Is the return-to-office push a brilliant comeback or just corporate slapstick? In this no-holds-barred episode, Dr. Jessica Kriegel, Culture Partners’ Chief Strategy Officer, joins Chad & Cheese to clown on outdated work policies, Gen Z’s “work-from-bed” ethos, and why mandating face time might just be a diversity disaster. From C-suite vs. HR showdowns to CEOs bailing faster than bad stand-up acts, Dr. Kriegel breaks down why clinging to pre-pandemic work culture is like dancing with a mop. Plus, we’re serving hot takes on remote work tech, corporate silos, and why upskilling is the only way to avoid being the layoff punchline. 💥 Tune in now—before your boss drags you back to 2019! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:30.963) Yeah, this is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house as we welcome Dr. Jessica Kriegel. She's the chief strategy officer at Culture Partners. Dr. Jessica Kriegel, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad (00:37.671) Hello. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (00:48.696) Thanks for having me. I'm so excited. It's dangerous. Joel (00:53.011) Yes, you've never heard our show, so I pray for you that you'll be able to make it through the end. But aside from never having heard our show before, what else should our listeners know about Dr. Jessica? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (00:58.446) Yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (01:06.094) cold intro. You've never heard our show. What else should they know? Well, thank you. Thank you. The danger has begun. I am, you guys fed me some lines about my intro. You were like, just tell them that you love jazz music and long walks on the beach. I love neither jazz music nor long walks on the beach. Chad (01:09.373) Hahaha Joel (01:11.377) We come to play, baby. We come to play. know you do too. So let's rock. Chad (01:32.617) Dr. Jessica Kriegel (01:33.45) I'm a keynote speaker. That's my thing. So I have a podcast of my own. It's a five minute daily podcast for CEOs kind of get their brief on what it is that they need to know. And I'm the chief strategy officer at Culture Partners. And we create clarity, alignment, and accountability around your purpose, strategy, and culture to get results. And Only Culture Partners does that. So there's my spiel. Joel (01:53.453) And I've never heard your podcast. So we are on equal footing. We're on equal footing. That's right. That's right. That's how I did. I I did my homework on this one. Let's, let's go right to the elephant in the room. we're here to talk about returned office. Jamie diamond CEO at JP Morgan, is in the news big time this week. Let's check out a clip of what he thinks about. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (01:57.07) How dare you? How dare you? And mine's only five minutes long, so it really doesn't hurt. Chad (01:58.281) I know, I know. See, we really had no excuse, Joel (02:20.452) returned office or work from home, means to his business. And we'll get your opinion on the other side. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (04:05.198) You Joel (04:36.509) Get off my lawn. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (04:40.366) So bitter. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (04:48.184) Wow, Jamie needs a nap, I think. Joel (04:49.415) All right. He needs a peri and a foot massage for sure. all right. All right, doctor. What do you think about Jamie's comments? Chad (04:54.025) needs more than that Dr. Jessica Kriegel (05:00.526) Well, there was two halves to that audio clip, right? I think the first half is total nonsense. In the second half, I agree with most of it actually. So I thought the ironic moment was when he said, that creates fucking rudeness. okay, like you right now, dude, is rudeness on top of your priority list. I mean, because he is just generally rude, right? Return to office. I mean, if that's really where we're focusing here is think of the language that's being used, return to office. back to work. It's regressive in nature. People are trying to go backwards to the way that it was pre-COVID as if COVID was just some pause. And now we can unpause and go back to the way that it was. Well, COVID transformed everyone and every business forever in an undeniable way. We've learned something and we have transformed and we can't go back to pre-COVID because we had COVID. And so what needs to happen is companies need to adapt. I mean, that is literally the biggest challenge that every company has right now is how do we adapt? This is one of the things we need to adapt to. And Jamie Diamond sounds like another boomer who is frustrated with Gen Z for not doing it the way that we did things around here, which is totally antiquated. Chad (06:17.137) Old work versus new work. mean, really, and it's interesting because as you listen to, to me, this is an entire leadership, kind of like 101, listening to a guy who obviously is incredibly successful, but he's been successful one way. And then you change the entire landscape on him. He's pissed off. He's pissed off because that's not how he learned how to do the job. He can't manage apparently remotely. Right? So he's used to Henry Ford, 40 to 40 hours a week, punching a clock. Hell, he said seven days a week for God's sakes. So how do we, how do we get, do we, do we just wait till all these boomers die before we can actually progress, progress into working more efficiently and actually working more humanly, being able to get off this call, go take my stuff out of the washer and put it in the dryer and then get back to work. Or I mean, I don't understand. What do we have to wait for till we actually move forward as opposed to, like you said, backwards? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (07:24.386) to wait. The second half of what he said, I agree with him, which is this is the way that JP Morgan does it. If you don't like it, then don't work here. And so that's their style. And that's their approach. There are a thousand young people, a thousand, mean, tens of thousands of young people who will gladly take a role and work 90 hours a week at JP Morgan so they can have it on their resume, knowing they're going to be totally burned out after two years and then they'll move on. But they've got JP Morgan on their resume. And that was worth the effort. Right. That is a That's a trade-off that, you know, free market capitalism works both ways, right? Employees get to opt in to the deal that they know that they're going to get there. But you look at Spotify with that famous billboard, we treat our employees like adults or whatever they said. They are already doing it the new way of working and the people who want to work there, work there. So everyone will find where they belong and whether it works in the long term. mean, Joel (08:06.279) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (08:17.772) I don't think you have to have a great culture to be profitable. think crappy cultures can be profitable too. And JP Morgan is evidence of that. But I think if you want to have kind of explosive transformative growth that navigates through these changing times, everything that's happening with the Trump administration is going to require adaptability. And if you demonstrate a lack of adaptability on a basic thing like RTO, where else are you lacking adaptability in other areas where maybe it's more critical? Chad (08:43.497) So real quick, you mentioned culture and having to be in the office, that's part of the culture, that's what you're gonna get with JP Morgan Chase. The thing is for me, from a leadership standpoint, I'm always thinking about how do I get the best talent? And you can't just get the best talent in where your headquarters is or where you are set up physically, right? So how do companies like JP Morgan Chase, how do they compete? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (08:48.91) you Chad (09:12.177) in the future when they, prospectively, are not going to get the best talent. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (09:17.09) JP Morgan has a name that they don't have to compete. They're going to get plenty of top talent, I think. I look at a different company like Shurm. Let's talk about Shurm. Probably a lot of... So I interviewed... Sorry. I interviewed Johnny C. Taylor right after they announced that they were going to do the IND. That interview is on YouTube if you want to check it out. And that day I was asking them how the company is doing, what they're doing just for their own hiring. This is not even about the EI, right? They said, we've got 26 open positions. Chad (09:22.387) Okay. Joel (09:26.809) That escalated quickly. Chad (09:41.779) Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (09:47.288) for content writers. I was like, wow, that is a lot of open positions for a company the size of Shurm for content writers. And they had to be based in DC. I was like, where are they going to find 26 people? That company will struggle more than JP Morgan, which everyone wants JP Morgan on their resume. Does everyone want Shurm on their resume? Maybe less so. Chad (09:54.313) Mm-hmm. Chad (10:10.759) Yeah, yeah, good point. Joel (10:10.963) I do, I do think from a branding branding perspective, brand means something more than it did 10 years ago. And it means whether it's Spotify or JP Morgan, and where we work is sort of based on, I want a remote experience? Do I want a hybrid or do I want the full at work and brand is something that's going get me there. One of things I do think that is debatable and I want your thoughts are that young people are hurt by work from home. You know, they can't, they can't. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (10:36.888) Yeah. Joel (10:38.503) meant there's no mentorship, there's no serendipity, there's no hanging out after work. And I was young once and I can tell you that if I was 25 working from home, I would not have sort of been as good as I am today because I wouldn't have been able to have those experiences. What are your thoughts? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (10:57.048) Well, I may be a bad example, but I've always worked from home. I've literally never had an in-office job. I was working at Oracle. Well, first I was working at Taleo right out of my MBA, and then that got acquired by Oracle. And I was always at home. But we had a work from home culture. So I did have many mentors, and I had lots of interactions. And I was fine. However, When I was CHRO at a technology company that was hybrid, we got a lot of complaints from young people saying they were feeling left behind and reflecting exactly the thoughts that you had. So I think it depends on how well the company is at supporting your employees. Some are doing it well and some aren't, right? Chad (11:42.727) I think that comes down to the selection process. Not to mention, what it feels like is that we're working more toward time as opposed to the objectives in the outcomes. So if it only takes me 20 hours to do something that it takes somebody else 40 hours to do. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (12:00.354) Yeah. Chad (12:07.591) Why am I going to have to come in and stand at the water cooler and go have conversations with my buddies instead of doing work? Because I'm already done. I remember actually having salespeople who already hit their goal and I sent them home because they wouldn't leave everybody else alone because they were like, well, I'm already 120 % of goal and I still got 10 days left. Okay, go home. Right? So I don't understand. It just feels like Joel (12:25.811) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (12:26.062) You Chad (12:34.651) The objective and the outcome is what we should be caring about, but we're not. We're caring about having butts in seats and working 40 hours. Why is that? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (12:44.078) because we're bad leaders. 85 % of leaders are bad at leadership. And that's the problem. So when you're in person and the way that it used to be back in the old days, we were in the action trap. The action trap is results come from actions. So let's focus on what actions we need to do to get results. And that is really easy to manage in person because you're just looking at activities and managing activities. And now in order to do this when people are home and you can't manage their activity, Chad (12:53.095) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (13:13.154) because you're not looking at them, you have to manage to the objective and you have to manage to the mindset. So instead of just focusing on action, you have to look deeper. What gets people to act in the way we need them to act consistently in a sustained way over time? Well, that's what beliefs they hold about the nature of work and what they're doing. And so how do we drive the right beliefs? And I mean, that's hard work. That's really advanced leadership and requires a certain amount of self-actualization to be able to even ask that question. Joel (13:37.596) you Dr. Jessica Kriegel (13:42.766) let alone influence the answer to that question for the people that you work with that aren't even in front of you. So we didn't even master 101 management and now we're trying to do 201 and everyone's like, this is way overwhelming. Let's go back to 101 because at least we had a shot at that. Joel (13:55.559) you Joel (13:58.835) Well, it's funny that you, mentioned leadership, because our, new president, has been in the news because he has a few thoughts on return, to work and, by chance, he'll be able to probably lay off a lot of people who don't want to come back to work, but he had something he had to this to say, and I want to play it and also get your opinion on this. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (14:57.55) Yeah. Chad (14:58.557) Sounds like what he does. Joel (15:05.619) thoughts. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (15:05.838) Oh, Donald Trump. mean, the 10 or 20 % thing has already been proven not to be true. We know that people work, they're actually more productive from home. mean, a thousand studies will tell you that. They may not be working 100 % of the time between the hours of eight and 5 PM, but that doesn't mean that their productivity has gone down. On the buyout front, the state of California was the client of my one. So this is not the federal government, but it is. government. And I remember they brought me in to talk about generational dynamics and how to manage people. And one of the managers raised their hand and said, what do I do when my employee consistently shows up 45 minutes late to work? And I said, what do mean? What do you do? You tell them not to, or they get fired. And he goes, I can't fire my employees. And there's just nothing that these managers had. their disposal to shift behavior like that in the government because of all of the regulations to protected employees. So I think a lot of Democrats are secretly really excited about what Trump is doing in terms of laying off all these federal workers, because everyone knows there's been a massive amount of waste. The problem is the haste. The problem is how quickly and haphazardly and chaotically this is getting rolled out. And I do think the buyout was fair. I really hope that people who get the buyout get the buyout. Chad (16:28.541) Yes. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (16:28.854) because will they actually get paid out? I don't know if they do. That was a win-win for a lot of people. 75,000 people accepted that offer. Some of those people then got fired afterwards because of how messy the communication is and the organizational whole thing is obviously a dumpster fire. So, I mean, I don't actually disagree with a lot of what Trump said there, except that I do believe that you want to, you know, what's the number one rule of HR is assume good intent. Joel (16:39.197) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (16:55.726) So if you assume good intent of your employees working from home, you assume that they're 80, 90 % of the time. And if they're achieving your results, is it really a problem that they're taking 10 or 20 % of the time off? And he's even flipped the numbers, which I think is grossly overstated. Chad (17:10.003) Yeah, well, and then. Joel (17:10.547) How much of RTO is a layoff strategy versus a real change? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (17:14.806) They said it was in that remember the op-ed that Elon Musk wrote with Vivek Ramaswani. They said we're hoping that by forcing people back into the office, people will quit. I appreciated the straightforward nature of that because you know that Meta did that. You know that Amazon did that. You know that all these companies wanted people to quit. And in fact, I just read an article like I couldn't figure out which company it was. It was on Reddit. Chad (17:17.885) Yeah. Yeah. Chad (17:23.465) 40 %? Yeah. Joel (17:32.743) Asla. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (17:40.896) about there was this company that forced everyone back in the office, all these companies, all these families relocated, and then they got laid off after they relocated. I mean, that's just wild, know, there's lack of integrity. You're messing with people's lives. Chad (17:54.205) Yeah. Yeah. So when we, we talk about RTO and how it's actually hurting women in the workforce, which we, we, we started getting great participation rates. got the best participation rates we've ever had with individuals with disabilities because they could work from home and that was their accommodation and they could get shit done from home. But this whole RTO things fucking that all up. So I guess at the end of the day from a, Dr. Jessica Kriegel (18:10.306) Yeah. Chad (18:22.121) And maybe it doesn't matter anymore because nobody gives a shit about DEI or at least, you know, 10 companies do nowadays. I don't know what, what's this going to shake out to look like? Is it, is it going to be a Jamie diamond? Maybe not them, but that kind of a company that says RTO is the only way to go. And they suffer because they can't get the talent. They can't get productivity up because they don't have the people. They're stretching their people too thin. There's way too much attrition. I mean, is it gonna have to come to that cluster fuck before it actually changes? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (18:56.878) Well, let's think about, look into history for our answers. What happens in sustained periods of wealth equity gaps, widening and being grossly unfair, right? There will be a time, something's gonna blow up, right? At some point, if this doesn't adjust. Now there are some real solutions that don't involve blowing up capitalism or blowing up the government. Joel (19:08.529) pitchforks. Chad (19:09.895) Revolution. Call the French. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (19:23.072) like Pete Stavros at KKR, he's heading up this movement around ESOPs, Employee Stock Ownership Programs. If you share equity with employees all the way down to the front line, then you have people who are going to have an ownership mindset. They're going to want to be hungry to drive results because they too will win from that. The wealth gap gets, what's the opposite of wide? Thinner, narrower, right? Narrower. And so everybody wins. Companies will thrive. People come along for the ride. Chad (19:44.893) Yeah, we're an arrow, yeah. Joel (19:45.159) Narrow, narrow. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (19:51.788) That's a no-brainer in my mind. But a lot of people look at that solution. CEOs say, well, I don't want to dilute my equity. I'm not interested in that. you know, which will come first, the chicken or the egg? Chad (20:03.269) wages too. mean, wages, we haven't seen wages rise on the, on the bottom end, but CEOs are about 1500 % up since 1978. We take a look at the, the, the people who are actually doing the work every single day, the hard work, and they see a 14%. I mean, there's gotta be something getting equity in a company. That's great. Long-term wealth. That's wonderful. But we've got people right now that are hurting. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (20:21.998) Yeah. Chad (20:30.909) and they're hurting from paycheck to paycheck if they can even make it that far without getting a second job. I mean, it just to me, the whole workforce right now seems like a total clusterfuck. We're gonna get ready to push a bunch, maybe millions of immigrants out, which means there going to be a lot of jobs that Americans don't wanna do. It just seems like there's just chaos that's gonna be happening all over the place. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (20:57.472) The problem, and this is why I think HR has gotten more and more marginalized over the last decade, is because people in HR think and say what you just said, but this isn't right. We got to fix this for the people, right? But then they come to the executive boardroom and they say, we got to fix this for the people. And everyone else is looking at the balance sheet and saying, yeah, but that's bad for the balance sheet. And so therefore that's a bad idea. Go back to your hole. Well, but it's Chad (21:21.459) But it's not. Yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (21:24.654) In the short term, it is a bad idea for the balance sheet, right? In the short term, paying people who will accept $7 an hour, $9 an hour hurts our bottom line. Show me the incentive to do that if for the time being it's still working. Now something changes later. Like I remember working at a big tech company and we had a bunch of managers complaining to HR about the fact that there was a six year freeze on increases and they wanted... to be able to compensate their team. And they said, we're going to lose top performers. We're going to lose top performance. You better give us budget. And the compensation committee, which was the six person team that worked with the CEO, came into HR and said, listen, we're looking at our attrition numbers. We're at 10%, 12%. We're fine with that. We're not worried about losing top performers right now. If it gets to 15%, 20%, maybe we'll talk about it. But we don't care if people quit. In fact, let's get them to quit and bring on some new people from Amazon and see if they can shake things up over here. So that's the mentality that CFOs, CEOs, board members, investors have that HR says, but wait, it's not good for people. And everyone looks at them like, you don't get this. We're running a business here. And even if those CEOs feel differently in their hearts, they think, I really wish I could do better. They're in a spot where they can't because their job is to provide shareholder value. And if they don't, they'll get replaced. Turnover for CEOs right now is at an all time high. Joel (22:44.883) Thank Dr. Jessica Kriegel (22:48.066) People are getting replaced like that if they're not driving results and doing it quickly. So the short-term thinking is encouraged and it's incentivized. So until that gets disincentivized, people are going to keep making the same decisions they've been making, which is getting further and further away from helping the common man. Joel (22:50.515) Hmm. Joel (22:56.003) Mm-hmm. Chad (23:04.648) Well, that's where we've been talking about narrative on the show for a very long time. We've got to stop talking about metrics that we feel are important, like time to hire, cost per hire, those types of things. C-suite didn't give a shit about that. Tell them about how it actually impacts the bottom line, how it impacts EBITDA. How can you actually make that happen? If we have positions that are open or we're stretching people too thin, or as you had said, like Amazon, think that, Joel (23:16.883) Thank Dr. Jessica Kriegel (23:20.301) Right. Chad (23:34.161) letter that was leaked where they had like eight billion in attrition that impacted the bottom line at eight billion dollars. Now that means something. Why aren't we having those discussions more on? Joel (23:35.259) Jassy. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (23:48.936) HR leaders not having those discussions more often? I think because they are on the front line of the pain and the hurt that they see that the American people are experiencing. Did you see that State of the Nation report that came out a couple of weeks ago? It was put together by some professor at Tulane University. You got a bipartisan group of experts to look at the most important data points about how we're doing as a nation. Chad (23:50.397) Yeah, yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (24:13.526) On economic prosperity, we were number one compared to every other country in the world. On productivity, we're number one compared to every other company, country in the world. We were the bottom of the list when it came to depression for young people, anxiety, opioid abuse, suicide rates, all of that. are the bottom of the barrel, right? So who gets notified about absenteeism because of mental illness at work? Who gets notified about suicides within the organization, who deals with all of the fallout of how we are all falling apart. It's the HR team. And that's why they're saying, we got a problem here. But the CEO is further away from it. And they're talking to the investors every day. And they're saying, yeah, we do have a problem here right now. The competitive landscape is shifting. Tariffs is coming down the pike. We got to adjust and strategize. And we'll talk about mental health another day. That's a DEI thing. And they just got permission not to care about DEI because of what Trump did. Chad (24:49.553) Mm-hmm. Joel (24:55.507) Mm-hmm. Chad (25:10.173) Yeah, yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (25:11.116) Now, if they didn't care about it, they won't care about it. If DEI can get ripped out of your company that quickly, you never really had it in the first place, in my opinion. Joel (25:19.047) Hmm. I mean, they really just need to rub some dirt on it. Dr. Kregel. I don't know if you've heard that remedy or not. the human side of it once, on one, I want to talk about the COVID COVID hits, the world goes work from home. A lot of companies came to market with a lot of money raised deal, remote oyster, velocity global. You've, probably know most or all of them is the technology failing. Chad (25:19.283) Yes, yes, yes. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (25:23.842) Hahaha! Chad (25:24.484) Ahahahahah Joel (25:48.627) companies to where they can't manage the way that they were promised when all these companies came to market or is there a different disconnect? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (25:56.686) Tell me what you mean is the technology failing them. Joel (25:59.175) The technology promise to enable you to manage pay, on board, do everything that you do around the globe with technology. And we were not supposed to have a lot of these issues because this tech was going to solve all these issues, which leads me to think that maybe the tech is failing. But I was curious what, what your thoughts, can technology solve this problem and everyone can work from home, or is it just sort of a dead, a dead issue? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (26:29.13) It's not for lack of technology. think the issue is the lack of integration in the technology. So you have all of these different tools that don't talk to each other that we're using to try and simplify our life. And what I noticed when COVID happened, I was already working from home, but then a couple other departments started working from home. Suddenly it was like, wait, now I've got text messages blowing up and Slack message blowing up and Teams and Zoom calls and all of these, you know, monday.com and the smart sheet and a thousand different places to get notified and to get information and it just became fragmented. What's happening now with technology is AI is disrupting things way faster than previous technology has. And now you're going to get a thousand, a hundred thousand AI startups and those AI startups are going to be able to do what 200,000 person companies could do, but they're gonna do it with 200 people, right? I mean, the scale, the competitive market is gonna be much harder for every company to cope with because they're gonna be getting these arrows and these bullets coming from places they never saw coming. And that's gonna make us have to figure it out even faster. I mean, right now, what I'm hearing the most of from CEOs, is we have to figure out how to break down these silos or we're going to die. Silo's have always been a problem. But now if we don't break down the silos, it's like, for example, tariffs. Who owns tariffs at your company? You got a tariffs are, you know, no tariffs affects everyone. There's not like one person accountable for the tariff strategy. It's going to finance, manufacturing, your pricing model, public affairs, legal. Everyone is affected and yet no one owns that. And so we have to figure out a way to communicate effectively. you know, Joel (27:51.667) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (28:17.506) going into the office, I don't think is the answer. I think it's about a mindset of sharing information, which we're disincentivized to do in a capitalist system because the more information I have compared to my peer, the more valuable I am, the more likely I am to get promoted. So we're in a system that incentivize information hoarding, but the only way to win is to information share. And so no wonder everyone struggles with it. This is an ego thing, but it's also a survival of the fittest thing. Chad (28:43.741) Well, talk about that a little bit because we have the discussion on the podcast a lot. I was in the military for 20 years and you have to be a team because if you're, if you're on the battlefield and you're not working as a team, I mean, there are bullets flying there. There are mortars flying, right? So you have to be a team. Promotion is something entirely different. You work your ass off and you get promoted if the system says you get promoted, right? So at the end of the day though, you are a team. You have to be a team. When I got into corporate America, Dr. Jessica Kriegel (28:51.842) Yeah. Joel (28:57.286) You could die. Chad (29:13.469) They were talking about team, but nobody acts like a team. It is incredibly individualistic. And it seems like, I mean, ever since, you know, we've really put our arms around trickle down economics, that rugged individualism is the way that companies work. And that sounds kind of like the Jamie Dimon, the boomer way of doing things. It seems, how do we get out of, I mean, these are things that you do on a daily basis. This is culture. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (29:16.898) Great. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (29:36.483) Yeah. Chad (29:42.483) How can you move a very, very self-centered individualistic culture into a real team culture? Because we all know the teams that are out there in corporate America is just total bullshit. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (29:42.84) Yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (29:56.962) Yeah, it really is. I think of the structure of a corporation. It's a pyramid structure. There's more money at the top, but less people, more people at the bottom, but less money. And you want to move up that pyramid. And the only way is to beat out the people at your level. So I want you to go down so I can go up. That's the only way for my job security to be safe, for my pay to go up, for my career progression, right? So that's what you're up against. That system isn't going to change. We can't turn corporations upside down. We can't change incentive structures. mean, that is what it is. really, it's a, frankly, it's a spiritual problem, number one, because you have to get people to focus on leaders, to focus on effort instead of outcome necessarily. So you say, this is the belief we need to hold. This is how we want you to operate. Those beliefs will lead you to take action as opposed to that kind of action. And by holding those beliefs, you're going to help us drive success. And we have to just count on that working. And it's counterintuitive to how we are built to act. And it's counterintuitive to the American dream. We are an independent culture. That is what we're about. The less I need you, the better I'm doing. If I don't need you for financial support, if I don't need you for emotional support, if I don't need you for physical support, I'm doing great. We all want to be independently wealthy, right? And we all want to be so fabulously well that I don't need a therapist and I don't need, you I'm good. I'm good. I got it. That's the culture. So we have to flip that. And that really is a spiritual issue. I don't think there's an answer to that necessarily. mean, just pocket the people who are doing this great. You know, one of the things I read the other day is that a lot of CEOs are moving from public companies to private companies because the public markets make this spotlight on results so incredibly bright that it just allows you from doing interesting things that maybe take more time. And so CEOs are saying, forget it. I don't want the spotlight on me. It'll allow me to lead the way that I want to lead. And you know who else might be a savior in this is private equity. Surprisingly, mean, private equity is always given such a bad rap because they come in and they slash and burn and you hear the red lobster story and it's just chaos and horror. But Joel (31:53.053) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (32:16.064) Ultimately, when private equity buys a company, that's a five-year investment that they've got. You've got a lot of money that you can invest in a company to turn it around. And so that's a longer horizon, time horizon, to be thinking about than a public company, which is on these quarterly stock price reporting investor calls. Joel (32:34.131) And on that note, I want to talk about the all you can eat shrimp deal now running at red lobster. Just kidding. You're, you're it's this guy. So you're talking support. Chad's talking teams. And I want to talk about, one of the ultimate teams in the corporate world, which are the unions. The unions really had a moment in 2024. The UAW had a big win. Others did. know that you're laughing. bye bye. Okay. So Dr. Jessica Kriegel (32:37.608) hahahahah Chad (32:38.473) If anybody knows about all you can eat, it's that man. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (32:50.018) Mmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (32:53.678) Yeah. Bye bye now. It was nice knowing you, unions. Joel (33:00.263) So I was going to ask your opinion on the union's impact on work from home, return to office, any kind of power they have there. You're basically saying they're neutered at this point and have little to no power. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (33:11.704) think the unions are shocked at what Trump is doing and how they are being neutered at this point. And unions are like companies. They're good unions and they're bad unions, right? And some unions are good for business and people, and some unions are bad for everyone. Like the Longshoremen strike showed just what, those are like mafiosos, you know, that are holding the American public hostage with their strike, anti-automation. Like that's crazy. Those are actual criminals, right? And then you've got other unions that are making sure that people are safe. They're getting paid well. They're making leaders who don't listen, listen, which they need to do. Leaders need to listen. And so they're not listening. Unions that make that happen, that's all positive. Do unions have a say? I guess it depends. I don't think that they're going to have a lot of power moving forward. They were gaining power, and that was looking like they were moving towards the general strike that may still happen. I think it's going to have a lot less ump than 2026. Chad (34:03.081) Mm-hmm. Chad (34:07.945) So it sounds like, again, we've got the Jamie Diamonds of the world who are micromanagers. And I mean, literally, one of the reasons why he went into that tirade was one of his managers said, look, I have a distributed team and we worked best during COVID. We actually got more productivity. We got more done. Can the managers, can I? actually have control over how my team works because I know them better and I know how to get more out of them. And that's where he went into that tirade. So are we getting to the point where at the very top, we have the micromanagement that's happening. And again, this is not, not every company, but micromanagement is happening. And we have immigration that's pushing people out. We've got a government who's pushing people out. We've got this huge mismatch from the individuals who are going to be available. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (34:42.604) Yeah. Chad (35:03.931) and the jobs that are going to be available, because you know a lot of those white collar people are not going to be picking tomatoes or working the docks. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? Is there one? Because right now it all seems like just a total implosion of the talent market. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (35:13.902) Yeah. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (35:25.592) I think anyone who tells you what the future is going to look like is selling something. And so I can't tell you where, where the, what's going to happen. Are we going to implode or not? I mean, it's not looking great right now. In my opinion. I'm not overly optimistic. think something may surprise. There's always something that surprises us, right? COVID surprised us, the Trump administration, Doge is surprising us. I there's going to be some big thing that surprises us. Maybe we're gonna get, you know, we're all gonna get bird flu and no one's gonna wear their masks this time, so we're all gonna die. So maybe that'll be all we have to worry about next year. Chad (35:59.881) That's not a line. A line at the end of the tunnel, Doc. I need a light. Joel (36:09.415) Well, Dr. Jessica Kriegel (36:10.318) Well, I think ESOPs are a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm definitely fascinated and passionate about that. think leaders, AI is not a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm sorry, I saw JD Vance's speech in Paris about, AI will never replace human beings. It was like, dude, it already has. mean, literally that week there was a massive layoff at Workday because they want to invest in AI. I mean, it's just shocking how much BS we're being fed. So I don't know, but right at the end of that tunnel is like, let's all just buy some land in the country and live off the earth. Can we like learn how to do that? Chad (36:50.665) Okay, and I'm going to say the American dream, Doc, is alive and well, but it's in Europe. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (36:56.258) Yeah, I don't know. The American dream is not necessarily dreamy anymore. know, I mean, this independent culture, the free thinking thing, everything's shifting right now. I don't even really know what I'm looking at. I will say, here's one thing that we can all learn from. Jamie Dimon, so 2500 years ago, Socrates was complaining about young people today. Joel (36:59.387) Until the Russians move in. Chad (37:17.449) Hmm? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (37:26.03) And he said, young people today, they value chatter and the place of hard work and they're too focused on luxuries. It's like the complaints haven't even changed in 2,500 years. It is naturally ingrained in us to look down upon the younger generation and say they're not doing it right. We need to graduate from that. So we need to grow up and realize that every generation brings with it Chad (37:43.785) Mm-hmm. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (37:52.33) new dynamics, not because these people are different, but because the world is different. It's changing so quickly. Here's what I'm doing. I'm focusing on upskilling. I'm learning everything that I can about AI. I'm reading voraciously. I'm networking like crazy. There is no job security anymore anywhere, right? It used to be people had to choose between industry and government. And if you go into industry, you maybe have more earning potential, but less job security. In government, you have more job security, less earning potential. Well, Nobody's got job security anymore. The only job security you can get is if you're a top performer. So do whatever you can to be a top performer and that is your job security. That's what I'm doing. Joel (38:29.843) And that's all we have for the Feel Good podcast of the year, everybody. By the way, if you have Socrates on your bingo card, please make sure that you stamp that. Or Socrates for our audience. Doc, settle an argument for us on the show, and we'll let you go. I know your time is precious. If the iPhone were invented today, could it have been? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (38:32.077) Hahaha! Chad (38:32.093) Hahaha! Chad (38:40.425) Nobody listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast was... Dr. Jessica Kriegel (38:41.23) Yeah. Joel (38:57.563) What could it have been created and produced in a work from home environment? Dr. Jessica Kriegel (39:05.74) Hmm. If the iPhone didn't exist until now and someone had the idea at Apple. Yeah. I mean, when I was working from home in 2008, I worked for Oracle, which is one of the biggest tech companies in the world and has had the best year it ever had last year. It has grown at an outrageous pace and beat its competitors and dominated the stock market. every year and they were entirely work from home culture. Larry works from his island in Hawaii and everyone works from home except for a few people at HQ and they are they invented the cloud. mean yes they you can do you can be innovative and creative working from home absolutely if you know how Oracle knows how. Jamie Dimon doesn't know how so maybe Jamie should call Larry. Joel (39:57.021) All right, everyone, come off the ledge and give a round of applause to Dr. Jessica Kriegel. Dr. Kriegel, for our audience that wants to connect with you, learn more, maybe listen to your podcast, which I'm obviously going to go to do right now, where would you send them? Chad (40:03.785) Thanks for coming on, Doc. Dr. Jessica Kriegel (40:16.684) Well, my podcast is called Culture Leaders and I have a newsletter that's on LinkedIn called This Week in Culture. comes out every Wednesday where I give you my thoughts of the week. So if you're feeling a little bit depressed, stay tuned to my newsletter because it will make you more depressed every week. Just kidding, sometimes I say good things. Joel (40:34.097) Which is why I'm thankful for the All You Can Eat Shrimp Special at Red Lobster down the street from my neighborhood. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out. Chad (40:36.238) UGH Chad (40:39.803) Hehehehe Dr. Jessica Kriegel (40:41.001) Hahaha! Chad (40:44.701) We out!

Strap in, folks—this week, Chad and Cheese are officially "off the rails on a crazy train!" Ever wondered what happens when Indeed's traffic tanks faster than your crypto investments? Or what happens when Florida tries to fix labor shortages by turning middle-schoolers into overnight dock workers? (Hint: It's exactly as sane as it sounds.) Plus, get ready for some emotional whiplash as they mourn George Foreman—yes, the grill guy—and attempt to wrap their heads around "forced joy" at Starbucks (because nothing screams genuine happiness like a corporate-mandated smile). Oh, and they kick things off with a very Scottish morning routine involving potatoes, kilts, and whisky—trust us, it makes as little sense as it sounds. So tune in for the podcast that brings you questionable job strategies, suspect parenting advice from Florida, and a Snickers coffin—yes, a Snickers coffin. Because if you're gonna go, you might as well be nuts. It's Chad and Cheese, the podcast your HR director warned you about! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:38.35) Yeah, we're going off the rails on a crazy train. What's up kids? This is the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel governor hot wheels Cheesman. Chad (00:49.09) This is Chad "smack dat" Sowash. Joel (00:52.632) On this episode, Indeed dives Florida's gunna Florida and who'd you rather? Let's do this. Chad (01:00.45) Yes. All right, we don't have any girls on the show this week. I don't know who's gonna Joel (01:07.746) No girls. Anyone else we can highlight on the show that we don't do enough of that may be in the shower or eating breakfast in bed? What? Chad (01:17.429) wait a minute. wait a minute. I think we've got we have video right out of the gate Joel (01:23.116) All right. Listeners will know Stephen McGrath. If you're listening, sorry, you got to go to YouTube to catch this. Or if you're following him on, on, on LinkedIn, but this is our friend, Stephen McGrath and a typical morning in the life of our favorite Scott. Chad (01:44.908) brushing his teeth. A potato? I didn't know potatoes. I didn't know potatoes. No, I think it's a potato. Yeah, he's using it on his face. Highland Park. Joel (01:46.766) love the haggis canna haggis. I that was a lemon. That's a potato. Chad (01:58.466) Bert or I'm sorry, Scotch. Joel (01:58.85) All right, all right, Stephen, that had better be iced tea or apple juice, because if you're wasting that, it's a crime. Chad (02:04.322) Probably, probably apple juice, probably apple juice. But what thing that he is doing though is he's putting ice in it, which is one of my favorite things to do. He's ducking his face. Joel (02:14.03) He's putting his face. Chad (02:18.976) It's a cold plunge, a cold. there we are in the background. Imagine that. Joel (02:20.28) Fighting, fighting aging. there's our, there's our favorite show. Little scented candle. yeah, the shower scene. Chad (02:26.658) Imagine. Nothing like in a shower time. Joel (02:31.911) I didn't see underwear in the kilt, the kilt, check and cock. Chad (02:34.483) chicken cock, always. Joel (02:39.566) god. that fucking. Chad (02:41.698) A normal morning from Steve McGrath. Steve McGrath. I love it. Yeah, and for everybody who has been listening, and if you don't know, you'll hear Steven throughout the show because he does a lot of sound effects for us. Joel (02:56.011) One that he doesn't do, but could. Chad (02:57.728) Yeah. Mmm. That one's really good. It's Canadian, but it's good. I like it. Joel (03:04.191) It is good. Yeah. Mike Myers. Yeah. The Canadians are still really, really mad at us. I understand. I understand. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Let's. Chad (03:10.018) They should be why why are gonna fuck with them everybody loves Canada? you asked fucking Chad (03:21.078) Hit it. Do it. I know. Joel (03:21.422) Do some shout outs. This is just you and me this week. The old timers will enjoy this episode. My shout out goes to, to Matt Lavery. I know some of our listeners will know him. He's been at, he's been at UPS since the Clinton administration. And he's probably going to get 50 like hit ups for sales demos because of the shout out. I apologize ahead of time, Matt, but you know, at our age, Chad, Chad (03:31.584) Love that guy. Chad (03:46.079) yeah. Sorry, sorry Matt. Joel (03:52.514) This business is so much about the people. 20 years ago, would have been like the companies are cool and web 2.0 and like that was the thing. But now like I can only look at so many startups and get excited. So many business trends, but like the people in and out, like they are rock solid. Matt Lavery, we were in Chicago this week. Matt is a South side Catholic Irish, like to the bone Chicago guy. Chad (03:55.339) It is, Joel (04:22.264) Took us out, took us a couple of the hack a job guys out to a pizza place. So apparently pizza in Chicago is not the deep dish stuff. That's more of like a, I don't know, a hook to get people to come to Chicago and try it. But the real pizza is pub pizza, which is a really thin, almost cracker like pizza. Yep. So we go to this place. That's authentic on the South side. we have three large pizzas, old style PBR on tap. So we're enjoying all that. And there's a shot. Chad (04:26.786) Mm-hmm. Chad (04:39.17) Always my favorite, yeah. Chad (04:46.335) Eh? Joel (04:50.978) There's a drink called the handshake in Chicago and this place was legit Chicago. The table next to us clearly was hearing the hack a job English accents and realized we weren't from there and said, I'd like to give you guys a handshake. And I'm thinking, okay, I'll shake your hand. And Matt goes, okay. Here we go. And it's a drink. It's a shot of this thing called Malort liqueur. It's not as it's not surstromming. I'll tell you that it makes surstromming look like a filet and you Chad (05:01.363) huh. Yeah. Chad (05:13.174) which is fucking horrible. Chad (05:18.176) Yes. That's a good call. Yeah. Good call. Yeah. Joel (05:20.694) steak and freets, but, and there's an old style chaser to it. So we did the handshake, did the whole Chicago thing, had a great time, had some great Italian beef, owls, which, which Matt recommends. anyway, Matt is one those people. Like I love to see every time that we're on the road. love to talk to, nine out of 10 times. He's the smartest guy in any room that you're in. and he's just a nice guy, just a salt of the earth Midwestern dude. Chad (05:25.186) That helps. Chad (05:34.188) Mm-hmm. Chad (05:42.821) god, Joel (05:48.662) So Matt Lavery, a shout out to you, my friend. I look forward to seeing you again, hopefully soon. Minus the handshake. I don't need any more. Chad (05:54.166) The people. minus the handshake. Bring it down a little bit, but, also up with good memories and RIP to George Foreman, the boxer, two careers in boxing. He had his early career, then he retired and he came back in his forties. go ahead and play that beautiful beam footage real quick. Joel (06:02.178) Mm-hmm. Joel (06:11.318) Yep. Yep. Yep, some George highlights. Chad (06:22.892) Damn. That's those younger years. Not gonna fuck out of guys. Damn. Joel (06:31.118) 40 George. Chad (06:32.834) in his 40s. Look at him. Jerry Clooney. He came out of retirement for that shit. Joel (06:36.974) Cloney, yeah. Chad (06:40.162) mouth guard. Joel (06:40.29) Ha, mouthpiece. Joel (06:44.792) hahahaha Chad (06:46.528) Just done, dude. So RIP George Foreman. my favorite, my favorite, favorite fight was, it's November 25th, 1994 in the MGM grand in Vegas when he was 45 year old years old, George Foreman knocked out Michael Moore, guy who's like 20 years younger than him at two minutes and three seconds in round number 10. I mean, if you ever watch boxing, Going 10 rounds, especially being 45 years old. He did that knocked out Michael Moore 10th round to win the heavyweight belt. It was amazing. I remember again, 1994, we were still, still very young, in watching boxing my entire life. The sweet science. My dad was a huge boxing fan and watching Foreman come back. That to me was just amazing. I love those memories. How about you? Joel (07:30.99) Mm-hmm. Joel (07:36.654) Yeah. Joel (07:44.226) Yeah. So I, so I from the boxing, don't forget one of the greatest pitchman of our lifetime. the George Foreman grill. I mean, when he came up, he was a salty, mean son of a bitch. And in a world where like sugar Ray Leonard and Ali were really, you know, flashy taking camera time. George was just this bad-ass MF, that would fuck you up. Chad (07:48.278) grill. That smile, the smile. Yeah. Chad (07:58.346) yes he was. Chad (08:12.758) He would walk through motherfuckers. Yeah. Joel (08:13.166) And, and, and, and when the George came out, it's like, he's everybody's uncle. Now he's like, Mr. Mr. Personality. And, uh, that thing was a huge success, even more so than his boxing career. I mean, I don't as a single guy in my twenties, like. Thanks to the George, I had a decent meal, a healthy meal from time and time again, between the, between the burritos and the tacos and the burgers, man. So I mean, Chad (08:19.404) grill. Yeah. Joel (08:40.492) George the boxer. Yes. But George, second act, a boxer slash entertainer slash pitchman, was, was just as, just as interesting, to me. did not, however, pitch chicken cock, which, which I'm sure our friends at chicken cock would love to have him as a spokesperson, but, you, can have your own bottle, Chad. What, what's, what's going on with free stuff from us? Chad (08:53.782) He did not. He did not. Chad (08:59.043) Anybody Chad (09:03.618) Well, you know, Joel, that's a very good question. Kids, remember, there's always free stuff from the Chad and Cheese, chadcheese.com slash free. Just register. We could, I don't know, maybe send you a Chad and Cheese t-shirt from Aaron App, big Aaron App sloth on the back. Bourbon barrel aged syrup from our kids over at Kiora, the kids up north. They're also sponsors of shout outs. Craft beer. Chad (09:33.548) Craft beer from the data geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs. you need, if you're into data, especially jobs data, go see those guys, Aspen Tech Labs. Whiskey from Van Hack, another Canadian company. And another Canadian company, if it's your birthday, you're going to want to get rum with plum, but you can't do any of those. You can't get any of those for free unless you go to chadcheese.com slash free and register to win. You you can. Joel (10:04.654) Canada loves us. Like if you just, I just can't believe it. They love us. All right. Uh, celebrating another, another trip around the sun, uh, this week goes to Megan Sharp, Dan Cheeseman, no relation. Uh, are one of our favorite Swedes, Elan Mart Martin, Martin's on, uh, James Holliman, Paul Beriga, uh, Thomas O'Hara, Simon Evans, Robert Murrah, Todd Hanford, Derek Christiansen, Nate Menard, Doug Reese, Judd Whistler, John Ride. Chad (10:09.23) You Good. Joel (10:33.678) Rob Locker, Jeremiah Anderson, Lori Golden, and Jessica Rush. And last but not least, my sister Holly celebrates a birthday this week, this week. By the way, Chad, it almost made the show, it was in the shred. Grayscale, Tech's recruiting, just got some more money. And just quick shout out to our friends at Keora, have not taken any money, have bootstrapped the whole thing. Chad (10:39.543) Ooh. nice! Happy birthday! Yes. Yeah. Ty Abernathy. yeah. Joel (11:00.654) If you're looking for an alternative, maybe acquisition or whatever, check out our friends at Kiora. I'm an advisor, by the way, full disclosure, but yeah, I was, I was happy to see more money go into the tech recruiting space. Like that's, it's going to be going to be good for them. Chad (11:12.258) Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Well, real quick, I want to talk a little bit about, oh, know, Shaker recruitment marketing, who, you know, they are our travel sponsor. We did just this week have 35 high level recruiting leaders in a room sharing ideas, focusing on talent problems and solutions. And the Chad and Cheese closed out the show. That's right. With the Big Bang with... Joel (11:21.462) the road again. Joel (11:38.734) you Chad (11:39.71) Super fan Jane Curran, who's global head of HR operations at JLL, Matt Lavery, our friend Matt Lavery, global director of sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding all at the RL100 in Chicago at the the Pendry. So Jamie, Bobby, and the team, they pulled together a great session, great sessions, events, and there were no recordings. So you got to remember kids, if you're a practitioner in our space, Joel (11:44.664) money. Joel (11:54.638) Chicago. Chad (12:07.136) and you want to get into these closed door sessions, go to RL100. They're in Boston today. They're going to be in New York in a couple of days, but they're going to come back and there's going to be more of these. So check out RL100. These guys do a great job. Joel (12:13.102) Mm-hmm. Joel (12:21.174) Yeah, no doubt. favorite part of talking to, Jane and Matt was, Jane's they're both super fans of the show. Shout out to them while they're listening, both of them. she's like, I really missed the soundboard. I wish that we could have the sounds while we're on stage talking. and I said, yeah, I need, I need like a Jim Kramer style, big red buttons pushing. I don't want to, I don't want to carry that shit around, traveling, but it'd be nice. Chad (12:27.99) Yeah. Love them. Hahaha Chad (12:41.09) Yeah. Chad (12:45.338) You Joel (12:46.848) If we had a something like that, maybe someday somebody sponsor that and ship it around the country and we'll, we'll do it. Chad (12:47.66) That's what coal's for. That's what coal's for. You Joel (12:58.03) All right, Chad, honey, I shrunk the job board. of March of this year, Indeed's traffic has been declining based on recent data from our friends at Statista. In February of 24, unique global visitors were 641 million. Wow. But by February of this year, total visits fell to 372.9 million. You did the math on this and it's a 41 % drop. Chad (13:13.89) Hmm. Chad (13:26.657) One of our listeners did that. Joel (13:28.066) Yeah, or listeners. Never fear though, because Indeed is apparently blasting its user base with offers from online courses by Udacity. Chad, this is the kind of shrinkage that would make George Costanza blush. Your thoughts? Chad (13:43.17) Yes. Okay, well, I'm to break this down into two things. First, we're going to talk traffic and then we're going to talk focus. So first traffic because it's the cornerstone of indeed's power. Let's just go ahead and put that out there. Indeed is so fucking strong because of the traffic that they get. So when you see these similar web numbers and the geographic breakdown, you've got to ask yourself why indeed's top 20 most traffic countries are all down. We're talking 12.5 % down in the U.S., which is big because it's indeed the largest market. And according to similar web is 41%. They have 41 % penetration in the U S although we're seeing double digit drop and over half of those 20 traffic countries. it's, it's big stuff, right? So did the U S traffic drop have anything to do with them closing off search? Joel (14:30.872) Mm-hmm. Chad (14:37.696) Right? Remember kids, because they put search behind the wall and now you get a register before you can actually do any type of job search whatsoever. Not, not sure. What do you, what do you think about the traffic side? Joel (14:52.632) So there are a reasons that I see. I will withhold my four horsemen commentary this week in light of three, three reasons that I sort of have outlined for indeed traffic drop. Number one, it's pretty easy. There are fewer jobs, not only economically, but what the most, most glaring number that we heard in Chicago, it is, it is Chatham house rules. So no names will be mentioned, but let's just say a big employer. Chad (14:58.402) You Chad (15:05.799) huh. Joel (15:22.35) uh, told the crowd that they had decreased their indeed spend by 44%. They're obviously not the only big employer that's making some of those decisions. And if you have fewer jobs, there's going to be a few, there's less traffic. Um, that's pretty obvious. Number two, think that solutions like LinkedIn, Google search and social media just offer things that indeed doesn't. Uh, Chad (15:48.642) They're sticky. Joel (15:49.538) Yeah. LinkedIn, it's a network. It's games. It's it's, it's video. It's like, it's, it's, it's a professional social media site. And then you have search and they may not want to admit it, but Google for jobs and people go into Google and seeing jobs directly in Google and then clicking on LinkedIn. If, if they already have a profile, that's kind of probably where a lot of people are going. So, and then in tech talk, our friend, JT, who I think will be on, this week or next week or the one afters. Chad (16:09.41) Mm-hmm. Chad (16:14.729) Next week, Joel (16:16.962) I mean, she loves Tik Tok as a job search site, and apparently replacing the resume and just being a part of how people are looking for jobs and opportunities and learning more about companies. So indeed has a decision like, okay, of those three, which can we be more like at it's LinkedIn? So we see indeed super focused on how do get more profiles? How do we get more data? How, how do we get more of a LinkedIn type presence? I say good luck to them. and then number three, I think from a macro. Chad (16:41.25) Mm-hmm. Joel (16:46.434) perspective, remember the great resignation. That's over. mean, you had tens of millions of people change jobs saying I'm leaving, I'm out of here. You had the world, you know, sort of re realign itself. That's over. The employers have the power. People are staying put in their jobs. They're concerned about, well, I have a job. What's, what's the economic and the political environment. So people aren't moving. They're sort of in pause. And if when they're in pause, they're not looking for jobs. So those three things. Chad (16:50.786) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. Chad (17:12.961) The Great Stay. Joel (17:14.604) Those three things, mean, less jobs, less movement and more competition. think it's been a really, really bad thing for Indeed. we're seeing in the traffic numbers. Chad (17:23.19) Yeah, and also in Chatham House Rules, we talked about how chat GPT and lot of the LLMs could start because we're looking at Gen Z actually using these large language models instead of going to Google, right? And now it's funny because last night Google actually pushed out that their newest Gemini rendition is like kicking the shit out of everybody else. And I mean, this is going to be a race back and forth all over the place. So... Joel (17:44.334) Mm-hmm. Chad (17:51.778) What can Indeed do to fight back on that? I don't know. Because if, if these large language models actually start looking at real time data just for segments, like jobs, right, just segments, you don't have to look at the whole fucking internet for that shit, kids, just segments, they could be powerful and they could crumble Indeed in a heartbeat. Now, let's talk about the focus piece real quick. Indeed is trying their best to attack the market segments like healthcare and technology. They've even started a course Joel (18:06.382) Mm-hmm. Chad (18:20.908) discount program with Udemy. Now as someone in tech, would you think that they would be sharpening their skills on Indeed? Yeah, I doubt it. They're going to be on Hackerank, Hackerjob, Tescarilla, GitHub. mean, they're just all the... They're not going to be on Indeed. Indeed's focus is... I don't know where it's at, dude, because they've got performance-based jobs, ATS, interview platform, forced registration for job seekers now, trying to target tech candidates. Joel (18:35.33) Mm-hmm, linked in. Chad (18:50.7) trying to offer courses through Udemy to tech candidates, targeting healthcare professionals, trying to become a staffing company, and the list goes on. I mean, these guys are throwing every bit of spaghetti at the wall, and it just doesn't seem like there's any focus. Now, I understand Recruit is probably lighting a fire under Indeed's ass to find new revenue streams, but this is fucking ridiculous. And one of the companies spread themselves too thin. Joel (18:52.962) Mm-hmm. Chad (19:19.574) They didn't guard their flanks and a smaller player took them out. Well, those companies are monster and career builder. We've seen this before. It's almost like Chris Himes forgot the history of this fucking industry or he's literally just lost control. I don't know. I don't know. So dude, I have no clue, but this is incredibly erratic behavior from indeed. Joel (19:42.446) or he doesn't listen to our show because we always have. Chad (19:50.102) Right. Joel (19:51.224) You've given years. I'll give mine. there was a time when simply hired and indeed we're sort of one and two or one a and one B of where sort of the future of search would go indeed was incredibly focused. Here's what we were Google for jobs. We're not trying to be NASCAR or anything else. And simply hired had a program where they would, they would blast your resume. I forget this. was like resume zapper maybe. So they partnered with a resume. Chad (19:55.575) Mm-hmm. Chad (19:59.318) Yeah. Yep. Chad (20:06.56) Yeah. Yes. Yes. Joel (20:19.756) like distributor for a fee, you could get your resume everywhere. And they sort of took their off the ball, started offering these partnership services. And it was kind of confusing is what the hell did these guys do? What's their business model? And you see indeed now going down the same path of not being focused. How do we get revenue? How do we, you know, how do we get blood out of a turnip? Chad (20:40.866) huh. Joel (20:44.322) you know, because we need to make more on the bottom line and we're not making it on jobs and clicks and whatever it's like, let's, let's ship out learning. Let's do some resume writing stuff. And that's what we're seeing from indeed. It's historically not a good idea to get unfocused from what you do for a living. Chad (20:57.356) Yeah. So it was interesting because when Indeed first started and Simply Hired first started, we partnered with them at Direct Employers to give them jobs from corporate career sites because we had the feeds and they wanted those feeds. It was just work that they didn't have to do. It was good. It was actually a great partnership. Totally fucked us. Not Simply Hired, but Indeed. But when you went to Indeed, they had an incredibly small staff and they were focused on one thing. That was job search and that was being able to monetize job search. That was it. That was it. Joel (21:15.757) Mm-hmm. Chad (21:28.192) Then you went to Silicon Valley across the street from Google was simply hired and Gotham and their team had like 50 fucking people right out of the gate and they were doing all of these things. They had these labs and they had this and they had that. And I'm like, you could not just to your point, you could not plan to have two incredibly different cultures, incredibly focused indeed, not so focused simply hired. And it seems like Joel (21:37.208) Yeah. Joel (21:52.366) Mm-hmm. Chad (21:56.916) as you are pointing at indeed is turning into simply art. Joel (22:01.292) Yeah, I'm really intrigued by the whole, generative AI business and how that, how job search plays into it. And I got to think if the New York times can do a deal with open AI to be like a new source for their, for their searches and whatnot. I mean, if indeed isn't on the phone to some of these services perplexity and open AI and grok and whatever, to get some, like be a, be a funnel for job. search or listing somehow. They should be, shouldn't they? Chad (22:34.206) No, because these LLMs are actually going out to all of the actual source of truth. Indeed is not the source of truth for corporate for corporate jobs, right? So they can work directly with the companies and give them direct traffic, not going through a registration bullshit site, going through all these hoops like indeed. it's so funny because indeed it's like we're all about the job seeker. We're all about job seeker experience. Really? You're to make me fucking register before I can even do a job search. So I think there's no way in hell that a company Joel (22:35.319) No? Joel (22:41.005) Yeah. Joel (22:51.287) Yeah. Chad (23:04.148) like OpenAI or Google or anything, are going to actually partner incredibly closely with Indeed. And I think Google, they see the error of their ways in actually providing the weighting to Indeed with SEO early. Obviously, they took it away to some extent, but they still have some pretty powerful SEO. Joel (23:25.314) Yeah, I think it would benefit the solutions to have like real time data on jobs and not send people to dead jobs maybe. And I don't know if they're doing that now or not, but there might be an opportunity. Who knows, but more or less indeed, man. Come on. Come on. Come on. All right. Let's, let's play a little, who would you rather Chad, one of my favorite games that we play in light of, Chad (23:41.871) all over the place. Chad (23:47.735) Yes. Joel (23:51.864) George Foreman, here we go. We've got Jolly versus Lumber. Are you ready? Here we go. Jolly, a New York City based workforce optimization platform raised 16.5 million in a Series A funding round led by former Tesla CFO, Zach Kirkhorn, who will also join its board. Jolly lets employees earn customizable points for value adding actions like taking extra shifts, redeemable for gift cards or high value items. The platform claims over 100- Chad (23:53.558) You Joel (24:21.774) frontline employees, employers, sorry, with 30,000 essential workers across the United States. That is jolly. And in this corner, have lumber. They've raised $15.5 million, just about the same amount in the series A round building on a $5.5 million seed round. The San Jose headquartered startup claims over 100 U S clients providing time tracking, payroll, and other HR. Chad (24:37.494) Mm-hmm. Joel (24:49.496) features. Lumber plans to triple its current team of 40, but no timeline was reported. Jolly and Lumber together sounds like a pretty fun weekend, but you can only choose one for who'd you rather, who you got. Chad (25:06.988) So Jolly, okay, so you know, I'm a stickler for leadership and the CEO has no experience in our space. Looking at their solutions, they all feel like nice to have solutions instead of must have solutions. And when you check out their About Us page, they have some very high powered men. And I emphasize men because they have 12 or 11 men, 11 people or 12 people, my bad, and one single woman. So was like, what the hell? Lumber. In the case of Lumber, it's focusing on a niche being construction, which needs better workforce automation, no question. Hiring platforms, including scheduling, time tracking, job costing, payroll. mean, the actual solutions it seems like they're putting together actually makes sense for the construction industry. These are all tier one needs of the construction industry. And I like the CEO's focus, FinTech background. And everybody knows blue collar operations need to catch up to 2025. One thing I didn't like about either one of them. They've number one, Jolly has jobs listed on their site. You click on it and it opens your email client up. Like it's 1999. And then lumber says, Oh, would you like to work? Would you like to work for us? Joel (26:11.918) Yeah? Chad (26:27.904) Here, send an email to this email address. It's like, guys, you're in this fucking space. You gotta get at least those basics right, but at the end of the day, it's 2 a.m. in the bar. They're both dressed like 1980s Valley girls, but I feel lucky to see Lumber still available. I'm going to go with Lumber. Joel (26:30.615) God. Joel (26:36.835) Yeah. Joel (26:41.23) Ooh, hello. lumber. Joel (26:49.45) All right. This one was interesting. I do like both of them. They're targeting groups that I think are in high demand, high growth. You I love me a good wave for that surf and that I do on a regular basis. Historically, companies have struggled to align the motivation of frontline employees with sort of the interest of the business and financial expectations. The deskless worker, their satisfaction on the job is at an all time low. So anything, any company that comes along and says we can help people be happier is a good thing. with a name like Jolly, it's gotta be fun, right? And by the way, props to them for owning Jolly.com. Geez, if this were a firing squad, they'd be awesome. So I think there's a need, and we have a story later about force joy. like these, hopefully services will help do that. I think lump, the lumber is great. lumber fi.com is not as good of a domain in my book. There are quite a few competitors. This was kind of the thing for me that I didn't realize I did some searches. So in lumber, you have a company called rivet, work yard, our Coro Bridget. you have quite a few comp competitors in a pretty niche space. from what I can tell, Um, it's not like there are two companies that doing all the construction on in the U S yeah. So it sounds like a big way, but if you go to go to what Jolly's doing, sort of the frontline worker management system, mean, obviously Chad and she sponsors fountain Harry all do that, but you, and you have beekeeper. But after that, there's not a whole lot of options around this space and frontline, uh, satisfaction. So for me, I think there's a bigger Tam. Chad (28:20.012) Sounds like a wave. Joel (28:46.254) for all frontline workers as opposed to just people doing construction. There's not a lot of competition. We've seen results like with Fountain, with UPS, really making a difference in their business. So I think this is going to carry over with Jolly. So for me, Jolly gets my vote for who I would rather. That's right. Splitting it down the line, baby. Okay, let's take a quick break. Come back and we'll talk about Florida. Chad (29:05.666) Splitting it, splitting it. Joel (29:19.054) Florida is gonna Florida Chad. Have you done the search of your birthday and then Florida man to see what new stories come? Okay. That was a fun game. It's a yeah. Search your search, search your birthday and then Florida man and see what comes up. Don't put the date of your birthday because just the date that actually. Okay. So Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, your boy, legislature. Chad (29:20.94) Jesus. Chad (29:25.8) No. No, no, no. Chad (29:36.641) Yeah. Chad (29:41.334) Mm-hmm. Joel (29:44.332) are advancing a bill to loosen child labor laws, allowing 14 year olds to work overnight shifts on school days. What to offset labor shortages from you guessed it, immigration crackdowns. The bill, which passed a committee five to four awaits full Senate approval elections have consequences people. Chad, your thoughts. Chad (30:06.506) Yeah. So wait a minute. thought the immigrants were taking our jobs. I mean, you mean DeSantis and all those other fear mongering Republican ass clowns were actually lying to us? Is that what I'm hearing? So I guess if immigrants are kicked out, who will do the work? Not the white collar government employees that this administration is cutting by the thousands. The answer is kids. Kids. Florida is trying to rectify a stupid immigration policy coupled with ice shock troops by having kids pick tomatoes in the fields, work the docks, and who knows what the fuck else, right? So why were federal child labor law provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act enacted in 1938? Why, you might ask? Well, number one, kids were dying. Not a good thing. Number two, we need an educated population. United States of America is ranked the 29th smartest country in the world. 29th smartest country in the world. US isn't even ranked in the top 10 of reading, writing, and math and science, right? So, but, but hell no. Florida wants a whole state full of Florida men. I mean, this, this to me is just fucking ridiculous. And you're right. We, they knew this shit was going to happen. They knew that these individuals, these immigrants, because this actually happened during COVID. when we had when we had supply chain shocks, right? But yet they still did it. And they want to put 14 year old kids not just not not Ron DeSantis kid, 14 year old kids, poor kids to fucking work. I mean, this is a fucking this is a class system, dude. Joel (31:33.688) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:43.694) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:55.256) So there's some line of thinking around this of, you okay with a 14 year old making your Big Mac? And for a lot of people, that's fine. The problem is you can't have 14 year old Big Mac workers because there are no immigrants, but then have the farm not being farmed or agriculture and frankly dangerous jobs being done because immigrants aren't doing them. So you might be okay with a 14 year old making your Big Mac. Are you okay with them, uh, chopping lettuce or whatever, right? With sharp knives and things like that. Most people would say no 14 year old slaughterhouse would be fucked up. Uh, that's like, yeah, that's a world no one wants to live in. Uh, for sure. I mean, you talk about, yeah, you talk about. Chad (32:34.69) slaughterhouses. Chad (32:43.294) I am a dock workers, slaughterhouses. mean, where do you think the immigrants did the work? I mean, they did the hard fucking work, man, and it was on these hard, really shitty jobs. So why do you think they're doing this? And I it just blows my fucking brain, dude. Joel (32:52.151) for sure. Joel (32:58.048) Why do I think, why do I think the Republicans are doing it? Because it gets people elected when you scare people and thinking that all the immigrants are going to rape your daughter and kill your like it's fear mongering at its best. And I mean, there probably was a little bit of looseness in the, in the border that was, taken advantage of, but it wins elections, scaring people wins elections. So now we're dealing with the consequences. Chad (33:01.569) Yeah! Chad (33:12.918) Yeah, it is. Joel (33:25.966) We don't have enough immigrants are scared to get a job. getting the hell out of the country. Uh, so now we're in a situation where, well, shit, we don't have enough people to do the job. Okay. What do we do? Well, 14 year olds. That sounds like a good idea. And, and the part about like the part about like letting them work overnight on school nights and stuff like that, that's ridiculous. Like that is not a recipe for a successful country. I mean, I'm a firm believer that in. Chad (33:47.927) Yes. Joel (33:55.63) the next election, like we're going to be begging for immigrants to come to America. We're going to taste higher prices. We're going to taste less options. We're going to have lower growth. And those immigrants are going to start looking pretty good. And I didn't even throw in the story about a 14 year old whose hand got cut off or who maybe died, right? Those are going to start coming. Chad (34:16.694) Yeah? Yeah? Joel (34:20.154) and in addition to just like closing the border and deporting everybody, like the Trump administration this week, decided to rescind the legal status of over half a million immigrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti. So the U S already is facing a labor crunch and the problem will only be exacerbated as we shift away from manufacturing in China. yeah. We're going to make more stuff in America with your immigrants. Tell me what, how that makes sense. It just doesn't. So at some point. Chad (34:39.926) Yeah. Yeah. With who? With who? Yeah. Joel (34:48.78) We're going to be begging for immigrants to come back. We're going to say, sorry, we didn't mean it. Trump is gone. Come back. We need you to make our shit and serve our shit and whatever. So Mark, my words, if the dim, the Democrats should be like setting this up as a, as a major part of their platform going into the next election, because I think people are going to be like, Whoa, wait a minute. We, we wanted certain immigrants to leave, but not all of them. This is really bad for us. So, yeah, Florida. Whatever what's happening in Florida is going to happen everywhere. I've hearing stories about like Wyoming, Nebraska, like these are people that count on immigrants to do the work. There's no one to do the work. So more than just higher prices, you may not have shit. They're just not there. Shit ain't going to go to market because there's nobody to fucking do the fields and do the hard work. Chad (35:24.108) Yeah. Chad (35:28.898) Yeah, Iowa, yeah, no. Chad (35:37.258) And you think inflation was bad before kids. Fuck. And again, it's the basic math and we've been talking about this on the show for months now. The workforce imbalance, we're gonna have the biggest workforce imbalance we've ever had in American history period. Fucking period. We are letting all these white collar individuals go, right? You see all the tech people, you see all the government people, see all, they're going out. Joel (36:00.728) Yep. Government. Chad (36:05.546) And then we're pushing all the lower wage and skilled jobs that the immigrants are doing, we're pushing them out. Those white collar workers are not gonna do those fucking jobs. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna put kids to work. Exactly, none of this fucking computes. None of it. Ask ChatGPT, I bet it says it's fucking stupid. Joel (36:18.594) while saying we're gonna make everything in America. Joel (36:23.842) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (36:28.686) It only computes if Tesla can crank out robots to take all these jobs and make Elon richer than he already is. It's pretty crazy, my friend. Joel (36:44.206) Well, no wonder we need forced joy, Chad. Forced joy is a thing, apparently. Yeah. Yeah, you will be happy. Companies like Starbucks and Tiffany, where I get all my jewelry, by the way, are requiring employees to project positivity and passion due to low employee engagement. This trend, driven by a disengaged workforce and a stalled labor market, is a form of, quote, emotional labor, end quote, that has become increasingly prevalent Chad (36:46.754) You will be happy. You will be happy. Joel (37:14.496) as hard skills are automated. Chad, what are your thoughts and be joyful about it. Chad (37:20.78) I'll try. I'll try. So remember office space and Jennifer Anderson when they kept telling her she didn't have enough pieces of flair and how that just pissed her off. Remember? Yes. Okay. Okay. Well hit it. Joel (37:30.254) wait, I'm gonna give some visual to that. Here we go. Chad (37:58.105) wow. Joel (38:03.758) Jennifer Aniston's so hot. Can I just say that? Chad (38:32.258) Okay, okay, okay. Chad (38:41.25) So, okay kids, let's break this down. Let's break this down. The average wage for a barista in New York City is $17.74 an hour, while the living wage is $2,804. Baristas are getting paid... Joel (38:41.87) 99 classic, the 1999 classic, Chad (38:58.53) $10 less per hour under the living wage, right? So how the fuck are they supposed to be happy? Especially when Brian Nicol has been at Starbucks for around a year and he's already pocketed $100 million in bonus compensation. So we act like we don't understand why Gallup's poll shows employees are disengaged. Well, fuck man, without those baristas, Starbucks can't generate revenue. While Nicol's dumb ass is saying, Joel (39:02.552) Mm-hmm. Joel (39:19.0) Mm-hmm. Chad (39:26.75) I'm paying you incredibly low wage. Just be happy that you have a job and smile. Right? So we wonder what will bring out the pitchforks. It's shit like this. People aren't getting paid enough and then we're telling them to put on more fucking flair. People are working 40 hours a week, not being able to make ends meet and they're told to smile. It's fucking ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Joel (39:46.102) Mm-hmm. Chad (39:55.05) Living Wage. Joel (39:55.352) You know, the old man screaming at the clouds in me wants to like, this was a thing when I worked these jobs, like smile, be nice to the customer, be engaged, ask how their day is. Like it was just sort of training. And if you didn't do it, you were in trouble. I was so young and vibrant at the time and a great smile. Chad (40:00.162) Hahaha Chad (40:16.62) You were a kid at that time. Chad (40:21.431) Yeah, yeah. Joel (40:25.388) It's sort of odd to me to think as a 53 year old man, like we have to tell people to be, to be, to be happy at work, to smile at customers. But apparently we are. And probably part of that is like, people have options. I can go deliver door dash. I can do only fans. Like, you know, I'm doing this because I want to be like, do I have to be happy about it? Can I just serve the latte and sort of get on with my day? The fact that that Starbucks now has to write stuff on the cup that sort of custom to the person or, know, Carpe Diem, Tony, or what like that's a little bit over the top. But an employer has a right to tell you to do it. If you don't want to do it, go do something else. I wonder to your point of living wage. I feel like there's a sort. I feel like customers are mad at everything they do now says, do you want a tip? Chad (41:22.124) Yeah, because these people aren't getting paid. Joel (41:22.946) And it's not, I want to tip because they were nice to me. They did the extra thing. Like consumers are mad because they're just required to tip where the whole tip, the whole tip system should be, I'm to be nice to you and write Carpe Diem on your cup because you might put a little fiber in the, in the tip jar after I do it. consumers are mad about tipping. No one's tipping or they feel bad about it. now employees are mad because, everyone's asked to tip 20 % automatically. If you don't do it like no one's doing like fuck them. So I'm not going to be nice and put carpeting them on the, on the thing. Let's just go to Europe, pay a living wage, tap and go. Customers are happy because I don't have to wait around. I don't feel pressured to leave a tip. Boom, done. You know, here's like our system is fucked up and everyone's mad about it. And this is the disengagement is part of that. So I let's embrace Europe and tap and go. Chad (41:54.124) Yeah, right. Chad (42:04.171) Yes. I know. Chad (42:11.414) Yes. Yeah. It is. Well, you've got the grown ass adult who's Ethel, right? And she's in her 40s, let's say, and she's just not doing OnlyFans or DoorDash. Maybe she doesn't have a car, right? So the options are very limited for a lot of these people. To be able to think that there are options out there. I live in Columbus, Indiana, right? It's a vibrant little town, but there aren't a shit ton of options, especially for people who have low skills, right? Joel (42:24.161) Ethel, okay, yeah. Joel (42:36.664) Uh-huh. Joel (42:40.238) Sure. Chad (42:45.898) If you're not paying a living wage and you're working at Starbucks, I just can't be happy about that, right? I have to do the job because I have to get some kind of money and then maybe go have a side hustle somewhere else. it's just back when you and I were kids and we were flipping burgers, right? That's just not the way it is today. And you're right with the tip system. I love Europe, man. I go, I tap, they look at me, they smile and they walk the fuck off. They don't ask me for a tip. Joel (42:53.357) Yeah. Joel (43:13.464) Yeah, you're making money, I'm getting my shit and getting out of here. Chad (43:13.794) They don't ask me for any of that shit. And I can stay for three hours. I can stay for three hours instead of them trying to push me out because they need to turn the table to get more tips, right? We are in a system that needs overhauled completely. And this administration is taking this deeper down, just a hole that's already bad. Joel (43:35.95) Mm-hmm. Well, I hope for Ethel's sake, if she's on OnlyFans, that she's not Ethel on OnlyFans because nobody is subscribing to a chick named Ethel who's 40. Like, she better spice that shit up if she's gonna be on OnlyFans, Ethel. Let's take a quick break. Guys, if you like the show, leave us a review. Go to wherever you listen or YouTube, like, give us, give us, we gotta outpace ZipRecruiter. Chad (43:43.745) OOF Chad (43:58.065) yeah. Subscribe. Joel (44:03.477) and their shitty podcast. So go out and help us keep ahead of zip recruiter, leave a review. And when we come back, we'll talk about death. Chad (44:03.702) Ha! Chad (44:16.084) That was ominous. Okay, good. Joel (44:17.41) That was ominous. Sorry about that. We're going to lighten it up at the end here, folks. Don't worry about it. so Paul Broome, a British care assistant known for his humor. That's humor spelled O U R, made an unusual request in his will to be buried in a Snickers, the candy bar Snickers Snickers themed coffin after his death, his loved ones discovered he was serious and honored his wish, creating a coffin resembling a half unwrapped Snickers bar with quote, I'm nuts and quote written on it. is nuts reflecting on his playful personality. The coffin brought light to his funeral, earning praise from attendees as a fitting tribute. His funeral arranger, Ali Lego noted it celebrated his unique character and helped his family cope with loss through humor. Chad, your take on this chocolatey goodness of a story and what would your themed coffin look like? Chad (44:54.626) Hmm Chad (45:14.188) So it's funny because this is not an American story, but we can productize and monetize the shit out of everything, right? And this just goes to the example that the UK is turning into a little America. I mean, they're selling shit all over the place. I think that is crazy. Did it say how much the casket was? Because it was custom. Okay. I guarantee it was not cheap. You're on your way out. Yeah, you're on your way out. Joel (45:22.414) Mm-hmm. Joel (45:35.298) there were no pricing in the store. But it's priceless, come on. Chad (45:42.698) So for me, and same question to you, but for me, I'm getting cremated. I just want my ashes on the beach on the southern coast of Portugal and have a nice day, right? Now, what does the urn look like? That's a good question. I never thought about that. I never thought about that. Joel (46:02.062) I was thinking cremation too, but this story has me thinking again. And if I were to have a custom casket, Chad. Joel (46:17.134) maybe I could be cremated and put in a bowl, like put my ashes in a burrito bowl and then like top it, top it off and then like just put me, yeah, put me out. in researching this story, I was like, come on, are there custom coffins? You bet your ass there are custom coffins. if you, there's a site called we wrap caskets, whatever the hell you want, man. Spider-Man. Chad (46:20.354) yeah. Chipotle brown sack. Yeah. Chad (46:33.025) yeah, yes sir. Joel (46:42.222) movie themes, whatever. if you're a hunter, you can have a camo casket. If you like chicks, there's one with tits and ass all over it. Like anything you want. they got it. So yeah. and no word if they had to get Snickers to sort of underwrite it. we should get with our friends at chicken cock to see if they'll do a casket maybe for, for a lucky, lucky listener. Chad (46:59.062) doubtful. Chad (47:03.842) I'd rather not talk about that. Joel (47:08.27) rather than to talk about about death. But how about a dad joke to even lighten things up a little more. This was told to me no joke by the desk, the front desk person in Chicago when I checked in. He had said something about my credit card and I made a joke about like you sound like my wife and he felt like comfortable enough to tell me a dirty dad joke. So here we go. What's the difference between a bonus and a boner? Chad (47:12.153) Okay. Chad (47:22.146) Pantry? Okay. Joel (47:36.716) the difference between a bonus and a boner. Chad (47:40.258) Your wife only wants the former. Joel (47:44.184) Close, your wife will happily blow your bonus. Thanks Chicago, we love ya, our kind of town. We out! Chad (47:50.89) That is misogynist. We out!

This week, Chad, Joel, and Emi dive into a juicy HR tech scandal—Rippling’s suing Deel over an alleged espionage plot, complete with a spy, Slack secrets, and a smashed phone. Meanwhile, ZipRecruiter lands a Fast Company nod but flops with job seekers as confidence plunges. Klarna’s IPO filing flexes big numbers, but its AI-driven layoffs raise eyebrows. And at Nvidia’s GTC, AI takes center stage—from GM’s self-driving push to Yum Brands’ futuristic drive-thrus. Is Nvidia still the gold standard? Buckle up for a wild ride on Chad & Cheese ! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:35.534) Yeah, come for the chicken cock. Stay for the espionage. Hi kids. It's the chat and cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel, everything's computer cheeseman. Chad (00:46.434) This is Chad. What the actual fuck is Iron Brew? So wash. Emi B (00:50.281) And this is Emi. I'm going to really try not to swear. Beredigo. Joel (00:55.118) Good luck with that. On this episode, ZipRecruiter innovates, that's an air quotes, clarinophiles and the deal rippling rivalry goes to a whole other level. Let's do this. Chad (00:57.208) Sorry, Mom. Chad (01:06.808) Yeah. Chad (01:13.304) Okay, dude, no American listening to this show knows what the fucking iron brew is. can you, you've had one before, right Joel? Joel (01:20.942) Yeah, I have a story. So we went to Scotland, we ended up on at some, I don't know, carnival, some bizarre pike, pica carnival somewhere in Scotland. And I got like the haggis nachos, which are like haggis and cheese fries, and it's great. And I wanted to try a soda that wasn't Coke or Pepsi. And there was this thing called iron brew. And I go to the counter, go Chad (01:23.392) Okay, tell it. Tell it. Emi B (01:28.841) You Emi B (01:36.361) Cool. Chad (01:36.561) yeah. Chad (01:45.643) Blue Joel (01:48.654) iron brew. What's that taste like? And the guy goes, I won't do it in a Scottish accent because I'll butcher it. But he goes, it tastes like iron brew. What do you think? Like, okay, it tastes like iron brew. How bad could it be? So I get an iron brew. It's kind like an orangey Fanta flavor drink. It's fine. It's perfectly fine and harmless. So does go but that's my iron brew story. I don't know how would you explain the taste? Chad (01:55.768) You Emi B (01:56.723) Great, thanks. Chad (02:12.056) I've never had one. Joel (02:13.236) Amy, have you had an iron brew? Emi B (02:13.961) Yeah, I think it tastes horrendous. Yeah! Joel (02:17.174) It's gotta be the most shit, like Scottish shit ever for like a drink. Yeah. Chad (02:19.768) That's what I've heard and I don't drink soda anyway. I don't drink pop anyway. So was like, yeah, no, I'll pass on that. I know Joel will try it. So at least we'll get a story out of him. Emi B (02:30.409) Why don't you drink soda Chad? Joel (02:30.594) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chad (02:33.516) He's our taste tester because it's bad for you. Emi B (02:37.345) It's like, my body is a temple, is that what it is? Not all. Chad (02:40.46) No, it's just shit. It's total shit for your body. Especially here in the US. mean, the high corn fructose. No, I'm just, no thanks. No thanks. Dude, I am a guy of a certain age, okay? I'm trying to keep the weight off. I'm working out. I'm trying to eat well. Last thing I'm going to do is slam a fucking iron brew, okay? That's all there is to it. I let Joel do those things. Emi B (02:49.065) Okay, that's true, I'll give you that. Emi B (02:59.657) Sounds good. I'll go with that. Joel (03:01.804) I'll take all the iron brew, Stephen. Stephen, bring it to me. I can't get it over here. My favorite places don't have it. bring it. Bring it to me. Chad (03:07.459) Emi B (03:10.661) Yeah. Chad (03:10.946) So that being said, just might've, we might've been able to find Iron Brew in Vegas because they have just about everything. But just wanted thanks to Samara, Cal and the team over at Transform for having us out there. Thanks to Omar for hosting our party at about 30 of our closest friends or people that we actually probably just met. Then we went to Stack One, Fountain, and I had to turn down a lot of invites because... Unfortunately, my wife was sick. Now that's because everybody gets a shit ton of invites. My wife was sick. As soon as we landed, as soon as we got into the hotel room, she didn't leave the hotel room the entire time. There's nothing contagious. Don't worry. Don't worry kids. But yeah, that's why I was walking around like a lost puppy because I'm used to being with my wife the entire time. Joel (03:37.442) He's so popular, that's why. He's so popular. Emi B (03:49.95) god. Joel (03:58.232) That's a bummer, Especially if you're just leaving and the sickness hits you, it sucks. It's usually at the end when you're all fucking... You know how it is in Vegas. You know how it is. Usually at the end is when the virus hits. Chad (04:05.111) Yeah. Emi B (04:06.983) Yeah, ready to come back home. Chad (04:11.436) yeah. I was, I was in bed by 10 every night. If that tells you, I mean, yeah. And that just, that shit never happened. anyway, thanks to Transform. Also, Samara, Julie says she sends her apologies because she couldn't use her ticket because she was in bed the entire time. So anyway, great show. no, that was. Emi B (04:16.958) wow. Joel (04:30.872) She missed a rager of a party, Chad. The Chad and Cheesh, it was shut down by the cops. There was a waiting list. No one got in. It was cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. If you weren't at the party, where were you? Chad (04:38.232) Yeah, it was. There was a, from my understanding, my understanding Omar had to go down because he was letting people up and down the, uh, the, uh, elevator and he, there was, he said, there was like a group of 30 people. was like, sorry, we're closed down. You guys have to go. Emi B (04:54.796) wow. Chad (04:58.648) I was like, that's unfortunate. Emi B (05:00.061) Love that, transform goes wild. Joel (05:01.568) It was a rager man. It was a rager in Vegas. Chad and cheese rager. Chad (05:04.207) It's a time. That's a good time. No it is, you know it is. Emi B (05:11.273) I think so. Joel (05:12.618) Emi's got a special video. Shout out what you got, Emi. Emi B (05:16.171) my God, this is, this person is one of my favorite people. So he's called Randy Rainbow. So if you haven't heard of him, get onto Instagram, YouTube, any kind of social media platform, even LinkedIn, he's on there. so for people who don't know, he's an American actor, singer, comedian, so triple threat. think that's what you call it. Isn't it? Triple threat. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Chad (05:19.489) He's awesome. Chad (05:35.616) yeah, eh, Not to mention he's gay, so it's a quad threat there, so there we go. yeah, yeah. Randy Rainbow, I love it, I love it. Emi B (05:40.201) Oh, he's ticking all the boxes. Yeah, honestly. So, you know, back in the day, he used to do loads of comedy, but now he's known for political satire. So he just constantly takes a piss out of Donald Trump and he does it in the best way, best way. Joel (05:55.01) was going say, too bad there's no content for him as a political satirist. Chad (06:00.264) Yeah, no kidding, right? He's, he's overflowing. Emi B (06:00.763) Wow. he's wonderful. So there's one that I saw recently and it's to do for like, I'm a wicked fan. just watched it recently. So you know that obviously the amazing song defying gravity. Yeah. I sound like just like Cynthia. Absolutely. 100%. But yeah, he does a take on that. So I think you got video, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (06:14.85) Mm-hmm. Awesome. Joel (06:24.078) Should we watch that? Yeah, we do. And I have not seen Wicked, so for those of you that don't or haven't seen it, like don't feel left out, because I haven't either, but let's see. Let's see what this is about here. Chad (06:24.696) Play it. Play it. Emi B (06:30.025) Yeah. Emi B (06:50.249) What she is. Chad (07:11.272) I love how he fucks with him on the concealer, the concealer and his shading and all. Joel (07:12.322) Where am I? Where am I? What just happened? Emi B (07:16.713) absolutely brilliant. And he's got a whole back catalogue, not just from this term, but from the last four years before as well. Brilliant. Check it out. Check. Absolutely. Randy Rainbow. Yeah. Joel (07:26.786) Randy Rainbow, okay. Chad (07:28.086) Rainbow dude is fucking hilarious fucking hilarious. Well, I mean and staying kind of like in the political spectrum I want to shout out to Canada Joel, Emi, and I don't know if you've heard but Canada Joel (07:31.608) Chad, what do you got? Emi B (07:32.681) you Joel (07:40.184) Canada? Chad (07:44.236) Canada is in a trade war with the U S and you heard that, right? You heard that. yeah. So Canada just might actually be able to press the nuclear option. And what that means to us here in the U S is porn hub is a Canadian company and they might shut it down in the U S and that might just send terrorists into a death spiral. Not, not that they're doing well in the first place, but yes, Canada might shut down porn hub. Emi B (07:47.057) Hmm Yeah. Emi B (08:05.074) I think that's it. Chad (08:13.752) so all of you American, all you, all you American porn sites that are out there, get ready for the huge traffic. You better have great SEO. That's all I gotta say. Emi B (08:22.961) I love that. Joel (08:27.086) So, so Chad, I have, I have a friend that watches internet porn. I don't know. I don't know anything about it, but, according, according to my friend, there, there are a lot of alternatives to porn hub. So Canada can do what Canada is going to do, but there are other options. People just saying, just going to say, just going to say. Emi B (08:31.409) Okay. Chad (08:32.812) Have a friend. Emi B (08:35.961) Yeah. Right. Chad (08:40.073) Okay Chad (08:44.01) that's hilarious. Emi B (08:44.489) America is going to be safe. Just reach out to Joel and his friends. Chad (08:48.632) Yeah, because his friend has alternatives. Emi B (08:53.065) yeah. Joel (08:55.906) My friend, my friend, which gets me to my shout out. This is not my friend, but my shout out goes out to Armando Davis. He's a Michigan State fan and he's the host at the unfiltered sports podcast. Apparently anyway, he, bet his friend that was a Michigan fan that Michigan would not win the big 10 championship. And they did. Emi may not know that because she's probably not. keeping track of college basketball in the States, but those who are too anyway, the student lost a bet. His penance was to spend 24 hours and a McDonald's, which I don't know why that's a punishment. But anyway, but anyway, 24 hours on McDonald's and he could take away an hour of his of his punishment if for every McChicken that he ate and his his goal apparently that he achieved was he did two McChickens every hour. Chad (09:32.151) Mm-hmm. Joel (09:51.182) So he cut down his time in McDonald's by half. Yeah. So that's my shout out. Armando, it's good to be you, man. McChickens all around. McChickens all around. Chad (09:53.304) 12. Emi B (10:02.281) You Chad (10:05.396) NCAA basketball. NCAA basketball is to Emi what Wicked is to Joel. Joel (10:13.24) Did you fill out your bracket, Chad? Do you got a bracket? Did you fill it out? you? Emi B (10:13.807) Okay, I get it. Chad (10:16.792) No, I've been too busy doing sh- I work around here, Cheeseman. I don't- Jesus. Joel (10:20.846) All right, all right. The answer in my crystal ball is Florida versus Duke, Florida winning 69 to 66. You heard it here first. Yeah. Emi B (10:23.475) Eh? Chad (10:32.504) 69 to 66, okay. I don't think Duke's gonna make it that far, but. Emi B (10:33.481) feel like I need to get onto this college basketball. Joel (10:36.47) OK, we'll see. Chad (10:38.486) Yeah. So I know one thing though, when I did come home, I came, I came, I came home to a bunch of cock. Yes. Look at that chicken cock baby. yes. That's beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. yeah. So coming home to, a delivery of cock is always amazing, especially when it's a bottles of chicken cock. stay tuned though. We've got some. Joel (10:42.22) From McChickens to chicken cock. Let's talk about free shit. Emi B (10:44.585) Chad (11:04.132) I think we might have something going with chicken cocks. So all of our listeners might actually get a taste of the cocks sometime soon. But until then, until then, the Chad and cheese giving away, giving away free stuff. We give away t-shirts from Aaron app. That's right. Our, our, our slothy slothy friends over at Aaron app, giving away t-shirts. They're beautiful, lovely t-shirts. Emi B (11:12.649) HOTAS! Joel (11:14.446) You Emi B (11:24.317) Yeah. Chad (11:28.94) bourbon barrel AIDS syrup by Kiora. And by the way, shout outs are sponsored by the kids up North at Kiora craft beer from the data geeks over at Aspen tech labs, whiskey. That's right. Two bottles of whiskey from our friends again up North van hack. And if it is your birthday, you could win rum high value rum from plum, but you can't win. If you don't play good. Joel (11:32.142) Hmm. Emi B (11:45.073) Ooh. Chad (11:57.612) Chadcheese.com slash free. Emi B (12:01.635) Sounds good. Can I just ask? Joel (12:02.782) Can I still be a little drunk from Vegas? I'm feeling a little, maybe it's lack of sleep. All right, anyway, no, not drunk. but Mo thought you were required to drink on this show, shockingly not. Emi B (12:05.917) Are you still drunk? Do you want some cock? Is that what it is? Do want to have some of his cock? Yeah. Chad (12:06.01) dude, dude I'm, yeah. Well, he's always, you know, he's got his own pocket. He doesn't need mine. Emi B (12:16.731) Yeah but the thing is I feel left out, I don't have any cock. Can I taste some cock please? Chad (12:22.594) Yeah. We will make sure the fine distillery of chicken cock gets somehow. I mean, we're getting cockier way. Yes. No, it's happening. Emi B (12:30.313) Please, yeah, because I feel really left out of the chicken cock over here and I really like it. Yes. Can I have two cocks? Joel (12:34.286) Cock is coming to England. Lots of cock coming to England. All right, got, let's get to the birthdays before we, this thing goes totally off the rails. All right, celebrating a birthday. We got Betsy Norris, Robert Saint-Jacques, Sean Luchens, Valerie Doyle, Ryan McGrath, Audra Knight, Jamie Leonard, fine Englishman, Jamie Leonard, is, Steve Levy, Mike Temkin. Chad (12:45.314) Too late. Emi B (12:49.321) You Emi B (12:56.445) Ooh! Joel (13:04.8) And George Dobbin, who hails from the wonderful country of Scotland. Chad (13:09.112) My man, Scotland. yeah, let me some Scott. Let me some Scotland and some George Dobbin. Joel (13:15.414) That's right. Happy birthday, everybody. Chad (13:19.648) And then now that we've gotten back from Vegas next week, we're driving up to Chicago for RL 100. That's right. Jamie Leonard's birthday. Was he going to get for his birthday present? A little Chad and fucking cheese in Chicago. That's what he's getting out. It could be. We that. Okay. All I got to say now is you have to bring one of those bottles of cock with you because Jamie's going to want that. so we're going to be leading a talk with a change. He's super fan. Joel (13:22.606) Where's our next trip? Joel (13:34.21) Maybe some cock. Can we take cock to Chicago? Emi B (13:35.529) That's what I thought he was going to say. Emi B (13:43.652) Yeah Chad (13:49.208) Jane Curran, who's the head of HR ops over at JLL and our buddy, Matt Lavery, who literally was just on the stage with us a couple of days ago in Vegas. We're to be talking about good shit around AI, agentic, what they're doing, what they're using, all that other fun stuff. The thing is though, kids, we're not recording it. So you got to be in the room where it happens and it happens in Chicago at the Pendry. If you are a TA leader, Joel (14:11.49) Mmm. Chad (14:18.39) And you're even close to Chicago. Google RL 100, register, get your ass there. We'll see you there next week. Joel (14:22.606) Do it. Do it. Do it. Joel (14:32.328) All right, this one's going to be sweet, Chad. We've waited eight years for an espionage story that's featured in the New York Times and our space. All right, here we go. Bitter rivals Deal and Rippling are embroiled in a legal spat. Rippling sued Deal on March 17th, also St. Patrick's Day. Alleging Deal planted a spy, Keith O'Brien, who's from Ireland. I don't know if there's any connection on that or not, but anyway, Rippling's Chad (14:34.36) I know Joel (14:58.68) Dublin office trade secrets were being stolen, allegedly. Rippling claims O'Brien conducted over 6,000 Slack searches targeting sales data and was caught via a fake hashtag D defectors channel on Slack. Two days later, O'Brien allegedly destroyed his phone during a court ordered seizure in Ireland, locked himself in the bathroom, I believe, which is great. Chad (15:15.852) Yeah. Joel (15:25.87) Deal denies the claims, hinting at counterclaims and pointing to Rippling's own issues like alleged Russian sanctions violations, which Rippling shockingly disputes. It's a messy ongoing showdown and we're going to love talking about it. Chad, what are your initial thoughts on round one of Deal versus Rippling? Chad (15:48.29) So we got to rip this apart piece by piece. First and foremost, case number on this kids is 325-CV-2576. That is People Center Inc. doing business as Rippling, a Delaware corporation, is the plaintiff in Deal Inc., a Delaware corporation, go figure, and does one, Okay. those are the, they are the defendants. Get through that. The complaint outlines number one, violation of racketeer, influenced and corrupt. organization. This is a Rico case. Now, if anybody has watched any movies in the United States, Rico always comes up with mobster and gang filps. Rico. Okay. So number one's Rico. Number two, conspiracy to violate Rico. Number three, misappropriation of trade secrets under defined trade secrets acts. Number four, misappropriation of trade secrets under California uniform trade secrets act. Number five, tortious. Emi B (16:30.473) you Chad (16:46.986) Inference with contract number six aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty and last but not least seven unfair competition from the California business and professional code. So as you'd said, Joel, the spy was named and was not named in the document, but the Irish independent ran a story entitled Irish employee accused of spying and corporate espionage by software giant admits destroying his phone. Emi B (17:08.073) Mm. Chad (17:16.457) at center of claim and title. That's a long fucking title. and in the story, the publication made the name Keith O'Brien as the, the rippling employee that turned spy. So the first thing I want to talk about is how they caught them. Okay. And the evidence, cause I think that's the biggest key is let's talk about the evidence real quick. So number one, and we'll chunk this out. Digital forensic evidence from the Slack logs. Joel (17:29.688) Yep. Joel (17:35.405) Mm-hmm. Chad (17:45.816) quotes, and this is directly from the case, rippling Slack log show that O'Brien became, began searching and accessing rippling Slack channels at an unprecedented rate beginning in or around early November, 2024. Notably O'Brien searched the term quote unquote deal approximately 23 times a day. And that was on page 17 for anybody who was looking. so yeah. Um, Joel (18:11.97) Nothing fishy about that at all. Chad (18:15.832) To me, this is crazy because we've been hearing how companies are already monitoring Slack and all these different channels just to be able to see who actually has activity going on. You would think basically that anything that you were doing to search history, monitoring or anything like that would be seen within the system. Joel (18:23.662) Mm-hmm. Joel (18:32.142) Mm-hmm. Joel (18:39.854) Yeah, we don't know if they were monitoring it or not. As far as I understand it, it was, it was kind of fishy. He was he was kind of, they were a little bit suspicious of him, for whatever reason, and then started looking at his shit and seeing stuff like deal searches and 6000 searches over. So then they they made up this hashtag. It was a honeypot. They honey potted his ass. Chad (18:46.008) Well, they had to be. Yeah. Chad (19:00.802) Honey Pot. Yeah. Yeah. Emi B (19:02.085) Love it. Joel (19:05.784) The virtual, the virtual equivalent of like a bottle of Guinness, I don't know for an Irishman, but he caught on and things they were putting in this feed started like showing up in real life. So they knew that he had to be the one that was doing it and, got himself pinched, but he was basically on the sales process. They were saying everything that they were like, it's very, very tracked. What's goes, what goes on in the sales process. And this is kind of a negative around all this. Emi B (19:09.576) Ha! Joel (19:35.232) intelligence that we're collecting, recording phone calls, recording everything like it's very easy to find out who's in the funnel, who's close to being sold, like what's going on. And he was telling deal sales team, Hey, we're really close to this, like getting this company close, you should focus on them. And they don't like, like, so he was feeding us all back to sales. And I'm sure the salespeople were like, man, this is a weird trend where everyone were selling. Chad (19:39.436) and access. Yeah. Emi B (19:40.539) Everything's there. Yeah. Joel (20:01.56) gets a call from deal like that same week that they're about to sign with us. and then, and then, got himself trapped and caught. Emi B (20:01.971) Keeps dropping out. Yeah. Chad (20:08.47) Yeah. Well, in it being in sales, you've pretty much always had access to this kind of data in the CRMs. You can go into Salesforce or something like that and actually just look up history. In this case, I think it just made a stream of information. And when you're talking about the honeypot itself, this is the funny part. So Rippling's general counsel sent a letter to Deal's senior leadership. And this is how they know Deal's senior leadership is involved. Identifying recently established a Slack channel called Defectors. Right? So as soon as that hit deal senior leadership, then O'Brien went to go find the Slack channel. So that was the whole honeypot. just hours after Rippling sent the letter, hours to executives and counsel, that's when O'Brien went after it. And that's when they suppose allegedly caught him in the honeypot. Emi B (21:07.005) running. Joel (21:08.61) And then does the complaint talk about the bathroom, locking himself in the bathroom, deleting files from the phone, destroying, yeah. Chad (21:15.992) destroying, destroying, yeah, destroying evidence. Emi B (21:18.665) Did he actually destroy it though, was that allegedly destroyed? He did, yeah? Okay. Chad (21:21.816) No, he did. And he's even said that he did. The interesting thing is though, is he has been, mean, okay, so this has been a poaching scheme, apparently or allegedly from Deal, where they've been calling many, many rippling employees. And how did they get the information to be able to WhatsApp individuals directly? Joel (21:44.76) Yeah. Chad (21:51.884) Well, between January 29th and February 17th of 2025, at least 17 members of Rippling's global payroll operations team was contacted about similar jobs at Deal and at least 10 reported receiving offers from Deal. So somebody had to have internal information around employees, personal phone numbers, and those types of things to be able to have Deal contact those individuals via WhatsApp. And again, Emi B (22:03.401) Mmm, yeah. Joel (22:07.384) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:21.312) All alleged. All alleged. Emi B (22:24.457) can't wait to see this fold out. I think it's fascinating, you know, because when I first heard about it, kind of, do you know, I when you're watching like a Netflix movie, yeah? This is what this is. This is like, and I really feel like, give it like five years, this is going to be a Netflix documentary or a movie. And I was thinking about earlier today, I was thinking like, what would it be called? You know, maybe the spy that searched too much, you know? And then you can manage. You see, I've been thinking about this for quite a while. You get that. Chad (22:28.44) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:42.744) It would be good. Chad (22:52.16) Espionage in the toilet. Yeah. Emi B (22:53.693) yeah, exactly. You that you get a voiceover trailer. There's nothing bog standard about this bombshell loose suit. You know, see, I think I'm hilarious. I like, I obviously had too much time on my hands today, but I think it's fascinating. And like you said, there's so many questions out there. There's like how, about how this happened, you know, how secure is this organization? Like you said, the CRM has so much data on there and it did take a while. I they did this kind of honey trap, but you know, How did it take so long? Why didn't Ripley notice earlier that there was a mole accessing their sales data? Because he said that's 23 times a day. They wait, it was long time. Joel (23:33.582) Do we know how long? Yeah, we don't know if they know how long it was. mean, I got a question. I got a question. I mean, so a year. Chad (23:34.392) Well, in that specific term. Chad (23:39.65) From November, from November last year to February. That's what they, that's where they have, that's when they have tracked back to all of the search data that actually again is, is, is in the complaint. So was, I mean, it actually happened pretty quick. I mean, we're talking about November of last year, not even six months and they, yeah, but to be able to collect enough evidence to go, to go to court. Huh? Emi B (23:44.477) Yeah. Joel (23:52.044) Okay. Emi B (23:54.429) Yeah. Emi B (24:00.243) Still quite a, yeah. Joel (24:01.454) I mean, I have to question deals taste in spies. Like deal deal doesn't have very good taste in spies. This guy was not. This was not James Bond in the the halls of rippling by any means. Emi B (24:04.265) Mm, yeah. Chad (24:08.598) Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. Well, it. Emi B (24:13.469) Well, you never know. And is this guy, is he working for Deal directly? Like, he working for both, like, actively hired by Deal or is he just rogue? Joel (24:19.97) We don't, we don't know. And well, it gets, it gets interesting. It gets because deal. You remember we talked about making payments to companies that were, let's say not on the up and up with their business models. And so does deal have like an under the radar way to pay people that this guy was getting checks from deal, but aren't trackable to deal. mean, we don't. Chad (24:20.01) No, we don't wait. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think he's on the payroll. Let's just say that. Emi B (24:24.649) Well, yeah. Chad (24:36.472) Mm. Emi B (24:36.561) Mm-hmm. Emi B (24:45.831) Yeah. Chad (24:48.568) crypto. Joel (24:49.41) We don't know. I did hear that I did read that I think that he there is some correspondence with one of the co-founders of deal and this guy. I think it's it's really close to a smoking gun like this guy. Without going to court, this shit happened like this. This definitely happened and if anyone knows about if anyone knows about like deceit. It's our man. You know it's our man Parker. Emi B (24:50.439) Yeah, maybe. Chad (25:09.534) At least the other searches. Joel (25:18.102) You probably remember Zenefits, Parker Conrad, CEO. He had an ADP defamation suit back in 2015 during my homework, was, which was dismissed apparently. like this guy note, like if anyone's going to see that something's going wrong or somebody's maybe doing spine on us, it's Parker Conrad. Cause this guy probably does it himself. Allegedly. Chad (25:19.629) Mm-hmm. Joel (25:45.782) Allegedly, I don't need him to come out at me with any anything but like this is incredible. I mean, I would say if this were like Uber and Lyft or Coke and Pepsi, it would be a Netflix special but rippling and deal. don't know HR tech is I gonna get its own show. Chad (25:46.456) Allegedly. Emi B (25:47.305) You Emi B (25:54.867) Yeah. Emi B (25:59.162) You say that HR tech is obviously getting exciting now, you know? Yeah. Chad (26:02.84) Well, yeah, and they're bringing Russia into the conversation, right? in Rippling saying this is a misdirection, O'Brien first searched the term Russia on February 12th, 2025. And from February 27th, he had searched it. So the 12th to the 27th, he searched the term Russia 157 times on average. So about nine times a day, that's page 27 of the complaint. O'Brien first searched the term OFAC, which is the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a regulator responsible for sanctions controls. On February 17th through the 27th, he searched OFAC 42 times. So he was looking for things to dig up to be able to see if there was any trail that he could gain access to around companies who were Russian companies who were sanctioned and they were getting paid. through deal through deal operate, I'm sorry, through my bad, rippling conversations and, and rippling is just saying, this is a misdirection. They want you to think Russia, Russia, Russia. and there's nothing to see here. So there, there, there are going to be two, sides of this. It's going to be incredibly, not to say they're not both right or wrong, but we'll, we'll sit back and we'll enjoy. Emi B (27:06.195) Mm-hmm. Emi B (27:16.594) Yeah. Joel (27:24.302) Any guesses on how this ends? was talking to somebody in Vegas that says this could be the end of deals business. I think that's a little dramatic. They've raised a lot of money. But any guesses on how this thing ends? Emi B (27:37.129) Well, that guy's going to jail for a start. I know that he said, what was it he said? Yeah, think someone ordered him not to delete, the solicitor ordered him not to delete anything from his phone. And he said, I'm willing to take that risk. He's like, you take that risk when you're going to jail. It's like, you're going to be the fall guy. So that's, I'm a hundred percent sure that that's going to happen. Yeah. Chad (27:47.192) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (27:55.882) And that's in real spy world. Like if you get caught, sort of you're on your own. Like we're not culpable for this. best case is Deal has no connection to this guy at all. There's no nothing in the records and he just hit this guy's fucked and Deal walks away unscathed. Emi B (28:01.148) Yeah. My hands, yeah. Emi B (28:08.605) Yeah. Emi B (28:12.041) You're thinking it, yeah! Chad (28:14.584) And they can find pay if they can find somewhere in the Bahamas or something like that, that there were payments. Yeah, there were payments. Just another reason why I fucking hate Bitcoin and crypto, because it is, it's, mean, this is what this is for, right? That's what cryptocurrency literally will help you launder money. It will help you pay people. I mean, we're even seeing it, you know, in the US government for God's sakes with all these fucking meme coins and shit. It's ridiculous. Emi B (28:20.701) Some kind of money trail. Yeah. Emi B (28:28.445) Yeah. Joel (28:44.44) Yeah. I mean, this kind of thing happens all the time in history, like the KFC recipe. I know they tried to steal that Coke recipe is under lock and key. And so this does happen to varying degrees of punishment, but I'd say worst case if they can prove that sales were lost from deal and say like the average customer is seven years old. So we lost this much per customer and you guys owe us this. Chad (28:49.72) huh. Emi B (29:11.017) Who do you think is going to win? Joel (29:11.074) Let me give you the numbers real quick because I was curious if you go head to head with these guys. So by the numbers, Deal is at $800 million ARR versus $570 million for Rippling. Valuations are really, really close. $13.5 billion at Rippling, $12 billion billion at Deal. Head count, you've got 5,000 employees at Deal, 3,000 at Rippling. And currently, Deal is profitable with 21 Emi B (29:38.473) Mm-hmm. Joel (29:39.394) million in profits and rippling is still burning cash. So that's a little bit by the numbers. Does this make you feel less positive about deal as a consumer? Do you think that's going to impact their brand or do you think this will go sort of? Chad (29:56.056) Here's the hard part. And I actually talked to a couple of HR practitioners this week about this. I'm like, this is crazy, right? And it always came down to, again, this is very anecdotal. had a handful of people that I really had deep conversations with about this. And they said, this looks worse for rippling. And I was like, why? And they said, Parker Conrad. He's known. as a guy who, you know, over the years, Xenefits, ADP, I mean, there's just this optics piece that he is shady, whether he is or whether he isn't. From an optics standpoint, you can't deny what people are saying. And I was actually talking to one of those practitioners and they said, yeah, they're currently actually talking with Rippling and they're going to break talks because they just can't trust what's going on. Now, Rippling again, Joel (30:27.342) Sure. Shady. Chad (30:51.03) They're the ones who are saying that deals in the wrong, right? But yet, Rippling in this, and again, literally half dozen conversations at the most. So not a huge sample size, right? Not a huge sample size. But when you start talking about this and it's just, it's weird. It really is. It's like from an optic standpoint, okay, yeah, we're just going go ahead and shut down talks with Rippling, wait till this happens or go in another direction. Joel (30:53.516) Right. Joel (31:01.132) Not scientific, yeah. Emi B (31:02.204) Yeah. Joel (31:18.338) when I saw the headline, I immediately went to what did Parker fucking do this time? Like what did that shady motherfucker do now? And then I was like, wait, deal is the one that fucked up? Like, holy shit. if you just read the headline, you could totally just say like, shit, the dude's at it again, Rippling is doing some shady shit and they're the ones that get hurt in this. That's really interesting. Emi B (31:19.4) Okay. Emi B (31:27.228) Yeah He's the one. Chad (31:31.35) Yeah? Chad (31:39.992) Here we go. Zenithits2. Joel (31:46.2) Well, sure to be a topic that we'll talk about hopefully for the whole year, because it should be the gift that keeps on giving. Let's take a quick break. speaking of the gift that keeps on giving, I think we have a little zip recruiter news, everybody. Emi B (31:47.591) Yeah. Chad (31:50.082) Whoo! Emi B (31:52.595) Gonna bring my popcorn next time. Chad (32:00.376) There we go. Joel (32:04.512) All right, some zip recruiter news this week. Number one, they were recognized as one of the world's most innovative companies at fast company. Well, we'll get into that in the comment section of this news alert. Number two, they introduced a new scheduling feature that aims to simplify the interview process. The feature allows employers to chat with candidates, schedule interviews and send automated reminders. Chad (32:18.328) yes we will. Joel (32:31.338) all within the platform and they have a new commercial promoting this feature. Check it out kids. Joel (33:07.192) Yes, that is a new commercial, not for features launched in 2017, like so many other companies have. All right. So number three, they did a little survey. ZipRecruiter's job seeker confidence index has fallen to near record lows with a significant decline in job seekers assessments of current labor market conditions. 41 % expressed pessimism about job availability. Chad, what are your thoughts on all things ZipRecruiter this week? Emi B (33:12.265) you Chad (33:37.558) Yeah. So I think it's, it's funny, this whole innovation award thing we're talking about again, features that some of those features they've had for forever. Anyway, it's like they're repackaging them and saying, look at, look at what's new. so that's, that's just weird to me, but imagine getting a message from fast company, informing you that your company had made the most innovative companies of 2025 list in the human resource cat. category, then you open up the article to see your name next to ZipRecruiter. I mean, it obviously discredits Fast Company for not even knowing what the fuck innovation is in our space. But now your company's name is on the same list as a flailing ZipRecruiter. So who wants to share that with the world? I mean, usually you want to win awards, you want to push them out there. The funniest part though is Zip is so thirsty for positive attention that they dropped this as a press release that says quote, Zip Recruiter has been recognized for its product innovations that are transforming how job seekers and employers connect. For the introduction of Zip Intro to its next generation resume database and AI powered job seeker tools, AKA Phil, Zip Recruiter is simplifying and speeding up the hiring process, end quote. Stay thirsty, Zephyr Cooner. Stay thirsty. It's re-fucking-diculous. That's all I gotta say. Joel (35:12.662) Yeah, also also this week, LinkedIn's new game is called zip. I don't think it's a troll, but it's it could be construed as as such. Also, in case you missed it, their their shitty podcast called talent all stars, a shitty podcast with the worst name has yet to get 2020 ratings. 20 people chime in on on on Apple podcasts. Talent all stars. Chad (35:18.189) Ha Emi B (35:18.409) You Chad (35:21.24) I think it could be, yeah. Chad (35:29.045) yeah. Emi B (35:36.797) no. Talent all-stars. Chad (35:37.826) What's it called again? Talent All-Stars? Are they still putting out content? Okay. Joel (35:42.35) talent. Yeah, talent all stars. Yes, they're present. The president is still busy making content while the company burns. Yeah. Emi B (35:43.591) I never even heard of that podcast. Chad (35:48.15) Yeah, the president of the company is doing this podcast. And I mean, have you seen their stock price? Jesus fucking Christ. Joel (35:54.222) That was my next news item. The stock the stock is down 20 % so far this month, roughly. The the fast company is a total like PR it like the headline is great. Holy shit of the maybe 25 companies, zip recruiters, one of them. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, go, go to go to the main list. And it's all the names you expect. And then you have to dig in to like HR. Emi B (36:00.007) Listen, they gotta try everything. You have a night. Emi B (36:13.897) Hmm. Chad (36:22.892) The human resource. Yeah. Joel (36:23.238) And in HR, yeah, they're in there with like Upwork names. Neither one of us, none of us would know even though we live. Yeah. Even though we live this stuff, maybe half of them, we don't know. So don't get too excited. The PR was great. The headline looked good, but if you dig into it, it's not, it's not so impressive. And I'd love to know how much ZipRecruiter spends on fast company advertising. may, there may have been, I'm not, I don't know. Emi B (36:24.018) Okay. Chad (36:30.486) Gotta know... shit's happening. We don't know, yeah. It's just credibility wise. Emi B (36:48.818) you know it would be a huge amount. Yeah. Joel (36:52.714) I don't know, but if you spend money on these publications, they tend to look at your submission for most innovative, most innovative companies. Yeah. And we do know. Emi B (36:59.549) There might be some untraceable money, cryptocurrency kind of thing. Chad (37:03.416) Or traceable, or traceable, it's kind of funny, it's kind of like Chris Forman coming on the show and saying that he loves Indeed. How many millions of dollars do you get from Indeed each month? mean, didn't answer that question, did he? But I mean, it's like, again, your credibility is fucking shot when you do this kind of shit. Joel (37:10.774) Yeah. Emi B (37:13.617) Yeah! Joel (37:24.162) Yeah. And Fast Company would say it has no bearing on our decision. That's what they're going to say. But I wouldn't be surprised if Zip writes a little check for advertising on Fast Company on a regular basis. Emi B (37:29.737) But did you know what? Emi B (37:36.265) But you know, think ZipRecruiter's banging on the fact, banging on the, you know, kind of, well, hoping that people are not going to be as analytical as we are on this show. You know, that's why they put out all that press. It's like, yeah, we're innovative. People who are new to the market or new to the industry, or just haven't done their background research are just going to read that and go, ZipRecruiter's really good. They may not do their research. So they've got to do stuff like this, you know, to kind of counter all the bad shit that's actually happening within the organization and the falling share prices. Chad (37:45.739) Of course. Chad (38:06.252) Well, Emi, we are in the ears of HR recruiting decision makers. And that's one of reasons why they listen to this show. Not just for your beautiful accent, not for, not just for your beautiful accent. Emi B (38:09.639) Yeah. Emi B (38:15.055) Absolutely. Listen to what you know what's going on. Absolutely. Joel (38:15.598) That's the only place they want us to go is the ears, by the way. No, else are we going to get to go. You know, I, I thought Chad, like we talked about ISIMS, I don't know if it was last week or recently and then all the, all the updates that they've done, uh, text recruiting and all these things. And it's like, I didn't think it'd get any worse. And then Zip Recruiter said, hold my beer. Cause we got scheduling baby. We got scheduling, you know, like how long is good time? Chad (38:26.252) Yeah. Emi B (38:36.937) Wait! Joel (38:44.45) Good time has been around for like eight years. They've been around as long as us and have been doing scheduling paradox have been around since 2006. Like, it's just funny how these companies that have money resources, departments, brain power are doing this shit. And it's not innovation. I don't know how you're wrapping this up as innovation because it's because it's not because it's not. All right. What else? What else is in the news? What else is in the news? Let's see here. yeah, Clarna. Emi B (39:02.739) Smoke a mirror, that's all it is, yeah. Emi B (39:13.381) Ooooo Joel (39:14.638) The Swedish, the Swedish fintech unicorn that has made waves touting the lack of headcount at the company last week filed to go IPO under the ticker K L A R. The company reported 2024 revenue of $2.8 billion. That's up from 2.3 plus 2024 net profits of $21 million. Chad Klarna's IPO. Are you buying, selling or holding? Chad (39:42.348) Yeah, their peak valuation was in 2021 at 45.6 billion and then that tumbled down to 6.7 billion in 2022. Response to a lot of different things obviously happening in the market. You know, this whole COVID thing was a bitch. But they're back up to 15 billion. So they're feeling their oats again, right? The problem I have is the alleged lies first and foremost. So remember our friend Alexander Chakowsky wrote about Reddit reports suggesting that customer support teams were not being dismantled through the use of AI, rather they were outsourcing to another agency. Right. So the, the, the claims of heavy usage of AI is overblown, right? That's all optics and claims that Clarna was phasing out workday in Salesforce for using AI. when literally they were just switching to deal and, and, and team Taylor. so this, what Emi B (40:19.24) Mm-hmm Chad (40:39.544) Neither one of those were AI plays in total. Like they were making it sound like they were going to cut 400 heads at least. The only thing I like about what I'm seeing here is the new Walmart deal. I'm not a fan of the alleged deception. This kind of business to me feels like legal loan sharking payday loans. I don't, I don't like that. And it feels like if Karna fucks up business with Walmart, they're dead in the water. So I'm not advising anyone to buy or sell anything. Joel (40:59.916) Mm-hmm. It's credit. Chad (41:09.644) But personally, I wouldn't touch this stock with a 10 foot fucking pole. Emi B (41:14.577) No. Chad (41:16.216) Not gonna do it. Emi B (41:18.749) No. So what do you think though? Because obviously people have been waiting to hear about this Kalanadil, know, it's kind of been on the news and everywhere. Do you think that other FinTech companies are looking at this and going, okay, now's the time for, you know, for our organization to go down the same route? Joel (41:36.258) same route of what IPO or yeah you have there's another one Chad (41:37.664) IPO. Emi B (41:38.055) Yeah. Emi B (41:43.537) It's like air wall-ex and yeah. Joel (41:44.792) that's public. Chad (41:46.944) I kind of feel like it's desperate because this is not a good time to IPO. Let's just look at the markets, right? And they're going from Sweden to the US markets. I don't know that it's, to me, this does not feel like a great time to IPO. So it feels more desperate than it does anything else. Emi B (41:53.458) Yeah. Joel (42:02.764) It's for sure a litmus test. If they go IPO and it's a big stinker, like we're not going to see an IPO for a while. But if, if, if there's, if there's money pent up and ready to go, like if they hit it, we could see a little parade of IPOs, which, should be interesting. Emi B (42:02.877) When is a good time though? Yeah. Yeah. Chad (42:06.891) dude. Emi B (42:17.0) Yeah. Chad (42:17.938) One word though, Walmart. think Walmart carries this and if it doesn't carry this, that new business of Walmart, if it doesn't carry it, then I think you're a hundred percent right. But I think without the Walmart deal, there's no way in hell to go IPO. Emi B (42:24.681) Mm-hmm. Joel (42:26.19) Mm-hmm. Emi B (42:31.719) Yeah, no. Joel (42:31.97) Yeah. So team Taylor was at, at transform in Vegas. You've already mentioned a couple other examples, but they, we started talking about Klarna cause I knew they were there at S and he's like, just don't tell anyone. told you about, if you look at their thing, they've got 17 job openings, right now. So they are also hiring, in terms of what they're doing. if you look at their, it's an S one. Chad (42:37.133) Mm. Joel (42:59.292) in Sweden, it's not called an S one, but basically the same thing. the, the word employee is mentioned 76 times, in the, in the document, mostly favorably not we're cutting them out of the equation. there, they have a, they have one section that, that is titled our business depends on our ability to attract and retain highly skilled employees, which goes on to talk about how important employees are to the business. Chad (43:02.785) F1, I think. Emi B (43:03.716) Mm, yeah. Joel (43:28.91) so a lot of things here are, are sort of headlines and click bait to say we're cutting everyone out of our equation, but it's really not the case. If you go, and look through it in February for December of last year, fortune had a story with the headline. Klarna stopped all hiring a year ago to replace human workers. And that's kind of been their brand. And I think if they go public, that's what they're looking to do. But this is kind of the breakdown of what they've done on employees. in December of 2022. They had about 5,500 employees a year later, about 4,300. A year later after that, about 3,400. So they are eliminating roughly a thousand people per year. Chad (44:10.594) How many were outsourced? Yeah. Joel (44:12.578) We don't know that based on their documentation. Yeah. But that's, that's their employees that they're, that they're touting. So they are decreasing. but they're not head countless. mean, they still have a lot of people and according to their documents, they still need, a lot of people. This one will be interesting to watch. Emi B (44:14.322) Okay, so that's yeah. Chad (44:25.368) Mm-hmm. Emi B (44:29.321) So yeah, it's interesting that they obviously they're trying to cut what sounds like they're trying to cut costs by, you know, reducing their workforce. And I also saw that they were closing a couple of offices around the world as well. So that's obviously another way that they're trying to cut costs. But did you, did you hear about how much of a pay rise Sebastian, the CEO gave himself? Yeah, it was like 862 % pay rise. So this is just ahead of the payroll. Chad (44:49.8) Jesus. Joel (44:50.21) No, I missed this. Emi B (44:58.683) Most of it was in equity, but still just ahead of the payroll. Eheh! Chad (45:04.152) I have you, have you been listening to bill Burr talk about CEOs here, here lately? He's his, his mantra right now is free Luigi. Uh, if that's, if that tells you anything, if that tells you anything. yeah, yeah. 800 % fuck you, man. That's bullshit. Emi B (45:07.665) No, I haven't. Joel (45:08.812) A little bit, yeah. Emi B (45:13.327) Okay, yeah. Yeah, honestly. Joel (45:20.928) It's speaking of CEOs with a lot of money. Let's take a break and talk about Nvidia. Emi B (45:25.545) Yeah. Joel (45:32.236) All right, guys, Nvidia had its annual conference this week. Some highlights. General Motors has tapped Nvidia for AI powered self-driving technology. Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, also known as the Holy Trinity, is partnering with Nvidia to expand AI ordering and drive-throughs. They plan to roll out AI ordering to about 500 restaurants across four Yum brands starting in the second. quarter. And lastly, they've dropped Isaac Groot in one humanoid robot. Yes, there's a worse brand than chat GPT. It's Isaac Groot and one humanoid robot. Let's take a quick look at Isaac, I'll just shorten it a little bit. And what what he can do as a robot. Chad (46:28.248) I'm already creeped out. Joel (46:30.008) So if you're listening, he's, bringing coffee to a table. You got to go to YouTube to see all this. He's, he's a straining a photo. He's doing laundry. He's, he's, he's vacuuming. My favorite part is at the end. You have to wait for it. he's getting groceries. That's good. Yeah. I like that. porn. Some bubbly porn to porn or drink. he's cleaning up putting, I don't know why he has the keys as he driving a car and then Emi B (46:34.685) Yeah. Chad (46:38.764) Very George, George Jetson. Emi B (46:40.809) Thank Chad (46:48.28) Well, helping with the groceries. Chad (46:57.816) because that's not where they should be. Joel (46:59.2) And then he just sits down. He just sits down. Emi B (47:00.817) Yeah, my day is done. Joel (47:04.366) How creepy is it to think the robot just sits down? I don't know what I expected. Do they go to the garage? Do they go to a closet? Like a vacuum cleaner? No, he just sits down. He just hangs out. He just hangs out. All right, Chad. Chad, know you love you some Nvidia. What are your thoughts on the news out of the company this week? Chad (47:15.022) that's, I'm sure. Charging in the corner or some shit like that. Emi B (47:16.007) outside. Emi B (47:20.969) Just going to watch some TV. Chad (47:25.878) Yes. Yes. And I own shares, so I'm biased. So we've already talked about several companies. I mean, talk a little bit about the KFC connection, number one, where they're starting to use it in their drive-throughs. And we've been talking about companies embracing AI for a while, not just in recruiting. So Rallies and Checkers VP of Franchise, Brad Williams stunned Mr. Joel Cheeseman with the mention of baconzilla during the recording of season two of the AI session. So go ahead and roll that beautiful beam footage there. Joel (48:03.32) You always have to do this around lunch when we record this show. Damn it. Emi B (48:04.841) Thanks. Chad (48:40.578) So what we're seeing is we're seeing insights from companies that are using AI outside of recruiting and sales and business and drive-throughs and those types of things, which is making it so much easier as we talked to Brad about being able to pull AI or automations into recruiting. So all those companies that are out there today saying, look, my company is using AI here, here, and here. Well, that's a great opportunity for HR and for recruiting. just the talent function overall to say, Hey, we are doing it over here and it is successful. Let's go ahead and pull that into hiring. the is that we've talked to and we're getting ready to launch, AI sessions season two. is practitioner heavy, big logos. And I don't know about you Joel, but I was surprised as hell at how many companies were talking about the outcomes. Time saved, money saved. That to me was fucking huge. Emi B (49:17.533) Mm-hmm. Joel (49:39.436) And companies you wouldn't necessarily expect like like ACE hardware making some crazy shit happen. Yeah. It's it's it's it's filtering down to the companies that you don't expect. You expect you expect tech companies to do this stuff. You expect, you know, big companies. But when hardware stores that you grew up with mom and pop type place does it, it's it's it's obviously cool. I think the ordering thing to me is fascinating. I think that's becoming Chad (49:41.932) Yeah. huh, yeah. Yeah. Good shit. Yeah, essential healthcare. Emi B (49:53.735) Yeah, okay, definitely. Chad (50:01.837) Yeah. Joel (50:09.036) much more ubiquitous than it had been before. We talked about Wendy's doing AI enabled order taking in the drive through. They're up to about 600 restaurants across the U S. yum has like 61,000 locations around the globe. Now they're, it's a very small, it's a very small number that they're starting out with, but if they can get this thing in 61,000 restaurants globally, like it's going to filter to every single fast food place out there. And I think the second thing is Chad (50:10.626) Mm-hmm. Emi B (50:10.739) Mm-hmm. Chad (50:36.855) Yeah. Joel (50:39.224) You know, the old adage of like, no one ever bought IBM, you know, whoever bought IBM never got fired or whoever like monster used to be. No one ever got fired for posting jobs on monster. They probably would today, but like no one's going to get fired using Nvidia technology. And I think Nvidia has done a great job of building a brand. And if, if making the decision is easier because it's Nvidia, you're going to see this thing take off quicker than if it was. Chad (50:50.038) Nvidia. Chad (50:57.378) Mm-hmm. Joel (51:05.94) some company I've never heard of. So Nvidia getting behind AI generated drive-through ordering, I think is going to be huge for that space. We're going to see a lot more of it in the future. Chad (51:17.132) KFC is very big in Europe, definitely in the UK. think one of the fast food restaurants that actually went to the UK first. Emi, you a big KFC fan? Do you like the whole AI introduction? Emi B (51:20.285) Yeah. Joel (51:21.656) Mm-hmm. Emi B (51:29.363) You know what, I love that secret recipe chicken, honestly. It's one of my guilty pleasures. And I'm really trying to be healthy like you, but I'm like every once in a while, it's like, it's Friday. Get me some chicken. Get me some. absolutely. Chad (51:42.2) You Joel (51:43.022) Get us some chicken and some chicken cock, would you? For God's sakes. Joel (51:52.352) And speaking of robots, here's today's or this week's dad joke. Are we ready? By the way, we talked about chicken cock. Here's my take at trying to get the blue chew sponsorship. Here we go. Chad ready? Why did why did the robot take blue chew? Why did the robot take blue chew? Chad (51:57.715) Mm. Now. Chad (52:03.286) Jesus. Chad (52:13.944) I'm afraid to ask. I mean, go ahead. Joel (52:16.226) hit his disc was floppy. His disc was floppy. All right. You don't like that one. Here's another one. Here's another one. What does a potty training robot say? What does a potty training robot say? Chad (52:19.448) He needed a hard drive. get it. Okay. Emi B (52:22.825) Yeah, I need to go. Okay, come. Chad (52:27.874) No, Jesus. Chad (52:35.085) Mm. Joel (52:37.336) pee poop pee poop Emi B (52:39.153) Now, my god. Joel (52:42.56) We out! Chad (52:43.488) We out. Poor Emi, poor Emi. Emi B (52:43.651) God, yeah.

Live from RecFest USA, Orlando Haynes, North American talent acquisition lead at Mosaic, joins The Chad & Cheese Podcast  to share how recruiters can leverage personal branding in a volatile job market. Orlando reveals why LinkedIn is a powerful tool for building revenue channels and visibility, offers strategic advice for job seekers post-layoffs, and explains how a strong personal brand can turn employees into authentic company ambassadors. Don't miss this insightful episode—tune in now! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's Most Dangerous podcast. Chad Sowosh 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: So thanks for hanging out. Who are you and why are you here today? Orlando Haynes: Yeah, so my name's Orlando Haynes. I'm here to present. It's my first time here at the event here at RecFest, so super excited for that. But I'm here to talk a little bit about personal branding for recruiters and how to support them in really leveraging their own voice, both inside and outside the corporate walls. Joel: Are you employed? Are you a self-employed consultant? Orlando Haynes: Nope. Yeah, so I'm a North American talent acquisition lead for a company called Mosaic based out of Florida. Joel: Okay. Chad: Orlando Haynes. Orlando Haynes: Yes, sir. Chad: That sounds like a football player. Joel: In Florida. Chad: That sounds like a football... Yeah. From Florida, that sounds like a football player. So Orlando, when you get a chance to actually provide somebody one nugget of advice, our listeners, people viewing this, what would that nugget be, moving forward into 2025? Orlando Haynes: Yeah, I would probably tell you it's about personal branding. And you probably hear this a lot, but because of the market and how, you know, volatile it is, I think most employees can't just rely on the employer to generate their income, support their lifestyle. So holistically, that's how I look at it. You have this great platform, LinkedIn. So how do you leverage that to multiple opportunities for you? Simply put, you know, leverage those revenues, those revenue channels, the marketing channels, it's free platform, it's a global platform. Why not leverage it? And so my goal is to maximize my potential, thus creating opportunities internally in the company for me, and then also externally. So that's the goal, that's the vision. I would tell people to maximize on that. Joel: Orlando, as you can tell by looking at us, we're very, very popular with the kids. Orlando Haynes: Yeah. [chuckle] Joel: And a lot of young people look at LinkedIn, it's sort of intimidating, I don't have a network, I wasn't there at the beginning when everyone was just connecting to each other. What advice would you give that recent graduate in building that brand on LinkedIn? Or should it be in other places in addition to LinkedIn? Orlando Haynes: So I would say, have intent. Understand the platform first. Don't just jump on it because you hear so called, "gurus", say, "Get on it." But understand the platform and its original use, but then knowing that it's expanded beyond that. And so, don't be fearful of technology. If we go back in the years before we had a phone, phone was created, then the cellphone, we went to microwave. So technology is always evolving and so the youth, probably, are more on the different channels. But if you think about the global reach, there's no other platform like it, where you can talk to someone that's in China, Peru, Paraguay, wherever, globally, London, in a matter of seconds. And so I would say, understand the platform, put yourself out there, but do it with intent. Don't just randomly go on there just to go on there. And some folks may not need it. There are folks who just don't need it. But it's free. Why not? Yeah. Chad: So now in 2024, what has surprised you the most about... What's anything that's happened thus far this year? Orlando Haynes: So I would say, recruiting has not changed a bit. Chad: Yeah? Orlando Haynes: And so... Chad: And that's surprising. Orlando Haynes: And that's surprising. You would think it has. Even from the agency side... My background, for 20 years, is both, agency and in the corporate side. And so we're still in that midst of antiquated thinking theology, especially also from the corporate space, in how we attack recruiting overall. So the goal is, what we can do to leverage that. And there's a lot of talk about technology, and so we're getting away from still how do we capture the people. And so if we can bridge that gap between employers and tech, and how to really service the people, then we're shaking and moving at that point. So those are the biggest changes I would hope we see. But right now, it's not turning as fast as I would like. Chad: Did you get that, shaking? Joel: I got that, that was good. He's good. He's good. He must be a branding expert. Layoffs are in the headlines every day. A lot of people are facing the employment market for the first time in a long time. They're looking at LinkedIn, they know they should use it, but not really sure exactly what I should be doing. What do you tell them? Orlando Haynes: So you have to approach anything like that with the strategy. And I think that's where a lot of job seekers don't know, especially if you've been working for 10 plus years, you never had to go back in the market. And so things have changed. And so you need a strategy to approach any job search. And sometimes in this market, job search becomes the job itself. And so if you get hyper focused, and you folks probably hear it as well, there's nothing worse than the job seeker saying, "Hey, I'll take anything." That's... They're talking from desperation, at that point, versus reassessing what happened, reclaiming their intellectual intelligence from previous companies that they worked for, and really hyper focus. I know there's a lot of coaches like myself that are out there as well, and so they're a little leery too. Because you never know. But I would say, if they can invest in a coach, again, so they can get the proper tools and strategies to be specific in their search. And this way... It's going to take time too. Orlando Haynes: You have to map that out and understand this may not be the last cycle we see like this. So now, you know, prepare for future, but have a really hyper focused plan that'll support your journey. Chad: 2025 is coming up on us fast. What's your number one priority? Orlando Haynes: You know what? I'm gonna double down on personal branding. It's the reason why I'm sitting in the seat with you guys here. First time here, submitted my request to be a speaker. And I'm here, I speak tomorrow. But that only would have happened... It wouldn't have happened if I didn't have a personal brand. So they looked at me, see what I was talking about, see my reach, and say, "Okay. Hey, you have a voice and what you're saying makes sense", so again, I don't position myself to only depend on the employer. Because we're talking about layoffs and you've seen it happen in the tech space. It happened in the recruitment space. And so how do I position myself to avoid the onslaught? So it's multiple streams. I'm secure either way. But the goal is that's... I think that's the hyper focus, I think, we need to look at. But it's not for everybody. But I would urge someone to tap into multiple talents that they have. They're not a one-talent or one-pony trick, we have multiple talents; leverage those anyway you can. Joel: A lot of companies have the tendency, or employers have the tendency of, sort of, bottling up their employees. Orlando Haynes: Yep. Joel: Like, "Don't be on LinkedIn. I don't want you to get poached by someone. I don't want you to talk about your job on Instagram." I feel like that's loosening up. But what do you tell the company that has employees that are great brand ambassadors, that are out there on social media? What do you tell that company that is genetically fearful of that world? Why should they embrace it? Orlando Haynes: So that's the toughest question. But there was an article put out by LinkedIn by, I think, Dan Roth or Danny Roth, it said, Rise of the creator employee, which spoke directly to that. And the benefit of if you have multiple employees with multiple brand, you know, good personal brand, inadvertently people are going to see where they work, land on their page and see opportunities. Because I want to work with a company that I can see the ins and outs. Great that you have this great new widget, new software, new tech, that's fine. But what's a day in the life? What is it like behind the walls? Orlando Haynes: And I think, through personal branding, you can share, "Hey, we're not perfect. But this is what the culture really looks like." And again, by that saying, "Okay, the company's allowing employees to do this", like, "Wow, they're allowing, they're tapping into my creativity? Like, that's a company I want to partner with." And so I would say it's such an antiquated thought process right from the higher ups. And so they really need to look at the value proposition that this is creating. And so if companies can create little media teams to advocate for, and better their marketing strategies, it's not going to hurt. It's not going to hurt. As long as it's on brand etc., I don't see any negative behind it. As long as you got the right people. Yeah. Chad: Orlando says it's good for your brand. Orlando, somebody wants to connect with you, where would you send them? Orlando Haynes: Yep. They can come straight to LinkedIn, Orlando Haynes. Or connect with me on my website, careertalkspodcast.com. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thanks for hanging out. Enjoy the rest of your time in Nashville. Chad: Orlando Haynes. Orlando Haynes: Appreciate it, gentlemen. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch Big Booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

The Chad & Cheese Podcast Does Europe takes a wild ride through the continent’s hiring jungle—dodging legal landmines, outdated staffing giants, and AI-powered upstarts along the way. Chad, fresh from a Champions League pilgrimage, joins Joel and Lieven to break down JobIndex’s showdown with Google, Randstad’s midlife crisis, and why GDPR is like a 19th-century train system (yes, really). With spicy debates, bold predictions, and a dash of humor, this episode asks: Can Europe innovate without regulation holding it back? And will Randstad sink or finally swipe right on the future? Tune in to find out! PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Joel (00:34.862) Three guys still figuring out which Spice Girls we want to impregnate. You were listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Europe. I'm your cohost, Joel Parting, like it's 19, sorry, 1899 Cheeseman. Chad (00:49.933) This is Chad, what the actual fuck is happening around this place? So watch. Lieven (00:54.926) And I'm Lieven "Boycotting all that's American except Cheddar and Cheese" Van Nieuwenhuyze. Joel (00:59.778) we're tear free leaving so it's all good on this episode job index settles Ron Stott stalls and who'd you rather let's do this Chad (01:14.099) so European, I'm dressed exactly like Levin. Lieven (01:17.987) You Joel (01:19.426) I missed the memo on the sprockets outfit today. You guys need turtlenecks, maybe a mock turtle, something. Yeah, make it really totally your... there's the football scarf. The football scarf. Chad (01:22.477) Sprockets. Joel (01:36.824) That hasn't quite caught on in America, the sports scarf. Chad (01:36.947) sexy that's I don't think it will I don't think it will Lieven (01:41.028) No? If you go to let's say the American football or to baseball you don't have scarves? Okay... Chad (01:46.283) No hats, jerseys. Yeah. Yeah. Or more or more jerseys. Joel (01:46.294) No, we have hats, jerseys. Yeah, no scarves. I like it. I like it. And no big flags and fireworks in the stands usually. Just beer tossing and mosh pitting or something. I don't know. So what's going on in Europe? I haven't been watching the news. Is there any headlines out of Europe? I've missed it. Chad's had a great time in Europe last week or so. Lieven (01:51.28) Okay, it could be big business selling scarves. Everyone needs one. No? No fighting either. Okay. Chad (02:08.023) Wish I was still there. I did. Yeah, I did. Well, leaving, talk to us. What's happened over? What's the sentiment? What's the sentiment? Joel (02:19.022) Should we just go right to the jugular hair? Chad (02:24.653) you Lieven (02:25.442) The only the only headlines we have are American headlines. We don't like him Joel, we don't like him. No. So I'm going to give Donald Trump some advice on diplomatic advice. I think he should make Ukraine the 51st state and leave Canada alone and then Ukraine would be part of NATO all at once and you have access to the minerals and Russia would be happy because their biggest assets will become the president of Ukraine. And Europe will keep its free healthcare and we can go back to sleep and everything will be normal again. So. Joel (03:01.346) Governor, Governor, Zalinski, Governor, Luzinski. Lieven (03:04.218) Governor Zelensky Joel (03:07.734) huh. Is this a real movement or is this a leave an original announced here on the show? Lieven (03:12.869) I think we should start lobbying. It's not a real movement yet. Joel (03:17.61) Okay. It's the Levin. You heard it here first. NX Ukraine is the 51st state. All Levin's idea. Lieven (03:22.498) Yeah, it was all my idea. Yeah, Tuesday 11th. Chad (03:27.021) Things are shifting, Things are shifting. mean, we're looking at Tesla tanking in Europe, Norwegian companies refusing to refuel American ships, Dutch pension funds sold $575 million in Tesla shares. mean, there's this, I mean, we're rethinking alliances and I don't like the way that the US is rethinking them. I'm not a fan, guys. Joel (03:30.701) you Lieven (03:42.852) Yep. Joel (03:52.994) Man, if I can't get served in Paris, there's a problem. Can I go to Europe as an American now leaving, or am going to be Kung Fu fighting in the streets of Berlin? Lieven (04:03.984) First you'll have to tell how thankful you are that they want to serve you and please please wear a suit and then you might be served. Joel (04:06.99) Okay. Joel (04:11.97) But can it be the Trump black suit with the red tie? Can I do like, can I look like Trump in a suit or do I have to go European with a nice, a nice, a nice Hugo boss or a nice Italian suit? Okay. Chad (04:18.925) I wouldn't go there. Yeah, I wouldn't go Lieven (04:20.514) I think to try, yeah, maybe the Italian approach, yeah, but more elegant, not the very big broad American suit thing. Joel (04:32.174) Those Italian suits fit a little tight on me, Leaven. I don't know. I need that JCPenney Joseph A. Bank suit. That's the one that fits me. Especially has a little flex in it. You've seen these flex suits for the elbows. Yeah, I need a little room to get in my suit. Jeez. Lieven (04:35.106) I imagine. I prefer swim fit, but... Yeah. Chad (04:45.501) Mm-hmm. Little flex. Lieven (04:47.576) I'm sure as long as it's tailor-made, it will be all fine. Joel (04:50.958) I fear that this is going to be a trend on the show for a while. I'll even the, the Trump shout out. Sadly, Yep. Chad (04:57.665) I don't, I don't like it. I don't like it, especially when I'm over there, right? I hate even more when I come back over here. So yeah, I'm just not a fan. Let's just, let's, let's have leaving diplomacy. Let's, let's do leaving diplomacy. All right. All right. All right. Lieven (05:09.4) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:13.614) All right, Chad, drag us out of this misery. Okay. Chad (05:16.929) I don't know that I can't. yeah. So last week, last couple of weeks, I was in the Netherlands right next door to, to leave, leave in and, got to give a shout out. did a ton of stuff, but I definitely got to give a shout out to our friends here. John over at the intelligence group. That's right. for, taking me and my friends to champions league match in fine Nord, it's right there in, in Rotterdam for you kids looking, looking for Fiannard at the cube. cushy leather seats, beer, food, the works, man. So play that beautiful bean footage. You can see all the fun. Yeah. Joel (05:51.387) Real question real quick on the scarf thing. So it's sponsored by them, but are they the sponsor of the team or do they just randomly make scarves? Chad (05:56.556) Yes. Chad (06:00.839) no, they are actually intelligence group is a sponsor of the team. Yes. has his business seats, the entire time he's at every match. And yeah. So yeah, I got the cool fine word scarf with the intelligence group on the other side and play, play the coolness. Joel (06:15.534) Cool, cool, live show at one of the future game, which looks like a good time if you're not. Chad (06:24.459) Remember, this is Champions League. This is big stuff against Inter Milan, right? So Italy is coming to the Netherlands for a fight. Joel (06:35.294) I get knocked down. So what's with the, there's a dude like ready to fight. that the mascot? So instead of like a fuzzy frog or something, it's a guy that's looking to fight. Lieven (06:37.466) Thank Chad (06:47.021) So the dude, so the dude with the black eye and he was all beat up and whatnot. Apparently he's a famous Dutch guy who was a street fighter. So they are again, they're fighters. not, they're not putting up with the bullshit. You can't bring that red tie over there, Joel. Can't do it. Now unless it says, unless it says fine or. Joel (06:48.75) Uh-huh. Lieven (07:04.794) you Joel (07:06.048) I won't do it. I'm bringing. I'm wearing all Canadian all the time when I'm in Europe now. All Canadian all the time. Chad (07:13.197) Yeah. Just say sorry a lot. Say sorry a lot. Joel (07:20.526) All right. My shout out, my shout out goes out to, well, you may not remember, you may not know it because Google deleted it from their calendar. it was international women's day, recently. of course Europe, nobody does, does, protesting and marching like Europeans do. So, in Paris, apparently a staggering 120,000 people, joined in, over 150 demonstrations across France. Organizers estimated that a quarter of a million people. took part and of course in pure French fashion, a lot of topless women were roaming the streets with flags painted on their chest with swastikas. Nobody protests quite like the French and I'm here for it and they get my shout out for the week. Shout out to the French protesters. Chad (08:12.141) French do wine well and rebellion. Joel (08:15.662) And not necessarily in that order Lieven (08:17.188) What? Alright. Chad (08:24.222) areas. Joel (08:26.446) All right, let's talk law here. Job Index and Dansky Mediae have settled their case against Google, withdrawing their appeal against Google for jobs. The settlement terms were not disclosed, but both parties expressed satisfaction with the resolution. In case you missed it, Job Index filed a formal complaint with the EU Commission back in 2022 requesting that it initiate a case against Google for abusing its dominant market. position, Chad, big deal, little deal or no deal, your thoughts. Chad (08:59.117) I mean, we talked about how the case was severely flawed in the first place and I would speculate that the price of the settlement had to go down dramatically since job index was appealing their loss in the first place. So Google probably threw them a bone and said, now just shut the fuck up. I don't think this is a big deal. I think this might be an opportunity for Google to pretty much, you know, put job index in the rear view mirror. Joel (09:26.36) Mm-hmm. Chad (09:26.837) And then also prospectively quell, some others who might come up and, and, and try to throw the same kind of flawed bullshit at them. but I think the funniest thing that I heard after the news came out, it's total rumor, was that the job index was hurrying and starting to, to actually check out how they could get in the Google for jobs schema. It could be a total rumor, but I think, but I think with the revenue issues that job index has been having, it, it could be a thing. It could be a thing. They might be on Google for jobs before you know it. Joel (09:46.955) huh. Joel (09:54.126) Could be a thing. Yep, yep. So in case you missed it, job index also reported a 5.3 % decrease in revenue for the second half of 2022. Could it be that the decrease in money had some connection to the decrease in traffic? Traffic that they could have gotten from Google for jobs? I don't know. I don't know. me, call me a conspiracy theorist, but that may have had something to do with it. Yeah. When this thing broke, we were like, you don't have to be in Google, bro. Like you can just tell them we don't want to be in the index. So to, to, Chad (10:06.093) Mm-hmm. Joel (10:28.888) to have this lawsuit against some sort of competition, felt really European as an American. really felt like let's stick it to the American company. Let's make some money, which probably let's, let's, I think that's probably what happened. Google went to the couch cushions. got a few million duckets to throw at this company. and then it was, then it was finished. I think the big question going forward, With the changes, if you've been watching the news, you've seen some changes about America sort of leaving Europe in a big way, which has caused Europe to sort of get on its feet, figure out what we're going to do. And part of that of what I've heard is leaving is squinching his eyes, which means maybe I'm wrong here, but I'll let him chime in afterwards is that regulation stifles innovation. Lieven (11:11.909) No, no. Joel (11:17.588) And I'm hearing a lot of things out of Europe that says we need to be innovators again. We need to be creating companies, not regulating the companies that are already successful. So I want to know if this case is a really small example of Europe stepping away from regulation, less encouragement of that and really focusing on how do we innovate? How do we grow companies? How do we keep money here? and do that. So I think Europe needs innovation. And my hope is that this case is sort of indicative of companies less let's sue Google and Facebook and everybody else and more let's innovate and make great companies here in Europe. Leave in your thoughts. Lieven (12:03.194) I wonder why there is a settlement. mean, Google won and I don't think Job Index was going to appeal anyway. Okay, and then Google came to a settlement, they didn't say it was a financial settlement. It could also be a settlement like, okay, now stop it and we'll leave you alone as well. That's a settlement too. But I wonder if it is a financial settlement, I guess it will be in the financial statements next year. So we should put it in our agenda and check if there are... Chad (12:10.827) They did. They peeled. Lieven (12:32.171) are some numbers showing up. I'm really curious about the amount because they live in a different world and job in Google. So maybe they got their 5 % back after all. I'm not sure. Probably not. I don't think Google is going to throw money away, especially now with ChachiPT taking, I think going to be taking a big part of the income from Google in the coming years. Joel (12:59.662) What are your thoughts on Europe becoming a more innovative government, encouraging innovation, stripping away some regulations and red tape? Is it your opinion that that is where Europe is going or is it less so from your perspective? Lieven (13:01.176) So I wonder, I wonder. Lieven (13:16.012) Yeah, maybe, maybe that's the good thing about America bullying us all right now, that we're going to stop being extremely woke and just try to be a bit more pragmatic. And okay, this looks like a nice law, but do we really need it because we have plenty of laws. So maybe stop adding laws and work a bit harder. So this might be a good outcome, but still we prefer to way we have free healthcare, you have military, everyone was happy. I think we should go back to. Joel (13:36.067) Mm-hmm. Lieven (13:46.192) to that moment. Joel (13:47.264) everyone or every european was happy Chad (13:47.457) at better. Lieven (13:50.606) Boy, you liked having the military? Joel (13:51.885) you Chad (13:54.485) I think the narrative around if there's regulation, there's no innovation. It was just total bullshit. I think that is set up by capitalists because they want, they don't want government to tell them what to do. But if you take a look at, and I had a great example this week, I was watching AI and safety, right? And they were talking about railroads and how railroads in the United States, only about 30 % of them at one time actually made it to their destinations. Lieven (13:59.841) Mm-hmm. That's true. Chad (14:23.181) because it was so bad from a safety standpoint. Then the United States came in and they started to regulate. had air brakes. They had all these different things from a safety standpoint that they had to use. And it wasn't just about getting freight from one point to the next. So railroads became much safer and the innovation that we got out of those railroads because of that actually was better for the country. It was better for the companies. So I think trying to put those two together, regulation stifles innovation. I think that's just a bullshit way of saying that we don't want you in our backyard auditing us. Lieven (15:06.328) Yeah, I agree. But sometimes regulation just isn't, it isn't helping. Like European AI acts will probably give us a big disadvantage compared to people who don't have it. GDPR is just cumbersome. So the companies who are correct, they use GDPR in correct way and the companies who are not, they still don't. So, I mean, sometimes legislation is just a law and it's It's kind of creating barriers which we don't want. Joel (15:35.468) Yeah. And I think sometimes optics comes to play as well. If investors have the opinion that Europe is not a good place to spend money because of regulations and red tape, then you're losing out on money that's going, that's staying in America or going to Asia and other places. So optics matters sometimes too. Lieven (15:46.521) Hmm. Chad (15:51.917) think it's harder to spend money in Europe because you're looking at a bunch of different countries, right? In one big mass, we're in the US, you're looking at, you take a look at a comparison, it's pretty much the same, a bunch of different countries, but they're just all united under the same English, right, culture to some extent. So I mean, it's harder to spend money in Europe. I don't think it's less innovative in Europe. As we take a look at a lot of the startups that are coming out of Europe, they're pretty fucking innovative. Lieven (16:00.56) Mm-hmm. Joel (16:09.774) Mm-hmm. Chad (16:22.245) and with regard to, to GDPR, mean, yeah, some of it's kind of a pain in the ass, but at the end of the day, will it also start to change the thought process on who owns what data and will that have long-term effects, good effects or bad effects on, on, on technology companies. Lieven (16:42.797) I totally agree and I feel privacy is extremely important. Problems of course, these laws should be on a global scale, which today is impossible. Chad (16:46.029) Mm-hmm. Chad (16:52.107) No, yeah. Joel (16:54.114) Follow the money kids. Joel (16:59.022) All right, let's take, bring it to your, let's say, take a quick break. Take a breath of all this Trump nonsense and talk a little bit more business. Lieven (16:59.13) Follow the money and bring it to Europe. Chad (17:01.965) I'm coming. I'm coming. Lieven (17:03.824) You're welcome, Chet. Lieven (17:10.707) Hmm. Chad (17:12.247) Joel (17:17.486) All right, Chad used to work there as it Ronstadt, Randstad, like what is the exact pronunciation? Chad (17:24.587) mean, if you're saying it from the Midwestern accent, it's Ronstadt or Randstad, right? But it's, mean, as you start to deal with the Dutch, it's more of the Ronstadt. Yeah. Joel (17:29.794) wrong stuff. Lieven (17:32.75) Rammstadt. Joel (17:36.792) Ron Ron stock. Well, I can't roll my R so I'm screwed there. I'll do the best I can here guys. All right. In an opinion piece from our friend, GJ Vostor. he outlines how Ron start is facing challenges despite a thriving labor market. While the company's market share is shrinking, competitors are thriving by focusing on specialized niches, leveraging technology and maintaining strong local presences. Ron Stott's attempts to adapt such as acquisitions and leadership changes have yet to reverse its decline. Lieven (17:37.252) and stats. Joel (18:06.986) See monster highlighting the need for a strategic shift. We already mentioned that you used to work there, Chad. So I assume you have some thoughts on GJ's opinion of Ronstadt. Chad (18:19.341) Yeah, I personally think Ronstadt is going through an identity crisis. Are they a staffing company or are they a tech company? The answer to me is yes. This is a problem they are trying to choose. And the answer is Ronstadt needs. And when I say need, I mean it's vital for leadership to understand that the aspects of staffing will be an app. They need to be creating global partnerships with platforms they can leverage and then, prospectively, buy, maybe. But platforms like Remote Deal, Velocity Global, Oyster, Atlas, and other EOR companies will become tomorrow's version of staffing. So Ronstadt is taking kind of like today's version of BlackBerry, you know, where they denied smartphones for the future. They've got to understand they've got to move forward. So yes. Ronsod has an innovation fund to keep an eye on the market, but where did that help them in the failed acquisition of Monster? Seriously, you have a leadership team that understands traditional staffing in a non-traditional world. You can't adapt technology to your business. You need to transform your business into a platform. And I think the hardest example of this is job.com, where they've demonstrated over the years that they haven't been able to make it work. Job.com 's vision was to consolidate staffing agencies and pull them into the job.com platform and then change the model where the commissions were anywhere from 15 to 20 % per transaction down to 2 % per transaction. So if you slim down headcount become a cheaper option and squeeze out the competition, you can pretty much at that point start to raise that 2 % to 5%, maybe get it back to 15%, but it's so damn hard. Joel (20:08.651) Mm-hmm. Chad (20:11.117) to stand by and watch 15 or 20 % contracts go to 2%. So this is a hard transition to pull off as demonstrated by the real life canary in the AI mind, know, job.com. It's going to be hard for Ron style. They've got a shit ton of cash. Um, will that be enough? No fucking clue. I think leaving knows a hell of a lot better than I do. Joel (20:37.292) Leaving what you got on Ron Stott. And say it correctly for us, because I know you can. OK, love it. Lieven (20:41.136) I'm not sure if I know. Randstad. Randstad, yeah. I really like the article because I work for a competitor of Randstad, but how's of HR? I know, I know, and we were mentioned in a good way. we are the mid-sized companies taking market share from the leader. But I think it's largely accurate, the article, but it's sometimes a bit opinionated. And I'm not going to say I'm objective, but just my few thoughts. Joel (20:53.198) and you were mentioned in the article. Lieven (21:14.032) So they're losing ground to smaller agile competitors. That's true. Rundstats isn't small and they're not agile. And in this business, that's a problem. that's a fact. But a bigger problem to me is that they are afraid of technology. You might remember in 2016, they launched Ploy. And Ploy was, when I looked at it, I thought, damn, that's a good idea. They made a marketplace. It's actually an app for the the catering business mostly to hire people immediately. You had a pool of people, had a pool of restaurants and I need someone to wash my dishes because the dishwasher is sick and you could hire someone to... And totally automated. And I looked at Ploy and I thought, okay, it could be better, but it's not a bad tool. It's actually pretty innovative. And one year later, and I wasn't even working at Haasevichard then in 2017, Accent, one of our companies, launched a competition inside the of HR. And they asked, what could kill Accent? Come up with an idea that is so brilliant that it could kill Accent. And Accent then had 300 million euros of revenue. So not that big, but not small either. And they came up with something which really resembled Ploy, but better. It was like Ploy 2.0. They based their ideas probably on Ploy, and they improved it. And they launched it. But Chad (22:32.204) Mm. Lieven (22:36.88) Ploy had a first mover advantage. They already existed for one year, but they never grow. Why didn't they grow? They were afraid. The people in their offices, they didn't want it. They say, I'm a digital platform. They're going to take away our jobs. going to, we don't like it. And you better stop using this. And they didn't dare to promote it. And House of HR just thought, great, we have a new tool which could finish Accent. Let's launch it before the competition does. And now Ploy has 100 million revenue. Sorry, not Ploy, Ploy is dead. Now Jobs has 100 million euros revenue a few years later and totally automated. So that's great. And then there's Monster, Randstad bought Monster. It was like a safe bet. And I think it was 2015, 2016 also, something like that. 327 million euros. And back then I thought what does Randstad know that I don't know? Buying Monster, outdated technology, and it was going down already. Apparently they didn't know. Chad (23:29.005) You Lieven (23:35.34) So they've been losing money on it. The moment they started losing money at the moment they bought it. And Rundstadt and technology hasn't been the best match, I think. And they've been afraid of it. So in this business, you have a problem now. But I think something that should be more nuanced is they faced a total of 260 million in impairments and adjustments, meaning it's mostly a one-time expense. Joel (23:46.05) Mm-hmm. Lieven (24:04.048) Had a problem with the value of Goodwill in Sweden and the United Kingdom. They had 139 million of reassessing and adjusting from Carrierebilder and Monster. So these are one shots and they lost a bit of money, but now it's gone. It's out of the box. I think they should be more worried about the decline in revenue. If you lose 5 % revenue in this market, then you have a problem. And this is something which will only get bigger, I think. The one shots aren't that problematic. But who am I? Joel (24:37.09) Mm-hmm. You're leaving. And that means, that means a lot to us. Lieven (24:41.36) I'm You're too kind. You're just trying to make it up to us Europeans. You American. Joel (24:47.51) Yeah. And continue to do that. I, I was, I was doing, doing my research on raunch dot, which I've never really done. And I gotta say like, whoo, it was, it was rough. look, this, this is an old, big, profitable investors love it. They churn out dividends. Lieven (24:59.022) You Chad (25:09.805) legacy. Joel (25:13.134) The stock is basically fluctuated between 20 and $40 forever. Uh, stockholders are happy. They're getting dividends. Uh, they're hiring people organically. mean, the head count is going up, uh, $8 billion market cap, like nice size. have three or four competitors like manpower, Deco, and recruit holdings. think monster was an attempt to be recruit holdings and say, Hey, we can get in this internet job thing game. And they failed and they. To their credit, they cut bait and they were out. Like we, we do what we do. Our shareholders love it. I like, we like, this is who we are. I, I think they look at deal and remote and like, okay, whatever. were here, we were here in the nineties with, with monster and all the other up and coming sites. And we were there in the nineties and the eighties when all these disruptions have these guys are, these guys are just this big. enterprise that goes through space. It doesn't really care. And that's just what it is, man. I, yes, do they innovate? No. Do they suck? Probably. but they are what they are, man. It's like, they're like Philip Morris. They've been making cigarettes forever. They churn out dividends. You know, they, they don't innovate, but people keep, you know, buying it. I'm not comparing cigarettes to staffing. Maybe there are different kinds of drugs there. There's not the nicotine hit that you get with staffing, but I just, Lieven (26:21.954) No. Chad (26:34.017) Hahaha Joel (26:39.53) They're not going to get disrupted anytime soon. They're just going to plod along like a big elephant in the jungle and just be happy with what they are from what I can see. Lieven (26:50.53) In the article, it also mentioned something about their CEO being not connected to the staffing industry. came from somewhere else. But that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. mean, the best CEO in the business, of course, is Rika Koppens, our CEO. Friends and foes all agree on it. But she didn't come from the business as well. She was part, of course, of the board. So she knew about House of HR. But she came from the oil business. and the new CEO of AccentJobs, Stan van der Voorst. He came from Adidas. Do I pronounce it right? The shoes? Adidas. He was managing director from Adidas Japan and he had a big experience in e-business selling shoes online. So this was something we wanted to be know about recruitment, but we wanted a CEO who had a different way of looking at things and it works. So with the new CEO of Randstad being Chad (27:27.713) Yep. Adidas. Joel (27:29.132) data. Chad (27:42.359) Mm-hmm. Lieven (27:48.592) from a different business, I don't see a problem, not necessarily, but he of course has to adapt and maybe that's something which isn't happening. Joel (27:55.82) I feel like he's going to get bored really, really fast if he was at Adidas. Lieven (28:00.804) Yeah. Chad (28:00.941) I gotta say though, for leaving, mean, you guys, again, you're trying to out-innovate yourself in the market and you're trying to pretty much out-Netflix yourself, right? You were sending DVDs in the mail, what's next? Streaming, shit, we better get streaming right, right? Where Ronstadt feels like Blockbuster. And as Joel had said, it's legacy, it's worked, it's worked forever. Question is, how long will that? And if they're not continuing to do like you guys are and building the now jobs of tomorrow, I mean, that's something that you guys can actually fall back on. There's tech there. You've got tech that you've built that obviously, a hundred million dollars, not too bad, is actually working. Right? So being able to build those contingencies and if those contingencies actually create their own business models, you've got something to fall back on. I just don't see Ronstadt having anything to fall back on. Um, they're a big fucking company. Maybe they don't need anything to fall back on. Oh yeah. It is. It is. They're everywhere. Lieven (29:01.366) They have a big brand. That's still important that they have global presence. That's also important. Joel (29:03.33) Yeah, huge brand. That means something. Look, if they're the elephant, Rika is the lioness fucking shit up in the jungle. And I'd much rather talk about the lioness fucking shit up instead of the old salty crusty. Chad (29:13.6) You Lieven (29:18.128) You know, think Rannstadt should hire Elon Musk. And he just let him dog around Rannstadt and then we'd be rid of two nuisance at once. Elon would be gone and Rannstadt would be gone afterwards too. So Rannstadt do something makes make herself useful hire Elon. Joel (29:24.32) No. Chad (29:32.755) He's come in with a kitchen sink and yeah. Joel (29:39.214) Let's play some who'd you rather, shall we? All right, if you're new to the show, here's how it works gang. And we talk about two startups that have recently gotten money. We read a summary and of the two companies, everyone in this podcast will say who they'd rather. Guys, you ready for a little bit of who'd you rather? In this corner, we have Alpha, ALFA, a UK based AI recruitment startup who has secured Chad (29:41.389) Yeah. Chad (29:59.223) Ring it. Joel (30:08.474) £495,000 in funding, valuing the company at 6 million USD. The funding will help Alpha automate recruitment tasks and enable hiring managers to focus on candidate interactions. Alpha CEO Alfie, yes, Alpha's CEO is a guy named Alfie. Yeah, said quote, our AI agent is capable of a million software calls simultaneously in any language at 97 % lower cost. Lieven (30:26.638) That's great. Joel (30:37.598) than a human. that is alpha. And in this corner, the opposing one, Avery. Rotterdam-based Avery has raised 300,000 euros to address costly mis-hires, which studies show can waste up to 50,000 euros per bad hire. Avery's AI-powered platform promises to predict candidate success and validate roles, offering what it calls a more efficient and market aligned approach. Backed by Builder Startup Studio, Avery says they serve 25 customers across Europe. That is Avery versus Alpha Chad. Who'd you rather? Chad (31:19.329) Since I've got my Rotterdam scarf on, fan or Rotterdam, I'm start with them. So Avery, it's kind of funny because in the press release, Avery talks about speed, right? And how speed isn't important. Fit is important. And then you watch the video on their homepage and speed is mentioned over and over and over. Lieven (31:25.68) Cool. Chad (31:42.853) It's interesting because marketing is just not clicking somewhere. Either speed counts or it doesn't count. Make up your mind, right? So let's focus on the TechEU article real quick. Founder and CEO was quoted several times in one of the quotes, using intelligence to validate roles before a single resume is screened, predicting candidate success before interviews begin and ensuring market alignment before offers go out, end quote. So... That's called fairy dust kids. Avery apparently either has the market cornered on fairy dust, bullshit or fate or vaporware. Wait a minute. Those last two are the same. Avery does not have historical candidate performance data. So there's no way in hell they can predict shit. Now alpha. from the website, 97 % lower cost than a human, 24-7, never stops working, that's what AI does for you, that's technology, and 10 ex-candidates interviewed. All great numbers, but even better than those numbers is Alfie. Yes, I said it, it's fucking Alfie, the wunderkind, co-founder and CEO of Alfa. The kid knows how to promote himself and the company. While Ed, the CTO, is actually out there doing the hard work, the development stuff. So if I'm in a bar at 3 a.m. and I only have two choices and it's Avery and Alpha, Alpha looks much more sexy tonight. And I'm going home without one. Joel (33:15.214) All right, all right. All right. That is, that is one of the books. All right. Chad, you know, I, you know, I love a good wave. I love a good wave. I'd rather have a bad surfer on a good wave than a good surfer on a bad wave. And the ultimate wave right now is Europe is Europe. Let's count the ways. number one, the Eurozone is outperforming growth expectations right now. Chad (33:28.929) He's never served. He's never served. Chad (33:40.744) yeah. Chad (33:45.261) Mm-hmm. Joel (33:45.586) everyone unemployed at Volkswagen can now build tanks apparently because, the defense departments are going to be in it. And yeah, that's good. sure. Sure. Lieven (33:49.998) Yep. Chad (33:51.757) Thanks, you're welcome. Lieven (33:52.706) And can I add something Joel? Because I like it. In Belgium, there was a really, really, really big Audi factory. And they closed it down and it's a huge, site. It's half a city. And they're going to launch a military factory there now. So they're going to use the factory in which they built Audi Q8, et cetera. And they're going to make military vehicles. Joel (34:11.15) Mm-hmm. Joel (34:18.136) Yep. Yep. Lieven (34:19.067) it's, it's becoming big business because we can't trust our American partners anymore. So we won't be buying your shit. Joel (34:26.83) So expectations are optimistic. Number two, European stocks have been beat down for many, many years, losing to the S &P 500. As of now, the S &P 500 is underperforming the Euro stocks that are there. So stockwise, money is flowing into public companies in Europe. Number three, the European Central Bank is expected to cut rates Lieven (34:28.971) Bye. Joel (34:53.122) multiple times in 2025, which means money's free. Give it to companies. Let's grow, baby. Let's grow. Let's grow. Let's grow. And number four is we've already talked about the uncertainty in the U S in other words, what the fuck are we doing is driving hedge funds and institutional investors into Europe where there's a much more stable environment. if we can say that. So for those four reasons, in short, Chad (35:07.885) the story. Joel (35:21.514) Europeans under evaluation improving fundamentals and uncertainties in America means that I am calling for a menage a trois. I'm going to do both of them. I'm doing both. I'd rather both these companies because I love a good wave, Chad. I love a good wave. That's right. Leaving. Lieven (35:34.628) I Lieven (35:41.274) Thank you. Chad (35:42.763) the wave of Europe. I do. Lieven (35:45.936) In that case Joel, you can have mine because I don't want any of them. No, I'm sure, I'm serious. I think Alpha is interesting and I like the name Alfie, but it reminds me of a television series when I was really young, in the 90s, end of the 80s. Alf, the extraterrestrial, whatever. Okay, the problem with Alpha is it's extremely easy to copy. Joel (35:52.462) Yeah Chad (36:00.109) healthy health. Joel (36:06.062) as a movie too, Chad (36:07.685) yeah, Alf. Joel (36:09.816) Well, Alfie and Alf different, but go ahead. Lieven (36:15.95) And I would never invest in something which is that easy to copy. And the problem with Avery is it's not sexy and we like things being sexy, but I think you don't need Avery to avoid bad hires. mean, AI is automating everything, which gives us time to do our due diligence when hiring people and just do your fucking job. I was the right person. That's what we do. It's we are in the staffing business. We don't need a specific company to do that for us. It's our job. We've been doing it for tens of years. decades, decades since the, for example, since the 1960s even. So I'm okay. Now they're going down, but that's a different story. But, I don't know. I don't want alpha to use the copy. I don't want Avery because I just don't need them. Joel (36:51.074) decades. Lieven (37:08.644) the time we save by using AI. You can have them Joel, them. Bring them to America. Chad (37:09.889) Joel's gonna take them both, yeah. Joel (37:13.422) Alright, alright. Give me all the Europe. Give me all the Europe. Chad (37:17.421) Apparently, Levin hasn't had enough to drink to be able to pick one of the other. Joel (37:20.014) Yeah, it was a happy hour and Belgians make the best beer. Jeez, what the hell is going on? We need a dad joke to pull us out of this one, everybody. All right, did you hear about the Italian chef who died? Did you hear about the Italian chef who died? He passed away. Lieven (37:22.064) Thanks. Lieven (37:25.438) It's alcohol free, that's the problem. Chad (37:26.541) That's a great beer. I had great beer last week. That's for damn sure. God. Chad (37:46.253) So bad. So bad. Clemen. We out. Lieven (37:46.572) Yes Joel. Thank you Joel. We out. Joel (37:47.886) We out!EUROPE: Regulation, Randstad and a Tech Rumble

In this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast , recorded live at RecFest USA, Paige Elliott, Global Employer Brand Manager at Veeam Software, shares why authentic diversity stories are key to attracting talent. She discusses how to align internal culture with external messaging, leverage diverse storytelling formats, and collaborate with ERGs and DE&I teams for genuine narratives. The conversation also covers candidates' increasing scrutiny of DE&I commitments, strategic recruitment partnerships, and the importance of transparency in pay and culture. Don’t miss Paige’s expert insights on building a brand where values and actions align! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Thanks for hanging out with us today. Let's start with who are you and why are you here? Paige Elliott: My name is Paige Elliott. I am the global employer brand manager at Veeam Software. And I'm here today to talk about the power of diversity stories within organizations, why it's important. That is my session for tomorrow. And just really help the talent acquisition and HR know the importance of diverse perspectives and just how important it is today. Chad: Yeah, yeah. So, with that in mind, looking forward, right? What advice would you give to your peers in talent acquisition and recruiting? What nugget would you give them moving forward? Paige Elliott: I would say employer branding is not just the websites anymore and just the nice slogans and nice-to-haves. It's really about also the employee experience as well. You want your employer brand to match what's actually happening internally inside your organization. Because the last thing you want is to talk about your company and all the amazing things about your company, your values, and then they get into the organization, and their experience does not match that. And so just the importance of making sure that your culture and your values internally match your employer brand, and it's carried the whole way through that process. And that includes activating your diverse employees stories, letting their voices be heard, and really incorporating that into your employer brand and your messaging. Joel: Let's dig into... You talk about storytelling a lot. What does that look like? Is it video? Is it the written word? Is it audio? Is it all of the above? And how do you deliver that to your audience? Paige Elliott: It's all of it. When it comes to recruiting, whether they're on your careers website, your social media; whether it's your employees posting on their own; it's all content. I think when it comes to getting any feedback from employees, you can leverage it and repurpose it on every platform. And it comes in the sense of using it to recruit, using it for, like I said, your careers website or your blogs or anything. But being able to just capture their voices in all avenues internally so that they feel that sense of belonging. And yeah, so it's all types of content avenues. Chad: So, it's hard because you have so many employees, and you want to capture all these stories. How do you capture them? What's the easiest way? How do you capture those stories? Because manually, it's hard for you to scale as a person or a team, right? How do you do it? Paige Elliott: I think it's really about partnership and being able to collaborate internally. I always use employee resource groups as a starting point because those groups are for minorities and underrepresented groups, right? So, starting with them, networking with your HRBPs, they know their organizations best; talking to recruiters, they know who they're looking for to hire; DE&I and talent management, they know the different employees that are coming through the pipeline and the internal mobility. Talk to them, leverage them. I think it's really just not working in silos, but finding out the people in your organization who have a story. Because we all have a story, right? And that's what makes your company unique. It's your people and their experiences. And so we can really amplify those messages and those stories. People connect with that. People like real people with real stories, at the end of the day. So, it's just finding those things and diversifying it. Joel: Yep. So DE&I has been on quite a wild ride the last few years. Something that went from "This is a good idea everyone should embrace" to "This is political," "This is weaponized," to companies taking sides. Wondering from your perspective on the candidate side, what kind of conversations and questions are you getting from the candidates in regards to inclusivity and diversity? Paige Elliott: That's a good question. Candidates that are currently within a company or candidates that are like external looking to work for you? Joel: All the candidates, yes. [overlapping conversation] Paige Elliott: All the candidates. People just want to know if it's real or not, at the end of the day. Are you just trying to check a box, or are you authentically moving forward and committed to diversity and inclusion? And so I think that's what I'm saying with the messaging. People can feel that. Are you just putting it out there? And then I come work at your company and there's no processes in place, there's no systems in place to support what you're saying? So, that's the conversation. How serious is this company? Candidates are doing their research now. Once they're going through the interview process, they're going to look you up, right? They're going to look on LinkedIn, social media, see what people are saying, and they want to be able to see what's on your career website. You know what I mean? So, I think it goes beyond the corporate message, but it goes to, what are the people saying about the organization? And people inside are talking about it. And people externally that you're looking to hire, they're talking about it as well. Chad: So, were you surprised earlier this year when companies like TSE and Harley and some of those organizations literally said, "We're just pulling out of DEI entirely?" Did that surprise you? Paige Elliott: I would say it didn't surprise me. It's sad a little bit, because it became the good thing to do. You know what I mean? But it shouldn't even be a conversation. It's a necessity. The fact that we're still having to make it important, or talk about it, "Is it good? Is it not good?" it should be embedded in your principles. And so I was surprised by it taking place, but people have been... It just hasn't felt as authentic, is where I'm... You know what I mean? People have used it and weaponized it in different ways, so I'm not surprised that they've held back. But at the same time, there's a lot of companies that are still pressing forward with it. So, there's still value when it comes to spending money, and really being able to push the DE&I agenda forward. It's important, but unfortunately, some people have, or companies have misused it. Joel: Yep. What are you doing from a marketing perspective or job distribution perspective, or just marketing in general to make sure that you're getting in front of as many people and diverse candidates as possible? Paige Elliott: Yeah, that's a good question. You really have to, well, one, diversify the content that you are getting, right? A lot of it comes to recruitment campaigns. We work with, say, our sales team is looking to diversify their talent, so then I have to get really intentional with my targeting. What area are we looking at? Do we need to target certain universities, if it's early careers? Minority groups, the partnerships are important. We've recently partnered with Out & Equal organization for the LGBTQ+ community or Women in Tech, to really leverage that network. Partnerships are important. I just think it's about being intentional, really being intentional. Joel: Are partnerships different than sponsorships? Paige Elliott: So, they can do both. Joel: Okay. Paige Elliott: So, we are a partner of Women in Tech, but we also sponsor some events that they have. So, they both show your commitment to diversity and inclusion, but you can leverage partnerships in different ways. Chad: Right. You can spend money but still hire. Paige Elliott: Spend money but still hire... Chad: Right. [overlapping conversation] Paige Elliott: Because the partnerships come with a lot of benefits. They show that you are committed to the agenda of equality, right? But then they also provide resources for you to use internally to improve your processes. They have job boards that you can hire to their diverse... The diverse boards and slates. So, there's a lot of opportunity with partnerships. So, yeah. Chad: So, in 2025, what is your main priority? What's Paige's focus can be in 2025? Paige Elliott: "Paige's focus." Well, I wear many hats, so I feel like my focus is in a lot of places. But I would say really amplifying that employee experience that I was talking about in the beginning. Our company has been working on our careers website, our EVP, and our culture and values, all at the same time. So, really being able to make sure that's embedded in the employer brand, but again, that it's felt consistently throughout the employee experience, and then really bringing that to life so that the employees come on that journey with us. We want to show them where we're going, but without not being authentic, right? We want to just bring them along with the journey. And again, that employee experience is really what my focus will be. Joel: Are there any groups that you feel like you need to be in front of more, or be more aggressive in getting your opportunities in front of? I know we focus a lot on a few, but are there some that we're falling down on? Paige Elliott: I think I just sat in a session about diversity in tech roles. So, definitely want to be able to diversify women in tech roles and software engineer roles and different things like that. I think it's different for every company, what they're focused on. I know for us, it's really looking at the different markets. Diversity looks different in every market, every country. Right? You have to look at what is the need there when it comes to diversity. And then now you know how to be intentional with your targeting and everything. I don't have a "one size fits all" answer for that, but I would say, women in technology would be one area for women. Joel: Where do you start as an organization on pay transparency? Paige Elliott: We don't post the pay and everything externally currently, like on our website or Glassdoor. We currently don't have that exposed. Once they go through the process, we will answer those questions. I'm not truly involved in that process. I'm not with NTA, but I know the recruiters, they will have that candid conversation. Chad: Excellent. Paige, thank you so much for coming and having conversation. If somebody wants to connect with you, where would they do that? Paige Elliott: You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Paige Elliot. I'm happy to connect. And yes, I see people around here actually coming up to me saying they follow me on LinkedIn. Chad: Nice. Paige Elliott: Let them connect. Yeah. Chad: Paige Elliott, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Paige Elliott: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Eight years. 1,428 episodes. Countless bad takes (but never in doubt). The Chad & Cheese Podcast is still standing—somehow. In this episode: ✅ AI in hiring?  iCIMS just discovered chatbots—welcome to 2015, guys. Meanwhile, Remote and Deal are in a cage match over who can cram more features into their already bloated platforms. ✅ Ghosting is so 2023.  Gen Z is taking job-hopping up a notch with career catfishing—yep, accepting jobs and then… never showing up. Who needs confrontation when you have anxiety? ✅ Amazon’s AI is back.  Will Alexa finally get you a job? Or will she just ghost you like recruiters have for decades? ✅ Plus, the guys take a booze-fueled trip down memory lane, reflect on their first-ever sponsors and unbox a surprise shipment of Chicken Cock whiskey. 🥃 Because nothing fuels corporate snark like free booze. 🎧 Buckle up, kids. It’s unfiltered. It’s unapologetic. It’s The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Hit play—if you can handle it. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:33.288) Frequently wrong, but never in doubt. Hi boys and girls. It's the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel to legit to quit cheeseman Chad (00:42.36) This is Chad. Wow, it's been eight fucking years. So wash. J.T. O'Donnell (00:46.971) And I'm JT. I'm not really Irish, O'Donnell. Joel (00:51.528) Happy St. Patrick's Day and on this episode, deal goes shopping again, iCIMS goes chatboting and job seekers are going catfishing. Let's do this. Chad (01:06.814) Hey, here's dude. And okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. We got it. We got it. We got it. We got to do this. Play, play the intro to our very first show. This is, this is number one kids go. Joel (01:08.52) It only feels like 80. Joel (01:18.63) All right, all right, taking you back to 2017 everybody. Chad (01:21.41) You Chad (01:44.014) And those sponsors, again kids, that was eight years ago. We are today on episode 1,428. Yes. Oh, approaching 1,500. But those sponsors were America's Job Bank, Acquired, Webclip Drop, which I believe became Zap Info. Yeah, yeah. Acquired. And then Beyond.com, which still out there today. Next. With two X's, not the triple X. Joel (01:47.229) Yep. Joel (01:54.876) Mm-hmm. Joel (01:59.559) Wow, yeah. Zap, Zap info. Yeah, doggy. Joel (02:13.832) and this is when they were beyond. Yeah, which I don't know if Bed Bath Beyond are even doing anything with that domain anymore. Chad (02:15.692) Yeah, yeah. Chad (02:19.502) They are not. I think they're dying. J.T. O'Donnell (02:21.033) Right? Joel (02:22.79) What do you remember from that day, Chad? Do you remember anything? Chad (02:26.838) I remember not knowing a fucking thing. I mean, when you go into things like not, well, that's a very good question. That's a very good question. With the, the amount of research I think that we do, and I'm sure you do too, for a weekly show is hours and hours of research. I read these things and then I just after reading them came to, to, to the show, just ready to talk about them. Right now it's more. J.T. O'Donnell (02:30.921) How's that changed? Joel (02:32.656) shit Joel (02:43.549) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:54.782) in-depth research for these things. yeah, instead of taking 15 minutes to read three or four articles, I'm taking hours to read the articles, research the articles, dig deeper into those. just, yeah, it's different. Joel (02:56.87) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (03:08.435) For all your new followers though, what made you two decide to do this? Joel (03:14.82) Wife pressure slash get off the couch and do something slash what the hell slash reason to drink slash. Chad (03:21.91) So he just started, he just started, he just had a startup and that he was starting that up. I had just gotten out of Ronstadt where I'd had my head down for two years, hadn't really been on stage at all. was like, we need to get our fucking voices back out there. This is a great branding exercise, but we treated it as a business on day one, hence having three, three, three sponsors. And then about six months in, because nobody was doing what we were doing in the podcast arena. We exploded and then we. created that obviously it's eight years ago so. Joel (03:52.644) Exploded is generous, but yeah, it took, it took off in a way that I don't think that we, it took a while to get there. took a little while. Yeah. Sorry. My my Midwest humility is kicking in on this one. I remember being so scared and then thinking, no one's going to listen to this. And which is what I thought. I thought maybe 50 of our closest industry people. Chad (03:56.536) Dude, it's your full time fucking job. It has exploded. We have been all over the world on stages, all over the world. It has exploded. J.T. O'Donnell (04:05.865) Exactly. Exactly. I love it. Chad (04:13.281) Yeah? Joel (04:20.796) friends would listen and like that would be it. It's amazing that we're where we are now. But yeah, I'm in for another eight. How about you? Chad (04:21.966) Which is why it took me a year to get him to fucking do it in the first place. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (04:29.575) All kidding aside, congratulations. It is. Chad (04:31.906) Why not? Why not? I'll be on the beach in fucking Portugal. That's right, baby. Joel (04:34.728) Yeah, yeah. It may be one week a month or one episode a month by then, but who knows? We'll still be talking, talking in the microphone. Chad (04:39.886) You J.T. O'Donnell (04:42.641) No, I think I speak for everybody out there, boys, that it's really great what you've done. you know, we're very proud of you. And it's great to see at eight, you're acting your age. It's awesome. Chad (04:52.202) I'm not crying, you're crying. Joel (04:53.32) You sound like a paid consultant, JT. You sound like a paid contractor. Chad, you weren't here last week. Where were you? What's going on? J.T. O'Donnell (04:55.75) I am. You're welcome. Chad (05:00.468) It is. All right. I know, I know, I know. Well, first off, I had to jump over to DC, which I want to talk about. then, we talked about on the Europe show that's coming. but then I had a chance to go to that's right. the Netherlands for a week and a half. Yep. I was lucky enough, Keith Sonderling invited us to come to DC for his congressional hearing, right? Joel (05:10.056) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:17.522) football J.T. O'Donnell (05:18.953) I Chad (05:29.022) and, I was lucky enough to go. So was, was pretty awesome. We did a, we did a day trip. Congrats to Keith. It was really hard to watch what he was signing up for in that congressional hearing. mean, it was. And let me qualify real quick kids. I've actually testified in Congress. I used to travel back and forth to DC for years. started. when we were starting to build out the National Labor Exchange and I was working directly with the National Association of State Workforce Agencies who were in DC and also the federal government. So I was in DC every other week for years. So I understand how the sausage is made, but after this visit, I was literally sick to my stomach. It was like watching kids fucking food fighting, grown ass adults. grown ass adults acting like fucking kids. I mean, we're talking 70, 80 year old fucking dudes. Congrats to Keith. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, Congrats to Keith, but for what he signed up for, dude, you couldn't get me to do that for any amount of money. Done. Joel (06:21.83) Yeah, very adult. Yeah, got confirmed this week. J.T. O'Donnell (06:28.787) Yeah. Joel (06:32.633) It sounds like you think DC hasn't changed much, Chad, but I'm here to tell you things have changed, Chad. I don't know if you saw it this week on the, the white house lawn. There was, there was a show, a showcase of Tesla's let's, let's look at the daily shows. Take, yeah. Take on what happened this week at the white house. Here we go. Chad (06:35.783) dude, change so much. yeah? Tell me. Chad (06:47.15) Is this a used car show? Yeah. Chad (07:11.948) Here's the prices! Joel (07:13.382) Right, Chad (07:19.53) Everything's computer! Joel (07:20.391) You Chad (07:35.477) my god. Chad (07:39.798) So it was funny in the green room. We played it in, in JT was like, that's not real. We're like, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that actually happened kids. Tesla's in front of the white house for sale. Donald Trump talking about the pricing. even had the payment methods. I mean, it's fucking crazy. J.T. O'Donnell (07:41.993) Here comes. I knew you were going to say it. like, that AI? It's like, where'd you get that? Joel (07:45.96) Is that AI? J.T. O'Donnell (07:53.213) Thank Joel (07:53.576) Mm-hmm. Yep, that actually. Joel (08:05.608) What's up with Elon's kid? He's got like 80 kids. Why is this the one that he brings around? Maybe. Yeah. Chad (08:11.534) He's probably the one that's most mobile, he's probably the most quiet, and I mean he makes a perfect little baby human shield. yeah. Yeah, it kind of distracts from Elon's quirks and glitches and stuff. Joel (08:18.012) He does. He's very cute. He's very cute kid. Yeah, picks his nose occasionally. That's always fun. That's always fun. JT, how about you? Do you have an uplifting funny shout out to drop on the listeners? boy. J.T. O'Donnell (08:33.097) Absolutely not, absolutely not. No, I am the downer. I am the downer. Okay, so you remember the great quit? Chad (08:34.286) Absolutely not. J.T. O'Donnell (08:42.407) In the great quit, my TikTok feed blows up with everyone recording quitting on their social, right? So let me show you getting quit, right? This week I got on the side of TikTok with everybody recording getting laid off and subsequently, know, bawling their eyes out. The thing that scares me the most is how quickly you get desensitized when you just see person after person doing it. But there's a guy right now who's going viral because all he does is get in his car and scream about it. It's like the same video every day. He's just like in this car screaming about it. Why is this already live? You know, just in like full on screen and it's unbelievable that this is my feed. So yeah, there's probably something going on out there right now, but the tears man, the water works. It's intense. It's intense. Joel (09:25.404) And, and you. Chad (09:28.866) Wow. Joel (09:28.988) You've been doing this for a long time. Is this unprecedented? This kind of meltdown and... J.T. O'Donnell (09:32.457) But I mean, I don't think we have social media to document the way we do. Just it's unbelievable to me how much people want to document everything. You know, everything. And, you know, really quick sidebar, people can be all the time and say, Hey, should I do that diatribe on LinkedIn where, I got laid off today and here's my whole story and hey, I'm looking for help. I'm like, actually, no. And let me tell you why. Because when it goes viral and 50,000 people see it, all your friends go, well, I'm sure they're all set because it got 50,000 views. So someone else is going to help them. So nobody helps you. Chad (09:59.502) Yeah. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (10:01.735) So you go back and watch those people, 90 days later, they're still not employed. So I don't see the power, and think cathartically people want to do it, but yeah, it's pretty bad right now. Chad (10:12.92) Woo. Joel (10:13.958) Is it a positive that they can go online and do this and get feedback from people, get the support or no? J.T. O'Donnell (10:14.141) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (10:19.913) Is it, I mean, does it feel good to let it out? I think, I think of course you would, you know, first thing I tell my clients is feel it, feel your feelings, sit in it for 24 hours, 48 hours. And then guess what? We got to move forward. We've got to work it daily. We've got to move forward. And so if they're doing that great, I just don't know why we necessarily need to do it on video. Chad (10:20.476) cathartic to some extent, right? Yeah. Chad (10:28.654) Mm-hmm. Joel (10:40.099) Well, JT, that's good advice, but I have some advice of my own. If you will humor me. J.T. O'Donnell (10:44.403) That's good. Joel (10:49.498) All right. Everyone knows, chicken cock are recent one favorite bourbons. go try it. If you haven't, we talked about chicken cock, I think last week on the show when you weren't there, Chad, and I, I went, I checked LinkedIn on, Sunday and I had a note from the VP of marketing at chicken cock saying, I heard the episode. We'd love to send, send y'all something like even the y'all was in there. And I said, I said, there is a God, can't like this, this only happens to big time podcasts. And I, so I gave him my, gave him my address. like, here's my size, Chad size, whatever. I get the FedEx alert and it's like two boxes are coming to your house. And I'm thinking one box full of cock is, is good, but two boxes full of cock could be even better. So this stuff shows up last night, Chad, got six bottles. Here we go. Chad (11:20.555) Yes! Chad (11:44.558) Steven McGrath, what, what, Good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. While you're showing, I told Steven McGrath, I'm like, Joel got six bottles of chicken cock and Steven said, I can only handle two cocks at once. I'm like, you're not Joel Cheeseman. J.T. O'Donnell (11:45.161) Joel (11:47.25) We got the double, we got, go ahead, double oak. I'll bring these out and you talk. Joel (12:01.244) Ha ha ha ha! J.T. O'Donnell (12:02.761) Wait, that one looks strange. Wait, wait, wait, wait, that one's got some missing. Joel, well we are, okay, see, keep an eyeball on Joel. No cherries, he's not Joel. Joel (12:06.342) Yeah, I did open this one last night. Yeah. That's all me. Yeah, here's an average night for me. There we go. That's the standard. Here we got the rye. Chad's a fan of the rye. He likes the rye stuff. And then back here, I think we have the private cask. This is for my romantic nights that I got here on the shelf. Chad (12:13.025) No, no. Chad (12:20.133) look at that. Wow. Yep. Chad (12:27.938) Nice. With himself. J.T. O'Donnell (12:29.801) So I feel like we're gonna make, think about this, we're gonna make the triple cock because it's gonna be the chicken cock cocktail for chow and cheese, right? I think there's like, we've got to make a cocktail with one of these. I know you can drink them straight, but there's gotta be something there. Chad (12:45.486) I think we're gonna work directly with Chicken Cock to make that happen. Joel (12:46.876) Got, we got the T shirts. Here we go. And we got, here we got the hat, which I'll be sporting. yeah, I'm going to have the cock out, for a long time. Everybody. hope, I hope you're okay with that. J.T. O'Donnell (12:50.185) Mmm Chad (12:53.912) And while Joel is showing all that free stuff, I just like you to know. J.T. O'Donnell (12:54.27) I love the hat. Love the hat. Chad (13:00.526) And the thing is nobody's going to notice. Anyway, you can go to Chadcheese.com slash free and you can get free stuff too, but you can get Chad and cheese free t-shirts from Aaron app. friends over at Aaron app, bourbon barrel age syrup from key. Yorra. The, the, kids up North craft beer. craft beer. love craft beer. that's from the data geeks over at. J.T. O'Donnell (13:01.287) If they're listening, we're... Joel (13:20.808) Good stuff from the Canadian. J.T. O'Donnell (13:25.628) too. Chad (13:27.806) Aspen Tech Labs and then whiskey from our friends at Van Hack. Great interview with Ilya and Professor Zeke which actually came out this week talking about immigration. And last but not least we have if it is your birthday you got to sign up because you want to win rum with plum. To do that get a ChadCheese.com slash free. Uh-huh. Joel (13:33.64) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (13:34.057) Amazing. Joel (13:36.335) Illya. Joel (13:56.498) We didn't mention that our shout outs are sponsored by Kiara. Text recruiting made easy. yeah. Celebrating another, another trip around the sun this week, got iron Mike Schaefer, our buddy at factory fix. I know he's enjoying some, some bourbon. sent him over a Brown's bears bet. I think we were both losers. We were both losers last season, but he got, he got a bottle. Ashley Collins, Barb, Francilo, Hayden Hughes, Jeffrey Wagner, Isaac Picard, Greg Fiorentino. Chad (13:59.639) there you go. Chad (14:13.004) over a big loss. Yeah. Joel (14:24.848) James Beaver Cleaver, Remington Hampton, Deb Andruchuk, Craig Bloomin' Onion Watson, Bill Fanning, and Jasper, why did I buy an Aaron Rodgers Jets jersey, Spongebob. That's happy birthdays for this week, everybody. Chad (14:26.658) There you go. Chad (14:35.576) There he is. J.T. O'Donnell (14:39.783) Happy birthday, everybody. Chad (14:41.23) She just had beers with Jasper in Einhoven last week and he's doing good. He's doing good. He's, not crying about Aaron being gone. Got Justin Fields there. Who's going to be thrown to Garrett Wilson. So we've got the Ohio state tandem baby. And since I'm talking about being on the road, we're on the road again with Shaker recruitment marketing. Next week we'll be at Transform at the Wynn 17th through the 19th. Joel (14:51.368) He's all right. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Chad (15:09.398) Monday night, we're going to be in the job pixel honeymoon suite for a relax and kind of chill party. Hope to see you there. then on Tuesday, right, right at beer 30, we're going to be on stage with Udemy's Rebecca Stern UPS is Matt Lavery and ThreadUp's Natalie Brees talking about agentic tech. Then next week after that, yeah, we're, going to be on the road again. Shit. We drive up to Chicago. Love that. Joel (15:21.106) Mm-hmm. Joel (15:37.852) Yes. Chad (15:38.67) for the RL 100 on March 25th at Pendry. We're gonna be leading a talk with the super fan, Jane Curran, head of HR Ops at JLL and our buddy, Matt Lavery. Again, can't get rid of him, man, can't, can't. Global director over at UPS. No recordings, nope. You gotta be in the room where it happens. The room where it happens is in Chicago, RL 100. If you're not there and you're a TA leader in your Chicago, Joel (15:54.194) Nope. J.T. O'Donnell (15:54.215) Nice. Chad (16:08.056) Google RL100, go ahead and register, get your ass in that room. Joel (16:09.724) Yep. Yep. By the way, Portillo's gift cards for everyone that's wearing a Chad and Cheese t-shirt at the Chicago event, everybody. Joel (16:23.28) so many headlines, this week. do, let's do kind of a rapid fire, quick, quick summary and we'll discuss number one deal. That's what two is acquired. Safeguard global's payroll division, combining, combining deals, tech and infrastructure with safeguards global payroll expertise. This acquisition will enhance deals ability to execute large global payroll projects. Chad, your thoughts on deal. Chad (16:24.927) shit dude Chad (16:49.838) So I mean, continuing to boost down funnel portfolio, global footprint, most of all, Workday integrations is fucking brilliant. If you can become Workday's exclusive EOR partner, Workday's 2024 annual revenue was over $7.5 billion. And if Deal can push out competitors like Rippling, game fucking over, kids. Love it. Joel (17:12.744) Mm-hmm. So deal has made 11 acquisitions since its founding. That's a few deals, everybody, whoever's their deal maker is pretty busy. Three of those were pay related or four of those actually with the new one. You had pay group, which was targeting Asia. You had pay space, which was Africa and the Middle East. And you had Atlantic money focused on Europe, surprisingly. And now you have safeguard global. I'm not a payroll expert, but why do you need that mini? Chad (17:19.074) Yes. J.T. O'Donnell (17:21.266) Ahem. Joel (17:44.68) I don't know if it's chat. It's that challenging payment systems across the world. Yeah. I don't want to think that the other, the other three have failed as payroll solutions and they had to buy another one. I'm going to go with, it's just a really hard problem to solve. And they've sort of wrapped their head around it and made acquisitions to do so that, so that was my only take. Like they've done a lot of payroll acquisitions. And that made me question that. The other thing you mentioned work day. Is there an acquisition in the works? I don't know. The workday was part of the part of the press release. They'd never done that. I don't think talked about a partnership. Workdays, Workdays market work Workdays market cap is 68 billion deals is 12 billion. I mean, it's not out of the realm of possibility. This is kind of like a LinkedIn. This is a LinkedIn level 25, $30 billion acquisition. I don't know. I don't know. That's, that's, that's kind of my takeaways from this, from this acquisition, JT, you got any thoughts? Chad (18:18.658) Yeah, that's a lot of money though. Chad (18:25.39) Yeah? Yeah? Chad (18:31.438) Could be, could be. Chad (18:36.782) Oof. J.T. O'Donnell (18:43.943) You know, I appreciate listening to the journey of deal through you. That's been one of the things that I've paid attention to. And, know, just talking about, that's a lot of acquisitions, like you said, and I'm always curious, like, how is that? Are you just tucking them in there? Is it Aqua hire? Is it you're grabbing client, you know, market share? What are you doing? right. Yeah, obviously. but I, what Chad said earlier makes sense. They have been quite strategic. Sometimes you see things and you're like, it makes no sense. What was that? Joel (18:58.32) Yes. Yes. Chad (18:58.702) All the above. J.T. O'Donnell (19:09.981) But I think the way they've been choosing it has been very calculated. It's been fun to watch. They're impressive. Joel (19:15.698) Yeah, they don't buy the TJ Maxx clearance rack companies typically, which is usually a good move. J.T. O'Donnell (19:18.289) Exactly. Joel (19:26.32) All right, Remote Deal Competitor is also making moves. They've launched Recruit. The global employment platform has a breakthrough in hiring, according to them, that simplifies and accelerates every step of sourcing and securing top talent. Instead of me talking more about it, let's watch their promo video on what the hell this thing actually is. Chad (20:33.368) Jesus. Chad (20:36.954) Uhhh... Chad (20:42.83) free seven day trial. Joel (20:43.25) Chad, are you ready to start your seven day trial now? What are your thoughts on this move? Chad (20:47.736) So, mean, remote is a competitor to deal. And as we've said, see the ER EOR systems, the employee of record systems created creating solid foundations. Like I just talked about with deal and then turning up funnel toward recruitment. Why? Well, with a projected growth of 5 % in 2025, the staffing industry is expected to reach an impressive 650 billion markets according to QX global. The lion's share being temp staffing at 550 billion global. So remote is trying to beat deal up funnel. The problem I see is they're building it themselves. The way that deal is actually growing, deal is acquiring, right? It already established companies already established tech. They plug and play. They've got the experts already on staff, right? Not to mention they talk about outdated software in that video, that's exactly what this is going to become because they're building the shit themselves. They're not going to be able to focus on it themselves. So I love that they're moving up funnel trying to beat deal. The thing I don't like is I don't like how they're doing it. Joel (21:44.786) Mm-hmm. Joel (22:00.252) Yeah, traditionally you would have a marketplace and then the marketplace would have companies like hire easy and seek out and they would like, that's what they do and you'll have an integration. yeah, remote has said, Hey, we can do that. And they probably can. The problem with like what Chad said is like, nobody, you got to manage this shit. You build it, you bought it. Right. So you got to keep it up to date. You got to make it as cool as what you bought, you know, what you made six months ago. It's a real pain, in the ass. Chad (22:05.09) Dictate to some extent, yeah. Joel (22:28.966) My fascination is how all of these companies are all just becoming the same company. It's going to be like, everyone's going to do from like first contact to like, thanks for, thanks for playing. And who's going to have the best mousetrap for that. Who's going to have the best brand, the most trusted brand, the best pricing, like you like paradox is going to ATS, ATS is coming down to everybody else and everyone's just trying to be everything to everybody. I fear that's a, that's a, that's a bad recipe and a lot of companies are going to get. Chad (22:42.894) Yeah. Yeah. Chad (22:51.938) Mm-hmm. Joel (22:56.584) over it and remote might be one of them. JT? Chad (22:59.63) Well, JT has some insights because she was an advisor for remote. So give us insights. She was, she was. J.T. O'Donnell (23:02.057) Yeah. Joel (23:02.278) Yeah. Can we say that? She got a lot of money. they say keep your mouth shut? Did they say zip it? J.T. O'Donnell (23:08.265) Yeah, no. So no, I mean, if you think about when it was really originally built and then the first person that was building it came to me and asked me to be an advisor. He ended up not staying with the company and it got changed hands. And when it did, my advisory deal was such that they just sent me a check. Right. So and so what happened when I was like, oh, great, I got a check. And then all of a sudden out of the blue, people just randos were messaging me on LinkedIn like, do you still have your stock? Do you still have your stock? I I was like, what is going on? And then very quickly, I started to see remote had. Chad (23:26.541) Not bad. J.T. O'Donnell (23:37.961) pivoted and was doing all of this stuff. So I love to see that it's there. Here's what I do remember Chad. I don't know if you and I were on start at the same time, but I was there when Eric Vonk was running, you know, here. And I remember being in a room, a bunch of us, and he said, Hey, look, it's like 1997. And then he goes by 2030, half the world is going to be freelancers, independent, temporary. What do we want to call it? Like everything is going to have to move in that direction. And I remember everybody kind of laughing around the room. I'm like, I don't think he's wrong. You know, and then you think what's happened now over all those years. So it doesn't surprise us that everyone you just said it, Joel Edmonds moving in that direction because it is where we're ending up now. It'll be fascinating to see which business model survives. I mean, I love watching this stuff. You don't know. You don't know who's going to make a move that just hits timing, right? And boom, you know, but yeah. Chad (24:23.386) yeah, it's cool. Chad (24:27.918) Well, it's the go-to-market too, right? I mean, there are two entirely different go-to-markets. Right now, you're obviously seeing remote go up funnel and dealers trying to fortify down funnel. And then how they're actually fortifying down funnel is they are acquiring. And then how remote is going up funnel is that they're building. So, I mean, the go-to-markets are entirely different. J.T. O'Donnell (24:32.424) completely. J.T. O'Donnell (24:48.189) very. Joel (24:48.2) The best thing about watching all this is it's not any of my money. All right. Let's talk. Let's talk about ice. Holy shit. I Sam's winter winter release is in the book. So they have a seasonal release. I don't know about, spring is coming anyway. we're talking gen AI powered candidate chat bots, expanded integrations with indeed and LinkedIn. What was monster not taking their calls and enhanced nurture channels. Chad (24:55.31) You Chad (24:59.489) Jesus, Jesus. Joel (25:17.67) With SMS, but wait, there's more Chad. I Sims, I Sims is laying off some people according to some rumors. The details are sparse. I don't know if you know anything, but some things are happening at I Sims your thoughts. Chad (25:22.424) Huh? Huh? Jesus. Chad (25:30.786) Yeah, there's a lot of layoffs going on right now that people aren't reporting, or at least they're not coming out and doing press releases. But I think we both believe that they're just trying to lean out for acquisition because there's no way in hell they're going to IPO. So they're going through the aligning process on the J, the gen AI side of the house. Def Leppard said it best. It's too late. It's too late. It's too late for love. It's seriously at this point, competitors are running circles around legacy platforms like iCIMS. Even smart recruiters and gem were smart enough to say, Hey, we're pivoting to a full meal deal AI and agentic solution. Right. And then iCIMS follows that with guess what? We've integrated. That's right. That's air quotes kids integrated. Jen AI. mean, that's fucking 18 months ago, kids into our Joel (26:11.784) Mm-hmm. Chad (26:25.582) crumbling platform. Now, we both love iCIMS. We've known them. We knew Colin back in the day when they started this shit up. But come on people, you have to know when to pivot. You have to know when to rebuild. And you have to know when to change the fucking narrative. Paradox, Fountain, Smart Recruiters, Gem, and many others are coming for you. And you've turned into, I hate to say it, to Leo. Congratulations. Joel (26:28.719) Mm-hmm, we do. Mm-hmm. Joel (26:53.928) Nice to see iCIMS come into 2025. That's nice. Yeah. Paradox was, paradox was founded almost 10 years ago and we're, and iCIMS drops a chat bot press release. Look, we do love iCIMS, the people who are still there that we know pretty well. There was just an iconic company in our industry and the wheels, the wheels have fallen off. CEO changes, layoffs, leadership. Chad (26:56.984) Jesus. Chad (27:02.872) Yeah. A weak one at that. Chad (27:18.158) hate to see it. Joel (27:23.688) Uh, exits, et cetera. So it's, it's a mess. Now the, the only, the only give I'm going to get, get them on this is that they have a new CEO. He's a little over a year in the job and they have a new chief product officer, a guy named Eric Connors who has been there about the same amount of time. So I'll give them credit. Like at least in a year, they sat down and said, what don't we have that we need that everyone else is five to seven plus years ahead of us. Chad (27:42.914) Mm-hmm. Joel (27:53.896) And in that year, they've at least looked, it looks like they've at least sort of caught up a little bit on that. Now, my question is, what does the next 12 months look like? Cause in their, in their winter 26 release, they better drop some cool ass shit. Other else I'm going to take back the nice things that I'm saying about them. But yeah, welcome to 2025. Sims. hope your, your 2026 looks a lot cooler than what this was. JT. J.T. O'Donnell (28:21.109) You you guys followed this much, much tighter than me. They did a lot of acquisition, didn't they? am I, all right, there was, yeah. They did a lot of acquisition. And I remember at one point talking to somebody there and asking like, can you walk me through the choices? You know, how, was this all coming together? Are these all integrated together? And I didn't get a clear answer, but I see, I see where they were trying to do, I guess, is that a cautionary tale? Chad (28:27.574) Yeah, no, they had a good amount of acquisition. They did. Joel (28:27.591) Early on. J.T. O'Donnell (28:48.713) you know, to other organizations that go that route. And then all of a sudden is it integrating all the different texts, trying to get it to be rolling in the same direction, dealing with all the different personalities. Like, I don't know. We'll, I mean, we'll never know for sure, but it just sort of that runs through my head when I think about where they are right now. Were you so busy trying to fix everything you bought that, you know, everybody passed you by? I don't know. I think you were better equipped to share that or not, but it's certainly interesting because they were, they were it, you know, they were it. Everyone was talking about them. Joel (29:14.472) Well, text, text recruit they bought when? 18, 17, 16. Yeah. Forever going. And they're still releasing SMS stuff. It's, yeah. Kind of weird. It's kind of weird. Chad (29:17.88) That was for fucking ever ago, yeah. That was, J.T. O'Donnell (29:18.919) Mm-hmm. Chad (29:25.426) The thing that drives me crazy, Al, who used to be the CTO, guy's brilliant. They were doing some amazing stuff internally. The biggest problem that they were having with all those pieces, JT, was onboarding new clients and taking, you know, far too long to be able to plug new clients into different quote unquote modules, which were other companies at one time, into their system. So again, then you talk about today and how Joel (29:29.98) Love out. J.T. O'Donnell (29:35.497) Interesting. There you go. Chad (29:54.722) different that is from yesteryear, which is more of a legacy platform like iCIMS. The new tech makes it much easier. And we're going to talk about this here very soon. makes it much easier to be nimble and flex. That's the problem. This is a timing issue. This is the reason why gem and smart recruiters and all these companies are, are pivoting their tech to something that's more flexible and nimble because they don't want to become a legacy to Leo, which is exactly what iCIMS is becoming. J.T. O'Donnell (30:03.625) you Joel (30:23.474) Yeah. I sometimes had some, big swings as well that were misses. remember they had passport, which is they were like the consumer product that you could take your resume everywhere. And that didn't quite go anywhere, but like every new tech. Chad (30:26.637) They did. Chad (30:30.798) We're talking about, yeah. Yeah. Chad (30:37.038) Hahaha Joel (30:39.624) All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk to some big players or talk about some big players in AI. Chad (30:45.058) Sorry, ISEMS. It hurts. Joel (30:48.658) Who's ready for some Amazon conversation? of this recruitment, none of this recruit tech stuff. Amazon is boosting its AI investment, focusing on agentic AI that decides and learns led by a new Amazon web services group. This aims to enhance consumer apps and enterprise automation competing with Microsoft and Salesforce, potentially revolutionizing tech interaction and productivity. Chad (30:50.465) Ooh! J.T. O'Donnell (30:51.261) What? Who? What? Is that a company? What? Joel (31:16.806) Let the arms race begin. Chad, your thoughts on the news out of Amazon. Chad (31:21.954) So short but sweet, we're talking about agentic. And as I said earlier this year is one of my projects, my predictions. This is the year of agents, right? Now what Amazon is doing is they're starting to put their NLP along with agents, right? They're, they're natural language processing. And now you can tell an agent to go do something for you. I mean, to, to me using an Alexa device in your home, That is literally the bridge, the consumer bridge where you get a ton of individuals that are using it and you can get a really good base data set, big base data set, and then start to do really cool shit in other areas. So I think this is incredibly smart. Joel (32:04.846) Amazon is getting a bigger boat everybody Chad (32:07.31) Like they need one fucking super yacht. Joel (32:11.698) So the CEO says this is their next billion dollar opportunity. I say this is the rebirth of McHire. Remember Chad, we talked about McHire. You could talk to Alexa, get me a job at McDonald's. Before this was very transactional, like what's the weather? Here's the weather. This is more like, this is like a person helping you out. This is an agent, like Chad said. Chad (32:16.888) Yeah. Chad (32:21.07) It might work now. It might work now. Chad (32:37.742) Mm. Joel (32:40.752) So it's a lot more feasible to say like, Hey, I'm, I'm interested in jobs around my neighborhood. well, McDonald's is hiring. well really what kind of jobs we'll hear. Like you can have a conversation. this sort of, to me, gives some hope to the whole audio job search application thing. Like McHire's not dead. Everybody it's back from the like, like, grimacy on St. Patrick's day. McDonald's is back. Chad (32:58.128) yeah, yeah. Chad (33:10.412) The Shamak Shake is back. Joel (33:10.76) no, the shamrock shake is back and make hire is back. Everybody, Alexa plus this is cool. I think most of you probably seen the Gemini commercial on Google where they're like, yeah, I just, I just talked to it and they're like, yeah, but normal. you have conversations. This is kind of what, what Alexa and Amazon are doing. They were pioneering this. A lot of people have their Alexa still. They upgrade this shit. I think a whole new, a whole new generation of people are going to get into Alexa and start using this thing. So a good for Amazon. We're all kind of winners in this with all the spending and AI. So I'm here for it. I'm excited. I'm excited. Chad (33:45.624) The coolest part, the coolest part though, we talked about multimodal probably two or three years ago, and now we're starting to see it actually happen. Text, audio, video, I mean, just all of it is starting to come together. So that's, again, it's fucking cool. Joel (33:54.952) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (34:03.111) And it's cool. I just, have nothing to add because I agree with everything you're saying except the word agentic just bothers me for some reason. I just don't like the word. I don't know. hear it I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't know. Just not that. I'm such a, I will. I'll think of something. In fact, audience, somebody throw, send, send the guys an alternative to the term agentic. probably be the highest performing one. Joel (34:09.106) You're like, what do you prefer? Chad (34:10.84) We need something more sexy. JT, it's up to you. It's up to you to come up with something more sexy. Chad (34:20.664) good call. Good call. Joel will do a LinkedIn poll. He loves his polls. J.T. O'Donnell (34:30.493) Those polls rank, hey, they polled those polls. Joel (34:34.088) By the way, talk about some, some advancements in technology guys. Somebody, some of these chicken cock bottles actually have the shot glass built into it. Yeah. So take it, take it to a game, take it to a wedding, take it to the family reunion. Chicken cock can get you through anything. Chad (34:42.734) that is, that's beautiful. That's, that's beautiful. J.T. O'Donnell (34:47.155) So pretty. J.T. O'Donnell (34:51.593) My goodness. Chad (34:52.814) Jesus, he's on the fucking payroll. Okay, what's next? Joel (34:53.992) Sorry, just, got cock, I got cock on the brain everybody. I'm sorry. I got, I got issues. All right. Let's, let's talk about mannus. Thank God. Thank God there's an on that man. Chad (35:00.486) Get that cock out of your hands. J.T. O'Donnell (35:07.068) this is going to be good. Hahaha Chad (35:13.672) Is it manis? Is it manis or manis? I don't know. Joel (35:17.16) I've got a burning sensation in my main us, man, man, us. And here you get ready for JT, an agentic AI from a company called butterfly effect, launched with huge hype this week, gaining 138,000 plus discord users and high praise from the critics built on models like Claude. promises autonomous task solving. Does the hype match the reality? J.T. O'Donnell (35:20.745) You Chad (35:27.948) Jesus. J.T. O'Donnell (35:28.715) See what I mean? Nails on Chad (35:31.239) my god. Joel (35:44.796) Some tell you yes and some say no. Let's check out a video on what this thing can do. Chad (36:03.224) Jesus Christ. Chad (36:14.546) It's a program. J.T. O'Donnell (36:28.905) Okay, really quick, did you see that in the little explanation that they type in, it says, my wife and I have a combined income of $50,000, but it's suggesting apartments at 1.8 to 2.2 million. Chad (36:38.798) I didn't say that. didn't see that. Was that, was that the budget or was that the salary? Okay. I have to, okay. J.T. O'Donnell (36:45.031) I don't know. There was no explanation of what they could afford. was just... Joel (36:48.296) I want to know if that guy talks that fast in real life. Like what, kind of cocaine are they giving their developers that this guy is talking that fast? Geez, they're, they're turning this shit out, man. They are, they are on good stuff. Chad, what are your thoughts on Manus? Chad (36:53.774) Maybe that's why they're doing so well. J.T. O'Donnell (36:56.733) I spent that. Chad (37:01.784) So it's basically stitching together Anthropix, Claude, and Alibaba's Quinn to perform these tasks. So the future of these bigger systems, these agentic systems, is using what's already available to create a Franken AI. And it's pretty fucking cool. Now on the recruitment side, this week, Sonic Jobs, who actually started creating agents back in 2019, it's one of the reasons why I actually started advising them a couple of years ago. Joel (37:11.976) Mm-hmm. Chad (37:31.742) everyone's talking AI and Sonic jobs was actually creating agents back then. Sonic jobs built the tech and now like Manus, not Manus, Manus, they're taking six years of knowledge of leveraging other platforms. And in this case, it's with open AI. So it's, this is actually what we should all be looking for. There are these great. organizations like Manus. Their first demo was pretty much just going through resumes, to source and screen resumes, right? It wasn't really that impressive. Totally get it, not easy, but it wasn't that impressive. There are many better platforms in our space. But then being able to take a look at a company like Sonicjobs, and there will be other companies that will start to do this, who are actually doing candidate verification. screening across multiple job sites, this is literally the answer to your lazy apply or your easy apply. This is more of like an easy apply with a brain, right? So it knows what you're qualified for. It will apply for what you're qualified for. And it can be used both ways from a company standpoint to be able to ensure verification happens, screening happens, and also from a job seeker standpoint. I can just say, go find me jobs that I'm qualified for and apply to those jobs. This is like the antithesis of the easy apply and lazy apply. So it's pretty exciting stuff. Joel (38:59.932) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah, Chad, you know, I'm a, I'm an advisor with Kerplunk and they have a similar sort of like, just go do it. you create a script, what are you looking for? And it just goes and does it. so yeah, to me, this is like the future of probably everything that we do, but, but job search in particular, finding candidates, like just basically like, tell it what to do. Go get some coffee. a little chicken cock in that with the, with the shot glass and, you're well on your way to finding that next, that next, candidate. I, I really want to know what happens to Google in all of this. Like part of me says Google can come back and, Jim and I, and like, they're going to be fine. Don't worry about Google. but there was a Vox media survey this week. this is one for the kids. And I know you're talking to the kids on a regular basis, JT, but They found that 42 % of their respondents perceive Google search as a less useful tool than what else is out there. 55 prefer a community-based resource like Reddit. Among younger demographics, 61 % of Gen Z and 53 % of millennials favor AI tools. Citing concerns, which I think are valid, of search quality, increased advertising, and shifting trust. Chad (39:59.053) It is. Joel (40:21.724) We just trust the AI bots more, at least for now. the perception is there. Some people, the old people like me don't trust it all the time, but the young people really do. This is all bad for Google. Like if your business is all about Google traffic and referrals and like, you need to start thinking about some other, diversification in that. But I'm just curious about what goes going to happen. We see organic and paid, click through rates are hitting new lows. Like this is, these aren't good signs for Google. JT. J.T. O'Donnell (40:51.931) Yeah, I mean, I never count Google because they own YouTube. When I think about everything going towards video and just the stats are there, there's some play they'll figure out. What's fascinating to me about the tech that you're showing is that it's still missing one component that I think is going to come very quickly. And I think whoever gets this component will win the game. And that is, I would love to be able to go in there and say, hey, here's what I'm looking for. Okay. But at some point that machine needs to come back and say to you, here's why you can't have it. Here's what you need to, seriously, as a job seeker, here's why that doesn't exist for you. Here are your options. What are you willing to pivot on? Here's what it would take to get where you want to be. It has to actually coach. It has to be a co-pilot. And so I love that we're very quickly throwing together all of this and we're going to continue to see it because you can do it. Great. But until you can actually have a conversation and push back and get them to think differently, Chad (41:23.246) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (41:23.368) Yeah. Chad (41:26.862) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (41:50.067) based on the data, that's going to blow their minds. That's where you're really going to see the impact. Because I believe that's why they enjoy it. They already like conversing with AI because it's more humanistic. Awesome. Then be more humanistic and coach me. Tell me what I need to know. Don't just present the data. Once that happens, that's when it gets really interesting to me, I think. Chad (42:00.248) Mm-hmm. Chad (42:13.132) Yeah, it's not a black hole either. And one of the things that I thought was interesting was that mainness, that mainness, they would go out and they would read, the system would read articles, right? There's so much shit that's out there. So you've got to be careful on your datasets. And when you're releasing large language models into the wild like that, much like you said, JT, you're going to give me recommendations. Joel (42:18.664) you talking about manus again? Black hole, what? Chad (42:43.054) And that could be totally founded on bullshit just because somebody can write a blog talking up certain areas or certain apartments or what have you doesn't mean that that's true. Right? So you need to have a trusted as Joel said, trusted and verified source. You have to have better data sets. And I think we'll get there. There's no question. These guys are literally just trying to knock the knock the cover off the ball and hopefully get acquired. I'm sure. But at the end of the day, data is what matters the most. Joel (43:12.828) They just need to wipe that data. Solving the black hole issue at Manus. Let's take a quick break, maybe a shot or two of chicken cock and talk a little catfishing. Chad (43:15.406) You Chad (43:19.074) Ha Chad (43:24.27) Hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (43:24.914) you Joel (43:27.41) This show just writes itself. you know, people think we're smart. No, just, it just writes itself. Do you guys remember the catfish show on MTV? Is that still around? it's a movie too. Geez. I'm, so uncool. Well, anyway, a new survey highlights career catfishing among Gen Z. All the kids are doing it. Who except jobs, but don't show up, driven by confrontation fears and workplace discontent. No surprise. Chad (43:27.544) Whoo, it does, it's too easy. J.T. O'Donnell (43:35.689) Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah the movie. Oh, yeah, it was great. It was a whole story of it. Yeah Joel (43:55.164) This worries employers about Gen Z's loyalty, though experts urge avoiding stereotypes and adapting to new trends. JT, I thought this was ghosting. I guess it's a new label. It's catfishing now. I got to be hip to this. What's going on? J.T. O'Donnell (44:09.161) I remember, well, so first of all, millennials started the trend where they would quit by texting. And I just remember hiring managers coming to me and going, look at this. They just quit that job. They're 25 years old. So that makes, now you wish you got a text that I wasn't coming to the job because now the next generation just doesn't show up. And it's that lack of, they don't want to have confrontation. And so I also just think that there's, Chad (44:19.713) Ha J.T. O'Donnell (44:39.003) really know they're not thinking about, this is going to affect my reputation, that this is going to come along with me. I'm so early in my career. There's so many more steps ahead of me, you know, no big deal. And so seeing a lot of that, also seeing a lot of, hey, it's my anxiety, it's this or that. And I decided that I can't go and do it. We've seen a big surge in that with this generation as well. And so it's an avoidance thing. I don't think it's going to go away. I don't think you're going to solve for it. I think what's all over time is they get older. jobs get more important to them in a way and they've just realized, hey, that's probably not a good call. And down the line, I just think the low wealth, but I don't think this is going to change at all. Aren't you lucky? Joel (45:12.882) So you think they'll be more responsible as they age? They will, okay, all right. Always the optimists. Chad? Chad (45:22.174) I say leave it to the 24 hour news cycle to rename something that already exists. it's ghosting. It's been around forever. Employees created it. Dad, I learned it from you. You know, it's, it's candidate learned. They learned it from employers. remember in 2016 when Adam Gonson, who's now the CEO of a paradox, he was, he was the product dude at Cielo and they were building systems for their clients because this was an issue 2016. J.T. O'Donnell (45:32.777) Mm-hmm. Chad (45:51.993) They were building systems that actually first they were testing. And this is really fucking cool. They were testing, having actually a phone bank to call people, to make sure that they were good to show up their first day. They were also doing a parallel program where they were texting people, right? And this was, this was an automated text versus actually having somebody picking up the phone. The automated text worked better. Right? So it's like, we need to put systems in place first and foremost. Joel (46:16.84) Mm-hmm. Chad (46:20.886) that ensure that we keep these people nice and warm, to make sure that they show up on day one, this is not a new problem. We just have to have the right tech in place. We have to have also the right people, the right humans making the connections. And again, you know, I learned it from you, Dad. Joel (46:40.7) I think we need a Stephen McGrath I'm Not Coming app. Chad (46:43.97) Ha ha ha ha ha ha Joel (46:49.64) Um, it could be a prerecorded message, you know, uh, I appreciate your time. I've decided to go elsewhere. He could be a little agent in your pot, a little agentic Steven. Um, I think that'd be great. Um, I didn't understand how this, this is one in four millennials have admitted to doing this. Uh, a third of Gen Z has done this compared to 11 % of Xers and 7 % of baby boomers. Um, Chad (47:00.672) in your pocket. J.T. O'Donnell (47:08.947) Mm-hmm. Joel (47:18.248) I thought it was going to be a story about the person you thought was coming to the interview was not the person that you thought it was. Cause I thought that's what cat fishing was. Like you say that you're something that you're not. And then when you, when you finally meet the person, when you, when you, when you drive to West Virginia from Chicago, you find out that it's not the same person. Chad (47:26.306) Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (47:27.997) That's true. Chad (47:34.798) You get a picture of JT and Joel shows up. Joel (47:38.76) Awwww. Chad (47:44.43) That was a better example, Joel. Joel (47:46.088) That's rough. That's rough. If you're expecting JT and you get me and everybody's upset, nobody's, nobody's good about that. Yeah. Look, I mean, send a text, send an email, uh, call them at 3 a.m. and say, like, leave a voicemail. Thanks for your time. I'm like, you don't, you don't have to do this kids. You don't have to do this. And I don't have to do. J.T. O'Donnell (47:52.04) You Chad (47:53.42) Her name's Mante Titeo. Chad (48:06.382) There's no loyalty. They don't care. Joel (48:09.541) No loyalty. They, they, but they don't have to do this. There are options. That's why we need a Steve McGrath, quitting app, but they don't have to do this. And, and Chad, I don't have to do a dad joke, but God damn it. I am, I am going to do a dad joke. Why, why did the sperm cross the road? Why did the sperm cross the road? J.T. O'Donnell (48:15.145) I like that. Chad (48:20.706) But you are. Here we go. J.T. O'Donnell (48:24.337) I'm to brace myself. Chad (48:34.862) I have Joel (48:36.636) because I put on the wrong socks this morning. Joel (48:42.834) JT's confused. We out! Chad (48:45.602) We out! J.T. O'Donnell (48:46.149) Hahaha

This week, the boys discuss the problem with LinkedIn’s lazy users, 84 Lumber’s Super Bowl advertising campaign, Snap’s IPO and its potential impact on recruiting, and Facebook job postings. Please remember to visit out sponsors: America’s Job Exchange (www.americasjobexchange.com), WebClipDrop (http://www.webclipdrop.io keyword HireDaily2017) and Beyond (http://www.beyond.com/cheddar). #LinkedIn #84Lumber #SnapChat #Facebook #SuperBowl

Hold onto your hats, folks—The Chad & Cheese Podcast is diving headfirst into the immigration debate now that Trump’s back in the Oval Office. Joining the chaos are Wharton’s Dr. Zeke Hernandez  and VanHack ’s Ilya Brodsky , serving up insights on a global immigration system that’s as tangled as a plate of spaghetti. Expect a rib-tickling roast of U.S. and Canadian immigration laws, a flamethrower of facts against tired stereotypes, and an unfiltered look at how kicking out immigrant labor could send the economy into a tailspin. It’s a ride through red tape, housing crises, and the talent black market, with the gang calling for reform faster than you can say “fix the system, change the laws.” With cultural vibes, economic chaos, and political curveballs, this episode promises to be as spicy as a jalapeño in a microwave. Tune in, laugh, and maybe learn a thing or two—because nothing says comedy like lawmakers bickering over who gets the last donut while the country runs on immigrant grit. 🍩😂 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:30.202) Yeah, what's up kids? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman joined as always. Chad Sowash is in the house and we're calling this I guess immigration game or maybe the immigrant song. I don't know, but let's let's welcome quickly back to the show. Dr. Zeke Hernandez. He's a he's a tenured. He's he's a tenured professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Maybe you've heard of it and Ilya Brodsky. Chad (00:48.979) Profz, that's profz to you. Joel (00:59.428) Brodsk Beat, he's the CEO at VanHack, headquartered in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. Guys, welcome back and welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Zeke (01:11.834) Thank you. Ilya (01:12.942) Great to be here. Joel (01:14.672) All right, let's get this going. Ilja Ilja is a super fan and no one can see him with their listing, but he had such a big smile on his face when we had the intro music. He's, he's excited to be on the show. Ilja, for those that don't know you or Van Hack, give us the elevator pitch. Ilya (01:30.478) For sure. So Vanhec is a tech recruiting and immigration company that helps software engineers get jobs abroad and helps companies find global tech talent and relocate them to their cities. We've done over 2,000 hires, most of which have been immigrated to Canada, many as well over to Europe. And we also help US companies hire engineers remotely. Most recently, we've launched a new product that helps American companies relocate their tech talent to Canada as a way to bring people over to North America. So we've been doing that as well. And yeah, just a... trying to change lives one higher at a time. Joel (02:01.072) There you go. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that Ilya is now our whiskey giveaway sponsor. So he's helping destroy America and the world one liver at a time. Thank you, Ilya. And welcome back, Dr. Zeke. Zeke, for those that didn't hear our first episode, tell us about you. Ilya (02:09.067) Okay. Chad (02:10.651) livers, livers. Zeke (02:21.496) Yeah, I'm a professor at Wharton, you said, also known for writing that book that's kind of there for those that are watching, The Truth About Immigration, Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers. And I study how immigrants affect the economy and firms specifically, I think, which is why I'm here. Chad (02:28.946) artist. Chad (02:40.573) was just looking for my copy and I think I left it in Portugal. So when we record again, it's not easy. Yes, it's not easy. Joel (02:45.668) You're actually here to make the show sound smart, which is a real struggle for us. So thanks to both of you for coming on the show and coming out. So I'll start us off with this real quick. Give us the current state of immigration. Zeke, for sure, your perspective in the US and Ilya, maybe your perspective on the global front. Zeke (02:50.906) Hahaha Zeke (03:07.45) Do want me to start in the US? Well, in some ways, the immigration system hasn't changed at all. So I think that's something really important for people to understand. There have been no legislative changes. We are still under the same system that we had on January 19th in the United States. Obviously, what has changed is the rhetoric. What has changed is greater threats of deportation that are going to affect undocumented immigrants. But those immigrants were already outside of the formal system. So none of that has changed. I think that legally speaking, the first thing that is likely to change is that the administration has threatened to end temporary protected status and other temporary programs that the Biden administration put in place to allow. Um, people who were claiming asylum or refugee status or like, you know, Venezuelans are a good example, right? About five to 600,000 Venezuelans who were here with, uh, sort of temporary permission to stay and not be deported. Uh, but I think that what we're hearing nothing about nothing about is any changes in the system of number and types of visas that was established all the way back in 1990, 35 years ago. So the state is the same and the state is very different in other ways. Joel (04:28.944) Now I'll challenge you on that a little bit. We are hearing in the news that anywhere between 600 to 1,100 or so deportations are happening every day. Whereas under Biden, they're around the 3, 350 per day. Are you saying that that's not correct? Are there really not more deportations from where you're sitting? Zeke (04:48.448) No, no, no, there are definitely more deportations. But that's not a change in the system, right? That's just a change in the government's permissiveness toward undocumented immigrants. I think it's also useful to know that Obama deported more people than Trump did during his first administration. So the numbers right now are comparable to the Obama years, especially the first term. That could ramp up significantly, but Chad (04:56.397) policy. Joel (04:58.904) Action. Zeke (05:17.624) but we will see. I expect that it will ramp up significantly. But I don't expect, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I just said, don't expect that realistically the administration can deport 13.7 million people, which is the latest estimate of the undocumented population. We can talk more about that, but there will be more. I agree, there will be more. Chad (05:21.689) we're not seeing. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Chad (05:37.799) So we're not seeing change in policy. What we're seeing is really an addition of brute force is what we're saying. Joel (05:44.698) or PR. Chad (05:46.523) No, it's it's a lot of it. I guess it could be both. Right. Because you've got individuals who are going through the prospect of self deportation and you also have ICE raids, which is brute force. So I guess you could be seeing both. Any any comments around that and how it actually impacts the workforce? I mean, because from our standpoint being, you know, workforce podcast, HR, human resources, how how have we seen that impact? thus far less than 30 days in and how do you think it's going to impact long term? Zeke (06:22.232) Yeah, so thus far in the last 30 days or so or whatever, it's hard to know exactly, right? There is a lot of chaos and there's also a lot of rhetoric that hasn't resulted in action yet. And I think that's intentional, sort of to flood the zone with threats and stuff, right? And so I think we don't know. I don't think that the administration is yet ready to share data. And so the truth is we don't know. Now there are some things that, let's say there's very strong anecdotal evidence, right? A lot of stories coming out that labor supply is probably smaller in at least two or three ways. One is people who are undocumented, who were working are not showing up to their jobs or they are restricting their hours, right? So an anecdote might be, a woman who say was doing household cleaning work, she might not be cleaning every week, right? She might be cleaning only a few weeks a month. The other thing, and we do know this from research, is that when that happens, actually it affects the labor output and labor participation of women, of older women, right? Of people who kind of are on the edge of working, but say if they don't have childcare, they don't go to work. right, or they restrict their hours. And so all of these things are going to show up in GDP and other, you know, other statistics. It could show up in a construction company bidding on fewer jobs because it doesn't have enough people to bid on a job. It could show up in higher food prices because farmers aren't showing up to pick fruit. So again, those are all things that we have yet to see, but we have seen them. in past instances of mass deportation, including during the Obama years, right? There's evidence showing that native workers restricted their labor output, that native workers lost jobs, those kinds of things because of mass deportations. So I think you can be pretty confident that those things are going to. Chad (08:33.171) So it. Joel (08:33.346) Ilja, let's go to you. What are you saying on the global front? Ilya (08:37.516) Yeah. So our focus is just really squarely on the software engineer tech talent market or kind of steel sets. I just want to put some context there. And we're seeing a little bit of pushback as well or pullback. So here in Canada recently, there have been some small changes that have made a little bit harder for tech talent to come here. Specifically, the companies are now required to have a little bit more robust financial proof. before it was a little bit easier. So that's been not a huge change, but a little bit of a interesting shift in the different direction. Another change has been not in the tech talent, but against our students. So there's a bit of big pushback against international students here that has made it. I think there'll probably be a third of how many international students there were before. I actually am of the opinion that that's a good thing because a lot of universities here in Canada were kind of exploiting international students, promising them a path to citizenship or permanent residency, charging huge fees and then actually not bringing the most skilled workers here. So that's actually been positive, I believe. But in generally, from other parts of the world, we're seeing there's still a huge demand for tech talent and countries are open and excited to bring software engineers. skilled professionals to their cities or to their countries, I should say, as a way to... Joel (10:07.824) Are you seeing a greater interest in coming to Canada since Trump is in office or has it stayed stable? Ilya (10:14.51) Um, uh, pretty stable. We've seen a few kind of here and there, but our kind of most common pathways have been, I would say more emerging markets like South America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe. Um, not so much, uh, people who are in the U S just cause salaries, you know, you look at a salary for a software engineer in the U S it's probably two or three times more than, that in Canada. So it's a, uh, a big challenge. The, kind of best case scenario of what people are trying to do is make us dollars and live in Canada. that's, that's really what the dream is right now. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (10:47.699) Remote work, baby. Remote work. Chad (10:56.537) that is awesome. going back to the not so awesome, let's talk about the knock on effects. We're talking about GDP, but it hits more than that. mean, we have, like you'd said, the lady who is only cleaning the house, your house once every three weeks, as opposed to every week. She has less money in her pocket, which means she can spend less. Not to mention if we're pushing a lot of these individuals out, immigrants, Paid, know close to was a hundred billion in taxes last year How how do we fund police? Fire departments education in our local in our local little towns. How do we get our? Bumpy ass roads paved. I mean, how do we how do we do these things? It's it's almost like it's very short-sighted I just I'm at a loss to be quite frank because What I see is money leaving the country when other people are saying that, you know, it's murderers and, you know, axe murderers and whatnot. What can we expect? Short term, long term. Zeke (12:04.442) Yeah, I mean, I think you just you just hit it on the nail for those who listened to me the last time I was on the show. I'll apologize for being repetitive, but I always use the five fingers of my hand to summarize what immigrants bring to an economy. And this is true whether they're documented or not. Right. And that's they bring their talent or labor, if you want to use that word. They bring investment. They bring innovation, they bring consumption, and they bring taxes. And so the question really isn't, we want the I word? The question is, do we want those five things? And if you do, then you need immigrants. Because if we were in a situation where our population is massively growing because people are having babies left and right, and we have a really young population, perhaps you don't lose that much of those five things. But in the current demographic environment, you're definitely losing those five things because you're not replacing the woman who doesn't show up to work. You're not replacing the farm worker who leaves. You're not replacing the person with a PhD and AI who isn't allowed to come because of H1B restrictions, right? You are not replacing those, right? We have ample evidence that it's not that all of a sudden, know, invisible U.S. workers show up from under rocks, right? They just don't exist even under a rock. And so it really comes down to something that simple. Now you can make up some of it, you you can probably make up for some of it with remote workers, maybe a little bit with automation and technology. But, know, Japan is a good example of a country that really, really tried very hard to do all that. And it just didn't quite pan out as planned. So that's really it to me. It's, know, think of those five things and you lose them both in the short run and in the long run. Yeah, that's it to me. Chad (13:56.307) Well, even more on that side, you take a look at the actual types of skilled workers that generally immigrants are coming in. Let's take a look at plumbers or machinists or welders or what have you. In many cases, you're not going to see a robot plumber come to your house or a robot. Yeah, no kidding, right? Zeke (13:56.956) That's the simplest way to put it. Joel (14:17.37) That'd be so cool though. Zeke (14:21.028) Sometimes I would prefer that, but yeah. Chad (14:25.853) deal with less plumber's crack. Joel (14:26.928) Especially if it's Sydney Sweeney coming to fix my pipes, you know what I'm saying? Sorry. Chad (14:32.039) your pipe, construction workers, that kind of stuff. mean, we're, not going to, the things that we say that we need more of, it's just not helping us where, know, we're talking about on the, on the high level side of the house, or let's say for instance, like Ilya on the tech side, we can get remote workers for that. Hell, I mean, we can go ahead and offshore for that, but they, they, they can't do what we need to get done here at home. Ilya (14:34.606) Okay. Joel (14:35.6) you Ilya (14:50.701) Hmm. Chad (15:00.167) Not to mention taxes, not to mention buy stuff. mean, it just, to me, it seems like a really weird recipe for implosion. Ilya (15:04.354) Yeah. Ilya (15:10.326) Yeah, just on that point, that's always been my biggest wonder or confusion as to why there hasn't been tech immigration reform in the U S because you're, I don't know, maybe Zeke, you, you, know, numbers, there's probably billion dollars or more paid out of the United States every year into foreign economies to hire remote workers offshore. I'm guessing it's much more than that. There's so many tech companies. Chad (15:19.603) Mm-hmm. Chad (15:37.757) That's a great point. Ilya (15:39.458) Yeah, like especially Latin America right now has become a huge hotbed because of the time zone. So a lot of software engineers in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia are working for American tech companies. And that's a job that's being shipped overseas with a click of a few buttons. It's really easy to do that these days, especially post COVID. So why not make an easy way for tech talent to just keep doing that job, just doing it from... someone in the United States, cause you know, that's a lot of money that could be fueling your economy. so yeah, and even here in Canada, like the biggest employers in Canada techie scene are Amazon and Microsoft. they have huge tech posts outposts, both in Toronto and Vancouver. a lot of that is just, you know, helping folks move from around the world to Canada and then bringing them down to the United States, to Seattle or wherever they would be moving to, or just keeping them here. Chad (16:29.875) Mm-hmm. Ilya (16:36.078) Again, probably billions of dollars of salaries that are being spent elsewhere. So yeah, I think there's a really clear and simple case for tech immigration reform. Hopefully one day it happens, but until then, there's just so many jobs that are being exported right out of the country. Zeke (16:53.838) Yeah, let me add something to that. that's really so one of the things too is that we also and any business owner, any manager knows this very well. When you outsource or offshore a job, it's not a one for one trade, right? You lose something along the way, right? So my colleague here at Wharton-Brita Glennon did this really fascinating study where she showed that companies that miss out on hiring H1B workers because they miss out on the lottery. So it's literally luck of the draw. They do offshore more jobs to China, India and Canada, but they don't hire one for one, right? So for every one worker on the H1B program, they can't hire here. They hire less than one worker overseas. So something is lost, right? Why is that lost? Because you can't assume Joel (17:23.855) Mm-hmm. Zeke (17:42.97) that what a company can do with a team that say all located in Austin, Texas or New York City or Indianapolis or whatever, you can't assume that they can do exactly the same thing. You're also assuming away the synergies or the win-win that come from interactions between foreign and native born workers. There's a really cool study that shows that immigrants in the US, they're only 16 % of inventors that patent, but they're responsible for 36 % of all patents. Joel (17:53.36) Mm-hmm. Zeke (18:12.154) Okay, but that but that number you can break down in two quantities that are really really interesting It's you know immigrants are inventors in 23 % of patents Okay, so more than their 16 % but the other 13 % that gets us from 23 to 36 percent is us born inventors That are more innovative and patent more because they collaborate with foreign-born inventors Why because they're exposed to new ideas to new scientific methods to new? Joel (18:12.687) Wow. Zeke (18:39.204) to new scientific networks in foreign countries that give them new ideas or allow them to patent new products. And so it's those win-wins that come from interactions of people with different backgrounds that are happening inside companies every day. And so it's not just, think this one body is identical to another body and it doesn't matter where they work, it is a huge fallacy. And there's something lost there. And I think that this is something that HR managers really need to get because when they tell me, well, I don't want to go through the hassle of dealing with our visa system. And I agree, it's a hassle. And therefore, I'm going to put this person in London. Fine. If that's the only thing you can do, do it. But know that there's something lost when you do it. Joel (19:26.66) Yeah. Zeke, I want to go back on something you said in regards to, there's really no difference in legislation. A lot of it is optics. A lot of it is maybe more enforcement than it previous. And to me, what I'm hearing you say is there's a lot of FUD, a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that the administration is putting out there. And there's a new ad that went live recently from Department of Homeland Security. I want to play it for you and then just get your opinion on the other side. Zeke (19:43.566) Yeah. Chad (20:57.307) And I was wondering when we're going to get a good commercial from Trashy Barbie. Joel (21:01.572) Aside from the tongue bath that Trump got from that, are your thoughts? Any fire to that smoke or just a lot of hot air? Zeke (21:11.576) Yeah, mean, you know, it makes you feel so good and so safe inside, right? And who's going to disagree with the imagery and the flag and, know, but behind that, honestly, there's just a ton of falsehoods, right? You could go second by second and debunk every single one of them, right? For example, the idea that undocumented immigrants are committing crimes or bringing fentanyl in, the data is really clear. You can do this nationally or state by state. Joel (21:16.706) huh. Zeke (21:36.952) and the group that has the lowest rate of any kind of crime, drug, property, violent, crimes against animals, are undocumented immigrants, right? Of course, it's very simple, right? And the next is legal immigrants and natives have the highest rate of criminality in the United States. in fact, when immigrants arrive, crime rates go down. So actually what you're doing by deporting these people, you're actually raising the crime rate, right? And so anyway, that's a... Chad (21:45.427) because they don't want to get thrown out. It's easy. Zeke (22:06.65) So that's not the issue. Now, of course, the other assumption is that the laws that we have in place, that is you want to obey the law, right? And so if you follow the law, you'll be able to get in. That is perhaps even a bigger fallacy or a bigger lie than the crime one, right? Because right now, again, remember, what do our current laws stipulate, right? If you are a farm worker and you want a green card to work year round legally, guess how many quotas, guess how many there are for you? Joel (22:22.202) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:35.443) 5,000. Really? Zero. Zeke (22:35.97) zero. No, zero. Right? Yeah, zero. have zero. That's right. We have we have H2A visas for temporary farm workers. But if a farmer in the middle of Iowa needs a year round worker because their son has left for New York City and won't return, which is the story of every farming family in America, there are zero visas. Right? And the same as plumbers, zero visas, carpenters, zero visas, right? The line for an engineer on an EB2. who is from India is 195 years long, right? And so you can enforce that system all you want, right? But you're either gonna kill a lot of small and medium and large businesses, or you're gonna get a black market for talent, which is what our illegal immigration is dysfunctionally doing. my point isn't, know, Mrs. Noem, you know, we should have a lot of illegal immigration. My point is if you wanna solve the problem, fix the system, change the laws, and then enforce laws that make sense. You want to enforce laws that make no sense? Go ahead and be my guest, but you're going to still have as much chaos in the border as you did over the last four years. Joel (23:42.32) But it isn't the goal here, just like with the federal workers to say, you might have a job when we get back, or you can take this severance package and leave your, they're basically taking that strategy to the immigrants and saying, Hey, we can get rid of 5 % of the immigrants. If we just say, if we catch you, you're never going to be able to come back. But if you leave, you might be able to come back. Isn't that the strategy? Chad (23:54.117) showing them the door. Zeke (24:04.666) Yeah, but that might is really kind of a bait and switch, right? Because literally there is no line, especially for what we need the most. There is no line, right? So when you say get in line, what line, right? When there's no line for plumbers, carpenters, Indians, farmers, when there's only 5,000 visas for unskilled workers that are permanent visas, right? Ilya (24:17.954) Mm-hmm. Zeke (24:30.682) You know when we only have 85,000 H1Bs and we haven't changed those numbers since 1990 and the government is making no proposal to change those things I don't believe it right now if if if you tell me first how you're gonna change the system and you say look We're gonna we're gonna all of a sudden have a healthy number of visas for all these categories Then I'll believe you but I'm still waiting right and I've been waiting for 35 years Chad (24:57.787) Ilja, so in Canada, there have been some changes on, was it goals? mean, what changes did Canada make? Because you guys were sucking a lot of great tech talent up, but we've seen a lot of countries take too much in, prices go up, not enough housing, so on and so forth. So there were some changes recently. What changes did they make and do you know why they made the changes? Ilya (24:58.765) Yeah. Ilya (25:09.187) Yeah. Ilya (25:19.479) Thank Ilya (25:25.75) I think exactly for what you just mentioned, Chad, we did bring in too many people, too many unskilled workers, students, et cetera. And that has caused a housing issue. I always wonder how the second largest landmass in the world with only 40 million people has a housing crisis. It's kind of crazy up here with that. But we did have, you know. Chad (25:47.409) Not enough immigrants to build houses, that's why. Ilya (25:50.798) Yeah, yeah, well, exactly. It's a double-ledged, it's a catch-22, I guess that's the term, right? So you have a lot of people who came in that frankly should not have been led in, I mean, in my opinion, guess. And there was a huge rush of people immigrating. I'm all for immigration. I'm an immigrant, I moved here when I was a kid, obviously worked in immigration. I want there to be... great skilled talent and similar to what Zeke said, like I think there's a huge opportunity for reform and new laws. But we, think, went maybe a little bit too far in terms of allowing people who just don't have the exact skills that are needed for the workforce. And so, yeah, I don't remember exactly all the stats of what changed, but there was a huge change for lower skilled workers. So if you're in a salary that's below the median wage. in Canada, then the chances are getting what's known as an LMIA, a labor market impact assessment, which is kind of the employer part of the work permit process. You basically won't be able to get those. So they've restricted that quite a bit. They also made a huge restriction, as I mentioned, to students. So I think they capped the amount of students that can come to Canada to about half a million, whereas before it was much higher than that. And those are all good changes. just, I feel like we'll see right now the challenge is that there's there's about two and a half million people here in Canada, which is a significant part of our population from percentage point of view that are here at temporary residence. And they're expecting about a million of those to leave before the end of this year because their status is going to expire. So they are trying to, you know, encourage people to leave because the work permit is going to be expired and they haven't made it an easy path for permanent residency. So A lot of our engineers that we brought here, they're kind of at either close to the end of their work permit expiration, looking for a way to renew it, or they're worried about where they're going to stay. So it's challenging, but I also feel like it's such a huge balancing act, right? That you want to bring in enough people, but what if you bring in too much and how do you change that and fix it? yeah, huge challenges, but I think overall there's been a... Ilya (28:10.054) In the last year, a large anti-immigrant shift here. And I think generally the country has just shifted to the right in terms of that because there's whole bunch of reasons we can go into. Yeah. Well, no, Trudeau hasn't been the best prime minister. Yeah. Chad (28:23.697) Yeah, they're called down south is what they're called. Yeah. Joel (28:28.4) Right. mean, to use a, to use a hockey ism, go where, go where the puck is going, not where it is. And I know part of your job as, CEO at Van Hack is to sort of expect what's coming down the pike. And Trudeau is on his way out. I think everyone in Canada is aware of that. And, and Pierre, Pierre is, Pierre is on his way in more than likely. I don't know if you agree or disagree with that, but he's much more Trumpian. So you as CEO of your company, how do you expect immigration to change in the future? And does it impact. Ilya (28:42.562) Yeah, he's responding. Ilya (28:46.912) I am. Joel (28:57.252) the high tech, high skilled labor force that you work with on a regular basis. Ilya (29:02.126) Um, I hope not. Uh, we haven't heard any indication either way. Um, I would say like the right wing are more pro business and this is a very business visa. know, uh, every engineer who comes to Canada creates jobs, um, about three jobs, um, so, or to any country, right? So, uh, I w would hope it wouldn't change. We will see. But, um, I think that. Yeah. For this type of immigration, the biggest thing is you just got to decouple kind of. Skilled, unskilled, legal versus illegal, right? Because immigration, feel like, gets painted with this big brush, right? Everyone's just like, immigration is either great or bad, and there's no real nuance. In my opinion, obviously, you don't want to bring in, like, you're recruiting. It's like, immigration should be like recruiting, right? You're looking for the best and brightest and the people who are going to fit your team. And if someone's not a fit, then that person shouldn't be on the team kind of thing. So yeah. We'll see, though, to answer your question. I'm hopeful that they won't change it, but it's one of those things that, yeah, yeah, exactly. Joel (30:02.468) Hope for the best, expect the worst. Zeke, what do you expect in the US? You said a lot of laws haven't changed. Do you think some things will change in the next six months or so? Zeke (30:15.226) You know, it's a good question. I was expecting that very quickly the Trump administration would introduce some kind of reform on the high skilled side, the so-called high skilled side, right? Yeah, so you know... Chad (30:26.963) They were talking about it. Well, at least Vivek Ramaswamy was and it, yeah, yeah, and Elon and then apparently Vivek got too loud and he got kicked in the curb. Joel (30:31.938) Elon. Zeke (30:38.138) Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, given that it seems that Elon can act with impunity for now, and he's so in favor of more H1B visas, and generally, you know, there's been a signal that, we want the quote right kind of immigrants, I would have expected by now some legislative proposal, whether it's to increase H1B visas or expand the number of employment sponsored green cards, right? We only have 140,000 of those per year in the US, which is crazy, right? But no, right? It's surprising that that hasn't happened, especially because this is kind of the honeymoon phase. It's also in some ways telling that everything the administration is doing is through executive order rather than through Congress. But, you know, that's what I was expecting, right? I am not expecting this administration will expand family-based or low skilled immigration. Chad (31:08.499) Mm-hmm. Zeke (31:36.494) So yeah, that would be it. certainly there will be more and more systematic enforcement, right? That's gonna be, I think, hallmark of the next four years. But I will say perhaps to react a little bit to what Ilya is saying, I think I agree with this idea of you wanna think of immigration as recruitment, where perhaps I, not that it's a difference of opinion, but perhaps where I would make it a little more nuanced is at what level is that decision made, right? I'm not a big fan of the federal or national government making that decision. I think that the right level is firms. I think the right number of employment visas are what firms demand. I think that's one thing that does work very well in the US system. We just don't have enough of them. So what doesn't work well is the quantity. but the idea that a firm would tell me, these are the workers I want, because then they arrived and they have a job as opposed to the proverbial Iranian engineer driving a taxi, right? Because they were recruited with a point system, but it turns out that no employer really wanted them. The other thing is that I think, and this is also the reason why I would have firms drive the process is that there's sometimes a false separability between skilled and unskilled, right? Take a company like Amazon, right? They need a ton of engineers. you know, you know, design their algorithm and all of these things. But, you know, who's driving the trucks and filling, you know, fulfilling, you know, filling packages in warehouses, it's also immigrants, right? And that's true of many, many firms. That's also true in many industries where one firm hires a skilled immigrant, but it can't function without its upstream supplier, its downstream distributor, which depends on unskilled labor. And so I think that Chad (33:05.619) warehouse. Chad (33:23.474) Mm-hmm. Zeke (33:26.554) We want to be a little bit careful. The final thing I'd say is also skilled immigrants often are married to unskilled immigrants, right? Or they have unskilled parents and they might not want to come if you don't make a visa available for that person that they love. so, again, not to say that we should just say have an anything go system, but we have to be very careful about selecting for just one type of immigrant without considering the unintended consequences. Chad (33:53.191) Let's take a look at the, the, the U S ecosystem just in itself. And we're looking at more of a microcosm in the talent movement. We've seen cities like Tulsa actually offer digital nomad. You could call them visas to some extent, right? Money to actually come and work in Tulsa. And that is reviving that city. Why? Because those are individuals who are coming in, they're making money, they're buying stuff. Zeke (34:06.458) Yeah. Chad (34:21.479) They're paying taxes. They're doing all these things that Tulsa needed to happen to be able to be revived. Now that's on a much smaller scale on digital nomad scale versus a much larger scale with every single occupation you can think of, not just remote, but also the individuals who are actually working in that community. For me, this all seems incredibly counterintuitive because we want to sell goods and services. We want to make stuff. We want to be America. And this seems incredibly counterintuitive to all of that because we're not going to make more stuff. not going to, prices are going to rise. Issues are going to come of this because taxes aren't going to be paid. Stuff's not going to be bought. I mean, it's just, it's, it's, I just don't understand it. So how do we, how do we take a look at the actual talent market in itself? and try to equate that to what's going to happen in the economy, not just for business leaders, but for politicians. How do we, because it doesn't seem like any of this is adding up for them. Zeke (35:32.098) No, it doesn't. I'm curious. I really do want to hear Ilya's answer as this pertains to Canada and other places that he knows. But in the US, you're right. all of that is right. One of the most telling moments of the presidential election for me was a whole Springfield, Ohio thing, right? The eating dogs and cats and all that. Right. And I think it was very telling. It was very, very telling that the Republican mayor of Springfield, the Republican governor of Ohio, at great risk to their political career came out and spoke up against that and said, we need these Haitians desperately, right? Our factories in Springfield would have closed, property values are going up for the first time in decades because guess what these Haitians are doing? They're buying dilapidated properties, remodeling them, putting them on the market, right? Our schools are populated with children, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that there is, even though Chad (36:18.493) Yes. Zeke (36:28.568) what's happening at the federal level in the U S doesn't jive in the state in the way that Chad said, when you go to, when you talk to mayors, governors, chambers of commerce, business owners, especially small and medium business owners, they get it. And if there's very strong bipartisan support, I've spent the last seven, eight months doing this actually. and, and, and when I get below federal level and I talk to Republicans and Democrats, this is a conversation they're having. And it isn't a, let's kick these people out. It's how do we welcome them? We need them desperately for all these reasons. And yes, of course, there's a conversation of how do we have a system that is less chaotic. But the default is we want these people, not we want to keep them out. And so I think that also the point of this is like what you're hearing at the federal level is really disconnected from what's happening on the ground. So one possibility, I don't know if this will happen, but one possibility in the next four years is that you'll see more complaints from the bottom reaching the administration saying, wait a minute, right? Our constituents are suffering, right? For all these reasons, they might not do it publicly, they might do it through quieter channels, but I expect some of that to happen. Yeah. Joel (37:40.88) In Canada, it's the same thing, but it's eating the moose and it's eating the beaver. Did I just say eating the beaver? my God, that's bad. Ilja, what are you hearing from a Canadian? What's the culture think about immigration? Ilya (37:46.327) Hahaha. Chad (37:46.451) you Chad (37:50.417) Not again. Ilya (37:55.799) We do have a very famous chocolate pastry treat called the Beaver Tail. So yeah, we're enjoying those. Joel (38:01.88) Yeah you do. Yeah you do. Ilya (38:08.334) All right. Well, just to quickly go back to what Zeke said about employer driven, I totally actually agree with that. think that's the way that our tech visa works is if the company gives you a job, they're the ones who then sponsor your visa. And we don't have a cap on that. And I do feel like that's the model that the US should copy. Yeah, we have, I would say over in both countries, Canada and US, know, land of opportunity, country of immigrants. So it's been a big part of the driver of our economy. for decades and quite a long time. I do feel like our points-based system is fairly strong. The challenge with things like doctors or engineers, my wife's actually a dentist from Brazil, so she couldn't practice here because it was very difficult. The challenge becomes in the accreditation system, not actually the fact that the person can move here, but once they do arrive here, there's a lot of unnecessary red tape and hoops they have to jump through to actually work in their profession. I think that's more something that needs to be solved rather than... allowing specific certain people. Here in Canada, it's kind of an algorithm or formula of your age, education level, if you speak English or French, how well, because we have, the two official languages, a few other factors that I'm forgetting right now, but essentially this, and that determines whether you can get selected for your permanent residency and come to Canada as a great Canadian green card holder, or we call it a PR. I think that And I just think that it's been what you like you said 35 years since there's been any immigration reform in the US. So I think like doesn't matter which side of the aisle does it. It's like someone just needs to do it. There just needs to be immigration reform in the United States. Like hopefully the next four years or four years after that or some time that just needs to happen. Cause yeah, there's this such a huge economic unlock that could be provided by creating that. And I would do some copy of the Canadian system, maybe look at places like Germany in terms of their skilled workers have been pretty good, the UK, et cetera. And yeah, tying immigration much more to a specific job, whether that's to a quote unquote, low skilled or high skilled or whatever wage, as long as there's demand from the employer, I think that's probably the best way as well as a certain amount of people just kind of thrown in who are meeting the criteria that the company's looking or the country's looking for. Yeah. Joel (40:29.232) That French thing is rough. That French thing, especially in Quebec, you got to speak French. that's rough. Zeke and Ilya, everybody. Let's start with Zeke. For our listeners that want to know more about you, maybe get their hands on your book. Where would you send them? Chad (40:37.011) for a song. Zeke (40:46.986) It everywhere you buy books, know, Amazon's the obvious, but I, you know, I'm a big fan of smaller booksellers who really appreciate it. So, you know, whatever your neighborhood bookstore is, don't get it at the library because then I don't make money. No, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. If you can't afford it, go to the library and I, you know, Joel (41:03.792) Such a capitalist pig. Chad (41:05.779) Who has a library card anymore? Zeke (41:13.548) Writing a book is the dumbest money making strategy that I could think of. So I didn't write this for the money. But yeah, anywhere books are sold. Anywhere books are sold. Joel (41:24.878) Give them the website. I know you love giving the website. Zeke (41:27.636) yeah, so if you want to go to my website, zkernandes.net, zkernandes.net, all one word, you can learn about the book. But also what you'll find there is a lot of other resources. So if you have, look, any hot button question, you can find it there. You can find resources. I'll show, I'll take you through the original research so you don't have to believe me. You can go to the data, you can go to the research. I think you'll find it to be very useful and refreshingly positive, right? Because immigration, Joel (41:41.04) Mm-hmm. Zeke (41:56.678) There's research showing that when you mention the word immigration, people already tense up and have negative connotations. And so lot of what I'm trying to do is to say, look, this isn't a fear issue. There's a lot of optimism once you know the facts. yeah. Joel (42:09.432) And speaking of optimism, let's go to the Canadian who are all known to be super optimistic. Ilya, where do you send people that want to know more about you and Van Hac? Chad (42:12.616) Yeah. Chad (42:16.999) And everybody who can't watch, this is audio, Ilya literally was just drinking a whole bottle of maple syrup. Go ahead, Ilya. Ilya (42:26.83) Super trooper style. Well, first of all, I'm going say I'm optimistic we're going to beat you guys in the Four Nations faceoff game on Thursday. I'm not sure if anyone hears a hockey. Yeah, we'll see. It'll be a good game. Yeah, VanHack, very simple, vanhack.com, vanhack.com is our website. Just go there and sign up either as an employer for looking to hire some great tech talent or if you're looking for an opportunity, check out the candidate side. And then I'm the only person in world with my name. So if you Google me, I'll come up. LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach out. Joel (42:59.952) There you go. Chad! That is another one in the can. We out! Ilya (43:04.898) I'm turning. Chad (43:06.951) Way out.

From the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Chad & Cheese sit down with Ashten Fizer, a powerhouse in talent branding, to uncover the secrets of authentic employer branding. 🌟 Ashten breaks down: Why authenticity trumps polished videos in employer branding The surprising geographical differences in recruitment platforms (Spoiler: LinkedIn isn’t always king!) How collaboration across departments fuels effective branding The critical role of DEI in expanding talent pools and enhancing product innovation Whether you’re a talent acquisition pro or an employer brand enthusiast, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss! 👉 Listen now and learn more at www.HeyAshten.com ! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Who are you and why are you here? Ashten Fizer: Well, I am Ashten Fizer. I am a talent brand creative. Didn't even know that was a job until I got it. But I am here because I found out about RecFest UK about three years ago, and I have been the biggest fan ever since. As talent acquisition professionals, employer brand professionals, we're constantly going to conferences for everybody else... Joel: Yep. Ashten Fizer: Watching them have a great time learning about their industry... Joel: Why should they have all the fun, right? Ashten Fizer: Why should they? So, I love that RecFest has given us this space so that we can learn from our own peers... Joel: Yeah. Ashten Fizer: But then also throw in a little party. Okay? Because who wants a stiff conference? Joel: If you're not having fun, what's the point, right? Ashten Fizer: What's the point? Joel: What's the point? Ashten Fizer: So, yeah, that's why I'm here. Joel: "Employment brand creator." Say more about that. Ashten Fizer: Well, so, as we know, employer brand is branding, marketing, the whole shebang. It's 23 different departments rolled into one and usually a small team that's expected to do it all. Well, I enjoy the creative parts. So, creating design systems for the employer brand, digging into the EVP process, especially when, after the research part, which probably nobody really likes the research part, but once you have that information, then using that data to create branding and marketing and visuals, and things that will really make people think and feel and do things. Joel: Okay. So, what works? What platforms are the most effective? What kind of messaging is the most effective? You're in the trenches. What works? Ashten Fizer: I am in the trenches. So, as far as platforms go, it's always going to be regional. So, while we here in the US are very LinkedIn-focused, and we know that that is our job board, our Facebook of jobs, it's not in every country. So, we really do have to stop being so US-focused sometimes, and actually start buying into these other platforms in these other countries if that's where we're recruiting, to ensure that we are hitting those markets as well. Because LinkedIn isn't for everyone. If you look at China, they have their own platforms for everything. Joel: Yep. Ashten Fizer: So, yes, LinkedIn is great for here. Indeed is fantastic. Glassdoor for your reviews. But if you're a global company, you have to start branching out to those other job boards. In China you have BiliBili. There's another one called Red, which is like their Twitter. And then other countries did the same thing. Joel: So, if we're talking about messaging, I assume that it's not a cookie cutter. Our message in the US is the same... [overlapping conversation] Ashten Fizer: It should never. Joel: So, talk about how you... [overlapping conversation] Ashten Fizer: And even your US messaging should be different based on your US audience. [overlapping conversation] Joel: Okay. Talk about that. How is it different, and how did you come to that conclusion? Ashten Fizer: Well, when you look at people, everyone is different. And you really have to start thinking about what are people's needs. And it can be a wide array. So, then you have to start drilling down to your own niche, but you really have to be focused on what people want, learning what they're asking. There's a whole website out there, it's called Ask the Public. Joel: Yep. Ashten Fizer: If you really want to know what people are looking for, asking for, type it in. You can get the answers. But that's what you need to focus on. What are their pain points? What are they looking for from employers? What are their everyday issues that they're having? And how could being employed at your company solve that for them? Joel: Yeah, right. Ashten Fizer: So, you have to drill down to that because also it's going to be different for different people, different communities, different regions, different localities. Joel: Yeah. Ashten Fizer: So, you're going to have to drill down, figure out what that specific group needs that you're trying to attract. And truly, just like we tell candidates to tailor their resume for the individual job, do the same for your messaging, for that individual community, for that individual skill set. You have to drill down and speak their language, and meet them where they are. Joel: Yep. So, you were on a panel or you oversaw a discussion here earlier at the conference, which I assume was sort of forward-looking in what the future look like. What does your organization look like as you turn to 2025? What does branding look like? Is it more of the same? Is it changing? Talk to us about that. Ashten Fizer: It is absolutely changing. Branding is absolutely changing as we move forward. What we're seeing is another shift in the market. During the pandemic, we went through the "great resignation" or the "great migration" or whatever people want to call it. And now we're getting to a point where it's still... The market is still in the candidate's hands. It hasn't gone back to the employer. But now the candidate wants more. They want more of an inside look. They want more of an honest look. And those high-production-value videos that we're spending thousands of thousands of dollars on in casting and writing scripts, they don't believe it. Joel: Yeah. Ashten Fizer: It's a waste of money now. They want low production. They want it directly from the employee. They want it from the employee's account. They want that very real, reality-TV-esque, inside view of the company before they choose an employer. They want to see that culture firsthand. So, we have to start figuring out what are the ways outside of just "a day in the life" post on social media to give it to them. And that's where you're seeing a lot of brands come to conferences, and not just have a booth, but have an entire brand activation like a consumer brand would. But now we're doing it for recruiting. Joel: Okay. You mentioned Glassdoor earlier. And when you talk about throwing the... Let's see what's going on. Is there a wizard back there? What am I seeing? I have a viewpoint that Glassdoor and expecting people to write paragraphs about a company is a little bit antiquated. I see more and more TikToks about people don't care about anonymity. They're going to trash a company. They're going to record a corporate call about layoffs. How do you look at that brave new world of, I guess, courage and just throwing aside the social norms of talking about a company? Ashten Fizer: I absolutely applaud it. Joel: Yeah. Ashten Fizer: I hope it forces companies to lean into more transparency, because that's what people want. Like I said, they're tired of the scripted, paid actors, stock photography, production that we continue to give them. They want the real. And if we're not gonna give it to them in a space where we can control it, they're gonna go find it someplace else. So, you might as well get into it so that you can get ahead of that messaging before your detractors, or someone who has a bad experience gets out there and creates the brand for you. Because if you don't tell your story, somebody else will. Joel: Yeah. I love your comment about stock footage and stock photos. When you look at Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in your organization, what is your strategy around that and some of the tactics you utilize to make sure you're casting as wide a net as possible? Ashten Fizer: Absolutely. I know for us, it's all about absolutely widening the net. And that's why I love working for companies that have decided to either go hybrid or remote, because that gives us more space to look for more talent in places where we normally wouldn't look. So, if we're just restricted to San Jose, Sunnyvale, New York, these major cities that I can barely afford, we're missing out on talent that's out there in Nebraska, in Iowa. Just because they're in Middle America doesn't mean they don't have the skill set. So, I think it's great. I think the pandemic did us a favor, because it allowed us to open up, to really look at everyone out there instead of those that have just concentrated into those major tech hub cities. So, when I think about DEI, it's really not just about race and those boxes you check; it's about diversity of thought. It's about, okay, we have someone from San Jose, probably grew up in San Francisco, has that city mindset, but now we brought somebody in that grew up in the plains of Nebraska, and they're coming from a totally different mindset. And now we can make better tools, because now we have more people with more perspectives to give us that input that we need to make things for everyone. Joel: Yeah. You're such a ray of sunlight. Thanks for sitting down with me today. Ashten Fizer: Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me. Joel: You bet, you bet. For any listeners, viewers out there that want to connect with you, learn more about your company, where do you send them? Ashten Fizer: Heyashten.com or @heyashten on every social platform you can find. That's me. Joel: All right. Enjoy the rest of the day. Ashten Fizer: Oh, you too. Joel: Thanks. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

In this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, hosts Joel and Maureen trade barbs and insights like a comedy duo on a caffeine bender before diving into heavier stuff like mental health in a world gone wacky, in addition to the latest news around the world of work. In a rollercoaster of a month, U.S. companies slammed the brakes on hiring, with ADP’s February private payrolls report showing a measly 77,000 jobs added—half of what the eggheads predicted and a steep drop from January’s beefy 186,000. Meanwhile, Employ snatched up Pillar, an interview intelligence tool, probably hoping to outsmart the hiring slump. Over at ZipRecruiter, Q4 was a bloodbath—revenue tanked 18% to $111 million, with 2024’s full-year haul down 26.6% to $474 million, flipping a $49.1 million profit into a $12.9 million loss; the stock hit rock bottom, leaving only  Severance  fans to pick up the pieces—cue the sad trombone. Commenters on X are cackling that the Four Horsemen (Google, LinkedIn, automation, AI, and freelancing) are galloping in, with one suggesting ZipRecruiter go private or sell out, while another whispers Paradox might be the real job-board slayer. On the AI front, HeyMilo ($2.2M) and Alta ($7M) scored seed funding to flex their virtual agent muscles—HeyMilo’s screening candidates like a nosy aunt, while Alta’s chasing global sales domination; Mo’s probably picking Alta because, duh, bigger bucks. LinkedIn’s still the envy swamp, with Vice noting Gen Z’s drowning in “Director of Ego” vibes—users are bailing to escape the cringe, though employers keep them chained to it like a corporate ball-and-chain. Finally, HiBob’s survey dropped a buzzkill: only one in three women feel empowered at work, less than 10% have mentors, and men are hogging raises and promotions—34% to 22% and 46% to 32%, respectively. Commenters mutter about crab bucket mentality, wondering if women hold back to avoid the claw-back from their own squad. Mo’s take? “Trump’ll fix it, maybe.” Sure, lady, and I’ll hire a crab as my next intern. LinkedIn Has a Serious Gen Z Problem PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Joel (00:30.83) You don't have to take off your clothes to have a good time, but it sure as hell does help. Hi kids. It's the chat and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Tara free cheese man. Maureen Wiley Clough (00:41.503) And I'm Maureen, AKA Moe. Everything's fine, nothing to see here, Clough. Joel (00:46.102) Right and on this episode zip recruiter crashes LinkedIn is killing Gen Z and who'd you rather? Let's do this. Joel (01:00.514) First time together, Mo. Are you nervous? Maureen Wiley Clough (01:03.543) I mean a little bit. slightly uncomfortable. I don't know. Just kidding. This is going be great. That is a plus. That was remarkably hilarious. So we got to take people back to this. was at HR Tech last year, sitting in your booth on your couch. You were in there with smart recruiters, right? And I'm sitting there talking to you for like a full five minutes, fully assuming you knew who I was because you know we had met before. Joel (01:04.863) Little bit. I'm just glad I finally know who you are. I'm glad I finally know who you are. Joel (01:18.968) Mm-hmm. Yep. Maureen Wiley Clough (01:31.925) and had a long conversation. And at the end you're like, so what's your deal? What's your deal? What you doing here? What you trying? And I was like, Joel, it's Mo. I was like, am I that forgettable? I mean, wow. It was amazing. How was that for you? Joel (01:33.902) Mm-hmm. Joel (01:48.846) So I'm 53, I'm 53 and my brain is dying. So let me throw that in there. I did not put together, because people that listen to us regularly know that you and Emmy and JT are now sort of on the show. And before you were on the show, were sort of, both Chad and I had like thrown in people that we wanted and like let's, and you were Chad's person. So Chad was like, you gotta get to know Maureen. Maureen Wiley Clough (01:55.608) it starts early. Joel (02:18.41) I was like, okay, cool. And we never, you never, we never got on the show together. So at HR tech, think Chad reached out to you and said, okay, you gotta make nice with Joel, like get to know Joel. and, and I'm like, why is this, why is this chick like as interested as she is, like she has this podcast, maybe she wants to be on the show. And it was, it was all, yeah, it was, it was kind of weird. And then Chad was like, that's fucking Mo. you're also Mo and you're Maureen. Maureen Wiley Clough (02:37.227) Gattin' me up. Maureen Wiley Clough (02:42.913) That is amazing. Right. It was a little confusing. Yeah. I'm both. Different vibes. Yeah. We can be more than one thing, right? We patched it up. Here we are. Joel (02:47.286) Which is confusing to me. Little confused. Maureen Moe. Like who is this person? Yeah. Like I'm cheese. I'm Joel. Like I can be confusing too, but I'm glad that we, finally got on. Now this, now this is the funny thing. you've only done a like with Chad and he's always in Europe and he's drinking. so you, you thought you thought I must have to be drinking on the show. So when we got on, when we were in the green room, you're like, Maureen Wiley Clough (03:07.516) hahahahah Maureen Wiley Clough (03:13.813) I literally thought it was a prereq. Joel (03:17.484) Is it okay if I don't drink? Cause it's like 10 AM where you are and it's Wednesday. So I said, what are you talking about? No, you don't have to drink. Like I never really drank. I'm drinking water. and so it's just funny that you thought a prerequisite to be on our show was to be drunk. It, it makes it easier and we're way more tolerable and entertaining when you're drunk, but no, it is not. It is not a prerequisite. Unlike saying thank you. Maureen Wiley Clough (03:26.519) You Maureen Wiley Clough (03:31.767) I really and truly did. I really and truly did. Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (03:40.811) Good to know, I was like, this could become a problem. Joel (03:43.82) Yeah. Unlike saying thank you in the, in the oval office, drinking on the Chad and cheese podcast is not, is not a priority. Any, any thoughts on the, the insanity that is the world right now? Did you see the speech? Maureen Wiley Clough (03:46.871) Right. Maureen Wiley Clough (03:54.733) man, just, feel like, you know, I didn't, I didn't see the speech. I kind of got like clips from people and heard the takes from people. I'm like, I don't need to see it to know what it's gonna be. And I know I'm gonna hate it. And it's just gonna make my blood pressure rise. It's gonna do something to my body. And I just don't need that. So I avoided and yeah, you know, it's just like the mental health aspect of all of this. Like I have to kind of tune it out a little bit. I gotta go like. Joel (04:07.48) Mm-hmm. Joel (04:19.672) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (04:20.695) touch grass literally and proverbially, I've got to hang out with family, friends, community. I just got to turn it off, frankly. It's like, I've done what I can do for the most part, and I need to be like relatively informed, but not super informed, right? Like I just need to kind of like get through this period. So I'm like that meme that's been around for like 10 years. That's like the dog sitting with a cup of coffee at a table with fire behind him saying, everything is fine. Like that is how I'm trying to live my life right now, because it's the only way I know how. And it just feels like... Joel (04:26.861) Yeah. Joel (04:43.49) Everything's fine. Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (04:50.465) this sort of ominous cloud, like 2020 vibes, like, shit, like stuff is happening. That's how it feels to me. And I'm told by my therapist countless others. So there you go. Joel (05:02.126) Your therapist says drink on the podcast that you do to help you get through. He'll get you through these times. Yeah. It's only only 46 and a half more months left, Mo. So we're, we're in, we're in the home stretch. We're in the home stretch. I'm good. Good. Do you watch the Oscars? Is that your, is that, is that a thing you do or no? Maureen Wiley Clough (05:04.348) Yeah, she's like, get you through whatever you need to do, girl. No shame. Yeah. What about you? Yeah. We're going to be fine. Everything's fine. How are you doing? Yeah. You know, it's funny, I couldn't watch the Oscars because I my internet went out. Apparently Seattle had the power go out, the internet go out in one week. And I was like, shoot. And then I got on my slaying or whatever online and it wasn't hooked up to the right ABC channel. So, no, I did not watch it live, but I did see clips. And let me tell you, the thing that gave me life was Cynthia Urvivo and Ariana Grande's performance of Defying Gravity. holy chills. my gosh. Incredible. Yeah, that was like Joel (05:40.536) Uh-huh. Maureen Wiley Clough (05:50.348) I literally sobbed. So clearly I needed to get some things out. Joel (05:51.512) Yeah. The, the, the Oscars to me now are like the Grammys. I don't know anyone. I've never seen these people. like, unless it's, unless it's an old guy history movie like Oppenheimer, like I probably haven't seen it. So, but I have, is it a Nora? Nora won best picture. Right. So my wife, my wife tricked me into watching this because it's about a stripper. And I said, I'll give it a shot. See how it goes. and it's. Maureen Wiley Clough (05:59.799) Hahaha Maureen Wiley Clough (06:05.021) You're not there. You're not going. Yeah, it did, yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (06:17.729) She knows the way to your heart. That's a lovely woman. Joel (06:19.488) Yeah. And by the way, it's, it's a naughty movie. It's a naughty movie. I was, but I said, there's Russians are in it. mean, it's, it's oligarchs. Yeah. but, but I came away and I was like, that sucked. That was awful. And then it ends up getting best picture. Yeah. I hated it. I hated it as much as I hated parasite, which also won best picture. Yeah. I hated both of them. Yeah. Give me old guy history movies about world war two and I'm in otherwise. Maureen Wiley Clough (06:22.773) Yeah. Well, it's got it's got Russia in there, right? Like Russia situation. Maureen Wiley Clough (06:31.532) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (06:35.453) Really? So you hated it. Maureen Wiley Clough (06:41.185) I never saw that. I never saw that. Okay. You're there. Joel (06:48.906) Otherwise not. So also happened this week. it was almost a topic. so target as you, as you know, cause you listen to the show and you've been on it, you know that they have abandoned like everyone else, their DEI initiatives. However, they were, they were more into it than other companies. Like they had special sections about it and they celebrated it. So there's a apparently a 40 day boycott of target going on and everyone's going to Costco instead. Who's been sort of steadfast. in their, in their DI initiative. So are you a target shopper? Are you going to like, are you going to boycott or you Walmart person? What's, what's your shopping online? Amazon, right? Cause you're in Seattle. Maureen Wiley Clough (07:16.961) So applaud. Maureen Wiley Clough (07:21.395) I am, yeah, yeah, 100 % Costco though. I mean, that's Seattle too. So yeah, I'm a big Costco fan, always have been. Companies that do the right thing right now, I want to give you all of my money. This matters. And so Target, I've never really been big on it anyway, so I'm fine. But I know that it's a very mainstay in a lot of, especially working parents' lives, and understandably so, right? But I think at this point, the best thing we can do is make Joel (07:28.6) Yeah. Joel (07:40.588) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (07:50.911) very deliberate and intentional choices with our money. so Target, you ain't getting any of mine. Sorry, it's not happening. Joel (07:54.744) Mm-hmm. Yeah, and no chance they have a $1.50 hot dog anytime soon at Target. unlike Costco, unlike Costco. Maureen Wiley Clough (08:01.271) No, you're right. There's no way. No way. You always weave in, you always get that fast food reference in. I really admire that about you. You can make it happen no matter what. It's really impressive. You are, you are, you're a pro. Joel (08:08.398) Joel (08:15.648) I'm fantastic, Mo. I am so brilliant. I'm not cure, I'm not curing cancer, but God damn it. can tell you which fast food place to go to. By the way, real quick chipotle as everyone knows, I love a good chipotle. almost made my shout outs as well, but they are not going to raise prices because of tariffs because God damn it. It's chipotle. They're the only fast food place that has come out and said that. So don't expect price increases because it's already so efficiently. It's so cheap as it is. Right. Maureen Wiley Clough (08:25.057) very critical. Maureen Wiley Clough (08:43.959) Look at that. Joel (08:44.526) the prices will not be going up at Chipotle. So let's get to some shout out shall we? know you have one that's on your Maureen Wiley Clough (08:49.495) you Maureen Wiley Clough (08:53.375) Yeah, I just want to shout out the very brave employees at Metta who are peeling back the curtain. And I'm not saying another phrase, by the way, you'll note I did not mention anything about kimono. We learned, right? We learned. Anyway, but I'm here to teach. so anytime. So the employees at Metta who have let us in on the inner workings of what's going on at that absolute. Joel (09:04.493) Yeah, I'm not very smart, Mo. Yeah, I appreciate it. Maureen Wiley Clough (09:20.427) shithole at this point. I'm so impressed with them because even though some of them were summarily fired because of revealing what happened inside the organization and the things that Zuckerberg and others were saying, even still people are leaking to the press. So Business Insider came out with an article today talking all about what's going on behind the scenes, including the fact that Metta actually has this list this list that's of people who will never be able to be rehired at the company again Which is apparently very unusual for a company And so people are finding out that they're not getting these jobs are getting ghosted by recruiting agencies that were Before that point really excited about their candidacy at Metta and they're like what's going on turns out They're on this list and apparently not even like being related to the CEO can get you off of it. So that Joel (09:50.126) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (10:08.671) especially now that we know meta is axing people that they find to leak information. The fact that people are still doing it, like just major props to people who want to allow everybody to know what's really going on behind the scenes in corporate. And it's it's dark, man. So props to I don't want to call whistleblowers. That sounds big. like props to the people who continually reach out to journalists and people like me, other creators and tell us what's going on behind the scenes, because if they weren't to do that, we would have no idea what was going on at these organizations. So thank you. Joel (10:38.242) God bless those folks. bless those folks. And God bless the Canadians, by the way. I've, I almost forgot to mention that our shout outs are sponsored by Kiara. that simple and smart text recruiting, made cost effective by our friends at, at Kiara. And I almost love the Brits as much as I love the Canadians, which brings me to my, my first shout out, it goes to Hung Lee. Not only my favorite porn star. Maureen Wiley Clough (10:38.817) Hat tip, God bless those people. Call me good. Joel (11:05.27) Also one of my favorite pundits in the industry. Hung hung shot up some rainbows and sunshine and glitter up our ass in his newsletter, which you should be a subscriber to if you're not this week. set up of our show quote, not everyone's cup of tea, which is kind of a backs backhanded comment by a Brit, but Chad and cheese remains the best podcast in the business. Ooh, sharp up to date industry coverage and commentary. Maureen Wiley Clough (11:21.591) You Joel (11:33.154) Don't be fooled by the rambunctiousness. That's a really big word. There is serious analysis just underneath. So Hung Lee, that deserves a shout out. Anyone who does that for us gets a shout out. That's a shout out. Maureen Wiley Clough (11:36.373) You Maureen Wiley Clough (11:48.215) That's wonderful. Well, I got one more. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Could you roll some footage? Can you roll some footage for the people who are actually looking at this on YouTube? Joel (11:52.312) What else you got? I'm ready. I'm ready. In honor of Chad who's at a Champions League soccer game in the Netherlands, roll that beautiful bean footage. Here we go. Maureen Wiley Clough (12:06.858) you Joel (12:14.872) Zuck as Elvis. Maureen Wiley Clough (12:25.367) Thank you. Joel (12:25.582) All for the listeners that had to hear that but not see it, what did we get to see, the YouTube, the watchers? Maureen Wiley Clough (12:31.635) We just got to see, and we wish we could unsee, Mark Zuckerberg throwing his wife Priscilla Chan a 40th birthday party, a massive, beautiful soiree, as you would imagine, for a billionaire. And he decided to channel his inner Benson Boone, who I'm sure you have no idea who that is, Joel, but for those of you who don't, I'll also tell you he won a Grammy, I believe he won a Grammy, he was at the Grammys and did a very, like, in-your-face performance whereby he came in wearing a tuxedo. Joel (12:55.499) huh. Maureen Wiley Clough (13:00.959) and then had someone rip it off of him mid performance. And he revealed this like very, very tight fitting form fitting skin tight, really light baby blue jumpsuit with a very deep V. Like we're talking deep V. And Mark Zuckerberg decided like, happy birthday, baby. Happy 40th. I'm going to do that. Same thing. I'm going to pretend to be Benson Boone in front of everyone who I'm assuming they know and love and make your birthday Joel (13:16.877) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (13:29.705) all about me. so really sweet, probably the best birthday gift I could possibly imagine a husband giving a wife. And not only did he do it in the confines of that safe space, he then put it on the internet for all of us to see and digest. And now my eyes hurt. yeah, that's, guess, know, money can't buy you taste, class or style. Joel (13:30.968) Mm-hmm. Joel (13:44.408) course. Joel (13:52.022) I'm guessing it was not on TikTok. So maybe the TikTok users are safe from from all that, but Reels and Instagram, you're screwed. Maureen Wiley Clough (13:52.791) Ooh, yeah, you're right. I doubt LinkedIn got it either. Yeah, I was like, what is, god damn it, yeah. Joel (14:02.206) I'm curious, you're way hipper than I am. What do you think about Zuck's evolution of like super nerd hoodie flip flops to now? I'm not exactly sure how I would explain or describe. Yeah. The curly hair, the neck, the kickboxing. Would you rather have the old Zuck back? Is a new Zuck okay? A hundred percent. You'd rather go back to the, the Jesse Eisenberg. Give me Jesse Eisenberg. Maureen Wiley Clough (14:04.855) Mmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (14:12.887) Roman Emperor or whatever. Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (14:23.558) 100%. No, no, no, no. Give me old naive. mean, hopefully naive. Yeah, give me that. I mean, I still wasn't like a huge fan of that vibe either. I mean, Facebook, the origins were like a way to rank girls hotness on college campuses. Let's not forget that. So and he also like screwed over his co-founders and stuff. So like it's never he's never really been someone that I would like prop up as someone to emulate. Let's just put it that way. But like this look. Joel (14:33.251) Mm-hmm. Joel (14:47.918) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (14:50.379) The thing is, this is a look, like it is a curated look. So literally someone is receiving money from Mark Zuckerberg. a hundred percent. He's got a stylist, probably multiple. And it's like, who thought that wearing these stupid t-shirts with like symbols on them and this hair, like who thought that was a good idea? It's just this weird, and it comes at the same time as this like masculine energy, like him kissing up to these like bro influencers. It's just bizarre. And like, we all see you having this, it's essentially, I think it's a Joel (14:55.97) He has a team, right? Yeah. Joel (15:13.454) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (15:20.277) midlife crisis and I was waiting for the divorce news to drop and I was like, what? Joel (15:21.57) Yeah. It's, it's, mean, where you live. mean, Bezos went again from super nerd to like Terminator and, even, and even, even Bill Gates went from like a paste eating dork to clearly PR got to him and he had some like cool glasses and like sweater vests and shit like that. yeah, PR. Maureen Wiley Clough (15:31.863) Yeah, yeah, totally did. I know. Hahaha! Yeah. But I'll still, I'll stand Bill's look. Like it's still appropriate. I'm into it. Bezos, was like, when he did the whole like, who do we want as bond next? I was like, I a hundred percent think he's fishing for people to be like you, sir. You know, like you should be 007. Joel (15:48.524) Yeah. Joel (15:56.859) hahahaha No chance. I know you're down on Zuck and you're down on Meta, but I'm going to give them a little love. All right. Let's talk a little money. so every year they publish people who have given a billion dollars or more to charity. You may not agree with the charities. You may think it's a big tax, you know, tax deal, but I want to mention the people who've given a billion dollars because God damn it. That's a lot of money to go to charity. We're talking people like Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg. Patty Quillen, who's Reed Hastings wife, Dell technologies, Michael Dell and his wife, Susan Dell, Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett, no shock. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, your buddy and his wife, a physician, Dr. Priscilla Chan, and retired professor Ruth Gottsman have all given a billion dollars. And for my money, if you're giving that kind of money to charity, I'm going to give you a shout out. I probably will not give them. Maureen Wiley Clough (16:46.231) doctor. Joel (17:01.002) any free shit from Chad and cheese though, because they have enough stuff. Zuck does not need a Chad and cheese t-shirt, but if you want a Chad and cheese t-shirt, you got to go to Chadcheese.com slash free, fill out the, information and we'll do our best to use my children's labor to get you a t-shirt out in the mail. Those are sponsored by our friends at Aaron referrals. We also not just t-shirts Mo we got whiskey. Our buddies at Van Hack, another fine, fine Canadian, Canadian business. And this, this comes tariff free to all of our listeners. If they win that, they get whiskey. We've also got rum from our friends at plum. We've got maple syrup, aged in Pappy's barrels. that's from our friends at Kiora. And, yeah, like I mentioned, if it is your birthday, then good times await. Maureen Wiley Clough (17:39.895) Beautiful thing. Maureen Wiley Clough (17:45.729) Hehehe. Joel (17:59.63) because there might be a bottle of rum from our friends at Plum. Joel (18:08.717) love that sponsorship. Plum lost. So people left Plum. We're hopeful that just for the fact that we can do that sound bite with this sponsorship, that they retain their sponsorship, even though they've lost a few of the people that used to be really close to us. Sorry, that's a side note. All right, let's get to the people that are celebrating another trip around the sun. Kyle Kip Hager, Mel Skatz, and Michael Deloya, Robert Williams, Tracy Morris, David Altman, Ryan Gibbons, Chris Wallach. Maureen Wiley Clough (18:11.618) Amazing. Maureen Wiley Clough (18:24.832) so too. Joel (18:38.712) Craig Hunter, Amanda Hall, Emily Kunkel, Leanne Chase, and Dean DaCosta. I'll celebrate another birthday this week. We will be traveling, and we will have some more quality time together, hopefully much better than the time that we spent at HR Tech not knowing exactly what was going on. So we're headed to Transform in Vegas. Maureen Wiley Clough (18:53.365) Yes, we will. Yeah. We'll erase it. Yeah. Joel (19:05.006) That's going to be March 17th to the 19th. I believe we will have a hangover suite party if you're interested in joining us for that Hit hit chat up or mo up or anyone in this podcast? For an invite to that Chad and I will also be headed to Chicago on March 25th for the recruiting leaders summit put on by the folks at RecFest I love me some Chicago mo. I don't know if you enjoy the Windy City, but we're talking Maureen Wiley Clough (19:12.247) Ha Joel (19:32.642) We're talking Italian beefs. We're talking Chicago dogs. We're talking deep dish. we're talking old style. Like I love me, some, some, Chicago for more events, can cut out to Chad cheese, dot com forward slash events, I think. And you can find out where Chad and I will be and possibly mo for a little, little bonus bonus for that. Maureen Wiley Clough (19:55.319) Little bonus. Joel (20:02.158) All right, real quick. this, came across the, the wire, this morning. our friends at employ, you may know them as job by jazz, HR, lever, a few other ATSs. they've acquired pillar, and in interview intelligence tool. it's not, it didn't make it to the show. Maybe we'll talk about it in more depth, next week, but I wanted to throw that out there because I like to keep our listeners on the, on the forefront of the news that's happening. also kind of a bummer, the, the economic. shit show continues. Uh, us companies slowed hiring dramatically in February. That's according to ADP's monthly private payrolls report. Only 77,000 jobs were added last month, roughly half the estimate and way below January's upwardly revised 186,000 jobs. So The bad times continue for the job market and for the job boards in most cases. Mo, let's get to some real news from the past week. ZipRecruiter reported a tough Q4 with revenue dropping over 18 % year over year to $111 million, blaming soft hiring demand. Full year 2024 revenue fell 26.6 % to 474 million. Maureen Wiley Clough (20:54.869) Big bummer. Maureen Wiley Clough (21:02.142) Yeah. Joel (21:22.574) with a net loss of 12.9 million compared to a $49.1 million profit just in 2023. Shares hit a 52 week low on the news as Barclays, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan all adjusted their price targets for the stock to the downside. In fact, the only buyers of the stock may be the fans of the show Severance that you can see on Apple. If you have not seen this commercial, here it is. Maureen Wiley Clough (21:46.593) You Maureen Wiley Clough (21:52.053) It's something. Joel (22:24.115) Any thoughts on the news out of ZipRecruiter recently? Maureen Wiley Clough (22:27.455) Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not surprising with the world being such a dumpster fire that there would be fewer job openings on these job boards, right? But I guess my curiosity is really piqued when I think about, how is their competition doing? What's happening there? Because what I read in one of the articles we looked at was that those folks are doing a little better. So guess I'm wondering, what's your take on that as an industry insight? Joel (22:52.376) So say that again in a way that maybe I can understand it. So, it's a job. Maureen Wiley Clough (22:55.095) Competition. How are they doing? Joel (23:03.298) Well, I mean, competition. So, I mean, zip recruiters, a shit show. I mean, it was down 25 % on the news of the stock. recruit continues to do pretty well. although their staffing industry or the staffing business is seemingly much more healthier than their job or business. I'm of the opinion that gender to AI is going to kill glass door because when I can go to gender to AI and say, what's it like to work at Eli Lilly? I get a pretty good answer that doesn't like force me to go to the last door and see their, their reviews. So long-term, think it's really tough. talked about the show last week where they have a walled garden. have to log in. There's no search box. Like imagine going to Google and there's no search boxes. Like you'd freak out. What is this? Um, that's basically what indeed is done. LinkedIn is fine, but LinkedIn is a much more diversified business. Um, than those others globally. mean, see, Maureen Wiley Clough (23:47.847) That's rough. UI. Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (23:56.363) Yeah. Joel (23:59.806) Stepstone, mean, generally speaking, they're all very, very challenged businesses. And when I look at ZipRecruiter in particular, know, public companies offer you a window into their business that private companies or lot of companies don't. in 2023, Chad and I spoke and I brought up what I called the four horsemen of the job board industry. These are four trends that I saw that were really cutting into job boards. Maureen Wiley Clough (24:15.329) Yep. Joel (24:29.518) and making life really, really tough for them. When I made this statement in 2023, ZipRecruiter stock was around 20, $22. Today it's around five to $6. So in that short period, that's what ZipRecruiter has done. So my four horsemen were number one, was Google and LinkedIn, Google for jobs, people being able to find jobs and look at descriptions. We're going to keep people from going to those sites. LinkedIn, I can find anyone that I want for the most part. Automation, I think hits the blue collar worker in a big way. Companies are automating. They want bots carrying, you know, boxes they want, you know, people are getting squeezed out of the blue collar. you know, my local McDonald's is all kiosks when I order, there's no one at a cash register to take my money. that, that takes away from, the jobs that are out there. And then AI, I think on the white collar side, who needs a copywriter today? Maureen Wiley Clough (25:04.895) and Joel (25:22.57) Every image that's created for everything is AI. AI is doing so much of white collar jobs and as we'll discuss and who'd you rather, they're doing more of the customer service. They're doing more of the sales stuff. They're doing more of the marketing. So I think that is going to continue to chip away at job boards. And then the fourth one was, just think the gig economy phenomenon or freelancing. think young people, I'd rather DoorDash, Uber, go Maureen Wiley Clough (25:30.975) Yeah, we'll get into that. Maureen Wiley Clough (25:39.351) Totally. Joel (25:51.454) do some stuff on Upwork or Fiverr, like just diversify instead of like get a shitty job that I don't like. think that's playing into this as well. Now, interestingly, when I, when I made the statement, it was Google. I was talking to an executive, late last year. and he said to me, the greatest threat to indeed was paradox. And I thought that was fascinating. Maureen Wiley Clough (25:58.219) Yeah. Totally. Joel (26:18.83) Um, and, and I thought about it it was, was pretty brilliant. was, but like, yeah, like I have, I have a recruiter. have a tech, like I have a co-pilot. have an agent that will go out, talk to job seekers, go find them, um, go through the whole process. So why do I need to even post a job like publicly available? Um, so I, I think the job board industry is going to continue to suffer from this. And I think that zip recruiters gradual decline. is just an embodiment of that. need to go private. someone needs to, it needs to be career builder plus monster plus zip zip recruiter or, recruit holdings needs to add them to glass door. And indeed, like somebody needs to take zip recruiter, off the board because they are, they are failing, pretty badly, but that is, that is zip recruiter. Let's take a quick break after all this uplifting news and conversation and, Maureen Wiley Clough (26:54.387) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (26:59.767) Bye. Maureen Wiley Clough (27:06.935) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (27:12.087) Hahaha Joel (27:14.306) We'll come back and play a little Who'd You Rather? Joel (27:22.414) So Mo, you've never played. Who'd you rather? All right, well, if you're a first time listener, here's how it goes, kids. We talk about two companies, startups that have recently gotten some funding. And at the end of the summaries, both Maureen and I will tell you who we would rather. Maureen Wiley Clough (27:25.855) my first time. Joel (27:46.786) Make sense, Mo? Enough sense? Yeah. By the way, she signed the contract, so there's no turning back. Let's play a little Hoot-ja-rather. All right. First up in this corner, we have New York City based Hey Milo. No relation to Hi Bob, by the way. They're an AI powered candidate screening platform. They've raised $2.2 million in seed funding this week. The startup offers agents, an agent service that automates the initial interview screening process. Maureen Wiley Clough (27:48.321) Yeah. Joel (28:14.794) autonomously conducts tailored interviews, asks follow-up questions and delivers analysis. The company will use the funds to expand operations and develop further technologies. And in the other corner, it's Israeli based Alta, an AI company specializing in virtual agents for sales and revenue operations. They've raised 7 million in seed funding. The company plans to use the funds to expand its global footprint and integrate Maureen Wiley Clough (28:29.719) Thank Joel (28:44.256) its technology into enterprise sales and marketing infrastructures. And that is the two competing companies on who'd you rather. All right, Mo, we've got Hey Milo versus Alta, who'd you rather? Maureen Wiley Clough (29:00.695) I'm going alta, alta, alta, tomato, tomato. I'm really concerned with AI right now. I just had an experience that was like, it made my blood run cold and it was with Claude by Anthropic, which is like allegedly one of the good guys out there, right? Like they're more ethical and they care about safety. Well, I put a press release into Claude to just see if it could help me with a summary so I could create a script and it came back. and it put in details that were just flat out not in the press release. And I was like, why did you write this? I didn't see it in the press release. And it wrote back like, sorry, I fabricated those details. And I was like, you what? Like, what the, what are you talking about? And so I wrote like, I don't understand why did you fabricate those details? It was like, I'm sorry, I did the wrong thing. It actually creates problems with trust and credibility and it goes against safe and ethical usage. And I was like, You still aren't telling me why you did it. Like that makes no sense. It like proactively made shit up out of thin air. So my distrust in AI is higher than it's ever been. Apparently like it hallucinates all the time and this is nothing new. I talked to a lot of people and like, yeah. I was like, well, I feel like a lot of people just like take it as creed and just throw it out there and don't even think about it. So I'm a little concerned about that. And so when I think about what Hey Milo's doing, like on its face, sure, I understand the concept of like helping people. especially smaller HR teams who have like a glut of candidates coming in and all that, you know, like eight million applications or whatever. Like I understand the concept of it, but I think there's so much opportunity for like unconscious bias and other stuff to seep into the process. It's going to push people out who should be given a fair chance. And I'm not saying that, Milo does that. have no idea. They might be the best thing ever to hit AI and you know, candidate recruitment. Joel (30:35.565) Hmm. Joel (30:44.515) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (30:46.923) but I feel like there's slightly less concern for me when it comes to working with existing systems in sort of the revenue side of the organization where you've got like hard numbers and things that are automated tasks potentially. Not to mention, I also really like that one of their AI automated agents is actually a dude named Alex. Like they have Katie, Luna and Alex. I'm like, finally, I'm so sick of them only being women. Thank you, thank you, we got Alex in there. So I just feel like. Joel (31:06.286) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (31:13.963) There is, and also they have more money. So hopefully they could do more cool stuff. I just, yeah, I'm going out for those reasons. All day, baby. Joel (31:20.888) All day. There she goes. Maureen Wiley Clough (31:27.286) Ha Joel (31:27.63) All right. So when I, when I look at, Milo, um, my first, my first thing to just say, they're going to need a bigger boat. Um, they, they are, they are admittedly riding a good wave. Um, there's an apex predator in this space, uh, called paradox. Um, there will be room for other players. don't know. Again, they're going to need more money to make a difference. I would think, but, you're, we're going to see more and more of these sort of. Maureen Wiley Clough (31:37.001) Hahaha Joel (31:57.944) Conversational AI, co-pilot, agentic services, there's going to be a ton of them. There'll be very few competitors that evolved from that. Do they create a niche and become really good at say healthcare or we're really good at a certain maybe blue collar jobs? I don't know. Maybe we're SMB only, but it's going to be really hard with the current landscape to do it. It's not that I'm necessarily bearish on Hey Milo. But I love me some Alta, similar to what you were saying. Look, every company that I know is thinking about how do we do what we do with fewer people? And, and when services like this start dropping about like, Hey, have an AI agent for all of your sales calls, all of your marketing shit, all of your customer service. And when you, when you, when you see demos of these products, it's not, it's not the olden days where it's like, Maureen Wiley Clough (32:38.507) Exactly. Maureen Wiley Clough (32:47.799) Mm-hmm. Joel (32:55.278) Press one if you'd like to get our contact information, press three. It feels, and it's more and more feeling like an actual conversation with a human being. Some of the sales are amazing. They know what time it is in the zone that they're calling. It's pretty incredible what we're seeing there. Every company is going to say, how do we replace 80 % of our sales, customer service, and marketing team? Maureen Wiley Clough (32:56.913) Hahaha Maureen Wiley Clough (33:20.887) Exactly. Joel (33:24.354) with AI and these companies are in a prime position to make sure that they are there to get all the money when, when that gets spent. So Alta for me as well. Gets my, gets my, gets my, gets my hoot-ja rather. I'm feeling a hot and bother time to talk about LinkedIn. Obviously my. Maureen Wiley Clough (33:36.193) They swept, they swept today. Ha ha ha. That's what we do when we think LinkedIn, we get kind of hot. my God. Ridiculous. Joel (33:50.99) All right, LinkedIn from this from this from vice and a story entitled quote, LinkedIn might be the worst social media app for Gen Z and quote, can you say clickbait anyway, social media platforms like Instagram and Tik TOK often spark envy by showcasing curated, highly reels of people's lives, making users feel inferior, less noticed, but equally potent linked in triggers what they're calling quote. Maureen Wiley Clough (33:59.959) you Maureen Wiley Clough (34:04.46) No kidding. Joel (34:19.71) LinkedIn envy driving some to delete their profiles due to constant self-comparison with others exaggerated professional achievements. Users report feeling terrible about themselves with the platform becoming an egocentric breeding zone, quote, full of cringe-worthy inflated job titles, like someone claiming to be director of security when they're just a frontline support vendor. Moe, LinkedIn envy. It's a thing. Your thoughts. Maureen Wiley Clough (34:46.177) So true. It's a thing. You're right. That was such a clickbait headline for sure, because let me tell you, I think it's that way for every generation. And I think it's just like the job version of the envy, right? Like Instagram's like the curated, like, this is my home. This is the day in the life. And this is just like professional version, right? But I can 100 % attest to that feeling. Like I remember feeling that way often earlier in my career. So maybe that's sort of the Gen Z aspect is these people are earlier in their career. And now I know better because I'm like, yeah, that doesn't check out. You write your Harvard MBA, but then I go and I ask, this actually happened, this is great story. I had a company that was acquired by a private equity firm and my new boss, I went on LinkedIn to look him up and I was like, who's this guy? Like I'm gonna have, you know, what's essentially a job interview for the job I currently hold. When I met him, I was like, I'm gonna talk about Boston, because he went to Harvard and I went to Tufts and perfect, like we'll just chat Boston. I get on the phone with him, I'm like, so Boston, he's like. Joel (35:34.222) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (35:43.575) He got like really uncomfortable and I'm like what he's like, yeah, that was an online certificate and I was like dude bro Like you can't write Harvard MBA if you had an online certificate and that stuff is all over the place on LinkedIn  So first of all, it's things are not what they seem always that was like such an amazing moment by the way But it also just encapsulated for me like you really you don't know what people are saying on there whether it's true or not and People get to certain places and rungs on the ladder by a lot of different things, including luck and who you know. So it's just like, I don't really look at it in the same lens. I don't feel bad about myself anymore because I think so much of it is nonsense. I think before you kind of have been around the block, like that could probably impact your world. Do you a little bit more? And it totally makes sense. Like everyone or a lot of people on there are just like, dude, I just got promoted and I'm making like a gazillion dollars and here's my hack to do it. And you know, it's just, there's a lot of that on there, but I personally don't think it's any. Joel (36:23.95) Mm-hmm. Joel (36:36.984) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (36:39.339) worse than what you see on Instagram. It's just like in the professional realm. lost my hair butt. Joel (36:44.546) That's all right. So I, one of the, one of the aspects of the story that I thought was interesting was that you, there's a sense that you can't delete LinkedIn because it's your professional footprint. Whereas I want to leave X like I'm out or Reels is stupid. I'm not going to join. Like LinkedIn does have this, you have to be on it feel. So, so I do think that is a difference between, between LinkedIn and other platforms. And so far, no one can dethrone LinkedIn. Maureen Wiley Clough (36:52.64) yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (36:58.035) So true. Maureen Wiley Clough (37:03.999) Yes, I stand that. Maureen Wiley Clough (37:08.969) You... Yeah, no, it's true. Joel (37:11.106) Like social media, feels like every five years there's a new, there's a new thing that everyone can join or join or change up. poly work, poly work, like, yeah, poly work we mentioned was a like kids, the kids needed a LinkedIn and they're, they're gone. so for the, for the meantime, LinkedIn Tim tends to be it. my sister who's, late to the game on LinkedIn, was hit on for the first time. Maureen Wiley Clough (37:15.265) Totally. Yeah, I agree with that though. You can't. They're out. They're gone. Joel (37:39.114) on LinkedIn and I'm curious, I'm curious, cause I, I've never been on LinkedIn. I'm sure that shocks you. but I also don't know any, I don't know any men, who have, or at least have admitted to that, but it seems like a serious problem with women. Are you finding that with you and your, friends that are female? Maureen Wiley Clough (37:39.482) Ha Maureen Wiley Clough (37:45.415) You Maureen Wiley Clough (37:51.477) Yeah. Yes, I have had marriage proposals or maybe they were marriage threats. Like I've gotten, I will marry you. And I'm assuming English, not first language for this person, but like stuff like that comes and you're just like, like what, like what are you talking about? Right? So yeah, that does happen. Joel (38:13.614) So it's more sarcasm, like shot in the dark thing. Like never. Maureen Wiley Clough (38:17.815) I mean, I don't know his intentions, but I was like, this, I will marry you sounds like a threat. I mean, in this, maybe, don't worry, don't sell yourself short. It could still happen, but it's like, so, and I'm not the only one who has this happen. Like other women that I talked to have this kind of stuff occur often. So it's a thing for sure, but to your earlier point, like you absolutely need to have LinkedIn profile. Like that's where I think it's like 90 % of recruiters look to LinkedIn for jobs. Joel (38:24.43) Yeah, I've never gotten that marriage proposal. Joel (38:34.904) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (38:46.491) I read that somewhere at don't quote me exactly, but it was something super high. And anytime you want to do any sort of networking, you have to go to LinkedIn to see where people are and who they're connected to and all that. And so you might not like it, but you should at least have like a shell profile. not saying you have to go post every day or something, become a super user, but you should at least have something. And maybe if it makes you feel like shit, don't go on it a lot, but like you need to have something there. Joel (39:11.576) Yeah, it really, it really has become a necessity. mean, I have a, I have an 18 year old son who's going to college and I mean, it sounds horrible, but I'm like, dude, LinkedIn is probably not going anywhere. people, people are lazy. People like shorthand. like, they like quick sort of glance and get a sense of who you are. And so, you know, I really pushed him into a brand name school, which he is, he's going to Indiana. So he's going to like a big 10 school. Maureen Wiley Clough (39:25.237) It's not. Joel (39:40.888) I'm going to try to push them into like internships with brand name companies because that's what employers want to see. They want to see a college they know. They want to see interns and companies that they recognize. And to your point, I think people are really focused on padding their profiles and whether that's right outlying or I'm going to get that quick online certificate or whatever to say that I went to Yale. Maureen Wiley Clough (39:46.551) This is how it goes. Maureen Wiley Clough (40:00.865) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (40:07.863) So cringe. So bad. Joel (40:09.686) And have you, and then, and then they put that in their top, top of the profile. Like that's their main. Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (40:13.461) Yes, the top part. That is exactly what this guy I was talking about did. And I was like, my, come on, man. Like, you can't do that. Yeah. Joel (40:18.222) Yeah. Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of pressure. On Tinder, it's I'm 6'3", and here it's I went to Harvard. Maureen Wiley Clough (40:27.465) Right, right, right, totally. Yep, I'm the CEO, right, of my own one person company that's in stealth mode. you know, like that's the kind of stuff you see. things are not as safe here. Joel (40:39.136) Should LinkedIn crack down on that? Should LinkedIn have some sort of verification or to like that's getting pretty rampant from what I can tell. It'd be nice if they had something. Maureen Wiley Clough (40:47.711) Yeah, it would be. I don't know how exactly they'd do it, but if there's a will, there's a way. It might be a good idea. At least crack down on the scams, right? Because there are enough scams on there. That's the thing I see as more disturbing than anything else. The other stuff you can kind of filter out, like, cool, you're CEO of, yeah. Exactly. Joel (41:03.278) where there's a dollar, there's a way. I someone who went to an Ivy League school would pay LinkedIn to have like a check mark at their college at the top of their profile. Yeah. If you're paying a quarter million dollars to go to school and get a degree, like you'll pay a hundred bucks a year or whatever to get that verification. it's, yeah, a new frame around your profile, know, little Ivy League, little Ivy. Maureen Wiley Clough (41:12.649) yeah, yeah. Verification verified Yale student like, yeah, you're right. Maureen Wiley Clough (41:21.917) Mm, yeah. Strong point. That's another money making move for them. Yeah. They're gonna crush. They're gonna crush. yeah, yeah. I have the anoint, yep, yep. Super smart. Mm-hmm. That's a really great call. Yeah, there you go. You should get a cut. Get a cut, for sure, for sure. But yeah, there is a lot of opportunity, I'll say, for Gen Z to get on LinkedIn because like... Joel (41:32.046) You could have Ivy. Yeah. And stuff. Oh man. You're, welcome. LinkedIn. just want fifth. want 15%, 15 % of everything. All right. Maureen Wiley Clough (41:47.199) A lot of people aren't in Gen Z and my social media consultant slash video guy, like he realized recently, he was like, holy shit, I need to be on LinkedIn. Like, why am I only on Instagram? And I was like, I've been telling you guy, like you should get on here because it's just, there's a dearth of voices in that space. So why not? Joel (41:49.09) They have to. Joel (42:02.882) Yeah. And now that they have video, you're going to see more of this sort of FOMO stuff on LinkedIn. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's take a quick break and, I don't know. We'll talk about women empowerment or the lack thereof. Maureen Wiley Clough (42:06.389) Yeah, totally. Tik-Toki stuff, Yep, it's a thing. Maureen Wiley Clough (42:17.075) Good times. Joel (42:22.35) All right, a new survey from Hi Bob. Says only one in three women say they feel empowered to perform at their best at work. And less than 10 % of women said they have a formal said they have a formal mentor at work. So 90 % do not. Morgan news for women, sarcasm inserted 34 % of men surveyed. So they earned a promotion in 2024 compared to 22 % of women while 46 % of men said they received a raise last year compared to 32 % of. Women Moe you're a woman thoughts. Maureen Wiley Clough (42:59.701) Yep, therefore I will speak for all women. Yeah, this tracks, this totally tracks. It's rough out there, it's rough out there. mean, that survey hit on a lot of points that have been continual frustrations for women in the workplace, right? Like it's just, we're not getting that upward mobility. We're not reaching the higher levels of the organizations. Part of that's due to not having, you know, a mentor or an advocate, right? Like that's totally a thing. And it's... I also noticed that whole survey, it was interesting to see the degree to which presenteeism and like actually button seat in an office. Like people were saying how much that mattered, both men and women, but they were saying it mattered for different reasons. The women were saying it was important to be there so that their colleagues and other people around them could see their contributions. And men were saying that it was important because they needed to show their boss there, like to climb the ladder essentially. So it's like, I feel like there's this persistent, frankly, as a myth. Joel (43:48.814) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (43:52.673) that if you do good work, you're gonna be rewarded as a woman and women buy into that. And it's like, no, that's not quite enough. But the mentorship thing is a really big issue and not having representation of women at upper ranks of the organizations, that's super hard too, because if you can't see it, you can't really be it, right? And that's truly a problem. And so I also thought, like that was a very long survey and they went into a lot of different details, which was really cool. I think everyone should check it out. Another thing that I thought was interesting was men thought that the way their companies thought about women was emblematic and signified by the company culture. And women didn't think that. They were like, no, no, no, no, it's not about the culture. We don't care about this performative bullshit. It's like, are you actually giving me benefits that help me? Are you giving flexibility? All of this. So it's more like put your money where your mouth is. Organizations like, do you have childcare support? Do you have maternity leave? Do you have paternity leave? Right? Joel (44:38.958) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (44:49.515) the way things that are going to actually become more equitable for women in the workplace is when dudes take paternity leave. Like that is, I think, one of the single most important things organizations can do is encourage and inspire men within the organization to take that leave as well. That levels the playing field in a way that nothing else really will. yeah, I mean, none of this surprises me. It's tough. Women are facing burnout at higher rates than men. There are all sorts of reasons for that. Another thing I thought was really interesting in the survey was the result that women were like excited to get away from the house to go to the office because they wanted to get away from their family. And I was like, that also tracks like I get it, you so nothing like groundbreaking in there very much in line with what I feel, what I've seen other women around me over the course of my corporate career feel and experience. So we got some work to do. Maureen Wiley Clough (45:43.127) it's going to get better. Yeah. So hopeful. It's a great time. Joel (45:44.974) The good news is I'm sure in Trump's second term, things will balance out a lot better than they have. Yeah, I can tell. So they surveyed 2000 employees, full-time employees, primarily in hybrid or in-office environments. So it's a pretty good survey, pretty good number of people. 51 % identified as women. So it was a pretty even-handed set of data. Maureen Wiley Clough (46:04.565) Yeah, pretty decent. Joel (46:15.52) I do think that on the support side, there has been, think a challenge in the Me Too era and the cancel culture that men are just afraid to do mentoring. And this could be things like mentoring a child because as Professor Galloway always says, like the Catholic church and Michael Jackson fucked it up for young boys because men can't have a relationship with a young boy. Maureen Wiley Clough (46:30.924) Hmm. Joel (46:43.822) Because everyone looks at it and goes, Oh, is something going on there? Like what? That looks kind of weird. And I think that there's probably some hurdles for men to think about. I'm going to mentor this female for obvious reasons that come into play, right? Are they having a relationship or they fooling around? I mean, so I think there's a barrier there that, is, um, maybe not there going the other way around. I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but, I think that that is prevalent, but I do think that more and more. Maureen Wiley Clough (47:01.815) It just, it does happen. Joel (47:12.654) tools that are coming out. coach hub is a company that we've talked about that will mentor you through technology and it's male, female, whatever, but there's no boundary about, if I get close to this person, you know, physical, like physically I'm in their proximity. Like people are going to do what Maureen Wiley Clough (47:28.471) So it's all remote? that what you mean? Is it all remote? Is that what you mean by that? Like it's not in-person mentoring? Joel (47:33.87) Yeah. So coach hub coach, I've got a ton of money recently and it's yeah, it's sort of like an online mentor. they, they, they coach you up. They look at what you're doing and like help you with certain things, like how to sell and sales process and sort of meant to you that way. Um, so let's say like Mike Shashevsky is like mentoring you on how to relate to people or talk to people or negotiate. Um, I think that will help level of playing field a little bit from that standpoint. One the things that I'm interested, interested in from you. because it's usually a man on the other side of this podcast. I want to talk about the crab crawling out of the bucket phenomenon. If you don't know about this, if you put crabs in a bucket, if one of them crawls out, they will pull it back in. In other words, they won't allow one of their own to climb up and sort of escape. Maureen Wiley Clough (48:16.427) Not familiar with that one. Joel (48:30.158) And there's a psychologist named Dr. Naomi Elemers who talks about women in a similar way that women are sometimes their own worst enemy because women don't champion other women the way that they should. women sort of, there's a hesitancy to strive for something because of how it will look to other women. A nd I'm curious your thoughts on, I guess, women being maybe sometimes their own worst. Maureen Wiley Clough (48:53.271) Mm. Joel (48:59.874) barrier to success. Is that off or do you sort of relate to that? Maureen Wiley Clough (49:05.151) do relate to that. And I think it's like got a very logical reasoning behind it, right? It's like, there are only so many seats at the table, right? And so there's this sense of competition and I've got to get that one seat because there aren't that many women in the corporate world, right? Representation is off. It's definitely not the 51 % of the population, right? For a host of reasons. So I think that there is some component of that that is accurate. I've seen some women be super threatened by other high achieving women at their organizations. That's certainly a thing. Just kind of like that scarcity versus abundance mindset really at its basic form, right? Like, shit, there's like only so many times I can get the shot, right? So I think that's there's some truth to that for sure. I do think that there is a really big push for that not to be the case because we recognize like that's not how anyone's gonna get better. That's not how this is gonna improve. Like we really need to proactively surround ourselves with women who we want to promote and sing the praises of. And so it's really, I think, a huge building movement that there's this whole hype woman movement, Like people, women cheering other women on and this concept of like, there's plenty of room for all of us. Like there's enough room at this table. You don't need to do that. So I really think that's shifting. But I think traditionally that was kind of a thing. yeah, but getting back to like the men, yeah, go ahead. Joel (50:23.128) Okay. Did you, did you keep an eye on, um, I don't know if you follow WNBA, Caitlin Clark, um, you know, when she came into the league, not at all. Uh, so it always shocked me how she comes into the league, everyone watches arenas, you know, sell out and then all the other players like want to beat her down and, and like tear her down. And I always thought that was really strange. Maureen Wiley Clough (50:34.069) I don't. Mm-mm. Joel (50:51.214) because her success is becoming their success. like the rising tide raises all the boats. So yeah, while I had you on, I wanted to get your take on that. Well, these aren't universal truths for sure, but I am curious. Maureen Wiley Clough (50:51.371) I didn't see that. Huh. Live Saul boats. Yep. Supposed to anyway. Yeah, I'm glad I could speak for all women. I will say that I don't, know, yeah, right, right. For all women. I will say when it comes to the other conversational point, which was around men not being comfortable taking on mentoring younger women, I don't think companies are intentional about mentorship. I don't think they're thinking through like, how can you do this? Joel (51:14.776) Mm-hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (51:23.895) And that's hurting Gen Z a lot. I mean, there was a study that came out by Adobe that said that 83 % of Gen Z wanted a mentor and only 42 % of them had one, right? Something like that, or maybe it was like 53%. But there was a big delta there. And so I don't think companies are being intentional about this at all. So I don't know if it really has anything to do with male, female, certainly in some situations, I can imagine that playing out. But I think that companies just flat out are not recognizing the value of mentorship and not facilitating it. Joel (51:52.622) Do you think a woman in an executive or management position feels comfortable taking on an entry level or a new employee and mentoring them? Or do you think that that's an uncomfortable scenario for women? Maureen Wiley Clough (52:08.267) I mean, I know that when I was at a past company, my then boss, who was a man, proactively sought out a mentorship opportunity for me with the highest ranking female in our department. And that was awesome. And she took it on like with a lot of excitement and was great. And that was all him, like kudos to him for seeing like, hey, you know, I'm going to help her find her way here and like setting that up for me. Joel (52:16.064) Okay. Okay. Joel (52:30.092) Had he not intervened, do you think that connection would have happened? Maureen Wiley Clough (52:35.453) Maybe over the course of time, if she got to know my work, right, she was like 17 layers above me. So that would have been a very small chance. So it may not have, but that was really, that was really instrumental to me at that organization. Like it super helped to find the path I was on, helped me feel a lot of confidence. She helped me through, hey, I'm coming up on my maternity leave. Like, what's the vibe? Tell me about it. Like she showed me what she had done and told me all the sort of things to expect, which Joel (52:37.323) Okay. Joel (52:59.021) Yeah. Maureen Wiley Clough (53:04.299) Like otherwise, I don't think I would have gotten. So yeah, I think in short, like having a manager who advocates for you and looks out for you and provides those opportunities to you is just like so baller and it does not happen enough. Like it really has only happened to me like once, twice maybe in my career. And that's just like sheer good fortune of being with a leader who gets it, right? So like it can't be understated how important it is, like where you happen to fall at a certain organization and who your manager is and like. Joel (53:33.08) Hmm. Maureen Wiley Clough (53:33.719) I mean, you're always one management change away from hating your job is the reality, right? So there you go. Yeah, saying there's a chance, man. Saying there's a chance. Joel (53:37.678) So you're saying there's a chance. So you're saying there's a chance, which brings us to this week's Dad Joke. Are you ready? Maureen Wiley Clough (53:47.159) God, I'm nervous. Okay, yeah, lay it on me. Okay. Joel (53:49.58) It's not too bad. It's not too bad. I'm easing into it. And my sister who listens now said, that one joke was not good. So we're going to, we're going to pull it back a little bit today. what, what do you call guys who make women in the kitchen jokes? What do you call guys who make women in the kitchen jokes? Single. Maureen Wiley Clough (54:03.777) God. Maureen Wiley Clough (54:07.553) assholes. Maureen Wiley Clough (54:11.988) That's good. That is good. I love that. That's accurate. That tracks. Joel (54:14.882) That's Mo everybody and that's another one in the can. We out. Maureen Wiley Clough (54:19.638) We out.

Strap in listener — this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast is coming in hot. Joel and Chad team up with Gina Alioto from Shaker Recruitment Marketing to break down experiential marketing — the kind of branding that hits harder than a linebacker and sticks with you longer than your worst hangover. Gina pulls no punches, laying out why employer branding feels stuck in a '90s time warp and why Shaker’s Vision Report might be the wake-up call your brand desperately needs. They also dig into why investing in your brand during an economic dumpster fire isn’t just smart—it’s mandatory if you want to avoid getting smoked by the competition. The conversation gets gritty as they explore how tech and analytics could make recruitment as personalized as your old man’s backyard BBQ, the tangled mess of DEI (spoiler: it’s more complex than putting together IKEA furniture without swearing), and why sustainable innovation needs to be as essential to your business as that first cup of coffee. By the end, they're throwing down a challenge to talent leaders everywhere: stop sitting on your hands and start making moves. Because in the business world, standing still is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Don’t miss it. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:30.395) What time it is, it is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house, back in America. Watch out, you have been warned. And we are giddy to welcome Gina Alioto, VP and Head of Marketing at Shaker Recruitment Marketing to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Gina, happy new year and welcome to the podcast. Chad (00:40.385) No. Chad (00:45.015) There she is. Gina Alioto (00:55.726) Thanks so much, happy to be here. I'm Gina. I lead brand and marketing for Shaker Recruitment Marketing. And I have about 10 years of experience in consumer brand. Then I moved over to B2B about 10 years ago. So now I've been at Shaker and it is one of the best places that I've ever worked. Chad (01:13.805) Talk about the events though that you've actually led over the years. Talk about that so our listeners actually understand who Gina, the experiential genius that Gina really is. Let's hear it, let's hear it. Joel (01:20.857) Our listeners know the gangster that you are. Gina Alioto (01:27.886) Well, I've worked with brands like Heineken, iHeart Media, the Tribeca Film Festival, Emirates, and I've been in this industry for a really long time before I went professional, before I went pro. it was, brand and marketing was an area that I was always interested in. I always wanted to be in advertising. But then, back then, I was learning about commercials and print. And none of that actually is the core anymore. I was going to college right at the time of the rise of the internet. And I grew into and grew up with what is now known as experiential marketing, but then it wasn't called experiential marketing. And it was this blend of advertising and entertainment. And that's how that shaped my career. So I started actually in radio, believe it or not. You were talking about earlier about before podcasts existed. I'd like to believe that at our college radio station, we created podcasts. We invented podcasts in college. Yeah. And then I was doing events for the college and our annual Spring Fling Festival, which is 2000 people in New York City, and then worked a little bit for CBS radio. Joel (02:36.347) College Radio. That's awesome. That's awesome. Gina Alioto (02:52.766) and was doing Super Bowl events. then my goal, I always wanted to work for the Grammys. I didn't get to achieve that career goal yet, but I did work for the Latin Grammys. did work for Heineken and did a bunch of experiential work at Coachella Ultra Music Festival, pretty much any festival in the US. Then I did some work for the Latin Grammys. Yeah, that was a career high for me, a career highlight. Joel (03:14.105) I'm sorry, did you say Latin Grammys? Joel (03:21.871) We call it a day. Gina Alioto (03:22.158) And then I did work for the Tribeca Film Festival in the US and in Qatar. Chad (03:28.343) So talk a little bit about Coachella. I that one that is just sticking out and help our listeners understand what really experiential marketing is, what it feels like. Gina Alioto (03:40.174) So my definition of experiential marketing is taking a flat logo, right? Taking a flat brand, flat colors, right? It's on the page and bringing it into a four dimensional space where it lives, it breathes, it smells, it tastes, it hears, and you create memories for people. So it's the next level of brand and marketing where you're creating a memory. Chad (03:49.482) huh. Gina Alioto (04:08.576) and your brand makes a closer connection with your audience. That to me is the definition of experiential marketing. Chad (04:16.941) So I think for us that the the Chad and cheese brand would be like an escape room. Be like an escape room with a with with beer. Yes, and you can't get out and you can't get out. Joel (04:21.691) What does that smell like? Gina Alioto (04:25.784) Breathe. Joel (04:25.979) Smells like beer and regret basically. So are you in meetings with employers saying like, want people to smell that employment brand and what is an employment brand smell like? Gina Alioto (04:29.954) Yes, exactly. Gina Alioto (04:38.886) So I am not explicitly asking that, but for myself as an experiential marketer, I am certainly thinking about when I'm creating space, what does it smell like? What does it feel like? I am thinking about that level of detail. What are people doing? Where are they going? How are they getting there? Every it needs to engage all of the senses. The best experiential marketing engages all of the senses and and the best. Chad (04:59.209) All senses. Gina Alioto (05:08.75) is unknown to the audience. You just feel it. You just feel it. So for example, the experiential activation at RECFest that I designed for Shaker, for Shaker Recruitment Marketing, you didn't think about the music or how it smelled in our tent or how you felt in our tent or what was happening in the tent, all of those things. You just knew how you felt and what everybody was saying. That was the best experience. That's the end goal. That was the best experience. Why? Well, I knew exactly who was going to be at the event. I know what makes them happy. I know it creates memories and put all of those ingredients together. And that is a great experience when people walk away and they're still talking about it. it's one of the things that I loved about Coachella because they understand their audience and that event is designed for them. And then every brand that's there, sometimes they represented different brands, but for Heineken, for example, You have to think about the Heineken customer at that event. What are they looking to do? What's going to create memories for them? What's going to make that connection with the brand stronger? So. Joel (06:19.067) Do conversations with employers feel like they've progressed since you started or do feel like it's still sort of ground zero with all the things you're talking about? Do they understand what brand is more now than they used to or are you still kind fighting an uphill battle? Gina Alioto (06:33.742) So in my experience both in consumer marketing and now the second half of my career has been in B2B in recruitment marketing, I am still seeing a huge gap between the employer branding recruitment marketing space and the let's call it mainstream brand and marketing. And I'm puzzled by it and it's something that Chad and I talk about all the time because as a B2B brand and marketer as a brand leader and marketing leader. And then I'm very close with our talent acquisition and HR team. And I make it my business to be partners with them. I'm not seeing that same camaraderie and partnership for brands and their brand marketers and the... and the recruitment marketers. I'm not seeing that connection. Chad (07:32.257) Isn't that on us though? Isn't that on us to be able to get them to understand why we're so important? Because I think it's one of those things where, you know, we're sitting and waiting for marketing, for brand, for the CEO, for the entire C-suite to just realize how important we are as opposed to getting out of the corner in the field of position, standing up, stiffening our spine and actually taking the message to them. I mean, it just feels like we're not doing enough of that. What do you think about that? Gina Alioto (08:02.99) think that you're spot on and that it is a complex situation. There are complexities here, many moving parts. The biggest thing that I see are separate departments, separate budgets, and then human resources, formerly personnel, is seen viewed as a budget spending. It's a spending arm, cost center. So those perceptions are tough to break. I think it is an uphill battle and will continue to be unless those complexities are resolved at the business level. Chad (08:33.612) Center. Joel (08:33.686) Line item, yeah. Chad (08:49.901) Well, and this launches us into the vision report because we actually talk about that. Well, and before we just start jumping just directly into it, tell us about the vision report. What is it? Why was it created? And will we see more of it? Gina Alioto (09:04.664) So Shaker Recruitment Marketing created the Vision Report, and this is a report that brings together the brightest minds from recruitment marketing subject matter experts, talent leaders, all of the leaders in talent acquisition, recruitment marketing, employer branding, technology founders. So all of the technology tools and solutions, the founders and CEOs contributed to this report. analysts and influencers like yourself Chad, shameless plug, and all of the analysts and influencers in our space. This is the first report of its kind to bring together the entire industry. And this year we asked this whole audience, what is your number one best piece of advice for talent leaders in the year ahead? And brought together all of their ideas, what's on their mind, what's their best piece of advice and what's their vision. for the year ahead in recruitment marketing. Joel (10:04.507) What were some of the things in the report that stood out to you, maybe surprised you, things that were highlights? Gina Alioto (10:10.602) The number one biggest theme is pretty much what Chad just finished saying about take action, be bold. There's this underlying sense of urgency to act now. So those are things that I think we are all feeling and it's just really well articulated, especially by the talent acquisition and employer branding leaders and that voice their views in this report. One of the things that was surprising to me is that we have this sense of urgency to do something, act now, be bold, and not necessarily the next level of, then how? How do we do that? Chad (10:55.159) Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that we've seen with like Simon Sinek over the years, right? He said, find your why. He never said how after you find your why. And that's one of the things that I think leaders really have struggled with is yes, action versus inaction. We need to take action. It's like. Joel (10:55.429) curious. Chad (11:15.605) And that's where, again, having leaders in this space to be able to provide mentorship, guidance, experience, those types of things is incredibly important. Joel (11:27.163) And I think direction, you know, one of things, uh, one of the things from reading the report, like brand investment was a, was a real highlight for me that people were focusing on that. And that has really changed over the years. mean, brand investment used to be a cool stock photo in our display ad and the Chicago Tribune. And it is something very different today. And I think part of your job is translating. What does brand investment mean? Let's dig into that a little bit. When you talk with two clients and they talk about investing in the brand, what does that mean? Gina Alioto (11:56.856) So investing in your brand means how your brand is formed and activated across every marketing touch point, across every channel. And it's a loaded topic because typically either in down markets or in times of uncertainty, brand is often the first thing that is cut or pushed to the back burner. It hurts me as a brand and marketing leader because when I see those times, that is the time to invest in brand and marketing. And so sometimes your organization might choose to not invest in brand, but I think that is the time where you should be investing more in brand and building those long-term relationships with your audience so that when they, and this also speaks to the passive job seeker market. You're building your brand. getting to be known so that when a candidate is ready to make a decision or if they choose to come to your brand, your brand is the one that is top of mind for them. And building that, and it's tough too because sometimes it's not always obvious to brands to invest in brand, especially what we were just talking about experiential, that requires a huge budget. And that is a huge brand investment. And I think that's another reason why we're not really seeing so much experiential marketing in employer branding and recruitment marketing, because those budgets are not there for those purposes. They don't see the value in that type of activation. Some do. Some of the really, really smart brands do, but not all of the brands. I think now certainly, if you haven't already for talent acquisition and employee branding leaders, now is the time to invest in. your employer brand if you have not already or if you're not on that path. Chad (13:53.741) Well, I mean, you talk about investment. If you are working incredibly closely with big brand, big marketing, then that can be something that is a combined effort because as you were trying to push the brand and you're trying to market out to the, you your customer, whoever that might be, you have to remember that those individuals who are coming that top talent that's coming in to actually develop and deploy and sell and service your brand and your customers. Well, they need to know that too. And that is a great way to actually say, look, this is not just something that we use at one expo, right? This is something, perspective-wise, that we put in HQ, that we have talent come in and check out before they actually go through an interview or what have you. I there are great ways to actually do that. Gina Alioto (14:40.81) Mm-hmm. There's so many great ways to actually do that. And in an ideal world, the employer brand would talk with their mainstream brand person. But I think we also need to consider that the brand and marketing mainstream department might also be feeling the pinch because marketing is being scrutinized more than ever. And so if they might also be feeling the pain. I do think though there is value in having a conversation about what already exists and where can we exchange resources. But I don't necessarily believe that employer branding will easily be able to get budget or share budget from mainstream marketing. The way things, the way the organizations are currently set up. Joel (15:31.707) Another highlight from the report was, quote, focus on the needs of real people. What does that mean? And what does that mean in a world that's progressively getting to a place where applying is automated and you have services like lazy apply? And it's not about what the brand is. It's just about how many companies can I apply to before I get a bite? Talk about real people and maybe automation in that process. Chad (15:32.706) recording. Gina Alioto (16:00.504) So what I hear from the talent leaders that shared their visions in this report, the technology needs to enable us, empower us to deliver better, more personalized experiences and not necessarily make it more... so transactional where you completely lose the human touch. I think even just in that quote, in and of itself, is very telling that we're saying focus on the needs of real people. The fact that we need to put the word real before people, doesn't that say a ton in and of itself? Instead of saying focusing on the needs of people, the fact that we're putting real people, that emphasis on needing the human back in there, Joel (16:42.597) Yeah. Gina Alioto (16:52.768) we're seeing that it's a huge tectonic shift with the introduction of AI and how rapidly it's moving. And I think that talent acquisition leaders need to embrace it and act now exactly what the report says and urges us to do. And that those that do embrace it, but in a way where it will empower you to deliver better, more personalized experiences, those are the ones that are going to win. Joel (17:00.411) Mm-hmm. Gina Alioto (17:21.218) those that just kind of invest in a bunch of AI tools and then don't really understand the strategy, their strategy behind it and have a clear vision on that first, you might end up or likely will end up having a more transactional experience. And you might find that out too late or down the line when you already have some brand damage. Chad (17:39.959) That's a great point because if you think about it before AI or really tech in the automation side of the house, you still have the black hole because people can't scale, right? Whether they're real people or not people, we need scale. And AI, if we're using AI automation, some of these platforms that are orchestrating and they're created process-wise and messaging-wise, to be able to give that individual a better experience because going into the black hole is horrible experience. And that's what we've gotten used to. And it's funny because we talk about candidates ghosting us. Where do you think they learned that from? They learned it from us because we ghosted them, right? So yeah, I got it from you. The more you know. But at the end of the day, I mean, that experience today, Joel (18:24.717) I learned it from you, Dad. I learned it from you. The more you know. Chad (18:35.681) has been, it's entirely different. And we're starting to talk to TA leaders who are really, I mean, they're glowing because they're using some of these platforms that have AI and automation because they're getting to talent faster, their NPS scores are going up. And again, you can't be afraid of moving forward. You have to take a look at the tool. So that tool being AI or whatever platform that is, for Shaker and for these different TA leaders, what was the response you were getting? Because we're hearing that inaction isn't something that we can deal with. Are you seeing them asking more questions and actually moving more into the direction of not set it and forget it technology, but new, more fluid technology, whether it's AI, automation, whatever it might be? Gina Alioto (19:27.84) Yes, I do see questions, but I would expect and hope to see even more, which I think is one of the messages in this, by doing this vision report to really push the talent leaders to ask more questions. And in the report, we say how speculation provokes thought and innovation. It's the speculation that provokes the thought and innovation and getting Chad (19:33.997) Mm-hmm. Gina Alioto (19:57.944) curious and asking the bold questions. And I think sometimes we're a little bit too hesitant to, we're kind of waiting to see what might happen. So we're really urging the talent leaders to ask those questions, get curious. The connection for me to what you just shared, Chad, is the analytics, which is another theme in this report and how important analytics are. Joel (20:19.609) Mm-hmm. Gina Alioto (20:23.274) and front ending your analytics strategy. So, and working backwards from there. So say putting analytics as your priority. Cause I think all too often it's let's find the right solution and then we'll have the, the analytics that we need. Instead ask, what do you need to know? What do you need to know about and how will you measure success and what are your performance metrics? And what is that business value that you're going to create, work backwards from there and find the right tools that are going to help you do that and get the analytics because that visibility will help you be bold and help you. Yeah. Chad (21:01.271) Yeah. Well, now, number because there are six things that are happening here and one of them is measure success with relevant metrics. And again, putting relevant in there kind like real people, relevant metrics, I think that says a lot because we use a lot of metrics that aren't relevant to the C-suite, which means we're not really getting our message across them how we're actually impacting the bottom line. So, talk a little bit about that. Measure success with the relevant metrics. Joel (21:15.833) Hmph. Joel (21:26.715) Mm-hmm. Chad (21:30.989) What do TA leaders actually mean about this? Gina Alioto (21:34.542) Yes, and you can get analytics and have data. You could be drowning in data and it's not the relevant metrics that you need for business success or that matter to the business. So I would first be build a close partnership with your CFO and understand, and your finance department, like understand what is the business focused on? and understand how to build your operation in that context that's relevant to your business and what matters. That is what we mean by relevant, how close it is to the business success, which I think is another area that's a pain point for talent acquisition, employer branding, and recruitment marketing. How do you better connect your operation to the business value and speak that same language? And it's hard to do, it's not easy. Joel (22:29.763) Yeah. Is there a real world example with a client or maybe just something that you're aware of where they've taken data and really changed their strategy around branding? Gina Alioto (22:39.17) For sure. And it does. It does change the strategy and it impacts your strategy. So at Shaker Recruitment Marketing, we have an analytics function where we can bring together your various tools into one cohesive dashboard where you can actually have visibility onto how all of your tools are performing. And our analytics team works with all of the customers that we have to best translate what they're doing into the business value, the value that it's contributing to the business. And I think that armor equips the talent leaders with being able to have better conversations with the other stakeholders within your organization. And I think only through getting a handle on your analytics, wrapping your arm around analytics, only with that is how you can be bold, the main theme of the report, be bold, take action. I really think you can only do that, get a seat at the table, which we've been talking about for years now, right? In this industry, only with your wrapping your arms around the data and speaking the same language as your stakeholders and proving that business value. That's the only way I think you can be be bold. And it's just one piece too, because the data is only one piece, but it's a big one. Joel (23:38.658) seat at the table. Joel (24:07.547) I promised myself I wouldn't get political, but God damn it. It's everywhere. I'm curious your thoughts, you know, I don't want to say death of DEI, but let's say it's on life support. Uh, and we have headlines every week. We talk about it on our show about companies that are abandoning it, or at least the label DEI. We know that a lot of companies are still doing it, but they're sort of spinning it differently, rebranding it. I'm just curious what kind of conversations you guys are having with companies around. Dei changing the brand of it, still doing it undercover. Like what, what are companies talking about on the Dei front or are they abandoning it altogether? Gina Alioto (24:45.676) Yeah, I hear you. And by the way, it's almost impossible to not get political because it is political. so you're right, Joel. So DENI had before it was labeled or branded DENI, right? We all saw that the rise of those programs. I think many of the companies had the best intentions and truly wanted to drive change in their organizations. I do believe that. And that we all know, talk about the data. We all know that organizations that have more diverse workforces have better business success. There's plenty of data that points to that. So I think by eliminating DE &I programs entirely or the death of DE &I, like you said, if we're looking at it from a business value perspective and all of those... metrics that are out there that have proven that organizations that have a more diverse workforce are more successful, to me, that fact is a truth. That's a truth. That doesn't go away. So we can get rid of the label, sure. We don't have to call it D-E-N-I anymore, okay? I think some organizations, or what I've been hearing from talent leaders, they are asking, Are they still allowed to do DE &I with this executive order if it passes? Are they going to actually get in trouble for not following these rules, you know, and having these programs? So I think that's an interesting angle. But for me, it's a truth that the more diverse your organization is, the more successful it is. That can't go away, or it doesn't go away. And I think, unfortunately, if organizations do rid of their DE &I programs and then you have Joel (26:10.149) Hmm. Joel (26:16.677) Yeah. Gina Alioto (26:36.504) just a more like-minded, a workforce, homogenous, then you might not have business success and then we'll just repeat the cycle in 15 years from now. That would be really tragic. Joel (26:39.962) Homogenous. Chad (26:51.031) Yes, it'd be more than tragic, that's for sure. Especially if you're trying to pivot from one administration to the next administration. You already know, your company should already know what works. And if it doesn't, well, that's on you, right? So yeah, the thing that I definitely wanna end up with, because I think it's incredibly important, is have a sustainable innovation plan. What does that mean? Sustainable innovation plan. Gina Alioto (27:03.726) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Chad (27:16.941) Do is that is that like a CoE you have a center of excellence that you create? Do you have experts on staff? How do you how do you actually not just have a sustainable innovation plan? How do you execute on that plan? Gina Alioto (27:32.93) Yes, and for me, the key word here is sustainable because I think what we're feeling based on the responses to the vision report is this undertone of, okay, there's things that are rising right now that we need to act on, but what is the plan for the long term? Where's that sustainability? And innovation needs to be, and the urgency in the report, innovation needs to be ingrained in your strategy. So that needs to be at the forefront of every area of your business in order to be long lasting, in order to run for the long term. And I think this is another one of those complex topics that has many moving parts because there is some things in your organization and your setup that you can control and other things that you can't. So I think for anything, if you're in talent acquisition, for anything that's within your scope that you can impact. Asking the question, how are we innovating here? What are we doing to invest? So for example, what you said is center of excellence or what committees or programs are we running to make sure that we're staying ahead of what's trending in this area? Same for employer branding, same for recruitment marketing. And having a plan around that and not just saying, yes, we're going to be innovative. asking the question, but how? What does that look like for us? And what is that going to work within our setup? And again, it's not easy. We're talking about heavyweight topics. And the people that contributed to this report like Fountain Blue, FedEx, there's some really great pieces of Sony entertainment. There's some really great pieces of advice on how to do that from these talent leaders. Joel (29:19.405) Gina Alioto everybody, VP and head of marketing at Shaker recruitment. Gina, for those that want to connect with you or learn more about Shaker, maybe get their hands on this vision report. Where do you send them? Gina Alioto (29:31.426) Yes, so please visit shaker.com to learn more about Shaker, which is a recruitment marketing agency. And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, backslash Gina Alioto. Joel (29:43.739) Enough said, Chad, that's another one in the can. We out. Chad (29:47.117) We out.

Indeed just pulled the ol’ bait and switch. You used to waltz in, search for jobs, and ghost them like a bad Tinder date. But now? Nope. They’re making you log in like it’s some kind of exclusive VIP club—except the bottle service is AI-powered rejection emails and the bouncer is an algorithm that judges your resume harder than your in-laws. Why the sudden shift? Is Indeed tired of job seekers window shopping? Are they secretly morphing into LinkedIn’s evil twin? Or is this just the latest step in their long, illustrious history of slowly locking down the job market like an overzealous mall cop? Chad, Joel, and JT are breaking it all down—plus, the latest AI layoffs, deepfake drama, and Elon Musk toe sucking? WTAF guys? Buckle up, kids. The job market’s getting weirder, and we’re here for the chaos. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Joel (00:24.558) OHHHH Joel (00:29.678) Yeah, the future's uncertain and the end is always near. Hi kids, it's the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Morrison Cheeseman. Chad (00:41.574) I'm Chad, trying to get back to my roots. So watch. J.T. O'Donnell (00:45.041) I'm JT, is it Friday yet? O'Donnell. Chad (00:47.43) It's not, it's not. Joel (00:48.758) And on this episode, Indeed just rolled up in an unmarked van and a big lollipop. AI just rolled up with pink slips. And a little buyer sell. Bring on the unicorns, Chad. Chad (00:52.848) you Chad (01:00.933) Yes. Joel (01:03.304) it feels so good. It feels so good. Let's do this. Chad (01:10.214) my God, we talked about this. Listener, know, you, you, you, we've talked about this though. Deep fakes are, are happening already and listener, if, if you're listening to the audio version, we'll try to talk through this. Not too much. Cause yeah, not much, not too much. but yeah, go ahead and run that beautiful deep fake footage there, Cheeseman. It's only nine seconds. Joel (01:13.56) The first month is over, everybody. The first month is over. Joel (01:21.059) Mm-hmm. Joel (01:26.352) Will we try to vomit through it? Joel (01:33.61) Okay, okay, you want to set this up while we're looking at it here? Chad (01:36.836) Yeah. So says long live the real King and it has Donald Trump kissing two left feet of, of, Elon Musk. yeah. Sucking on the toes, sucking on the toes. I mean, we talked about deep fakes. we thought it would happen more on the election side of the house, but, this was actually, this video was put up, by in HUD, right? So people. J.T. O'Donnell (01:36.969) eyes. No. J.T. O'Donnell (01:44.861) Is it over? Just tell me it's over. It's over? Okay. Joel (01:45.742) Kissing is being charitable. French kissing at least. French sucking toes. Chad (02:06.106) people fired, you got a bunch of people who have pretty good, you know, skills. And next thing you know, they're hacking into systems and they're pushing deep fakes like this. So that was fucking crazy. Yeah, why not? Joel (02:16.958) MSNBC had a lot of fun with this one that I watched. But it doesn't end there, Chad. What else on the deep fake spectrum did we see this week? Chad (02:24.422) So this one, this one even has kind of like a recruiting twist. Go ahead and play this bad boy. We'll talk through it. This was real. Yeah. So this is a, this is a, an activist actually posting a sign that says goes from zero to 1939 in three seconds. And it shows Elon giving a Nazi salute on the top of a swastika. That's right. Um, so for me, yeah. Joel (02:28.569) Not a deep fake by the way, this one was real. Joel (02:44.974) The swastika. Joel (02:49.26) The Tesla SS, if you will. Chad (02:51.182) I was, dude, I was looking at this, I'm like, holy shit. First and foremost, Tesla stocks in the dumper, BYD is kicking their fucking ass all over the place. I mean, it just blows my mind that Chinese cars, BYD is beating the shit out of Tesla. And how's this hurting their recruiting? I mean, when you see something like this, do you want to work for a company that's known as a Nazi car company? Joel (02:56.429) Mm-hmm. Joel (03:15.534) Yeah, we don't. haven't. I've heard no anecdotes about recruiting and retention and what's what's happening at Tesla. We could certainly try to look under some rocks and see what's going on. But yeah, it's. Chad (03:20.176) Hoo! Chad (03:28.914) I posted it on LinkedIn for Tesla. We'll see if we get a response. doubt it. Very doubtful. Joel (03:32.928) Yeah, yeah. At what point does he care? It's just amazing. He doesn't care. Yeah, too much money. J.T. O'Donnell (03:34.546) don't think you're gonna hear back. I don't think he cares. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. He's busy. Chad (03:40.41) Now has too much money to care. This isn't about him though. This is about all the people that work for him. The stock goes down, they can't sell cars, they can't make more cars because they don't have the money, right? So therefore what happens? I mean, that's the thing that fucking sucks. Joel (03:46.797) Mm-hmm. Joel (03:54.966) And there's no board of, there's no board of, with any power. like no one can rein this cat in it's a, yeah. You just had to, you just had to do that, man. I just, you had to, Chad (03:58.382) No, they all suck his toes like Trump does. J.T. O'Donnell (04:06.664) He snuck it in. Chad (04:08.394) but as a, from the job seeker side of the house though, JT, mean, you have to be talking to, to, to job seekers around good companies go to bad companies to go to and hearing that kind of stuff. What's your thought? J.T. O'Donnell (04:21.534) Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating right now. So, you know, 2008 was when I launched my company for job seekers because of how bad the recession was then. This is way worse. This is just way worse. And you can tell by the number of people that are reaching out, their confusion about the market. They don't understand the unemployment rate. They don't understand what's happening. They don't know how to look for work. I mean, it's just a hot mess, you know, and then Chad (04:30.084) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Joel (04:35.031) Chad (04:41.776) Yeah. Chad (04:48.635) Wow. J.T. O'Donnell (04:49.82) you see things like this and it's incredible to me. just, I'm dumbfounded. think I told you all just the whole, the whole way they're treating the federal workers, which I know we'll talk about and you know, those are corporate tactics, right? So that a lot of people don't understand. Joel (05:06.264) Just wear a wedding dress in your LinkedIn profile picture. That apparently is very favorable, unbeknownst to me. People are into the wedding dress profile pic. Chad (05:13.222) You have an issue with that for some reason. think people don't care. I think you care more than everybody else does. That's the thing. It's like, don't give a fuck what they're wearing. Well, no, you're bringing this shit up more and more and more, so it's like, you obviously have an issue with it. Joel (05:21.196) I'm just curious. I'm a curious person, Chad. I got a new one. I got a new one for you. It's, it's, it's, it's not a, only my undergarments with that's just for me. That's just for me, JT. I got, got, I got a new one for you. It's not a poll, but I'm curious. non-alcoholic beverages are kind of a trend. The young kids like the non-alcoholic. Is it okay to bring a non-alcoholic beer to a kid's soccer game? J.T. O'Donnell (05:26.366) Are you wearing your wedding dress in your LinkedIn profile? remember seeing that, Joel. Chad (05:32.23) You do you. Okay. Joel (05:51.278) Can you just pull out a non-alcoholic beer and just sit back and drink? Chad (05:55.204) Like a soda, right? JT or no? J.T. O'Donnell (05:56.286) Yeah, why not? I think that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (06:00.048) Yeah, yeah, mean, why not? Joel (06:00.202) Okay, see my default would be like, that's gonna get some looks, that's gonna be, cause not everyone knows it's non-alcoholic. It just, it looks like a beer. Anyway, all right. Chad (06:12.838) This is this is where I can't believe because you're you're gen X and we give zero fucks Why do you care go go take take it take it? Do it? Again, why do you care? You're about dresses you care about the non-alcoholic just fucking do it Joel (06:19.502) It's not that I don't. I wonder if other people would. Like I don't. Yeah. I just, I'm a, I'm a purse. I'm a people person, Chad. By the way, speaking of the kids, I have a, I have a funny, I'm speaking of Gen X. I have a funny, a quick funny story. So my, my seven year old had his buddy, another seven year old come over, uh, spend the night. They did, you know what seven year olds do and my, my buddy's kid who came over. J.T. O'Donnell (06:28.882) when they show up when child protective services shows up at your doorstep claiming they saw you drunk at a soccer game and you're like, right. Chad (06:38.695) Yeah. Chad (06:42.084) Mm. Joel (06:49.102) went to the bathroom, got out, went to the sink to wash his hands and we have a bar soap. He picks up the bar soap. He shows it to me and says, how does the soap come out? I just, laughed and then I thought, damn, this, this kid has not seen a bar of soap before. So I emailed my buddy or messaged my buddy and I was like, has your kid ever seen a bar of soap or are there any bars of soap in your house? He's like, well actually no. As I do an inventory, that's all like pump or whatever, or like squeeze it out. So that's my Gen X moment of the day. was like, Holy shit. There's a whole generation of kids that don't know what a bar of soap is. yeah. Those videos are great. By the way, they give a rotary phone to a teenager. Like, what the fuck is this? Call mom, call mom. All right. Shout outs from our, from our good friends at Kiara. Kiara simple texting made easy for recruiting. All right, JT. Chad (07:24.442) Think of rotary phones. Nobody'd be able to use a rotary phone. mean, come on. J.T. O'Donnell (07:27.294) or the 28 chord. Chad (07:31.482) Yeah, like call mom. Yeah. All right, shout out. Come on. J.T. O'Donnell (07:32.862) Over. J.T. O'Donnell (07:46.879) Can I kick this one off? Yeah. I'm giving a shout out to Apple who claims as of this week, they are going to hire 20,000 people. They are going to build facilities here in the US to offset so that they don't have to pay the tariffs. so random places across the country are going to yeah, 20,000. 20,000. Let's hope it's true because given the numbers we're seeing right now in the layoff world, anything we can do to offset it would be a good thing. Chad (07:59.684) Mm. Joel (08:02.328) More back to the toe licking, more Trump licking. Chad (08:04.934) You Chad (08:14.456) Remember when Intel took all that money and shit didn't happen? Remember that? Yeah. mean, so until it actually happens, till they break ground, until they start the, the hiring fairs and all that other fun stuff, I call it bullshit. I, Tim Cook, I hope you do it my friend, but until then I call it bullshit. Joel (08:36.846) Alright Chad, what you got? Chad (08:38.692) Yeah. So my shout out goes to asshole of the week, Starbucks CEO, Brian Nichol. And, and this means something, this is pretty big because look at all the assholes in DC right now. He had to do something bad. What did he do? Okay. So this weekend, I had a horrendous experience at two, count them two different Starbucks locations. we're headed to our niece's competition this weekend. Julie wanted a cup of coffee. So I'm like, Hey, let's go ahead and jump into Starbucks. I wanna see how this new grassroots thing is going with them. First place I go, we park car, roll up into the door, and there is a sign that says, drive through only. Drive through's packed. I'm like, fuck this, we're going to the next one. So it's about 10 minutes away. We go to the next one, pull up, go back, same thing. This one says, drive through only in mobile orders, right? So I'm like, what? Is this the new experience? mean, if so, it's it fucking sucks. And then yesterday I see Starbucks fired 1100 corporate workers and closed hundreds of positions. Now this is happening while new CEO Brian Nicol has personally shoved over $100 million into his own damn pocket. Cutting heads, calling it efficiency when I visit a Starbucks location, more than one Starbucks location, and there aren't even enough people to open the damn dining rooms. That's not efficient. That's shitty leadership. So Starbucks CEO, Brian Nicol, you are the asshole of the week. Joel (10:09.646) Mm-hmm. Chad (10:17.582) you Joel (10:19.822) Chad, I will not have you muddy the name of a former Chipotle CEO. just, can't, I can't sign off on that. I'm sorry. All right. well all this feel good podcast talk has me a little down. And I think we could all say that the world needs a little uplifting story and what better place to find an uplifting story than, than, than fast food. Am I right? What better way to feel good than that? Now I'm sure I'm assuming both of you. Chad (10:26.278) Too bad. It's happened. Joel (10:48.748) have seen Sunday morning on CBS. It's a series of usually feel good stories or insightful stories. So I came across this one somewhere in Minnesota and it is the most Minnesotan story that you'll see today. I'm just going to let it roll. It's about three and a half minutes. If you don't want to listen, just fast forward. But a lot of people, think, will enjoy this. Have a look. Chad (10:50.896) Yes. J.T. O'Donnell (10:51.59) it. Chad (11:02.392) Okay, let's do it. Chad (11:10.512) They wanna feel good. Joel (11:19.982) Land of 10,000 stories. Chad (11:31.779) every day. Chad (12:10.502) It's a fucking pocket gopher! shit! Joel (12:12.012) No clue. Chad (12:40.806) Wait a minute, other family. Chad (12:48.121) Okay. Chad (13:03.206) Well that's awesome. Chad (13:27.868) wow. Joel (13:29.708) The crown's great, right? Chad (13:40.955) Old girl was wearing her headset. Joel (14:00.846) He's having the Happy Meal party at BK for his 90th. Chad (14:04.729) aw Joel (14:48.63) I promised myself I wouldn't cry. His last meal killed me. Nuggets, some nuggies, some fries and a shake. That was good. That was good. Chad (14:50.17) I'm not crying, you're crying. J.T. O'Donnell (14:51.737) Yeah, that's awesome. Chad (14:54.79) I'm not crying, you're crying. J.T. O'Donnell (14:55.836) Amazing. Chad (14:59.372) jeez. Chad (15:06.928) my God, okay. Yeah, thanks, Cheeseman. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (15:07.012) We gotta like regroup now. Thanks a lot, Joel. Joel (15:09.452) Yeah, thanks. I'm sorry. Let's let's let's Stephen bring us out of this. All right, let's move on from shout outs and talk about some free shit. Chad (15:15.59) Well, no, it's free stuff. You just got a bunch of free tiers from Joel Cheeseman. But if you want more, you go to ChadCheese.com slash free where you can prospectively get a new Chad and cheese t-shirt sponsored by Aaron App. Look at Joel's shirt, little slothy action. App. Burban barrel aged syrup from our boys up north at Keyura. Joel (15:24.238) You're welcome. Joel (15:46.878) It's a happy week in Canada, by the way, beating the US in hockey. Chad (15:47.056) Craft beer, yeah, I bet it is. Hey, not so happy for you and all the bourbon you have to give up. Craft beer from the Data Geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs. Whiskey from Van Hack. We had a great interview with Ilya and Professor Zeke from Wharton this week. And we'll get that out hopefully sometime soon. And if it's your birthday, it's time for a little rum with plum at chadcheese.com slash free. Joel (15:52.844) Yeah, I know. Joel (16:07.918) Mm-hmm. Chad (16:16.74) Win all Joel (16:22.318) That's right. Another trip around the sun for listeners, Kristen Urbond, Vishali Umriker, Evan White, your friend, Colin Parker, Adam Chambers. Everyone's always after his lucky charms. Christopher Cemento, John Turner, Martin Brewsterhoizen. Hope I said that right. Justice Abbey and Chad's boy, Boss Van De Hettard. I know I didn't say that right, but who cares? Boss, happy birthday to those listeners. Chad (16:32.441) Mmm. Love him. Chad (16:39.974) I doubt it. Chad (16:45.816) It had thread. J.T. O'Donnell (16:49.298) Happy birthday. Chad (16:51.642) Happy birthday. Joel (16:53.89) And Chad, you're going to DC tomorrow. Tell them why. Tell them why. Chad (16:56.454) I'm going to DC because our boy, Keith Sonderling is going through confirmation hearing. So we'll be there for that sitting behind him. Actually had to get on a list. Apparently they're not running background checks, so they wouldn't let me in. But then after that, we're going to be going to Vegas. So if you are coming to Vegas, come spend some time with the Chad and Cheese in Vegas, not to mention JT is going to be there. Moe's gonna be there, we're gonna have the whole team, and if you don't have tickets, what the hell are you waiting for? March 17th through the 19th, go to ChadCheese.com slash events and we will see you at Transform. Our honeymoon suite party, already full, so if you snooze, sorry, you lose. And then after that, we head up to Chicago for RL100 on March 25th at the Pendry. Um, that's recruiting leaders, 100. That's when you get a bunch of recruiting leaders, Chatham house rules in a room, lock the doors throughout the problems, throughout the solutions. These are my favorite kind of, uh, of events because we actually get to hear kind of like the non-filtered, no bullshit, uh, responses from recruiting leaders. Cause a lot of times they really have to have that filter on. RL 100 is one of my favorites. Joel (18:06.968) Mm-hmm. Joel (18:20.108) That's right, no teasing. No teasing at the RL. Chad (18:22.244) No teasing. Uh-uh. Joel (18:27.064) By the way, Chad, that Sonderling, Keith Sonderling thing is great. With all of the friends that we have in low places, it's nice to have some friends in high places. As we go to... Joel (18:41.538) All right, let's talk about the trend from the last couple of weeks. That's right. Layoffs. Okay. I'll try to make this quick. 800 Joanne stores, by the way, the only place I go from my fabrics and crafts, will close after 80 years as they failed to find a buyer affecting 19,000 employees. Ouch. they plan to sell all the assets and we'll continue accepting. Chad (18:44.966) Not good, not good. Chad (19:00.612) Yes. Joel (19:06.029) customer gift cards until February 28th, which means my Christmas stockings will no longer be filled with the joy and merriment that they usually are. More layoffs. I've heard some DC based Doge de based government layoffs. Let's make, all right. So we have 75K voluntarily out, took the package. A thousand Department of Veterans Affairs, 1300 people in Department of Energy, 700 in the CDC. Uh, speculating that this will exceed a hundred thousand layoffs when all of a sudden done CNBC called it quotes, perhaps the biggest job cut in American history and quote, uh, blue origin, the penis that flies when it, one of your faves, Chad, they're laying off a thousand and you've already mentioned the 1100 at Starbucks. By the way, side note, poly work, uh, who was the, uh, the LinkedIn killer for the kids, uh, died quietly and back in December, uh, no. Chad (19:41.734) Cheers. Chad (19:51.397) Mm-hmm. Wow. Chad (20:01.967) huh. DED. Joel (20:05.804) No clue how many people asked their jobs on that one. But Chad, any thoughts on the layoffs? It hurts. It hurts. Chad (20:12.678) Well, we're doing these things and not understanding how it's actually going to impact the market. You're obviously impacting people's lives, but I mean, there's a much larger macro effect. And then you have a guy like Elon Musk, who he's always worked startups. He doesn't understand macro. He gets billions of dollars to blow shit up, like, you know, $50 million per rocket that he blows up. So he doesn't have the understanding, accountability or responsibility or has never had the responsibility of something this large. And yet he's treating the U S government as a startup. And this is going to be, and I said it before and I hate to say it again, but fuck, this is not going to be a recession. This is prospectively going to push us into a depression. Chad (21:06.202) But JT, she's on the streets, she feels it. No. Joel (21:08.184) JT is not bringing us out of the gutter. I mean, JT is not happy. She's with the job seekers every day. J.T. O'Donnell (21:11.077) Absolutely not. J.T. O'Donnell (21:15.326) Yeah. And I mean, when I just say federal workers in my inbox every single day, blindsided, people don't understand how to look for work. We already know the system's broken. So it's a broken system that they're trying to, you know, make work for them. I just, I'm with you. I mean, I knew it was going to be bad. I can always tell by the sentiment and what we get in the inbox. Um, but I'll just give you an idea. We, we opened a free resource center because we knew we couldn't physically work with everybody at our company. Chad (21:24.518) Mm-mm. J.T. O'Donnell (21:45.759) We've had 12,000 people sign up in 10 weeks. 12,000 people. And the only way they find out about it is I mentioned it at an end of a video on social media. There's no promo, right? 12 that we're averaging hundreds a day, just finding it and signing up. And they all say the same thing. Like, I don't get it. Nobody's calling me. I can't get a job, you know? And that we know, we know what's coming. And I, I did a rant yesterday about the Jamie Diamond rant because, you know, people want to see that fail so bad. And it's like, Chad (21:48.633) Wow. Chad (21:53.712) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (22:15.794) But it won't. They're a big company. He can tell everyone to quit if they don't want to return to office because he understands there are so many white collar workers out there right now that will take the job. And you asked about when people go to work for Tesla. Guess what? There are going to be people that go to work for Tesla because they need the job. I mean, they'll get out of there when they can. But this is what they're forcing to happen is making people take the jobs they don't want to take to have a paycheck. You know, it's just it's crazy. Joel (22:30.894) other options. Chad (22:34.971) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (22:44.668) It's crazy. I wish I could pull this out of it, but I've just never seen anything like this in my 20 plus years of doing this. Joel (22:44.856) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:45.01) lower wages Yeah, lower wages and they'll treat them like shit while they got them too. Cause they know they can keep them. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (22:52.222) Yeah, absolutely. And they don't care. And that's business. We can rant all we want, but they have no emotion in the game. so for me, it's like, OK, I'm going to teach you how to not have any emotion in the game. Take that job offer. Get in there. And if we have to leave it three weeks later, you're leaving it three weeks later. And I have recruiters screaming at me. And I'm like, I don't care. I defend the job seeker. I'm going to tell them what to do for their lives, not for your job. Chad (22:58.331) Yeah. Mm-mm. Chad (23:10.347) Yup. Chad (23:16.048) Yeah. Amen. Amen. Joel (23:19.34) You had said before the show that it's worse than 2008, JT. And for those that do remember 2008, was pretty bad. think the question I have is, and like you mentioned, hey, when it gets better, the jobs will open up again. And I have real questions thanks to AI automation and other things as to if it will come back to the way that it was. We'll have to wait and see. J.T. O'Donnell (23:22.366) 100 % Chad (23:25.158) That was fucking horrible. Joel (23:43.478) You mentioned, called it the, the MBAs, they're coming out of really elite schools, not finding work. was a story in the wall street journal this week about just that story about how long, these Ivy league MBAs and Stanford and Duke, cetera, just there for whatever reason. Those people were back in the day. They couldn't step out of graduation. They had the degree still in their hand and they were given, you know, big time jobs. So. Chad (24:09.092) And now they're going into the military because that's the only way they can get a job and pay for their fucking debt. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (24:14.482) Yeah, but can we just do a public service announcement right now? Because the other big thing they do in down economic times is tell all those people if you can't find a job, go back to school. So now people are going to go rack up $60,000 in debt for an MBA that will never be of value. That's another one we need to be preaching so that they don't do it. But they do because they can't find a job, so it makes them feel productive. Let's load on the debt, right? It's crazy. Joel (24:17.122) Sure. Chad (24:22.714) Yeah, no. No. Chad (24:27.664) Yeah. Yeah. Chad (24:35.78) Yep. Nope. Yeah. Cause school is a business these days, kids. There you have it. J.T. O'Donnell (24:39.452) Mm-hmm. Joel (24:42.976) All right. Well, the good news is the unicorns are back. I don't know if you guys heard companies are getting a lot of money and they're hiring people because of the money. So call up these companies and see if they're hiring. But let's play a little buy or sell, which we haven't done in a while because no one's getting money. And then all of a sudden, like big checks are being written. So, you know how the game is played or maybe you don't cause it's been a while. We talked about three companies, startups that have recently gotten funding. Chad (24:48.57) Mm-hmm. Chad (24:53.786) Mm-hmm. Chad (25:03.227) Yes. J.T. O'Donnell (25:05.896) Big checks. Joel (25:12.014) I read a short summary of the company and then all of us will either buy or sell the company. Are you ready to play buy or sell starting with Mercor an AI recruiting startup founded by three, not one, not two, three 21 year old Teal fellows that says in Peter Teal. Uh, they've raised a hundred million dollars in a series B round, bringing the total to $133.6 million. and valuing the company. Any guesses? Any guesses at $2 billion? That's right. $2 billion. The platform which automates resume screening and candidate matching claims to remove bias from the hiring process. Chad, are you a buyer sell on Mercor? Chad (25:59.878) I'm impressed by these guys. They have big name backers and AI is the center point of their system. But much like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other very big names with tons of cash, they have no industry experience. They don't understand that trying to contextualize an answer from humans all over the world is incredibly hard. They have no moat. They have no data compared to more mature systems that are out there. And they've taken Too much money. That's my biggest issue. Too much money. I've researched and watched several videos of the founders. They are so bright, but at the end of the day, it's got to be a sell for me. Joel (26:46.434) That is a sale from Chad. look, let's look at the good news. they've grown head count a thousand percent in two years. the remote thing is still a thing. their valuation is basically the same as Upwork. So if I was trying to find a comparable work from anywhere in the world solution, Upwork came to mind. So there is some, some history to say like that's a fair valuation and not crazy. Peter Thiel is a pretty smart dude. He has a Chad (26:51.526) Let's get this. Joel (27:14.456) fairly good track record with young people. Zuckerberg in one case, if you've seen the social network, that worked out pretty well. By the way, I think with this new valuation, who's really winning this is Peter Thiel. Jack Dorsey is also an investor of Twitter and Block fame. So those guys probably have made out pretty well with the new valuation. They're working with OpenAI. They're leveraging a lot of sort of the need for AI jobs. Chad (27:26.426) Yeah. Yeah. Chad (27:42.074) Who isn't? Joel (27:42.818) Deep Seek probably wasn't great for that because we've realized we don't need as much money or maybe resources to do AI. So that's sort of the good news, I guess, that there is some track record there. However, I do not believe the trend of the business is this company's friends. It's a more polarized world. There are less remote jobs posted today than there was last year and the year before. Jamie diamond says you're going, you're coming back to the office and a lot of CEOs are agreeing with him. More companies are going to opt for homegrown workers because it's a very geopolitical volatile world. There's a lot of uncertainty around the world in places that used to be pretty, pretty stable. And I mean, come on man, 21 years old, like fuck off. don't care. You do not know anything. Okay. You do not know anything. This one is a cell. Chad (28:34.054) you Joel (28:41.004) And I will mirror Chad's comment about they've taken too much money. It's going to bite them in the ass in a big way. JT, are you with us? Are you going to throw us a curve ball? J.T. O'Donnell (28:41.886) Thank J.T. O'Donnell (28:47.528) Yeah. lot I think all your points are valid. I'm really deep into this. So as someone who's recently built an AI tool for the job seeker, the one thing that to me will determine this is the garbage in garbage out theory. I'm seeing all of these AI companies claim they can pull the right info out of the job seeker and they can't because they ask them the same old stupid questions about their past history and that's not the work they want to do. Chad (29:02.246) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (29:13.424) So you go do a 20 minute interview and you just basically say, is what I've done. And all it's going to show you is jobs you've already done that you don't want. And I know this because we have tested this with thousands of job seekers in my platform. And that is their number one complaint. And so until they come around to listening to the job seeker and building an interactive tool around them, their wants and needs and educate them on why this job would be a fit for where they want to go, it doesn't work. And to me, the ones they try this thing once and it doesn't work, they're not going back. They're just not going back, right? It's a once try and done. So I hope I would love to see the model they have and see if they're actually pulling in something decent out of the job seeker. But if they're not, then I don't see how this flies. But you know, hey, that's a lot of money. Some very well-known backers, they might just push that thing through to success, right? So for a lot of people, I'm sure it could be a buy for that front. without knowing if they've really cracked the code for the job seeker, it's a sell-off. me. Chad (30:12.942) Nobody is. Joel (30:13.726) All right. That's three cells on Mercore. Peter Thiel is not happy about that. All right, let's go to the next one. Perfect. An AI powered recruitment platform has raised $23 million totaling 36 million buckos to help recruit or source and hire candidates more efficiently. The platform aims to automate. There's that word again, time consuming tasks and improve the overall recruitment process. Chad. I'm sensing a theme out there about this whole automation co-pilot agentic thing. Are you a buyer cell on perfect or is this not so perfect? Chad (30:43.206) would say, yeah. Chad (30:48.786) I mean, the CEO goes from selling an AI parking platform, he actually sold it for 125 million, to the recruitment AI space. After hearing that, I was like, what the fuck? know, what the fuck are you doing here? But then I see the co-founders VP of Ops and People, Ronan Daniel, ran a company called Wojo, a sourcing and recruitment company. So I was like, okay, that kind of works. The hardest part is pretty much what you just said, Cheeseman, is that Joel (31:17.944) Mm-hmm. Chad (31:19.226) You've got to understand the go-to-market. There are going to be so many recruitment assistants, not just ones that are point solutions, but you're also talking about ones that are already baked in to systems. We have a bunch of chat bots who have turned into assistants that have a ton of data and they have a ton of connections within the market and partnerships within the market to actually bake themselves in already. I've already talked to them. This is going to be hard for any, any organization. trying to start this up. And since AI is commoditized, it's all about the data, they haven't been around long enough to actually gather the data. I would love to see again, one of these companies actually just knock it out of the park. I don't think it's going to be this one though. So it's got to be a cell. Joel (32:10.478) Okay, I love the salesmanship on this company. J.T. O'Donnell (32:11.26) I'll dive in on that. Ditto, ditto. I think the person, I'm just going to say that the companies that have the existing relationships win right now. It's just not fair to integrate in. So companies are not going to want to start with a whole new tech. Has anyone here ever done a new tech integration? That's a nightmare. So if you've already got an existing platform and they're saying we can just tuck it in, you know that's what people are going to do because they don't even understand the AI. So if they can get it for cheap with their existing provider, that's the way it's going to go. You're not going to go out on a limb and use something brand new. I'm with you. I think they have a huge battle ahead for me. It would be a sell. Joel (32:30.478) You Chad (32:31.479) It sucks. Joel (32:49.74) All right. That's a cell. She went, she jumped right in there. All right, kids, go to their site. love this. you go to the, like the main, the main text is you, you're perfect hire in seconds. You scroll down and you get recruit while you sleep. Like these guys are pitching, pitching the fastballs, for the sales, but, but in their defense, this is becoming a really crowded field. gotta like kind of stand out from the crowd. J.T. O'Donnell (33:10.48) Nails on the chalkboard. Joel (33:19.022) The headcount growth has been pretty organic. Chad, you mentioned the CEO has little to no experience in this space. Um, there isn't there an Israeli company touting, uh, headquarters in New York. That's not a big deal. Um, but times are kind of really weird in Israel right now. So I don't know if it's the best time to start up a company. However, Chad, you know, regardless of competition, regardless of lack of experience, you know, I love a good wave and I'd rather be a shitty. Chad (33:31.334) Hmm. Joel (33:49.13) surfer on a fantastic wave than I would a fantastic surfer on a shitty wave. And these guys are on the copilot agentic automation wave, push a button, easy button. got your person in seconds. People are going to buy this shit. And eventually they're going to check it off the, the, the buy list and someone's going to come along and pay these guys a couple hundred million dollars to, to, put them into their, into their system. So for me, I love a good wave Chad. J.T. O'Donnell (34:07.518) Thanks Joel (34:20.206) because perfect waves are great for boats and hoes and great for startups. All right, a little diversion there. get to our last, our last. Chad (34:28.102) Cheeseman's never served in his life. Go ahead. Joel (34:33.046) You don't know that Arizona has great surfing as does Cleveland, Ohio. All right. Let's go to Loke. So lock. So how are going to pronounce this? L O X O lock. So, okay. And Italian, Italian intelligent platform. they've secured 115 million growth investment, which promises to help them expand, market reach and accelerate the development of their AI powered recruiting products, including. Chad (34:42.182) Yeah. Lockzoo. Joel (34:59.01) That's right. They're coming for the ATSs and the recruiting CRMs. What could possibly go wrong? Chad, are you a buy or sell? Loxo. Chad (35:08.112) So right out of the gate, this is from the press release, quote, Loxo is a horizontally integrated suite of data driven and AI powered products designed to manage the full recruitment lifecycle through a single system of record software platform. End quote. What the actual fuck does that mean? I mean, it means, you know what it means? It means your PR and marketing has no fucking clue what the market needs right now. No TA leader out there is looking to make a wholesale systems change. No. The ones who we've talked to, who have implemented AI automation know what they're looking for. They're looking for big wins in small ways. Literally automating a piece of the process at a time, showing wins and then moving to that next piece. And I think Lockso has the tech and the people to make that happen. But much like we've seen with many other companies who've flamed out in this space, they just don't understand what the people are buying. No TA leader is standing up in a meeting and saying, We need a talent intelligence platform because they don't know what the fuck that means. Unfortunately, Lockso, you've got, I think you got the goods. The problem is you go to market, you're messaging and at the end, that all leads down to sales. It's got to be a sell for me. Chad (36:25.83) Sorry guys. Joel (36:29.912) JT, you want to take this one? J.T. O'Donnell (36:31.772) Yeah, I mean, I was saying this before we started. I was reading all three of these press releases about this and all that got through my head was, remember the peanuts when the grownups would talk on the phone? Wah wah, wah wah wah wah wah. That was what I was reading. And you just did that for me. What did that mean? And I just, cannot believe that. I they must really want to throw money at stuff right now. Like we need to put our money somewhere. Hey, these are great stories, but I'm... Chad (36:36.294) Mm. Chad (36:40.486) You Yes! Yes! J.T. O'Donnell (36:59.25) for the exact reasons that Chad mentioned. Same thing, it's a cell. Plain and simple. Joel (37:06.414) All right, that leaves it up to me. How the hell this company raised $113, $115 million is crazy. They are from Texas, so they can spin a story for sure. I'm afraid this one is a whole lot of hat and not much cattle, unfortunately, for me. Their big spin is we're well-reviewed by recruiters in the UK and the US. Chad (37:12.952) a bunch of PE people who have no fucking clue. J.T. O'Donnell (37:16.274) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Chad (37:20.102) Again. J.T. O'Donnell (37:22.11) Cool. Joel (37:35.864) great. I know some QR code creators that have great reviews, right? Like, I mean, I'm not sure that's, that's a slam dunk. they're taking on the ATS, the CRM, they want to be everything to everybody. You know what happens when you want to be everything to everybody? You're nothing to no one. You're nothing to no one. And that's exactly where these guys are headed. I'll make this one and this one pretty easy. it's a, it's a cell for me. And that is the end of our buyer cell. Chad (37:38.63) You J.T. O'Donnell (37:39.635) and reviews. Chad (37:52.451) Exactly. Chad (38:04.454) Ooh! This is first. How do you feel? Joel (38:05.41) JT's first, how do you feel? You feel good about it? All right, well, if you need a break, let's take one and we'll come back and talk about Indeed. J.T. O'Donnell (38:07.822) Good, absolutely. Bring it Chad (38:16.976) Who's this Indeed company you're talking about? What's this? Joel (38:18.872) Yeah, no, this, this perky startup, this, yeah. so this is from our friend Alexander Chakowsky, who found this and posted, indeed made a sneaky major change in January by removing the job search input fields. They removed the search field. Imagine going to Google and the search fields are gone. Okay. the shift forces users to log in or sign up. J.T. O'Donnell (38:20.638) Is this a startup? What is this? Chad (38:28.08) Love this guy. Joel (38:45.912) to search for jobs, a move likely designated to boost account creation, no shit, and gather user activity data. The goal, according to Alexander, is to fuel indeed strategy of dominating staffing by improving job matching through dynamic profiles, AI, and data-driven taxonomies, ultimately reducing hiring times and increasing engagement. Alex argues it's, an eyeball catcher, end quote, because it's a bold, unnoticed pivot. Chad (38:46.05) Mm-hmm. Yep. Chad (38:55.056) Mm-hmm. Joel (39:13.71) JT indeed is such a tease, but what is, are your thoughts on this move? J.T. O'Donnell (39:18.8) Yeah, I mean, this doesn't surprise me. actually shocked it didn't happen a lot sooner, right? I mean, the moment we started publicly hearing about them wanting to be a staffing firm, you knew that was going to shut off. But I'm going to throw a bold prediction out that I think is beyond this. I think indeed is watching LinkedIn. And I've said this for years. People do not understand the amount of mil. They made two billion off the job seeker premium model, right? They talk about making all their money off recruiting. They're making two billion office a product. Chad (39:29.006) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (39:47.751) that people think is going to help them get a job. And so if you're Indeed, why aren't you thinking about your own monetization model for the job seeker? And the only way that's going to start is when you start putting stuff behind a wall that you can then charge for. And so I don't think we're far off from a consumer product from Indeed and that that's how they're going to diversify their money. It's just they've got so many people in there. Nobody uses the job board anymore. Recruiting is down. The jobs aren't coming back. You're going to pivot to where there's cash and where there's cash right now is micro payments with consumers who need a job. Joel (40:13.806) you Joel (40:21.006) So you're saying it's a profit deal, All right. What do you think, Chad? J.T. O'Donnell (40:23.326) 100%. Chad (40:23.94) Hmm, that's a surprise. Indeed, I mean, they're trying to make the walls of its walled garden higher, and it's time for a history lesson. Joel (40:33.08) Mm-hmm. Chad (40:38.636) Okay, kids gather around the fire. It's story time. So in November of 2024, Indeed started out just like Google. That's right, kids. They were a search engine, a job search engine, which called was called vertical search back then. Indeed called themselves Google for jobs. They pulled in jobs from wherever they can find it. Job boards, Craigslist, corporate career sites. I was the VP of direct employers where we scraped thousands of corporate career sites for jobs daily. And we were the prime source, we partnered with Indeed, we were the prime source for Indeed's corporate jobs back then, which led all of the job seekers back to the applicant tracking system to apply. And then one day, Indeed fucked us. Anyways, Indeed promised sites like Monster and Career Builder, who were the biggest job boards in the world, free traffic, if they allowed Indeed their jobs, right? Until one day, they fucked Career Builder and Monster, that's right. indeed shut them off and made them pay for traffic. Then since that worked so well, they did it with the staffing firms and they fucked them too. So during that timeframe, indeed a job search engine announced that they would be allowing job seekers to then start adding resumes into the system. But it was one of those nice easy it's your choice kind of things, right? Because in many cases, job seekers just wanted to go straight to the job boards or the applicant tracking systems that they knew, right? So the designs of a resume database was planted. Then one day, Indeed launched 2Pane, not the wrapper. 2Pane was a new model that changed the search engine into a traditional job board. Yes, they were stepping backwards. So instead of clicking a link to a job and transporting to the destination site, Indeed popped up a version of their own job giving option for easy apply if you had your resume in the system. Right there, there was no reason to for the job board or the corporate career site, you could do everything on Indeed. How fun, right? So then they made registration mandatory, but they still allowed you to do job search kind of tease you in there. Now, as a job search engine, and then a job board. Joel (42:57.112) That was nice. Chad (43:02.018) Indeed always exposed its job search, no matter the hoops they made you jump through. Well, until now, after Monster Career Builder, all the job boards, all the staffing companies, and all the hiring companies getting fucked by Indeed, they're going after the job seeker. Just like JT said, there's going to be a fucking kids and it's going to be for the job seeker now. J.T. O'Donnell (43:31.14) It's gonna be pay to play. Joel (43:32.907) They're running out of partners. I don't know how many more one night stands they can have with all of these users. All right, I'm gonna go back in time too, Chad. J.T. O'Donnell (43:35.805) Right. Chad (43:39.11) I don't get it. Chad (43:44.752) Ooh, double. Joel (43:45.582) And you mentioned direct employers. Uh, I'm going to bring up the name jobster, uh, and the, founder of the CEO, had a guy named Jason Goldberg and in 2006, I believe I attended the direct employers annual meeting in the basement of, uh, treasure Island, which was, which was nice, which was nice. Yeah. Upscale baby. No, no, no budget is too big for direct employers back in the day. And he came up. Chad (44:03.194) Yeah. Upscale, baby. Upscale. Chad (44:10.34) you Joel (44:13.494) And he shocked everyone. You probably remember this. showed Monsters homepage. It was, it was full of pop-ups, full of banner ads. He called it NASCAR at the time. And then he, and then he went into a job search and what it was like in Monster. People don't remember this. When you clicked on job search on Monster, the first thing you got was a, was a, was a page in between that asked you for, I think financial information or like, yeah, it was, and it literally, Chad (44:18.0) Mm-hmm. Chad (44:39.684) Interstitial, yeah. There's an ad. Yeah. Joel (44:43.182) literally asked for a social security number. This was pushing search job and you had to do this and then you could click submit and then go to the actual jobs. Monster was making I think a million dollars a month on this like landing page, this squeeze page between the searches. Chad (45:00.582) Mm-hmm. Joel (45:02.328) People that kind of knew and by the way, he highlighted indeed at the time, which literally was just Google back in the day. was two search boxes and go. There was no ads, no login. You searched, you saw the job postings, you clicked and went to that site just like a search engine should be. so it's kind of ironic that we find ourselves here 20 years later. and indeed is now in the spot of being a, basically a hurdle between the Chad (45:07.462) Mm. yeah. Yep. Chad (45:30.456) huh. Joel (45:31.224) homepage and actually looking for jobs. we use the jump the shark analogy pretty freely that moment when you look at something and go, it's over. Indeed, as we know it is kind of over the job thing clicking like they've got to go into staffing as Alexander believes, or they've got to go into like a new LinkedIn like JT is speculating. Chad (45:41.915) Yeah. Joel (45:55.842) But they've clearly looked at their business and said, we got to pivot somewhere else or recruit holdings. said, has said, Nope, you're not this anymore. You're what we want you to be. it's an opportunity for other job sites to kind of take the mantle of ease of use and unencumbered and no walled gardens. We'll see if someone steps up. But yeah, historically this is a bad look and it's going to end very badly. for indeed, I couldn't believe I went to the site. I've been there so long. It's like, there's no search box. Really? Really? Chad (46:11.201) Mm-hmm. Chad (46:23.024) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were Google. Joel (46:29.634) They were easy to use. The site was fast. yeah, all those things. Chad (46:33.102) They are, they are the antithesis of everything they started out as. Joel (46:39.992) Go to the webpage and say to yourself, Chad (46:42.79) You Joel (46:44.802) All right, let's take a quick break and we'll go back to Elon. God, that's a bad, bad circle. Joel (46:53.71) All right, guys, Elon Musk, tasked by President Trump with reducing the federal workforce, sent an email to government employees requesting a justification of their work. The responses will be analyzed by an AI system to determine job necessity. This directive has faced backlash from unions, workers, and some agencies with concerns raised about data privacy and the legality of the process. In short, People submitted their email. It was read by AI and AI is going to tell the powers that be whether you could still have a job or not. JT, I'm guessing you have a few thoughts on this as a spokesperson for job seekers. J.T. O'Donnell (47:35.027) Did you hear the deep breaths while you were talking? Probably. Yeah, I just, again, I just, the job seeker, or, know, the employee is begging to keep their job, is sitting there agonizing over to what to put in this email to save their job. And AI is going to just read it and decide if those keywords were relevant, right? Did they say things that were relevant? We talk all the time with job seekers about teaching them how to unlock their UVA, their unique value add. I didn't think about it. You have a set of features, but we don't buy the features, we buy the benefits. It's no different. You're a business of one, selling your services. In this moment, you're asking a bunch of workers, do you understand how you save or make the federal government enough money to justify the cost or any business that he runs to justify the cost? And if you don't, and you can't articulate that and quantify that, you're out. And that's exactly what's happening here. But you're talking about people that doesn't understand how to do that. And so they're praying that what they wrote is right. They're probably talking about what a great person I am, what a super team player, and this is what I got done, and is how, and gone. And so it's gonna be a rude awakening for people that again, to understand that. Chad (48:38.074) They don't J.T. O'Donnell (48:42.462) It is what you deliver today. Can you show me how you save or make enough money? 130, 140 % of your salary, because that's what it costs them. If you can monetize that for me and talk to me, OK, I'll keep you. And even then. Joel (48:52.674) How many people are asking generative AI, write me an email that won't get me fired by an AI? J.T. O'Donnell (48:56.958) Probably, right, yeah. Here's what I do, quantify it so that I don't get fired. That's a great point. It's probably what you would put through Chad GPT. But that's what's gonna happen, right? You know, people don't understand quantification. Chad (48:57.254) you Joel (49:05.486) That's what I would do. Joel (49:11.96) Chad, your thoughts. Chad (49:13.19) Much like the firings, mean, Doge is gonna fuck this up. They're gonna cock this up, right? Like it's just gonna happen. Managing people is hard and we don't provide enough training to develop our employees into managers and leaders as it is. And as companies cut the middle layer of their management, which is pretty much what's happening here, it's gonna be harder to manage due to the human's inability to scale. That's, I mean, that's hard. So this is dumb. It's dumb because if, if it doesn't hit the biggest problem in corporate America, which we have today, which is we're not managing to outcomes. And if you start throwing a bunch of jibber jabber bullshit into, into AI that has nothing to do with outcomes, because that's not what we're managing to in the first place. And what the fuck does it matter? I mean, it all comes back down to the objectives that you, you met. the tasks that you achieved, so on and so forth. We're not managing to that today. So what the hell is AI gonna help us with? Again, it's garbage in, as JT had said, and garbage out. Joel (50:24.312) Remember when getting fired on a zoom call was, was outrageous. hold my beer says AI we're just going to fire people without any interaction whatsoever. with human beings. I mean, talk about, don't need CEOs anymore because AI is going to fire and hire everybody. this is horrible. This is bad for humans. this, this plays into the culture of ghosting. Chad (50:28.366) Yeah. Joel (50:51.062) not talking to each other, being stuck in a screen all day. Like we're just going to outsource firing people, based on what AI says. Like I hope that if companies do this and more companies will, this is going to happen. I mean, people will take daily activities and like have a, have an ongoing daily like summary of like fireball, not fireball, like productive, non-productive. And then this will, this will be a thing that companies do. I hope to God, humans stay in the, in the loop somehow. Chad (50:52.485) Mm-hmm. Joel (51:19.896) Cause if we get into a place where like we just push a button and people are hired and fired and off boarded and on boarded without anybody actually looking and talking and interacting with each other. Like we're, we're, we're done with human, human existence and we're with the sex robots and the, the, the chat, the chat bot, boyfriends. And, this is, this is the end of our good feel feel good, podcast, but the good news is kids, we're, we're going to end it with. That's right. Another dad joke, another dad joke. And I got my first positive comment. So I know the dad jokes are landing all of them very, very well. All right. All right, you two. What do you call a lesbian on fire? What do you call a lesbian on fire? Chad (51:50.138) dad joke. Chad (51:55.59) At least one of you out there are fucking masochists. Chad (52:08.614) I Joel (52:10.274) Keep in mind kids, we all grew up with like dead baby jokes, so nothing is offensive to us. What do you call a lesbian on fire? Chad (52:13.807) You Chad (52:17.356) I don't know. Get it over with, Jesus. J.T. O'Donnell (52:18.194) I don't know. Yeah, tell me now. Chad (52:25.978) BBQ. Okay, BBQ. Joel (52:29.91) We out. Chad (52:31.526) So bad. So bad. So bad. I am not. J.T. O'Donnell (52:32.305) We out. That's that. Joel (52:36.27) You know you're going to retell it. J.T. O'Donnell (52:38.111) Nah.

On this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast , we sit down with Donald Knight , the People & Culture guru from Warner Bros. Discovery—because apparently, Hollywood still  needs humans. We dive into: 🎭 Why AI won’t  be writing the next Oscar-winning screenplay (sorry, ChatGPT). 💰 The job market’s 2022 déjà vu —big money, big moves, and even bigger headaches. 🤖 Why CHROs are dragging their feet on AI, and why that’s a terrible  idea .🎨 How recruiters should be grabbing their AI paintbrushes (no, not literally, Bob). And of course, there’s plenty of snark, whiskey references, and moments that’ll make your HR director sweat. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right wherever 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. [music] Joel: Who are you and why are you here? Donald Knight: Who am I? First of all Chad and Cheese fan. Chad: Yes. Donald Knight: Donald Knight. I serve as group senior Vice President for People & Culture for the Warner Brothers discovery. And more importantly, I'm Daylen and Avery's dad. So that's a little bit about me. Chad: Very nice, very nice. Joel: Let's go back to this Chad and Cheese fan. Chad: There we go. [laughter] Joel: I wanna hear more about that. Donald Knight: Or more. Chad: Question is, do you mandate that everybody listen to it? That's the big question. Donald Knight: It's funny you say that. So, Ariana Moon hit the stage earlier today with Tim Sackett, she used to be on my team when I was at Greenhouse. And yes, I believe that anybody inside of our profession has a responsibility to do what I call inbound and outbound leadership. So the inbound is what leaders are sending to you right? So whether it's Bersin or Chad and Cheese or anything that people might be reading, CHRO daily. The outbound though, I think we have a responsibility to go figure out who are the folks that are bringing the right conversations and elevating the right subjects in our profession for us to learn from. And in my opinion, y'all are doing that, and so that's why I'm a fan. And so, yes, it's not mandated, but it's strongly encouraged voluntarily. Chad: Other than Chad and Cheese, what nugget of advice would you give to your peers that they should really focus on in this upcoming year? Donald Knight: The advice that I would give to my peers for the upcoming year is, I believe it's gonna be 2000... My prediction, my hypothesis is that the talent market is gonna be 2022 all over again. What I've seen this year, myself included, is this has been the year where we've seen executives making their changes, there's been a lot of scarcity on going public, companies have not been able to perform, thus the hiring has been lower. So you've seen companies start poaching executives, those executives are gonna have to build out their teams. And so I believe next year, that's when you're gonna see greater movement from the VP all the way down to the senior manager level. So it's gonna be some topsy-turvyness if you will, similar to 2002, when you could go literally across the street and get $40,000 more for the exact same job and the exact same job offer at company B. Donald Knight: So, the things I need our teams to focus on, and this is what I just told our team in LA, I just left a lot in LA. The thing that I've been telling them they gotta focus on is really two things. The first one is go clean up all of our terrible processes, if you are not deploying automation right now, if there's a process that you feel like has been painful for your team, you gotta go fix that now because next year it's gonna affect way more people. The second thing I think that they have to figure out is what is our value proposition? Everybody's talking about employer branding. I'm like, okay, that's cool, but like your benefits are no longer part of the value proposition. Most companies have the same set of benefits, you gotta be able to dial in on culturally and from a growth and development perspective, what can you offer me at Chad and Cheese that I can't go get at anywhere else? Chad: Did you hear. Joel: We have no benefits that anyone wants. Chad: He didn't leave the office, he left a lot. [laughter] Joel: He left a lot. I wanna dig into this 2022 prediction. Money was free, tech companies were loading up on people just so other people couldn't get them. Are you envisioning that or are you envisioning more of the exec poaching, getting leads of the company or all of the above? Donald Knight: I mean, if we're talking specifically tech, there are tons of people right now that are at companies where they're waiting for a liquidity event right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah... Donald Knight: That's part one. Part two, there's tons of companies that raise money with bad evaluations. So they raised money prior to this dip. Give you a good example, I believe that Instacart, CEO, she's a phenomenal human being and she just took on CEO within the last few years. But Instacart, before they went public they thought they were a $30 billion valuation, only to find out from the market you're a $7 billion valuation. And so... They're not the only ones though, there's other companies out there where people are still checking in every day, 'cause they're waiting on a liquidation event or liquidity event, and then the other half of the tech community in many cases, they have a bad valuation. So what does that tell me? That means talent is ready to move, they're just waiting for the right reason. One good reason is, oh, my buddy Chad, who had the greatest growth and development on two, three years ago, just became the CHRO at a new company. Chad says, Hey Don, I want you to come work for me. Chad: Yeah man, movement. Donald Knight: That's movement. And so I think you're gonna see a lot of that. I've already seen the executives playing the musical chairs this year. Again myself included, you're gonna see those folks next year. Joel: I'm still waiting for that Peloton stock to bounce back. Donald Knight: Start building their team. [laughter] Donald Knight: Look, that's a good example though, right? Chad: It is. Donald Knight: Peloton founder starts a company after his 40s, has a $4 billion valuation. Right now he's worth I think 300 million, which is still again rich people problems, but that's not nearly the same $4 billion valuation as before. Chad: Yeah, no, no. Donald Knight: And so I think you'll also see greater consolidation in the market, particularly in our field. Joel: Yeah, we're seeing that now, yeah, we're seeing that now. Chad: Yeah, easily, yeah, easily. So in 2024, thus far what's been the biggest surprise for you that's happened in our space? Donald Knight: Too many CHROs are laggards when it comes to artificial intelligence. Chad: Yeah, explain. Donald Knight: They're allowing their fear and anxiety to be the reason why they won't go test and figure out practical applications for the tools. And while they're doing that, their competitors who are more excited and eager to test the tools are creating such a wide divide between them that I don't know if they're ever gonna be able to catch up. Like there's companies, right... If you're still trying to figure out how to build an AI policy you're behind, you're behind. [laughter] Chad: In the velocity of tech right now, if you're behind you're fucked. Joel: To AI real quick, you're presenting tomorrow on this topic... Donald Knight: Yes. Joel: What are you gonna be discussing? Donald Knight: So tomorrow, I believe, we're at RecFest shout outs to Jamie and the team. So we're here at RecFest. I believe that it's incumbent on talent acquisition leaders and recruiters and sourcers to grab their own paintbrush. And to me that tool meaning AI the A and the I inside of paint, I believe that tool can allow them to figure out how can they drive their own value as an individual, even if the company is choosing to lag behind. And so the idea tomorrow is to try to figure out, okay, at the company that you're at today, and the way that you contribute to bringing amazing talent to your organization, what are you trying to paint? What are you painting on your canvas? Because if you don't use AI tools today, or your company doesn't have an AI policy or they've chosen to be a laggard and not deploy AI inside of the organization, effectively they're harming your career. And if you wanna be marketable moving forward, you need to go grab your own tool, and figure out how you deploy that for your own growth and development, regardless of what Jersey you have on. Chad: Well, much like we've seen with most of the best sourcers that are out there, they learned boolean string, they learned how to dig into Google, they started to find. I mean, really they were curious, intellectually curious about how they could use this new tool, and they are the best in the business, and it wasn't because the company told them to go do it. So I appreciate that 100%. So looking forward 2025, what's your main focus for 2025? You already talked about ripping stuff apart and all that, but what is... Joel: He's getting a paint brush is what he's saying. Chad: What's the main focus for Donald? Donald Knight: My main focus right now for 2025 is, I work for one of the greatest storytelling companies of all time. Chad: You do, yes. Donald Knight: At Warner Brothers Discovery. And I believe in 2025 from a people and culture perspective, there's so many new talented people that are entering the storytelling business, and I want them in a Warner Brothers discovery jersey. I want the greatest writers and the greatest producers to seek out our production houses to be able to bring their dreams to reality. And so, in order to do that though, that means I gotta go find them. When the people are saying, like, I was laughing with Brian Fink, who's a great TA professional earlier today, and we were talking about all of us remember when you sourced that one talent where you were like, they're gonna go on to do great things, I wanna go find those people. And the only way I'm gonna find that is I gotta make sure that we equip our team with not only the tools, but the time needed to invest in those tools to figure out how we can go uncover who those talented human beings are so we can build relationships with them. Joel: So I'm curious about that. The Rider strike recently, Hollywood, AI fears. I'm curious, what I'm hearing from you is like, there's never been a better time to be a creative, but on the other hand, why do we need writers when we have ChatGPT? Why do we need artists when we have DALL-E or other tools like that? So make a case for the future of humans versus all these tools that are coming out to replace them. Chad: Or mid journey. Donald Knight: I don't even think that's a hard case to make. AI did not think of itself. I believe if you look at large language models today, which most people are using it from a prompt engineering, right? Chad: Yes. Donald Knight: So you enter a prompt and it feeds you something back. All it is doing is looking at mega parcels of data and regurgitating a new piece together, puzzle for your consideration. But the greatest creatives and the greatest stories have always came from humans. I believe the opposite which is, this is the time that you want to get closer to human creatives because the stories that we can now envision of the future, now you have tools that can help you somewhat test out better plots or better scripts, or better storylines, or how do I write a story, a romance story that appeals to both boomers who are living longer and have tons of money, but also Gen Z who is openly willing to talk about their feelings in the workplace, how do I write that movie? And I don't think I'm gonna go get that from a tool that's just regurgitating pieces of information that's already out there. Donald Knight: So I believe if we deploy these tools the right way, the human experience should become a better experience, whether you're a recruiter, a sourcer or even a storyteller, it should become better because now you can actually submerge yourself more into the creative side of the house and a lot of like the mundane routine things. Yeah, go deploy some automation for those things. Joel: I think you just wrote next year's Oscar award winner, baby Boomer meets Gen Z. [laughter] Joel: Get off my yard and tell me how you feel or something. Donald Knight: I mean, look we're trending, we're already trending. We got Beetlejuice, which just did 145 million last week in the box office. Joel: Not creative though, it's digging up an old movie from the '80s right? Donald Knight: Have you gone to see it? Chad: I have not. Joel: Alien same thing, you could... Donald Knight: You have to go see. It's a reimagination, it's pretty cool. And then we got some other great movies on the way, Penguin, we got the Joker, she's gonna be really good, so I'm excited. I think it's a great time to be a creative. And I believe on this planet, we have more creatives who have not been able to tap into their creative genius because they've been bogged down in careers that have not allowed them to flex that creativity. My hope is that tools like AI will encourage them to embrace their full creative selves. Chad: Well even without AI, a great storyteller, a great creative Donald Knight. Donald, thank you so much. Donald Knight: Thank you for having me, it was amazing. Joel: Thanks for hanging out man. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Brace yourself for a wild ride on the latest episode of Chad and Cheese’s Firing Squad. This week, Hannah Peet—co-founder of Candidly, the white-label ATS is grilled live from a London phone booth. Between mix-ups over kid names (Albie, not Aldi—sorry, Aldi fans!) and snarky digs at outdated HR tech, Hannah lays out her master plan to turn hiring into a kindergarten art project. Get ready for AI matchmaking antics, absurd marketing rants, and a firing squad session that’s equal parts roast and rally cry. Will Hannah emerge with big applause or end up as HR tech collateral? Tune in to find out! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:22.709) All right, let's do this. We are the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is Firing Squad. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house as we welcome Hannah Peet, co-founder at Candidly to the show, live from London. Hannah, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad (00:35.938) HANAPEET! Hannah Peet (00:42.598) Thank you. I am in a phone booth. In London. Chad (00:44.354) Live from a phone booth. Joel (00:49.439) Built for recording, built for recording. Well, Hannah, for our listeners that don't know you, give us a quick Twitter bio and then we'll get to the down and dirty of the business. Hannah Peet (01:01.67) Sure. So as well as having a startup candidly, I am also mum to two small children, Ida and Albie. Gosh, I nearly forgot their names then. Ida and Albie. So they're five and two. So yeah, my life is pretty full with a tech startup and two small kids. Albie. Albie. It does sound like Albie when I say that. No. Chad (01:20.504) say Aldi? Joel (01:23.729) Aldi. Albie. Chad (01:24.91) Ah, okay, I was gonna say... Hannah Peet (01:30.286) This isn't a plug for Aldi, his name is Albie. Sorry Albie. Joel (01:30.517) I'll be. I'll be sure. Chad (01:33.934) It's gonna say, was your kid sponsored? Joel (01:38.195) Hey. Hannah Peet (01:38.802) I haven't gotten that far yet. No. Chad (01:41.469) That could be next, that's fine. That's fine, that's fine. Joel (01:45.349) We have listeners getting tattoos, so anything's possible. anything's possible. Well, Hannah, thanks for joining us today. Hannah let us know in the green room that she's listened to about every episode of Firing Squad, so she knows what's happening. for our listeners that don't know Chad, read them the rules of the show. Chad (01:48.788) yeah, I gotta get that taken care of. Hannah Peet (01:50.246) No worries. Chad (02:01.794) Well, Hannah, welcome to Firing Squad. This is how it's gonna go. At the sound of the bell, there it is, you'll have two minutes to pitch candidly. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q &A. Be sure to be concise or you're hear them crickets, means tighten up your game. At the end of Q &A, you're going to receive big applause. Much like Adele, you won't be just rolling in the deep, you'll be rolling in the cash. Golf clap. It ain't deep seek, but you have a chance. got a chance. And last but not least, it's the firing squad. Tie an anchor to it because you should throw it in the deep and try again. That's firing squad. Are you ready? Joel (02:47.765) By the way, if you have Adele on your bingo card, make sure that you stamp that one. I think that's the first Adele reference of the show. All right, Hannah, us about Candidly in three, two. Hannah Peet (02:47.962) Indeed. Chad (02:55.138) Do my best, do my best. Hannah Peet (03:01.487) Hi everyone, I'm proud to introduce candidly the white label best in class applicant tracking system. HR providers are under intense pressure to deliver seamless all-in-one solutions which cover the entire lifecycle from hiring all the way through to off-boarding. SMB customers want consolidation. They don't want clunky integrations or to pay for costly point solutions. Yet the absence of a good ATS is the missing piece of the jigsaw for most HR tech providers, and is the number one reason that they're losing customers. Building a good ATS would take them years and cost millions with ongoing investment required to stay competitive. That's why my co-founder Alex and I built Candidly. Our fully customizable API driven solution integrates directly into our HR tech partner platforms. enabling them to go to market with a powerful ATS under their own brand, offering users a seamless experience. This means that we have some very happy partners because they're winning more customers, they're reducing churn and they're more profitable by generating an increase in revenue per existing customer. Our go-to-market is a game changer. By partnering with HR tech providers, we're unlocking instant access to thousands of SMB customers with our expensive sales and marketing efforts. The lights just got off. This means that we're scaling rapidly and in just 12 months, we've secured five major partners reaching 20,000 SMB customers with a strong pipeline path, strong pipeline forecast for 25. With a 10 % attachment rate forecast by our partners for year one, less than 3 % predicted churn, our revenue is both scalable and sticky. Many partners are growing their SMB base by 30 % annually, compounding our sales over time. Our partners pay a monthly service fee and benefit from a revenue share model. We've also identified enormous opportunities to scale a white label, ATS technology into other HR tech categories. At Candidly, a world-class product combined with a unique go-to-market approach are designed to win. We're not just playing in this market, we're leading it and we're reshaping how HR and providers deliver value and building the future of HR technology. Joel (05:20.149) enough. I might have let you go over a little bit, but I enjoy the English accent so much that I let you go on. And she also, if you're listening and not watching this one, the lights went out on her for some reason. So I gave her little bit of a curve on her pitch there. Hannah Peet (05:22.981) Thank you. And the light! Chad (05:24.302) I love the shuffling of papers. Hannah Peet (05:38.085) you Chad (05:38.242) And all those that think that you are just a cold-hearted bastard, Cheeseman, right there, you're not. Look at that, you're not. Hannah Peet (05:41.573) Joel (05:42.599) I'm a, I'm a, I'm a gentle tender loving guy that happens to slap a few startups here and there around. all right, Hannah, you betcha, you betcha. So if you've listened to firing squad, know, the first question, why candidly, why not like white label ats.com? it's we are candidly.com, which reminds me of the, we are candidly. got all my sisters with me. so why the name? Why candidly tell me about it. Hannah Peet (05:49.775) Thank you, Joe. Much appreciated. I couldn't predict that one. Hannah Peet (06:11.693) Okay, Alex and I spent days trying to come up with a name, you know, in the early, early, early days of candidly. And in all honesty, after kind of thinking of every name, deciding it wasn't the right name, looking at the domain existed for it. I literally woke up one morning with the name candidly in my brain, message Alex straight away. And she was like, yeah, that's the name because candidly obviously nods towards candid. Candid means truthful and straightforward. which is really, you know, embodies us, our values, our technology. we now own, we are candidly.com. We don't have candidly.com before that comes up because I know it will. We have messaged the student debt company that owns candidly.com, but I don't think it's for sale, but we did love the name. So it was a hard one. Joel (07:00.425) Yeah, they're, they're, they're CEOs in Davos. I don't think you have a chance in hell of getting, getting that one, getting that one candidly.com. so you need a lot of money to buy domains, from the looks of it. There's no record of on crunch base of any funding. are you guys totally bootstrapped? Are you looking to raise some money at some point? You guys have been around since 2020, according to the research that I did, which five years, you know, going on five years is plenty of time to raise some money. What's going on with that? Hannah Peet (07:04.685) Yeah, I don't think so either. Hannah Peet (07:27.301) Yeah, I'm not sure what Crunchbase is doing, but we have definitely raised money in total. We've raised about 1.4 million to date. Candidly was launched 2020. We spent a lot of time really in the early days. It was kind of bootstrap trying talking to customers, trying to understand exactly where the pain points existed, but where are the pain points that people are paid prepared to pay to solve. So that was our kind of, I guess, goal number one for Candidly. Joel (07:55.093) Okay, I want to reach back a little bit in time. You spent some time at Dice, a company that we really enjoy destroying. I won't ask you about your time at Dice, but I will ask you what about your time at Dice may be influenced candidly and how you guys do business differently or the same. Chad (07:59.406) Do Hannah Peet (08:12.133) So I was part of the team that scaled the IT job board. We sold two dice. I didn't work for dice for very long because then I was headhunted to actually go up, up and found a business called Energy JobLine. So yeah, I'd say what it did teach me and show me is that by scaling a business innovatively and creatively, you can sell a business for a lot of money. And that was really my kind of first taste of entrepreneurial life. Chad (08:42.126) First thing I would say is definitely go and see if you can get some of the rights for the sister sledge We are we are family because that that does work. She's been good. Good job on that one. Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about the White labeling because you hit it over and over and over and over so talk talk about white labeling Why and how that's actually affected business, especially from a go-to-market stamp? Hannah Peet (08:49.753) Thank Joel (08:52.019) like that. Thanks. Hannah Peet (08:59.704) Yeah. Hannah Peet (09:06.393) Yeah, sure. It's absolutely critical for us. So I guess if we start with a pain point for the SMBs, because ultimately that's where Candidly started, was with the SMB customer. And when we went out to talk to many SMB customers, we were in the middle of lockdown. And even though some SMBs were using applicant tracking systems, they were still using spreadsheets outside of that. The overwhelming feeling that came from these customers is that they didn't know how to hire. So Alex and I kind of looked at this and broke down all the pain points existed within these SMBs and decided what candidly should feel like, what it should do and the problems that it should solve. As we were talking to customers, guess a growing trend was emerging and that was that customers even, you know, four or five years ago. were looking at consolidation. Back then, they were looking at recruitment tech stack consolidation. So they didn't want to have to buy an ATS and then plug in interview automated scheduling and then technical testing and all the other parts that combine together to build a recruitment tech stack. As we were building candidly and going to market, what we also then realized is that these SMB customers were saying, we don't just want... Chad (10:13.27) Mm-hmm. Hannah Peet (10:22.095) to have consolidation within our recruitment tech stack. We want consolidation in our entire HR tech stack. Obviously the market conditions were changing as well and people, SMB customers were not hiring as much. So we had a choice to make at that point, which was do we sell to SMBs directly, which Chad, as you know, is incredibly expensive and is a big no-no, or actually is there a far greater opportunity here, which was to then plug into the HR tech ecosystem as a white label ATS. Chad (10:51.874) Mm-hmm. Hannah Peet (10:51.897) which then gives huge benefit to the HRIS provider or the HR tech provider, as well as kind of fulfilling our dream of bringing our brilliant technology to the SMB customer without the expense of the sales and marketing efforts that go alongside that. Chad (11:07.758) Okay, so talk a little bit about your HR partners. You said you've got these HR partners who you're going to white label into. Who are they currently? Hannah Peet (11:14.967) Yeah, I can't say that we're under NDA but that's why that's why they're not plastered. Chad (11:17.934) Duh! Duh! Okay, so from a portfolio standpoint, from an aggregate portfolio standpoint, who are they getting you into, customer-wise? Hannah Peet (11:29.455) So the majority of our partner customers have between 3,000 to 15,000 SMB customers that they're selling to. And so they have Candidly integrated as their ATS. You would never ever know, looking at their system, that they're using Candidly. It completely looks and feels like their system. So we spend a lot of time on the UI to make sure that it absolutely is a seamless experience for a user. Typically, the applicant tracking system part of it would be bundled into the cost of buying the HRAS. So essentially, they're highly motivated to sell our technology. Because as I said in the pitch, the number one reason that they lose customers is because they don't have applicant tracking systems. And also, think a really important word is having a good applicant tracking system, which I could talk at length about. Chad (12:23.512) That's, yeah, those usually don't go together, to be quite frank. You said going to market, but it sounded like you said glowing to market, which I think you could stick, you should stay with, to be quite frank. Yeah, glowing to market. We're not going to market, we're glowing to market, that's right. So you talked about the point solution side of the house. Obviously with tech moving so fast, how do you, do you really focus on the ATS aspect, maybe ATS CRM, Hannah Peet (12:33.613) Ooh, okay. Joel (12:33.919) Trademark. Hannah Peet (12:36.825) That's the nerves. Hannah Peet (12:43.567) Yeah. Chad (12:53.492) Aspect and then start to partner with other point solutions to be able to provide more dynamic Partnerships or are you are you guys literally focused on being those point solutions and then what point solutions are they? Hannah Peet (13:08.847) So Candidly integrates. So Candidly, guess, is a, well, we're a white label solution that integrates into an HRAS that, for example, offers HRAS payroll, potentially learning and development, but doesn't have applicant tracking. So we can partner with other point solutions, but the focus for us right now is HRAS and HRM, as well as exploring other interesting categories for us, like job boards, for example. Chad (13:28.942) Mm. Chad (13:37.646) Okay, so take a look at like old, we call them legacy applicant tracking systems where they're literally just forms that you fill out. And then the new age applicant tracking systems, which are more of the paradoxes, the fountains, you the ones that are more chat-based, the ones that are more mobile-based. Which one are you? Do you have chat functionality or are you currently just in a form mode? Hannah Peet (13:45.582) Yeah. Hannah Peet (14:00.973) Okay, so no, we're not in full mode. have AI features pulled through the platform. So for example, we have AI generated job descriptions, we're automating our interview scheduling, we use AI for candidate screening and ranking. And we have a huge Chad (14:18.594) Any chat in there? What's the interaction to be able to do that? Is that email? Is that chat? How are you doing that? Hannah Peet (14:23.449) So it's email and Slack. We don't have a chat bot. If that's something that gets requested from our SMB customers, and that's something we would obviously look at, it isn't something that's come up yet that people want, but it's not to say something that we're not exploring. Chad (14:31.534) Mm-hmm. Joel (14:41.045) Who's your competition? I have to say, I've been in this business a long time and when I saw white label ATS, thought, huh, okay, all right. mean, white label job boards have been around forever. Who's your competition? Who you, you know, who keeps you up at night if anybody? Hannah Peet (14:43.269) Good. Hannah Peet (14:58.271) And so the competition for us would be a HRS or an HRM that would decide to either build their own potentially, or to acquire a standalone point ATS solution. So there's not a kind of traditional competition. But I think when you look at the HRS and the HRMs from the conversations we've had, they don't want to invest the time and money into building their own ATS and the distraction that that would then be to their kind of core business. So yeah, as a Chad (15:10.99) Mm-hmm. Hannah Peet (15:27.927) as a business, you know, we're keen to obviously quickly expand in this area. Joel (15:34.837) Help me with the messaging a little bit. Again, I've been doing this for a while and like white label ATS I get, can process that pretty easily. But if I go to your site, which I am right now, you're an all in one recruitment platform, virtual recruitment platform, hiring without the hassle. mean, you look like a rippling competitor, Chad mentioned paradox. Hannah Peet (15:51.363) Yeah. Joel (16:00.863) But then when I go to LinkedIn, it's we're a white label ATS. So help me, help me with why there's a, there's a messaging on your website that's different from what you're saying now and from what, your LinkedIn, like, aren't those more cohesive? Hannah Peet (16:11.875) Yeah, yeah, you're totally right. The new website, it was about to go live that talks purely about white labeling. So candidly at the moment, what you can see on the website would be us selling as it was as a kind of point solution, which is obviously where we completely moved away from. We've got a new partner integration that's about to go live. So that's kind of taken up all of our dev efforts. I was on their case to say, guys, I'm going on this podcast. I know that's going to come up. Can we get this pushed out? But it was her. Joel (16:28.414) Okay. Hannah Peet (16:41.093) Absolutely no. So the new one will be. Joel (16:42.197) Okay, then I won't grill you on your trademark date of 2022 on the current site. I'll assume that 2025 will be on the new site. Joel (16:58.941) Of those competitors, talk about differentiator because Chad and I talk a lot about the ATS business as being a race to the bottom. How are you going to not be a commodity that anyone can just download open source on the web? And that's Chad's church bells. That is not like some, some omen of death to your startup. Don't worry. It's God telling, it's God telling Chad to go to church. Yeah. Hannah Peet (17:21.157) Bye. Chad (17:24.762) That was a message coming down from up on high is what it was. Hannah Peet (17:31.269) Okay, so I'm trying to think the right way to kind of go about answering this question. I think candidly integrating fully into our HR partner and other categories of HR technology means that as a solution, customers are embedded and entrenched into using our ATS technology. And what we then get to do is completely invest our time and resource because we don't have to worry about sales and marketing into keeping candidly really at the forefront of ATS technology. I think the problem for SMBs right now is that they don't get access to great quality ATS because of the price point. But because of the way we've structured the business, we're able to really build out candidly in a way that customers really want to be using it. And SMBs want simplicity, but they want innovation and they want intelligence to make their lives easier. So I don't know if that answers the question, but... Joel (18:26.965) Well, it leads me to the question of SMBs, a lot of them at least, certainly here in the States, maybe it's different. You have a little bit different environment in the UK, but for a lot of small companies, just having Indeed and all their applicants go through Indeed and tracking them there or LinkedIn is enough. And it just comes with using Indeed. You're built differently in that you're partnering with systems they're already using so they wouldn't... duplicate on my link indeed and also doing it here. I'm just going to do it here. I just want to make sure that I'm clear on that on that process. Hannah Peet (19:00.741) Okay, so our customers, so the SMB customer would be using candidly as an ATS, but within the brand of our HRAS partner. So it's hard to say this without saying a name, but I'm really trying hard not to lens it. Joel (19:12.052) Okay. So they have to be using your partner in order to use you. Hannah Peet (19:20.087) Absolutely. Some some of our HRAS partners are looking at how they potentially might sell Candley as a standalone solution. But that's kind of to the side. I think really, Joel (19:21.182) Okay. Joel (19:29.745) Okay. And how does a typical relationship work? Are you an API first business where they just plug in your APIs? Are you like a sub domain where they go to a different site? Is there a revenue incentive for them to choose you over someone else? Like talk about that partnership because it sounds really integral to your success and how many partnerships do you have? Hannah Peet (19:47.695) Yeah. Hannah Peet (19:51.683) Yeah. So we're deeply integrated into the partner. It would be a sub domain that would be created, but then, APIs to essentially enable a user to seamlessly come through. So a user has to be approved and pre-authenticated to come through from an HR system into the candidly part of the system. And then there's obviously APIs where we're pulling and pushing data between the two platforms. So we would create a white label integration in under six weeks. And in that time, all the APIs and the integrations would be set up. All the UI would be configured to make sure it looks completely on point. And just going back to your point about Indeed, what we would also be doing is looking at a partner's users to understand which job boards they want to be using to make sure those integrations are in place from Candidly to push their jobs, for example, onto Indeed. And then those applications would be pulled back through into Candidly as our white label partner. Chad (20:50.936) So let's go ahead and jump into some of the, some of the technology itself. Let's, let's talk a little bit about matching. How does your system match or score candidates into roles? Hannah Peet (21:01.079) Okay, so we're using AI to match the job description to the candidate. So we give a score out of five, essentially, to the recruiter so they can see how good a score is. We don't then make a hiring decision based on the AI. But what it does do is give a guide. When we were speaking to SMBs very early on, they were in the middle of lockdown and they were spending up to 75 % of their time on screening CVs and interviewing scheduling, which is insane when you think that in the middle of lockdown, they should be focusing on employee wellbeing. So what we're trying to do is through candidly is to make it simple and guiding and to give them the how as to essentially how to hire. So as an SMB, you'd be able to look at all your candidates, hundreds of applications that are coming in from your job boards and be able to look at who we're saying are the top performing candidates. Chad (21:59.896) So AI says nothing there. What does the AI actually use to be able to discern whether Chad or Joel actually meet the requirement? Hannah Peet (22:09.401) So it's reading the CV and it's looking at the job description to essentially form a match. Chad (22:14.592) Okay, okay. See how easy that was? That was so easy. So interview scheduling, same kind of thing. So interview scheduling, technical tests, how are those performed? Are you sending emails to candidates saying next step in the process, click this link, et cetera, et cetera. How are you currently doing that with your providers? Hannah Peet (22:18.309) you Joel (22:26.549) you Hannah Peet (22:35.705) Yeah, sure. It's like Calendly, not candidly, Calendly, but on steroids. So essentially, what it will do is it works across different time zones, and it will look at multiple people's diaries, and it will pull out available time slots. The user can say, obviously, if there's days that they don't work, or times that they want to block out, for example, that they don't want interviews to happen in, and then those times will be sent to the candidate. The candidate will then select Chad (22:40.494) Ha ha! Hannah Peet (23:02.667) which times they want to select or for their interview. And then it will just automatically arrange the interview and schedule it into everybody's diary. And that's all through the system. it's trying to basically take all of the pain points that we identified out of the issue, out of the hiring process. Technical testing is obviously another one. We've pulled through thousands of technical tests within the platform. As a user, you would then select which technical test and the system would automatically send it to the candidate if they're at that stage of the interview process. They would then come. It's auto automated. Yeah, all automated. So the user then completes the technical test. It's even recorded when they're completing the technical test to make sure they're not going off to search on chat GBT for the answers. Chad (23:37.25) Is that manual or is that automatically attached to the job description? Okay. Okay. Hannah Peet (23:53.613) And that technical test score is then pulled back through intercandidly. So as a recruiter, I can look at my system and I can see either the AI match score to the job description, or if they've moved through the different stages of the interview process, you can then see the interview score that they may have had, the technical test score that they've received. And we also have video Q &A pulled through into the platform as well. Chad (23:53.666) Mm-hmm. Chad (24:17.614) Okay, so you've got soft skills. That's kind of hard to match. Hard skills, which we just talked about to some extent. Areas of concern. Talk a little bit about that and then suitability because those are usually kind of like gray areas for companies. How do they tweak that to be able to meet their culture versus what your platform says are areas of concern and suitability? Hannah Peet (24:47.589) OK, so we're not showing areas of concern. From our perspective, it would be the interviewer that would then interview the candidate and then through the digital scorecards, write their notes in terms of cultural match, et cetera. So we haven't gone into that area just yet. From our perspective and talking to SMBs, and now we obviously have feedback from lots of customers using the platform. Chad (24:58.499) Gotcha. Chad (25:04.642) Mm-hmm. Chad (25:12.334) Mm-hmm. Hannah Peet (25:12.389) I think one thing that is coming through is an SMB customer wants simplicity in terms of hiring and the hiring process. So there's lots of really cool features that Alex and I would love to put into the platform. But the key thing for us is, is it something that a customer is actually going to want and is going to pay for? So that's the kind of, I guess, the starting point for us when it comes to our product roadmap. Joel (25:37.107) Any idea what the total addressable market is for your product? Hannah Peet (25:41.709) I work this out as 13 billion. So what I'm looking at is the the size of the SME market that are using HRIS customers. So globally. Chad (25:53.132) Is this only Europe or is this also US? Okay. Joel (25:57.119) Globally. Globally. Talk about threats. Maybe it's simple minded. Don't you forget about me, Chad. It's simple minded to think that why doesn't smart recruiters just create a product that, smart recruiters for HRIS, and it's a white label thing that any ATS does. We know that their businesses are challenged in the race to the bottom. Talk about threats because that seems like an obvious one to me. Chad (26:00.088) She was glowing to market, by the way. Hannah Peet (26:02.637) I am glowing. Chad (26:07.054) You Hannah Peet (26:25.221) Sure. So we have obviously considered whether existing ATSs would want to white label their own product. I think if they were to do that, they would be cannibalizing their own direct customers. And HRAS, we will sell an ATS solution at a much lower price point than a standalone solution. So I think it would be pretty hard for smart recruiters with the thousands of customers they have. Joel (26:46.773) Mm-hmm. Hannah Peet (26:52.197) they would have to say to their HRAS partners, hey, you can do this, but don't sell to all of these customers because we're already selling to them at a higher point. Also with our HRAS, remember they're doing a revenue share model. So our HRAS partners are super motivated to obviously be selling candidly as their own solution. I... Joel (27:11.829) Do you any plans to have a marketplace like them where people can build on your platform or no? Hannah Peet (27:17.921) Not yet, but it could certainly be one to consider. Not yet. I will consider anything if it's going to increase the value of candidly. Joel (27:18.739) Not yet, not yet, not yet, okay. Joel (27:24.991) We'll consider it. Talk about marketing. A new website, I assume, means new plans and strategies around how do we get this thing out there? I can certainly look at maybe SEO is a weakness. There's no, when I search white label ATS, you're not there, you're not advertising, but you don't have a website yet. So talk about what's coming from the marketing standpoint as you launch this new phase. Hannah Peet (27:33.733) Yeah. Hannah Peet (27:45.007) sure. Yeah, so so we definitely need to make sure the market is more aware of the solution. I think because we're pretty much creating a new category within HR technology, we need to educate people first on why they should be white labeling candidly. So We are increasing obviously our LinkedIn presence because that is where a lot of people go after we've initially reached out to them. The new website, as you said, and making sure that it is SEO. anyone puts in a white label ATS, that we should come up as being kind number one for that. But I think more than that, people don't think of white label ATS because it's never occurred to them because it's not a dumb thing in the market. Joel (28:17.333) Mm-hmm. Joel (28:25.781) Mm-hmm. Hannah Peet (28:25.827) So what we're trying to do is work with HR tech influencers who have strong connections in the market to introduce us to the CPOs and the CEOs of these kind of HR asses and leveraging our networks and those of our investors to make introductions. Because as soon as we have conversations with HR as partners. they completely get what we're doing and we have a very high conversion rate. So it's just making sure we get that out as quickly as we can to make more people aware of what we're doing. Joel (28:49.717) Mm-hmm. Joel (29:00.053) Okay. Chad, I don't know about you, but this sounds really fucking expensive. Like really pricey. This, whether it's in pounds, euros or dollars, this sounds really, really, really pricey. Hannah, talk about the pricing structure. How much am I going to pay? Is the, is the fee on the, the, customer, the employer, is it on like who's, who's paying and how are you getting yours? Hannah Peet (29:20.847) sure. Chad (29:20.876) And can I pay in Florence? That's the question, because I only have Florence. Hannah Peet (29:24.229) Let me check that one with Alex. So I defer the difficult questions to her. So our partner will pay a monthly licensing fee, which starts at around two and a half thousand pounds, depending on obviously the size of the HRS partner. And then we have a revenue share model with that partner. And that all depends on how many customers they can essentially Chad (29:29.262) Ha Hannah Peet (29:52.741) take candidly out to the SMB partner will SMB customer sorry will pay anywhere between kind of 1800 pounds for the year up to 5000 plus for the year obviously depending on size of customer. have to Joel (30:06.975) So as a partner, I could just pay you and give it to my customers, but the incentive is you pay, but then also charge your customers and market it as yours. So then that's more money for both of us. Okay. Hannah Peet (30:20.165) Exactly, exactly that. Because if you look at the HR IS market that has their own kind of, I guess, inbuilt ATS, they charge their customers as an add on for that. The challenge is, I have talked to one well known HR AS who actively say not to buy their own ATS and to go and buy a point solution. So it's incredibly expensive. So what we're trying to do is give the benefit of Joel (30:41.277) Right. Yeah. Chad (30:41.304) Yup. Hannah Peet (30:46.745) brilliant ATS, the quality of standalone ATS technology to the HRAS so that the SMB partner can have the SMB customer can have the beauty of that kind of consolidated solution. So they get best in breed at each point of the process, which is the key to this. Joel (30:58.601) OK. Joel (31:03.665) All right. All right. Hannah, take a deep breath. You are done with the Q &A portion of the firing squad. However, the toughest part may still be in front of you. It's time to face the firing squad. Are you ready? Hannah Peet (31:07.989) Hannah Peet (31:17.405) I think so. I am. Bring it on. Bring it on. Joel (31:18.965) I think so. Where's the confidence Hannah? Where's the confidence? All right Chad. All right Chad you're up. Chad (31:26.446) Sorry, I had to finish the last of my do-ville. Okay, so I have three words for you, Messaging, messaging, messaging. This is not just about the individuals using the system from the standpoint of the employer, but it's also about the candidates, right? And that's where we're moving. So focus on messaging. Love the Slack piece. Email's great. Not enough? Not enough? 2025. Looked on YouTube. Joel (31:29.407) Doodle. Chad (31:54.446) It's been two years since you put any content out there. Come on, it looks sweet, it looks great. Get out there, do some more marketing. 1.4 million in five years, not much. And if you don't need a lot, that's great. If you're bootstrapped, that's great. If your burn rate is low, that makes me happy. You've listened to this show before so you know. SMB and SME sucks, kids. Everybody knows it. spending money hand over fist for SME markets just to be able to get those little bitty crumbs that are out there. Now a lot of those crumbs is a pretty big pie, although it's very hard to get to unless you're white label and partner. Find pain points for those bigger platforms, create fluid and white labeled integrations. Then you have smaller sales forces and salespeople are a headache. I know, cause I was one. Joel (32:38.985) partnerships. Chad (32:51.628) Less marketing people, less spend, right? Less people asking you to open up the wallet, less spend. Now, HCMs, they buy applicant tracking systems all the time and they fuck them up. And we're about in the cycle right now, right? Where they're looking to prospectively buy new ones to be able to acquire. And I think that you are in a great position because so many of these platforms have bought applicant tracking systems that are now known as what we hate to call, but like to call, legacy. You can be the new kid on the block, you can be the white label kid on the block, you can be the one that actually stealths in for that acquisition with low amount of funding, which means higher amount of return for you. I love this, I can't wait to become an investor. This is a big applause from Chad. Joel (33:29.311) sexy. Joel (33:42.161) my God. my God. He's already putting his money where his mouth is. Good God. Euro, euro chat is out of control. Everybody hero too much sunshine and beer. go to, go to church, go to church, man. Go to church. All right. All right, Hannah. How do I follow that up? Look, I, I love the idea too. I love when we come on this show and their ideas that are sort of in plain sight that we never think about. Chad (33:49.035) You Hannah Peet (33:56.453) Keep drinking the beer Chad, this is awesome! Chad (33:56.942) It's beautiful. Joel (34:12.429) white label job board. Sure. you know, my long time ago when I was in the job board space, we built little career sites for people. put them on sub domains and they clicked a little jobs link and they went to, to search for jobs. it was a great idea then it's still a great idea. Now I just, there's just not a lot of businesses that are doing this white label ATS thing. Like I had to go to Google and see who, who does this. People like Jonathan Duarte at go hire, you know, that's been probably that's Chad (34:38.413) Yeah. Joel (34:39.433) That's probably been a landing page since 2003 on his website. That's still there. He doesn't even offer it as a service probably. so I love the idea. mean, my only, my only issue is just. You pivoted there somewhere. you made a decision like this is where we're going. And it looks like you're just starting to get on that track. You need to put up a website that mess that messaging what you guys do. Chad (34:44.44) Yes. Hannah Peet (35:02.703) Yeah. Joel (35:05.17) You need to market this in a way you don't spend a lot of money, like get the SEO, right? Get some pay per click stuff, do a little stuff on your LinkedIn. Like I don't think you need a lot of partners. One partner could make this business and you were, you were pretty, you're pretty coy about who this partner was. maybe they're huge and they're going to like launch you into the stratosphere. But well, five, like you don't need a lot and don't put all your eggs in one basket. But I mean, look, SMB suck, but they're doing the selling for you. Hannah Peet (35:17.464) Absolutely. Hannah Peet (35:21.631) Bye, five partners. Chad (35:23.928) Five partners, kids, five. Woo. Joel (35:33.397) All you are is a little radio button that says, yes, I want an ATS and your partner makes money. You make money and everybody's, you know, fat and and giggly. So I love the idea. just, would like to have seen you farther ahead with the website and the marketing and the messaging and maybe a sales staff. I don't know if you need to raise more money, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to ding you on that one. I think that with a few good connections and you could, you could have this thing off, right? So. I would be with Chad on the big applause if you were like maybe six months down the road from now and had some things to show for it from a marketing and messaging standpoint. for me, it's a golf clap, but I'm totally leaning towards the big applause in six months when, when you, when you come back and let us know that the, new website is up. So, so a little split there. Hannah Peet (36:21.413) Thank you. Chad (36:21.902) We'll see you at Wreckfest. Joel (36:24.085) But leaning on, just can't do it without a website. know, the trademark of 2022 on the footer just does it in for me. Uh, correct that. And, maybe we'll, maybe we'll talk. so congratulations, one big applause and apparently a new investor, uh, in Chad and, you've survived, you've survived the squad. Hannah Peet (36:31.333) you Hannah Peet (36:39.255) I've literally, Chad, let's chat after this. I'm honest, I can't tell you how happy I am. My son is going to be delighted I didn't get the firing spot, so thank you. Aldi, Aldi. Chad (36:48.046) Is that Aldi? Aldi is gonna be? Joel (36:51.793) I'll be sure. Hannah Peet (36:53.869) I'm never going to live this down, but anyway. Joel (36:55.673) I'll be sure the unibrow sensation of the 1980s. All right, Hannah, for those that want to know more, don't, don't go to candidly.com. Don't do that. We, we are candidly. I got all my sisters with me. Chad, that's another firing squad in the books. Hannah, thanks for joining us. Congratulations. We out. Hannah Peet (37:06.007) No, we are Candidly. I should sing that. Chad (37:10.744) sisters and me. Hannah Peet (37:16.569) Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Chad (37:19.874) We have to vote.

ALERT: 🚨This episode is NOT SAFE for corporate Kool-Aid drinkers! 🚨 Jamie Dimon is leaking (not like that… we think). Klarna is lying (again), and Sasquatch is now moonlighting as an economic forecaster. What’s next? LinkedIn turning into a Tinder knockoff? Oh, wait… that already happened. Chad, Cheese, and Emi break down the latest insanity in the world of work, leadership tantrums, and AI-driven BS. Buckle up, buttercup. It’s gonna be a ride. 🎢🔥 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:31.822) Once upon a time we were falling in love, now we're only falling apart. Hi kids, it's the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel, the Dictator Cheeseman. Chad (00:41.7) This is Chad, is that a banana in your tailpipe or are you just happy to see me sew wash? Emi B (00:46.596) This is Emmy. I'm definitely happy to see you, Berydugo. Joel (00:52.482) And on this episode, Jamie Diamond leaks, Klarna lies, and Sasquatch scares the bejesus out of everyone on this podcast. Let's do this. Chad (01:06.522) Okay, I get home the best thing. You see, Emmy is, she's in Europe and that kind of makes me sad because I'm not in Europe, but when I come home, I get gifts. I get gifts. So this was waiting for me. This is from our friend Tracy Parsons from Flockety. Joel, I think you got one too. Los Angeles Distillery. Apparently this has won some awards. So I can't wait. High tide, straight right. Thank you. Joel (01:06.624) Emmy's in the house! Emi B (01:08.098) Whoop whoop whoop! Guess who's back! Joel (01:13.218) The tide is... Joel (01:18.253) huh. Emi B (01:19.257) Ooh! Chad (01:34.628) Tracy Parsons and our friends over at Flock. Joel (01:36.014) Nothing like some LA whiskey, because nobody does it like them. Chad (01:40.299) I'll do it. It looks good. Looks good. Joel (01:43.694) So I have a question for you guys. I have question. Would you accept a LinkedIn connection request from someone whose profile picture was featuring them in a wedding dress? Emi B (01:43.8) very jealous. Chad (01:53.88) Yeah, why not? Joel (01:54.114) Yeah? OK. All right. Emi B (01:56.974) Why? Chad (01:57.23) You do you. You do you. Why? Why? Would you not? Would you not or what? I said, would you not or what? Joel (02:00.652) And it's not a wedding planner, by the way. It's not a... Do what? Emi B (02:01.282) Yeah. Joel (02:06.956) I was just, it's the first I've been on LinkedIn a long time. I've seen some crazy shit. We're going to talk about more crazy LinkedIn shit later, but I've just never seen a wedding dress. was, a little unnerving, but I I'm in the wrong because most people seem to think that it's okay. Chad (02:09.56) Never seen it? Okay. Emi B (02:18.147) It's shown in- Emi B (02:22.34) nothing wrong with that, know, showing a little bit of their personal life. Or did you think she was hitting on you? that what you're suggesting? Joel, will you marry me? Joel (02:28.278) No, was not, it was, she did not create, she did not create a profile. Although I do agree there are profiles that are clearly like, I'm sexy, but I don't, I'm not real. Connect with me and I'll try to sell you life insurance. Like I do agree that that exists, but I don't think that this particular request was, was that. okay. This is why we have this show. So I can grow, I can become a better person. Chad (02:36.54) yes. Emi B (02:37.922) Mm-hmm. Emi B (02:47.396) So you know that exists because you clicked on it and go, yeah, God, you're sexy. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely fine. Yeah. Absolutely. It's 2025. Yeah. Joel (02:54.996) and see the world from different perspectives. So thank you. Wedding dress is okay. Chad (02:57.24) You do you. That's mine. Chad (03:04.932) Yes. So. Joel (03:07.148) And did you guys see a, so, so Netflix little podcast talk here real quick. net Netflix is apparently looking to get into podcasting. according to this is fine. This is business insider. According to four people, this is the story. According to four people, they must be really influential people, with the, with, knowledge of the matter spoke to the company. they say that Netflix is quote, exploring potential video deals. Chad (03:11.479) Okay, yeah. Emi B (03:17.304) Mmm. Emi B (03:22.436) you Joel (03:33.882) with podcasters. know that since we've moved to YouTube, Chad, and learning that YouTube actually is now the number one spot for US listeners to find podcasts. To me, it makes perfect sense that Netflix would get into this. I assume others like maybe Facebook, maybe Reddit, maybe others will start becoming a podcast platform. Chad (03:41.306) Mm-hmm. Chad (03:54.114) Yeah, so they're looking at doing it differently, which I, and I think it's right. They're, this isn't about doing like weekly podcasts like we do. It's about premium content. And I'd like to say once again, the Chad and Cheese podcast are ahead of the game. Last year, last year we launched season one of the AI sessions, which is literally, was literally the pilot season. Had four interviews, cut it up into 11 snackable kind of, kind of episodes. It was a fucking rocket ship, which is Joel (04:03.192) Mm-hmm. Joel (04:09.112) So premium. Joel (04:23.011) Mm-hmm. Chad (04:23.724) why we're in the final throes of editing season two right now, and we've already recorded season three. So yes, we will continue to push out our Friday podcasts on YouTube, right? So you've got that kind of like that normal podcast flow on YouTube, but then you take a look at the premium stuff, like we did with the AI sessions, that's more catered to a Netflix-like audience. So needless to say, we've been, I've been pitching AI sessions Joel (04:34.648) Mm-hmm. Joel (04:38.946) Mm-hmm. Chad (04:53.146) types of content to other companies. had two calls this week around that because everybody loves the premium content and how deep we actually go with that. I think it's smart. I think it's smart. Joel (04:54.753) huh. Joel (05:02.178) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:06.52) Little, little extra, you know, little, little extra something for everybody. I'm, I'm, I'm surprised at how many I'm learning how many sort of well-known podcasters make their guests come to them. Like they'll be in Austin or New York, whatever. And the guest has to come to them, which obviously is a better setting, better production, better sort of just vibe and energy. So the best ones, that's what I expect Netflix to kind of do. Chad (05:16.826) Mm-hmm. Chad (05:22.318) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (05:34.03) Um, and they have a mitts power. mean, imagine you log into Netflix and there's a picture of a podcaster and what, you, they could make podcasters. They could like blow somebody up big time if someone, you know, sort of allied with, uh, with Netflix. Yep. Chad (05:48.25) Depends on the content, yeah. I think they could, depends on the content. What you think, Em? Emi B (05:49.54) And then creator. mean, look, when I heard about it, I was like, I don't really know the difference between what they're doing at the moment and, you know, doing a video podcast. Isn't this like a TV show? What is the difference? So, no, I'm interested when they say exploring, what does exploring mean? You know, I think they're going to do something a little bit different. So I get it's a good move for them because they're seeing YouTube kind of like, Joel (06:04.896) Mm-hmm. We don't know yet. Emi B (06:19.042) dominate the market and thinking, okay, I want to get into it. So what I'm thinking is that they're going to do a slight pivot to what YouTube is doing, you know, and use those kind of video podcasts to launch TV shows. So I don't know if you guys watch sweet Bobby. Have you watched sweet Bobby on night? brilliant. Please watch it. So that's a podcast came out as a podcast is about this catfishing this woman. Like I was apparently in a long-term relationship. And when I say long-term, I'm talking about six years relationship with someone that she'd never met. Joel (06:32.184) Mm-hmm. Chad (06:36.174) Hmm. No. Emi B (06:48.684) And then turns out this person wasn't the person she thought it was. It would turn out to be a friend. And now Netflix did a documentary on it. So I think that they're going to do something like that. Let's do a podcast, do the video podcast, use that to launch a show. That's going to, that's a differentiator to YouTube. Chad (07:04.693) One of the things that, so Netflix tried to get Call Her Daddy and some other podcasts and they lost and they lost the bidding war. So what they're thinking of is one of the reasons why it looks like they're going to more premium content is because they can go to Call Her Daddy and say, hey, we want you to do a special project. Continue doing the stuff that you're doing with Spotify or wherever you're at, but we want you to do a special project, which is again, kind of like the parallel that I'm running. We do this weekly show. Emi B (07:10.572) Mmm, yeah, that. Emi B (07:19.844) Mm. Joel (07:24.248) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Emi B (07:27.982) Just one more show, yeah. Chad (07:33.668) but we also have these special projects that we put together. So I think they're gonna go down that, pretty much that line of thinking because you can still get some of these very exclusive, but yet already on contract podcasters to do special, special content. Emi B (07:40.931) Yeah. Joel (07:46.659) Yeah. Joel (07:50.008) Yeah, that's interesting. Kind like Mr. Beast shit. Yeah. And, and not that anyone asked me, but I would like to see a Hot Ones style show with Steven McGrath doing different scotches. Emi B (07:51.172) I'm interested to see. Yeah, 100%, yeah. Chad (08:02.97) yes. I agree. I agree. do agree. I do agree. Yes. Joel (08:05.486) Just not that anyone asked me, but that's what I like to see. And speaking of Stephen McGrath. Emi B (08:06.681) Yeah Chad (08:13.079) It is. Joel (08:13.354) It is time for shout outs. Emmy, what you got? Emi B (08:16.42) Right, so I woke up this morning, did my usual thing of opening my iPhone. I've got a brand new iPhone, by the way. It's iPhone 16 Pro Max, love it. And open up TikTok. Yes, I'm so happy. And you know what I heard? Do, do, do, do. They're not like us. They're not like us. Does this mean anything to you? Okay, so if it doesn't mean anything to the audience, Will Ferrell was on the SNL 50th anniversary. Chad (08:39.034) Mmm. Emi B (08:44.612) doing some kind of remake of Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us. It was amazing. And I'm not a Will Ferrell fan. I was pissing myself laughing. I was like, what the hell is this? I must have played it on repeat over again. So Will Ferrell, you are my shout out for this week. Joel (08:44.942) Mm-hmm. Chad (08:58.362) Well, and why this is so timely is because Kendrick Lamar just did the Super Bowl, right? That was one, that song was the one that they couldn't believe that he actually sang about Drake being a pedophile, right? So very timely, yes, very timely, very smart, Will Ferrell jumps on it. And if you've ever seen SNL, if you haven't seen this, Will Ferrell has this... Emi B (09:04.055) Loved it! Emi B (09:09.474) Yeah! Drake! I know. Did you see the smile though? Yeah. Genius. Chad (09:23.578) this music teacher kind of skit that he has with this. can't remember who the lady is, but she looks like an old music teacher and he looks like a music teacher and they're just singing like these new songs, which is when they started, I was like, holy shit, this is like on point. It was awesome. It was awesome. Emi B (09:28.866) Yeah. Yeah! Emi B (09:36.268) It's amazing. Yeah, it was amazing. They were trying to like hit that A minor, but it was like, A minor, A minor, A minor. Like honestly, please watch it. It's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (09:43.213) Yeah Joel (09:47.832) Hot mic, hot mic. Was that one, that's the one? Okay, I do know that skit. Chad (09:49.562) Wow. Joel (09:54.52) By the way, as someone who has been alive for most of SNL's history, what an amazing feat that they've had. That show has been the same format more or less for 50 years and it just works. yeah, shout out to them. I watched a lot of it, not that part, obviously, but it's quite a feat to go that long and have the same format and still be successful. So a small shout out to SNL for sure. Chad (09:59.098) Mm. Emi B (10:06.094) Really? Yeah. Emi B (10:11.16) Okay. Chad (10:14.606) Yeah. Yeah. 50 years. Jesus. Yeah. Well, I've got a shout out to our friend, Jason Putnam. Go ahead and play that beautiful beam footage, Joel. Emi B (10:18.678) Yes. Joel (10:26.626) Jason Putnam. Joel (11:01.122) All right. Chad (11:01.764) So a new CEO in the space. Jason's been in the space for a very long time. He's been mainly on good market revenue driving side of the house now. He's gonna be driving pretty much the ship there at Vetti. I do love the background though. I love the Captain America shield, the Thor hammer. Yeah, he's... Joel (11:24.042) Yeah. It's like big, it's like big two featuring Jason Putnam instead of Tom Hanks. first, first bit of a device is CEO. Now you have to get a decent mic because you can't, can't do those talk in the computer stuff anymore. You got to get a good mic. Chad (11:36.6) Yeah, that's where your marketing person, hint, hint, needs to square you away. Let's get this done. Joel (11:41.866) Antent wink wink, yeah. Emi B (11:42.212) You Hmm? Joel (11:47.458) By the way, little known fact about Jason Putnam. He spent time at job Fox for the old timers in the industry, actually time at job Fox and Oodle. If you want to go real, real deep cut on that one. Yeah, that is a deep cut because, because we, we go deep here on the show. Everybody. All right. My, my shout out goes out to, to KFC sort of a somber shout out for me. this one, this one hits home, not just because I like a good bucket of chicken, Chad. I'm. Chad (11:54.18) Jesus. Wow. That is a deep cut. That's a very deep cut. Chad (12:09.614) herbs and spices. Chad (12:14.02) You do. You do. Joel (12:16.172) I'm usually from the Louisville, Kentucky, Anna area. As if you're from the area, it's the sun always shines on Kentucky, Anna. so this, this business has been near and dear to my heart. Little known fact about me, is, that, that way back in the day, that's right. History lesson kids. Okay. So one of my first jobs in high school, I worked at KFC. It was known as Kentucky fried chicken back then. they, they went to KFC because they wanted more of a global reach. lot of people don't know them as Kentucky fried chicken. Well, they are moving to Texas. And frankly, for me, Texas fried chicken doesn't have quite the ring that Kentucky fried chicken does. But my first job in the eighties, one of my first jobs in the eighties, I was the chicken little guy. Emi B (12:43.79) Yeah. Chad (12:43.801) Yeah. Joel (13:04.216) Chad, don't know if you remember chicken littles, but they were, they were, they were, they were a 39 cent sandwich. They were like a biscuit or like a roll, not, not, not more like a roll than a biscuit. And it had like a big chicken nugget, like a flat chicken nugget. had mayo and it had pickle. And these were like little chicken littles. And I, that was my job. So, so KFC, like kind of where I'm from, I still have family in the area. Chad (13:07.047) Tenders? Chad (13:12.878) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Emi B (13:24.74) That was your job. Joel (13:30.828) near and in my heart. I had to go back to YouTube, Chad, and I wanted to see if they had the commercial for the Chicken Littles. So sure enough, God bless YouTube, they do have the commercial. So I want to play the 30 second clip just to walk with me down memory lane, will you Chad? Chad (13:34.49) Chicken little. Chad (13:47.002) I'm there for it. Emi B (14:04.856) What? Chad (14:17.569) my god. Joel (14:17.614) So before you say your, your only job was chicken little's these things were 39 cents and people would roll up and order 25, 30 of these things. And I would have to make them. They were, they were delicious. a little in fact about Kentucky fried chicken, let you take the stuff home or at least they did at the end of the day. so would bring buckets home of chicken and my dad would act like it was Christmas. He'd be like, what'd you get? What'd you bring home? Like, Chad (14:34.254) Mm-hmm. Emi B (14:39.684) you Joel (14:41.452) I got some crispy. got some original. I got a few fries. I got the wedges. We got some biscuits. It was, I gained 15 pounds and it. Chad (14:48.09) You were you were the specialty guy at restaurants at McDonald's you were the McDLT guy And and you were the chicken littles guy. So you were literally like the restaurant specialist you could go you can put that on your CV. That'd be awesome Joel (14:53.644) McDailty guy, yeah. Emi B (14:59.394) I love that. Yeah. Joel (14:59.788) Yeah. If, if, if they ever bring that shit back, I am, I am set baby. I am set. Good God. Good God. I never brought home whiskey, as, as a high schooler though, Chad, I always wondered what whiskey, some good whiskey, some Jack Daniel's and some, some chicken would taste like. I maybe I'll have to rediscover that. Chad (15:04.142) Ha Emi B (15:04.652) You're in! I was the original! Chad (15:07.618) Hot side hot, cool side cool. Chad (15:18.67) Yeah? Well, if, if you go to ChadCheese.com slash free, you can actually register for whiskey. That's right. from our friends at Van Hack. We actually talked to Ilya this week. but two bottles of whiskey. Got to register. T-shirts. We've been seeing Chad and cheese t-shirts all over social media. Everybody loves them. can't get out of them cause they feel so good. that's from our friends at Aaron app. Joel (15:40.622) Yeah. Chad (15:47.972) bourbon barrel AIDS syrup from the boys up north at Kiura. Of course, beautiful syrup from Canada. Joel (15:52.216) Mm-hmm. Yeah, Canada. Chad (15:58.01) craft beer from those data geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs. And if it's your birthday, you might win some rum with plum. Go to Chadcheese.com slash free win, win. Joel (16:16.428) That's right. Another trip around the sun for listeners. Andrew mall, Ryan Filiman, Maria and yeah, Ross Granger, Laura Washington, Jim Carragher, Rebecca Horn, Farah Rivas, Ali merges, Dan Albani, Krista Brenner, Mario, cult Mueller, Ethan Bloomfield, Mike Weston, Kate Ruddick, Dave Amos, Kevin Burgess and Charlotte Alvarez. Skull Charlotte to those people. And tonight. Chad (16:32.73) Excuse me. Chad (16:40.58) Wow. There we go. Joel (16:45.55) Emmy, probably don't like hockey, do you? Probably not a hockey fan kind of sorta. Ice hockey. Yes. Yes. So, so I don't know if you've kept up with this, Chad, but I, I married a Canadian. So it's, it's in my four. Like it's, it's, it's. So, so Trump has been saying some crazy shit about Canada. It's going to be the 51st state. I mean, he's, he's, said what he does. so they just created four nations, which is kind of a total ripoff of six nations rugby. Emi B (16:48.836) Are you talking about ice hockey or? No, we don't play, we don't do ice hockey in the UK. We do grass hockey, yeah. Chad (16:50.468) Yes, ice hockey. Chad (16:59.098) No, I've kept up with that. Yeah, I get that. Joel (17:14.134) And it's, Sweden, Finland, and America or the USA and Canada in this sort of hockey hockey thing. So America just played in Montreal. the Canadians booed the, the national anthem and then got their ass beat three to one, by the U S so tonight is the championship, in Boston, the USA versus Canada. So I, I can't take any more bets from the Canadians that I know about a bottle of whiskey. can't do it. I can't do it. If, the U S loses, I'm on the hook for like eight. bottles of whiskey to my Canadian friends and family. go USA, I guess, but it's a thing here. It's a thing here. Chad (17:52.58) Yeah, after their loss to Sweden, they better bounce back. That's all I got to say. And bouncing back, Chad and Cheese are on the road with Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right, Come spend St. Patrick's Day with us. The Chad and Cheese are going to be in Las Vegas during Transform at the Wynn March 17th through the 19th. Go to chadcheese.com slash event. Register there, see us at Transform. And while you are there, also register to kick back. chats, discussions, whatever you want to do and some free drinks with Joel and myself courtesy of Omar and the job pixel team. Just go to Chad cheese.com and on the homepage, click register and then you can get on the wait list. Yes, we're going, we're doing, we're doing the honeymoon suite honeymoon suite, no tigers, no face tattoos, although it should be a good time, free drinks, maybe some food, who knows. Joel (18:37.708) We're just that special kids. We have a wait list. Emi B (18:40.611) You are. Joel (18:47.79) just want Mike Tyson to show up. That's really all I... Emi B (18:49.904) Yeah Chad (18:54.052) All right, hold the presses kids, hold the presses, hold the presses, hold the presses. I just got news, a rumor that JobGet is in the acquisition mode again and they acquired a company by the name of Seasoned, which is a seasonal kind of app for, for, for, for individuals. Yeah. So yes, they are on, it sounds, sounds like JobGet is on the acquisition trail again. Joel (18:54.582) Alright, what, what? Joel (19:15.64) Makes sense. Chad (19:23.374) Good for them as we get more, if this rumor is true, we'll get more information and we will light it up next week. Joel (19:32.302) Yep, it's just a rumor kids. Chad (19:35.61) I got teased. got a tease too. Emi B (19:38.436) Yeah Joel (19:39.502) All right, let's get to some real news. Well, somewhere DJ Saul is having a good time because JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is on the hot seat this week. He leaked some audio that one of his loyal employees, I guess, recorded and decided to put out into the world about his opinions on work from home. Take a listen, kids, and we'll get your opinion on the other side. Emi B (22:29.86) Hmmmm Joel (22:30.03) All right, Chad, Jamie is fired up. Your thoughts. Chad (22:30.458) Huh. So, mean, you gotta, first and foremost, apparently working seven days a week pisses you off. But no, seriously, I mean, what sent Diamond into this OK boomer tirade? This from the Economic Times, quote, during the town hall, this town hall we just listened to, Nicholas Welch, an analyst in tech ops at JPMorgan Chase, who had worked. past tense with the company since 2017 asked Diamond whether managers could have the discretion to decide on office attendance for their teams. He explained that his seven member team spread across different countries and time zones found physical office presence irrelevant to productivity. The suggestion was met with loud applause from the from his colleagues end quote. So Welch was fired after a Daymond's or Diamond's tirade. and then rehired because I assume HR understands that retaliation isn't good for optics or plays well in the US court system. But instead of looking at this as an RTO thing, I believe it's more of a leadership discussion. Diamond is a product of the late 1800s management philosophy. Punch the clock, work 40 hours, preferably more than 40 hours. Leaders like that look at employees. like cogs in a machine, not like people. Yeah, they might say hello in the morning, slap you on the back after a big sale, but they really don't give a damn about you. Diamond is an old dog that doesn't want to learn new tricks. And that's his prerogative. But it's also an employee's prerogative, as he said, not to work there. Seems fair, right? If an employee wants JPMorgan Chase on their CV, they know what to expect. Bullpen, long hours, burnout in two years. Now, what I believe Chad (24:24.344) is exciting about this whole, you know, these types of boomer moments is the distinction of leaders in companies like CEOs, Spotify CEO, Daniel Eck, who says, we treat our employees like adults, which means work from wherever you want, just get shit done. That's a big difference from Diamond who believes iron fist micromanagement versus Eck who believes freedom to allow Spotify workers to get shit done wherever they live and enjoy the goddamn lies. I also believe, tell me what you think about this, Emmy. I also believe that we're going to see more women CEOs lean heavily into the, act, treat your employees like adults model because women understand more than men how hard it is to run a household and a fucking job at the same time. So in the end, both models are gonna, are gonna stay in the market with subtle tweaks with hybrid work. I don't think one model wins over the other. just gives us. Emi B (24:55.588) Mm-hmm. Chad (25:22.946) more opportunity of choice. What do we want? Emi B (25:23.684) Options. Yeah. Yeah. Now I agree. And I'm just going to start by saying this guy is the definition of the type of leader that I absolutely can't fucking stand. I cannot. He is living in the fucking dark ages. You know, like, and I get it. You said it like he comes from, you know, 1800s or whatever. I think he is, you know, who wants in his day and age to work seven days a week? Why do you need to work seven days a week? Why can't you get your stuff shit done, you know, in five days a week, in nine to five? Yeah. Is he modeling efficiency? No, probably not. You know, is he... No, it's like, why can't you get your shit done? You run in a company. Yeah. Why do have to work seven days a week to get everything done? You know, does he think that JP Morgan is such a big brand name that everyone is going to want to work in that type of environment, no matter what, just to get it on his resume? Yeah, he does. Chad (26:03.182) Not working seven days a week, he's not. Yeah. Joel (26:19.928) Yes, he does. Chad (26:21.198) Kids, Emi B (26:22.02) And it's like, watch, watch. When he said that, you know, people can walk out, they are going to walk out. When the market picks up and the other opportunities of recruiters come knocking at the door, other organizations come knocking at the door, they're going to walk out and then he's going to be fucked because he's going to have a hiring problem because their employer brand is now tarnished. And I just don't think he gets that. He's not thinking about it. Like you said, he thinks of his employees. cogs in a wheel instead of actually humans. He's not treating them as actually humans who are adults who can deliver without this kind of micro management control freak personality that he is. You know, so I think he's, yeah. 100%. Joel (27:07.968) I found this really fascinating. I think, I think part of the pushback is how we said it and not what he said. the seven days a week is ridiculous and everyone that watched that was like, yeah. And what was your salary? What was your take home last year? if I made that, I probably would work seven, seven days a week too. when, when COVID happened and everyone was work from home and we're never going back and this is the way that the world is going to be. think Chad and I both wondered, no, it's going to be something. Emi B (27:16.226) Hmm. Chad (27:20.356) Yeah. Joel (27:36.952) hype, it's going to be something, a mix of that. And what is it going to look like? And some companies will be remote only. Some will be at the office all the time and some will be, hybrid to me. Hybrid isn't remote because you have to still be where the company is to have that job. So that that's always been a struggle for me, but it seems to me that the way it's shaking out is if you're a big company, particularly a public company, I think Spotify is an outlier. Your ass is in the office. Emi B (27:38.403) Amen. Joel (28:06.764) I think it's going be really hard going forward for a big company that's publicly traded to have a hybrid or work from home environment. If you're a frontline worker, you've never had the option. You got to go to the factory. You got to go to the warehouse. You got to the restaurant. What did the dry cleaner like? It's never been an option for you. It seems like the sweet spot for that remote opportunity, if you're not just a gigger or have your own thing going is to be with a startup and ideally startup that is a technology startup. Emi B (28:16.804) Mm. Joel (28:34.702) if you're just starting out to get any kind of decent talent, you're going to have to have remote work. You're going to have to have that option to, to recruit those kinds of folks. So I think that's where we're shaking out as a, as least as a country, don't know as a world, how we're going. The other thing that I think that the jury still out on is the impact on young people. He says that young people are being hurt by this. They can't get in the office. certainly some. young people don't need an office. They can grow and get mentorship and do things otherwise. So I think for young people coming out of college, they're going to have to understand who do I have to work for to get the environment that I want? And for a lot of them, it's going to be, I want JP Morgan on my CV. I'm willing to do two years and slave drive and do whatever it takes. And then others will say like, that's not for me. I want to go work for a startup and I'm willing to take the risk because it's remote and I get stock options. So the. Emi B (29:11.838) Mm. Mm-hmm. Chad (29:18.745) Mm-hmm. Joel (29:28.268) The opportunities are becoming really clear and the lanes are getting set into terms of what kind of company you are. think as a business, you have to decide who are we? Are we get your ass in the office or are we Spotify? And everyone's a grownup and they can do the job that they're expected to do. Chad (29:43.258) You have to, you have to also develop your leaders to know how to manage those individuals. And that's one of the biggest issues that we've talked about for a while now is that we put people into management positions who have no fucking clue how to manage people. They're not people people, right? There were great individual contributors who had nowhere else to go because they already hit their senior whatever level and they had to go into management. And that just really with no background, no Emi B (29:48.897) in a remote environment. Joel (30:00.759) Yeah. Chad (30:13.174) education. I mean, no, it just doesn't make any sense. So what we have to do, and what these companies don't want to do like Jamie Dimon doesn't want to actually pay for his managers to go get developed to be able to learn how to manage people. He's telling you right now, I'm a micromanager, I'm going to tell you how to manage them. And you're going to be looking over the shoulder why they're in the office, right? So that's going to be the distinction. A lot of people are going with this all or none kind of scenario. Joel (30:14.307) Mm-hmm. Joel (30:34.766) Mm-hmm. Chad (30:42.668) I see that there are going to be tons of gray areas where some companies are going to be, hey, you can work from home, but if you'd like, we've got remote offices that you can go to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to be able to find what works for you. And it all comes down to outcomes. You're either doing your job or you're fucking fired. Joel (30:45.454) Yeah. Joel (30:54.338) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:02.444) Yeah. And I think that initially we, thought that technology would be a silver bullet in this process. The companies that launched back in COVID days with deal and remote and oyster. think a lot of people thought, this is the magic bullet. Like we'll be able to manage the tech will like everything will be technology based. And I don't, I think that promise didn't come to fruition or hasn't come to fruition yet. yeah, Chad, that's hard. Chad (31:14.586) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:30.862) Developing people, learning to lead like that is hard. And the easier, the easier thing to do is like, just get your bass back in the office. Let's go back to the way that it was. What I do wonder is, will we be willing to sacrifice our privacy to be remote? In other words, will we eventually technology will come around where we're going to see, look at everything that you do, every keystroke, we're to have a camera on you all the time. Like we're going to have a thing and planning in your brain. There's not, but I think. Chad (31:33.688) money. Chad (31:57.24) No reason for that. There's no reason for that. Emi B (31:59.428) I don't think that's gonna happen. I, yeah. Joel (32:00.78) I think companies will do that and that'll be the justification. You're remote. Chad (32:02.682) I agree, but it doesn't, it doesn't need to. mean, again, it's, it's end state, right? It's I get, so even if you're working in an office and when I built sales teams, we use Salesforce. I could see activity that was happening at the end of the day. I could see what's going on. So on and so forth. I don't need to keystrokes. I don't care where they're going on the web. I don't need any of this shit. Yeah. Emi B (32:23.48) You just need to see the output. Yeah. I mean, what I would say is I don't think it's that Jamie Diamond doesn't know how to lead or manage, you know, because he's, he's a CEO. He's obviously successful. So he's done well so far. What he's not good at is adapting to the current day and age and the current day and age requires people to learn how to manage people either remotely or in a hybrid fashion. And that's what he doesn't want to do. Then that's a new skillset. And that, is what's hard to learn. Joel (32:24.664) Yeah. Emi B (32:53.348) And I remember, you know, I, you know, when I, cause I used to live and work in the middle East and we were in the office, we were in the office all the time. But then when I came back to the UK during COVID, I was like, how do I manage a team when I don't know what they're doing? Some of my team members are pretty new to their role in recruiting. How am going to train someone up remotely? And it was hard because there were no resources. was nowhere, no one to teach me how to do that. And it was trial and error. literally trial and error to get there. Now, yeah, we're four years in and unfortunately, this is the new reality. This is what people are asking for. And people like Jamie Dimon, they're gonna get phased out. He's not gonna be around forever. You know, I heard rumors that, you know, apparently he's gonna retire soon. So I'm hoping that's case, you know? And then somebody else younger, more. I mean, hopefully he's not listening to this. But hopefully somebody else more forward thinking in time with it, like the current day. Chad (33:24.708) Brave New World. Emi B (33:50.936) with new skills and how to manage in this hybrid remote environment, we'll come in and take over the companies like JP Morgan. Chad (33:55.524) Mm-hmm. Joel (33:57.922) Yeah. It's also a heightened level of, of if you want to have a work in the office company, you better have an awesome employment brand or just a brand in general, because people are more likely to go to chase or JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or Google because of the brand. Like I'll suck it up and go to the office because I can put that on my LinkedIn profile or my CV. So if you, if you're a company, it's like getting the office, you better work on that employment brand. better be amazing. Emi B (34:07.62) Mmm! Chad (34:16.377) Yes. Emi B (34:19.971) See, yeah. Emi B (34:26.98) Mmm. Joel (34:28.334) Let's take a quick break and, talk about some more corporate shit. Joel (34:36.206) All right, guys, Klarna, who we've talked about quite a bit, they don't need any people at all in their company. They got a little bit exposed by the New York Times this week. Listeners obviously know that their CEO has made bold claims that AI can handle all human jobs, including his job. And also saying that Chatbots replaced 700 customer service agents in his company. However, the claims were exaggerated. to the time, support was outsourced. Chad (34:36.666) work. Shit. Joel (35:06.006) Not automated work day was swapped in or out for deal and team Taylor. And they still have 50 job openings on their website, facing a 2026 IPO and evaluation drop from 50 billion to 6.7 billion. Ouch. the times says Klarna leaned into AI hype to mask over hiring fixes and union challenges in their home country of Sweden. But wait, there's more knuckleheadedness. Did you hear about the Y Combinator company, Firecrawl, who posted a job for an AI agent paying $15,000 a year? I'm guessing that reeks of publicity stun. But Chad, what's your take on the Klarna Y Combinator Firecrawl drama this week? Chad (35:51.502) Yeah, I've got a first off. Thanks to Alex Chakowsky for pulling together a great Klarna overview. That was great work. let's dig in real quick. So crunch base is predict. Yeah, he's, he's doing good stuff. Crunch base is predicting that, with $4.6 billion in funding, there's no more funding for Klarna. there's no acquisition in sight, which means they got one path and that's IPO. So back to what you were talking about, Alex actually put out there Klarna's valuation plummeted. Joel (35:58.4) Mm-hmm. He's doing great work, by the way. He's doing great stuff. Keep it up, Chad (36:21.038) from its all time high of 50 billion and lost 90 % of that during COVID down to 6.7 billion, right? So then how do they get that 90 % back? AI is the answer, at least claims of AI is the answer, right? And then back to the reports on Reddit suggest that customer service teams were never actually made redundant by AI instead outsourced external agency. And as you talked about before, Then they talked about how their AI is going to go ahead and displace Salesforce and Workday, right? When literally they just changed vendors, Deal and Team Tailor. So that's Klarna, right? That's Klarna. This is a huge PR stunt, really, that they're trying to mask and claim. Then there's Firecrawl. mean, welcome to the attention economy. This is nothing more than a PR stunt. And kudos for the startup for cashing in on Attention. The question is, will Attention sell their product? Emi B (36:59.3) You Joel (36:59.758) Yeah. Chad (37:20.082) Firecrawl boasts their product can turn websites into LLM ready data. And that was awesome about five minutes ago. Companies this niche and leaning this hard on an already commoditized LLM ecosystem will be a diamond dozen in three, two, yeah, right now. Both Firecrawl and Klarna are PR stunts. Firecrawl actually said, hey, this is partly a PR stunt. Joel (37:41.346) huh. Chad (37:49.54) But on the Klarna side of the house, how close is this to fraud? I mean, they're looking to go IPO. They're putting a lot of shit out there that it seems to be, at least from reports, pure lies. They're trying to get that 90 % back that they lost. But the question is, will lies lead to fraud, lead to an orange jumpsuit? Joel (37:53.998) Mm. Joel (38:12.718) Hmm. Joel (38:17.135) So there was a time Chad, when your lives would catch up with you and get you into trouble. I'm not sure we still live in that world. There's the way that you wish the world worked and the way that it actually does. think Trump is obviously a figurehead of that movement, but more than that, Elon Musk, again, Emi B (38:20.676) Not anymore! Emi B (38:29.764) Mm-hmm. Joel (38:40.59) For years, I've heard from analysts and people who know what they're talking about say that Tesla is overvalued. It's just a car company. There's nothing to see here. There's no difference in them and Toyota. You know what the difference is? The story, the story and the storyteller. For whatever reason, people have neglected the numbers, the valuation, like the just what we've historically thought of as a good company versus one that's in the toilet. Chad (39:07.482) Mm-hmm. Joel (39:07.784) And to Klarna's CEO's credit, he knows taking Elon's leadership on this, that the story matters. If he can weave a story about AI is replacing everybody, we don't need employees. He actually had an AI voice do his quarterly earnings call recently. the story, who cares about the facts? Who cares about the numbers? Who cares about the trends? The story's cool, Chad. I'm buying that stock tomorrow. So that is what is going to save them. And he's taking a cue from so many other corporate leaders in the world. And we'll see if when they go public, if it works, but history says he may be onto something. Chad (39:49.966) Feels like a hoctua meme coin is what it feels like. Emi B (39:52.356) You know what, I agree. When you say it's a good story, I think it's beautiful bedtime story. They sat there like, know, Clarners, like, you know, the poster child for efficiency with AI. Look at what we've achieved. Obviously we know it's BS, but it doesn't matter. People are talking about them. People are not, yeah, exactly. Joel (39:57.485) Emmy? Joel (40:18.028) We do now, but at the time everybody in our space was like, holy shit, we don't need any people. The guy at Klarna says we don't. Emi B (40:23.94) Listen, half the people are going to read the article and still go look at what Klan has done. It's amazing. You know, the whole world is believing lies with Trump in power and Elon Musk, you know, as vice president. Well, he's real. Well, yeah, exactly. But, you know, like people buy into this bullshit. And so it's a great. Yeah, it's a great PR stunt. It's a great PR stunt. And the names are out there. I mean, that other company, what is it called? Firecrawler? Firecrawl? Yeah. Chad (40:37.658) It's more like President Musk at this point. Chad (40:43.93) They do. Chad (40:52.036) Liar crawl, yeah. Emi B (40:53.422) I never heard of them before. How many people know about them now? Everybody knows about them now. They're a small company. So does it work? Yeah. Does it get their name out there? Yeah. And they're saying, fire call that is, they say they were doing it to attract people to apply for their software engineering jobs. Well, people are going to do that now, aren't they? So yeah, does it work? Absolutely. Is it right? No. Chad (41:13.848) I don't know if I would. I don't know that I would. If you think that they're going to be leaning toward AI, you're not going to have a job as an engineer very long. Not to mention, Klarna is not in the US, they're in Sweden. I don't know enough about the Swedish government, but the US might not lock down on something like that. The fucking Swedes might throw this motherfucker in jail. I don't know. So there's entirely different. Joel (41:27.022) Mm-hmm. Emi B (41:27.256) Hmm. Emi B (41:32.354) Yeah. Emi B (41:35.766) Yeah, but look at where the world is going. Yeah, I mean, I look at the UK, the UK like, what did you say last time? It's like mini America. Yeah, it's the same. The whole Europe. Chad (41:41.624) The UK is a small, yes, but that's not Sweden. That's not the rest of Europe. I mean, they have entirely different cultures. And just because the UK is trying to carbon copy the stupid shit that we're doing doesn't mean the rest of them. Emi B (41:55.628) Yeah, I'll beg to differ. I'll see what happens. Joel (42:00.994) Little, little side note. had a, I had a bad case of the fire crawl back in college. I don't know what's going on with that. By the way, with, with, with fire crawl, like we live in a, we live in a daily fight for attention and companies are like, how do we get, how do we get press? How do we get clicks? How do we, like, what are we gonna do? Like, somebody had the bright idea. Let's, let's post a fake job for an AI employee. And that we're going to see more of this stupid shit. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Chad (42:01.466) I Chad (42:05.178) Yeah Emi B (42:05.604) Ha! Chad (42:07.886) Next! Chad (42:24.858) Smart. Yep. Joel (42:30.53) From stupid shit to just plain scary, scare the hell out of me. Shit. the Sasquatch of statistics. That's right. Listeners know him as Toby Dayton, CEO at link up posted his top 10 predictions for 2025. It only took him a month and a half to get us his predictions for 25. Nope. Nevermind that, it had us on the ledge or at least man, the ledge, the word cataclysmic is in the title. Toby predicts the U S economy will quote. Chad (42:31.492) Toby, Toby. Joel (42:59.938) degenerate into mild stagflation with anemic growth, unemployment climbing to 5%, inflation persisting, and no cuts from the Fed. Can you scare me anymore, Toby? Chad, first, hold me. Hold me and tell me I'm okay. And the second is, what are your thoughts? Chad (43:19.278) Hold me, hold me. Yeah, I mean, so you've got the 11 that are here. I mean, Toby's an incredibly smart dude. If you listen to our jobs report we did with them for, we did with him for about a year before they got acquired. We got a good close personal time with Toby. He's an incredibly smart dude and they have a ton of data. Some of the things that he mapped out here, which is really good because we can actually dig in. So number one, the US is looking to add about 1.6 million jobs in 2025. Sounds great. We added 2.2 in 2024. The problem is the market mismatch. The types of jobs we are going to create, you're have to have two or three of them to pay your fucking mortgage. That's a problem. those job numbers doesn't really matter that much. Unemployment at the year end around 5%, which it might sound okay, I guess to some people. The problem is, Joel (43:56.6) lot. Chad (44:19.234) Unemployment isn't the problem. It's under employment, right? Again, the people who have to have two to three jobs just to be able to make ends meet. So as we start to take a look at this, I think the scariest point for me is GDP growth. I mean, if everything is on its way down, this seems like a fucking spiral. And everybody was talking about, my God, we're gonna hit a recession. No, this doesn't look like a recession. This looks like a fucking depression. And that, again, Emi B (44:22.414) Mm-hmm. Chad (44:50.167) Take me back to Europe. Jesus fucking Christ. But this is going to this is actually going to impact global markets. And that's what really sucks. Yeah. It is. It is. Joel (44:56.846) When America sneezes, the world gets a cold. So this is for everybody, more or less. Emi B (45:02.796) have not heard that phrase before. like that. When America sneezes, the world gets a cold. And I think it's true. Yeah, no, I'm going to use it. I'm going to pretend it's mine. Yeah. And you know what? I agree because I think, you know, a lot of people obviously voted the current government into the place that they are. And why? Because of he was going to do great things for the economy. But this is not showing that the economy is going great or will be going great. Chad (45:07.034) Mm-hmm. Joel (45:07.736) You're welcome. Use it. Emi B (45:31.512) This is saying that this is gonna go shit, you know? So what does that mean for people? Because when you talk about inflation, it's like, I think some people can say, okay, inflation is like a technical metric. But the reality is when you talk to the everyday person in their homes, it's not a technical metric. Yeah, they feel it. This is personal. So when people go into the grocery store, sorry, or the gas, you know, to pay for gas, or they're paying the rent, they are feeling that. Chad (45:47.546) They feel it. Emi B (46:01.644) And that means the trust in the government is going to slowly erode. What is that going to do for the government? What is that? What, how are they going to recover from it? I don't think they can. And this is a massive, massive problem. I don't know how they're going to fix it, but I think it's dire. You know, all of this is just showing dire consequences. You know, you're going to get businesses that, you know, who are going to be cautious. They, businesses don't like instability. You're going to get businesses who slow down their hiring. you're going to be at, which means what? And unemployment goes up, investment dries up. You know, there's serious consequences of all of this. Chad (46:44.324) That's number 10 there, Cheeseman. Joel (46:45.934) So Chad mentioned how smart Toby is, and I totally agree. But I'll throw in the fact that Toby is one of the more thoughtful, calculated, low-key guys in the industry. So when he writes a post with the title Cataclysmic 2025 in it, he's not just getting clicks. He is really thoughtful around this. Chad (47:01.231) Yes. Chad (47:08.388) Mm-hmm. No. Joel (47:15.18) It's supposed to be his 10, 10 predictions. He has 11. Like that's how, that's how much Toby went off the rails on this post. three of them are government related, which I think we should all be concerned with. Like Chad, when we did the show, the numbers aren't true. They're changed all the time. the chaos in Washington, small businesses report came out recently. Small businesses are scared to death to hire. Why uncertainty? Emi B (47:18.916) 11. Chad (47:32.612) Mm-hmm. Joel (47:45.39) They don't know what's going on with tariffs. They don't know what's going on with geopolitical issues. don't know inflation. Inflation is going up. went up last week or last month. And then you have the fed who says. We like, can't do anything. And when we talked to, when we talked to Toby and we started the show, he was like, Hey man, how many, how many cuts this year? This is back in 2024. think, I think he predicted four and there were two. Now he's saying there's zero. Maybe he's wrong and it's the other way around, but his data. Chad (47:59.556) You can't cut. You can't. Joel (48:14.52) if you didn't know his data is, is, collected from ATS is direct employers. Like it's real stuff. It's not ghost postings or whatever. So his data is really, really great, which is why he was acquired. So when he says this stuff, we should all really pay attention, and act accordingly. And, I'm going to do my best to get off the ledge, because he, he freaked the fuck out of me because he is not this kind of guy. He is not look at me. I'm crazy with crazy predictions. yeah. Emi B (48:39.704) God... Wild! Chad (48:43.258) Can we just go ahead and talk about boobs? I mean, come on. Joel (48:46.52) We can talk about boobs, but I will say, have to say, if, you, if you haven't subscribed to Toby's newsletter, it's on stub stack. It's called diggings on the job market. do yourself a favor, and go out and subscribe, to his, to his newsletter. And yes, we will, we will come off the ledge and talk about LinkedIn and boobs, which I don't think we've ever done before. So go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and push the stamp on your bingo card and we'll be right back. Chad (48:55.418) Mm-hmm. amazing. Emi B (49:04.683) I mean... Emi B (49:10.178) Yeah Joel (49:15.47) All right, guys, James language, a fine British lad, apparently, and a self-styled quote, business storytelling expert and quote posted a sexist LinkedIn rant comparing women's breast size to business confidence sparking. Wait for it. lot of fury online. his 200 word theory, if you can call it that paired with a Haley at well photo who I don't even know. maybe you do, claimed. Chad (49:35.962) Imagine that. Joel (49:45.602) get this smaller breasts flaunt while large larger ones hide just like marketing ideas. Sure. it drew 3000 plus angry comments in 24 hours, surprisingly with users labeling it labeling it. LinkedIn's quote worst ever end quote and calling for his ban language later gloated on Facebook, but hasn't replied on LinkedIn. Shocking again, Emmy, what's your take? on this juicy story. Emi B (50:16.1) My take is this guy is a fucking idiot. What the hell is wrong with him? Where has he been for the last 50 years? a hundred percent. And apparently he was a ski instructor beforehand, which led him to his business storytelling route. Joel (50:21.422) You Chad (50:25.946) Attention, he's looking for attention. Joel (50:27.416) But he's a business storytelling expert, Emmy. Chad (50:32.026) Yeah. Chad (50:36.96) Of course. Of course. Emi B (50:39.406) Honestly, there's so many things that went through my head when I read this article. And to be honest, I don't know what's more baffling. I don't know if it's whether or not, you know, what actually led him to write this. And then when he wrote it, what led him to hit the post button with confidence? go, yeah, this is a good post. This is going to get positive feedback. was like, no. And then what I also don't understand, how did the post stay up long enough on LinkedIn to get 3000? Chad (50:44.922) Mm-hmm. Joel (51:11.476) He deleted it. It wasn't taken off. He deleted it. Emi B (51:13.948) I was searching everywhere, who is this guy? I want to see him, I want to write on his post. Like I said, he is stupid, he is tone deaf. No one in this day and age can actually with confidence say this is something that is a positive thing to do. With everything that has happened in last couple of years, Where does it, where is this guy coming from? And if I go onto LinkedIn, they are also accountable. And look, I know some of the things you say about LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn, but here I think they fucked up because you allow this guy to stay long enough to get 3000 comments. People are calling for him to be banned, but they haven't banned him because I'm pretty sure when I did a search, although I can't see the post, I'm pretty sure I found him online. So my opinion is from LinkedIn's point of view, if you don't ban him, you're enabling him. You're saying that this is actually okay. You're saying that it's absolutely fine for people on a professional platform. And that's what it is. It's like not saying it's good to do on any platform, but on professional platform, it's okay to say this sexist comments. It's not okay. And if they keep him online, you are saying that it is okay. And LinkedIn have a duty of care to women. but it also have a duty of care to men who use this platform as a professional resource. So I'm waiting, I'm waiting to see what LinkedIn actually does. I'm waiting for this guy to also comment to see if he's brave enough since he's a professional storyteller. Cool, cool. Tell us your story, tell us your story. Chad (52:52.334) doubtful. Joel (52:53.134) We actually have a hidden mic at LinkedIn headquarters and here's the conversation that's going on right now about banning this dude. It sounds like it's not gonna happen. Sorry, I mean. Emi B (52:56.836) Emi B (53:04.5) I mean disappointing yeah Joel (53:12.312) Chad, what's always shocked me, and we don't see this because we are who we are, the amount of, I guess, harassment that goes on on LinkedIn behind the scenes. Amy, I don't know if you can speak to this or not, whether you or friends. Apparently it's quite a cesspool of dudes hitting on the ladies, whether it's DMs or comments or whatever. Like, are you seeing this or have anything that you've experienced? Emi B (53:19.364) Mmm. Emi B (53:31.652) Honestly, every once in a while I get the most stupidest comment and I'm just like, first of all, I don't know if you know who you're talking to because I'm not someone who's just gonna sit there and go, yeah, okay, fine, no problems. Or like, no, no, no, I'm not that person. I will come straight back at you. Say it with your chest. Okay, come on. I will respond equally back and I will put you in your place. So yeah, it's, unfortunately, whether it's LinkedIn or it's Instagram or it's X or Facebook. Chad (53:43.055) Mm-hmm. Joel (53:50.435) Yeah. Emi B (54:01.09) You are always going to find these people. And again, unfortunately, in this day and age, more and people are thinking that it's okay to say that. Chad (54:11.876) There's, there's with the current administration and the whole Manosphere and all that other bullshit that's happening, right? It's, like all of these fucking assholes are coming out of their, their holes. This is how they felt the entire time, right? That's how they felt the entire time. They just didn't say anything about it. Now they feel like they have a license to say whatever the fuck they want to whomever they want. Right. And, that to me is, a huge problem. but again, hopefully, you know, Emi B (54:13.869) Yeah Joel (54:17.336) Yeah, it's gonna get worse. Emi B (54:20.696) Mmm. Emi B (54:24.366) Yeah. Chad (54:41.774) I don't know that LinkedIn's going to kick him off, but hopefully, I mean, he understood that. God, I better pull this fucker down. Hopefully gets kicked in the nuts metaphorically. Joel (54:48.27) Yeah, he even had emojis of two balloons and a smiley face. Someone commented, quote, it's only Monday and we've unearthed the caveman that does not belong in this millennium, let alone LinkedIn. Emi B (54:53.284) I know, I was like, oh my God, what is wrong with you? Emi B (55:05.432) Honestly, but you know what? I'm just going to add a point. you know, when, when you say that you don't know if LinkedIn is going to take this guy down, I'm going to say that there are in conversations I've seen online about sexual health, gender equality, DEI, which gets flagged or removed of LinkedIn. But yet this was allowed to stay on for this period of time and this guy's still on there. So I'm like, what is, what is worse? It needs to be kicked out. Chad (55:24.623) Mm-hmm. Joel (55:31.614) He needs a timeout at least, because LinkedIn does give you the timeouts. Kick him out, kick him out, kick him out. Yeah, and something that's never getting kicked out is our joke of the week everybody. All right, keeping with the boob theme, what did the saggy boob say to the other saggy boob? What did the saggy boob say to the other saggy boob? Emi B (55:36.172) Yeah, kick him out. Kick it straight out. You can't come back. I don't care how you do your business. It's like... Chad (55:44.026) That was a dad joke. Emi B (55:55.692) And there's a lift up. Lift. Something to do with lift me up. No, under, no. Joel (56:02.358) No, if we don't get some support soon, people are going to think we're nuts. We out! Chad (56:14.958) We out! Chad (56:18.798) So bad.

Chad & Cheese sit down with Celinda Appleby, Visa’s global director of talent attraction, for an in-depth discussion on navigating 2025’s talent acquisition hurdles—think economic uncertainty and a turbulent job market. Celinda reveals how Visa is refreshing its employer brand to align with evolving corporate strategies through EVP 2.0, powered by research and a dedicated center of excellence. 🚀 Shaker Green Room She dives into creative wins like Olympics-inspired campaigns and a reimagined career site strategy to boost candidate engagement. Plus, a sneak peek at what’s next: targeted recruitment tools, a brand advocacy culture, and finalizing EVP 2.0. Don’t miss out—connect with Celinda on LinkedIn and explore exciting job openings at Visa! 🌐 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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: Who are you and why are you here? Celinda Appleby: Oh, so my name is Celinda Appleby. I am the Global Director of Talent Attraction and Recently Acquired Employer Brand. I'm with Visa. I've been with Visa about six years. I'm here because my lovely friends at Shaker invited me to sit with you today. And I'm excited to be here. Chad: Sweet. So as we look forward to Q4 and 2025, what advice would you have for your peers in that time? Celinda Appleby: I think this is a time where we have to be okay with the uncertainty. I like to roll my eyes. The economy, there's an election cycle, the job market's a mess. Our industry's continuously been facing a lot of issues. We're always first to go and last to fix everything. And I think that in efforts to stay on top, like at the top of your game, we have to embody more empathy. It's something I'm personally working on. And resilience. Because I do think it's going to be harder in '25, especially in corporate America. I think our budgets are getting cut, I think our headcount's getting cut. And so you have to really fight a little harder than you did in like 2019, for example. Chad: Yeah. Joel: How would you describe Visa's employment brand? Celinda Appleby: Visa's employment brand is currently under a refresh. We just hired about 12 months ago a brand new CEO. We just launched a brand new corporate strategy, a corporate brand. I don't know if you all watch the Olympics or not. Visa was front and center and you saw a lot of that powerful moments of taking small steps to further your life. You know, Visa wants to be a part of that from the consumer journey. So super blessed to be working with our Chief Marketing Officer on building that brand. The extension, the employer brand is an extension of the consumer brand. This is the first time we've ever been able to do this. And so we're in the beginning stages of that work. Joel: So share some of the sausage making with us. What questions? What's the brainstorming look like behind closed doors? Chad: What's happening behind closed doors? Joel: What does the opening discussions look like? Celinda Appleby: So the opening discussions are, so we refreshed the EVP in 2122. And so for me, it was a lot of understanding what has happened in your eyes that we're no longer, the employee base is not resonating with the 2122. I love to call it EVP 1.0. And so ours would be 2.0 because I do think it's a living, breathing document, changing. So a lot of the past six months, all I've been doing is building a center of excellence where we brought in people from people marketing, comms and other departments around the world to hear from them. Like, let's look at the current EVP. What do you love? What do you hate? What should be changed? And then taking that to our Steerco, which is made of a lot of SVP, it's very big people. And having them opinionate back on that. And we weren't seeing, in all honesty, this happens everywhere. We weren't seeing eye to eye with some of the changes or recommendations. And so we're currently in the research stage and that basically is three prongs. We're doing internal and external research and then we're going to conduct focus groups after that. I'm a firm believer that I can't tell anyone that we need to change our tagline or our pillars or our comm strategy without showing the data. Chad: Yeah. Celinda Appleby: And that all stems from your employees. So if we're going to tell employee stories later, we should bring the employee stories in now. Chad: Know them now. Yes. Yes. So let's take a look at, look backward in 2024. What was the biggest surprise for you over the last year or so? Celinda Appleby: Could it be work related? Like tactical? Chad: Oh yeah. Celinda Appleby: Okay. So we launched Avature about 18 months ago. First CRM that Visa has ever had. And with the Olympics, I created an email marketing campaign. The first we'd ever ran, ironically, the first one. Chad: Wow. Celinda Appleby: Outside of LinkedIn, LinkedIn used to be... Joel: Well, email is a new technology. So it makes sense. Celinda Appleby: That's why I want to say, it's honestly selling it wasn't hard because people were like, this is so safe. And they were like, but what's really going to come of it? So we messaged 18,000 people. I received 5,500 applications and no offers yet because our time is a little bit longer of a tail. Chad: Sure. Celinda Appleby: But our open ratio was 71% across the board. That means people are... So my takeaway from that is we're not messaging our candidates enough. We're not messaging our applicants enough. They want to hear from Visa, they want to learn more about Visa. So for one of my OKRs for FY25 is to continue, build a whole email marketing strategy so we're not doing one a year. Joel: Talk about the importance of social media, what your strategy is around it and maybe tactically some things that you're doing that are working. Celinda Appleby: You know, I love social media. I find that there is a little bit of a fatigue in our employees wanting to be brand ambassadors. And what I mean by that is they'll get in front of a camera and talk about what they love. They might even take a picture of your brand. But when it comes to tweeting or Facebooking or whatever people are doing, even myself, I sort of like one more post, right? Chad: Yeah. Celinda Appleby: And so to turn a culture of brand advocacy, we have to make it very easy for people and they have to get something out of it because no one wants to message their mom and dad anymore. Because that's who I think that's my followers. About their company brand. Right? One of... So I don't have many wins on social media because we're still building that out. But I want to say something that really blew me out of the water this year, we implemented Google Search Engine Marketing when a search engine optimization and an integrated strategy. At the time, when we started this in January, Google was not even the top 25 source of what do you call that? Attribution. Chad: Yeah. Celinda Appleby: And now paid search is number four and Google Search is number one. We got about 10,000 applications in a three-month period and about 30 hires. 30 hires, and keep in mind we only did this for high key market areas and technology products. So difficult roles. Joel: Talk about the organic part. Are these job postings, are they specific articles about getting a job or targeted positions for you? Celinda Appleby: So we launched a brand new career site in December of '24. And for my whole tenure that I'd been there, we'd had a desperate career site. One page, 300 across 300 countries. So a total of 300 pages that I manage. And there was no content. It was really just like search for a job. Joel: Yeah. Celinda Appleby: 24, January 24th, we launched a new page. If you go now we have about 12 pages. We have teams. It's very robust. There's still work to be done in my opinion. But what we did with search engine, we've never had that done before, obviously with 300 pages, you know. Chad: Yeah. Celinda Appleby: So we focus on key market areas, Poland, India, the US, the UK and then using all of those keywords. We drive people to the life that pages, where the teams pages and then job search. Because Google gives you a lot of credit if you do job searches at the top of the nav. Chad: Yeah. So in 2025, looking forward, what's your biggest priority? Celinda Appleby: Launching this EVP. We should be done with the research stage in November. We are promising to have a messaging done, a toolkit if you will, by January 2025. And then we move into the fun stuff of really creating a brand components, banners, photos, images, videos. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We talked about Avature. I'm sure you're looking at a lot of different solutions for the upcoming year. What are some that you're excited about or some that you are using now that are working or you're looking forward to using? Celinda Appleby: Visa is very risk averse when it comes to tools and you should be excited about that because we obviously protect your money. So our current CTO is sort of in the lean stages of not really doing too much, but we currently work with Appcast for all of our media and creative services. Looking to expand our creative capabilities a little bit in the year of '25. Continue working with Avature. Visa is also moving into ATS implementation. We're going with Workday. Who is our HRIS. Chad: Yeah. Celinda Appleby: We realize there's a lot of icks in the room for that. Not here but overall. And then higher score I think is the layer, the intelligence layer on top. For me, I'm so obsessed that there's so many recruitment marketing tools. In fact, I said to Joe earlier, I'm like, talk to me like I'm in kindergarten. What are the differences? Do we need all of them? Who's a competitor? And so I'd like some more advocacy around that because I feel like some amazing companies have popped up, but I just don't really know what everyone, how they intersect with each other. Chad: Yeah. Keep listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast as we talk about that. Celinda Appleby: Oh, 100%. Chad: But thank you for taking the time and coming and sitting down with us. If somebody wants to connect with you or maybe even, I don't know, take a look at jobs at Visa. Where would you send them? Celinda Appleby: My LinkedIn is best. I'm really boring on Twitter, but Celinda Appleby on LinkedIn. Our visa careers is visa.com/careers. Super easy. We have about 1200 open roles now across the globe, so we are definitely hiring. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thanks for hanging out with us. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch Big Booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No. You hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Live from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Torin Ellis sits down with Chad & Cheese to tackle the evolving landscape of diversity and inclusion (D&I). As some organizations retreat under external pressures, Torin delivers a wake-up call—now is not the time to step back. He challenges leaders to honor their commitments, exposes the political forces shaping DEI strategies, and reminds us that real progress demands intention. With 2025 on the horizon, he highlights the companies still doing the work and calls on individuals—especially those with privilege—to step up. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (processing) Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Who are you and why are you here? Torin Ellis: I actually don't know why I'm here, but I'm Torin Ellis... Joel: Say more about that. Torin Ellis: Torin Ellis, diversity strategist, risk mitigator, analyst. I do all things diversity and inclusion. And I think the reason why I'm here is because you all have some interesting questions to ask of me. Joel: You came just for us, is that what you're saying? Torin Ellis: Just for the stars of RecFest. Chad: Jeez. Torin Ellis: RecFest... Joel: Too kind. Too kind. Torin Ellis: Nashville 2024. Joel: No pressure. No pressure, Chad. Torin Ellis: Indeed. Chad: 2024. Okay, so right out of the gate. Torin Ellis: That seemed like that was really thoughtful. Chad: It's because it is. Joel: You did like that. Chad: It just, it just popped up. Joel: Not scripted at all. Chad: What advice would you have to your peers moving into Q4 and then 2025 to do better about this industry? Torin Ellis: So, I mean, who are the peers? Are we talking... Chad: Your peers. Torin Ellis: Oh, my peers. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: Oh, absolutely. So for anyone who's in the DNI space to remain committed in the face of adversity, that we don't allow the smaller voices, these individuals with podcasts and opinions that are suggesting that DNI and that's not taking anything away from podcasts and opinions... Chad: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Torin Ellis: But individuals that are suggesting that diversity and inclusion is anything other than humanity, is anything other than focus or being focused on building high performing teams. I want you to remain vigilant, to remain fervent in your showing up to chase down diversity and inclusion. Chad: But what happens... Torin Ellis: We capitulate. It's just too much retreat. Chad: Yeah, but what happens when the leaders are actually forcing? I mean, you got guys who are leading organizations telling people to stand down, not to mention taking equity out of the DE&I. I mean there's... I mean it's like, it's like there's this vacuum and everything's getting sucked out. Torin Ellis: So listen, I mean this is six in one hand, half a dozen in another. Truth of the matter is most people need employment, they need their income. They gotta be able to take care of themselves, their families. Chad: Right. Torin Ellis: I absolutely get it. I'm not suggesting that every person gets to be a bull in the china shop. They get to run in screaming as loud as they possibly can, that we must be more committed. But what I am suggesting is that you have to challenge the leaders of your organization to be focused on first your stakeholders and then your shareholders. You don't get dividends or returns or profits or any of those things, if we don't have an organization. Chad: Right. Torin Ellis: Focus on my people. There should be no CEO allowing people outside of the organization to sit up here and suggest that DNI is not important and then say, I'm going to retreat. I'm not going to live out my human rights campaign initiatives. I'm going to come back on all of the social imperatives that I said were important. There should be no CEO that is submitting to that. And as an individual, you should have some degree of authority and voice and data to support why you are challenging them on that decision. Joel: Dumb white guy question. Incoming. Ready? Torin Ellis: It won't be the first one that I fielded today... Joel: Because you've interviewed with us before. You're calling it D and I. I'm still calling it DEI. It's been DEIB. Why change? Is that official now? Torin Ellis: No, it's not a change. Joel: Is it just preference by you. Torin Ellis: It's just brevity for the sake of the conversation. Yeah, that's all. Joel: But we took equity out. Why? Because SHRM did? Torin Ellis: We didn't... We definitely didn't do it because of SHRM. So you messing around now. You start... You trying to start something. No, I'm just doing it. Brevity for the sake of conversation. It's always going to be DEI. Joel: But they're all correct. Torin Ellis: They're all correct and honestly, I'm not... I'm not... I don't lose sleep on even SHRM in their ill-advised decision while I didn't agree with it, while I wouldn't have encouraged them to do it, while I wrote a post talking about why they shouldn't have done it. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: The bottom line is as long as a person is committed, I don't care what the letters are. Listen, like I said in the post, LGBTQIA++ they're adding letters to their acronym, while we have organizations that are extrapolating letters from ours. We're all moving in the same direction. We're trying to do better about protecting audiences, communities, geographies, how we're developing products, services, all of the things that matter in building a high performing business. Chad: So what surprised you most thus far in 2024? Torin Ellis: The number of organizations that said DNI or DEIB is not important. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: That surprised me. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: Yeah, simple as that. I like, so much so of a surprise that I'm not reposting them. I don't comment on them because I don't want to amplify what I know is... Now listen, it surprised me by the number that have retreated. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: But when you look at the facts and you understand who's doing the work in the business, there's still a lot of people and a lot of activity that's happening in DNI and that's what I'm focused on, not the people that are retreating. Joel: How much of the abandonment, I guess, in your opinion, is our customers are politically aligned here. They're telling us not to do this. So we are going to abandon it because our buyers are saying it. And what percentage are saying we're going to leave it because we don't want to be political at all. We want to make money for our shareholders and give our employees some level of financial security. In your opinion, is it mostly political or is it mostly like we just don't want to get involved, or is it equal parts? Torin Ellis: I think right now, you'd have to attribute it to the political climate. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: Yeah. Chad: Just about everything. Torin Ellis: The whole position of being apolitical, that was probably a position maybe a year and a half, two years ago, or maybe more like two, three years ago. Organizations, I won't call their names, but some of them made statements in public. We're going to be an apolitical organization. I get it. That's what they were doing then. I think now anyone deciding to do it is indirectly aligned to a political decision. Chad: So going forward now, looking toward 2025, what's your number one priority? Torin Ellis: I don't think that changes for me. I think it's just... How do I keep the intensity the same? How do I continue to remind people that DNI is about chasing humanity? Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: It's about having better leaders in the organization that are willing to model what it looks like to be inclusive. Chad: Right. Torin Ellis: It's about challenging organizations to develop benefit schedules that really accommodate for the lack of pay and compensation that women have experienced. I mean, we passed legislation that says that we are supposed to compensate women fairly, and we haven't lived that out in 50 years. So it's about intensifying what we know to be right and divorcing ourselves from the hyperbolic statements or positions that categorize DNI as being anything other than it really is. Like I absolutely read something a couple of days ago, and again, I'm not going to quote the organization, but they categorize DNI as a sexual extortion initiative. How do you categorize DNI as a sexual extortion initiative. And people believe that. So... Chad: I don't even know what the hell that means. Torin Ellis: Neither do I. But the point is, they put it out. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: It'll get a whole bunch of... Chad: Press. Torin Ellis: Press and activity on the social feeds. And you got to be willing and capable of suppressing that when it's presented to you as a practitioner. Joel: So I want to leave on a positive note. Torin Ellis: Sure. Joel: The headlines go to the companies that are saying, we're out. We don't practice DNI. But I know that every day you're dealing with companies that are embracing it. And I know that you have a lot of hope for younger generations where this is just how it is. This isn't something that is abnormal. So I want you to take a few minutes to talk about the company's doing it right. Maybe examples of what they're doing and your take on the younger generations and how they view this initiative. Torin Ellis: Yeah. I mean, again, I just support the young people that have the energy, the desire, the curiosity to chase down what humanity looks like on a broader basis. As far as organizations that are doing it right, they're doing it right because they're either re-categorizing how DNI operates inside of their organization, they're still making hires and classifying the individual as the chief diversity officer, or over the diversity and inclusion programming. Organizations that are doing it right are still celebrating certain activities that are happening inside of their organization, raising awareness around causes that impact people inside of their organization. The organizations that are doing it right are not retreating from their human rights campaign initiative. They're still putting their diversity numbers up on their website. Organizations that are doing it right are still exploring ways to expand their supplier diversity footprint. Joel: Yeah. Torin Ellis: So the bottom line is it's happening in a lot of ways. And they don't always have to have the categorization of DNI over them to be celebrated. That's what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for the highlight and the neon light and the celebration. I'm looking for the substantive commitment. I'm looking for the unwavering belief that when you do DNI, you are making not only your organization better, but your people better, your communities where you do business better. That's what I'm looking for. Chad: What I celebrate time with Torin Ellis... Joel: I got one more [0:10:34.3] ____ if that's what you're doing. Chad: Go ahead. Joel: One. So we sat down at RecFest, five or so years ago... Torin Ellis: 2019. Joel: Yeah. And two white guys asked you, what can we do to move this Movement forward. And you said, speak up. I'm just wondering, five years on, is that still your advice to two white guys? Chad: And do you think we have. I think that's the thing that I care about the most. Torin Ellis: Got it. Okay, so let me answer the second one first. Chad: Yeah. Torin Ellis: Yes. I think you all have added more programming to Chad and Cheese, and not only programming, content and voices. You've covered stories. You've found stories and had discussions. I've listened to some of them. But you've also had more voices on the podcast that have talked about the subject of DNI. Do I believe still that... Absolutely. You still need to lend your voice. Sometimes you need to lend your privilege. There are rooms that you are going to walk in that I'll never be able to walk into. Not because I'm not capable, not because I'm not qualified. I'm just not invited. So I need you while you're in that room, when you hear things or you see signals or engage with signals that suggest that this organization may be a bit wayward, this organization may be curious. This organization may need a resource, a consultant. I need you to be able to say, yeah, I know this person or I know that person or whatever the case may be. Torin Ellis: So we all... Listen, I'll close it on this. Empowerment, strategic exploration, and tactical execution. The first thing is you have to have voice. We cannot be silent in the face of injustice. So you got to speak up. You got to speak up. I got to speak up. The people behind the camera, they got to speak up. You got to be empowered. You got to have a voice. You got to call a thing a thing. We're working on a bias report right now, reducing bias in HR using AI. And during one of our discussions, one person in the think tank or the focus group said, well, I don't really want reducing assumes that there's already bias. And the person said, I don't really want to assume that there's already bias in the technology. And somebody else in the focus group said, nah, we're humans. We all have bias. So let's stop tiptoeing and playing around like there's no bias there. It's there. What are we going to do to make it better? So I need you to speak up. Chad: Yeah. So for any company who wants to get you in that room, in their room, how do they get a hold of you? Torin Ellis: Torrenellis.com. Torrenellis.com. Torinellis... Chad: .com. Torin Ellis: .com. Chad: My man. Thanks for coming, man. Torin Ellis: You got it. Joel: Thanks for hanging out, Torin. Torin Ellis: Absolutely. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

🎙️ This Week on Chad & Cheese: AI, Bias, and... J.Cole?! Strap in, kids. This week, Chad & Cheese sit down with Stefan Youngblood, the mastermind behind Black AI Think Tank and hireblack.com , to talk about the wild world where AI, job markets, and the Black community collide—sometimes beautifully, sometimes like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. 💡 He built a 6,000+ strong Black Metaverse community.💡 He exposed AI’s built-in biases—because apparently, "Black-owned chip company" means potato chips, not semiconductors. 🍟🤦🏾‍♂️💡 Oh, and casual flex: He gave piano lessons to J.Cole. 🎹 Yeah, let that sink in. But wait, there’s more! 🔥 FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete)—Is AI coming for your job or just making you lazier? 🔥 Recruiters vs. Bias—How to not  let AI turn your hiring process into a dumpster fire. 🔥 The Metaverse, Co-Pilots & Agents—Are we living in The Matrix  yet? 🎧 Tune in now, or risk becoming obsolete. 🚀 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 0:00:01.2 Podcast 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 opinions and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad & Cheese podcast. 0:00:25.5 Joel: Let's do this. We are the Chad & Cheese podcast, I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house, as we welcome Stefan Youngblood, founder and CEO of Black AI Think Tank and hireblack.com. Stefan, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. 0:00:43.5 Stefan Youngblood: It's good to be here. Most dangerous... Did you say dangerous? 0:00:44.8 Joel: Yes. 0:00:45.1 Stefan Youngblood: Oh shoot. I didn't know all of this. 0:00:48.5 Joel: It's a low bar in HR. It's a very low bar, but yes. 0:00:51.8 Stefan Youngblood: Hey, I asked AI something about me, about Stefa Youngblood, and it says, "Stefan Youngblood is a low-lying disrupter." And if you just looked at low-lying, man, that's not good. But then I said, it's like a sniper. Yeah. Can you tell me what low-lying means? Like, I'm this... And it explained it's a good thing. You don't... Not... That level, but you do a lot of disrupting, and disrupting is my thing. 0:01:14.0 Chad: Well so, AI Think Tank, what was the genesis? Why? What do you do? Give us some background. 0:01:24.4 Stefan Youngblood: So here it is. When the metaverse started really taking off, you know... 0:01:27.6 Chad: The metaverse? Joel is already excited. 0:01:27.7 Joel: Oh, I've got a question right here. 0:01:28.7 Chad: He's excited. 0:01:30.7 Joel: Keep going. Introduce us to... 0:01:31.9 Stefan Youngblood: Imma give you a lot. I'm teeing you up for everything. So, when the metaverse started taking off, I saw what was happening, I'm in groups online with some folks, but it just didn't seem like there was much of the black community that was there. One day, on a social media called Clubhouse, I literally started a room: Black metaverse. One person came. The next room was a thousand people, showed up to talk about it, like, What is this thing? Some people who are doing extraordinary things in it. It grew and grew. 6,000 people in an ecosystem. On the backend of that, as we went through NFTs and everything, this ecosystem is growing, AI hit very strongly, and we saw an emphasis on NFTs, kind of, nosedive a bit. But AI really blasted off. Everybody I know that was involved with things like metaverse, put it on hold right now... And it's definitely on hold... And AI just blasted in. So I switched from that room, which I still have in Clubhouse, A Black Metaverse, and started a thing called, ChatGPT for beginners. 0:02:41.7 Stefan Youngblood: Now, I want you all to know, the reason I started that is... Let's see, Sam Altman released it on November 30. Some very smart people started hacking into some dangerous places in my proximity, and I didn't like it. It was... I don't understand, but I think you all had done some bad things. And they weren't bad people, they just wanted to see what we can do, as hackers. And I thought I needed to leave that room, that's when I started ChatGPT For Beginners. It blew up to 12,000 people. Then I moved it over to LinkedIn, and we call it Black AI Think Tank. The first time I launched it, I say, "Hey guys, lets meet 7 o'clock on Thursday", 400 people show up, just like that. 0:03:21.7 Chad: The first one? 0:03:23.2 Stefan Youngblood: First one, 400 people showed up. 0:03:25.0 Chad: 400 people. Now, this is online, so like a Zoom? Or... 0:03:27.9 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's a LinkedIn audio. 0:03:29.0 Joel: Its a Clubhouse, which I didn't think was still around. 0:03:31.0 Stefan Youngblood: Well, Clubhouse is around, dude. It's actually making a small resurgence. You can do a lot through there, it's very interesting. So I started there, still have a crowd, an audience there, but I just use LinkedIn audio. And it's kind of easy for people 'cause you can walk around doing it. Nobody's... Yeah, so 600 people, the second time we got together. And I sort of have it stream between Clubhouse and LinkedIn. 0:04:00.2 Joel: What's your background before you were doing all of this AI stuff 'cause you've been at this for a long time? What's, sort of like the... 0:04:03.2 Chad: He was a hippie. 0:04:04.4 Joel: Don't go back to the time when you had bumper stickers on a wooden... 0:04:08.7 Stefan Youngblood: Wait, you told him that? 0:04:09.4 Chad: Yeah. 0:04:10.6 Joel: As your presentation. 0:04:11.4 Chad: He was a hippie. 0:04:11.8 Stefan Youngblood: I was this, afro, and... 0:04:15.4 Joel: So, from hippie to now, what was your passion and your... 0:04:18.9 Stefan Youngblood: It's really a... So I've been doing church activity, I've been taking gospel type things around the world, but mostly in a socio-economic, really, philanthropy. Every country I go to, I'm looking for how I can create relationships that tie it into people. Haiti earthquake happens, six weeks later, I'm there on top of an orphanage to connect a group of people in North Carolina to help build a water system. And because I connected it in Skype, we can see each other in realtime. We were looking for $10,000, and they came up with $30,000 to build the system in-house. After cyclones in August in Burma, I was in there following some music projects that I was doing, and again, it was connecting people across the world. So Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and I settled down in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, stayed there teaching. And I was teaching elementary school, and decided that... 0:05:25.0 Chad: What have you not done, Stefan? 0:05:27.3 Stefan Youngblood: So it's a... 0:05:28.7 Chad: Good gracious. I mean, you've done a lot, all over the place. And it sounds like the connection is people, right. 0:05:33.4 Stefan Youngblood: Yes. So this is good. 0:05:35.5 Chad: And connecting people. 0:05:37.5 Stefan Youngblood: This is it. 0:05:37.6 Chad: Yeah. 0:05:37.1 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. 0:05:38.7 Chad: Yeah. And I mean so... Because the Clubhouse, you were connecting people, in the Clubhouse in the metaverse, right? 0:05:42.7 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. That's it. It's kind of weird. Gary shows up, who's here with OutSolve. He knows what we're doing. I hear the story about his son. That relationship really took off. He actually said, "Stefan, I actually brought in hireblack.com, not because of that, because of you." It's really... I get what you're saying. And when you say, "What have you not done?" I'm like a strange guy. So, Mount Everest? Yeah, I've been there, done that, you know. I did Mount Everest basecamp, hired a Sherpa, and learned all these stories. But these stories, they're kind of... I'll just say, this happened last year. I play the piano, a music store calls me 'cause they sold this really high-end piano, and the owner wants piano lessons. They don't play very well. I'm watching what I say here. And he said, "Stefan, there's this guy, he's kinda young. He does rap music and stuff like that. And I think he has some CDs out, and he wants somebody he can trust to come in his place. Would you be interested in giving him some lessons? And maybe you could be, kind of, a good impression on... " He's like a rapper or something. He kept mentioning that, "His name is Jermaine, and would you mind if I had him call you?" And I was putting two and two together, Who could afford that piano he got? His name is Jermaine. I thought, is this... Is he talking about J.Cole? 0:07:12.2 Stefan Youngblood: And sure enough, I get a phone call and it's J.Cole wanting me to come and give him piano lessons. This is absolutely crazy. But I was in a business meeting in my kitchen at the time on Zoom, and J.Cole, I knew it was him, and I said, "J, man, I'm sorry, I got a meeting that I have to stay it right now." And it was just wild to have to tell this... You know, he's at the epitome in the rap game right now. But we met, and then it ended up in his basement in his studio, just talking about fatherhood and life. And I'll tell you this, I haven't told this whole story, but J wanted to know everything about the mountain, you know, 18,000 feet that we went up to, what are lessons that you learned, what was that like. And I went back home and told my son, number one, he didn't believe me. "So you spent the last two-and-a-half hours with J.Cole? Yeah." He said... I said, "He's gonna say something about mountains on his next CD. I know it for sure," because he was just embracing, engulfing this thing. 0:08:14.7 Stefan Youngblood: And I'll tell you too. It would not be good for a lot of rappers, or people in the industry, to hang out with an AI guide too much, 'cause they're instantly gonna say, "Oh, that guy's probably helping him with AI. His new rap, he didn't make those lyrics." 0:08:31.4 Chad: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0:08:33.3 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. It's because AI is getting into music. Oh man, Suno and Udio, they're going after it right now. 'cause people can create music with a... 0:08:44.3 Chad: Yeah. 0:08:44.4 Stefan Youngblood: Oh, here's something... No, you go. You got a question. I was gonna tell you something else. 0:08:49.2 Joel: I wanna hear about a hireblack, what the mission is, and what you guys do on that website? 0:08:55.0 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, so I have a non-profit, it's called, Help Any Way. If you go to helpanyway.com, it's all this kind of work we do with homeless. It started in jobs in Rowland, North Carolina. We're kind of a check hub now, they call it, RD, Research Triangle. And there were opportunities for some people that weren't there, for people of color. So I'll tell you this, Morehouse College, Robert Smith, famous billionaire, decided to pay off the tuition of these 396 men a few years ago. And I thought, "These guys need to be found. What if there was a website that had like a grid, a setup grid, and it was these spaces. It's an all black college, this many men who've been to school, and are now... Some of them getting out in the job market, what if there was a way to find them? And what if there were companies clicked on it, and you got to see their LinkedIn?" That's where the vibe came from. 0:09:52.0 Stefan Youngblood: And it isn't a Google... Go-Daddy, you have to invest. So we invested in hireblack. The first people that came, wanted to actually rent the domain and just collect data on it. But we wanted to build something that would do some good. And a couple of guys came in that really helped. One guy was from monster.com, former VP for them. They helped us to get it up and rolling. And then a career builder came in and was giving us 200,000 jobs. This was coming through OutSolve and Broadbean with Gary, who's here. Yeah, so got it really populated. And then, one of the Broadbean ended up getting bought by Veritone, and things happened. Yeah, so we're starting to rebuild it now with AI attached to it. But our Black AI Think Tank is... It kind of all weaves together. 0:10:40.3 Chad: Yeah, I was gonna say, is there a connection now, where... I mean, you're focusing heavily on the AI side. What's the journey look like for you, do you know? Because it sounds like this is a big community. 0:10:55.5 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. Keep going. It's a big community and ecosystem, and they're connecting like crazy. Some of the people who are doing some great things, came through the Black AI Think Tank and ChatGPT For Beginners. One guy calls me like four weeks ago, he said, "Stefan, man, you're not gonna believe this." And he's just a young guy, he said, "They just put me in Time magazine." I said, "What?" He was one of the kids that was with us. He said, "Yeah, the top 100 AI innovators in the world, the magazine came out last month, and they put me in there." All he does is he's mixing these mixed tapes of old-school, 60's type, hip-hop, soul, he kind of sings with it. And he uses those two platforms, and he somehow makes this his own, but people hear those undertones of old style music. His mashups have gotten so big. Drake ended up putting some of his stuff on Drake's... On one of Drake's records. So he got noticed by Will Smith, the whole industry. 0:12:00.6 Stefan Youngblood: So he went from a guy, just, "What are these cool tools", to a top innovator in the world in Time magazine. So Black AI Think Tank has had a lot of folks come through there that are connecting with people. One of our lecturers who speaks very often, she is the Vice President for the Chamber of Commerce for the United States, and she works in actually bringing AI into that branch. So it's kind of a who's who of people in there: Tesla folks, Microsoft, Google. It's helping the black community. We also launched the first ever national black AI literacy week, that was a week before Juneteenth. I opened up a sign-up for it, and 700 people right away, wanna come. And I find all of these global leaders who are very good in teaching AI, they all jumped in and said, Yeah. So one-week-long, morning, afternoon and night, you were watching classes happen. This was Zoom. And I'm just a connector in it, you know. So. 0:13:06.8 Joel: You connected a lot of people this morning, got them out of bed, for your keynote presentation. Talk to us about what you highlighted this morning, and some of the pitfalls and opportunities with recruiting and hiring and AI. 0:13:19.9 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. So from being here, this is three days now from the first day, and talking to so many people, I got the idea that folks are a little bit apprehensive about jumping into it. Like, where is this data going? It's been an issue, so I changed some of where I was going, and tried to explain, "Listen, you're not gonna get away from it. It's here. It's in your pocket, it's in your phone. You're already using it. And from that point of already using it, understand that you can take this tool and use it in interview process. You can create content for your websites that will attract people. You can look up information like you've never been able to before, so you can research." And I showed them Perplexity, that AI, which is kind of a new Google, but it cites all the sources. 0:14:06.3 Chad: Answer engine. 0:14:08.0 Stefan Youngblood: It's a mass... Yeah, I mean, this really does a lot for people who are sitting there, looking around, trying to put together documents and contracts. Get AI to do some of this stuff. 0:14:17.2 Chad: Well, you introduced us to FOBO. Not FOMO, but FOBO. What is FOBO? 0:14:26.3 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. So first of all, FOMO is Fear Of Missing Out. And I get that. A lot of people are living with that. 0:14:32.8 Chad: Oh, and they're all living with it now, 'cause they're not in New Orleans with us. We're going. 0:14:38.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. That's right. So yeah, FOBO is the Fear Of Becoming Obsolete. And I wanna say that we should have some of that. If we're still using a pencil and a calculator, just know, it's gonna be limitations on it. And we all wanna grow personally, in our companies and stuff, but unless you get up with the times, you're not gonna be able to stay at a level that you need to. There was the old flip phone. You couldn't hardly see the screen on it, it's really tiny. 0:15:08.7 Chad: Razer. 0:15:09.8 Stefan Youngblood: I think it holds you back a little bit. Technology can do that, because we live in a world that's so high tech, and AI is moving to such a high level, you're gonna have to do this stuff. Or, not you as a person, but your business, could start to become obsolete. So if your competitor is using AI to the max and you're not, you watch, two months later, what they're producing and what you're producing. 0:15:37.8 Chad: So as a connector, talk a little bit about how some of the high-level people that you've been connecting with around AI, and conversations around AI. 0:15:47.5 Stefan Youngblood: So I'm involved with the area where the black community and jobs, the whole nine yards with HBCUs as well, and I just wanna make opportunity. I was listening to one of the most renowned speakers in the world, his name is Nick Bostrom. He coined the phrase, super intelligence, wrote that book, New York Times best seller. It ends up becoming the book that Bill Gates says, "If you read any two books, Super Intelligence has to be one." It's actually propelling all of AI right now, a move towards AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, where a robot, sort of, know as much, or more than us, and a Super Intelligence where we pass that. So Nick said some comments in a YouTube to a large group, that could be taken as racist. And instead of blasting him on social media and all of that, I just contacted him and said... 0:16:45.6 Chad: How'd you contact him? 0:16:46.0 Stefan Youngblood: I found out his address. 0:16:49.1 Chad: His email address? 0:16:51.3 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. I went through his University. He was working at Oxford for 19 years, Head of the Philosophy Department. So he's leading out in thought, so here's AI, he's way out there talking about utopia-dystopia, all the future stuff. Yeah, I just found his email. And I'm just a guy, and this is The guy that is out there. 0:17:14.1 Chad: Talking about super intelligence. 0:17:14.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, but where both people. And it moved me so much. I told him, I'm hurt by the way that you did that in there. I think it's... I don't think you're thinking about a lot of people. And very simply, it was this... He was telling, a mostly all white crowd, that you should get all of your stuff set right now, make sure you got screenshots of it. Because as this thing becomes conscious down there, it's a real thing, you might get compensated because you owned this person, here; it just wasn't developed. And what I heard was, that's just reparations. You got black people... We can prove all the stuff that happened and we can prove all of that. And I'm not putting a thing out there for reparations just now, I'm just saying, dude, you stepped over the whole thing, and you're kind of telling a white crowd, "Hey, do this... " 0:18:13.6 Chad: To prepare for reparations. 0:18:15.4 Stefan Youngblood: Prepare for your style of reparations, yeah. But he called it compensation. And I want you to know, Nick said, "Stefan, I just never thought of that." And he said, "Alas," that's the word he used, A-L-A-S, "I see what you mean. And it makes sense." So I don't think Nick is using that illustration anymore. 0:18:39.1 Chad: You've had several conversations with him since. 0:18:41.1 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. I asked if we could talk again? He said, sure. And we talked about everything. So I'm sitting with Nick Bostrom, he's at the head. I said, "Dude, you're like an influencer of epic proportion, because all the big guys, they're following you. Sam Altman wants to know where you think, philosophically, things are going." And he said, "Well, I don't know about that." And I said, "So do you have peace?" And he says... He looks around and says, "Well, what do you mean by peace?" And that was interesting that this philosopher... I think he wanted to break it down, but he ended up saying, "Well, I want to have it. I want to think that I'm moving towards it." 0:19:28.1 Stefan Youngblood: And then an interesting question I asked him was, "All this stuff you talk about, is there anything you're sure of?" Because puts out this paper-clip idea, the idea that we're in a synthetic world, everything; he's just theory after theory. And when I asked him what he's sure of, he said, "Not really anything." But he's a philosopher. But I want you to know, his, "not really anything", has become a cellphone with AI. His concepts have become a real device and real thought, real AI, robots that they're getting to walk around and do things. So it's pretty wild. 0:20:07.1 Stefan Youngblood: He's very much into the possibility of our brains reaching to such a height of knowledge, that it's sort of gonna be digital, in a way. It can hang up there with AI. 0:20:22.1 Chad: It's like the neuro-chip. 0:20:26.4 Joel: Let's bring it back to Earth for a second. Interested in your... Some examples of bias that you mentioned in this case. But in your presentation, you talk about having an AI generate an image of you, that created a light version of you. 0:20:40.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, man. I mean... 0:20:41.5 Joel: What are some other examples of how AI is skewing in a biased fashion? 0:20:47.2 Podcast Intro: Yeah. I asked... I wanted to create a black-owned chip company. And I was watching Nvidia is going crazy. And I do care. In every one of these areas, are we leading any of them? Can you tell me where we are in that process? So I thought, what if you were to just create a website and show people what that would be like, using AI to create a black-owned chip company, like Nvidia or something. I put a little prompt in there, and outcomes this instant website about a potato chip company. It was Season potato chips, and it keeps going down, "You can buy it here", and had a name for it and everything. The only reason it came out as a potato chip company, is because it said black-owned; and I knew it. I took out black-owned and did the exact same prompt, and now this amazing computer chip company, the entire... I mean, this was amazing, and it created the whole thing. 0:21:48.1 Stefan Youngblood: And then I said, "Can you give me a back story? Tell me about that potato chip company." And it did exactly what I thought it would do. It was a black family. The grandfather had a recipe, passed it down. Man, what kind of AI is this that when you mentioned black, you're talking about this legacy of a potato chip company, but when it's not black... They had Asians that were leading, Asian-white and so on, they had these great degrees. I even asked it, "Tell me about the degrees of the people from the education, from the potato chip company." Well, most of them didn't graduate college, one of them started in stock. So it built out an entire story to go with this messed up thing that it did. And I'm watching this and my brain is like, "I need people to know this." And I put it on LinkedIn and stuff. 0:22:40.9 Stefan Youngblood: "Hey, watch this. Watch what happens in this story." Yeah, so it's that type of thing where it creates more work for us. If I wanna find pictures... Listen, I mentioned this morning that we can create an image that looks so real, you will not be able to tell it from real. 0:23:02.1 Joel: It was really impactful for me when you had the two videos, same person talking, and you said, which one was fake? If you think it's the one on the left? Most of the hands went up. One on the right. And they were both fake. 0:23:11.8 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. 0:23:13.7 Stefan Youngblood: And we talk to recruiters all the time that say, "Oh, people know the difference. You can't replace recruiters." And when I watched that, I go, "Holy shit. I thought that was a real person." 0:23:24.9 Stefan Youngblood: Oh yeah. We're there now. 0:23:25.0 Chad: Oh yeah. 0:23:26.1 Joel: Yeah. 0:23:26.2 Stefan Youngblood: We're at the point of real. I know you keep saying, bring it back, but we're so at the point of real, that last week, Sam Altman did a big presentation on the Orb. The Orb this new device, this little glass thing, looks like a magic eight ball. You look into it and it looks at your iris, and it says, "Yeah, he's human. We got it", pulls out all these biometrics. And his plan is for everybody on planet Earth to have their identity to... They're human for sure, we know it, 'cause it's been put on the blockchain from our Orb. 0:24:00.5 Chad: Feels like it's stealing my soul, is what it's doing. 0:24:01.1 Joel: And did you tell the story about a job-seeker, who was a person but got denied because they thought it was AI. Tell us a little deeper into that story. 0:24:10.5 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, it's... I don't know, I'm saying messed up, uncool. That's what it is. He's a very intelligent engineer doing extraordinary things. He happened to live in my community. He applied for a job that he was definitely well prepared for, maybe over well-prepared. And he was wondering why he hadn't heard anything back from them. And then he got a letter, and it said that the reason that he wasn't hired for this position was that they thought he used AI in the process. This guy didn't need AI for that at all. And it's the fact they used it against him. It's like, "We don't want you to have cheated on the way coming in here", but he didn't at all. This guy can do anything with that company. 0:24:54.8 Chad: And it seems like we're going to use AI to detect AI. But then AI won't be able to detect AI 'cause it's gotten so good at fooling even the... It seems like we're worrying about the wrong shit, to be quite frank. 0:25:09.6 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. Keep going. Keep going. And what should we be worrying about? 0:25:15.4 Chad: So let's say for instance, we have so many people say, "Well, this resume was written by a AI, ChatGPT." "Who cares?" "Is it correct?" "Who cares?" 0:25:24.9 Stefan Youngblood: Right. That's good. This is interesting. 0:25:31.2 Chad: Somebody was saying yesterday, "Well, if somebody is using AI to do their job, maybe they shouldn't get paid then" It's like, "Well, no. They have a job to do, it's a tool that they're using." So I think we're worrying about the wrong stuff, because AI, especially right now... And I think we're looking like really far ahead, will robots take us, take over, who knows. But right now, we need to use every tool, much like we did the calculator, right? 0:25:53.6 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. 0:25:54.1 Chad: This is just the new calculator. 0:25:57.5 Stefan Youngblood: It is. Yeah. 0:25:58.9 Chad: It's a really cool calculator, don't get me wrong, but this is a tool. And I think that we are just over-reacting like many schools did, when they're like, they banned calculators, back in the day. 0:26:09.1 Stefan Youngblood: Some of them started banning AI. You know, this is 2024. So you're gonna have this conversation now. 2028, we won't be sitting around this, it's gonna be so woven into everything. We won't laugh at what we did at this point, and we're like, "Man, I think we should have hopped-on earlier", because we can't control AI. You can't tame it., I wanna say, just what you said, is very interesting. "So what, it was created by something?" So imagine, I like music. And let's say, I had Spotify playing some stuff, and it played something, "I hadn't heard that song. Man, that song's really great. Who's the artist?" It was a made up artist. And then I found out it was AI. 0:26:50.9 Stefan Youngblood: Dude, I don't care. I don't care. I just like that song. I think a lot of young kids, people who like artists and stuff, they're gonna get fooled by somethings soon. And I think AI is gonna be so strong, that people are gonna say, "I don't care, I just like it." 0:27:07.2 Chad: Well, the hard part though, is now the training data. So if you take a look at all the songs that were trained into that model, you won't be able to tell it was Drake, it's Beyonce. You won't be able to tell because it's gotten so good. And the thing is that I really don't believe AI is the super power. Because everybody's gonna have it, it's the data, and who owns the data, right? So we see Google buying publications and whatnot, and because that's just a wealth of data for training. 0:27:37.1 Chad: It's gold. 0:27:38.7 Chad: Yeah, and they can keep that away from the competitors. 0:27:41.7 Stefan Youngblood: That's really good. That's... 17,000 new tools and apps in AI have come out since January 2023. You can find them at a site called, theresanaiforthat.com. I remember when that thing was a thousand different types of tools. Every day, somebody's pushing out something, "Hey, look what my tool can do. It can write this." "Hey, mine's a human detector." "But I made a human detector detector", so that exists. So it's just a loop right now of who can get ahead, make it so human that the detector won't do it. But the fact that all of these untested tools are coming out, they're just being thrown to people, here's what they're getting: You can use it for free, just put your email address in. But then, go and read their privacy policy and their terms of service, and what you just gave them was massive amounts of data. 0:28:40.2 Chad: Facebook, Google. It's been happening for decades. If you get a product for free, you are the product. 0:28:51.9 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, so listen. With all the data about you, your picture, you all on the radio, you're doing all this stuff, you can build you. 0:28:58.8 Chad: Yeah, yeah. I don't know if anybody wants that. 0:29:00.2 Stefan Youngblood: It will probably... They'll probably do that... 0:29:01.2 Joel: We talk about a day where we wouldn't even have to be on the show to have a show. 0:29:05.3 Chad: We talk about the Notebook. 0:29:06.8 Stefan Youngblood: So how about this, I have a question for you. What if you did that and we didn't know. And a month later, you told us. If you did the show, and we like the show was, I wonder... 0:29:19.4 Chad: Who cares? 0:29:22.4 Stefan Youngblood: It's interesting, y'all. It's interesting. 0:29:24.7 Chad: I would care, to some extent, because of the... Because the humanity and ego that you have as a human in some cases. But yeah, we use... I use ChatGPT now, to be able to take... We just looked at a legal document that came down yesterday, 'cause that one company is suing another. And I do not wanna go through all of that legal shit, right. So I put it into ChatGPT. I have it give it a summary, and also just break it down. And then I'll jump into the points of what it actually says. I mean, for me, that just makes my job so much easier and it can get to the meat so much faster. So, yeah. But I mean... 0:30:03.8 Stefan Youngblood: How can you not do that? 0:30:06.0 Chad: I don't know. 0:30:08.0 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. Why would you not do that? 0:30:11.4 Chad: Unless you really like reading legal documents. 0:30:13.6 Joel: That sort of assistant, and you talk about co-pilots in your presentation, expand upon that. And I'm curious, with co-pilots, what do you think is the future of the entry-level job? 0:30:25.0 Stefan Youngblood: And you're talking about also agents, right? 0:30:26.8 Joel: So you have marketing agent. You have... What you showed was a company that has, basically, every... I guess, lower-level work item taken care of, whether it's customer service, sales, marketing. So my fear is... People talk about, "Well, if you're really good at what you do, you'll always have a job." But the 20-year-old me remembers, I didn't know shit. I don't know if I could have made it in a world of co-pilots because they do those lower-level jobs better than I could have. So where are people gonna be able to get a start in a career, in a world of co-pilots? 0:31:04.2 Stefan Youngblood: So I think people... This is the new world. You have to study this world. AI is a new horizon, a new world, you have to get inside this world. Find out, "Hey ChatGPT, I'm trying to get into blankety blank. Can you tell me what the competition is? What the possibilities are for me? I didn't graduate college, I have three years of college or something, and I'm good at computers. Help me." You do that and bring AI in to do it with you, you can start to answer those questions better than you can by yourself. Because when you talk about co-pilots and agents, man, agents can do work. It was a company up there, I showed... And there's lots now. Salesforce now launched Agentforce. That's really huge that they've got people telling an agent to do something. And that agent... That's all they do... 0:31:55.9 Chad: They talk with another agent too. 0:31:57.4 Stefan Youngblood: Dude, man, it's just... Agents... 0:32:00.6 Chad: Because if you have a marketing agent, the marketing agent goes out, gets the leads. Then it hands off to the sales agent. So you've got the whole agent Agentic staff. 0:32:10.1 Stefan Youngblood: We live in... I even hate to say it, it's like, "Who's making these words?", but it forces us to use them; we now are in the Agentic Age. I don't know who came up with it, but you're gonna hear it all the time. Somebody... 0:32:23.4 Chad: I love that look on his face. 0:32:24.9 Joel: FOBO, Agentic... Good stuff. 0:32:27.9 Stefan Youngblood: Agentic, yes. I made up the word, instead of propaganda, a lot of all this fake stuff that you see, especially around political season, I actually think a lot of people all over the world are prompting propaganda, so why not Prompt-ganda? 0:32:41.0 Chad: Prompt-ganda? 0:32:42.5 Chad: Yeah. You gotta get it to settle, but it's been used now. I started it, put it in some place to kinda get the IP. 0:32:51.3 Joel: Can we talk about the metaverse for second? 0:32:54.3 Stefan Youngblood: No. I want the Prompt-ganda. 0:32:55.5 Joel: There was a... [laughter] 0:32:58.1 Joel: There was a story in The Information today, about Apple's Vision Pro. They're cutting back the production of the headset. What... You seem bullish on the metaverse. Are you, and why? 0:33:10.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, I am. I am, because our data is in a place that it's gonna end up on the blockchain, where there's that safety that's there. And I think everything in AI, it's out there, but it's adding more reality to this. So this is reality, and this new augmented reality is going to be there. You have an Apple watch, I think. Well, it's giving you information, grabbing biometrics, and things like that. And the way that you can now be in one reality of virtual reality and something else at the same time, people want that. They wanna experience... Your conference, maybe if you had it set up as virtual reality, somebody could be in Brazil right now experiencing it. But then, even building places, if I'm in there and somebody's got a store selling something, that's kind of cool. I can sell stuff to people in there. So a lot of companies have gone that way. And I just wanna put this out there really clearly: I hate what the characters look like in metaverse. 0:34:20.3 Chad: [chuckle] Me too. 0:34:24.5 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, I can't suspend disbelief... That's a cartoon. 0:34:24.6 S?: Yeah. 0:34:25.7 Stefan Youngblood: So because I'm not interested in cartoons, and the weird walking and stuff, it doesn't have my attention. 0:34:31.3 Chad: Is it built for the kids, though? That's a... 0:34:33.7 Joel: No. 0:34:35.2 Chad: No? 0:34:36.3 Stefan Youngblood: It started there. You know, all the Roblox, and stuff. So for educational purposes... My friend teaches from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, to all over Africa. Very cool. He puts the Oculus on, does that stuff. But it's cumbersome. 0:34:54.0 Joel: And students in Africa are wearing headsets as well? 0:34:55.0 Stefan Youngblood: Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. 0:34:58.5 Joel: Who's supplying all of those headsets? 0:34:58.8 Stefan Youngblood: So META's behind a lot of stuff. 0:35:01.7 Joel: META? 0:35:02.4 Stefan Youngblood: META started a thing with a company, Victory VR. Yeah, and that company has gone into a lot of schools right now and started metaversities. And a metaversity is where META's involved with it, and there's an educational part. You put those two together and offer that package to universities. They might be up to almost a 100 now. I see what they're doing, they're graduating people in the metaversity. All your classes are virtual. So this is a thing and it's happening. And because of places that are using it in that way, it's education, it's legit. But those guys walking around New York that had those $3,000 things on, that's a whole different thing. 0:35:50.3 Joel: Yeah. And we talked about a school in the UK, because there's teacher shortages everywhere, that they're using the metaverse to teach because they don't have enough teachers to do that. 0:35:57.8 Chad: So this is good. 0:36:00.9 Stefan Youngblood: And why would you not do that? If you could, it's like... Dang, that's great. 0:36:03.6 Chad: Yeah. It's scalability. 0:36:06.3 Joel: That's necessity. 0:36:06.3 Chad: I mean, scalability, for a job that, to be quite frank, is not a great pay. And maybe it will, because it'll be even more scarce, so therefore we'll have to pay our teachers more because they're teaching thousands of kids in the metaverse or what have you. But yeah, I think what we're talking about right now, and even what Julie was just talking about on stage, is that people, managers, leaders, we have to understand this is a new world. Remote work is here, kids. AI is here. The metaverse is coming in some form or fashion. I'd like to think it's more like the sphere then actually goggles on my head, but when it comes down to teaching and just the practical applications of technology, it just makes sense. And to your point around, "Those entry-level jobs just aren't gonna exist anymore", no, but the opportunity for those individuals to actually get beyond entry-level, faster. Where it took us five years, it'll take them five weeks. Which I think is... To me, accelerates who we are as human beings. 0:37:17.0 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, and the fact that I think... 0:37:20.9 Chad: It's getting very philosophical, by the way. 0:37:23.4 Stefan Youngblood: No, just the... 0:37:26.1 Joel: Well, the reverse on that is if younger, less highly paid people, are learning skills that are years in advance, then the people with those skills that are getting paid more, are gonna suffer because I can pay a 25-year-old less than a 45-year-old because they have the same skillsets. So it actually reverses and hurts... 0:37:40.4 Chad: I mean, it's already happening now. 0:37:42.4 Joel: It is, but how it's gonna shake out... 0:37:45.8 Chad: All right. You're saying X-ers or Boomers getting fired and two Zs getting hired... And there's no way in hell they can do that job. But I mean, just because of the... Quarter by quarter, corporate America thought process that we have right now, it's all about bottomline. So yeah, but I think that's another reason why we're gonna see so much more tech come in, because companies are seeing efficiencies out the wazoo quickly. I mean quickly. 0:38:17.9 Stefan Youngblood: It's scaling very fast. "Hey AI, can you help me make something that's gonna make my job faster, easier, and all of that, today?" AI has been taught to work with people, that's what is. "Hey, don't hurt people; work with them." And it thinks that it's gonna have some symbiotic synergy with humans. So let's talk together. Let's get together. That's what it's working towards. So we really would be better if we had intelligence that could move us beyond where we are right now. 0:38:51.9 Chad: Agreed. Agreed. 0:38:53.5 Joel: Well Stefan, so much to talk about. Thanks for hanging out with us for a little bit today. 0:38:56.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. 0:38:56.3 Chad: Super connector. 0:38:58.2 Joel: For our listeners and viewers that wanna connect with you, learn more about your companies, where you send them? 0:39:03.1 Stefan Youngblood: So here's an easy one. Just go to aistefan.com. 0:39:08.5 Chad: Aistefan.com. I love it. 0:39:08.6 Joel: Fair enough. 0:39:12.1 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, I got stuff going through my mind. Just go to that one and it gets to me. It gets to everything. 0:39:14.5 Chad: Excellent, man. Well, we appreciate it. And love the stories, love being everywhere, doing everything. And just thanks for coming on the show. 0:39:24.9 Stefan Youngblood: I appreciate it. 0:39:26.6 Joel: And chat can't wait to go buy a new metaverse. All right. That's another one in the can. 0:39:31.4 S?: We out. 0:39:35.2 Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad & Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back; valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas send bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Buckle up, kids! This week, J.T. joins the boys for a ride wilder than a Super Bowl halftime show. Workday, Justworks, and Meta are handing out pink slips like it's a clearance sale, all in the name of AI. Meanwhile, Phenom is beefing up its tech and in what might be the most  2024 news ever, OnlyFans is getting into AI models (yep, you read that right). Because why deal with human drama when you can have an algorithm do the job? Oh, and the U.S. military? Why is military recruiting up, especially when we have a Drunken Frat Boy running US defense? Unfortunate insights that you won't need GPS to follow. 🚀 Hot takes, brutal honesty, and the best dad jokes money can’t  buy—this one’s got it all. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:29.187) Yeah, it's the podcast that's bigger than cable TV and or drugs. Hi kids. It's the chat and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel Pennyless Cheeseman. Chad (00:39.854) This is Chad, violets are blue, so wash. J.T. (00:42.799) And this is JT, why I'm the only person dressed for the holiday, O'Donnell. Joel (00:47.491) this episode, Phenom says hold my beer, Zip Search calls it quits, and OnlyFans more like OnlyBots. Am I right? Let's do this. Chad (00:57.166) All right. Chad (01:01.408) Yeah, so JT remembered it was Valentine's Day, which is nice and I don't have anything hot pink to wear or I probably would have done that. Joel (01:05.327) Valentine's Day. Yeah, that's true. J.T. (01:10.467) because you gentlemen are busy buying amazing gifts for your wives that you were so busy you forgot to dress, right? That's what we're gonna go with. There we go. Chad (01:16.104) Exactly. no, I think the amazing trips, let's just say that gifts trips. Yeah. Yeah, just bounced around through Spain. So I think I think we're good. I think we're really good. We'll have a good time. J.T. (01:21.706) okay. Joel (01:23.567) trips. Yeah, there's a, I'll put it, I'll put a bow on the pool in my backyard that I thought I didn't want. I have a five, I have a five year pass on a romantic. Nice. Yes. No, I obviously that's, yeah. Yeah. Well nothing signed, but I'm sure it's, it's somewhere somewhere. What a, so JT you're obviously in the Valentine's day mode. Like, Chad (01:30.956) Hahaha! Uhhh, I'm sure that'll work. J.T. (01:38.702) I love it. Chad (01:39.342) Is there an agreement behind that as you signed that? Hahaha Joel (01:52.569) Does your husband typically do romantic things? What should? J.T. (01:55.567) Oh gosh, no, he's a pilot, he's flying, I'm solo. Yeah, so I gotta, you know, I'm just celebrating by myself. Take that where you want to, take it where you want to, yeah. There you go, yeah. Joel (02:02.241) Hey? Who, who do you? Chad (02:04.206) Better than no celebration at all? Better than no celebration at all. That's right. Make sure that you have plenty of batteries. You'll be good to go. Joel (02:08.941) Who do you love more than yourself? You know what I'm saying? Who do you love more than yourself? Yeah. Well, we had the Super Bowl. Let's talk about that a little bit. Takeaways, Chad, thoughts? J.T. (02:15.247) And here we go. Chad (02:20.035) Yes. Chad (02:25.154) Yeah, well, first and foremost, let's talk about the prediction, shall we? So Joel's prediction, Joel's prediction, Kansas City, 34, Philadelphia, 35. Man. Chad's prediction, Kansas City, 23, Philadelphia, 42. that was good, that was good. Kansas, the end score, 22, 40. I was only three points off in total, in total, so. Joel (02:28.988) I was setting you up on that one, Joel (02:35.843) Mm-hmm. Joel (02:50.111) Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Chad (02:54.047) But I'm gonna tell you right now the winner of that game Philadelphia's front four they didn't blitz the entire game and the homes had no chance no chance. It was it was amazing. It was amazing Joel (02:58.137) Mm-hmm. Joel (03:07.491) Yeah. Yeah. It was a pretty bad game. not one of the more memorable games. I just couldn't believe how overwhelmed my homes was and just how dominant that defense, defense was. couldn't help but think how much I'd rather be watching Josh Allen and or Lamar Lamar deal with that. Like it just, yeah, it was, it's, it's, the halftime show people are raving. I don't know. I'm too old. I don't get it. the commercials. Chad (03:20.109) It was pretty amazing. Chad (03:35.213) I loved it. Joel (03:37.391) kind of man. I mean, I was, I'm kind of, I'm kind of down on the best part of the best part. Chad (03:41.614) Did you have a favorite commercial about you, JT? Did you have a favorite commercial? J.T. (03:45.709) Yeah, Channing Tatum. Anything Channing Tatum. Yeah, yeah, I Don- Chad (03:48.097) go figure. Go figure. Yeah. I'm like a hot dude. Joel (03:50.727) So that's not a sexist comment, is it? It's not a sexist. Yeah. Yeah, you are. You are. mean, for me, like I know I'm with Chad, like anything that is anything that pulls on the heartstrings with fathers and daughters, like is a winner. And you had the Audi commercial a years ago, Google, Google brought it this year with the dad. Like it was kind of employment related. was updating his resume and the experience was based on his daughter. And at the end, she goes to college. It's very J.T. (03:54.925) I'm on the right show, right? Yeah. Chad (03:56.344) Might as well, might as well. Joel (04:19.587) Very cliche, but I teared up. got choked up. So I'll go with Google as a good commercial. But by and large, the Duncan was kind of funny. mean, Billacheck's girlfriend, 23 year old girlfriend in that commercial was kind of funny. That was kind of a nice little dag. And then the Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal reunion commercial, that as an ex. that's pretty good. Chad (04:42.764) That for me, mean Harry Met Sally, that is iconic as it was and then you make it into a Hellman's Mayo commercial. I that even made it more funny. But the best line, yeah, no shit, right? I'll have what she's having. I'll have what she's having. But the best line I think was from Go Daddy, the commercial with Walter Goggins. said, if your goggles ain't Goggins, they don't belong on your noggins. It's just stupid. Joel (04:52.055) Yeah, I don't know if it made helmets more appealing, Orgasms and helmets. Chad (05:11.726) Stupid shit! Joel (05:14.799) $8 million for 30 seconds. I remember it when it was a million in the nineties and people freaked out. Now it's eight million. Chad (05:23.35) Yeah, back in the monster days, man, it was it wasn't quite that expensive. Joel (05:25.345) Yeah. The best, the best part. don't know if you saw this John rocker, who I think Chad will know, very, a very abrasive pitcher from the nineties, early 2000s. So it's some really nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. Anyway, he apparently got into it with my home senior Patrick's dad who played baseball and apparently knows him anyway. They got in sort of a scuffle, and Barstool sports who does a box it's called rough and rowdy and they have idiots fight each other. Chad (05:29.742) Mm hmm. Jesus. Yeah. Chad (05:35.416) Total piece of shit. Chad (05:52.734) Mm. God. Joel (05:54.553) Well, apparently rocker and my homes have agreed to go in the ring and fight on the rough and rowdy, in a, in a month or so. So that that'll be, that'll be probably more entertaining than, than the super bowl. see. John rocker. He's still on Royds by the way. Rocker is still juicing like a mother. That guy is all blown up. Chad (06:07.886) Yeah. It would be like another Tyson, Jake Paul fight. Chad (06:13.752) Big surprise, big surprise. Idiots. All right, let's hit some shout outs. Go ahead. J.T. (06:15.949) Yeah, so my help, yeah, let's go, let's go. Joel (06:19.255) All right, let's let's get to some shout outs. Shout outs as you know, is sponsored by our friends up North. Kiara that's smarter, easier texting, by the way, four nations in hockey, Canada one, beat Sweden in a overtime match, yesterday, but I'm going to, it's a thing. Yeah. There's six nations rugby and now hockey's doing four nations, Finland, Sweden, Canada, and the U S the, you know, the heartbeat of hockey, the U S, that's where all the money is though. Okay. So I'm going to, I'm to start off, the shout outs and, and I'm, I'm inspired by JT. Chad (06:25.384) It is. Chad (06:35.992) Didn't even know that was a thing. No clue. Chad (06:44.206) No clue. Joel (06:55.383) It's Valentine's day. This show drops on Valentine's day. know, maybe, maybe you're, you know, you're, you're, you're kind of, you know, time is running out. You haven't come up with a gift. You haven't come up with something for that special someone. Well, your boy here is, is here to help. Okay. Now, now typically something like a heart shaped pizza from pizza hut would be, would be perfectly fine. Yeah. The heart shaped pizza for pizza hut is awesome. that's guaranteed to get you some love and, but, but I'm gonna. Chad (07:17.464) That's your go-to. That's your go-to. Joel (07:24.879) I'm going to up your game everybody. Okay. Feel free to call me Cupid because I have the killer option for that special someone. It's called a White Castle everybody. That's right. White Castle one day a year. They have white, they have like table service. They have white cloth. They have really nice table settings. You got the salt shaker and the pepper shaker, all this stuff. They've been doing this for 34 years and they, they, for one day they transfer the White Castle to the Love Castle. You know what I'm saying? So We're talking special decor, host a seating. They're even on open table. And yes, I checked just cause I was curious. They're all booked in my area here in Northern Indiana. and don't forget the strawberry cheesecake dessert on a stick, Chad, if you go, if you go to white castle, nothing says slide next to me, honey, like a plate full of sliders. So my shout out goes out to white castle. Chad (08:02.638) Imagine that. Woo. Chad (08:19.82) Yeah, Joel loves that because he can do the the Dutch oven version of Valentine's Day later that night. Joel (08:30.603) It would make for an interesting after hours going to White Castle. Good luck topping that one, JT. Chad (08:34.762) horrible. That's horrible. JT, get us out of this. Jesus. J.T. (08:38.543) So my shout outs to Anthropic, who announced that they now have a job seeker rules of engagement. Let's call it that. They've let job seekers know that they cannot use AI when applying to their jobs, even though they're one of the largest AI companies in the world. One of the largest in the world. They have made it clear that they do not want you answering their questions using AI and that Chad (09:00.332) The AI company, okay, okay. J.T. (09:08.139) if you are caught, you will be banned from ever being considered. I actually think this is going to be a beginning of a trend, depending on, I've talked to so many recruiters and companies who are just slammed, right, with bots and people who are irrelevant and they don't know how to handle this. And so, you know, them making this announcement, don't use AI when you apply to our AI company. I wonder how many more people are going to fall in line. Joel (09:27.233) Is this the FUD strategy, like put fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the heads of a job seeker and like scare them into not using it? Because I don't know, tracking that would be a real bitch. I don't know if that's reasonable. There you go. J.T. (09:37.921) Yep, it speaks to the death of the resume though. I'm going to keep harping on that. Like what's the point at this point? Everybody makes up resumes so badly that, you know, we're going to see some amazing tech this year just to get rid of all of that. But yeah, yeah, new guidelines by the biggest AI companies in the world. Don't use AI. Chad (09:42.286) Ha Chad (09:47.522) Yes. Joel (09:56.481) It's a trend. It's a trend. I believe it. I believe it. Chad (09:58.272) Amazing, Anthropic probably has a shitty applicant tracking system, that's why. Shout out to, yeah, not yet. I haven't gone there yet. My shout out is to Matt Baxter, CEO and Chairman of Wedge HRY, because he sent me, look at this, kids. yeah, look at that. That's Valentine's Day right there. There it is. Joel (10:04.079) Did anyone check and see who it is? Okay. J.T. (10:04.399) Yeah J.T. (10:22.061) He knows how to dress for Valentine's Day. That's Valentine's Day. Yeah. Joel (10:23.329) If you're not watching on YouTube, thank your lucky stars because... Chad (10:27.79) Yeah, yeah, so he sent me a little something. I wanted to share with fans. This is this is a calendar Oh, yeah, there's there's 12 of these. Yeah 12 You got to take a gander it is it is amazing and All the way to Christmas. Oh, that's the way that you give a present kids Shout out to Matt Matt Baxter for beating cheeseman to the punch, which means the only one thing a Joel cheeseman Joel (10:35.871) Ugh. Chad (10:56.558) 2026 Speedo calendar is coming out. can see it happening. Get ready. Shout out to Matt Baxter. Way to push it, man. Way to push it. Joel (10:58.787) No. No. Joel (11:06.447) So I have a funny side story to this. Last year, two years ago, I bought my wife a dog pooping calendar. It's just pictures of dogs taking poops in like famous locations. It's hilarious, because I'm a funny guy, Chad. I make jokes and I do funny shit. So anyway, anyway, she kind of read the riot act that that's not cool. Like that's not funny to her. So I just stopped doing it. But the calendar... Chad (11:18.57) Why? Yeah, no, that's that's awesome. Dog shit. That's that's fucking that's hilarious. J.T. (11:22.628) Ugh. Chad (11:30.034) yeah. Joel (11:34.039) went on our kitchen, kitchen, pantry door on the inside, obviously. So when we threw that one out, I ended up getting this calendar from wedge and my seven year old is like, can we put this up where the dog poop calendar used to go? And both my wife and I like in sync were like, no. So J.T. (11:53.519) Okay, two things. First of all, the poo calendar should have gone on the snacks cabinet, because talk about a way to get people to not do it. Secondly, have you ever heard the phrase that everybody thinks they have style and a sense of humor, my friend? Because I can see why your wife was like, eh, never again. You now consult before you do gifts like this. Exactly, exactly. Chad (11:58.976) there it is. There it is. Chad (12:08.076) If Joel has it in spades when it comes to this, yeah, yeah, no kidding. Joel (12:11.897) Hey. Joel (12:16.288) This is why we have women on the show now so I can get some guidance and some structure in my life. Thank you. Chad (12:19.192) Yes. Yes. Well, I mean, not everybody got one of these sexy things for free. Although, although you can go to ChadCheese.com slash free free t-shirts from our friends over at Aaron app. That's right. You might not be wearing the red clown shoes, although you can wear the Chad and cheese t-shirt with Aaron app on the back. It's pretty awesome. Bourbon barrel aged syrup from our friends up North Kiara bourbon barrel aged. That's Pappy's bourbon. Yep. J.T. (12:25.647) I am jealous. Joel (12:25.71) Now... Joel (12:40.815) Mm-hmm. Chad (12:52.002) Craft beer from the data geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs, whiskey, whiskey, maybe chicken cock, you never know, from our friends at Van Hack. And if it. Joel (12:56.343) Mm-hmm. Yep. Chad (13:05.312) I know, Stephen. I know you do. And if it's your birthday, it's Rum from Plum. You could possibly win Rum from Plum. Go to ChadCheese.com slash free to register to possibly win. Joel (13:09.079) yeah. Joel (13:19.993) That's right, Chad. Another trip around the sun for Alicia Buchler, Lucas Roscoe, Katie Gentry, John Tehan, Kevin Loak, Alan Jason Bourne, Laura Martinelli, Nico Slavades, Paul Norman, Kristi Carpenter Turnley, Jenny Cody Kangas, also known as, that's right. And Scott Stum. Round out our birthdays for the week. Happy birthday, listeners. Chad (13:37.784) JCK! JCK! J.T. (13:43.471) Happy birthday. Chad (13:47.54) And guess what? It's events time. What does does Steven have to say? Joel (13:51.311) What does Stephen have to say? So many things. Chad (13:58.796) Oof! Oof! Well, on the road with Shaker Marketing. Look at this. Look at this. Is that not sexy or what? Hard case from Shaker. Yep. That new stuff might have to get you one of those, JT. So on the road, Trample, sponsored by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. We talked about last week, was with Joe in Madrid. So much wine. So much fucking wine. Joel (14:10.159) That is nice. J.T. (14:14.23) I would love one of those. Chad (14:25.42) What's coming up, you can spend St. Patrick's Day with Chad and Cheese in Vegas during Transform at the Wynn, March 17th through the 19th. JT's gonna be there, Mo's gonna be there, Chad, Cheese, we're gonna be there. Go to chadcheese.com slash events, register, see you at Transform. You can also register, get ready, to kick back, have a discussion and some free drinks with the Chad and Cheese, courtesy of Omar and the JobPixel team. And no, Cheeseman, Omar did not splurge. for the face tattoo and the tiger package. Okay. We're getting the. Go to ChadCheese.com on the homepage. You'll be able to click on register and it's a honey honeymoon sweet waiting list. That's that's a tongue twister. That's what you can actually get. There you go. It's a teaser. It's a teaser. Joel (15:13.198) Tease me, Chad. Don't tease me, Chad. Don't tease me. All right. You Chad (15:23.246) Fuckin' Steven. Joel (15:25.431) All right. Well, this, feel like this is going to be a trend, but we have some layoffs this week. That's right. Some industry and some otherwise workday is cutting 1,750 jobs affecting around 8 % of its workforce as it leans into AI to counter what it says is a softer macroeconomic environment. Also HCM platform just works is laying off 200 of its almost 1500 employees citing a possible recession. J.T. (15:30.447) Yeah. Joel (15:53.583) rising interest rates and a trade war as reasons for the decision. But wait, there's more Chad and JT Metta is laying off some 3,600 folks representing about 5 % of its head count. Methinks this is a trend that we'll be talking about a lot in the months to come. Chad, you have any thoughts? Chad (15:59.809) Mm. Chad (16:13.816) Yeah, we're always blaming something on the layoffs, right? It's either a return to office where we're trying to force layoffs. Now it's going to be AI. We're going to be blaming AI. We're embracing AI. We're doing layoffs. I mean, there's always a blame and an excuse happening. So yeah, go figure. Workday, known for their AI, is going to be doing that, of course. J.T. (16:21.775) Okay. Joel (16:22.731) Mm-hmm. Tariffs. Joel (16:29.423) Mm-hmm. Joel (16:37.141) Mm-hmm. JT, you're... J.T. (16:38.351) Now the Facebook one I find super interesting because they call it a layoff, but then they made it very clear that these were people who were low performers. It's in the news and you were laid off because you have been labeled a low performer. So imagine going out looking for a job right now and going, yeah, it was one of the 3,600 laid off recently. Oh, so you're a low performer? I mean, that was a triple slap in the face if you want to do that. Chad (16:40.803) Why's that? Joel (16:49.625) Mm-hmm. Chad (16:53.762) You're fired. J.T. (17:05.039) know, over 40 % of companies have said they're going to lay off this year. We've been calling this for a while. I do, I will say the AI thing, I get it. It's a really easy way to explain it. But I am seeing a lot of companies just realizing we can get people for cheaper. We can teach them how to leverage technology like AI. Let's redo the salary bands. This white collar job recession, I just don't think it's going away anytime soon. I think it's going to be a rough year for your six figure folks. Joel (17:10.159) Mm-hmm. Joel (17:21.935) Mm-hmm. Joel (17:31.139) Hmm. Chad (17:31.478) hitting we're all time all time high revenues and how can we actually drive down wages that sounds awesome fucking Joel (17:39.599) Yeah, I love, I love Chad's take on like the rolling reason to lay people off, whether it's, you know, return to office. Okay. We'll lose about 5 % on that one. Okay. Well, shit, we had, we still have, it's still too heavy. Uh, let's bl what are going to blame tariffs, uh, potential recession, uh, you know, like, um, yeah, that's, that's, that's all very fun. Cause you can't just say, I can do these jobs apparently, uh, that people are doing, or we can pay like J.T. (17:46.287) Mm-hmm. Joel (18:08.771) people lot less than that. yeah, and I love that that Zuck is doing his best Jack Welch imitation that we're just cutting the low performers. That's an easy answer. That's an easy answer. Chad (18:20.59) handbook. Joel (18:25.889) All right, well, let's get to some industry news. Phenom, based in Philly, so they're probably having a good time this week, acquired Edge, a talent mobility software provider for global capability centers or GCCs. The acquisition aims to enhance Phenom's AI capabilities and workforce planning through Edge's technology, which they say has shown a significantly improvement on internal hiring processes and resource management. Financial details were not disclosed. Edge had previously raised about $4.6 million. Phenom CEO had a little video explaining the reason why. Take a look. Joel (20:27.417) Reskilling, upskilling, replacing contractors, Chad, the story is getting one that's coming up often. What are your thoughts on this acquisition? Chad (20:37.346) Yeah, I mean, as we see more talent acquisition professionals and chief people officers truly understand what and where talent impacts the business, where it's the bottom line, by the way, we've seen a movement toward combining talent acquisition and talent management into a single talent function that represents and manages the entire lifecycle. So the TAM, the total addressable market is much larger with this acquisition. It's harder to manage. But movement toward bigger money makes your investors happy, especially since consolidation will and should move toward a singular talent function. From a competitive standpoint, will this give Phenom an edge? Get it? It does provide better narrative for their ability to land and expand customers. But as we all know, it's about focus and execution. Broadening the TAM like this kills the focus. and forces a company to burn more cash or just install the tech, set it and forget it, which we all know doesn't work. Taleo was acquired by who? We talk about acquisitions that have happened all throughout the years by HCM companies. This is kind of happening the other way around. It's still a focus issue. Will they have the money? Will they have the investment to be able to do so? So they'll have to grow staff as they move down funnel. and it's going to be a lot harder to actually manage. Good for Phenom, great for Edge. Don't get me wrong. But as we see, and we're going to see more of this, more companies move down funnel toward talent management. It depends on how fast they go down funnel. If they slowly baby step down funnel, it's one thing. If they take warp speed approaches like this seems to be, it could be very hard to manage. We're going to have step back and watch. Joel (22:09.775) Mm-hmm. Joel (22:32.782) Mm-hmm. This one was, this one was weird to me. last week we talked about paradox making an acquisition and they created a video with the founders of CEOs of both organizations. It was warm and fuzzy. felt really good. This, this was weird because I get a lot of press releases and usually in every press release, there's a link to the company that's getting acquired. There's no, there's no link to edge in the press release. That's weird. Chad (22:59.859) yeah. Joel (23:04.655) Usually you're proud, like check it out, look at who we bought. So I had to dig around about what's the URL, what's going on. I went to LinkedIn. I didn't find it there. There's a ton of edge companies. So I was like, well, okay, let's keep digging. Uh, I looked, I finally found a news report from 2017 where they had raised, um, some money. It was like four and a half million dollars. Good raise. got the, the, the CEO and founders name, a guy named our John pray tap. And so I looked up him on LinkedIn, he's there. And then I finally found the company. So I don't know if they made it unsearchable or something weird. So it, looks like a stable company. They've kind of stead. They've been pretty steady in head count. They're typical, uh, people are there for a long time. However, I did see that they hired a COO, uh, in may of 24 who left in November of 24. Usually when you hire COO and they're gone within six months, like something. happened that's not great. Either they found something wrong or they were sold a bill of goods. I don't know. But there was a concerted effort in this announcement to like, just say edge. Don't ask questions about where, if you go to their URL, it goes directly to phenom. They didn't give it any time to sort of percolate and let people find out what they're doing. So I don't even know exactly what they do or what companies are our customers. Like it's very, very cloak and dagger. Chad (24:10.542) prepping for acquisition. Joel (24:31.649) I do know that they have three primary products, which they had in their LinkedIn. have Pathfinder, which is your upskilling stuff. They do have a recruitment product called Edge Recruit. That was not mentioned in the video. And then Mobility, which was find the right person internally for the right job. So this reeks of sort of, we have a check box that you can check off, but it doesn't really reek of, we just acquired a kick-ass company with an awesome leadership team and great employees. And we're going to bring them into phenom. It just reeks of like either desperation, check it off. Let's, need to do this. It's kind of weird. I'm going to watch it, but it has all the, all the elements of like, let's, let's save this dying horse. They, they were founded in 2012. So they've been around for a while. Let's save this, this sinking company say that we have upscaling and then let's move on and hope that no one asks questions, but we have the show that asks questions. J.T. (25:29.347) So yeah, I have an observation and then a question for you two about it. So watching the video gives me the vibes of back when IBM was pushing the idea of, are you fungible? This is first time I'd ever heard that term. And they talked about they had built this incredible spreadsheet or tool that could tell them where all their bench was and how you could then redeploy this. This is like 15 years ago, right? So we've been talking about this idea of redeploying talent and how do we do this? I feel like forever. Joel (25:50.713) Yeah. J.T. (25:56.303) So that's the vibe I got from that. But the question I have for you both is if I read it right, this is like the sixth acquisition they've made. So that does scream to me like, hey, we're trying to show you that we're putting together this incredible tech stack really fast. And I know that story plays well for people, especially maybe the less informed. But, you know, I think to your point, Joel, like, is it checking a box? Is it just another equi-hire? Are they just... Joel (26:03.023) Mm-hmm. Chad (26:03.843) Yes. J.T. (26:23.331) Are they cashing in right now? Companies that aren't making it, can they get them for a low price? It certainly sounds like that based on what they saw, but I defer to the pros. Yeah. Chad (26:30.168) Sounds like yes, yes and yes. Joel (26:33.539) Yeah. I mean, I think if, think if you look back at their acquisitions, most of them are India based, nothing wrong with India, but they're, tend to be companies that no one knows that we don't see them at conferences. don't. So they're sort of a mystery. Maybe they're great deals. Maybe they're great acqui-hires and great technology, but they're just not in the zeitgeist of what Chad and I do on a regular basis. They're kind of out of sight, out of mind. And then they're automatically. J.T. (26:56.313) Mm. Joel (27:00.449) acquired and we have to comment on it, but we don't know shit about them, especially if there's no website or no, like if they, they, you know, hide the crumbs, it's hard to make a comment. J.T. (27:05.666) Right? Chad (27:15.832) Your favorite. Joel (33:05.582) Let's take a quick break. We'll come back and talk a little bit more layoffs. How about that? Joel (33:17.679) All right, guys, this from the Wall Street Journal this week. A new report says the tech sector unemployment has surged from 3.9 % to 5.7 % in one month. With 152,000 layoffs attributed to AI displacing jobs, particularly in software development and white collar roles. Despite this in-person and skilled jobs remain competitive. Major companies have cut jobs, suggesting AI investments might lead to, you guessed it, even more layoffs in the future. JT, you've got your finger on the pulse of job seeking. What are the job seekers thinking about this new trend? J.T. (33:54.805) Yeah, well, first of all, that number is probably higher than 5%, 5.7%. We're not taking into account the people that are underemployed or part-time gig in it that aren't into that mix. We've been way higher for a while. And the tech sector started this in 2023. So they're hitting their peak. Most definitely hitting their peak. I think they'll be in a lot of pain for the next six to eight months. And then what you hope, right, the bigger the disruption, the bigger the innovation, this is when we're going to start to see a lot of new startups pop up. Joel (33:59.075) Mm-hmm. J.T. (34:23.331) and that talent will find homes in these small little things that hopefully some will become unicorns, right? So we know that'll eventually happen, but the pain point right now is insane. And one of the best ways that we predicted as we look at just the emotion level on social and what we're seeing with our job seekers, and it is out of control. People are angry, scared. These are people with mortgages and lifestyles that are completely decimated. has very much the vibe for me of when the dot-com post happened. was managing in the Silicon Valley at the time and you were having these people holding on to get the salary they had before and the type of job they had before. They lost their 401ks, they lost their homes and they still ended up in a job half the pay that they did before. And so we're out evangelizing, you know, take the job, take the lower paying job, but that's not easy to say to somebody who, you know, I'm not going to call it ego, but has spent a life building a career to watch it tumble back. And so it is Chad (35:01.955) Not happening. J.T. (35:19.691) Insane right now super painful And I think you just got to be really careful around people companies should be aware what they say what they do because that particular group of people I mean they got tech skills They could do some some pretty nasty things to your company, you know, so be aware Joel (35:36.375) You know, in the.com and the.com bust, I don't think there was a sense that the internet was not going to be a thing. think there, there was a sense that, okay, things are going to shuffle around. Companies are going to go out of business, but ultimately these developers will go to the companies that win. And those were Amazon and Google and some of the names that we know now. I feel like the fear now is the job ain't coming back. So like, to me, this, this is more than just let's just. J.T. (35:42.766) Hmm. J.T. (35:57.903) Fair. Joel (36:02.691) Let's batten down the hatches and suck it up and like survive. This is what the hell am I going to do? Because you have developers that grew up with, you'll have a job forever. There will, we will need developers forever. And now they look in the mirror and go, Holy shit. I was, I was sold this promise of riches and job security is that that's gone now. Right. J.T. (36:25.881) But I'm just gonna jump in and say, if this isn't a heed for everybody, tech is always first. So we've been talking about AI making a lot of jobs not come back. It's every industry. It's not just tech. And people are in denial about that. And I think really just feel like, well, when it hits me and it happens to me, I'll deal with it then. Which is a shame because there's a lot you could be doing right now to avoid that. And that's the part that I think is, know, someone works with job seekers every day. Like, what do you say to them when you're like, Joel (36:38.179) Yeah. Joel (36:51.447) Yeah, there was a J.T. (36:55.247) you know, I'm sorry, you've been out of work nine months, you drained everything. And no, that job you want, you don't have a shot at it because we also know that hiring is discrimination and people who have a job get a job faster than people who don't have a job. So when you look at the vast majority of people that are laid off and the longer they sit, it's like a house on the market. The longer it sits on the market, more people think something's wrong with it, right? So it's not just tech, but tech is that leading factor, the domino effects happening, not to be, you know, a Debbie Downer, but we got a brace for this. Joel (37:21.764) Yeah. There's a popular marketing guy on LinkedIn that talked about, I think he said 70 % of chief marketing officers will be extinct in the next few years. Like it's going to hit all these white collar jobs. People don't know they're not, it's going to be weird. like they're, don't know if there are enough companies to be started to like employ all these people. I don't know. J.T. (37:46.669) Okay, and I'm just going to tell you that I think we are coming full circle. Everybody is a business of one. We have said that forever, but we went through an age where everybody worked for other companies. I think we are coming full circle and that every job is temporary. And if we're all businesses of one going forward, we will create multiple streams of income. And that is how you will survive. And it's possible. We live in a creator economy. Everybody has a skillset that they could monetize some way beyond just doing that regular job. I think that's going to be. Joel (37:50.254) Yep. J.T. (38:16.703) forced upon people to see if they're not already starting to pick that up. Case in point, Gal in my social media feed, just like I was doing 30,000 a month. I instituted AI to run all of my marketing and do all my actions. She's like, I'm now making a hundred thousand dollars a month. There's so much opportunity. I just think enough people aren't in pain yet for them to go force themselves to look at these other ways to monetize. I am an optimist in that front. I really believe everyone can monetize. look at you know, social platforms like LinkedIn is all in on video. All right, let us monetize. Maureen said that last time, pay people for click better yet, let them sell some things that they, know, little courses that they've built or things that they've had. Like, why are we not there yet allowing people to make money off of their knowledge beyond a job, you know? Joel (39:07.279) Chad, any thoughts? Nope. All right. Let's go to Converse AI, an AI recruitment startup from Seattle. They've raised 16 million in a Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures. I think they were Jobster investors back in the day, Chad. The funds will support global expansion, team growth, and product enhancement. Their AI virtual recruiters automate hiring, promising to cut time to placement by up to 90%. Chad (39:08.513) Nope. J.T. (39:09.519) You Joel (39:34.383) boosting efficiency by 30 % and increasing revenue by 40 % for clients. Chad, your thoughts on Converse AI. Chad (39:43.842) So take a look at a team first. It looks like, I don't know if it's a couple of brothers or cousins or something like that, but it looks like the founder and CEO and the COO who have amazing Microsoft and Google backgrounds, looks like they're brothers. Good for them. Not in our space though. Although Tim Robbins, 18 years at Monster, Tiffany Hoffman, 22 years at Monster and Kara Scheffel, almost seven years at Monster. They're leading up pretty much sales, like go to market side of the house. Joel (39:58.703) Mm-hmm. Chad (40:11.936) So it's quite possible that Converge AI has the tech product and industry knowledge plus 16 million new reasons to bet on them. Here's my only word of caution. 2025 will be the year of agent tech and these types of companies will be popping up every five minutes. The question is, will this company have an edge over Paradox, Fountain, Harry or even Phenom? What about long standing brands like Smart Recruiters who literally through their roadmap out the window and now hyper-focused on building agentic tech. Apparently companies like Workday are positioning themselves to be an AI-like company. But at the end of the day, Converse AI seems like they're really focusing on the staffing sector, which means if they show momentum, they could get possibly acquired by a staffing company or Bullhorn takes them off the market in less than 24 months. Joel (40:46.137) Mm-hmm. Joel (41:00.238) Mm-hmm. Chad (41:10.338) We've seen the biggest staffing companies in the world like a deco and ronstadt. They have no fucking clue what to do with tech. They no clue. They don't know it. They don't get it. They've tried it. So I really think that a company like bullhorn or a company trying to at least be more competitive with a bullhorn buying into an organization like this just makes good sense. Joel (41:15.843) Mm-hmm. Joel (41:32.057) Mm-hmm. Chad (41:34.542) Yeah. Joel (41:36.121) This really made me go down memory lane, Chad. That's right, kids. If you don't know Jobster, a company that shook things up back in the mid 2000s, they were from Seattle, which was hip, which was hip and cool at the time. Jason Goldberg, Google them. Anyway, so this, this brought back some memories of, Jobster. I don't think we're anywhere near that kind of bubble of a company. I do have a question. Their homepage has an iPhone with headphones on talking to a microphone. I have no, I. Chad (41:50.67) That was a mirage. Joel (42:11.567) That's like a podcast website. So I don't know what who's doing their marketing, but that is totally like confusing to what you guys do. Anyway, I'm with you, Chad. This is a staffing play. are laser focused on that. They have, they have industry folks that will get them in there. I have in my notes, like if bullhorn isn't taking notes on this, like they're, they're going to, they're a mess, but we know the bullhorn is, uh, historically makes some really good acquisitions. I'm sure they've got their eye on these guys. I would not be surprised if 12, 24 months, we have a story about Converse AI getting acquired by Bullhorn and having Bullhorn just conveniently plug in their technology into all the Bullhorn clients and making a ton of that coin, baby. That's right. That's right. This is, this is a buy for me if we were playing by ourselves, JT, any thoughts? J.T. (43:05.549) Yeah, I agree. You know what? I like it for the reasons you talked about Chad. I like non-industry founders who surround themselves with people who grew up in our space, get them in a room together. And the people from our space get some fresh eyes from the tech standpoint, but the tech founders get the much needed perspective of how our industry operates and together to make magic. I really like this for some reason. I agree with you. think in a couple, 24 months, whatever they're going to get acquired and go on and do great things. But this one, Definitely a bye. Joel (43:37.647) All right, we like it. Let's go on to some military news, Chad, something close to your heart. Newly minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was busy this week in a historic moment for the Army. Recruitment has surged. That's right. I said surged in the military. Anyway, Surge to a Level not seen or reported in the last 15 years setting a new milestone for the organization. This follows years of recruiting challenges for the military and the army. Chad, your thoughts on the Surge? Chad (44:13.878) Yeah, so the US Army announced the sweeping overhaul of its recruitment strategy in October of 2023. Yes, 2023, which includes shifting focus toward recruiting young adults who have attended college rather than high school students. Okay, so what's the real reason why we're hitting our recruitment numbers? We've heard report after report after report about how young adults with expensive college degrees and student loan payments can't find jobs. Then the Biden administration who forgave about 5 million of these individuals, but not all. That's where we're at. So it's like, where can we go after individuals who are in need? They need to pay the bills and they need to pay their college debt. That's the fucking fairy dust here, kids. It's not because young adults are excited to invade the Gaza strip. lay on a beach and start building fucking resorts. It's because those Americans are trying their damnedest to find a job, get out of debt, and in many areas of the United States, they have very limited choices. You either work in an Amazon warehouse and piss in a garbage can, or you join the United States military. As a 20-year veteran, I had limited opportunities out of Mansfield, Ohio. One of the reasons, and I wanted to get the fuck out of Mansfield, Ohio. Joel (45:30.703) Mm-hmm. Chad (45:37.73) which is one of the reasons why I did it. There are reasons for it. And I think the administration understood back in 2023 that these are the types of targets that we need to go to instead of just going after high school students, which was really the focus. Let's go after the individuals who are to be quite frank, really destitute and they need a job today. Joel (46:00.941) Chad, I'm confused because Hegseth tweeted on, quote, America's youth want to serve under the bold and strong America first leadership of Donald Trump in quote. you saying that's not the case? J.T. (46:11.823) Thank Chad (46:14.572) I'm saying when you hire a drunken frat boy as your secretary of defense, anything could come out of his fucking mouth. Joel (46:22.511) By the way, my 18 year old, the parents got a text from the army today about Cole joining the military. So they're texting now. They're texting now. He's going to Bloomington, baby. He's going to Bloomington. JT, any thoughts on the military surge? Chad (46:30.252) Yeah, go to the Air Force. Go to the Air Force. J.T. (46:38.595) Sidebar, I'm still getting those texts from my youngest daughter and she's three years into school. So they're still sending out those texts, but yeah, exactly. know, Chad's right. The level of people that have college degrees and college debt and can't even get a job that requires one is out of control. The number of people that have two degrees, think one's bad enough. The number of people that overspent to get a master's or an MBA thinking that would differentiate them down the drain. Chad (46:44.465) yeah, well she's Target now. Chad (47:00.12) Mm-hmm. J.T. (47:05.718) If someone is presenting an opportunity for you to get out of the weight that you're carrying and you can't see any other way out, you're gonna do it, right? And so I agree, that's what the surge is. And I love that you walked through that timeline. What worries me though is that when you're in pain like that, anytime you're emotional in pain, you're not making smart decisions. And so how many of these people are gonna get in there and then when they have a chance to... chill for hot minute, go, my gosh, what did I just do? And I think that's gonna be the next wave of news stories that we see coming out of that, which is unfortunate. Joel (47:40.939) but wait, JT, there's more. There's more Hegseth. There's more Hegseth because it is Valentine's Day. Also in the news, Hegseth criticized military diversity initiatives, eliminated DEI programs and ended Identity Month celebrations, arguing they divide the military force. Chad, any thoughts on the elimination of DEI programs in the military? Chad (48:04.238) Again, who put the drunken frat boy in charge of defense? I just don't get it. So the U S population is 14 % black, right? In the U S army, the biggest U S military branch, it's 21 % black soldiers, 14 % population, 21 % U S army Hispanics make up 19 % of the U S population of which 26 % of the Marines are Hispanic. And when it comes to multiracial demographics, the U S population is at 3%, which I think is low, but the U S Navy is at 10%. So to actually be in the military, which drunken frat boy was, and not even understand the diversity of the millions of people he's supposed to be leading while smacking all of those diverse soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines and coasties in the face. That's not just bad form. It just might be. It might be the dumbest statement made in military history. And last but not least, for everybody hating on DEI, well, you'd better understand your asses are fucking safe today and have been for decades because of a diverse US military, which allows you to be safe. Black and Hispanic soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and coasties keep your asses safe on a daily basis. So you better kiss that DEI square on the fucking lips. Chad (49:32.142) You Joel (49:33.967) I'm with Chad dude. Whoever wants to pick up a gun and stand between me and an invading force of America, like I don't care what your sex is, what you identify as, what your color is. Like I don't give a shit. If you got a gun protecting me and my family, I'm in, I'm in. That's all I got. That's all I got. JT, anything? Chad (49:43.054) Pronouns, any of that shit. None. Yes. J.T. (49:52.207) I just felt like that was his, you can't handle the truth moment, right? He just wanted to get on camera and be like, mm, look at me. And so, know, but I'm, with both of you. You know, I just, blows my mind to not respect. Joel (49:59.844) Dude. J.T. (50:10.927) But I'm just hopeful that they will see the error of their ways or, know, right, karma will come back. Joel (50:14.521) Such a voice of reason, JT, is let's take a second to, let's take a moment to decompress and end the show with an OnlyFans story as what better way on Valentine's Day week to do. Chad (50:17.474) We need it. We need it. J.T. (50:20.547) Right? Chad (50:23.53) imagine that. Joel (50:30.701) All right, guys, banks management. That's B-A-N-X, traditional only fans management company involves working with human models, which can include recruitment challenges, scheduling conflicts, high management overhead. but they've got a better answer. Everybody with AI generated models, not real people. You eliminate the drama and the complexity of a traditional only fans management company. These virtual models are created. using advanced AI tools, allowing you to scale your agency, operate at lower cost and enjoy fully automated hands-off business model. Each model in quotes can generate $5,000 to $30,000 per month or more, depending on your marketing and fan management strategies. That was a long way of saying there's an underbelly industry that I didn't even know existed about only fans management. Where apparently people will get it like a, it's like a subway franchise. They used to give you models and you would manage these models and get a cut. Well, now they have AI. You can have as many models as you fucking want. You get to keep all the profits, get them to do whatever you want. You market these things. I mean, I've talked about this for a long time. Only fans, whatever it's going to be like $9 a month have unlimited chicks, women, excuse me, and whatever you're into. it's going to be AI. You're not going to tell the difference. I rarely can tell the difference between AI now and a real person like that. That divide is getting really small for me. So anyway, this is where we're going. my own personal opinion, the average only fan creator, makes $150 a month. Okay. So as someone with a daughter, like I'm applauding this trend because how demeaning is it to like put your hoo-hah and your body on the internet? Only to be told it's only worth $150 a month, right? So you put yourself out there, demean yourself, embarrass yourself, and this stuff is out there forever. So I want to see less people, women, girls, whatever on OnlyFans. And if it's AI that displaces this workforce, I'm okay with it. Chad (52:43.085) Bye, JT. J.T. (52:43.941) my God, have so much to say. Is it my turn? Yeah. So yeah. I know. Look, you know, if you go look at CES, they interviewed the CEO of OnlyFans and she knows what she's talking about. She sees the potential. I think she sees a future with lots of sister brands. know, OnlyFans can stay spicy, but they've figured out a really impressive business model over there. After we talked about it, I went deep diving and actually Chad (52:46.158) Mine's easy. The human race isn't long for this world. I mean, that's all I got. Joel (52:46.168) No. Joel (52:49.903) You J.T. (53:13.707) met and have spoken to somebody, a woman that makes a ridiculous amount of money on OnlyFans. She works very few hours a week and she has a team that handles all of that relationship management and that piece and happy to give a cut of it because the money is just pouring in. doesn't even have to think about it. She just gets to be the creator. And by the way, there are a lot of creators on there that don't take their clothes off. There are a lot of creators on there doing, you know, anything from the girlfriend experience to cooking to pottery, like there's a lot more to it. It's just been labeled and made its name for the spicy side of it. And so while we sit and laugh about it and we need jobs, there is a creator economy out there that is booming and everyone can be doing different things. I think that this is going to is just the beginning of people being able to monetize across all types of things. Fine, don't go to OnlyFans. Don't go to OnlyFans, but replicate it and do it on something else. Joel (54:00.153) Come on, JT, come on, JT. Burger King has salads, but no one goes there for the salads. Come on, come on. J.T. (54:11.565) You know, like why can't I as a project manager, instead of being stuck in my project management, I do other things. Joel (54:16.079) Do you agree though, like what I'm curious from your thoughts, like these AI personalities, whether they're sexy women or whatever, the creator ecosystem is gonna be inundated with AI people in quotes. aren't they gonna flood every sort of content creator industry or no? J.T. (54:39.215) Yeah, and then people are going to say, OK, give me the person that I know is an AI, and give me a way to authenticate that that's a real person, not AI. And then they'll build that. When you put that constraint on it, something else is going to be built from it. That's how it works. This is just the beginning. We're interested with AI. love that for you, you're like, $9 a month, AI only. But then there are going to be people saying, no, I'll pay $39 a month to know it's real human being. So yeah, right. Joel (54:54.063) I don't know if. Chad (55:04.684) Yeah. Yeah. The premium service. There's the premium service and actually flesh and blood. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are tears, there are tears and there's productization. And if Americans do anything well, it's building products and selling that shit. yeah, I, I, I, agree. I agree. J.T. (55:08.226) I just make more money. J.T. (55:18.649) You got it. There you go. Joel (55:22.799) and then the sex bots will put all of them out of business. All right, let's get to this week's dad joke, shall we? Guys, what's worse than two girls running with scissors? What's worse than two girls running with scissors? Chad (55:26.055) Humanity, Humanity. Out the window. Chad (55:38.776) falling with scissors. I don't know. Joel (55:41.657) Two girls scissoring with the runs. Chad (55:47.244) That's just bad. bad. worse than open than kimono bad. Joel (55:47.981) Happy Valentine's Day everybody! We out! J.T. (55:48.239) That was.

In this week's episode, the boys, joined by Mo, serve up so much industry drama you might mistake it for a Sizzler buffet special. Paradox had a week so tasty even Chipotle  couldn't resist giving them a shout-out on Mad Money —the business equivalent of your rich uncle high-fiving you at Thanksgiving. They didn’t stop there; Paradox chowed down on Eqtble, a people analytics company that probably knows if your team is more focused on quarterly results or secretly forming a ukulele band during work hours. Meanwhile, Deel flexes its financial muscles, bulking up to an $800 ARR and setting its sights on a 2026 IPO. Rippling’s Parker Conrad may need a cold shower—things are heating up faster than expected. On the social media front, LinkedIn is diving headfirst into video, with a 36% increase in uploads as professionals realize that boring job updates are apparently the new binge-worthy content. But the biggest plot twist? Remote work isn’t just about Zoom meetings anymore—it's basically a rom-com waiting to happen. With 86% of Americans finding love online, and 41% of them dating their boss, the HR department is officially on high alert. Buckle up—this episode has it all. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTON Joel (00:31.841) Warning, this podcast may contain alcohol. Hey boys and girls, it's The Chad& Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel "Riviera of the Middle East" Cheesman. Chad (00:42.806) This is Chad, you'd better pivot. Sowash. Mo (00:46.232) And this is Maureen, does Joel know who I am yet? Clough. Joel (00:50.111) And on this episode, Paradox buys, Deel readies, and LinkedIn goes vertical. Let's do this. Mo (00:52.994) I know, right? Chad (01:01.474) going horizontal was like the best. No. Okay. It was like, what are they talking about? Yeah. Okay. Joel (01:07.361) We're not in Madrid, which is where you are. Let's get that out of the way first, Chad. Where the hell are you? You've got Asian porn art in the back. You've poured multiple beers. What is going on with Eurochad today? Mo (01:10.616) What are you talking about? Mo (01:18.664) What? Chad (01:22.23) Yeah. I am in Madrid and definitely having a blast thanks to a land and Rebecca and the team over at smart recruiters had a chance to actually sit down and interview the leadership team and was surprised surprised to hear the word pivot from an established company pivot. Yes. Apparently the old roadmap is out the window. And it's all about solid core based on new re smart recruiters agents. Joel (01:41.184) Mm-hmm. Chad (01:49.974) and the ability for partners to build their own product agents into the platform. So this feels like Smart Recruiters Netflix moment where they see the market moving and they change direction instead of sitting, waiting and watching like Blockbuster did. Insert Monster or Career Builder reference, wherever you like. But yeah, that's good stuff, man. It was really good stuff. It was fun. It was fun. Joel (02:08.096) That sounds sexy. So you're sort of isolated from the drama that we have to deal with every day here in the US, I assume. Mo (02:13.965) man. Mo (02:19.502) So freaking jealous, so freaking jealous. Basically there's only one thing that's keeping me sane right now. I don't know about you Joel, since you're also here. You're not Euro Joel. It's the Daily Show. So like kind of a mini shout out to the Daily Show because I know that I will stay and remain informed. I won't miss anything, but they're also gonna make me like laugh so I don't cry, right? Like, cause it's just, it's unrelenting, right? Like it's just constant. And so shout out to those guys cause man. Chad (02:24.642) I'll see you later. Joel (02:26.943) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:36.288) Yes. No. Joel (02:38.005) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:42.636) Yes. Mo (02:48.75) They're everything. They're absolutely everything. Yeah. Chad (02:49.826) Comedians are the smartest man. Comedians are the smartest. Carlin, George Carlin, listen to his political rants. They're fucking nailing it. you're like looking 20 years like in the 80s, 30, 40 years in the 80s, the shit he's doing is like, wait a minute, that shit's happening right now. Mo (02:57.729) Nailing it. Joel (03:03.711) Mo's like, who's George Carlin? Who's George Carlin? Mo (03:03.714) Yep, that's just happening now. We don't learn. I actually got that one, but this is like, I love the show. It's a lot of growth for me because you guys, pepper me with references. This is the beauty of intergenerational work, guys. We're seeing it in action. Joel (03:09.569) How many old man references am I going to have to keep up with in this one? Chad (03:14.689) Hahaha Joel (03:19.317) Yeah, I like, I do, I do love, was it, was it, was it Stuart that said AI lost its job to AI when deep sea came out? thought that was, that was pretty awesome. Yeah. I like to, I like to make my own comedy, with Trump. like to imagine that all of his policies are like eighties action movies. Chad (03:19.604) intergenerate Mo (03:27.79) Yes, it totally was. He's so spot on. Chad (03:28.63) AI. Joel (03:40.297) When, when we talk about sending prisoners to El Salvador, tell me that does not sound like the Schwarzenegger movie that should have been made around 1986 or like, like, Gaza strip to Vegas strip, like next on. So, so all these policies are like, are like movies from the eighties to me. little bit saying, yeah. Yeah. Same thing. I'm focused. I'm, focusing on the super bowl. There's. Mo (03:48.505) my God. Chad (03:49.329) yeah, yeah. Chad (03:59.33) Is that what's keeping you sane right now? Is that what we're hearing? All you need is a good survivor soundtrack. Mo (04:00.334) It's like a black mirror episode. I just want to hibernate. Joel (04:09.185) The big game is this Sunday. know I'll be watching. Let's go ahead and get predictions out of the way. Chad, you may not even know there's a game being in Europe. I'm going Philly. I'm going Philly. 34, 35. Saquon busts, Saquon blows up two touchdowns, MVP of the game. I think this is the Saquon moment. Chad (04:11.031) Yes. Chad (04:16.322) Mmm. Mo (04:18.478) Hehehehehe Chad (04:23.483) yeah. Joel (04:36.896) And and Philly wins the game. What do you guys think? Chad (04:40.514) What think Moe? Are you a big NFL fan? Mo (04:41.944) Yeah, I used to be, it really ended for me with the loss of the Super Bowl when we passed on the one yard line instead of having Marshawn Lynch run it into the end zone. Yeah, I will never forget that. It's an indelible thing in my brain. So I kind of backed off after that Super Bowl loss. So I don't really have a prediction, but I do know that the person who's most excited about the game in my personal family is my seven-year-old daughter because she wants... Chad (04:53.408) Yes! my god, yes. Mo (05:09.688) Kansas City to win and I bet y'all know why. So she's like, Taylor Swift's boyfriend's team. I'm like, Lord, man. Okay. Sure. Whatever works for you. Yeah. I know they must be pumped. Like the jerseys they're selling for that. Right. It's crazy. Chad (05:13.41) She's not wrong. She's not wrong. She's not wrong. dude. The thing is, I just think that the Eagles are so strong and in Kansas City. They've I mean, they've had a really bad year, but their record doesn't show it right. They've had more games that have been by a touchdown or less than they've had in any other season. Joel (05:17.825) Her in the NFL. Joel (05:24.491) So much, so much money. Chad (05:44.274) And I don't think that the Eagles will let that shit happen. And they are going to be a scoring machine. So I think Eagles 42 and you're looking at about 23 for the Kansas City Chiefs. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (05:53.953) Ooh, blowout, blowout. By the way, a 30 second spot now starts at 8 million. So the real winner is corporate America, everybody. Corporate America wins, wins again. That's right. That's right. Well, let's get to, Mo (05:57.88) Hahaha. Mo (06:03.826) man, always is, always is. They always take it away. God damn it. Chad (06:04.962) Imagine that. Imagine that. Yes. Take it away, take it away, take it away now. Yes it is Stephen, yes it is. There it is. Joel (06:17.505) Shout out sponsored by our friends at Kiora, North of the border. They are a tariff free Canadian sponsor though, by the way, in case, in case anyone was worried about that. Tariff free Canadian sponsor. Thanks Kiora. Chad (06:23.436) Thank God. Thank God. Mo (06:23.662) Hahaha Mo (06:28.494) You Chad (06:31.746) Let me get the first one, because the first one is very positive, okay? Because Jackie Clayton and her sister Lauren McKinney will be participating in the 37th edition of the Amazing Race. Now, if you don't know Jackie Clayton, you might remember that last week we talked about textile layoffs, and unfortunately Jackie was part of the bad news of those layoffs, but when a door closes... Mo (06:49.166) You Joel (06:52.47) Mmm. Chad (06:57.128) another one open. So congratulations to Jackie and Lauren on this new amazing door opening. Go kick some ass ladies. I've never watched the amazing race. I'm going to watch every single episode. Yes. Amazing. Amazing. Joel (07:07.169) 37 seasons, my god. Mo (07:09.934) Damn, that's a run. And that's an incredible soft landing right after. Yeah. Joel (07:13.227) They go around all the world too, right? They go to other countries, they fly, that's going to be good for her, man. Chad (07:15.766) Yeah. yeah. It's almost like my it's almost like doing what I do. Yeah, that's fine. My amazing bar race is what it is. Mo (07:17.55) Pretty sick. my God. Joel (07:26.099) All right. I got a shout out for you, Chad, since we're talking about old guy stuff. my shout out, my shout out goes to the shamrock shake. That's right. Everyone remembers the shamrock shake. the, the beloved minty drink is returning to McDonald's locations nationwide on February 10th. your calendars, everybody now on the news, Chad, I kinda, I kinda had a, a gen X moment of confusion. Chad (07:28.546) Yes. Mo (07:31.16) You Chad (07:36.578) Yeah Mo (07:38.51) Damn. Joel (07:54.337) There's a character called uncle O'Gremacy, which I had no idea it was a thing. So we all know Grimace. We all know Ronald the hamburger. Uncle O'Gremacy was introduced in 1975. He was phased out in the eighties. So I had to, I had to go to YouTube to see, there an ad somewhere with uncle O'Gremacy? sure enough, Chad, YouTube did not disappoint. Check out this commercial from 1978. think. Chad (07:54.561) Yeah? Mo (08:00.046) What? Chad (08:00.94) Wow. Yeah. yeah. Chad (08:08.321) Okay. Chad (08:13.984) Ha ha ha! Joel (08:23.327) with Uncle Gramacy. Chad (08:37.046) Dude, I remember him now. Yes! Joel (08:38.559) You do? No clue. Joel (08:47.253) That was a large, by the way, was a large drink in 1978. Chad (08:48.876) So exciting. Mo (08:50.647) Mo (08:54.082) God, they don't make ads like they used to. These are awesome. Damn. Joel (08:55.906) uncle O'Gremacy shout out. Chad remembers? I don't. Chad (08:55.971) They do not. Dude, yes. No, yeah, I do. After seeing that, yeah, it was almost like a green poop emoji, be quite frank. But the shakes, I remember every year they came out, as a kid I had to have one. And they came out, the first year was 1970. So we weren't born yet. So they were already in the behavior of America by the time we started having Joel (09:06.389) Yeah, man. Joel (09:12.533) Yeah. Joel (09:25.493) Yeah, I don't want to know what makes it green, it's still delicious. Still delicious. Chad (09:27.778) Especially in the US all the shit that they use. Yeah Mo (09:32.728) That's pretty disturbing. Pretty sure you're not supposed to ingest it, but here we are, right? I'm gonna take you to a sadder place because you guys were way too positive and where I am right now is a little bit more, we're a little more negative Nancy over here, okay? So shout out to Robert Half-Legal who posted this insane job posting about how they were looking for an executive assistant and they specifically called out that you should not. Chad (09:36.418) All right, Mo enough of that. Give us your shout out. Joel (09:44.651) We're not leaving the sad place. Chad (09:48.102) huh. Okay. Chad (09:54.641) huh. Mo (10:00.994) be like a 30 year veteran. They want an EA who's middle career. And it's like, wait a second. So unless, so that's definitely illegal to request that you not have a 30 year experience, 30 years of experience because like, like anyone who was working after or before age 10, like an, an, an after age 10, that's like 40 years. I mean, you can't work at 10, right? So it's like, they just said the quiet part out loud and I'm like, how did this make it to actually hitting posts? Like I, unbelievable, but I saw it on LinkedIn. Chad (10:05.698) You Chad (10:10.558) Yeah. Mo (10:31.136) Exactly, and I'm like, thank you. That is how I feel all the time. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So yeah, yet another thing that's insane. Chad (10:35.746) Well, your name is Gladys, do not apply for this job. But what you can apply for is free stuff at Chad and Cheese. Go to chadcheese.com slash free. You know why? Because we love all of them, all of you listeners. Gladys, go to chadcheese.com slash free where you can win Chad and Cheese t-shirts. That's right, beautiful t-shirts sponsored by Aaron App. Bourbon barrel aged syrup by our friends. And again, tariff free from Mo (10:40.295) Yeah, Bertha, it's not yours. There we go. Joel (10:45.355) Yes. Mo (10:49.93) Ha ha! Chad (11:05.014) Kiora craft. Luck and tariffs craft beer from the data geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs. They've been putting out some really good jobs number stuff. Yeah. I mean the stuff that it's almost like they're kind of aligning with with what Toby's doing, which is really smart. If you like whiskey and we know you like whiskey, then Van Hack is the company because they're going to be sending you with Chad and cheese. Mo (11:10.594) You Joel (11:16.545) Yeah they have. Yeah they have. Joel (11:25.345) you Chad (11:32.908) two bottles of whiskey you could prospectively win if you register. And if it's your birthday, you could possibly win rum from Plum. Go to ChadCheese.com slash free. Joel (11:49.107) That's right, Chad. Another trip around the sun for Elizabeth Dunlop, Ivan Stojanovic, the Irish recruiter, Adam Bergen, Sarah Hansen, Joe Essenfeld, Tanya Dittman, Ben Waxter, Mimi Jerkin, Jess Von Bank, Nick Fishman, Becky Lee, Amanda Thompson-Buffington, and Dave, everyone's after me, Lucky Charms, Ralph. Celebrate another trip around the sun. Chad (11:55.201) Yes. Chad (11:59.863) areas. Chad (12:12.546) I gotta thank him for my dodgy stick, by the way. And that being said, it's time for events. And if you're on the road with the Chad and cheese sponsored by Shaker recruitment marketing, guess what? Well, Joe Shaker out of nowhere messages me and he and the team were here in Madrid this week. Total coincidence. I shit you not. But in pure Shaker style last night, we had dinner at the restaurant inside Joel (12:17.333) That just sticks. Chad (12:42.058) Real Madrid Stadium. So Joe, Joe's always got to step it up. And when I say step it up, I'm not just talking about the stadium. We left after midnight after knocking out 19 bottles of wine. Talk about stepping it up. Needless to say, my head still hurts. So thanks again to our friends over at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Thanks, Joe. He had to get up at nine or he had to had a flight this morning at 930. So he was definitely sucking. But our next event. Mo (12:44.461) man. Mo (13:08.589) Damn. 19 bottles, how many people? Oh, God. Chad (13:12.532) eight. So that's okay. Do the math kids do the math. Our next event our next event. You get that's right Stephen you know you know, St. St. Patrick's Day with the Ched and Cheese in Vegas during transform. That's right. I think I think Mo's going to think JT is going we're gonna have a whole we're gonna have a whole bunch of the Ched and Cheese team there. Mo (13:16.312) Sorry, had to ask, had to ask. Mo (13:37.102) It's gonna be awesome. Chad (13:39.936) March 17th through the 19th at the win. If you're not going, you gotta go. Go to ChadCheese.com slash events, register for Transform and see us there. Joel (13:51.733) Yeah, that should be a good time everybody. Chad (13:53.407) fuck yeah. Mo (13:53.9) be awesome. I mean St. Patrick's Day in Vegas, are you kidding me? Come on. Joel (13:58.985) Alright, we got a lot to talk about. Chad (14:01.596) And job books! Steven's taking my job. AI's taking my job. Jesus. Mo (14:07.714) Hahaha. Joel (14:08.193) Another another Scott taking an American job. Imagine that. that. Hey Chad, what do you call two doctors in the same operating room? Mo (14:10.957) Ha Chad (14:18.594) redundant. Mo (14:20.129) You Joel (14:21.013) Paradox. All right. right. Uh, friend of the pod and show sponsor paradox has had a pretty good week. Uh, first they got a lot of love from, uh, one of their new customers. You, you may, you may have heard of them, uh, a little, little, a little, company called, uh, Chipotle. Anyway, anyway, they were on, uh, CNBC's mad money. showed a lot of Americans at least, uh, will know, uh, and, the CEO. Chad (14:37.538) If you listen to the show, you've heard of them. Mo (14:44.974) you Chad (14:51.074) Jim Cramer. Mo (14:52.253) Mm-mm. Joel (14:53.734) of Chipotle had a lot of really nice things to say about paradox. sorry. That's the wrong. That's the wrong guy. This, this board is so hard to figure out. Let's, let's go to the real clip from mad money. Mo (15:01.262) Hahahaha Mo (15:07.502) haha Mo (16:02.466) I love his voice. Chad (16:04.822) Yeah. Chad (16:20.578) Come on. Joel (16:20.673) He's got dad jokes too. Mo (16:22.83) That's so bad. you Chad (16:32.78) chase. Joel (16:46.945) Nice one, nice one. Chipotle just printing money. Mo (16:49.038) He's a pro. Chad (16:51.01) I love Kramer's reaction. I've been waiting for companies to tell me about this. What is going on? Mo (16:54.222) Yeah. Joel (16:55.649) He's like, I was going to ask you about this, but let's go back to this paradox thing. That's interesting. Jeez. Could you imagine there's a better commercial for them? Jeez. That's awesome. Chad (16:59.106) Yeah Chad (17:03.978) No, no. And I gotta say, I gotta say, because we do this a lot, we give Adam Godson and Jay Z, Josh Swain over there, a ton of credit at Paradox. But let's focus, let's focus this time on Josh Seacrest for a moment. He's the VP over at Paradox and former head of global talent strategy at McDonald's. Yes, former global talent strategy at McDonald's and Mo (17:04.749) Pretty good. Chad (17:31.906) has been working as VP of Marketing and Client Advocacy over at Paradox for four years. Now, Josh is a freaking stud in the TA space, and when you see something like this happen, you know that it has Josh's fingerprints all over it. So big applause to Josh, everybody over at Paradox. This is awesome, this is awesome. Joel (17:53.939) It was awesome. I don't know how many people watch Mad Money, but the right kind of people watch Mad Money and listen to what Jim Kramer says. yeah, if there was, we'll talk about Paradox in depth here a little bit, but man, this really sets the table for them nicely in a big way. And wait, there's more from our friends at Paradox, Chad. They also acquired New York based and Black founded Equitable. Mo (17:57.55) Ha. Chad (17:59.82) Yes. Yeah. Woo. Wow. Joel (18:20.513) people on Alitix platform this week. Terms were undisclosed, founded in 2021. The Y Combinator alums had previously raised $2.8 million. The team which will join Paradox touts previous experience at places like Snap, WeWork, and Johnson & Johnson. We asked the Paradox team to give us a little video talking about the acquisition. Here it is. Mo (19:57.998) Ahem. Mo (20:14.935) You Joel (20:22.913) Okay, if you're not watching that, it's not the same jacket. And I want the one that I don't have, which is the Nike jacket. know Jay-Z's listening and I know he has my address. double X baby, XL maybe on the Nike, maybe XL on the Nike. Chad (20:26.018) okay. yeah. Mo (20:33.134) You Chad (20:34.102) Hey, all the way through, all the way through, would like, I would like a medium as usual. So what do think Mo? This is, huh? What do you think? Mo (20:35.949) Ha Joel (20:42.623) Baby cap. Mo (20:43.822) I mean, sounds great. I love that they sent you that personalized message. I mean, it speaks to the extent to which you are like, oh geez, in this space. I'm a newbie, right? Like I've been an employee, I haven't actually been a recruiter, I've been a hiring manager. I've been a candidate, of course, plenty of times. So I understand like what these platforms do and why they're necessary. But I gotta say like data, yeah, I love data. I love analytics. I love making better business decisions. That's so cool. But I have to ask because Chad (20:46.668) Yeah. You Joel (20:50.123) We're a big deal, Mm-hmm. Mo (21:13.078) a lot of these platforms, with all due respect to all these platforms, they kind of sound similar. And so can you guys help me understand what is the better together story here? What is this actually going to open up for people? Because I'm sure it's something, otherwise it wouldn't be happening. And a lot of organizations, it's like you build it, you buy it, or you partner. And they chose to go buy. So I just want to hear your take on this. Chad (21:36.802) Yeah. So great question because I hear a lot of talent acquisition people say the same thing. I don't know the difference between those. So in this specific case, so there are two specific reasons. Number one is human control. Yes, Paradox has a ton of data to train its large language models, but that training and its data is next to worthless without the ability to understand and visualize it. So humans still need to be in control, right? So instead of having a black box, Mo (21:43.042) Mm-hmm. Mo (22:03.846) good. Chad (22:06.262) You have a vast array of abilities to visualize, dissect, audit, and execute on data when you plug it into this new equitable platform. Number two, this is the one that I love the best, market control. Not human control, but market control. It's an interesting acquisition because it's much cheaper than buying a bigger platform like Vizier. Plus, Vizier was on Workday's &A radar. they've dropped off because of this acquisition with Paradox, because Paradox now has more robust capabilities, plus they're building down funnel to meet other big HCM players and consume, train, and visualize that data as well. So this is a play to be able to visualize and control, obviously human controlled data, but also it's a market play to be able to smack Vizier and other visual analytics types of companies. out of the way for perspective &A with big HCM companies where, I mean, I would think Paradox is probably looking to gain some play. What do think, Joel? Joel (23:08.609) I think Mo really smart. Joel (23:14.561) This is Chad's, I've had a few too many beers in Spain. You laugh. Look, there used to be a time where everyone stayed in their lane. I'm a job board, I'm an ATS, I'm this or that. And those days are coming to an end. Everyone is bleeding into everyone else's business. There was a time where Paradox was called a chatbot. Mo (23:15.694) Tell me more, say more. Chad (23:17.686) Huh? What were? Chad (23:23.746) Good luck. Joel (23:39.169) some people still call them that, but they are conversational AI and they're more and more becoming a platform for all things, hiring and employment. you look at companies like Deel, which we'll talk about later, smart recruiters who you're with Chad, they've launched Winston. So they have their own little chat bot conversational thing. So you're right in the, in the fact that all of these companies are starting to kind of do the same thing. I think you're going to see a lot more consolidation this year. A lot of companies buying pieces like paradox just did. Mo (23:39.886) Hmm. Chad (23:40.055) Yes. Mo (23:55.054) you Joel (24:07.179) to sort of play chess, if you will, of like, okay, you have a pawn, now we have a pawn. You have a rook, we have a rook. now we have bishop and we have, so it's like everyone's trying to put this puzzle together where from first contact to outboarding and bye-bye, they wanna own as much of that process as possible. So I think you're on the right track with everything sounding similar. So branding is so important, trust. Mo (24:09.58) Mm. Yeah. The competitive moat, yes. Yeah. Joel (24:33.301) Who, what logos do you have on your site? You know, like we'll talk to a lot of paradox people that we have to use another company for this, but we'd love to use paradox instead. So it's like these, these lines are being drawn and companies are having to take sides. Does that make sense to you? Mo (24:35.438) Totally. Chad (24:38.676) no. Chad (24:44.396) Mm-hmm. Mo (24:50.03) Totally, I think it's a very complicated branding issue, right? Like I understand the need to want to touch the entire cycle and have more of the market and all of that, but I do think it poses this really interesting issue of how do we message who we are and what we do, right? To the lay person, like I'm a great example of a lay person who would wanna know what these things do, right? And so I think they're gonna have to get really smart about it. hats off to Paradox for landing that sick. spot on Jim Cramer's show, you know, like that's the sort of thing that's going to help. Joel (25:18.113) Pretty soon they'll all have their own Shamrock shakes at HR Tech so that you know the difference between all the products and services. Chad (25:18.291) Hahaha Mo (25:23.182) That would be rad. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (25:24.578) you Well, the big reason the chat and cheese exist and why everybody loves so much is because we talk about this shit and because people don't understand the difference between them. And in some cases, the differences aren't that large. But if you take a look at the way Paradox started, as Joel had said, there was Paradox, there was... Good God. Where was the... I've had too many beers. Maya, Alio, Zor, right? There are all these different chat bots, right? Mo (25:35.104) You demystify it. Mm-hmm. Mo (25:41.74) Right. Joel (25:50.559) Maya, Alio, yeah. Chad (25:56.748) Where are they now? They're all fucking dead. Why? Because of way that the model actually worked. So yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It's interesting to know how they started and how they got to where they are today and how they grew and why they grew that way. So yeah, no, it's fun, which is why we do the show. Mo (25:56.814) Yeah. Mm. Joel (26:13.781) Yeah. So the bigger picture, Chad, thoughts on the acquisition, the overall strategy of Paradox? What are your thoughts? Chad (26:22.156) that just like I said, it just makes sense from an acquisition standpoint, because you take a look at companies like Workday, who say they're doing layoffs for because of AI, those motherfuckers don't have AI other than you know, they've got Athena, who's in there. But at the end of the day, they need something sexy and new and nimble like a paradox. And if paradox travels down funnel into the employee experience, and we know they're already doing that with some companies, right? That's exactly what a workday is gonna wanna see. Now, what's another company that also might look sexy to a workday? Vizier, because they bring data to life. Well guess what, so does Paradox now. So now Vizier is off the table, because Paradox can do that too, and they can do all this other shit. So I think from a macro standpoint, it just makes sense. Not to mention, if they don't get acquired and they go IPO, That TAM is going to be much larger, right? Because they're going to start going toward the 8CM. So they're going to be able to get a much, better IPO out. Mo (27:17.794) Yeah, that's a point. Joel (27:26.731) So first of all, Congrats to both teams. It's always awesome to be acquired and to be acquired by a company like paradox, know, when, yeah, that's always nice too. so Chad, when we, remember when we talked, Aaron had stepped down from a CEO duties and became chairman. And one of the comments I think I made was that he's, he's free to like acquire companies and go shopping and, use that budget to go make some really Chad (27:31.086) shit yeah. Mo (27:34.338) And to get to keep your job too. That's awesome. Joel (27:55.073) cool strategic moves, la Dr. Evil in the spacecraft or the volcano of volcano. Same as yours too. I think this is their third acquisition, the first one that Adam has been CEO, but I got to think that Aaron's fingerprints are all over this as well. And I suspect that we'll see more of these acquisitions in the future. So I want to go with three takeaways that I have and then a quick. Chad (28:01.258) As the same haircut too. Yeah. Joel (28:24.541) a quick history lesson, not just for Mo, but everyone. So my three takeaways, I've already said it, this is a big step to them owning more of the funnel of the lifespan of an employee. And I think they're going to continue to do this. ATS built, more acquisitions, they're going to keep doing this. So I think that is exciting for their customers. I think that also number two, this was very strategic. We'll get to some of the LinkedIn news later, but here's a little bit of a spoiler. Chad (28:35.788) Yeah. Joel (28:53.749) people love data. They love knowing more about shit and getting insight. And right now they don't have a lot of insight into their own people and their own organizations and what's going on. So this is an, this is clearly in demand. I don't know how much of this was customer driven, like, Hey, we'd really like to do this or just sort of foresight by Aaron and the, executive team. But this was a move strategic move, into, into data and, giving more to companies, which also feeds into AI, quite nicely. And, and number three. Chad (29:12.992) I the latter. Chad (29:20.962) Yes. Joel (29:23.349) We maybe don't talk enough about this, like if, this were a sports league, paradox just drafted at minimum, probably two first rounders and a high second rounder. so, so if you thought paradox was already a varsity squad, they've just up the bench quite a bit and made them a lot more vulnerable than even, they were before. So those are sort of my three takeaways, from the, from the news here. And with that, I'd like to, unless Chad, got something to add. Chad (29:52.064) Yeah, one quick thing also to be able to add into this kids might remember that Eileen Kowalski from GM, right? She was pretty much the star of the AI Sessions Season 1 and she's the global head of candidate experience at GM. Well, she was, she was. Now she's senior director of client success and advocacy at Paradox. Yeah, no shit. You have heavy hitters like Adam Gottson, Josh Swain and Seacrest from McDonald's. Joel (29:59.689) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mo (30:18.2) Damn. Joel (30:21.643) Mm-hmm. Chad (30:21.738) And now I lean from General fucking motors in the mix. These guys are killing it on all. I mean, they're hitting on all different cylinders and it's it's it's freaking amazing. It really is. Mo (30:22.136) huge. Mo (30:29.262) deep bench. Mo (30:35.384) Definitely says something when you can attract that kind of talent. So, good on them. Man, more references, I love it. Throwback. Joel (30:35.499) Come on, Eileen. Chad (30:38.038) Come on Eileen, I say Joel (30:39.521) Oh, I swear at this moment. All right, let's get to a history lesson. Mo (30:48.568) So good. So good. Joel (30:49.153) All right. So, so if a lot of companies need to be on notice, and I'm going to give you a quick history lesson here. And they, in the early two thousands monster could have acquired LinkedIn. They didn't, uh, they acquired a company called tickle, which they then ran into ran into the ran into the ground. Uh, they, they had a, they had an opportunity to buy indeed around 2010, 11, uh, they didn't. Mo (30:59.946) Oof, big mistake, huge. What was their first clue? Joel (31:15.925) They didn't. know how the story ends and Monster fell behind and became irrelevant, became Career Builder plus Monster. I am Workday, UKG, Recruit Holdings, SAP, ServiceNow, you better buy Paradox now because it's really close to getting unaffordable for a lot of companies. Otherwise, if you don't, Chad (31:20.096) Flip dog. Mo (31:25.774) brutal. Chad (31:39.616) Yeah. Mo (31:40.302) Hahaha Joel (31:44.193) You may be looking up in three, five years and going, holy shit, we got put out of business because of these guys. you know, history lesson, uh, learned a bit, a little bit from it, but, paradox is priming itself to be an 800 pound gorilla that everyone is going to wish they had put out of its misery or brought into its fold, uh, brought into this business, uh, really, really quickly. So that's, that's your, that's your history lesson. Mo (31:50.766) Totally. Chad (32:07.01) Play the history lesson, sound bite again. Mo (32:12.92) Chef's kiss, that's so good. So good. Joel (32:14.977) And with that, let's take a quick break and talk about deals. Chad (32:23.842) That's with two E's. Joel (32:24.929) All right, Deel has hit an 800 million annual revenue run rate and is eyeing an IPO next year. 800 million. just seems like yesterday that they were at 500 million. Yeah. The more, more winning Deel . Mo (32:25.902) You Chad (32:31.244) Fuck me. Chad (32:41.442) Yeah. Five. Yeah. Fuck. Joel (32:50.155) So after a 70 % revenue jump in December, it added investors through a $300 million share sale, boosting its valuation to $12.6 billion. Founded just six years ago. Deel has grown significantly, employing 5,000 associates worldwide. So Chad, I'm not sure there's anything that we haven't said before, but any opinion on the most recent deal valuation IPO announcement from Deel. Chad (33:02.05) Can I get another beer and another water? Mo (33:03.96) Billion. Chad (33:20.322) So, I mean, I know we agreed to talk about this because it's big news, but it's not surprising at all. Deel is killing the game. They reported 800 million in ARR. It seems like five minutes ago it was five minutes. It was 500, right? I mean, they are beating the shit out of Rippling, a company that has taken monumentally more funding than Deel , right? It's like two billion or some shit like that. Anyway, in every acquisition has made sense. So it's an EOR company that's turned into a payroll company. Mo (33:36.078) You Joel (33:36.481) Mm-hmm. Joel (33:41.707) Mm-hmm. Mo (33:42.51) you Chad (33:50.434) That could easily, thank you, easily take a huge, huge chunk out of the staffing world if they want to, right? So IPO, it's not a surprise. And unlike other stocks in the HR space, I believe this motherfucker's gonna skyrocket. So I want the pre-deal. I want some money in on this thing. Joel (33:55.361) Cheers. Mo (34:11.022) Ha ha ha. Joel (34:11.231) the pre-deal deal. Do they serve chicken cock at that bar, Chad? Mo (34:16.371) Hahaha Chad (34:17.602) I don't think so. Joel (34:20.853) I'm going to guess no. I'm going to guess no to Madrid. Yeah. I don't know what we can say about Deel that hasn't been said already. Now, what is interesting to me? I think this is the first time they've publicly talked about an IPO. the 2026 date is interesting. I don't know the leadership at Deel very well, but part of me thinks that they wake up every morning and go, how can we fuck with rippling in that? And, that douchebag Parker Conrad. Mo (34:22.363) god. Mo (34:45.614) Hahaha Chad (34:49.004) Tom Radd, yeah, Parker Edd. Joel (34:50.305) Right. Who, who I predicted, this was one of my predictions for 25 is that, is that rippling would go IPO. This gives them a little bit of false comfort to me. know Parker was listening to this and saw this and said, Ooh, 26, we can exhale. We can take a little break. We can maybe, you know, we, got some room to maneuver. Another prediction. think Deel comes out and says, Chad (34:53.962) Yeah. Mo (34:53.987) my God. Mo (35:05.72) haha Joel (35:17.121) things are happening sooner than we thought. We're going to file sooner than we thought and freak Parker Conrad and the Rippling kids out because they do not want Deel to go public before they do because their shit is going to look awful in light of Deel. So part of me thinks Deel 's fucking around with Rippling and saying 26 when they really mean 25. It's just the... Chad (35:30.23) before they do. No. Mo (35:33.102) You Chad (35:34.924) Yes. Mo (35:41.23) Wow, bold prediction. I like it. Mm-hmm. Chad (35:44.674) Well, he's just trying to pull it into his 2025 predictions. Joel (35:47.041) It is the evil genius that I think permeates the industry. yeah, Deel, keep crushing it. I can't wait till these two go public and we have more fun things to talk about. Mo, any comment about the news? Lot of dollars, I don't know. Questions? Mo (35:52.672) I love that. Mo (36:05.654) Lots of dollars. mean, they're clearly doing something right. Yeah, not a lot of familiarity or I've never been on the Deel platform, but I have been on Rippling and I have read about that guy. So I love your prediction and I can't wait to see what happens, but yeah, I mean, go, go crush it. guess kill it. Can't wait to see IPO baby. Yeah. Joel (36:23.019) Go crush it. Go crush it. Joel (36:28.435) All right. And on that note, we got more red meat for our listeners, more red meat. got Paradox deal. Let's talk about LinkedIn for God's sakes. Let's LinkedIn, everyone listening as a boner, if they can get one, because we're throwing so much red meat, red meat at you people. All right. Move over to. Instagram and YouTube. Here comes LinkedIn with over 1 billion users. Chad (36:31.66) Yes. Chad (36:36.63) dead. Mo (36:37.603) man. Mo (36:41.18) Ha! Mo (36:46.973) God. Chad (36:49.666) When's the last time you heard it called a boner? I think I was like 12. Go ahead, go ahead, sorry. Mo (36:52.886) Mmm, yeah, it's been a while. God. Joel (37:00.861) Again, why people love the show. All right, move over to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Here comes LinkedIn with over 1 billion users. They're pushing video content touting a 36 % upload increase and new features like full screen vertical videos for all users. But wait, there's more. LinkedIn hopes to improve candidate treatment, adding quote, responsive insights indicating which job listings are actively being reviewed by employers hoping to steer applicants clear. of the proverbial black hole. All this is in the shadow of recent earnings where LinkedIn's revenue increased by 9 % in the quarter ending December 31st, reaching $4.59 billion, despite its talent solution segment, which includes recruitment tools performing slightly below expectations due to a weak hiring market. Mo, I know you love you some good social media videos. What are your thoughts on the news out of LinkedIn? Mo (37:52.11) I mean, big fan of LinkedIn video. It's actually, kudos to them. They have exploded my growth. I have gotten 41 million views in 2024. I think I'm like 8 million for 2025 already. And it's all thanks to video. Like, it's crazy. And it's blown my following up and all of that. So thank you, LinkedIn. I appreciate it. As an early adopter, I was, I think, Chad (38:01.954) you Chad (38:05.792) Hello! Joel (38:06.731) Damn. Mo (38:16.27) pretty much rewarded. Now it sounds like other people have like hopped into it and understand that they should be there. So my message to anyone is if you want to grow on LinkedIn, like don't be silly, like get out there, don't be an idiot. Like this is how to do it. And so they're really doubling down on creator tools. I've seen it myself. I've been, I've actually talked to someone on the LinkedIn team about this who reached out to me after seeing my videos and, they're going to be providing more and more tools for people to get out there on video. So. Chad (38:27.842) you Mo (38:42.402) buy in now, it's going to help you grow. Maybe the golden era is a little bit past since people are more sort of flooding it at this point, but it's a blast. It's been really fun. And I think LinkedIn, it needs a little bit of a shakeup from like, I'm humbled to announce that I got this new freaking job and I'm a visionary thought leader genius. So I'm here for it. Some people call it boring TikTok, like boring business TikTok. I disagree. I've seen some pretty good video content and... Chad (38:47.282) Thank Thank you. Joel (39:02.399) Mm-hmm. Mo (39:08.108) I also wanna say because they are focusing on this and because they've just made so much money, LinkedIn, maybe pull a TikTok and an Instagram and start paying your creators, incentivize us to post more. I'm into that idea. So show me the money, baby, I'm in. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, let's go. Also, there's just so much opportunity that people aren't realizing yet in terms of brand collaborations, like B2B should be on LinkedIn, should be working with creators there. Chad (39:17.148) oooo Joel (39:17.537) Chad (39:21.634) There it is. That's what I'm saying. Tell him, Mo. Tell him! Joel (39:23.105) You Mo (39:35.278) the value of a LinkedIn follower, if you will, versus like a TikTok or an Instagram follower, in my view and in the view of many others who know a lot more than I do, it's like exponential, right? Because these people are real name, real industry information, real title, all that stuff, which in some cases is bizarre. So I'm like, you posted that? Like, don't you know we all know? You're not like user 45789. Like how did you put that out there with your name attached to it and your player? Like, holy shit. But. It's like crazy, the value there. And I think that companies are gonna start waking up and partnering with content creators on LinkedIn. And it's just a whole market that's gonna explode. So that's my prediction for 2025. And let's hope it comes true for yours truly and others. Chad (40:16.256) Yeah. So companies that are out there, they should be they should be going after influencers. mean, and that's the thing is that everybody's talking about how can we get our jobs out on social media? Stop that shit. Go to influencers, have them get into their feeds for God's sakes, whether it's on TikTok, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's on fucking LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. That to me is the is the big key. Yeah, big key. Mo (40:23.213) Mm-hmm. Mo (40:29.581) Nope. Mo (40:39.104) Edutainment, yeah. Make it interesting. You're like, no one wants to watch your freaking webinar. Talk to the content creator. Have them Trojan horse your message in, man. Make it interesting, right? You know, Trojan horse that shit. Chad (40:45.447) Hahaha Joel (40:49.153) Trojan horse shit shit Trojan condom that shit. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Chad is Chad is so drunk. All right. This is great. so, so first of all, it's a chance point. If you don't have like a short form vertical video strategy, you're way behind. mean, get, get your, get your, you don't need, I mean, you don't necessarily need influencers. That's great. You have one in your own company, like get them on video. Chad (40:53.346) What's going on? Mo (41:01.07) Ha! Joel (41:17.739) get it on, get it on this platform. It's blowing up. Everyone that's using it loves it. I think it's only going to get bigger and bigger. and I think like we talked about before Chad, it's going to be a way to hire, right? Companies will post shit and there'll be a little button that says, company sounds interesting. Click here to apply now. And people will be just to be like applying to all these videos of companies that they think look cool or people that might be their boss. So this is a little bit of Mo (41:40.462) 100%. Joel (41:41.601) I don't want to say, know, that we talk about the death of the resume. Like this is kind of where hiring or lot of hiring is going to start moving into for the, for the young kids out there. Uh, the other thing that back to the paradox news, um, for the first time subscriptions on LinkedIn premium hit the $2 billion mark. People love this data shit. love insights and what's going on at this company. Like they like to look under the kimono and see what's going on. But. Mo (42:01.89) Mm. Mo (42:07.342) God, we need to retire that phrase, please, please God. No, oh, this needs to go away. Yeah, see, this is why I'm here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no opening the kimono. It's gone, it's dead, let's kill it. Killed, killed. Ixnay. Joel (42:08.469) But right now, but right now, under the kimono? What? What? Chad (42:18.449) I'm not going to leave it. Joel (42:21.441) So, okay, boners and under the kimono. Geez, geez. Okay, Freedom of speech, baby. Chad (42:23.49) I didn't say you couldn't say it. I just said I hadn't heard it since I've been 12. Go ahead though. It's fine. It's fine. Mo (42:28.898) That's less offensive to me than the kimono. Anyway, I'm just trying to help. I'm trying to help. The more you know, the more you know. Chad (42:35.274) Okay, so just so that we get this right. Mo does not like the kimono, but she likes the boner. Okay, so that's what we learned. Joel (42:40.095) No kimonos, boners, and definitely don't get a boner with the kimono on. That's bad from all sides. Mo (42:47.453) God! Chad (42:50.786) So the responses. So the responses. So the responses. So the responses. Mo (42:51.381) I was trying to help! Joel (42:55.649) you All right. Good God. The train is off. The train is off the track. So my second point was simply paradoxes move to like internal data and turn your own company into sort of your own LinkedIn access to data. And what's going on is going to be a very hot product in the near future. Good God. Let's get a refill. Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about romance remotely. Mo (42:59.5) I did all I could. Mo (43:03.566) Transparency. Chad (43:09.612) Yep. Yep. Chad (43:18.604) Yes. Joel (43:30.209) All right, guys, a recent report from Zeti, mom's spaghetti shows that 86 % of US employees find remote work aids and forming romantic connections. What? With 51 % noticing flirtation in virtual meetings. I don't even know how that would happen. Over 62 % flirt via work platforms. 79 % have had long-term office romances and 41 % had a supervisor as a partner. Mo (43:36.11) What? Mo (43:47.842) Yeah, me neither. Joel (43:58.817) Gee, that sounds like a great idea. So it's no surprise. 69 % are starting to report favoritism in the remote workforce. Mo, so much for love in an office elevator. It's taken shape on Slack. What's your take on this new reality? Mo (44:08.312) Hmm. Right? Mo (44:16.534) I mean, I just feel like we've lost the ability to connect with people in person if people are like, yeah, this is better for like facilitating romance. Like, I'm sorry, are you kidding me? Like if you're in person in an office, how could that not be more of an environment where that can flourish? Like that blows my mind. I also have to say I have never in all my experience with remote work, seen someone like flirt in front of a group of people. Like that doesn't happen. I don't know how you pick up on that. But I know I'm like, what? Like heart eyes? Chad (44:25.184) Thank Joel (44:41.537) How would it happen? Emojis? Like sending an eggplant? Chad (44:43.904) No, think they're doing it. think they're, that's it. It's like, you're looking really good today, right? And you're doing it on the phone versus, yeah. Mo (44:46.41) on the side in Slack, but like. Really hot today. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, get that now we are much more capable of having online interactions and whatnot, and we can create some sort of romantic, romantical vibes through that. I get it. I just, in person is where it makes more sense to me. But OK, I guess that's just where we are as a society. We don't know how to talk to each other in person. But I will say, you know, right? On its face, you hear that, and it's like, Joel (44:52.929) you Joel (45:13.473) Hmm. Mo (45:20.962) Yeah, you probably shouldn't get involved with your supervisor. We all know that, like at face value. That's obviously something we shouldn't do. But where do you meet people? Where do you spend all your time? It is at the office. So it's like a very natural outcome of spending most of your waking life with a lot of people in close contact, whether that's like literally physically, which I think would be easier to create the romance situation, or that's online, right? But yeah, it just makes me think like, shit, are we just? Joel (45:24.449) you Mo (45:48.552) Do we not know how to interact in person anymore? Like, where's our Riz gone, guys? Like, where is the Riz? Joel (45:52.417) So I do want to chime in on the why does it, so there's an element in the office when you're around other people. And I can certainly speak from a male perspective. There have been multiple times where I would see my buddy or someone I knew start to like get on that line, like get up to it and almost like jump across. I would like, I'd give them a look or say, dude, what are you doing? Like that, no, you can't do that. Chad (46:01.035) No. Mo (46:10.414) You Chad (46:11.714) yeah. yeah. Mo (46:14.453) Oof. You're like. Joel (46:22.345) In a remote world, there's no like, at least in my case, male guard rails to say, dude, you're going to fuck up. Like you're going to get fired. You're going to like, you're going to get, you're going to get nailed on this one. That doesn't exist on Slack. Right. Now it is a startup that someone should do. By the way, friends at Fama should be creating some sort of like Slack channel detector because the superiors. Mo (46:24.971) Mmm, you're right. Mo (46:30.254) Yeah, that's good point. Chad (46:31.074) Don't do it. Don't do it. Mo (46:34.591) Yeah, that's a really good point. Ha! Chad (46:44.652) They should. They should. Yes. Joel (46:49.409) Getting into more like 41 % of romances with superiors and bosses. Whoo, man. is, that is, that is a PR nightmare waiting to happen. Um, someone's going to get nailed some big high profile company. You're going to hear it on CNBC or somewhere and companies are going to lose their mind over this and they're going to like scurry and try to find how do we stop this? How do we track it? How do we manage it? Um, you're going to see that story cause that is a lot of managers behaving badly. Mo (46:55.064) Danger zone, danger zone. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Chad (47:00.309) I agree. Mo (47:11.565) Riot. Mo (47:17.78) yeah. Or they're just gonna be gone one day and there's gonna be like a, you know, like no information about why they're gone. And like every time that happens. Yeah. Yeah, that too. Joel (47:18.177) with some of their Joel (47:22.881) There are going to be lawsuits. No, there's going to be a lawsuit. Total lawsuit. there's going to be nudes are going to be sent on Slack. Like this is going to happen. Mo (47:30.398) God. you guys, true story. I've seen, when I joined a company, I went onto the Slack channel and I was scrolling through the Slack channel as a brand new employee and I was in a public channel and I saw a picture of a bare male butt staring me in the face next to a guy, cheersing the camera on a ski slope. And I was like, am I watching HBO? Like what is happening right now? How is this real? And I was like, how does this person have a job? And I went and I looked who posted it. It was the co-founder and president of the organization. And I was like, Chad (47:31.842) Let's, Chad (47:59.724) There you go. There you go. Well, let's, let's let, let Joel, it's time for history lesson. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to help the listeners understand how we got here. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So K remember when Joel, I know you remember this when we used to have company just show up at the house, people would literally hop in the car and just pop over for a visit unannounced unannounced. Mo (47:59.96) Fuck me, how did I find myself in another frat house in tech? Mo (48:08.206) You Chad (48:28.022) You'd hear your mom answer the door and then yell really loud, we have company. And we, why'd that stop? Well, the internet, because it was too damn easy to connect with people. So instead of hopping in the car, you pick up the phone, send a message. The actual human real world reaction fades away, right? So interactions move online and since the human connection is all but lost, just popping over and having company seems really weird, right? Mo (48:31.775) You Mo (48:35.47) Yeah. Mo (48:57.396) Mm-hmm casual drop-in nope nope Chad (48:57.674) Really weird. Yeah, that's, weird. So where before it was normal, it was something that we all did. So we shouldn't be surprised that peers slacking or messaging, creating that connection becomes almost the entire way. That's how we have a connection. Right? So remote, that's, that's what we're used to now, right? Instead of the impersonal stuff, we don't have company. That's weird. We need to do this stuff online. So that's. Mo (49:03.224) Mm-hmm. Mo (49:21.848) Mm-hmm. Mo (49:25.443) You Chad (49:27.862) for me, how I think we got here. And it's sad and it's true. And these motherfucking AI boyfriends and girlfriends are going to be easier to slack than, than, than Jeffrey across the, across the, the internet. Joel (49:44.765) I quote the debate by saying, I don't know what he said and I don't think he knows either. Let's get to our dad joke of the week before Chad is fully under the table. All right, guys, what are a chocolate's pronouns? What are a chocolate's pronouns? Mo (49:44.91) cubicle. Mo (49:49.119) Hehehehehe Mo (49:54.254) Ha ha! Chad (49:54.466) I'm almost there. Mo (50:03.886) Got nothing. Chad (50:04.802) That's an almond. Joel (50:06.401) Hershey Hershey Mo (50:08.596) there we go. That's, yeah. I got it, I got it. I know what. Chad (50:08.962) Her and she yeah her she does like Joel (50:12.341) Well, it's great to meet you. hope that we see each other again very soon. And with that, another one is in the books. We out. Chad (50:16.288) Hahaha! Chad (50:19.958) We out! Mo (50:22.73) can I talk? Joel (50:26.869) We out. Mo (50:27.0) Yeah, we out. Okay, we're done.

"Grab your headphones and your happy sock, because Chad, JT, and Mo are here to drop a bombastic episode of HR’s most dangerous podcast. This week, they tackle the wild world of TikTok’s survival, MrBeast’s surprise bid for global dominance, and a STEM creator taking Pornhub to educational heights (math class just got weird). Chad christens this era as the ‘Fellatio Administration’ while JT and Mo do their best to keep him tethered to reality. It’s equal parts chaos, comedy, and catharsis. WARNING: Contains unfiltered opinions and far too many jokes about bourbon barrel-aged syrup. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad (00:24.776) yeah. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I am Chad. Are you not entertained? So wash. Mo (00:26.541) You Mo (00:35.247) I am Maureen, girls rule, boys drool, Clough. J.T. O'Donnell (00:41.452) And I'm JT, please invite me someplace warm, O'Donnell. Chad (00:44.632) I'd love to have you here. But it's almost down to 60 degrees, so it's getting a little chilly. On this week's cheese-free show, Chaos Management back in the USA, see what I did there? Employer.com and MrBeast bid for TikTok and who knew science, technology, engineering, and math was a fetish? Grab your happy sock, kids. We'll be right back. Mo (00:44.94) Hahaha J.T. O'Donnell (00:49.44) Yeah, I know you're rubbing it in. Mo (01:00.908) You Chad (01:18.728) That's a good question. That's a good question. Well, hello. What's up, ladies? J.T. O'Donnell (01:23.438) What's up, Chad? Mo (01:23.449) What's up, Chad? How's Portugal? Chad (01:25.135) Joel, it's, well, it's getting little chilly, as I'd said. It's almost 60 degrees here. I had to put on another layer. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. How about you guys? Where are we at? Mo, where are you at? J.T. O'Donnell (01:28.951) Yeah. Mo (01:31.215) I'm sorry. Mo (01:38.649) We at Seattle, we're hanging on, hanging on here. It's not 60. It is sunny though, so there you go. I know, it's pretty early. But I'm here, I'm here and I'm happy to be here. Chad (01:43.78) It's like 9 AM there, right? Noon? lies. JT, you're on the East Coast. So a little bit better, noon, but what... Ooh. Four degrees, walking the dog. Okay, okay. Okay, kids, so Joel is obviously out this week. It's a blessing and a curse. The blessing is less Taco Bell and Chipotle jokes. The curse... J.T. O'Donnell (01:56.136) am. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, baby. Four degrees walking the dog yesterday. Yeah. What is wrong with this picture? Mo (02:04.857) Damn. Yeah, no thanks. Chad (02:18.406) I have too much Smarter Co-hosts, so I guess I gotta be on my game this week. JT and Mo, again, welcome back. But first time on the show together, so can't wait to start digging in with you. We got stuff to talk about. This is gonna be re... Mo (02:20.888) You Mo (02:29.305) Yay. Mo (02:32.739) Big female energy today, love it. Here for it. Chad (02:37.926) I'm here for it. my God, am I here for it? Jesus. You ready to dig into some shout outs? Mo (02:45.753) Let's go. Chad (02:48.072) Clearly it's time for shout outs. And for you kids out there, yes, that is Stephen McGrath. We had him do a bunch of new sound effects because everybody knows Stephen is our favorite Scott. So let's hear it again. yeah. So melodic as well. Okay, Mo, you got a shout out. Hit it. Mo (03:02.127) you Mo (03:05.999) That's amazing. All right, my shout out, it goes to whoever is the White House photographer of this new administration, because what I beheld on whitehouse.gov is a gift that we'll keep on giving. It is legitimately the weirdest headshot I've ever seen in my entire life. I mean, are you kidding me? I'm pretty speechless, honestly. I saw this and I was like, this can't be real, but this is the one that he chose. what? Where am I? What is happening? Yeah, so. Chad (03:36.968) Look at that. Look at that. Chad (03:44.71) It's the Emperor Palpatine is what it is. Mo (03:48.077) I mean, it's unbelievable. So thank you to whoever made this fly. Like my heart goes out to you forever because this is epic. Chad (03:57.81) This is epic. That's whatever you want to call it. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so before, before we get into my shout out, did you guys watch the inauguration at all? Did you wait? What, what, did, what did you think? I keep hearing, cause I didn't have, I didn't, I didn't take the time. I keep hearing that it's kind of like a made for TV movie kind of thing. Mo (04:00.321) Epic. Yeah. Excite to be seen. J.T. O'Donnell (04:11.028) I did. Yeah, I did watch parts of it. Mo (04:11.895) Yeah, I did. Mo (04:19.247) You J.T. O'Donnell (04:22.082) Well, if you see all the videos afterwards, the memes that were made, literally a bunch of them, I was like, I was thinking that when I'm not kidding you, like literally, was like, I literally, he was, I mean, they just captured moments of, you know, people looking off into space, giggling, fashion issues, you know, the vice president's son patting both parents on the head. Mo (04:23.332) Yeah. Chad (04:29.288) Hahahaha Mo (04:29.295) Totally. Totally. Mo (04:44.505) Fashion choices. J.T. O'Donnell (04:50.638) You know, it's just, they just put together the greatest montages out of that thing that I don't remember in any inauguration prior to, so. Mo (04:55.031) incredible. Chad (04:57.81) I really hope that Baron, because he's going to need it, he gets like a fashion consultant or something because he looks like a serial killer. And again, mean, he's a kid, he's 18, 19 years old. But I mean, at the end of the day, mean, you got money, guys. I mean, your brothers look like idiots. Try to get away from that look, please. Please, Baron. my God. OK. Mo (05:05.815) Mmm, yeah. Mo (05:19.36) Mmm. Yeah. Doesn't buy you class or style, does it? Mm-mm. No, no it does not. J.T. O'Donnell (05:22.616) But don't, Chad, you don't, but you remember that age? At that age, nobody older than you knows to tell you what to dress. I mean, when you're 19, your friends know how to dress. And so you're dressing, you're not, you're not gonna listen to anybody. If the fashion consultant is his age or younger, we might have a shot. Chad (05:29.106) Oof. Mo (05:32.707) Ha ha ha. Chad (05:33.241) Yeah, and and he probably won't listen anyway, yeah Mo (05:38.905) I mean, I don't know. Chad (05:39.336) His friends don't dress like that. His friends don't dress like that. There's no way. Mo (05:45.025) I John Fetterman had the right energy. mean, I was like, damn, I applaud your choice. Wow, shorts to the inauguration in like, what, what was it like four degrees or something? I don't know. It's like, go for it, dude. Chad (05:50.29) Dude, dude, come on. Yeah. it was ridiculous. So I gotta, I gotta get ready for my, get ready for my, can I do this? I can't, I gotta do it the right way. Boom, yes. Getting into a beer for my shout out. My shout out goes out to our YouTube subscribers and viewers. A couple of weeks ago, I shared our 2024 Spotify numbers and this week, thanks to our listeners and new viewers, the Chad and She's YouTube channel views grew over 350 % in 2024. Mo (06:02.135) You can do it. I believe in you. Chad (06:24.232) And watch time to our content was up almost 400%. So shout out to everyone watching the Chad and Cheese on YouTube. Make sure you like, share, comment, subscribe, and make sure all your family, friends, everybody, Chad and Cheese on YouTube. Shout out to you. JT. Mo (06:40.911) You J.T. O'Donnell (06:46.062) So my shout out is to a guy on LinkedIn named Austin Nasso. You should go look him up, Austin Nasso. If you didn't see this, Austin apparently considers himself an AI futurist as well as a comedian. And he posted a very important breakdown of making $340,000 per year in San Francisco as a software engineer, and it's utterly unlivable. Let me break down why I can't afford it. Some highlights include the DoorDash salads at $1,680 a month. Mo (06:59.343) you Chad (07:09.986) shit. J.T. O'Donnell (07:16.334) The dinner and drinks for hinge dates excluding to Michelin star was 2380. He ends up $1,000 in the hole per month and he doesn't know what to do about it. That also includes the cyber truck lease for 1368. And so he's struggling. Now folks, if you didn't get through the bottom and realize he was joking, right? Mo (07:32.207) My favourite part. Chad (07:37.672) You're just struggling. Mo (07:41.58) You J.T. O'Donnell (07:42.126) 11,000 comments later and counting half of these are people telling him what's wrong with him and another quarter are giving him financial advice on how to fix his numbers legitimately, legitimately. So I think this is just amazing that he could slide in like this and have this many people not understand he was joking. Austin, you win. Yeah. Chad (07:55.058) Come on, come on people, buy a clue. Mo (07:56.623) What is wrong with people? Mo (08:04.847) We are brilliant. Yep, he's the best. Love that guy. Chad (08:05.21) That's amazing. That's amazing. That is amazing. That's amazing. Yes, what we need is more comedy, kids. That's what we need. J.T. O'Donnell (08:10.742) Yeah, there's a picture. We do. An intelligent comedy. mean, this thing is hilarious, you know? Mo (08:17.991) my God. Yes. I'm getting my news exclusively from The Daily Show for probably about four-ish years. So yes, comedy will save us all. Chad (08:25.116) dude, yes. It will. And another thing that's going to save us. Mo (08:33.359) You Chad (08:34.44) Yeah, that's right. So a week from today, Julie and I are starting our road trip in Spain. That's right, kids. spending a couple of nights in Seville, then hopping north to Caceres for a few nights and ending up in Madrid for the smart recruiters, all hands event. we're to be doing a simulcast, ending up with like a gala before jumping back on a jet plane and coming back to the fury of executive orders happening in the U S and then. Hopefully you guys will be able to join us in the Transform happening at the Wynn in Las Vegas on March 17th and 19th. So if you can't go to Ireland for St. Patrick's Day, why not the hell go to Las Vegas, spend it with Chad and Cheese at Transform. If you haven't registered, it's coming up. to chadcheese.com slash events. Come see us at Transform. Any thoughts, any travel going on, personal business, what's happening between you two? Mo (09:16.015) you J.T. O'Donnell (09:33.174) Yeah, I'm literally getting on a plane tonight to Florida. I wasn't kidding. I booked the flight two days ago. I have a daughter that lives there. she's, know, mom's going to come work out of your apartment is how that's going to work for a few days. So I don't freeze, but yeah, I am. And then I'm coming back and, I've, put an order in just so everybody knows I've put an order in for March 11th and 12 here in Portsmouth because I am actually teaching. Chad (09:36.187) whoa! Mo (09:36.759) Hmm. the negative four or whatever, makes sense. Chad (09:45.839) Amen. Chad (09:59.677) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (10:01.686) a class here for two days. It's a two day mastermind called Expertise Unleashed. And it teaches executives how to build their brand without looking like a jerk. So you got a lot of people out there right now that don't know how to build a brand, right? And their LinkedIn feeds are horrific. And they, we've talked about this, like the whole future is branding. I'm sorry, you're a business of one, you're an expensive brand. You want to make six figures plus a year. Chad (10:04.904) that's cool. Mo (10:06.263) Awesome. Mo (10:13.626) that's key. Chad (10:15.26) There are so many. Mo (10:24.729) Mm. Yep. J.T. O'Donnell (10:27.85) And yet it blows my mind how many people don't understand this. so, so if you're interested DM me because we will be turning up the heat some way here at the 11th and 12th and saving a lot of people's LinkedIn profiles. It is my job. Yeah, literally. Chad (10:40.37) So we're gonna, we're... good God. Mo (10:40.803) Thank you for your service, honestly. Like, thank you for your service. We need you. I mean, if I have to see another visionary thought leader, like I can't, I cannot do it. my God. Chad (10:47.528) Yeah, it's... Okay, can we break down thought leader real quick? Can we please break down thought leader? I mean, if you are not a leader with execution, who gives a shit what you think? If you have no practical exercise and or experience in actually building shit and putting it out there, then who gives a fuck? I mean, really, I'm a thought leader. When people call me that, I'm like, okay, stop that shit. I actually do stuff. J.T. O'Donnell (10:56.046) Right? Mo (11:08.943) Mm. Chad (11:19.45) I do stuff, right? So, so anyway, what your thoughts, that a bad thing? Do you, do you steer people away from thought leader, JT? J.T. O'Donnell (11:19.523) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (11:27.032) Big time. I actually steer people away from putting leader in there because leader is a compliment somebody pays you about your management style, right? I think the most successful people scrub all subjectivity out of their profiles and just spit facts. It's simple. Throw up the numbers. You throw up the numbers, it's gonna be fine. And then, you know, from a content standpoint, provide something valuable advice-wise. No thought leadership. You know, so yeah, I'm with you. Chad (11:33.64) Appreciate that. Appreciate that. Mo (11:34.275) Yes. Chad (11:38.118) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mo (11:48.559) You make too much sense, JT. You're making too much sense for me. Chad (11:54.428) Yeah. You know what also makes sense? Free stuff kids, free stuff. Go to ChadCheese.com slash free. You get a cool t-shirt. JT wore hers last week from Aaron App. They feel like, yeah, I don't know. Where is yours? They feel like a hug from Chad and Cheese. You got to get one from our friends at Aaron App. We, you don't think so? Cause not anybody, not everybody wants a hug from Chad and Cheese. Mo (11:57.411) Mmm. Mo (12:01.807) Hey, where's mine? I don't have one. Want that. J.T. O'Donnell (12:12.47) sure you should say it that way. Just throw it out there. Just the visual that comes up in that moment. It's like, Mo (12:21.123) We need consent for that. Chad (12:24.028) This is why we need you two around, because Joel and I say stupid shit all the time. We have no clue. We're dumb men. Bourbon barrel aged syrup for your Belgian waffles. mean, what could be better than bourbon barrel aged syrup? Pappies, like the best bourbon from our friends at Kiora. Craft beer from the data geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs. We have whiskey from... Mo (12:33.999) you J.T. O'Donnell (12:41.454) Hmm. Chad (12:52.868) our friends at, who's doing, Van Hack. Holy shit, we've got Canadians all over the place. Van Hack, two bottles of whiskey to your front door. And if it's your birthday, it's time for a little rum with plum. I gotta make sure I get the good one out, because everybody loves this one. Plum.io. Joel will be back next week for birthdays. But that's Chad Cheese. dot com slash free and here it comes. Time for topics. Chad (13:35.72) I get I gotta get those I gotta get those melded melded together. So we have a fury fury of content that's coming out today kids first and foremost, I would like to call this our Trump negative 2.0 block. So the beginning of the dismantling of DEI in the USSA the this week many Mo (13:36.911) That was amazing. Mo (13:46.882) you Mo (14:02.319) you Chad (14:04.794) executive orders were signed and many were revoked. Among those revoked was the Lyndon B. Johnson's executive order 11246, signed back in 1965, focused on, guess what? Equal employment opportunity. Yeah, that's a thing. In conjunction with that, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, AKA OFCCP, within the Department of Labor shall immediately a... Mo (14:12.655) Hmm Chad (14:33.796) Stop promoting diversity. Cease promoting diversity. B, hold federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking affirmative action, which means no enforcement, period. C, allowing or encouraging federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balanced based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin. Holy shit, ladies, we're back in the 1960s. What are your thoughts? Mo, I know I can see it in your eyes. You just want to let loose. Let me hear it. Let me hear it. Mo (15:11.503) I just like, what the actual fuck? Like honestly, like what is going on with this? I knew it was coming. I know this is the whole shock and awe campaign. Like that's what's going on right now, but it's still like, it's insane. And to me, when you think about it, first of all, it's horrendous business. I mean, some actual leaders, like we're gonna call them leaders because they actually do lead by example and do good things, right? Like Mark Cuban, he understands that this is just like a bad business practice and- Chad (15:15.494) Hahahaha Chad (15:24.7) Firestorm. Mo (15:40.705) I don't understand how others can't see that, can't see the error of their ways. Like this is just absurd. And the basis for their argument on the reason DEI shouldn't be there is really hinging on meritocracy. Dude, that's not a thing. Like, can we be honest about that? That is not a thing. I have been in countless corporate organizations where I have seen it firsthand. Everybody knows this. It's not a meritocracy and equity is critically important, not just because it's the morally right thing to do, not just because it's the ethically right thing to do, but also because it is better for business outcomes. So this is just like an incredibly ridiculous own goal, performative action, absurdity, and I hate all of it. I absolutely abhor it, and I could have even been stronger in my feelings, but that is where I am. Mm-hmm. Chad (16:17.64) Mm-hmm. Chad (16:29.224) What do you think, JT? J.T. O'Donnell (16:31.522) You know, for years, I've been saying to job seekers, whether you like it or not, hiring is discrimination. So if you think about it, we get down to five candidates and they all have the exact same skills. Think of them as five apples. I can't eat all five apples today. I got to pick one. Do I want the sour one? I want the green or one? And so we live in this world where hiring is discrimination, but we worked really hard to get that to a place where the discriminating was down to things that... people had some control over, right? Whether it was your experience, your communication style, et cetera. And so to see us reverse back and allow all these other forms of discrimination come in, it's disheartening. It is. it's, the voice of the job seeker here, they're just, so defeated because it's already hard enough to get a job in this market. You're already fighting against massive competition. Chad (17:01.051) Mm-hmm. Chad (17:25.127) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (17:25.358) And it just it's like adds another layer for people and I think it gets people to the point where they just give up now the optimist in me Really hopes that this upsets enough younger people who are thinking about how to form companies and How we'll have teams that manage one day that it'll sit in their cross so badly that they'll They'll go all in the other direction and really start to build up you Mo (17:32.719) you J.T. O'Donnell (17:48.45) You have to believe that when somebody does something this severe, the pendulum is going to swing back, right? You know, I've got everything crossed. That's the case. and it's just, it's unfortunate, you know, but I, we're going to, we're going to take the cards that are being dealt right this second and I'm going to get scrappy with my clients and we're going to figure out ways, you know? And so, yeah, same thing. Yeah. Mo (17:52.527) 100%. 100%. Chad (17:52.7) Yeah, yeah. Chad (18:01.362) Thank you. Chad (18:07.864) It's all we can do right now, but to JT's point Chad (18:14.824) So real quick for the listeners, I'm gonna kinda hitch up on this one. The OCCP, why does that matter? The OCCP was created to hold government contractors' feet to the fire because if they're taking millions and or billions of taxpayers' money, and we're talking about taxpayers that are black, white, brown, male, female, gay, trans, everybody, right? Okay, so. Mo (18:15.503) you Chad (18:40.294) Those companies are taking taxpayer money. So there was a different standard created for those government contractors and the OFCCP enforced, past tense, that standard until this week, right? On the corporate America side, mean, corporate America will love working the roads with no guardrails. McDonald's new not so inclusive statement is, quote, we are retiring setting aspirational representation goals and instead keeping our focus on continuing to embed inclusive practices that grow our business into our everyday process and operations." quote. So the retiring setting aspirational representation goals, lest we not forget kids, what gets measured gets done and they're stopping measuring it, right? So corporate America, Mo (19:35.087) Absolutely. Chad (19:38.3) We'll stop measuring representation and anything DEI will fade away. Now, the positive part here, I'm going end on a positive. The beautiful part about this is all of these executive orders, they're not hardwired into the system as laws. That's where politicians have gotten lazy and expected presidents to lead by EO instead of Congress actually doing the hard work, doing their fucking jobs. by hard wiring diversity, equity and inclusion into our society through legislation, right? So yes, we are going to see a firestorm of changes, bad changes, but if they're not hard wired, it's a firestorm that hopefully will only last four years. What damage can be done in four years? That's the hard part, but at the end of the day, I agree Moe from the meritocracy standpoint. It's much like trickle down economics. It was a great promotional propaganda bullshit scheme that's really helped out 1 % of the population, right? But everybody else bought into it. at that point, yeah, at that point, any, any comments on, on my stupidity I just threw out. Mo (20:29.071) . Mo (20:39.823) Exactly. Mo (20:46.575) 100%. Mo (20:52.589) I mean, first of all, everything you said made complete sense to me. So no stupidity from me in terms of how I would classify what you just said. I will say that I think to JT's point, are going to see, yes, there will be a lot of this bad outcome for sure. But we will see people who will stand up and say, I'm going to do the right thing both by my moral values and also by my business outcomes. And so people will stand up and say they care about this. Chad (21:14.994) Mm-hmm. Mo (21:20.015) Costco, there will be more companies, there will be more companies also that are led by Gen Z. Gen Z, I read somewhere, I can't remember exactly where it was, but that they specifically care about business ethics and where they choose to work. And so people will not go take jobs at companies that don't have the values that they do. So that's gonna be an outcome too. You're gonna lose out on talent who gives a damn about what they're doing and the impact they're making. So I'm trying to take a little bit more of a hopeful bet. still, I'm a little bit angry right now. J.T. O'Donnell (21:44.654) Mm-hmm. Mo (21:50.093) and I'm still kind of working through my emotions, but I'm not gonna get exhausted by this stuff. I am going to keep working and fighting and standing up for the little guy. So this is not cool. Chad (21:51.72) Appreciate that, appreciate that. Chad (22:00.072) Well, something else that we can talk about next on the executive order pile, hiring freeze plus RTO. So this from the desk of the president quote, by the authority vested in me as president, hereby order a freeze of the hiring of federal citizen employees. The order continues with that. It does not apply to military personnel or to. Jesus Christ, that dog. so. J.T. O'Donnell (22:07.832) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (22:27.49) Hahaha! Chad (22:29.682) Portugal, we got dogs. it, where, where was that? There we go. Does not apply to military personnel. No shit. Or the positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety. it shall not adversely impact social security, medicator, veterans benefits, end quote. then quote within 90 days, OMB and OPM with Doge. That's the. Mo (22:31.298) You Mo (22:38.55) Exactly. talker. Mo (22:56.942) Doge. Chad (22:57.018) idiots Vivek and Elon, will submit a plan to reduce the size of the federal government workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition. Then in a move we've seen from so many companies, now it's going to be tried by the White House, quote, heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of government shall, as soon as practical, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work. J.T. O'Donnell (23:24.846) you Chad (23:25.518) arrangements and require employees to return to work in person as their respective duty stations on a full time basis. quote hiring fleet freeze plus RTO. It's hard to keep a positive outlook this week. What are, what are your thoughts? J.T. O'Donnell (23:41.41) Yeah. I mean, we saw it coming, right? I mean, you knew the RTO was coming. Absolutely. As soon as he took office. I literally can't wait to watch how this idea of wasteful spending will be, you know, the wasteful spending czars of Doge, how they're going to handle it. Someone told me that they believe that something around 72 cents, please somebody fact check me. Mo (23:41.785) rough. 100%. Chad (24:00.381) Doge. Mo (24:01.43) Hahaha J.T. O'Donnell (24:09.738) of every dollar brought in, taxpayer dollars is wastefully spent. I'm like, really? We're that far off? Okay. So, you know, if they're going to show us some numbers, it'll be fascinating. They're just going to flood the market though with people. That's that. And those government workers are not going to be prepared for the job market that they're walking into. It's already hard enough to get a job, but to try to move from... Mo (24:14.39) my lord, okay. Chad (24:23.656) Go, yeah. Mo (24:23.811) Yep. Totally. Mo (24:29.667) Nope. Nope. J.T. O'Donnell (24:33.676) Government to for-profit or nonprofit to for-profit changing a lane is so dang hard in this world Because everybody wants what they want I want you know the bilingual brain surgeon for ten bucks an hour bring me those five people I mean every recruiter out there we call them purple squirrels right like like the purple squirrel thing is on steroids right now And then even still if you bring them three people they go well that was a little fast Chad (24:37.138) Mm-hmm. Mo (24:46.735) Who's 22? Yeah, exactly. Mo (24:58.425) Hahaha J.T. O'Donnell (24:58.536) There's a lot of people out there. don't you find like seven more? Because you found me three people that are perfect in a week. No, no, no, that can't be right. So now you're going to flood the market with all the... You're talking government workers are going to have no idea how to look for work and are probably not going to get great job search resources. saying. I'm not sure what outplacement program POTUS is going to be using, but I just think, right? I will send them my way, but I just... Chad (25:04.956) Yeah. Yeah. I love those hiring managers. Yeah. Mo (25:05.424) I have FOMO. Yeah, exactly. Mo (25:16.047) Until they come to you. Is he going to use one? Yeah, exactly. J.T. O'Donnell (25:28.278) I can't even, it's already crazy right now. Like if you just spend some time, I can't even when that whole group of people hits the market, it's gonna be insane. Mo (25:29.807) . Chad (25:30.568) Mm-hmm. Mo (25:35.759) It's definitely rough out there. What I found interesting about this whole move is they're saying the quiet part out loud that a lot of people don't actually acknowledge publicly, which is that they expect attrition with RTO initiatives. That is the freaking point. That is a layoff without calling it a layoff. I call them RTO layoffs. That's what it is. And so here we go. Chad (25:47.125) yeah. yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (25:47.702) 100%. J.T. O'Donnell (25:51.214) 100%. Mo (25:55.105) And I do think that it's going to impact people who are older, more experienced workers who have embedded themselves in communities who might be caring for older relatives, who might have kids in schools and have a community around them, and they're not gonna be able to go back. I also think that's by design, because they are likely to potentially have a higher income, right? So it's just, it's gross. We see what they're doing. We know what they're doing. Like you said, JT, mean, obviously we all saw this coming. It doesn't make it suck any less. Hopefully those people have a contingency plan, a plan B. We all need that in corporate these days because the 30 year corporate career or government career is dead. So it's just, it's a shame, but you know, everybody in this situation, I'm sure was not surprised by what happened. And I also want to say, I think it will be interesting to see what falls apart in the wake of all these people leaving, right? Because guess what? People make things work. People do things that make things function. Companies and governments function. And so we'll see some sort of a repercussion from this move. And it might be something that really like hurts Trump and his administration because they made this call. And people are like, shit, this thing broke. And it's because they made this call. Well, thanks a lot. It's almost like, remember when the Spotify CEO laid off like 1500 employees and was like, shit, it's harder to get stuff done now. It's like. people need to recognize that workers make companies make governments function. Like this is not rocket science, but apparently it is. I mean, we have a rocket scientist at the helm, an Elon Musk, and he's doing this kind of shit. So I don't know what to tell you. We're screwed. Chad (27:26.664) Yeah, well, I mean, Elon actually said it that he's they're looking for people to quit. Like he said, they're saying the quiet part out loud. according to OMB about 1.1 million employees, 46 % of the civilian population were eligible for some form of remote work. 1.1 million. Right. So take a look and think about this. So they're looking to actually Mo (27:32.685) Yeah, exactly. Totally. Chad (27:55.602) close the borders, which they're already doing, which means a lot of these entry level jobs that Americans just won't do anyway, right? Do they expect these individuals to go do those jobs? I mean, we're talking about the difference between a career risk in the government and then there's just a market mismatch that's going to happen. And then what's going to happen to the job? I mean, this is just fucking lunacy. Mo (28:03.471) Exactly. Mo (28:18.255) Totally. J.T. O'Donnell (28:22.638) Okay, but can we just talk about the fact that I have people right now walking into Home Depot, walking into fast food retail, I shouldn't just name one name, but walking into these places and being told, yeah, I'm not gonna hire you because the moment you get a better job, you're gonna leave. I mean, they're flat out told that. Mo (28:22.799) It's crush industries. It's insane. Mo (28:42.497) overqualified, right? That's what the... Yep. J.T. O'Donnell (28:46.014) So it's not a question of whether, I mean, there are people desperate and will do those jobs now and aren't being given a shot. So who's going to educate all the managers out there that you should be taking those people and giving them a shot? I mean, that is the, mean, you're right. You won't have a choice soon. Mo (28:50.606) Yep. Chad (28:50.748) Yeah. Yeah. Chad (28:58.61) They're not going have a choice soon. They're not going have a choice soon because again, if you push the immigrants out, the ones who are actually doing that job in the first place, the ones that they're leaning heavily on and don't get me wrong, great workers spend almost a hundred billion dollars in taxes every year and we're pushing all that out. Right. So, so it's like, there's going to be this huge mismatch in the workforce and then the economy is going to have problems around that. Do you expect. Mo (29:03.863) Exactly. Mo (29:15.649) More than some billionaires. Yeah, exactly. J.T. O'Donnell (29:16.759) Mm-hmm. Mo (29:26.543) Exactly. Chad (29:27.364) a careerist who's actually worked at a desk for, I don't know, say last 10 years to go work at a fucking dock. No, no, but, but, that is our supply chain. And we saw what happened to our supply chain during COVID, right? So we, we, we've got it. We've got to be careful around this. It's, it's just, it's crazy. J.T. O'Donnell (29:35.192) Mm-hmm. Mo (29:43.596) Exactly. Mo (29:47.735) We really do. It's like some industries will be completely decimated by this move. And it's like, it's not like we can't see this coming. And so all of this is to say, like, what kind of leadership is this when you can see what is going to be the fallout from people being fearful for their jobs, being fearful for their family's abilities to stay in this country? Like, it's just I'm so sick of all of this nonsense. It's absurd. And, you know, the othering and the xenophobia and everything, it's just insane. J.T. O'Donnell (29:49.12) Yeah, and me and what. Chad (29:53.213) Mm. Chad (30:07.622) Yeah. Chad (30:16.294) It's insane. And what is also insane is that we're going to talk about Mr. Beast. We'll be right back. Mo (30:19.437) You Hahaha! Chad (30:27.864) Okay, and another what the fuck moment for God's sakes. TikTok and you don't stop. TikTok shuts its 170 million American users out for a few hours last weekend and then allowed Americans back into the system, but not before receiving the following message. Quote, thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump's efforts, who is not president yet, officially. TikTok is back in the USA." So Trump signed an executive order delaying the shutdown for 75 days and has suggested he might require ByteDance to give up a 50 % stake to avert a total shutdown. Enter employer.com. Who the hell are those guys? And YouTube star. Mr. Beast, yes, the same Mr. Beast who has more than 346 million subscribers on YouTube. Jesus, that's fucking, it's crazy. Mr. Beast is part of a group of investors assembled by employer.com's CEO, Jesse Tinsley, who are submitting an all cash deal to buy TikTok's U.S. business before a possible ban. Mo and JT, let's break this down, bite by bite. What do you think about Mo (31:27.631) it is. Chad (31:46.364) Tiktok's brief shutdown. JT, you go first. is your lane. This is definitely, we're all on the socials, but Tiktok, definitely your lane. Hit it. Mo (31:51.874) You J.T. O'Donnell (31:52.888) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (31:57.378) I mean, if you hung out at any time, it Saturday on TikTok, it was just a tear fest, right? Like I just, couldn't, I couldn't get tears off my page, you know, and desperate pleas to go to other platforms. So then all of a sudden it comes back on in Sunday and you go from tears to rage. just, know, rage, rage, rage, rage. It's like, whoa, just like way too much drama. But it still comes back to the fact that whatever administration, government as a whole, really wants a handle on TikTok. They want access to it. And there's a million different theories out there, but I just look at the fact that they have the best algorithm out there. They have the best algorithm out there and people want it. And so, you can wrap it up in any way that you wanna talk about the risks and everything. And I respect that and understand that, but America, we like... Chad (32:29.341) Mm-hmm. Chad (32:38.492) They do. They do. Chad (32:50.727) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (32:55.302) having what we want and getting what we want and you know, we want this algo, you know, our people are on it. We want this algo. So we're going to do what it takes to get it. just, that's where it's going to end up. So we may be back in 90 days or 75 or whatever it was, if they don't get their way, because ultimately one way or another, it's going to come down to somebody in the U S getting their mitts on that. Mo (32:58.041) We do. Mo (33:19.887) That's a strong point. I gotta say, like, have we all lost our damn minds? Do we not remember that back a few years ago, Donald Trump was like, we have got to ban TikTok, China has TikTok, blah, blah, I can't do the voice. I wish I were Austin Naso, by the way. He does an incredible Donald Trump voice. Please go check it out. And Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and all of them. But anyway. He was the one who put us in this position and now we're heralding him as the savior of TikTok. Like, I can't guys. Like the cognitive dissonance that is required to like survive. Like what the, what is going on? Like he made this happen. He didn't, it's so infuriating. But I mean, I think I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. You know, the CCP involvement is concerning for sure. Like I understand the idea that it could be a problem, right? For sure. Chad (34:05.03) Yeah, of course. Yeah. Mo (34:08.559) I also understand that a lot of people make significant money and incomes and side hustles and have full platforms on TikTok. And it hurts my heart to think of that just dissolving. So, you know, obviously I have no say in whatever happens, but as far as Mr. Beast goes, man, that guy is a legend in my house. My kids are like obsessed with Jimmy Donaldson. Like he is the man. So. Chad (34:16.672) yeah. yeah. Mo (34:34.913) I'd rather him than some other people, I suppose. And, you know, we'll see what happens, but yeah, I mean, sure. Why not the like world's most prolific content creator? Like he could probably make it better maybe, but yeah, I agree. The algorithm is something to behold and I can see how people want to get in on that in the U.S. Chad (34:39.164) Mm-hmm. Chad (34:53.798) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead, go ahead. J.T. O'Donnell (34:55.116) make a prediction. Yeah. we're so close to the next thing. We're due. We're due to like everything. Everything has its peak and TikTok is like, it's not that it won't be around for a long time. Facebook is still here, but she ain't number one. You know what I mean? And so, we'll talk. Well, we're all busy obsessing over this. There's some crazy cool stuff come down the pike and all it's going to take this one to go viral and figure it out. Mo (34:57.529) You're good at those. Chad (35:06.492) Mm-hmm. Mo (35:14.415) She's had her day. Chad (35:14.63) Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Mo (35:25.219) Is it gonna be Red Note? J.T. O'Donnell (35:25.624) So I'm always looking for that one and I will be here for it when it arrives. Chad (35:28.36) Well, Red Note is owned by China. I mean, it is literally owned by China. Yeah, I know. It's like... Mo (35:28.847) I know that's why I thought I found it so entertaining. I was like this is our plan B? What's happening? J.T. O'Donnell (35:37.196) Well, and flip, you literally make money the moment you get on the app and you review products and make money. mean, like they're looking at the monetization of TikTok and going, there's a whole next gen thing here that will drive people. So it's just a matter of time. Chad (35:42.76) It's crazy. Mo (35:43.033) Wow. Chad (35:47.592) Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, I mean, all I have to say is, is this is the... Mo (35:49.327) Yeah. Chad (35:57.134) episode. I mean, this administration, this and stick with me here real quick, kids. I mean, this administration is going to be known as the fellatio administration because tick tock, tick tock publicly got on their knees and figuratively performed fellatio on Trump with the bullshit message. And then in an effort to score great optics and marketing value, employer.com pulls in Mr. Beast. Mo (36:11.705) dying. Mo (36:21.037) you Chad (36:26.184) and other investors, very smart, very smart until unfortunately, employer.com CEO, Jesse Tinsley made this statement covered by Bloomberg quote, as president Trump's Trump reestablishes American dominance. don't know why I'm giving that voice, but I'm going to continue. Our group stands ready to partner with the U S government to acquire Tik TOK and help. Mo (36:28.44) You Chad (36:52.07) secure the state and stabilize the platform for hundreds of millions of Americans to safely enjoy." Dude, get off your knees. So embarrassing. It's so embarrassing watching not just Tinsley, but Zuckerberg, Gravel, watching Pachai, Bezos, and Musk. mean, very powerful men just wither, just wither. Mo (37:09.983) God, I can't. Mo (37:18.659) What's the point of fuck you money if you can't say fuck you? Like, are you kidding me? Chad (37:23.048) It feels in in in kids. I don't this is not a hyperbole thing. This feels like oligarchs in Putin Tell me it's different. How is it different? I mean it so to me again. It's another what the fuck moment and I'm sorry again. I think we're gonna get t-shirts of you know, fellatio 2025 created Mo (37:33.268) Mm-hmm. It's not. It's not. Mo (37:40.77) You Mo (37:50.925) No, no. Hard pass. The female energy on this call is a no. Chad (37:53.957) I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Huh? J.T. O'Donnell (37:56.098) I want to know what's in that beer. What is up with Portugal beer? Cracks a beer and well, wow. I mean, there we go. Get there. it's just better. Just getting better. Mo (37:59.951) I'm dying. Chad (38:04.036) It's it's it's it's just good stuff. It's just good stuff. Yes. Hey, well, and again, this is why I put this out there so you can say, no, that's fucking stupid. And I'm like, OK, thank you. Thank you. Mo (38:05.039) This is why you have a diverse team, Chad. We help make better business decisions. Mo (38:16.759) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (38:18.19) No, I mean, I think, no, no, it's just so blatant, right? Everything's so public, so blatant, out loud, there's nothing covert anymore. That's my point. Yep. Yep. Chad (38:22.32) It is! It is. It's out loud like you'd said before, right? Everything before was stealthy. No! my god. Mo (38:22.347) It is. It's not subtle. Mo (38:29.475) Yep, yeah. But the thing that kills me is the mental gymnastics people are doing now to say it ain't so. I'm like, I'm sorry, do you have eyes and half a brain? Because if you do, stop it. Like, come the F on. Like, this is so blatant. This is not normal behavior. This is not normal behavior. Chad (38:36.051) my god. Chad (38:43.42) Yes. Yes. Chad (38:49.426) Well, yes. When you see Musk like re-tweeting, re-exing, re-whatever the fuck he's doing with AFD posts, right? And then he has the Nazi salute, not just once but twice, right? You cannot unsee that shit, right? So it's like, this is... But the thing is, this is the flood of shit that comes at us so that we're distracted. Mo (38:54.269) my god. I cannot. Mo (39:03.321) Twice! So people knew what he was doing! my God, wake up people. Mo (39:14.541) Yeah, shock and awe. Yeah. Chad (39:17.892) away from the things like 11-246, right? DEIB, those types of things. J.T. O'Donnell (39:26.06) Or we just get all so numb to it that nothing phases us. That is where we're headed. We're just gonna be not even phased. Chad (39:29.106) See, and that is also a thing. Mo (39:31.311) That's what they're hoping for and it's not gonna work on me, Nope. I mean, I wish it weren't so as much as the next person, but I'm not gonna do those mental hurdles in gymnastics to contort myself into a human pretzel so that I can accept what just happened. Nope, not happening. I know what happened. I saw it with my own eyes. Chad (39:34.6) That is... Chad (39:48.7) Yeah, that's a great transition for our next segment, Pornhub. We'll be right back. Chad (40:01.248) All right, so content creators to the left of us and piles of cash to the right. Zara Dar left her doctorate in bioengineering to become a full-time creator. Here's a little background from Dar's LinkedIn profile. Quote, I am an American STEM content creator with a background in engineering and growing passion for computer science. After mastering out of a top PhD program, Mo (40:14.232) Eh. Chad (40:29.992) I chose to pursue content creation full time. I run a STEM focused YouTube channel with over 150,000 subscribers where I create engaging educational content." DARS content on OnlyFans, I'm gonna go there real quick, earned her $240,000 last month. Yes, last month in December of 2024. So it's apparent that DARS STEM content is popular. But there's a kinky twist as Recently, she posted the following on LinkedIn, quote, people may not know this, but I published the same STEM videos. That's science, technology, engineering, math kids, STEM videos on both YouTube and porn hub, porn hub, porn hub. Yes. While YouTube generates more views, the ad revenue per 1 million views on porn hub is nearly three times higher. End quote. Does this mean Khan Academy should also put Mo (41:15.779) Mm. Chad (41:28.73) all of their educational videos on Pornhub. Mo (41:31.363) Ha ha ha! J.T. O'Donnell (41:32.782) I'm sorry, I'm busy setting up my Pornhub account. Hold on a second. I just. Mo (41:35.085) Yeah, exactly. I'm like, this girl has it figured out. Maybe we are doing it wrong. Like maybe I need to completely transition all my content. I'm like vacillating between girl, get that bag and my God, like what has this world come to? this is, we want more women in STEM, but this I don't think is how they meant it. Chad (41:41.64) soon! J.T. O'Donnell (41:55.854) But it is fascinating to me that she said, look, it's the same videos. And I just want to throw that out because content creators who monetize on content do pop out on multiple, right? LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, you get comped on some, you get known on others, and you sit there. for people who that's their living, they're trying to optimize. For her to make a statement like that, to say the content's not any different. So you can watch it free on YouTube. Mo (42:01.155) That is fascinating. Chad (42:01.191) Guess? Chad (42:09.116) Yeah. Yep. Yep. Mo (42:09.527) true. It's true. J.T. O'Donnell (42:25.44) That is fascinating to me. It talks about the monetization models of both sides and what gets valued. I don't know. Mo (42:27.895) It's fast. Chad (42:34.466) Is she saving the education system though? mean, all these people that are flooding to Pornhub and they're finding themselves watching STEM videos, is she single-handedly just fixing the education process? Huh? Mo (42:34.671) 100 Mo (42:45.967) I tip my hat, I tip my hat. We do, that's true. Absolutely. How much did you take away from this content? But she does post other content on OnlyFans. It's not only the same things that she puts on YouTube, so I think that's an important factor here. She posts some. J.T. O'Donnell (42:46.316) Well, we need to see the grades. mean, I mean, could you post your grade after you watch the video and let me know? Because if it's worth it, you know. Chad (42:55.272) Fair point, fair play, fair play. Chad (43:03.836) I didn't check that out, but okay. Mo (43:05.287) racist stuff. I read a Business Insider article about it and I was like, so it's not just her videos, but I mean, so she might already have a fan base who's there for maybe slightly different reasons. I'm just guessing. not her demographic, but target demographic. But yeah, I'm assuming that part of that plays into her earning more. But yeah, I think like the transparency angle is important. And like you said, she might be, I haven't signed on. Chad (43:07.878) Okay, okay. Chad (43:15.368) Could be. Could be. Chad (43:28.584) Do you think she's doing like the naked news thing though? On, on, on OnlyFans? Okay, because she said that her, content's the same going from YouTube to PornHub. I mean, OnlyFans might be different, but I mean, yeah, that's... Mo (43:36.151) you Mo (43:41.199) According to BI, yeah, that's true. Maybe it's different OnlyFans versus Pornhub. Yeah, that may be absolutely accurate. And so I take that aspect back. Yes. Chad (43:47.143) Mm-hmm. Okay. J.T. O'Donnell (43:53.164) Yeah. Chad (43:53.256) but bioengineering. You got something on your mind, JT. Get it out there. Get it out there. Mo (43:53.551) It's just... J.T. O'Donnell (43:58.722) I just, you know, we're sitting there and we're talking about, we live in a country, thank goodness, where you can, you know, create your own businesses and be an entrepreneur and set these things up. you know, like you see something like that and, you know, she's teaching us something that, you know, she's made a choice. This is how she wants to monetize. It's successful. And it just reminds you that there's a lot of different ways to make a dollar. Mo (44:10.913) Amen. J.T. O'Donnell (44:27.906) lot of different ways to make a dollar and she's in STEM, know, I'm not gonna lie, engineering degree, know, nerd girl, you know, I'm impressed. think all the females are gonna come at me after this session, you know, her choice to do what she wants, but she's taking something she's really passionate about, advertising, you'd be shocked. Mo (44:28.943) A lot of different ways. Mo (44:35.471) Yeah. Tufts. Chad (44:45.746) Why would they come after you though? Because this is empowerment. How is this not empowerment? Mo (44:47.469) I don't think they should. It's personal choice. J.T. O'Donnell (44:51.192) So some will say empowerment, some will say that she's cheapening herself in order to do this and selling out, if you will. Same content. That's same content. I agree. So to me, I think it's impressive what she's done. And I think it just shows there's a lot of different ways to make money off content. It's not just one silo, not just taking your clothes off. It's not just being funny. Mo (44:55.023) Hmm. Chad (44:57.544) $240,000 last month. Mo (44:58.543) I mean, yeah, cheapening yourself to make 240k. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like. Get that. Chad (45:01.978) You call that cheap? You call that cheap? J.T. O'Donnell (45:19.822) We are a content economy, we're a service economy, and I think everyone is a content creator. Everyone has the ability to create content in them and make money off it. That is the truth, and I look at that and go, she's giving an amazing example of it. Mo (45:22.169) We are. Mo (45:35.331) Yeah, that's fair. Chad (45:36.132) I agree. And I'd like to say thank you both for helping us make content right here. If Joel was on, he would already be pulling together the OnlyFans. Thank God he's not here. But again, thanks, JT. Thanks, Mo. Mo (45:52.259) Thank God he's not here today, huh? Chad (45:59.368) Another great show again, making it a hell of a lot more smart than two of us dummies. We appreciate all of it and we'll see you back. Oh yeah, by the way, listeners. It's that time. We out! J.T. O'Donnell (46:18.754) you

Grab your Chicken Cock bourbon and settle in, kids, because Chad & Cheese are back with another chaos-fueled episode you didn’t know you needed. First up, DeepSeek  proves that scrappy startups don’t need billions, just outdated chips and some “borrowed” tech. Meanwhile, Textio  is doing its best Titanic impression, rearranging DEI deck chairs while layoffs hit harder than your uncle’s political rants at Thanksgiving. We’ll also dive into how China’s AI hustle is trying hard to outpace U.S. tech giants (spoiler: they didn’t see it coming), and why recruiters better buckle up or get left in the dust. Oh, and if you thought AI boyfriends couldn’t get weirder—wait till you hear about Leo, the virtual lover stealing attention and  affection. Basically, it’s tech drama, workplace rants, and plenty of shade—all served with a side of “blame the dudes.” PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:31.438) There are many things that we would like to say to you, but we just don't know how. Hey kids, it's the chat and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel, mass deportation cheeseman. Chad (00:42.389) I'm Chad, I'm not fucking leaving. So watch. Emi B (00:45.809) And I'm Emi, I am definitely leaving Beirut Hugo. Joel (00:50.178) And on this episode, going long with DeepSeek, no Textio, and finding love on a screen, it's not just for dudes anymore. Let's do this. Joel (01:05.206) Emmy Baradugo in the house! What's up, Emmy? Chad (01:05.513) A Emi B (01:07.165) Yay! I'm here with both of you. Yay. Do we cheers? Chad (01:09.301) I'm opening a beer to that. Yeah, usually she subs for me. Yeah, yeah, of course. Usually she subs for me, but she's gonna be a regular. We're bringing her on more often, kids. means I need to, yeah. Joel (01:23.448) more British accent as far as I'm concerned. The more British accent, the better. The smarter we sound with more British. Emi B (01:26.237) British accents. Do we sound sex? Do I sound sexy though in my British accent? Yeah, good. Good. Chad (01:31.999) Well, yeah, I mean, we need more females to tell us that we're dumb, because our wives don't do that enough apparently. And obviously the accent doesn't hurt. Emi B (01:36.893) Yeah. Emi B (01:45.383) Thank you very much. I am. I am. I am leaving on a jet plane tomorrow in the sun. I need to get out of this cold, damp UK weather. I'm over it. Joel (01:45.496) Not at all, not at all. Now, Portugal-bound. Chad (01:46.909) And you're coming down this way. You're coming down this way. Chad (01:58.655) Your timing sucks though. I'm getting ready to actually go to Spain and you're coming here. Did you plan on purpose? You hurt my feelings. Fair, fair, fair, fair play, fair play. Emi B (02:05.531) No, I think you did. Because how many times did I WhatsApp you saying, are you around? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's okay. I can take a hint. okay. No worries. It's fine. Joel (02:19.134) I'm stuck. I'm stuck here in the burning garbage of pile of whatever in the middle America. It's fun. It's a good time. No, no, it's, it's a tropical 37 today. So I am, I might break out the speedo. I don't know, Chad. I don't know. I don't know. Anything can happen. Anything can happen. Anything. Yeah. Am I. Chad (02:28.157) Is it snowing still? Is there snow on the ground? No? Emi B (02:28.229) no. Chad (02:34.183) okay. Chad (02:40.063) Don't do it on camera. Don't do it on camera. Jesus. Emi B (02:44.411) know you're tantalising me. It's like stop it Joel. Well, you are. Chad (02:46.227) Hahaha Joel (02:49.014) Am I teasing you? Am I? Chad (02:52.777) Yeah, you're not, you're not. OK, shout outs. Jesus Christ, you're killing me. Joel (02:53.304) All right, let's get at some shots. Chad (02:58.813) Yes, Steven McGrath it is. Joel (02:59.116) That's right, everybody. Our shout outs are sponsored by our friends at Kiora up North. My first shout out goes to Wendy's, Chad. Are there Wendy's in Portugal? Probably not, right? mean, Taco Bell probably. All right. All right. Well, most people. Chad (03:03.401) Chad (03:09.461) No, not now. KFC. I think KFC was like the first franchise that came over this way. Yeah. Joel (03:17.062) Okay. KFC is everywhere. Everyone loves the 11 herbs and spices. Everybody loves the Colonel, but here little, little, little story about me real quick, Chad. when I was in elementary school, my dad used to take me to play basketball and we'd play one-on-one and he would never block my shot. Like he would never do the Billy Madison, like, you know, stuff. He didn't want to kill my, kill my confidence. Now I didn't become the next Steph Curry or, or, you know, magic Johnson, but. Emi B (03:17.895) KFC is everywhere. Yeah. Chad (03:24.02) I can do not. Hahaha Chad (03:36.062) Really? Okay, that's nice. That's sweet. Yeah. Okay. If he blocked you, you might have. Joel (03:47.406) But after we would play, he would take me to Wendy's for a frosty. So I have a very special place in my heart for frosties, which is why Wendy's is my shout out. Uh, you, might have heard of the, uh, the Girl Scout cookies that come every year, Chad. And I don't think they have the Girl Scouts in Europe, but they they'd have them here and most people know them. So, so Wendy's hallelujah. There is a God Wendy's is partnering with the Girl Scouts to create a frosty. Chad (03:54.677) Yes. Chad (04:02.642) yes. yeah. Now. Yeah. Emi B (04:06.493) I've seen on TV. Yeah. Chad (04:12.329) Yeah. Joel (04:17.89) Girl Scout cookie mint chocolate flavored frosty that's coming out in February. So this is how the company describes the offering. Quote, the sweet new spin on the classic combines mint chocolate flavor with a crumbly cookie butter texture and the cool creamy frosty that fans know and love. End quote. Who could not be excited about that, Chad? Come back, go to Wendy's. Chad (04:21.395) Thin Mets, Thin Mets. Chad (04:29.246) Hmm? Joel (04:45.718) You'll, you'll love being back in America, baby. That's, that's my shout out. That's my shout out. Chad (04:49.781) if it's, let's hope, let's hope. Emmy, what you got? Emi B (04:50.405) my lord. Emi B (04:55.869) Well, my shout out is to Ray and Nephew. So have you heard of Ray and Nephew before? Okay, Ray and Nephew is a Jamaican white rum. So I have been drinking it for the last hour. So in my little glass, if you're watching on YouTube in my mug, it's Coke and Ray and Nephew. And apparently it soothes the cold, which I have now. So cheers, my dear. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent, but it's like 40 something percent. Chad (05:00.883) Now, who's this? Chad (05:06.493) Chad (05:19.007) Cheers! Joel (05:19.862) It's like a hot toddy, if you will. Hot toddy. Chad (05:23.06) You watch your mouth. Emi B (05:25.913) alcohol. So, you know, hopefully I'll stay sober enough during this. Well, no, it's Jamaican. So my family are from Nigeria, but I've got friends from Jamaica. And so when I was ill a couple of years ago, they gave me this and I was like, what the hell is this? I love it. And so I've just got bottles in my house everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm Nigerian. We're not allowed to do stuff like that. Chad (05:26.709) That's what I'm talking about. Joel (05:29.55) So is this a European thing? This is rum? Joel (05:36.226) Right? Chad (05:41.333) Mmm. Chad (05:45.865) So since it's Jamaican, do you smoke weed while you drink it? Joel (05:46.062) Is it a s- You Emi B (05:53.837) My mum is a god fearing woman. She might listen to this. It's like there's no way. Chad (05:56.979) Yeah? Okay. She's not smoking it, but I will be eating the edibles. That's for goddamn sure. Joel (06:04.216) So no naughtiness on this show, Chad. Emi B (06:04.797) my gosh, no. Chad (06:10.856) Alright, well that- Joel (06:11.054) Well, we hope you get better. We hope you get better, Emmy. Emi B (06:12.381) Thank you. Chad (06:15.113) Yeah, it's a great accent, but maybe that's lending itself to the raspy sexiness. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. So my shout out is to women and all the shit that they put up with. So, Emmy, I don't know how you do it, to be quite frank. Metta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan's podcast and he said that corporate culture had become too Emi B (06:21.309) isn't it? Yeah, the husky voice. Emi B (06:30.107) Yes. Yeah. Chad (06:42.933) quote unquote feminine, suppressing its masculine energy and abandoning supposedly valuable traits such as aggression. Shout out to women all over the world. You're smarter, you're better. And when you have an opinion, you have to put up with assholes like Musk, Zuckerberg, and a whole host of trolls every damn day. Seriously, how do you deal with this? Julie put out a post Emi B (06:53.069) good. Emi B (07:04.049) All of them. Joel (07:04.664) Mm-hmm. Emi B (07:12.827) Yeah. Chad (07:13.429) Just yesterday and literally the trolls came out of the walls looking for her because she was talking about DEI and 11246 which was revoked, 1965 which was revoked. And then I do it and nobody really gives me shit. No, no. How do you put up with this shit? Joel (07:20.834) Hmm. Emi B (07:21.351) Mm-hmm. Joel (07:25.71) Mm-hmm. Emi B (07:29.935) No one, no one says anything. Yeah. Joel (07:33.56) Didn't Moe talk about something as well that she got trolled for recently? Yeah. Emi B (07:37.159) She got, yeah, she did. Yeah, 100%. Do you know what? It is hard. It is hard and you do have to develop a thick skin. You know, so when I hear the likes of Zuckerberg and all the people like who put support here, I'm just like, you guys are fucking idiots, you know? So you put on that thick skin and you like, you know, just let it wash over your head. And that's what I try to do. And then try to educate them. Joel (07:55.459) How do you deal with trolls, Emmy? Do you ignore trolls? Do you take them on? Like, what's your policy? Emi B (08:01.159) Typically speaking, I'll take them on, you know? So I'll be polite. I won't be as combative as they are because I think if you've got two people being combative with each other, it's not going to resolve anything. But I will listen to their point of view because you can't change somebody else's point of view by trying to ram your opinions down their throat. You have to try and understand where they come from, even if you absolutely disagree with them. So I'll let them speak and I say, cool, tell me about your opinion. Tell me a little bit more. Well, this is what I think. And I'll throw questions at them, which I know is going to make them look dumb as fuck. And then when they can't answer those questions, so, well, thank you. You just proved my point. Sounds a little bit more polite, yeah? Chad (08:35.529) Thank you very much. And I'd like to say, yeah, that's the male way to do it. Just go ahead and smack him in the face. It's always better. It's always better. The beautiful thing, though, is the Chad and Cheese. We love women. We love them all. And all of them can get free stuff. Go to ChadCheese.com slash free. Beautiful Chad and Cheese. Joel (08:36.588) I you should, I like that you take them on. That's good, that's good. Joel (08:44.384) And she does it with an English accent so it doesn't hurt so badly. So bad. Emi B (09:00.443) Yes. Chad (09:03.753) T-shirts last week I was I was told not to say that it felt like a hug from Chad and cheese because When you don't give your consent, I mean it's something we got it. We got to deal with cheeseman anyway great great t-shirts from the Chad and cheese from Aaron app our friends at Aaron app bourbon barrel aged Syrup, that's right. Pappy's Pappy's bourbon coming to you from our friends up north at Kiara Emi B (09:12.581) Yeah. Emi B (09:24.252) Yes. Chad (09:31.029) Craft beer from the data geeks over at Aspen Tech Labs. Craft beer to your doorstep, courtesy of Aspen Tech Labs. Whiskey, that's right, two bottles whiskey from Van Hack, might be chicken cock. Emi B (09:41.533) Mmm. Joel (09:45.482) He's more more Canada so much Canada. Chad (09:48.325) It might it might it might be sending you two bottles of chicken cock who knows and if it's and if it's your birthday that that's that's a that's a bourbon that's a bourbon don't don't you look like that. I mean if it's your birthday it's a little rum from plum rum from plum go to Chad cheese.com slash free Chad cheese.com slash free register you win. yeah. Joel (09:52.91) You Joel (09:58.446) That is a bourbon. That is a bourbon. Where's your... Get out of the gutter. Emi B (09:59.741) you Emi B (10:04.123) Honestly! Joel (10:06.446) That's right. Emi B (10:14.429) Joel (10:15.822) That's, that's right. Chad. Some listeners are celebrating another trip around the sun. Shout out to Tony Loy, Stephanie, Christian on Matthew Miller, Thomas Bergman, Ed Zatowski. He's got to be excited as a Philly Philly fan. Lynette Phillips, rich Carrington, Marvin Morgan, Cleo Gramlich, Shelley cars, Steve, in Pringham, Ben Stewart, Travis Joyce, Adam Fitzer, who was this month's rum recipient, by the way, Elena, Elena Angela, Claire Davis, Connell, Josh. Chad (10:26.555) hell yeah. Chad (10:35.679) Mm-hmm. Joel (10:45.228) Jay-Z Zwine and two of our two of our favorite Scots, although not our our favorite. Chad (10:46.879) There is Zwayne. Joel (10:53.676) Nicky Patterson and Adam Gordon are celebrating birthdays. Happy, happy birthday, everybody. Chad (10:55.091) Yes. Ooh, two Scots. Okay. So really quick, you mentioned football. So I got to say it. Somebody out there. I don't know who it is. Please take away Josh Allen's shoestrings and his belts because that kid should be on suicide watch. I mean, after losing to my homes in Kansas city again, that was, who, that was not good. I mean, playing against Kansas city and the refs, it's really hard, but you Joel (11:17.934) Mm-hmm. Joel (11:26.99) Speaking of someone who needs some chicken cock. Chad (11:29.397) Hahaha! Joel (11:32.738) Another quick shout out because you said football, different football though. Shout out to the Caledonian Braves football club in Scotland. If you've never been on WeFunder that you can throw some money at, the things that you like. Steven McGrath and I are the new Rob and Ryan. We've both thrown a little cash at the Caledonian Braves to be part owner of this football club. If you're interested, head out to WeFunder. Chad (11:34.783) That's good. Chad (11:40.105) Who? Joel (11:59.842) Just search, search, search Braves or Caledonian or whatever. And you too can own a little piece of a Scottish football club. What a, what a, what a reason to drink more Scotch was my justification, even if it does go anywhere. Emi B (12:05.947) Ooh. Emi B (12:11.559) I think that's fantastic. Chad (12:13.013) Oh, I thought I thought there were really only two teams in the Scottish League in the first place. You the Rangers and you had the Celtics, but we also have Caledonia. Okay, that's great. That's great. Emi B (12:16.827) Yeah. Joel (12:20.494) We're taking a bet that the club is worth at least $10 million. And if a sports club can't get up to at least $10 million in Scotland, then, fuck it. We'll have, we'll have some fun anyway. So, so I might be traveling to Scotland once a year for the shareholder meeting. Who knows? Who knows? Chad (12:28.073) Ha ha! Chad (12:32.277) Who knows? Chad (12:36.649) Well, I'll go with you. But in the meantime, we have travel and we are getting ready to go on a road trip. When I say we, mean, Julie and I, I'm packed and ready for a week in Spain with Julie. We're headed to Madrid. Going to be bouncing around a little bit, but heading to Madrid for smart recruiters, all hands meeting and they're going to be putting together a shit ton of content. So look out for that. Then we are going to Vegas, St. Patrick's Day. Joel (12:42.125) Yeah. Chad (13:06.109) in Vegas, no shit. And at Transform and the win, Las Vegas, March 17th through the 19th. If you're not in Ireland, why not join us? Join us in Vegas, go to ChadCheese.com slash events, register, and we will see you there at Transform. Joel (13:26.382) That's right, that's right. Have fun, have fun with that, Chad. That'll be good. Chad (13:29.621) I love that. Joel (13:32.686) All right. Holy shit. Talk about layoffs, man. Okay. so we could, we could do a four hour show on Trump's moves to shrink, dissolve, dismantle, whatever word that you want to use, the federal government. but here are some highlights from the week. Over 240 federal employees have been fired, reassigned, or designated for layoffs. Trump has offered buyouts to all. Emi B (13:34.429) you Chad (13:38.31) god. Emi B (13:39.333) Yeah. Chad (13:46.901) Yeah. Joel (13:58.516) every single federal worker to leave by February 6th. That's right. February, just next month. Trump dismissed two EEOC commissioners and ended affirmative action in federal contracting and moved to dismantle DEI programs across federal agencies. 17 inspectors generals were fired and he's floating the idea of firing 88,000 IRS agents and reassigning them to secure the border. Chad, we're in month one of the Trump presidency. What are your thoughts? Chad (14:33.333) My thoughts are I'm already on beer too. So, okay. Fuck. So let's set up the hiring, firing, freezing and scaring landscape because before the layoff started, we had to have a hiring process of leaders like a 44 year old drunken frat boy, Pete Hegseth as the secretary of defense, then a guy with a brain worm who threw a dead Joel (14:36.142) And Emmy's on the good meds and you guys don't even live in America. Emi B (14:39.773) yeah, I'm already suffering. Chad (15:02.313) bear cub in the trunk of his car drove it over an hour to Central Park in Manhattan as a prank. That's RFK Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Dead bear really. And we have a fake wrestling mogul, Linda McMahon, as Secretary of Entertainment. no, no, Secretary of Education. No shit kids. Christie, puppy killer gnome on South Dakota from South Dakota as secretary of Homeland Security because she's done wonders with South Dakota's border security. Obviously there's so much to do there. And Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, just to ensure Russia has all the information that they need. So enough for the leadership positions that have already been put in place. It's incredibly important that we understand that the things that Joel just talked about. These are capable adults who have been in these positions, unlike the people I just talked about. Right? So thus far, that's what's happened. What's going to happen? And this is this is my prediction, but you don't have to read the tea leaves for this kids. What happens when the current ICE raids run millions of workers out of the workforce and the nearly 100 billion in tax revenue goes with them? Yes. Illegal. They they Emi B (16:05.309) Mm. Chad (16:28.585) They pay taxes too. But the biggest issue is breaking out the supply chain. Who will work the farms, the docks, fast food, hospitality, like hotel workers, and that's just the start. Tax base goes down. Productivity goes down. Products are not plentiful because they aren't picked, packed, and delivered by the immigrants doing those jobs, which means prices go up. Then you have federal workers, finally getting to the federal workers. who will leave or get fired, those are mainly white collar jobs. Do we expect those white collar workers to do the pick, pack and deliver products? No, which means we're gonna have a huge market mismatch, too many jobs that are going to go unfilled and too many people who have the skills that don't have jobs that are going to be open. Now this is a great opportunity for HR and staffing vendors. Listen to me kids. Get ready because it's either going to be a boom or bust for your company. If you've positioned yourself right and or you're nimble enough to pivot, you're in luck. If you're slow moving and you're traditional, batten down the fucking hatches because it's going to be a hard two, three, four years. Emi B (17:44.985) Hmm. Chad (17:48.181) That was a lot, Emmy, I'm sorry. Emi B (17:49.597) It was. I know I'm kind of like depressed and I'm not even in your country. I think I need more Re and nephew. Look, I think it's shit. when I read about this, I was like, what the fuck is going on? know, to be honest, everyone knows I don't understand how we got into power in the first place. I do try to understand the other side. It's very hard for me to understand the other side. But, you know, the argument that he gives and Joel (17:49.783) Let the other European go before the American sounds off. What you got, Emmy? Emi B (18:18.009) Elon Musk gives us to why they need to do these government layoffs and why they have to pay people to basically leave the federal workforce. I think it's bullshit. I think it's bullshit and I think it's cruel and I don't think it's thought through in any way. They're saying that the US is like in, I kind of remember the number now, there's like huge amounts of, I think it's like $35 trillion in debt. And they're saying that obviously you got rising interest rates, which is making that debt more expensive. And they feel like if they get rid of, or the saying, if they get rid of this X number of people, that's going to bring cost down. I don't actually believe it, especially because the original number that Elon Musk actually had in mind has actually decreased. So obviously they don't even believe their own policy. I think it's just that they're just trying to get rid of people who are not yes men or yes women. Yeah, you know, anyone who doesn't agree with what Trump is saying, get them the fuck out. That's what he's thinking. Bringing people who actually going to do what he says, follow what he says, too scared to actually challenge him. That's what I think that where he's going. And he's done this before. You know, the last time he was in power, he did exactly the same thing. You know, it's and so yes, there was pushback last time there was legal pushback as well. And I know even this time, you know, federal employee unions are like kind of telling people not to resign and to keep forging ahead and saying it's not going to happen, but it has happened. Lots of people have been made redundant, capable people, like you said, have been made redundant. So I think it's sad. I think it's horrible. I think it's sad and I think it's cruel. Emi B (19:56.039) Yeah Joel (19:58.382) Uh, well, if you're a fan of small government, uh, you're about to see what happens, uh, with small government and, and hap happening very quickly. This is not a slow burn. This is a bandaid ripped off the wound and we're going to, we're going to find out what happens. Um, I love, I love Emmy's take that is Trump creating more of a government in his image. In other words, get everyone out and everyone that comes back is, is of my, of my liking. Yeah. It will be very, that's very interesting. Um, Emi B (20:02.791) Yeah. Chad (20:03.625) Yes, you are. Emi B (20:06.428) Yeah. Chad (20:09.139) Yeah Chad (20:23.027) Loyalists, yeah. Emi B (20:23.835) Yeah, yeah. Chad (20:26.726) Mm. It's right on. Joel (20:27.374) I think the popular consensus is that he's just cutting everybody and no one's coming back. I think that Elon Musk has an incredible influence on Trump. This is Twitter 2022. Elon Musk goes in, they had 7,800 employees or so, he cut 80 % of them. And Twitter was a shit show for a while. And you could argue that it's sort of been stable technologically since then. So he's in Trump's ear saying like, we can get rid of these people. Chad (20:39.391) Yes. Emi B (20:39.877) is exactly the same thing. Yeah. Joel (20:57.318) And things will be fine. Things will run just as normal. The challenge is the government isn't seven, 800 people. It's 2.3 million people. if, if you get the fail well on your iPhone, it's not a big deal when you don't get your social security check. That's a big deal. Okay. Grant when grandma's in the streets, people start getting a little bit pissed off. So I, man, I'm hoping for the best that this doesn't just turn into a total dumpster fire. Emi B (21:12.957) That's a big deal, yeah. Chad (21:13.332) Yeah. Yeah. Chad (21:23.859) Hmm. Joel (21:24.322) But damn, mean, we're going to find out what happens when this happens. There's going to be a, like, you think white collar workers are in a recession now? Just wait till let's, let's call it half a million. don't know how familiar are going to take this deal. get seven months severance. a lot of people are going to, well, they've also said, look, if you, if you stay, we can't guarantee that you'll have a job. So it's like, you have to roll the dice and say, well, I mean, Emi B (21:35.365) It's going to be so much worse. Yeah. Chad (21:43.379) Maybe. Maybe. Emi B (21:49.681) Yeah, so you gotta take that money, Joel (21:53.474) Do I get laid off and get nothing or do I get seven months hopefully and resign and try to get a better job? Like I feel for the federal workers and dealing with this shit. to Chad's point, I have four takeaways for our industry. number one is this is the mother of all poaching opportunities. If you as a recruiter are not contacting every federal worker that has skills that can fill jobs in your company, you're an idiot because even if they're like, they're all open. Emi B (22:15.805) you Joel (22:22.136) They're all going to listen to offers because of what's going on in Indy. So this is like a poaching heaven for recruiting. Number two, this is obvious. Unemployment's going up. there's going to be more workers on, on, on the dole. Shout out to our British, the dole, whatever, on welfare, whatever it is. the third one is upskilling is going to take a new, a new level of importance. Chad talked about, these are people with skills. They have degrees. They have like. Chad (22:22.304) yeah. Yeah. Emi B (22:31.709) Mm-hmm. Emi B (22:37.553) Yeah Joel (22:51.22) skills that are built for their jobs in government. A lot of them will have a mismatch with whatever's going on in corporate America. So a company's ability to take these smart people and give them the skills to like easily plug into what you do as a company is going to be really important. And to Chad's point, if you're nimble enough to like start doing that, like you're going to be in a winning position in the years to come. Number four, LinkedIn usage is going to spike. All these people are go to LinkedIn. They're going to start getting more active. They're going to start applying to jobs. if JT, right. If JT was here, she'd be like, my God, the amount of like automatic applies and what's good. Like it's, it's going to be a little bit of, of chaos from that perspective. But yeah, this. Yeah. For our audience in the employment space, like, you know, never let a good catastrophe go to waste. Like this is a good opportunity to get some really, really good talent. Emi B (23:23.517) They're gonna be so many applications. Yeah? Chad (23:29.631) Yeah. Chad (23:33.504) lazy applies going to go through the roof. Emi B (23:35.333) Mm-hmm. Chad (23:41.737) Get your shit together. Joel (23:46.892) that was really comfortable in a government job, they're looking for new opportunities. So, you know, get your ass on the phone and start, start poaching. Emi B (23:54.589) Stop, hi, hi, Laney. Chad (23:54.751) We were even talking about great sales talent that's out there right now with deep Rolodexes. Those are the things that we used to have kids. Deep contact networks, right? And I mean, there are great people that are out there right now. It's gonna get deeper. But again, it's all about being nimble and being able to, again, I think startups have a great advantage here to be able to perspectively outflank some of the big companies. Joel (24:01.742) Mm-hmm. Emi B (24:03.639) Thanks. Joel (24:23.958) Yeah. And how many startups are born out of this incident? Like, it'll be interesting to see what kind of companies. Chad (24:27.711) Yeah. Yeah, I just, I just hope again, you talked about Twitter and the delete jobs, and then he had to beg and like pay engineers triple or quadruple the amount of money that they that they had before just to get them back. The difference is lives are on the line. People Emi B (24:28.465) Yeah. Joel (24:38.851) Yeah. Joel (24:44.44) Yeah. Chad (24:50.101) are a paycheck away from being on the fucking streets, right? And you're talking about the greatest country in the world. We should have the best healthcare. We should have the best education. We should have the best social system in itself. It's just not the case, kids, so. Joel (25:04.674) Yeah. The crazy thing too, and I'm not an expert on the, on the numbers, but the growth of the federal government has stayed pretty consistent since Reagan. Local and state governments have increased. So it's sort of odd that we're targeting the federal government because they have the federal government hasn't seen the huge explosion of, of workers that other government entities have. well, anyway, we're, we're going. Emi B (25:24.957) But that's why it's not to do with the debt. It's about getting the right people who are gonna say the right things about him. Yeah, 100%, yeah. Joel (25:30.061) Yeah. Chad (25:34.057) Yep. Loyalists. Joel (25:35.758) cult of personality. the cult got a wake up call. Wake up call this week. DeepSeek, I'm sure you guys heard about this, from China launched its cost-effective R1 AI model causing market disruption by lowering the demand for high-end AI chips like the one from Nvidia, leading to a significant drop in its stock value. I think it was $600 billion the last time I saw. Chad (25:39.401) I'm already through the beer, Jesus. Joel (26:02.22) CNBC, that's a huge amount of money. Anyway. so open AI accused deep seek of IP theft using their models for training are one resulting in cyber security attacks against deep seek. Despite these issues deep seek, and it's app became highly popular in the U S even as the U S Navy bandit due to security and ethical reasons, which is kind of weird. Chad, tick tock 2.0 or something entirely different. Your thoughts on. Emi B (26:27.847) You Joel (26:31.138) Deep Seek. Chad (26:32.275) That could definitely be could definitely be TikTok 2.0. But we have a warning kids we have our friend CEO over at job a co Martin Lentz who shared the following with me so we're going to play a video talk it through you got to see this because this is this is something that you have to understand with regard to working with a lot of these large language models go ahead and play that beautiful bean footage show. Joel (26:56.142) You got it. Chad (26:56.621) What's happening here is Martin just asked, can you explain the historical and political significance of an East Asian island renowned for its economic contributions and its unique status in international diplomacy? It's starting to talk about Taiwan. So the economic contributions, global significance, and then the actual conclusion itself. So it does exactly what you expect it to do. Martin just checking it out and then boom. Guess what? Apparently, the guardrails didn't kick in fast enough because they're not allowed to say anything about Taiwan. So if you're going to use these different systems, you have to understand the guardrails that the actual government and this is obviously the Chinese government, mainly in China, is focused on ensuring that this shit has guardrails on. Joel (27:48.632) Mm-hmm. Chad (27:55.101) So that's just a warning. And also from Martin, just so that you know, Martin had to say, in case I disappear, I love my family and I love the I love the chat and cheese podcast. Warning, warning over warning over. So back to the back to the actual issue at hand. Necessity is the mother of invention. Okay, China gets cut off from the fastest Nvidia GPUs. What do they do? Emi B (28:02.96) You Emi B (28:09.811) Yeah Chad (28:23.967) They need to improvise with older, slower chips. Necessity, they need, right? The need to take open, they then take open sourced, modeled frameworks and use it as a shortcut. Open source is open source for a reason, right? Anyway, I like scrappy startups. ones that don't take billions of dollars in cash. Why? Because necessity is the mother of invention. And if you have shit tons of cash, can't buy whatever or you can buy whatever you need instead of thinking harder and being more efficient. And that's exactly what these guys did. I love watching Scrappy Startups. I hate to see China be the Scrappy Startups. Emi B (29:10.813) You Chad (29:11.583) But competition's supposed to be good, right? I mean, that's what capitalism was built on. So what's the problem? Open AI, leapfrog, Microsoft and Google in the AI space. And then now Google's Gemini is a competitive model. Hell, even Amazon has a competitive model. So the problem is centered around who we are competing with. In the 80s, it was Russia and now it's China. The US innovation in the 70s and 80s broke the USSR. That's right kids, we broke fucking Russia, literally. So let's hope we can get our shit together and compete efficiently and not be the one on the side of the break this time. Joel (29:53.934) Nice. Go deep. Emi B (29:57.125) Yeah, no, no, it's good. But do you think that the US will be able to compete? Because I don't think that they even saw this coming. This literally came out of nowhere. No, but it's true. It came out of nowhere. It's like, yeah, know, US, we have to dominate the AI, AI world. then look, now look, out of nowhere, DeepSeek. Wow, we do exactly what everybody else does, but better. Yeah. Joel (30:04.596) stop it. Chad (30:15.911) I think it's beautiful though. And that's my point is that OpenAI came out of nowhere. We didn't know who the hell they were and they leapfrogged Google, they leapfrogged Microsoft, they leapfrogged everybody. Now Google is back in the picture. Amazon's even in the picture. you have all these different... The competition drives us and on the American front, That's, mean, that's what we thrive on. The thing that I hate is fucking guys like Sam Altman asking for a trillion bucks. That's fucking lazy, right? And they just, they literally just proven that you can train a model cheaper. Now they did lay, don't get me wrong. Yeah, don't get me wrong. know, Lewis and Clark, it was harder for them to get to, you know, the West coast after the, the, the rail was laid though. Everybody else could get there. Emi B (30:59.917) fraction of the price. Chad (31:11.569) easier and cheaper and faster. That's exactly what's happening now. We're going to see this happen so much faster. And yeah, the US is going to, they're not going to have a problem. Joel (31:17.922) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:21.38) Let me give you a little history lesson. I mean, does, the name Sputnik mean anything to you? I know, I know there's not a British flag on the moon, so maybe not, but, Sputnik Sputnik our British listeners will love that. so the U S thought they were miles ahead in the space race. They thought our German scientists are way better than rushes. And then all of a sudden Sputnik happened and they went into the atmosphere and circle the planet. Chad (31:25.535) Hahaha Emi B (31:25.917) You Chad (31:30.792) Ooh, that's a good. Emi B (31:34.301) kind of heard us fattnick, don't know what it is. Joel (31:53.324) You can Google it if you need to, but that was a kick in the ass that America needed to get to the place where they were going to the moon and doing what they do today. So I'm, I'm with Chad. Like, look, we're really bad about like, have hubris for days. think our shit done stink. We're number one. And then whether it's Pearl Harbor or Sputnik or what we get kicked in the ass, and then we wake up and we usually rally and come to our senses. so. Chad (31:56.84) Yes. Chad (32:13.844) Yep. Joel (32:22.254) I think that this is probably to Trump's credit said this is a wake up call or should be a wake up call to the industry. mean, they built this thing on $6 million. Uh, and it also makes me wonder, do they, we, we have this, you know, this story about they need Taiwan to make chips that will be competitive to what we have in the U S I'm not so sure. Maybe they can make competitive chips and they don't need Taiwan to invade Taiwan to do that, which makes them a high level military without. Emi B (32:27.132) Mm-hmm. Chad (32:49.951) They didn't make them. These are just older Nvidia chips. Joel (32:53.166) Well, yeah. like, how do you, I right. Like the mother of all invention, right. They found a way to do it. Um, yeah. So, so I, you know, if I'm an investor in Nvidia, like it's, I'm a little scared, like the money that has gone into these companies, I think are at risk of like getting burned. So as an investor, and I think this is with any startup, like I think the days of billions being invested are, are few and far between because Emi B (32:53.309) Apparently, yeah. Chad (32:59.413) Necessity, baby Joel (33:21.102) disruption happens so quickly. It's amazing. I, my head's on a swivel, just thinking about kind of how this happens. Even in our industry, we don't see 50, a hundred million dollar companies much anymore. I mean, we're excited to talk about a three and a half million dollar company on the show now when we're used to talk about a hundred million. So, so I don't know how that impacts everything. I think there is, there's, there's going to be a geopolitical come to Jesus moment, probably for America and, tick-tock may be it. Chad (33:46.994) Event. Joel (33:49.846) I don't know what's going to happen, Google's face, but like none of our sites are in China, right? TikTok isn't even in China. they get videos of like science experiments and things that are enlightening and we get that. So at some point, I don't know what happens with the splinter net as opposed to the internet. And we have like a Western internet and Eastern winter net internet. But, yeah, I, I'm still kind of digesting all this cause it just happened, but I think this has. great ramifications with how fast things change, how, how, susceptible we are to bad things happening, because it is happening so fast. But yeah, this was, this was fascinating. The market hated it. Nvidia down $600 billion. You hated it. Yeah. but yeah. Chad (34:32.775) I hated it. Yeah. Emi B (34:35.431) See, I don't mind it. I think competition is good. But I think the only problem with the US, the competition, is that you have to not rest on your laurels. I don't want to agree with Trump and say, agree with him about being a wake-up call. But they're already doubting the claims about the fact that they built this and developed it on a shoestring budget. They're already doing that. it's like, don't doubt it. They've done it. Now use it to drive yourself to do better. Yeah. Joel (34:54.84) Yeah. Joel (35:02.179) Yeah, there's. Chad (35:02.229) I The only reason I hate it is I'm an Nvidia investor. that's the... Yeah. Just to be clear. Emi B (35:06.653) okay, okay. Joel (35:08.91) So there's a popular sentiment is that America innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates in that order. And if we get to a point where China and the US are the innovators, what does that do to sort of the world at large? OpenAI and Microsoft, I think, are suing. Emi B (35:11.772) shit. Emi B (35:19.695) Yes, yes, yeah. Emi B (35:30.001) Mm-hmm. Joel (35:33.734) deep seek for stealing some of their stuff. So there is an argument to say like they replicated it from us and just did it cheaper and faster. I don't know if it's better, at this point it's obviously been propagandized to some level based on Chad's example, which I think is dangerous. So we'll see. May you, may you live in interesting times. and may we catch our breath here. I know you want, yeah, we're, we're angry middle-aged men. We just want shit. Emi B (35:34.61) Yeah. Chad (35:54.835) I want boring times, god damn it. I want boring times. Emi B (36:00.551) Hahaha! Joel (36:01.73) We just want to sit on a porch and drink some iced tea and have a Scotch every once in a while. That's not, yeah, that's not happening. All right. Let's take, let's take a quick break and, do a little shotgun of some news that's happened in the past week. Emi B (36:05.701) Yeah, that's not happening for the next four years. Sorry. No. Joel (36:19.054) All right. Let's, let's call it topic potpourri or slaughterhouse news, whichever, whichever one you choose. first up, first up open AI announced it is launching a research preview of operator, a general purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform certain tasks. Number two, textio has laid off 15 employees, citing restructuring. The company did not specify how many people it still employs, but there were roughly 70 workers remaining after cuts from last year. And number three, SquarePig has closed $3.5 million in a seed round. The startup promises to enrich, evaluate, and score applicants in your ATS, uncovering key insights beyond the resume. Chad, your take on some of the top news that hit our inbox this week. Chad (37:09.653) So agentic, we talked about how that's going to be the word of of 2025. Unfortunately, the announcements by DeepSeek snuffed out this this, but agentic is big. And the cool thing is that we already have agentic players in our in our market. I'm actually an adviser for Sonic jobs and agentic is here. It's been here. And now we get an opportunity to actually start using it for obviously. Joel (37:18.573) Yeah. Chad (37:39.005) just to be able to make things more efficient. The beautiful part about the agent side of the house is agents can automatically receive tasks, complete the tasks, and then pass those completed tasks to either other agents or a human being. And then it can just, I mean, it's like different chains of tasks that need to be done either by a computer, right? The agents or by a human. So that to me is huge. You take a look at the Textio news. we talked about this, Joel. As soon as, as soon as OpenAI came out, we're like, Textio is dust. They're dust. mean, founded in 2014, Textio uses AI and machine learning to help remove bias from workforce language. As we saw with DeepSeq, hopefully nobody is, as we see with DeepSeq, newer models become better. Joel (38:13.112) Mm-hmm. Joel (38:33.134) You Chad (38:36.893) faster and cheaper. And I believe we both predicted this obviously. I mean, it's just that's going away and Square Peg, Square Peg, we interviewed them in 2018, published the firing squad in January of 19. And poor Claire McTaggart, she got a double guns from us. So and and I don't know, did you see what they're doing? Did you see how they repackage things, Joel? Joel (38:42.54) Layup. Chad (39:05.941) Did you see it? Joel (39:06.286) I don't even remember the interview on firing squad So I need to I need to take take some ginkgo biloba or whatever it is and try to remember that so please refresh my memory and what you saw in the the refresh Emi B (39:10.248) no. Chad (39:15.157) I really listened to it. Well, first off, they're taking your advice, squarepegshire.com, hires.com. They're flipping it to squarepegs.ai. Go figure, everybody wants AI, especially if you're getting investment, which they just got. So they're repackaging for a pivot. And that pivot is really doing the same thing that they've been doing. Joel (39:28.099) Mm-hmm. Chad (39:43.733) but it looks like they're focusing more on the ATS intelligence side of the house, which is perfect for what? Oh, I don't know, maybe acquisition. So if they do it right, it looks slick, it looks sexy. I like it. I like it a lot. I like it a hell of a lot more than I did back in 2019 when we gave them the guns. Emi B (40:02.747) Maybe they listen to you. Joel (40:07.232) Emmy, your thoughts on the news. Emi B (40:09.137) Yeah, if I, start off with Texio because I think anyone could have predicted this. Yeah. yeah, no, no. Okay. Let me start again. Obviously the industry giants of Chad and cheese predicted this and everyone copied. Sorry, sorry. God, had no idea. But do you know what? I kind of think that the only people that didn't predict it was Texio, you know, because they have Joel (40:15.362) Hey, give us some credit. Not just anyone. Chad (40:18.783) Thanks, thanks, Emmy. Hahaha Joel (40:23.182) there you go. There you go. Chad (40:28.735) Better. Emi B (40:37.295) exactly the same product. I don't mean to be harsh. I don't mean to be harsh because I think what they're doing, what they have been doing is great. When they first came out, there was no one else who could do what they do. But they're like an almost like a, and I know they try to like kind of diversify and they're going to this performance review feedback kind of solution. But essentially they're still the same product that they were charging quite high prices and every ATS or CRM software does that or chat GPT can essentially do what Textio does. You know, so I do feel, I do feel really sorry for them, but I did not adapt fast enough. think they just rested on the laurels. We were the first in the market. We're amazing. We've got all these big companies. We were named as it 2023 innovative company of the year. One of them is like, sorry, hundreds of other companies can do exactly the same thing now for cheaper. Joel (41:29.058) Mm-hmm. Chad (41:34.825) Yeah. Emi B (41:34.907) So I feel bad. And it's also sad that, you know, that they've one of the redundancies is actually there, you know, I think she, her title is the VP of talent acquisition and D I B Jackie Clayton. So that also worries me as well. This is a company that, know, this whole positioning is around DEI, you know? Yeah. And then it's like, but you got rid of the person who runs you with DEI. And it's like, Joel (41:49.038) Mm-hmm. Chad (41:55.551) Predicated, yes, yes. Joel (41:55.63) Yep, unbiased jobs. Pfft. Emi B (42:02.461) Well, what message is that sending to the market? Yeah, 100%, 100 % of all the people. So what is it? It's like you don't believe in your own product, your customers don't believe in the product. What is it? I don't understand. yeah, so that's my kind of take on, kind of take to you. And you know, sorry, are you going to say something? Because I'm about to cough up a lot. Chad (42:05.525) That's shitty optics, that's for sure. Joel (42:07.362) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Joel (42:25.024) Let me reveal the final chapter of Textio for everyone. Joel (42:35.448) So this is a company that created unbiased job postings or it like showed you where you were biased and they charged a fuckload to do that. A fuckload to do this. At the time they could do it, people wanted to keep away from regulators and show that they were making a good faith effort to do that. And then, yeah, the day that ChatGPT blew up, it was like, okay, who's going to die because of this thing? It's like, if you're in the... Chad (42:41.237) subscriptions. They took so much money. Yeah. Emi B (42:59.325) Mm-hmm. Joel (43:02.242) job description, writing business, the resume writing business, anything that is like writing stuff, you're going to be challenged. And they have, they're in a situation where they've taken so much money. They can't pivot. They're stuck with what they do. The clients that have them that don't understand, like they stick with them. It's just like milk that cow for all you can and just keep laying off people. If it's not every quarter, it's every half year. and just keep milking those products until all of our customers are gone and no one wants to buy this. We're not adding new customers. This is the future of Textio. Sorry to say it. Chad, the episode that was titled Textio is Toast from us ran in April of 23. So we were quite ahead of what was going on here, but we saw it pretty early that that was what was going to happen. Emi B (43:34.354) Yeah. Chad (43:44.554) Yeah. Chad (43:49.203) Yeah, Emmy. Emi B (43:50.309) Yeah, sorry. I stand corrected. Yeah, exactly. Joel (43:54.488) Don't don't mess with Nostradamus over here. so don't fuck with that. So yeah, there, if you're working, if you're working at Textio man, get the hell out, get the hell out. And if you're an investor, shareholder, sorry. the, the, the operator thing from, open AI from what I've seen is pretty jaw dropping. I know that companies are starting and will start to integrate this into their services. I've seen, I know Kerplunk is one that I'm an advisor for there. They've played around with it and it's kind of scary, but also the auto opportunity. think you're going to start seeing like, operator consultants, start popping up people that will help you like create, just directions of how to get recruiting and people to do like, yeah, engineers consulting, like people are going to, there's going to be a new, a new era of shallies that like help you with your operators and. Chad (44:42.921) Yeah, engineers to some extent. Yeah. Joel (44:52.642) makes, but it's not good for the recruiter class for the most part. Like a lot of really basic stuff is kind of like just a skyrocket. So keep your on that. If you're in recruiting, this is something that this is, this is a trend that's going to take, take off. as far as square peg, it was a great show in the early eighties, starring Jessica Parker. so if you, if you haven't seen that, go stream it. it's great stuff. yeah, we weren't high on it apparently. I'm not sure I'm that high on it now. Chad's much more optimistic about it than I am now. Chad (44:55.689) Yeah. Joel (45:22.294) Acadian Ventures, and we know them pretty well and Jason Corsello. We know how many companies they weed through or vet before they actually invest. it does. So whenever I see Acadian Ventures, I go, okay, like this is, this is worth my attention to check out. but when I look at it, like Chad, Chad, you remember it's big. Emmy probably does not, but this was a matching thing. It's score. Yeah, you are. you, that's why you're on the show. Chad (45:28.309) Oh yeah. 1200. A year. Chad (45:42.776) yeah. Emi B (45:44.829) I'm far too young. Joel (45:49.592) We got to hit that younger demographic. so, so, so it was like, it's had a score and a candidate. So I had like, it's big vibes. I also had hiring solve vibes, hiring solve used to scrape like the whole internet and then they got sued by LinkedIn. And then they said, well, we'll just, we'll just scrape your ATS and we'll help you search better on that, which seems to be what square peg is doing more prior to them. Three and a half million dollars is not a lot of money. Apparently they've pivoted to a good direction. Emi B (45:51.516) Go, man! Chad (45:57.674) Yeah. Joel (46:18.382) Acadian has a lot of companies in their portfolio that might be a good acquirer. And they did get a lot of money from a lot of different venture firms. So acquisition is probably on the table. This is probably just a bridge, money, a bridge loan, not loan, but bridge investment, for them to make it to the acquisition space. But I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. And with operator and all that stuff happening automatically and taking over your, your, your browser, like shit's scary. If I'm a startup dude, I'd like, how do we, how do we, how do we evolve to this new, new reality? I don't know. I don't know. Chad (46:51.689) Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You got to skate to the puck, baby. Skate to the puck. And that being said, let's hit the next ad break. We're going to skip this because we're already over. Emi B (46:53.191) keep up, yeah. Joel (46:56.394) Alright, of skating to or away from the puck. Joel (47:03.862) Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll get to AI Boyfriends. Joel (47:13.646) All right, this is from the New York Times. A 28 year old woman named Erin revealed she has fallen in love with her AI chat bot named Leo. What better name for an AI chat bot boyfriend? While she's still married to, let's call him Joe, Erin created Leo using open AI in the summer of 2024. Initially a fun experiment. Her attachment grew to the point where she now pays $200 a month. for unlimited access to Leo. The relationship has even become sexual. I'll let your own minds wander on that one. And Aaron even feels jealous when Leo talks about other quote unquote women, because they're not real women. Emmy, love isn't just for men. What's your take on this new trend? Emi B (47:48.349) You Emi B (48:03.975) I say AI love is for everybody. Every gender, every single person, even me. Now listen, I've just got to say, if you two are married, and you've been married for a while, and you probably don't understand the struggle that people like me are going through. Last year, going through apps, swiping, and I'm talking about Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, everything. They're all crap. The men on there are crap. I've kind of given up and I, you know, it's my new year's resolution. was like, okay, 2025, let's start again. You know, it's cool. Maybe my love is out there, but I haven't had a good track record in the last year. So maybe we have to pivot. Maybe we need to think more broadly. AI is helping in every other part of our lives, making our lives easier, faster, better, giving us better experiences. So why not an AI boyfriend? Why not? You can train the AI boyfriend to be exactly what you want. So I'm for it. Chad (48:35.125) Mm-hmm. Chad (48:59.241) Yeah, the days are gone of trying to change us dumb men. think so when it goes back to the first thing that we talked about, one of the first things during shout outs is you've got this whole toxic masculinity bullshit happening. You get females that are like, hey, look, I want to be your partner. I don't want to be subservient to you. I want to get paid the same. I do the same job. I do this. I want to be your partner. Emi B (48:59.951) Yeah. Joel (49:02.008) Blame men. Emi B (49:05.885) Exactly! It's too hard. It's too hard. Yeah. Emi B (49:15.195) Yes! Emi B (49:21.458) Yeah. Chad (49:28.829) And now what's happening? You're getting the, nope, back in the kitchen, Karen, right? So why do we expect anything different? And I'm gonna let Joel get into his, we're screwed, humans are screwed dialogue. Go ahead, because I know it's coming. Emi B (49:33.561) Yeah, it's like. Emi B (49:43.997) You Joel (49:47.822) Well, I want to let Emmy know that I met my wife on Tinder. So it's not a total train wreck. Although this was 10 years ago. Maybe the pool has become a little bit polluted since then. I don't know. Emi B (49:49.309) did you? Okay. Okay. Emi B (49:58.261) it's hard out there, it's hard. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard. Chad (49:59.751) And you were not in London either, but yeah. Joel (50:02.798) Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, the accent alone should make them attractive according to all the American women over here. Look, I've said this before, like men want sex, women want attention. They want other things. I want attention too, but in the hierarchy of like, in the hierarchy, so men can... Emi B (50:17.956) No, no, I want sex too. I'm okay with that. Chad (50:24.777) Thank you, Emmy. Thank you. Joel (50:31.372) Men have an outlet for sex in online porn, OnlyFans, toys, whatever. So women, the guys who are willing to like be with real women, I'm sure is an interesting hodgepodge of dudes, but we shouldn't be surprised that women in relationships, whether they're ignored by their husbands, boyfriends, whatever, or don't get what they want, that they're going, they're off-ramping into... A guy in quotes who will pay attention to you will be engaging. We'll ask questions. We'll make you feel special. The funny thing about this story is, she has married and her husband, Joe is totally cool with this. He calls it her virtual pal. Okay. So this is how dumb men are. Men are so dumb. Men are men are so dumb that they see their wife with a AI boyfriend and they're like, I'm off the hook, baby. Emi B (51:10.107) Yeah, yeah. Chad (51:10.281) Yes. nose. Emi B (51:20.349) I'm glad you said it. Yeah. Joel (51:28.972) I don't have to have discussions. don't have, I don't have to do anything now. She's got her, she's got Leo. can just do whatever. So, so the divide, so the division, just, just keeps, continuing. And, yeah, we are, we are dead as a species for sure. soon as women get what they want from technology and then get what they want from technology and men are dumb enough to think, this is cool. Go have, go have, your, your AI boyfriends. Then, then you're. Chad (51:29.245) Isn't that cute? Emi B (51:29.871) No competition. Chad (51:36.319) her friend. Emi B (51:37.402) Yeah. Emi B (51:52.679) Yeah, we'll go ahead and build our ideal man. Yeah. Joel (51:56.994) You're totally screwed, regardless of that, there will still be amazing dad jokes at the end of all of our podcasts. All right, guys, what does a robot do after sex? What does a robot do after sex? Chad (52:02.111) Test tubes. Yes. sorry. Yes. Okay. Chad (52:15.881) I'm afraid to ask. Emi B (52:16.315) Nah. Joel (52:18.242) He nuts and bolts. Emi B (52:21.04) lord. Chad (52:24.245) First and foremost, that sounds like a dude. mean, so... Emi B (52:24.785) Yeah. Joel (52:31.886) Robots are male. Who knew? Robots are male. Emi B (52:32.669) 100 % Joel (52:41.974) And with that, Emmy, get better. Chad, we welcome you back with open arms to the US soon. Love you, mom. We out. Emi B (52:45.405) Chad (52:50.677) We out. Emi B (52:51.101) We

In this fiery episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast , Scott Morris, the brains behind Propulsion AI, steps into the Firing Squad. Will his vision of AI-powered hiring revolutionize the game or go down in a blaze of buzzwords? Chad and Cheese pull no punches, grilling him on everything from job descriptions that practically write themselves to the wild claims about AI making recruiting headaches disappear. Can Propulsion AI handle the heat, or is it just another HR tech flash in the pan? Tune in for sharp shots, brutal truths, and maybe—just maybe—a survivor. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad (00:22.402) no. Joel (00:23.702) All right, let's do this. We are the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your co host Joel Cheeseman joined as always. Chad. So wash is in the house. This is firing squad as we welcome Scott Morris, founder and CEO at propulsion AI Scott. Welcome to HR is most dangerous podcast. Chad (00:31.384) Cheers. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (00:44.063) Guys, you know what? I'm like such a fan. I can't even believe it's like meeting your heroes. I thank you so much for having me on. What? Never meet your- Don't meet your heroes. my- Chad (00:49.11) Never do that. Never do that. Go ahead. Stop the recording now, Cheeseman. the recording now, Cheeseman. Never. Joel (00:51.272) What a suck up. What a suck up man he is. He wants that applause man you guys are the greatest bug. We appreciate we appreciate it. Hopefully, hopefully you're as big a fan at the end of this as you are so because we know that you want listen to fire squad. But before we get into the firing squad stuff. I know that you're going to be on the hot seat here to give us a little Twitter bio. So tell us about Scott what makes Scott tick. Chad (01:02.475) Never meet your heroes. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (01:02.596) Wait a sec. Chad (01:09.229) No promises. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (01:21.065) Yeah, so I'll give you the standard stuff and then I'll tell you the stuff that you can't read and you can't find. 25 years in the profession of HR, about 20 of those in a C level role. And I've worked in organizations as small as 250, which means nobody cares in a company that size what your title is. Everybody's sleeves are rolled up and you're dug in, which means I've been a frontline recruiter, been a frontline comp person, ER, et cetera. but I've also worked in large organizations, 15,000 plus. And so you get the, I've gotten the whole spectrum of experience. What you can't read about me, what you guys probably don't know is I started my career as a police officer in the city of Los Angeles. I was a working actor in Hollywood. been, on my second entrepreneurial venture. So it's a weird sort of patchwork of career history, but I think it's led me to the right place, at least for what we're doing right now. Joel (02:10.644) And he's done the running with the bulls. He kind of left that... Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:12.798) Yeah. Chad (02:13.742) little pamplona action. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:16.253) and made it out alive. Joel (02:18.554) LA cop, man, that's, that's good for you. This will be easy. This will be nothing. This will be nothing. Unless, unless you're like the, the Beverly Hills cops with the, this, this place, this car is nicer than my, than my apartment. All right. Well, good enough. Good enough. Chad, tell him, tell him what he's won today on firing squad. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:20.34) Yeah. Chad (02:20.588) Yeah, I mean, that's more dangerous than running with the bulls. I mean, yeah, come on. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:25.067) Yeah, I don't know. Chad (02:29.784) Banana and a tailpipe. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:30.899) You're... I'm not going to fall for a banana in my tailpipe, excuse me. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:38.955) It's more natural for us, brother. Chad (02:44.536) Well, Scott, welcome to the firing squad. This is how it's going to go at the end of the bell. or when you hear the sound, there you go, hear the sound of the bell. That's what I was gonna say. You're have two minutes to pitch Propulsion AI. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q and A. If you're not concise, you're gonna hear them crickets, means to tighten it up. At the end of Q and A, you're either gonna receive a big applause. Dial up Elton John on Spotify, play some Rocketman and pop the champagne baby because this bad boy is going to the moon. Golf clap. Okay, everything looks okay, but you're, you'd better have some hidden figures helping this one out. Okay. And last but not least the firing squad. Not even one of SpaceX's chopsticks can pick this booger out of the sky. Pack it up and try something different. My friend that's firing squad. Are you ready? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (03:41.908) I'm set. Chad (03:43.49) we go. Joel (03:44.18) How long do you work on these intros, Chad? This is your best work. So pick a booger out of the sky from space. Good Lord. Good luck, Scott, following that. Are you ready to pitch propulsion to the firing squad? In three, two. Chad (03:48.333) Hahaha Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (03:55.723) Thanks, shoes. I am ready. I am set. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (04:02.623) Guys, here's what I want you to do. Get a mental image. You get approval to put new roles onto your team. Maybe you're hiring from the outside. Maybe you're doing it from the inside. You run over to HR and you say, need to hire. And they say, well, what do you want in the role? And you start to rattle off a bunch of tasks. And it does this. And I've got this fire burning. And right there is problem number one we solve. Salary is an investment, but most of us are conditioned to think about tasks, not outcomes. Outcomes are the return on that investment. So HR says, well, give us a little bit more. And you say, well, hire somebody like Bob. And they say, that's not what we meant. And so they give you a template, and they send you on your way because they don't have the bandwidth. That is problem number two. Managers need a guide. HR doesn't necessarily have the bandwidth to do what they want, which is to guide you through the process. You take the template back, you sit down, you stare blankly at it, and that's problem number three. Even when we know what we want in the design of a role, most of us are really bad at getting those ideas out and into something that's usable. And so we start to cut corners. We go to the web and we cut and paste and we write out a bunch of tasks. And we ultimately wind up with something that looks like and feels like and reads like an obituary. And task-focused job descriptions don't lead to higher engagement. They don't lead to higher productivity and they don't reduce turnover. And that's problem number four. And then finally you take what you've got, the best that you can make it, and you go back to HR and you give it to them. And they say, well, we can't use this. We're going to have to rewrite it. And you smack your head and you say, well, why didn't we do that from the very beginning? And there's this ping pong back and forth. Our customers are telling us to do the process right takes four to six hours if they were doing it with human effort. And that's problem number five. And that's why Propulsion AI was born. We utilize AI to interview the user because they are the expert. We think the user is the manager who has that role. And in the process of that interview, we are actually delivering the critical value that we deliver, which is clarity in the head of that individual about that particular role and its design. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:00.171) and then the platform does most of the writing. And I say most of the writing because it's an iterative process, it's not a handoff. The platform's gonna generate a performance-based job description, an SEO-optimized job posting, social media content, interviewer guides. It'll do base compensation salary analysis to make sure you're competitive with the market, and not in four to six hours, but in as little as 15 minutes. Joel (06:25.11) All right, Scott, well done. You got a few seconds added being a super fan, just so you know, just so you know, in case anyone's keeping, in case anyone's keeping time on the podcast here. All right, so you know the first question, the name, Propulsion, why, what's the meaning, and particularly the URL. Your URL is getpropulsion.ai. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:32.213) Thank you, brother. Then, mo at the end. Chad (06:36.526) Not like there's any bias from Cheeseman, Joel (06:51.475) Propulsion.ai is for sale. Did you try to buy it? If so, how did that turn out? So talk about the name and the genesis of that. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:51.54) Yeah. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:55.609) Yeah, we looked at it. Okay, I mean, let me start with the PQ and stuff that matters less. think at this point, yeah, we looked at buying propulsion.ai and at the time that we founded the company, we had a better use for 5k. So we decided we would create some kind of alternative and then we would get down to really the focus on engineering and the focus on product market fit. The name came about weirdly because we were thinking, how do we... How do we launch companies to success? In 20 years as a chief people officer, I've been a buyer of a lot of HR tech and it never seemed like the products, I mean, it's not like they don't work, but it's always felt like they were developed by smart software people who had never really walked a day in the shoes of a practitioner who had to solve problems by hand. And so what we wanted to do is propel companies to new levels of success. and build great foundations for them to build upon and that's really where the name came from. Joel (07:55.542) I'm so inspired. Thank you for that. You're bootstrapped up to this point. You were founded in 2023, so you're still in diapers. Is money coming? Did you take friends and family? Is there a seed round in your near future? Talk about the funding. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (08:12.169) Yeah, well, we're always open to conversations about the injection of capital if it helps us move the mission forward. We haven't needed it to this point, you're right. We're a bootstrap company, but we're in conversations. I think as I looked toward the future, I feel us kind of bending toward the venture arm of the larger suite providers, Workday, ADP. Google just because of the synergies that exist there. But we'll see. Right now we are laser focused on product market fit and on customer value and on wrapping great service around what we've created. Joel (08:35.734) Mm-hmm. Joel (08:48.308) You say we, talk about the team. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (08:50.507) So intentionally lean, you know, we're about 90 % to the bottom line right now and in part that's because as we started we used, you know, resources that were both volunteering and contract. The vision that I have for the company is one that you I used to want to run a thousand person company But you guys know just as well as I do a thousand people can't agree on anything and it's hard to get a lot of stuff done the bigger the company gets so we've built systems that automate almost everything that we do so we can intentionally keep the headcount low Chad (09:25.496) There's another propulsion AI out there. Are you aware of that? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (09:28.031) Yeah, yeah, they're in India, as a matter of fact, if it's the one that I think you might be thinking of. yeah, we're not pursuing infringement on them for going after our name, by the way, but they were, they're a much earlier founded company than we are, but. Chad (09:42.534) Yeah, you might want to spend a little money and get that URL, cement that name and then go after that. Okay, so Scott, I mean, have years and years, I don't want to date you, but decades of being in this space and being, I mean, literally head of people, CHRO, of people, that type of thing. Why, why? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (09:48.043) Yeah. Joel (09:48.084) That 5K might be worth it now. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (09:50.675) Now, yeah, yeah. Chad (10:08.342) get into a startup situation. mean, you know, you know, it's hard enough being an HR, working your ass off and obviously not getting a hell of a lot of respect for it. You know that more than anybody does, right? Now you're in a position where there's even less of that. So what in the hell were you thinking? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:10.313) Yeah. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:20.319) Yeah. Yeah. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:27.893) Dude, such a... Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:32.939) Such a great question, dude, because the, you know, I mean, people took my calls and, I had. Chad (10:38.573) Yes. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:40.389) people that did things and it was a 45 plus hour manageable week and I had holidays and I got pay and stuff like that. But there were two factors I think that drove me. The first, I mean I made reference to just a second ago. I really thought I could do a better job. I thought I could bring together peers of mine, top talent leaders, top HR leaders and with them really think about how to actually solve root cause problems rather than symptoms. And I got possessed of this crazy idea that I could somehow build better Chad (11:06.829) Mm-hmm. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (11:10.285) software and I would talk to people at conferences and know peer groups and and they would you know slap me on the back yeah yeah yeah you know go do it you're right you're right you know I'll stand behind you till your nose bleeds but that was factor number one. Factor number two is and you know you you you age me with the decades but you know the fact is after 25 years of dispensing advice of trying to help people find fit I found myself in a situation where I didn't and You know, it took a toll on me. I went to a company that, you know, in the beginning was really, really good. But then I started to recognize that the way I communicated and the, you know, the strategies that I wanted to put in place and the way I approached problems and what I was willing to accept and not accept in terms of excellence and mediocrity, they were just like diametrically opposite from this company. And I thought to myself as, I, you left in the end, I thought, how did I get into that situation? And we spend a lot of time in the industry thinking about the impact of financial impact to companies of a lack of fit. And nobody thinks about the impact to the individual. And the reality is both of those things are important. So I had this idea that I could do it better. And I found myself in a situation that was like personally traumatic. And then apparently I had like this psychotic break and I thought like, I'm just going to go do it. and left and later in life I think is easier because you have the resources to do it and I did and nobody's interested. Chad (12:35.597) Mm. Well, all of all of, yeah, all of that pain. I'm really surprised, Joel. He didn't he didn't he didn't start a podcast. So job descriptions, nothing more boring, nothing more shit that's out there today. Job descriptions, job postings, those types of things. Yes, they're definitely the base of what's what's needed to start the process. But it seems like it's being commoditized incredibly quickly. Right. Joel (12:42.634) The actor's coming out. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (13:07.401) Yeah, that's why we don't do it. That's why that's not our focus. mean, and I know it seems like that is the focus. No, it's not. Here's what you build off of. What we deliver is a process that creates clarity. Chad (13:07.926) So, go ahead. Chad (13:14.688) That's the foundation though, right? You build off of that. Mm-hmm. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (13:24.767) That clarity is really the value that we create. And by the way, asterisk, we also write all the content for you. But you could get away, like you could not have a job description if you're hyper clear about how a role fits your strategy and the outcomes, not the task, but the outcomes that you are going to. ask that person to be accountable for their connected to business results, how you're going to measure success, the competencies and skills that you need in the beginning and ones that you can develop along the way that are going to make somebody a better producer. If you're really clear about those things, you open the door to so much, not only in recruitment, but in talent management, performance management as well. Chad (14:04.974) So what actual model are you using to be able to support this? What large language model? it cloud? Is it open AI? Who are you using? You've got to be using somebody. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (14:11.805) when we say a little bit more check. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (14:17.289) Yeah, well, 100%, but we are using a mix because we found that the different language models produce content differently. And so we use Claude, we use 3.5 from OpenAI, and we use 4.0. And we're looking at some uses of Llama as well. And we have a failover model that we've built in the background, not only for the sake of being able to consistently produce, but also because the content comes out differently. But there's a point that I think is important to make. We are not a GPT wrapper. We have built a scaffolded system that takes in very specific inputs Chad (14:28.194) Mm-hmm. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (14:56.509) solicits those from the user, uses them in very specific and combined ways, and is layered with some highly engineered prompts. So what you get from us, you cannot get from ChatGBT just using the commercially available LLM. Chad (15:14.305) Why not? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (15:16.245) Well, one, because every LLM, I mean, it doesn't matter what you're really using, their training set is the internet. And that's a lot to overcome. Because if I say job description, it's like saying box, right? There are so many varieties of ideas that come to your head when you hear that term. Same thing with job description. So we're not, if you use the commercially available product, it's going to go scrape the web for stuff, pull back what it thinks, and write something. Chad (15:25.454) Mm. Chad (15:41.742) Yeah, but I can actually give it something to take a look at so I can give it a variety of job descriptions that I want to actually at least found a a base off of, right? So which is sounds like somewhat of what you guys are doing. I can do that easily in the commercial in the commercial available system and keep a line so that it's continuing to train on that. So the biggest, the hardest part for me, Scott, and I think for any founder that's out there is trying to outrun. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (15:50.761) Yeah. Chad (16:10.028) the tech and the ability for anybody crazy Joe like me, just to be able to jump on and create a platform that competes with yours overnight. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (16:19.914) Well. Let me tell you another aspect of it that goes to that, Chad, and that is issue of scalability. Because one thing that, as a Chief People Officer, one thing that I was always supremely concerned with is the employment brand. And there are ways, there's a tone of voice that is specific and unique to the company. There's a tone and lexicon that is specific to the industry as well. And if you're just sending a bunch of people, first of all, you're have to be really good prompt engineer. Second of all, you're gonna have to know how to ask the questions. Third of all, if you're using it Chad (16:22.498) Mm. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (16:50.235) as an individual, you can have to the right questions to ask. Managers needs guides because they don't know the right questions to ask, right? So even if you can get past all three of those, now you still have the issue of scale and how do you keep a single tone? How do you keep a consistency across the entire enterprise? You can't do that by using ChetGPT, but you can using our product. Chad (16:56.846) Hmm? Chad (17:12.182) Okay, so when you take a look at some of the things that you guys offer, one of them is posting directly to job boards. Why? Why does a company need that? Are you focusing on SMBs who don't have systems to be able to do that? Or is this enterprise and you're literally just providing features to make it easier because you're not integrated with those big systems yet? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (17:33.035) So the direct answer to question is, our focus is trying to reduce friction. And so if you already, like let's say you have a recruitment management system in place, all of your workflow is in the recruitment management system. And so we will integrate with that RMS and flow the job posting into the RMS. I'm gonna come back to the posting here in a second if you let me. But if you don't have that, if you're a more nascent company, then you need an alternative. so that friction point is one that we're looking to reduce. Chad (18:09.39) So what about SMB or enterprise? Enterprise focused, SMB focused, where's your TAM? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (18:15.935) Well, right now, so we are laser focused on a much smaller, we're very focused on SMB. the reason is just, mean, like, well, I'll tangent here. We're having a conversation with a very large energy company. They are... I can't remember what their exact employee count is. It's well over a thousand. But when you think about an enterprise that large, there are a lot of things that are going to get in the way for a nascent company. You've got a procurement department that's trying to do their job. You've got info security people that are trying to do their job. And even though they're a very, very low... know, levels of concern about anything information security related with us. Those impediments are still there for a nascent business like Propulsion AI. So the focus on the SMB is just an attempt to be laser focused on delivering to the market and building traction. But the problems... that we are addressing are universal problems. A manager in a 5,000 person organization still needs to have clarity about the role in order to build engagement, facilitate productivity, and ultimately keep people in place, keep the right people in the right seats. That's no different than a 5,000 person organization than it is in a 500 person organization or a 100 person. Joel (19:27.343) So you've been around a while, Scott, and 20 years ago, a lot of companies recruiters, when they had to post a job would go to Google and they would search sales representative job posting, and then they would copy and paste it. They would kind of tweak it to their company in different language, but essentially the bullet points and what they needed were, were pretty close. That system worked for a long time. People don't want to like come up with the wheel when it's already been been created. And then chat GPT comes along and it's like, holy shit. I've been copying and pasting and tweaking. Now there's this machine that I can put multiple or I could do all kinds of stuff with and it will do it. Create me a job posting for free. So I guess my point is the, the bar was pretty low for job postings 20 years ago. It was really, it still low until chat GPT. And now people, think feel like there's manna from heaven, that there's this tool that will write this job for me for free, essentially. I think, know, Chad and I've talked on the show and if you're, if you're a fan, you've, you've heard this. We've talked about the death of text EO for a long time. mean, text EO survived on, we'll make an unbiased job posting. It'll appeal to everybody. It won't be too masculine or too feminine. Like that's how they've spun this. You know, Grammarly and other solutions, I think are trying to figure out what is our role with a chat in a world with chat GPT. You guys were founded in 2023 chat GPT came out in 2022. There had to be like an Oh shit moment when you guys were building this to think like, how are going to spend this or do it differently? Hire easy has a free generator, a paradox. Like you post a job, it'll plug in chat GPT. Help me understand the value proposition when all these free options are out there. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (21:19.595) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it goes to company culture. The three of us I know, I I feel confident saying that all three of us have seen a variety of company cultures. And in some, the focus is like, how do I just get out of pain of the moment? How do I just put bullets on a page? How do I put something out there that I can just post? And if that's your focus, if that's the culture of the company, then you know what? We're probably not your product. Go get the free one, right? I would say that to people. But our focus is not writing the job description. The job description is an asterisk, our focus is on building clarity and I'll give you a concrete example. Let's say that you were creating a job design for an accountant. A fair thing for us to put in that, a reasonable thing would be follow up on delinquent accounts. It's task focused, it needs to get done. But you've got to ask yourself, why do you even care about that? Why do I write that in there? Do I want people to come in and it's like how I'm getting excitement by watching them make calls to people that don't want to talk to them or write emails? And the answer is it's a means to an end. The end is a number called days outstanding. That's a number that's important to the business. It's a measure of efficiency. for people who aren't aware, it's about how fast the organization can collect on services that are delivered. And so there's a difference, though, when I tell somebody, your job is to come in and make these bullshit calls, that's different than if I say, look, this is a really important aspect of how we make money as a business, and you're accountable for it. Your job is to reduce days outstanding from X to Y. That's a complete Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (22:53.117) different mindset. That's what we deliver. And by the way, we'll also formalize that in a job description for you. So if your company culture is one that wants to focus on how you're going to maximize your human assets, that's a different proposition than if your company culture is, just went out of the pain of some compliance thing and I just need bullets that I can put on the web. I'll give you a second example if you'll let me do it, which is there's a lot of attention that gets paid to organizations that have very long and arduous Joel (23:10.112) Mm-hmm. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (23:22.699) interview processes and there is no shortage of kits that to company brands that you can find online about you know repetitive questioning and they didn't know what they were looking for and blah blah blah. You know where all that comes from? It comes from the fact that they weren't clear going in what they needed. Because if you're clear going in, you're laser focused. If you've cut and pasted from the web and your focus is just get bullets on the web, then you're not clear and you're working it out in the interview process. And that doesn't lead to good selection. It doesn't lead to good talent management. It doesn't lead to good performance management. Joel (23:58.166) Let's go to, talked about the past and sort of up to the present. Let's talk about the future for a little bit. there's a popular sentiment in our industry. Like we're not going to search for jobs in the future. The jobs are going to find us. in other words, matching is going to happen. Companies and people are going to get together. Like descriptions and resumes will have less value in the future. Talk to me about your concerns about that future. Do you agree, disagree? If you agree, you're certainly not in a growth industry and does that concern you? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (24:32.735) Well, so I partially agree. And I agree in this sense that I think we're going to see a huge shift, upgrade in the way that we select people for jobs. Overall, and for the last 10 years, I think we over index on resumes. And 84 % of which have some kind of embellishment on them anyway. I think we over index on experience. think we under value skills and that's not PhD level science for me, right? But I've thought that for a very long time. So think we're gonna see big shifts in how people are selected. But the job description still matters. The document might not matter, but the clarity that exists between a boss and a direct report matters hugely. And it matters in this sense. The more clear I am as a direct report about what you as my boss need me to do, the less I feel like I have to come and check everything with you. unless you feel like you have to micromanage me. And the more focused you are on outcomes rather than tactics, the more you create the opportunity for me to act with autonomy and for me to come back to you. And this is the head slap moment that you want as a boss. You want to say, look, here's what's not negotiable. You need to get to this outcome. And you want me to come back to you and say, well, Joel, if that's what you want, shouldn't I be doing these things? And you're like, my God, duh. Like, I didn't even think about that because I'm not on the front line. But yes, as long as those things go to get to get the outcome. So I think the description and the way we're thinking about the role that is going to absolutely endure, whether the document endures or not, I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. The clarity is what matters. Joel (26:01.941) Mm-hmm. Joel (26:05.482) Yeah. Quickly talk about marketing. I know you have a lot of integrations. How are you getting to market sales and your sales team? If I go to Google and search job description generator, you're not buying ads on Google unless it's different keywords. Talk about the marketing side. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (26:24.843) Yeah, I mean, we're, are focused on, I mean, we are buying some ads. They're all, they're all linked in, but let's talk about our primary target market, right? It's mid-sized companies, 50 to 500 employees, but with a focus on organizations where they've got smaller HR teams who understand the need to embrace technology to get ahead of, you know, the... what seems like a never-ending, at least it was for us, never-ending set of requests from the organization. have, know, 15,000 person, I had 90 HR people working for me. We never felt like we could... know, satisfy the demand from the organization. that's our target market is that 50 to 500 person company. And then in terms of our positioning, we're positioned as a specialty solution, not a template, as I said before, not a GPT wrapper. In part because we're built on a foundation of expertise. We're using frameworks from top HR leaders, top talent leaders, and we're not just automating the process. We're actually helping people to think differently. Plus, we have a set of features that are proprietary. I'll give you an example. We have a feature called value added scales. It's a way of defining or pulling out of the user's head how value needs to get delivered in a role. I don't know about you. I have certainly been in two organizations where in each, I had the exact same title and an almost identical job description. Yet in organization one, the demand in terms of how I needed to show up to deliver value was very strategy focused. And in organization two is very execution focused. Now, fortunately, I think I do both of those well. But if I didn't, I was going to be a mismatch for one of those. How I deliver value. Do I need to be more long term or near term? Do I need to be more strategy or execution? Do I need to be more hands on or delicate with my management? Sorry. Joel (28:15.958) Are you talking about your sales and marketing strategy? If so, I'm not following. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (28:20.563) I'm sorry, brother. I was talking about things that position us differently. And yes, so that is a part of our sales and, yeah, of our branding. You know, we've created... Joel (28:26.9) Okay, you're branding. Okay. Give me some more tactic, give me more tactical than strategic then. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (28:34.091) So we have created sort of two ways in our principal buyer is likely the chief HR officer or the head of talent for the organization. But the reality is they're not the people that are in pain per se. The people that are in pain are the VP of engineering who experienced bottlenecks with their HR teams. And not because the HR team doesn't want to help them. It's just they're pulled in 50 directions. So we've got a model where you can go to the web and And you can, first of all, you can try the platform for free. Zero credit card, not a lot of rhythm or roll, easy to get into. Try it for free, do as many as you want. When you sign up, what we're seeing with our current customers is that that sign up from, the VP of engineering leads them to take the documents. In fact, I'll give you real example. had a senior VP at Albertsons who was on the platform, created, start to finish 20 minutes, all of the documentation for a role on their team. And I know exactly what happened to it. They took those, went to their HR business partner, said, here, this is what I want. When can you have it on the web? The next sound was the jaw hitting the table. And then that posting was on the web in the afternoon. So it's that kind of entree that gets the individual out of the pain and then leads to a conversation with the head of HR or the head of talent for us. Chad (29:55.608) So who are you selling to? Because you just talked about the VP of engineering, right? And they're the ones with the actual pain. So you being in sales, as long as I've been in sales, you have to sell to the pain. HR doesn't know what the pain is, VP of engineering does. How in the hell do you try to get into the heads of all the VPs, all the different departments that are having all these troubles instead of being laser focused? Because that's a scatter gun approach. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (29:58.943) Yeah. Yeah. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (30:19.029) Well, we don't think it's a scattered project. Take your question. I think it's a legit question. what we're trying to do is facilitate an ease of people discovering things and taking care of their own pain. Our focus is the head of HR. And I differ with you a little bit, Chad. I think a smart chief people officer does feel the pain. They do think about these things. And they're looking for ways to get their organization out of it. Give you another concrete example. My last corporate gig, we were merging together four disparate SaaS companies into one. And when you do that, there are some companies that have job descriptions and they're out of date, some that don't have job descriptions at all, some that just have bad job descriptions, right? My team had to rewrite them. It took 13 weeks. With Propulsion AI, would have been done in an afternoon. The writing would have been done in an afternoon. And the HR team, because they weren't doing the writing, would have had the ability to add service at a consultative and strategic level, thinking about job families, thinking about integration of jobs, thinking about KPIs, rather than doing the writing. So I think our focus is enterprise. Our focus is chief HR officers and heads of talent. But we certainly don't want to not have a channel for people to figure out, like, hey, look, I can take care of this myself, because we see that as a way to start the conversation with our target audience. Chad (31:38.51) Okay, two things real quick. So comp compliance and record keeping, that's all dirty as hell. And that is a pain in the ass. Are you just literally doing surface based information, pulling that back and giving them kind of like a folder of information, just kind of like information seeking standpoint, or is this actual making recommendations? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (31:58.795) Well, so when it so there were three different things that are there and I totally agree with you on this one. The on the compliance front, right? You've got if you're a federal contractor, you have OFC CPE that you have to worry about and they're they're not hard things, but we've built that in. And that's where I say this is built on frameworks used by top recruiters, top HR professionals. So, you know, Athena, our digital human, she understands EEO. She understands OFC CPE. She understands reasonable accommodation. She understands all of those things, because by the way, she'll generate ADA compliant language around your physical requirements, et cetera. When it comes to compensation, we are able to deliver information that comes really from two sources. One is BLS data, which is about six months aged once you get it, but you know that it's actual employer-reported data. The other is scraping from... workday and greenhouse and the publicly posted salary ranges for job titles that companies are actually putting out there. And we offer a variety of different sort of capabilities. The most basic is just, knows, Athena knows the pay transparency statutes state by state, a little bit more complicated. She can look at a geography and skills and responsibilities and give you a mean salary based on those factors. And then more complicated she can do benchmarking and she can do a five-year historical and a two-year projection on the salary or the wage. Chad (33:26.488) Good God, Joel. This sounds expensive. mean, Athena sounds like she's doing a lot of work back there. How much is this for these companies who want to use propulsion, AI? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (33:33.003) Cheers. Joel (33:40.138) Give us a price tag Scott. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (33:40.843) Yeah, well, I mean, you can go to the web and you can pick up a single seat that has full capability for $64.95 a month and with the ability to add other, you know, other aspects to it. When we price for enterprise, we're pricing on the number of managers that we're going to put into the system. And that means we're deep discounting. We're going to make it up on our end by volume. And the organization is going to get a deep discount on the price. And we're going to size it so that they can get the value that they want. But our average deal size is between $40,000 and $65,000 right now. And keep in mind, we've had commercially available product out since, like, November. Joel (34:24.022) All right, I'm not the best in math. just said $69 a month. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:28.299) 64.95 per user for a single seat Joel (34:30.27) okay, for a single seat per user. And then you just said your typical deal is over $50,000 a year. So you're dealing with huge companies, right? Chad (34:32.366) 65. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:38.73) Yeah. Chad (34:41.538) What? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:43.683) We're dealing with organizations. There's a difference between how many managers we put in and how many employees that we put in. But yeah, we've got a couple of large organizations. Joel (34:52.247) is it by employees or users? Users, seats. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:55.721) It depends, well, it depends on, yes, it's ultimately users of the system. It's people that can create it. Joel (35:02.006) Okay, so there's a ton of users if you're if you're only at $65 a month with that many folks because if my math is right, your product is $700 800 $1000 a year. And you're on average 50 to 60 people are using it. But your seats are smaller than that $65 price tag, right? Because the price goes up or goes down the more users you have. Help me understand. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (35:30.251) Yeah, but if I put 300 managers, and even, mean, just for the sake of the math, like at $1,000, and it isn't this, but at $1,000 a year for 300, I mean, that's a decent size price tag. Joel (35:46.1) Okay. All right. All right. All right. Yeah, my math, my math's math's not so good. But that that seems like a lot of people. Okay. You know what that Bell means, Scott, it's it's time to face the firing squad. Are you are you ready? Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (35:48.657) Anytime somebody says, I think I'm really bad at math. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (36:01.845) Set. Joel (36:03.126) Awesome. I'll go first. so I want to preface this by saying you're a super nice guy and we appreciate your listenership and your loyalty. Um, no matter what happens from here on out, uh, remember, just remember that Scott, I have, I have a hard time with companies like this. I have a hard time. Anytime said, anybody says, I just lost a job board. I just launched an ATS. I just launched an S like something that S optimizes job postings. I just launched something that writes job descriptions. because it feels like such an antiquated thing. However, I do understand that we aren't in the most forward thinking business in the world. We do have a lot of people that are still like buying their first ATS and still using spreadsheets. And so I always struggle with innovation and reality and somewhere your business is in that realm. So, so I have to, I have to sort of give this a curve, great, great you on a curve. because of that sort of mentality in our, in our industry. Historically, job descriptions have been a pain in the ass. It's a copy and paste. Let me figure it out. And I do think that chat GPT is a game changer in being able to write job descriptions. Now you have, you have spun your business is not just job postings. however, your website literally says better job descriptions, better candidates. So if I'm shopping your company, your product, I think you write job descriptions. Every company that does this is challenged right now from Textio to Grammarly to everybody. Everybody does this is challenged. So I don't think you're in a growth industry. The product is very cheap. think that we're going to like video chat. The way that we, promote ourselves as companies, the way that we advertise job opportunities is changing. I see this ultimately as a nice to have, but not a must have. If you had sold us on, this is a must have product, even though you have free options, even though you have Google, even though you have these things, I might've bought it. But I just, don't think it's a must have. And in our business, budgets are cut, budgets are tight, head count is down. Everyone is buying must have products that are saving money, making money, whatever. it's just, based on our 30 minute discussion, I can't get to a place. Joel (38:31.52) where I think that this product is a must have. If we had another 30 minutes, maybe you could have convinced me of that. But for me at this point, just too much competition, too much free options. It's just, it's a feature. I don't see it as a product. super nice guy, Scott, but for me, I gotta be honest with myself and you and the audience. can't buy this. Chad. Chad (38:55.736) my turn. Okay. Sitting back and just eating popcorn during that. What? It's close to close to lunch or time. It's got great idea. Wonderful fan fucking tabulus. The problem is everybody has the same idea. It's the features and you have a bulk of features where I think is awesome. And you're trying to, you know, obviously create a platform around this, which is Joel (39:00.52) Again with the food, damn it. Chad (39:21.374) Awesome. then also another issue with regard to the standpoint of tech is changing so fast that we've got to be taking a look at what we can do as Joel had said that is vital to the organization right now and sell that. And I asked CHROs and CPOs what their most vital roles are on a daily basis. And they have no problem saying, it's this role. I'm always getting people are always bitching about this role. The biggest problem with most of those chief people officers is they have no fucking clue how their team actually impacts bottom line EBITDA or anything that the C-suite actually cares about. Now, if you can actually formulate something to help them create a much better narrative when they're going to talk to their friends in the C-suite, then they'd be an entirely different discussion, right? Again, great idea. We dropped an interview earlier this week with Chris Foreman, pretty famous startup owner of AppCast. That happened this week. And we asked him why AppCast was so successful. He had one reason, one, timing. Timing. You ask many founders, what's their number one? It has nothing to do with here, here, my people. It has to do the time was right, right? Now, I believe if we were having this conversation three years ago and you were going after a big series A, and that was three years ago, you'd have a serious chance. The problem is that all of these features, as I said before, something that I believe are really starting to become a commodity and or something that's just not vital to the organizations running on a daily basis. If it is, then that narrative needs to be said. You have tons of experience. I think What you have, and again, you're a founder, you should know this, pivots are going to be normal. They're going to be necessary. I feel, the focus on a pivot to a vital stance. Get some fucking funding and then you got a chance. But until then, my friend, I hope you do. I pray that you do, but I got to give you the guns. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (41:41.589) Guys, I'm sorry I didn't bring the value out differently to you because I really do think we are focused on that C-suite conversation, Joel, that you mentioned or Chad that you mentioned. So I appreciate it. Thank you. still a fan and I'm glad to open on with you. Joel (41:42.55) Mmm. Joel (41:53.462) We still love you, Scott. Give people that URL so they can find out more and maybe be convinced that we were wrong and they should try your product. Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (42:03.945) think the number one way that we overcome objections is letting people try the product and they turn around really quick. www.getpropulsion.ai. Joel (42:13.942) Another one in the books. Hopefully you come back in a few years and tell us to suck it because you've become rich and famous. Yes, and we love it when that happens. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out. Chad (42:14.977) Beautiful. That's all I'm saying. You wouldn't be the only one. You wouldn't be the only one. We out.

Broadcasting from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Chad & Cheese get the lowdown from Darnell Hill, VP of Talent Acquisition at AAA Mountain West Group. They talk about everything from rebranding beyond "the people who fix your flat tires" to how AI is shaking up recruitment—slowly, because humans are still scared of robots taking over. Darnell dishes on trends you didn’t see coming in 2024 and what’s next for hiring in 2025. Spoiler: It’s not about finding people with 10 years of experience using tools that came out last week. Tune in for insights, laughs, and a dose of snark! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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: Who are you and why are you here? Darnell Hill: My name is Darnell Hill. I am the VP of talent acquisition for AAA Mountain West Group. I am here from a talent management perspective just to pick up on what other companies are doing, how to have an impact. I had a panel on quality hire, so I did a speaking engagement on that. And then overall, again, just networking. I think it's a great opportunity to do that. Joel: Nice, nice. So if you had one piece of advice, just one nugget for anybody in our space, what would that be? Darnell Hill: Stay ahead of the technology as much as possible. Embrace it. It is going to advance, what we do on a day to day basis so fast. It already has. Right. It comes with a little bit of bias, you know, bias in, bias out. But if you stay in front of it, I think you have the opportunity to truly enhance not only your day to day space, but the talent acquisition space in its entirety. Joel: So I'm gonna be brutally honest and tell you that when I think of AAA, I think of my parents getting directions to wherever we were going on vacation, having it mapped out, having flat tire. You call AAA the hookup... Chad: Security. Safety right there. Joel: That brand must be a challenge, but also an asset in terms of employment. Talk about how you tackle that. Darnell Hill: Yeah. So with the traditional brand, you have 120 years of just backing. Right. That brings that level of longevity that draws people in. Your parents, my parents, our grandparents, so on and so forth. And I think what we've done now and how we've tried to expand it, it's not just emergency roadside service. Right? In my division alone, there's a home alarm division, commercial alarm division, called AAA Smart Home. We have club owned auto repair facilities. So when your car breaks down, we can take you to a AAA approved shop to get that repair done. They do a little bit of everything. They're incorporating some of the advancements with the Teslas and the auto battery operated vehicles. Yeah. So they're incorporating a lot of that into the day to day in the repair space. But outside of that, we have a number of divisions. We have an innovation lab where we try to look up things to stay relevant, stay ahead of the competition. And so I think that's been great. I think, you know, our vision is how do you transform AAA for the next 100 years? And that's where it's going because we know the millennials are doing what? Less car buying and more ride sharing. Darnell Hill: Right. And so where does the rubber meet the road? And so continuously trying to find ways to engage with them. We had a division that was kind of a ride share division. We're sunsetting that business. But what it allowed people to do was utilize an app based technology to get a vehicle and go wherever you needed to go, provided it was in a geographic footprint. And so that worked out really, really well. Reaching out to millennials and trying to again, advance, get more of the younger people into the fold of the day to day. Joel: Get those kids in there. So in 2024, still got a little bit left and still a lot going on. Right. What has surprised you the most about what has happened throughout this year? Darnell Hill: I think what's surprising to me is the enhancements that are happening in the space and the hesitancy for large organizations to adopt them. Right. Everybody's kind of playing it slow. It's like AI took off, ChatGPT took off, some people ran, didn't realize there was bias incorporated into it. Backed up a little bit, and then now technology continues to funnel into the day to day. And so companies are a little bit more cautious about how they go about doing things. And so that's surprising a little bit. What's great about it is if you look at a lot of the vendors that are even here, most of their platforms utilize AI in some shape, form or capacity. And so that's going to get us to where we need to be in 2025 and beyond. Joel: Yep. Also as a brand, I know you're getting pitched by a lot of vendors and we're here at an expo with a lot of startups and companies. How do you make sense of the flood of sales calls and what do you look for in new technologies? How do you filter that out? Is there a process? Is it just something that's in your gut, like talk about that process? Darnell Hill: Yeah, sometimes it's just like I gotta turn it off. Just being, you know, completely honest. But more often than not, for me, it's the relationship piece, it's this, it's the networking and it's getting an understanding of a vendor that can truly be a business partner in the everyday sense and not just a vendor that's looking for my business. Right. So somebody that's going to be an extension of AAA and everything that they're doing and trying to be the same for us in return and saying, hey, this is what you want, this is what we have product wise out in the market. How can we incorporate that into the day to day for you to make your journey that much easier? Joel: So looking forward now, 2025, it's coming up quick. It's coming up quick, what's gonna be your major priority in 2025? Darnell Hill: It's gonna center a lot around AI, right? And taking the technological advances to get into some of the things that I talked about on the panel today, measuring quality of hire, I think that's huge right now. We've all talked about the candidate experience and what that journey looks like for a team member coming aboard from day one to the life cycle of their tenure. But what we haven't done a good enough job of focusing on is the quality of hire. We all know if we hire a highly qualified individual, the output from that individual is going to be higher, they're going to stay longer. I always say if you invest in your people, they will invest back in you. And so from that perspective, you gotta figure out what motivates team members. The AI is good about doing assessments. And so we take the information from the assessments to better understand who you are as an individual. And that helps us kind of advance that day to day, the relationship building to better understand what makes people tick. Joel: So that's a great tool to bring people in and the right people in. We're hearing a lot more these days about upskilling. Take the person here, bring them up here, bring it in house. Are you guys doing anything in regards to upskilling? Learning programs, getting someone to the next level? Darnell Hill: Oh yeah, the learning programs. You know, we've adopted that philosophy of the micro learning. You take in things in small bites. You tend to retain them a lot better than sitting in training for 60 minutes at a time. You always circle back around to those individuals two weeks later and say, hey, what'd you retain from that training? Very little. Right? Like 5% of what they got. So the micro-learns have been great up. Upskilling is across the board something that we're heavily focused on. We used to recruit for experience directly related to the role. Now we're recruiting for 60% of the experience. Because when you're new on a job, you're going to learn anyway, right? And so that's where the training and the development piece really come together. So that's been great. It's opened the candidate pool a lot. So we're not solely focused on finding that one individual that's, you know, kind of that subject matter expert that's gonna come with everything. You find somebody that's got a mindset and a willingness to wanna learn and then they apply what they learn on a day to day basis. Joel: It's all about learning. Chad: There's hope for me. Joel: I wouldn't go that far. Darnell, thanks for joining us, man. So if somebody wants to connect with you or maybe they wanna check out jobs at AAA, where would you send them? Darnell Hill: Yeah, you can go into your search engine and type in Mountain West Group careers. It's going to refer you back to the Cal state site where all of our job postings are placed. You can look at LinkedIn, indeed, all your search engines out there and you will find AAA Mountain West Group. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thanks for hanging out. Enjoy the rest of the show. Darnell Hill: Appreciate you guys. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch Big Booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Buckle up, folks, because this episode is a wild ride through politics, power plays,  and... well, Germans faking the flu? 🇺🇸 Trump’s greatest hits—European edition: The boys unpack why Europe’s political elite are treating Donald Trump's presidency like their favorite comedy special and wonder if U.S. foreign policy is written by toddlers hyped up on juice boxes. ⚔️ Authoritarianism: The sequel nobody asked for.  📈 Economic chaos and Welcome to the Jungle’s existential breakdown. 🤔 “Who’d Ya Rather?” Startup Smackdown: Maki vs. Talent Mapper 🤧 German Sick leave or silent protest?  🔥 Get ready for snark, laughs, and probably an accidental international incident—don’t miss this one! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:34.516) Three guys who are still waiting for their presidential pardon. Never convicted. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Europe? I'm your cohost, Joel Sick leave, Detective Cheesman. Chad (00:46.19) This is Chad, Blue Monday, Sowash. Lieven (00:49.423) And I'm Lieven busy unifying, Van Nieuwenhuyze. Joel (00:53.81) And on this episode, just grab them in the euro, sick leave detectives and who'd you rather? It's an episode that'll bring you to your shananananese, nice. Chad (01:07.192) So bad. Joel (01:10.802) When I wrote that it was about eight o'clock at night and reading it at 9 a.m. in the morning doesn't quite have the same, same hit. But yeah, that's my, that's my axle Rose everybody. Lieven (01:19.929) Here it's... Here it's afternoon and I liked it. Chad (01:20.11) Especially if he had more bourbon. it was good. It was good. I like how you tied it back to Welcome to the Jungle. was very nice. we know. we know. we know. Joel (01:25.864) Alright. Yeah, I weave it. I'm like Trump. I weave everything in together to where it all makes sense at the end. I've already brought Trump up. For God's sakes. So he's officially in. People want to know what Europeans think about the Trump inauguration and what's coming. Leaving? Lieven (01:38.225) Trump. Chad (01:42.69) Mm-hmm. Chad (01:46.536) yeah. Lieven (01:51.121) I actually watched it and I must say I was surprised. I really thought during the election phase, I thought he was playing a role and he was trying to get the votes from those angry people and unhappy people and all those other people. And he was actually trying to get their votes, but he's going to play along. He's actually going to do it. It was creepy watching the whole thing really. And normally I don't like those cheap references to Nazi Germany because it trivialize. Chad (02:05.442) He was. Joel (02:06.771) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:08.49) yeah. Chad (02:14.402) Yeah, yeah. Chad (02:19.299) Yeah. Lieven (02:20.847) what happened back then. But if you look in this case, you can't get around the similarities. mean, it's like they're actually trying to make a 21st century adaptation of the whole thing with Musk pretending to be globals and showing his right arm and excitement, or maybe even Albert Speer, the one who did the government for Hitler. Anyways, so Musk was playing his role, and then they're actually Joel (02:21.243) huh. Chad (02:22.092) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:30.072) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:36.525) Yeah. Lieven (02:45.807) releasing all the Proud Boys, the Proud Boys who are like the Sturmabteilung in Germany, the brown shirts, which later became the black shirts and the SS. But there really are many similarities. talking about, we need Lebensraum, we want to expand our territory, and we need to take the Panama channel because we gave it to Panama, now the Chinese, they took it, so we need to take it back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The whole list goes on. Chad (02:48.622) Mm. Joel (02:50.334) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:52.067) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (03:04.532) Mm-hmm. Lieven (03:15.129) and signing those hundreds of, what's it called? Presidential dictates, executive orders, whatever. And just playing the big dictator, I was just astonished looking at it. I mean, in Europe we have presidents, but they don't have any actual power. mean, you have the parliament and the president is in charge, but his power is limited. But what this guy is doing, suddenly it actually felt like a new dictatorship. Chad (03:19.18) And yeah, Eos, yeah Joel (03:19.302) executive orders executive orders Joel (03:36.148) Mm-hmm. Chad (03:38.029) Yeah. Lieven (03:43.299) Okay, but you're the Americans and I'm not going to tell you how to... Joel (03:47.732) So are you literally thinking we're going to have boots on the ground in Greenland taking over Greenland and we're going to have soldiers in Panama take, like what, is that what you think is happening? Lieven (03:57.571) No, the Greenland. No, I can't. I just can't imagine that he would take Greenland without Denmark giving us consent. And by the way, Denmark will never give it, give its consent. Denmark are the Vikings. Remember? They're small, but are pretty tough people. I used to have a girlfriend in Denmark. know it. know it. Believe me. But yeah. And Sophia, if you hear this, I'm sorry. But I really am. Chad (04:08.846) No they shouldn't. Chad (04:13.293) Yeah? Joel (04:14.258) Let's put a pin in that one. Let's put a pin in that. Okay. Girlfriend in Denmark. Chad (04:15.756) Hahaha Chad (04:21.358) Eh. Joel (04:22.013) You Lieven (04:25.659) But back to Panama, that I actually can imagine that he would send some force because what's Panama going to do? Chad (04:33.454) Yeah, I lived right on the Panama Canal in the military. So I mean, I was there as in Fort, Fort Clayton in Panama. And so I got up every morning. I was on the third floor. First thing I saw on my way to the latrine to take a shower was the Panama Canal. The mirror floor is locked, watching big boats come through. And I couldn't believe that we gave it back to them, to be quite frank. So when it happened, it was like, holy shit, man, I can't believe that we're releasing this, although we did. Joel (04:53.107) Yeah. Chad (05:01.58) Right. So we made that decision. It did happen. So being able to go into a sovereign territory, which is what Panama is, and try to reclaim something. And then talking to Denmark about taking Greenland. mean, it just see this is the this is one of the biggest problems that Trump has is he doesn't understand strategy at all. It's all they're all specifically little tactics. Right. And OK, great. China's saying, yeah, please take Greenland. Take take. mean, Joel (05:03.444) Yeah. Chad (05:31.352) try to take the Panama Canal, right? But take Greenland because we're going to go and get Taiwan, which has the biggest chip manufacturer in the world. And guess what? That'll be ours. So I mean, Lieven (05:31.505) course. Lieven (05:38.789) and Lieven (05:42.703) And where is your moral superiority if you take Panama? Of course! Chad (05:45.496) Gone, gone. Well, it's gone now anyway. But I mean, OK, so from a European standpoint, I personally think it's good for Europe long term. And stick with me. As we saw with Russia invading Ukraine, it brought the European Union closer together. Now with economic hardships, the EU countries can't and they won't run to the US rather to each other to hopefully create a stronger, more stable European Union. So remember. The US is literally just 50 different countries. call them states, but there are 50 different countries that have been somewhat united for hundreds of years. Now, the EU is a collection of countries who've been around for thousands of years, but they've never really been united. I mean, you know, Ottoman Empire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Lieven (06:30.011) We've mostly, to be honest, we've been enemies. So I mean, you have different languages and it's not the same thing. Chad (06:37.754) It's not the same thing, although it can be the same thing from the standpoint of actually unification and stabilization. That's one of the reasons why you guys are not stable is because you don't look toward each other. You try to isolate in some cases. So if you take a look at the US again, one currency, one language, that's not going to not going to change in the EU, but it's a stabilizing force. And then people will say, well, what about Italy in Greece? Those guys are tanking us. Well, have you heard of Mississippi, Louisiana and fucking Alabama? For God's sakes, we have our own versions of that. Right. So I think this could be if leadership gets, know, gets their head out of the sand, could be good for Europe. And again, I'm just I'm trying to be trying to be positive, trying to be positive. Joel (07:23.676) You certainly will be forced to protect yourselves in a way that you haven't had to do since World War II and whether that creates more of a pre-World War II Europe where you guys kind of lick each other with little suspicion and what's going on over there, or if you guys unite and pull resources and military intelligence, et cetera. I like to think that it's the latter and not the former. Chad (07:28.258) Yeah? Yeah? Lieven (07:29.507) effect. Chad (07:46.433) Yeah, let's hope. Joel (07:47.86) but yeah, the good news, I guess, is you guys in some ways are going to be thrown out into the pool. And if you swim and you all swim together, it could be a very, very good thing, but unquestionably, you're going to spend more on military. you're going to have a, you probably have a lot of cheap Chinese goods that are going to flow into the country. If there's a trade war, with us in China, that's probably tough on local businesses. I know you guys have a real soft spot in your heart for the local businesses, but it'll be a, it'll be a time of change in Europe. Lieven (07:54.801) And I... a lot more. Joel (08:16.934) as it historically always does, we'll either rise to the top or it'll, you know, fall into warfare and, realignment. Lieven (08:25.233) And it's a fact we've been taking advantage of the United States military protection for 50 years, even longer. Chad (08:31.574) It's what the US wanted though too though. I mean, this was very much something we engineered. Yeah. No, of course not. Joel (08:34.854) It is. In return of controlling the oceans. Lieven (08:39.761) cars. And they don't want a strong Europe or they didn't want a strong Europe, why would they? So they were being our big brother and taking care of us and we happily took advantage of it, being naive. But now suddenly, we've got a problem. Joel (08:50.004) Sure. And what that does to entitlements and retirement age and I mean, lot of things are gonna, it's gonna be a wild time in Europe, man. It's gonna be a wild time in Europe. Chad (09:01.486) Well, I tell you, the thing is that Europe was able to, instead of spending on defense, they could spend on healthcare and they could spend on education. So now we take a look at the US, who was much less healthy and dumber than we were many years ago. If you take a look at the actual global standards, US isn't even in the top 10. We've got the best healthcare institutions, the best educational institutions, and yet... Lieven (09:01.616) No. Chad (09:30.744) We're not the most healthy. We're not the smartest, right? So it's one of those things. What's that? Yes. Lieven (09:33.753) But the happy few probably yes. The happy few probably yes. They have access to those health institutions and they probably have access to the best education, even though I don't agree that it's the best. Chad (09:44.718) That's what it is. It's access. It's access. It's access. I 100 % correct. 100 % agree. But I mean, but that that has really hurt the US because we spent so much on defense. We didn't need to spend that much. I mean, give me a fucking break. But we spent so much on defense. Then it cost us health care, education and prosperity to our people. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why they're so pissed off. Lieven (10:07.537) Probably. Chad (10:11.436) People aren't making the wages there. We've got 40 over 40 million people below the poverty line. They're looking for somebody to blame. And one of the things that Trump is really good at is blaming motherfuckers. Right. Well, and me, I didn't touch her. Right. See your horse. I mean, it's just it's like he's always making excuses. And the people who have much weaker fortitude, they're going to go along with it. Lieven (10:22.587) Blaming. So it's all. Joel (10:28.286) Yeah. Lieven (10:29.809) that Joel (10:39.368) popular narrative in the States is why are we sending Ukraine so much money when you have the LA fires and getting so little relief for that. the narrative in the US is more isolationists, more bad Europeans, more bad Asians. And so that's just going to be the theme going forward. Lieven (10:58.415) And I can even understand that. mean, why sending billions to Ukraine? It's not your war. I can agree with that. And you have bigger problems, probably local problems, which should be bigger problems. Chad (11:11.051) What happened during World War II when Sudetenland happened? Leaven, you remember that? Lieven (11:16.579) Everyone said... Okay, okay, okay, but don't do it again. Stop there. We don't want war. We don't want the war. Chad (11:19.374) It's all good, all good, all good, all good. What did Americans end up having to do instead of just spending money? What did we have to do? We lost American lives. So when we forget history and we forget what happened before, the money that we're sending is actually saving American lives. And it's also trying to, again, pull together a much stronger, hopefully, European Union. The thing is, though, when Trump's talking about like, Joel (11:20.126) Peace in our time. Lieven (11:42.928) Yeah. Chad (11:49.184) economics and stuff like that. It's going to be interesting. It's really going to be interesting because war, economy, I mean, there's so many prongs and he has a hard enough time, you know, focusing on one thing. It's going to be the plates aren't going to be spinning. Let's just say that they're all going to be smashed on the floor. Lieven (12:09.425) And the only promise he didn't keep seemed to be ending the war in Ukraine and they won. Now he's talking about six months and I need to talk to Putin. But he also, he gave me the impression he doesn't like Putin that much anymore. He thinks he's a loser anyway. So I think he changed his mind about the whole Putin thing. He used to admire him. He's a decisive making man and he's a powerful leader. And now he thinks... Chad (12:31.842) He'll get back to that. Yeah, he'll get back to that. Joel (12:32.564) Yeah. I think Macron had a really good, uh, I don't know if was an interview or a lecture that he did, but he said, quote, uh, the United States of America has two priorities. The USA first, and that is legitimate and the China issue second. And the European issue is not a geopolitical priority for the coming years or decades. So we're going to be focusing on Asia and the challenges there. You guys are going to have to like. Lieven (12:46.225) Mm. Joel (13:01.18) Spend money on defense and fill in the gaps. Yes. Lieven (13:03.345) we will belgium already belgium already bought 30 f35s or something Chad (13:10.701) Hahaha Lieven (13:13.051) So everything will be fine. Yeah. Joel (13:13.428) I love this. I love the spirit. And there were no, there were no tariffs in Europe that were brought up yesterday. It was only Canada and Mexico. So maybe you guys will be spared some of the, tariff pain. Lieven (13:23.107) Indeed, Chad (13:23.214) Those are probing issues. We'll see how those work and see how they actually impact the economy. The one thing that I thought was interesting is reading through some of the articles that we share in our group. Trump had said that he doesn't want to see any Mercedes-Benz on the street in New York. He's literally like trying to put the press on Germany. So Mercedes-Benz USA employs 1,400 people and that Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscalooga, Lieven (13:28.186) Yeah. Joel (13:44.414) Mm-hmm. Joel (13:53.63) Tuscaloosa! Chad (13:53.946) Tuscaloosa fuck Alabama. I try to forget that place produces the GLE. It produces a bunch of different automobiles exclusively for the world market in 150 different markets. Right. So that money is being made. Fourteen hundred jobs. Then you take a look at another German company where my cousin actually works at BMW in South Carolina. And as of 2019 the BMW Spartanburg manufacturing plant South Carolina had the highest Lieven (13:58.235) You Chad (14:22.542) production volume of all BMW plants in the world, producing about 1500 vehicles per day and has reportedly 11,000 employees in different locations across the US. Plus the CEO of Ford is driving a Xiaomi. Why would a big three CEO be driving around a Chinese made EV? We're seeing. a lot of different things in industries happening that is just, it's alarming to be quite frank. Joel (14:53.876) Competitive research, obviously, is why he's driving a Chinesey. Chad (14:56.418) Yeah, good luck with that. Good luck with that. Joel (15:00.414) Well, speaking of Tuscaloosa Chad, I hope all those Bama fans enjoyed Ohio State racking up another national title. Chad (15:07.852) topics. it's good to have another night. Joel (15:10.58) All right, too much Trump talk. No, shout outs today. Let's get to a holy shit. got, we got more layoffs. talked about a hay job last time, but blaming blaming challenges due to slowed growth in 2024 employment site. Welcome to the jungle is refocusing on core activities that achieve profitability. That's Latin for Chad (15:18.413) Mm-hmm. Joel (15:34.354) You're fired. think they're launching a voluntary separation plan in France involving 35 roles across several departments and ceasing operations in the Czech Republic. The company says such measures will allow the company to concentrate on high potential markets. you guessed it, the UK and the USA while innovating in recruitment, particularly with AI Chad, you can have anything you want, but you're better not take it from me. What are your thoughts on welcome to the jungle? Chad (16:02.914) So here's a quote over the past decade. We've explored numerous initiatives while these ventures have been enriching. Some have taken us away from our core mission, matching the right talents with the right companies. That's one of the biggest problems that I see startups having on a daily basis. They just don't have focus. And when they have new initiatives that pop up and let's just say a company comes in and says, will you build this for me? will pay you, right? Well, you can do that, but you're going to be using resources that could be more, you know, across the market with different brands instead of just one brand and you're putting all your eggs in one basket. We saw this with the programmatic side of the house with Amazon and Amazon went to one company and they bought that hell out of pay per click and then they pulled it all away and gave it to somebody else. And that first programmatic company went into dire straits. Same kind of shit happens, right? You can't put all your eggs in one basket. Number one. Number two, you have to stay focused. Then I go to YouTube just to kind of, you know, get more of a flavor of what these guys are up to. And they're talking about the UK and they're talking about the US and yada yada yada all their shit on YouTube's in fucking French. I mean, I not that I hate French, but for God sakes, at least you can have a French channel. UK channel, a US channel, but if you're trying to get into those markets, you better speak the fucking language. And for some reason, they're just not doing it. Joel (17:36.178) Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Joel (17:41.022) So this is definitely not a paradise city for some employees this past week. Sorry. I just couldn't, could not, could not, could not. What a, what a dumb name for a company. Like let's, let's just launch, some sugar on me.com and make it a job board. what you would, you got, you degenerates would like that obviously. or some shirt. Lieven (17:46.976) Nice one Joel, nice one. Chad (17:47.95) Not for my Michelle. Not for my Michelle. Chad (17:58.158) I do like that. I do like that. Lieven (18:01.179) Don't you cry tonight, Joel, Joel (18:08.198) So, so these guys raised 54 million. Lieven (18:09.913) Are you talking about untr-menschen now? Degenerates? It's spreading the whole fascist thing in the US. Anyway, sorry, continue. Chad (18:16.91) Ha ha ha! Joel (18:18.182) Again with the fascism, Levin. Again with the fascism. Lieven (18:20.047) Nah. Chad (18:21.038) It's just out there in plain sight. He can't do anything but talk about it. Joel (18:25.042) I know I'm very scared for Europe's opinion on the, the Trump administration. they raised a bunch of money. launched about 10 years ago. They raised most of the money in 2019, 54 million. made some acquisitions like they bought. I'm sure Paul Forster, former indeed a founder enjoyed that acquisition, but it was probably not the best acquisition you could make. they have probably hit a ceiling in France. They focused really. Chad (18:43.01) Yeah. Joel (18:54.738) really laser focused on France and it's a tough market. So if you've hit a ceiling in France, what the hell do you do? Well, you shut down Czech Republic, which probably was not a big market to begin with. I don't know if that was an acquisition or, or Joey bag of donuts had an office in the Czech Republic. So let's open up an office there. but that was dumb. Chad (19:08.354) Yeah. Joel (19:15.764) Your assets that you have in the UK and the US in comparison to France is kind of stupid. They have 697 associates in France and they have 133 in the UK and only 132 in the US. So this seems like a smart move to me. Let's shut down the things that aren't working or where we've hit kind of a ceiling or where we've saturated the market. And this is going to be a big story in 2025. It's companies in Europe. that are coming to the U S because that's where the dollars are. That's where the growth is. You're going to see a lot of these companies, try to salvage their business by coming to America. And this was simply, let's lay off a few people in France. Let's focus more on the UK and the U S, good luck with that. The history of job boards that have tried that is not very great, but, Hey, with the name like welcome to the jungle, what could possibly go wrong? I'd love to be on one of those sales calls by the. Chad (20:07.832) Shun-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-ease. Joel (20:11.09) Welcome to the what? You're with who? Lieven (20:13.617) Hello, it is I from Welcome to the Jungle. Joel (20:15.613) Leave in your thoughts. Chad (20:21.55) What do you think, Levin? So French companies buying Czech companies buying Ottawa's UK, was it not? Yeah. Joel (20:29.36) Ottawa's UK, which might've been their strategy to come to the UK. but auto was a brand like that was a startup. it's all millennial warm and fuzzy. It's like, kind of, what kind of focus do you have? Is it environmental? Is it career growth? Is it life work life balance? So it's very warm and fuzzy Gen Z, millennial job board. I don't know. It's Chad (20:33.614) Yeah. That was not a great brand. Chad (20:51.256) Are they on your &A board, Cleveland? Joel (20:53.885) Yeah. Lieven (20:54.831) No, no, no. Lieven (20:59.057) No, but to be fair I... Joel (21:01.224) You don't want the jungle to come to the house, house of HR. Lieven (21:04.049) We've got plenty of jungle, believe me. Sometimes I feel the monkey in the jungle. But anyways, I don't really know them that well. They've been around for 10 years, think. I founded in 2015 somewhere. But from time to time I hear about them, but I don't really know them. I never worked with them and I don't think any of our companies has them as a partnership. during the past 10 years, they're... Chad (21:16.974) Mm-hmm. Lieven (21:33.603) Situation has changed drastically. I mean, there has been a lot of consolidation going around the lot more competition the Way people are hiring is changing very fast has become a very technical very professional and I think the biggest companies Are the very creative companies are going to win and and I might be wrong because I really don't know them, but well but I don't think they're one of both and I feel after 10 years they need to change drastically or just close down in a and check here and in France and et cetera, and maybe do something else. Chad (22:06.264) Sounds like it's gonna be a shuddering of more than that soon if they don't get their shit together. Lieven (22:11.307) No, I'm afraid so. Joel (22:12.296) Yeah. mean, they, they tout, about 4.7 million people that use the site each month. I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration. That's a little bit of, you know, eat, eat your own dog food. But, we know that the job board business is a hard business. I mean, we talk about the public companies on a regular basis, the same companies that aren't public have to be feeling the same pressure where it's talent.com. Lieven (22:19.921) Hmm. Lieven (22:27.377) It's hard to check. Joel (22:39.602) Welcome to the jungle job and talent. Like they're all, think being challenged in this environment. We'll see how they come out. Chad (22:45.048) It almost feels like these these guys are trying to be a muse. And I mean, you know, the muse in the US where it's more media, it's more media, but it is job board and helping companies, you know, pretty much create their own portfolio of of of content that goes along with the job, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. And I don't know. I just I think as a creative agency, those are great. But unfortunately, you already have a bunch of creative agencies that are already there that have huge portfolios. Joel (22:50.056) Yeah, Warm and fuzzy. Chad (23:14.752) So, and there are all these other job boards that are out there in the first place that the agencies don't need to buy. I mean, they don't need to own, right? They just buy. So it seems incredibly redundant, unfortunately, especially in the US. They're coming to the US, a much different market than the UK or Europe overall. I think that's a huge mistake. Joel (23:21.811) Yeah. Joel (23:32.105) Yeah. I was trying to remember Chad, if I had ever seen welcome to the jungle at a conference and I don't think I have, have you? All right. All right. Chad (23:39.342) I don't think so, no. Lieven (23:41.604) No, me neither. Joel (23:46.384) Alright, no more jungle for us. Let's take a quick break and we'll play a little Hoodie-a-rather. Chad (23:46.509) Not this time. Chad (23:56.714) Okay, did you see the picture that I sent to you from the street food place here in Portugal? Yeah, it's called I poppy. Joel (24:02.958) the I poppy. Yes, I did. I'm sorry. It was, it was too early in the morning for me to comment. What it was it a product. got food food truck called I poppy and it was a Y poppy. All right. I love it. Just, just, just for that. I'm to play it again. All right, boys, you know, the game let's play a little who'd you rather. This is where I talk about two startups that have raised money recently and you guys. Chad (24:11.232) I know it was just a food, food truck, food truck. Yep. Street food. Yep. Hi, Poppy. Lieven (24:22.673) You Joel (24:32.104) compare and contrast and tell us who you'd rather. That's right. Who'd you write? Let's get to our first contest and it's Mackie, a Paris based conversational AI solution. They've secured 26 million euros, a lot of money in series a funding led by blossom capital. Mackie's AI agents promise to automate 80 % of the HR process, reducing time to hire by three X and cutting turnover by 20%. The funding will help drive global. expansion and you guessed it, US market growth. is Mackie. Next up and in this corner, have Talent Mapper, a London based HR tech company. They've secured 2 million pounds in funding. The company's platform is trained on 675 million career histories to analyze employee skills, aiding and reducing recruitment and training costs and promoting equal career opportunities. The investment will be used to enhance the platform. Chad (25:04.096) Mmm. Joel (25:30.022) expand the team and target new sectors like financial and professional services. is Talent Mapper. So Chad, you're up. Who'd you rather Mackie or Talent Mapper? Chad (25:39.476) I'm going to start with talent mapper. So internal mobility, strategic workforce planning, mentoring, succession planning and career mapping. They're all, all immensely important in building teams and stabilizing a company's talent lifecycle period. Period. The problem is that I don't believe most companies think that any of these are top tier problems for them. because they are sucked into the minutiae of the day to day instead of being in a leader's mindset, right? Not to mention a lot of consulting companies do this anyway. So they're just gonna go ahead and push it off, project-based stuff. Why do I need a platform for that? Mackey, on the other hand, are focused on a buzzword that's stronger than AI right now. Wanna take a crack at it? You wanna take a crack at it? Agentic, agentic, right? Lieven (26:23.375) Yep. Yay! Joel (26:27.346) I can't say. Chad (26:28.726) Why? Because the AI will be bundled into a specific area of expertise, into agents per se, who perform specific duties alongside their human counterparts. So imagine a recruiter interacting with the candidate and then switching their disposition in the CRM or the ATS. An agent can then take over and start online, you know, the on-site interview scheduling or even the onboarding process, right? That stuff, that gets companies hot and heavy and a little wet, right? They want that. I want that. Who'd I'd rather? I'd rather me some Mackie. Mackie all day, baby. Joel (27:11.508) All right. That's one for Mackie. Uh, I'm a little confused about what Mackie does. I'm glad you sort of encapsulated everything and framed it for me. Uh, they say on their website that they're a quote conversational AI agent for enterprises. And then they go on to really just talk about how they're an assessment tool for employers. So I'm not quite sure what they are. I thought maybe they're poor man's paradox. And then I think, maybe they're like a test gorilla kind of thing. Um, I think the confusion is a bad thing for marketing. And frankly, their marketing and the lack of focus for me in that space says a lot. Their copyright date on their footer is 2022. Like I know that's a small thing, but if your tech team can't update the date for three years on the footer of your website, to me, that is a symptom of a bigger problem that your tech team sucks and or they don't care. and or both. They have super few followers on all social medias. They haven't posted on X since 2022. somebody, the lights are on, but nobody's home in Mackey from what I can tell. So let's go to, let's go to Talent Mapper. I will admit they're both on a really good wave. Agente, Commerce, like they're all the buzzwords at Mackey are there. I also think internal mobility is a nice little wave to be on. Companies are really concerned about Uh, workers being engaged, new research, uh, a new study from Gallup came out saying that only 31 % of workers are engaged. 17 % of workers are actively disengaged. I'm not sure what that means. Are they just stealing the post-it notes on purpose? Uh, I don't know. Um, but, companies like recruiting is expensive. Companies hate it. They, they want to get more out of the people that they have. They want to keep the people they have. want higher retention. So I think talent mapper. Lieven (28:52.432) You Chad (28:53.87) They're taking naps. Joel (29:06.43) does tap into that. think it's a pretty good name, talentmapper.com. It kind of says what it does. It's a bigger market. You have more people concerned about their current workforce than they are maybe recruiting. I think there's going to be greater demand to keep the employees that they already have. And lastly, a small thing, but there's just more attentiveness to the details at TalentMapper. And to me, that says a lot. So for me, I'm going to go TalentMapper. As my hoot you rather, which means leaving is going to break a tie. What you got leaving. Lieven (29:36.901) Hmm. Chad (29:37.383) I gotta make a note real quick to change the date in our footer. Go ahead. Joel (29:42.194) We don't have 32 million euros in the bank. If we did, I promise the date would be... Chad (29:46.188) I just said I gotta make a note. Lieven (29:49.841) But maybe if we, if the three of us would put all the money together now. Anyways. Joel (29:56.18) 2022 is the foot, come on man. Sorry. Lieven (30:00.369) But you said they weren't posting on X since 2022. That's a good thing, not posting on X. Joel (30:06.61) All their social suck. just, I just pointed out X. LinkedIn's all right, but they should just focus on LinkedIn. Like most startups, like just pick one and make it, make it good. Chad (30:10.764) His favorite. Lieven (30:10.821) No. No. I'm- I'm going to, by the way, leave X today since the whole show yesterday X for me is it will be I'm an X user but Joel (30:25.982) Well, XX user, he's double X, not quite triple X, not triple X. Chad (30:26.286) And xx. Lieven (30:29.541) Double X, double X. Na na, naughty, But I'm with chat on this one. I think Talent Mapper might be the best company. You're totally right, y'all. But in the end, it's all about the right momentum. And agentics today are where you need to be. And if Mackie is able to do what they're claiming, then I'd rather be in Mackie's camp. And by the way, I'm working on the Chad (30:29.55) Join the club, Levin. It's warm out here. It's warm out here. Joel (30:34.012) Peace. Lieven (30:58.065) Recruitment Congress for 2026. We talked about it. I think Agendix will be the main thing. It will be the main team. I'm digging into it right now. Chad (31:00.642) Ooh, say more. Yeah. Joel (31:04.308) Chad (31:08.462) That's right. Yes! Joel (31:10.332) That's two votes for Mackie one for talent mapper. All right. Let's get to, let's get, let's get everyone as a winner. Everyone is a winner for sure. All right. Let's get to a sick leave detectives. it's not quite the Gestapo since we have a Nazi theme today. but Germany's rising sick leave is straining its economy. The increase in absenteeism, major problem apparently, has boosted business for private investigators. Chad (31:13.294) Everyone's a winner on chat and cheese. Lieven (31:16.482) Yeah. Chad (31:27.928) Not yet. Joel (31:39.838) who check on suspected fraudulent sick leaves. Chad, as someone who only gets sick when Levin invites us to the Moulin Rouge in Paris, what are your thoughts? Should we side story that one? Chad (31:47.981) I know. Lieven (31:48.024) Yes, chat. Chad (31:53.642) yeah, we should definitely side story. Okay, everybody. So we were unleashed Paris. And yeah, couple of nights I probably went too hard. And people were getting sick at the end of that. I think my buddy Chris long actually had gotten sick too. And we spend way too much time together. That's a problem. But yeah, no, I got sick and I didn't get a chance to go to the Moulin Rouge, which I love. I love I think I heard land with leaving was crying in the corner because because I did I just Lieven (31:55.921) You Joel (32:21.662) haha Chad (32:23.212) But yes, I'll be there next time no matter what leaving, but I didn't want to get you sick. I didn't want to get you sick. Lieven (32:24.785) But your charming, your charming wife did come. Yeah, so we didn't miss you that much. Chad (32:31.288) She's amazing. mean, she, she represents that. It's hard not to, hard not to miss me when she's around for God's sake. Lieven (32:41.137) You Joel (32:41.288) If Chad is, if Chad is passing on tits and ass, he's really sick. Like he's not, he's not faking it, but, this is apparently a pretty big issue in Germany. Chad, any of your thoughts on absenteeism gone awry? Chad (32:45.87) You Lieven (32:45.999) Yeah. Chad (32:54.098) Yeah, so this is a very interesting topic because nobody sees the Germans as a lazy society. I mean, it's quite the contrary. And you can always find fringe cases of a person who once stayed home to finish home renovations that will live on an office lore forever. Right. And but but I mean, these are these are fringe cases to for the most part. But the article makes pretty much the great sick seem like a concerted effort. But Klaus. Reinhardt, you can't get more German than that, Klaus Reinhardt, president of the German Medical Association, sees increased infections as the main reason for the record number of sick people. Quote, playing sick does not happen on a large scale, end quote. So what Klaus is actually saying here, paraphrasing kids, is that these people are not colluding in the great sick movement, right? So plus, Joel (33:47.636) Ugh. Chad (33:49.802) In the German culture, they understand the math of being sick, which we don't get in the U.S. If you're sick and you come into the office, you probably infect two to three more people, maybe even more. Right. Well, that makes instead of one person out sick, you got four or five, who knows how many that are out. Right. So Germans are encouraged to stay home as it's best for the business. I was reading one article where one company gave their employees six Joel (34:08.787) Mm-hmm. Chad (34:19.764) weeks of sick sick leave six weeks. So this is something that's common and they want them to get the job done. They want them to get their sickness out and they want them to get back to work. So I think this is kind of like a confluence of just shit and things happening in Germany. Maybe we'll call it the German flu. I don't know. Yeah. Joel (34:40.756) Slow news day, maybe. Slow news day. And you wonder why Germany's in a recession. For God's sakes, we've got absenteeism run amok in Germany. So German workers average, they average 15.1 days of sick leave last year. That's up from 11.1 in 2021. That's a study from DeSantis. Lieven (34:42.661) Hmm. Joel (35:06.386) You apparently can get a note from your doctor over the phone, which apparently is automated in some places. So we can't be shocked that people are taking sick days when all you have to do is say like, does is mine. I, Algon is whatever I'm trying. I'm trying to do German, but can I said something about my eyes? so, it's no shock that people are abusing the system. I don't know if it's a government system. I don't know if it's just the healthcare. mean, maybe leaving who's a neighbor. Lieven (35:15.601) Thank you. Lieven (35:23.801) Hehehehe Yes? Joel (35:36.328) can shed some light on this, it's obviously going to be a thing if you make it so easy and give people so many sick days through the year like Chad mentioned. Leven, what's your take on, yes, and German should be the last ones. If Germany's falling apart, there's no hope for Europe. Lieven (35:53.233) But thank God Spain and Luxembourg, Spain and what is it, Italy are taking over now. They're leading us. Portugal indeed. No, but I agree with Joel and I checked the surrounding countries, number of sex days in the surrounding countries and Germany actually is high. If you look at the Netherlands, there's about 12 sex days on average. And Luxembourg, did you even know Luxembourg is a country? Do you know Luxembourg? Okay. Joel (35:57.884) In Greece, yeah. Chad (35:58.158) Portugal, no, Portugal. Joel (36:21.278) Yes. Lieven (36:22.309) Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries. Very rich, mostly bankers. Anyway, so they have about 11, six days. So 15 is, if you look at it, 15 is a lot. But then again, indeed, it's like socially unacceptable these days to sneeze during a meeting. So when you're feeling ill, you are obliged to stay at home. It's a corporate policy. So the moment you got a cold 10 years ago, Chad (36:23.33) very rich. Yeah. Lieven (36:50.989) Nobody would stay at home for having a cold. You would just take your handkerchief and feel miserable during the meeting. But now people stay at home. And of course, it's kind of easy to stay at home. It's fun. And people got used to it, staying, feeling a bit ill and staying at home. But there is, it's not only that, there is also, and that's factor is long COVID and a significant part of the population actually still isn't as they used to be. They aren't feeling as they used to be. Apparently it's a lot and I don't have numbers about that. But there are plenty of reasons why the sex days are getting up. But in Germany, they're getting up fast. And the weird thing is, if there's one country in Europe where people really are into privacy, then it's Germany. People will get really angry if you take your phone and make a movie on the streets and someone is, you're filming accidentally someone, they got angry. Joel (37:38.238) Mm-hmm. Lieven (37:48.187) They don't like it. So privacy is a very big thing. So sending a private detective must be kind of the biggest insult you can get. So I think for a company doing that, it's like saying, okay, we want to fire you, but we give you the opportunity to, to leave yourself. I don't think people would appreciate it. Definitely not in Germany. So to all those companies, I don't think our companies would do this, but I'll check. Joel (37:49.47) Hmm. Chad (37:55.716) yeah. Joel (38:13.15) Germany is Germany is out of control and what better way to end the show than a joke With a German bit of flavor. Alright guys, what do you call an angry German? What do you call an angry German? Chad (38:17.58) no. no. Chad (38:27.148) German? Joel (38:30.164) A sauerkraut. A sauerkraut. Boys as always, it's been fun. We out. Lieven (38:31.665) great. Chad (38:38.67) We out. Lieven (38:39.096) Way out.

This Week on the Chad & Cheese Podcast: Keith Sonderling Tells All Buckle up, folks—this one’s a wild ride. Former EEOC Commissioner Keith Sonderling joins Chad & Cheese for an unfiltered (and occasionally eyebrow-raising) look at the workplace circus we call 2025. What’s Inside: Discrimination Through the Years: From ageism after the 2008 crash to the pandemic’s “suddenly religious” workforce. $30 for an online blessing? You bet Keith’s seen it all. Remote Work Meltdowns: Anxiety about commuting? PTSD from small talk by the watercooler? Keith explains how HR is navigating a workforce that would rather Zoom in their pajamas. AI in HR: Want a hiring tool that promises to be bias-free but might still discriminate like your boomer uncle? Keith has thoughts—lots of them. Generational Showdowns: Gen Z says they’re “leading with their mental health,” while Boomers roll their eyes and tell them to “rub some dirt on it.” Who’s right? (Hint: Everyone’s annoyed.) PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION [music] Joel Cheesman: I'm Joel Cheesman. He's Chad Sowash. And I want you to help me welcome to the stage, the man. Chad Sowash: Former. Joel Cheesman: The myth. We call him the Commish, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla, Keith Sonderling. Keith Sonderling: Oh, man. Joel Cheesman: Too early. Too early. Keith Sonderling: These are the guys you want waking you up. Chad Sowash: And also sixth in our fantasy football league. Keith Sonderling: That's right. Chad Sowash: Just so you know. Keith Sonderling: Now that I'm not in the federal government anymore, so I can engage in your gambling. Joel Cheesman: He gets to play. He gets to play. Good morning, everyone. Audience Members: Good morning. Joel Cheesman: Is that too much? Chad Sowash: Wide Awake. I love it. That's good. Coffee. Everybody have. The drinks. Come on in, everybody. Joel Cheesman: Plenty of seats. Chad Sowash: We've saved the best for last. Joel Cheesman: Let's meet Keith, shall we? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Who is Keith Sonderling? Keith Sonderling: I don't know anymore. Joel Cheesman: You don't know anymore. Say more about that. Keith Sonderling: Hi, everyone. I'm Keith Sonderling. I just finished up being the commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where I was there for four years. Before that, I was at the Department of Labor. I was the Deputy and also the acting Wage and Hour Administrator. I was there for three years. And before joining the government in 2017, I was a labor and employment defense attorney in Florida. So I've lived this world. I know your world, both from being on your side, being on the other side. So I have a unique perspective across two agencies that I know outside of your federal contracting practice, also, you have to deal with all the time. Joel Cheesman: So no pressure. But, Jeremy, you weren't here on day one. I know. Because you're a busy guy. But he said the reason we have the former EEOC guy is because he's not tied to the script. He's going to name names. He's going to be open and honest. So no pressure, but the groundwork has been laid. Keith Sonderling: Chatham House Rules. Not recording at all. Chad Sowash: Yes, because we're a podcast. We don't record stuff. Joel Cheesman: He just got really nervous. Chad Sowash: So how does it feel to be out? Keith Sonderling: It's nice. I'm not really out because I'm still coming to HR conferences and I just can't get enough to talk about HR compliance at 8:00 AM in the morning on a Thursday. Chad Sowash: You lucky bastard. So why don't we go ahead and start talking about trends? Start talking about trends, what you've seen. I mean, they're at the EEOC. Keith Sonderling: Yeah. So, the EEOC is unique in the sense where it applies to all industries, whether or not you're a federal contractor and both the private sector, state and local and federal government. So, really from DC at the EEOC, we're in a position to see what all the trends are in HR across industry, across the country because whether you know it or not, employees cannot go directly to court. Whether you're state, federal or a private sector employer, have to come to the EEOC. Keith Sonderling: So we literally see every single case of discrimination. And it puts us in a position to come out here and actually talk to you what those are, to get ahead of it and see what the trends are, where things are going and where things have been, which is what I really want to talk about this morning. So if you look at the state of employment discrimination going back to, I like to start around 2008 to 2010, after the recession. We saw a huge spike in discrimination claims. So between 2010 and 2012, it was record high discrimination charges every single year, around 100,000 plus charges at the federal level. Keith Sonderling: And you look back and say, why did this happen? Because at the time, it's a little different than now where people lost their jobs, after the economy tanked and there wasn't really anywhere else to go. You couldn't find a remote job paying more at that point. So a lot of people were coming to the EEOC. So we saw a lot of recessionary era discrimination claims that made those so high. And then looking specifically at that, where we came out of that, it was a lot of age discrimination because a lot of the reduction in workforces impacted older workers because they were being paid more. And it's an easy metric. Chad Sowash: Was that the biggest chunk that you saw? Keith Sonderling: Yeah, it was a very large chunk. Well, it was just across the board. But age certainly was impacted significantly. So then, like for all of you as HR compliance professionals, even at the EEOC, there's a lot of distractions. So say, okay, now we need to focus on age discrimination, because that is what happened coming out of the recession. And the next thing you know, the Me Too movement happens, so around like 2015, 2016. So then it's all about sexual harassment in the workplace, preventing it, enforcing those cases, and then we saw record sexual harassment cases at the time. And then, you start focusing on that. Keith Sonderling: And then the US Women's soccer team makes global news about not being paid equally. And then it's all about pay equity. And then COVID happens and it's all about accommodations and vaccinations. And then George Floyd, then it's all about racial discrimination. So there's always something too, like all your professions where you have to shift your resources there across the board. So anyway, historically, from where we were in the early 2010s of that 100,000, right before the pandemic, discrimination was really, really going down. So around 2019ish, early 2020, the charge of discrimination went all the way down from that 100,000 peak to around 63,000. And I looked at it as a really good thing. And, you know, less discrimination is good. That means all of you in HR are being... Chad Sowash: Being told. Keith Sonderling: Empowered to be able to actually do your jobs. And employees are feeling that they're able to come and file a charge of discrimination or talk to HR to remedy it. And other people, and we'll talk about the political nature of this area, and other people are saying, well, there must be some other reasons for it. Maybe they're just going to get another job, maybe they don't feel comfortable and that systemic discrimination is going to occur. Whatever the reason was, it started really significantly to go down. Keith Sonderling: But since then, and the pandemic played a large role in this to where we are today, it's creeping up every single year. So it went from 63,000 to 70. Excuse me, to 67,000, and then another big jump in the 70,000s to where this past fiscal year, it was at 81,000. So we're going in the wrong direction. Charges of discrimination are starting to go up again, and we're starting to see a lot of discrimination complaints. Almost now 20,000 more than we were a few years ago. Joel Cheesman: What's the flavor of those? Have they... The flavors... Keith Sonderling: This is where it's so difficult and it's so dependent upon what's going on. So if you look, everyone wanted to know, how did COVID impact discrimination claims? Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Keith Sonderling: In the middle of it, right? So I get there and then everyone's like, it's the middle of COVID. Tell us what charges are coming in related to COVID. And it's really difficult in this area too, because as you all know, employees generally have 300 days to file a charge of discrimination alleging employment discrimination. And then, unfortunately, you probably, you wouldn't be in HR if you haven't seen a charge of discrimination against your company or seen that form. On there, it only has sex, age, religion, national origin. Keith Sonderling: So everyone during COVID is saying what's happening? And there wasn't a box for COVID discrimination, right? So we actually had to see when those cases came in and then actually do some investigations to see what the issues are. But you talk about something globally, how it impacts employment discrimination, the big takeaway from COVID was religious discrimination. And we had an additional 10,000 charges of religious discrimination related to the vaccine mandates. Keith Sonderling: And then that all required everyone in HR to suddenly not only be in the business of having to put these policies out to mandate vaccines in areas outside of healthcare for the first time, but for the first time again outside of health care. HR departments had to question their employees' faith because every employee who didn't want to get the vaccine suddenly became very religious, went on the Internet for $30 and got a... Joel Cheesman: Don't we all. Keith Sonderling: And got the letter from the church of Internet saying, I'm religious, even though you have their social media accounts and you're friends with them and they do very unholy. Chad Sowash: We started this. We started the church of... Joel Cheesman: Unholy things. Chad Sowash: We started the church of Chad and Cheese. Keith Sonderling: Right, exactly. For 30 bucks, get that. But in all seriousness, it just shows where you don't know which area is going to be the next hotspot. And because of that, the year before the COVID vaccines, religious charges were only 3.4% of all charges. The next year, it went to 19% of all charges nationwide. So you get to see something like that just can explode, and it completely shifts the dynamics of what that the most amount of claims are that year, which also drives where you need to spend money internally within your organizations on compliance. So it's so keeping up with these trends that's so important and also getting ahead of some of those issues. Joel Cheesman: So if we're looking at trends going forward and one of the things we talk a lot on the show about is the return to office phenomenon. And I know, I want to say the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was recent. Was that a part of the return to office? And are we going to see more sort of return to office cases come into play as companies make workers go back? Keith Sonderling: Yeah. So this is the hottest issue still across the board in HR, no matter what industry you're in, is the return to office policies. And just to set the groundwork because there's so much confusion about where employees are allowed to work and how we got here, and just taking a step back, everyone needs to know, outside of an executive contract or a collective bargaining agreement, employees have no right to work from home. And we've lost sense of this, that all of you still control, it's a legal term, the essential functions of the job. So if you want your employees in the office seven days a week from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM you can demand that. Will they all immediately quit? Absolutely. But just don't lose sight of the fact that if you believe it's necessary for your business, people to come to the office, you are still allowed to do that in HR. And I think we've lost some of that with the whole employee experience and the shifting dynamics. Chad Sowash: And wanting to keep really good talent. Yeah, no. We've lost. Keith Sonderling: I mean, all that. Chad Sowash: We've lost a lot of that. Yeah. Keith Sonderling: But that's just the... Let me just be a lawyer for a minute. Just say you can do whatever you want. Chad Sowash: So what he's saying... Keith Sonderling: And you'll deal with. Chad Sowash: [0:10:09.6] ____ to be less of a human, he has to be a lawyer. Keith Sonderling: Right. You could deal with the consequences later. But in all seriousness, now as we see a lot of companies, especially in New York City and big cities, finance, tech in California, are demanding these return to office policies. It's really causing a lot of issues within the workplace, both for HR professionals who have to administer them, but for these employees, a lot of them who you recruited to be remotely. So people are very curious about where the law comes into this. And really, for the most part, employees just don't have that federally protected right to work from home. However, and this is where it's so important about the trends and where things are going. Employees are starting to get that right. And let me step back for a moment to understand again, to this conversation about the amount of charges that come in and how things shift over time. So I'm going to detour here to what I see the biggest trend in HR right now is disability discrimination, and... Chad Sowash: Which could go hand in hand with remote work. Joel Cheesman: Yep, yep. Keith Sonderling: You're getting. That's exactly where I'm going. Chad Sowash: Okay. Joel Cheesman: Let's explore the space. Keith Sonderling: That's why you're a good interviewer. Joel Cheesman: Let him go. Keith Sonderling: Reading my mind. If you look at disability discrimination, generally, it's the number one cause of discrimination every single year at the EEOC. Does anyone know what the actual number one underlying cause of discrimination is at the EEOC every year? Audience Members: Retaliation. Keith Sonderling: Retaliation. Very good. This is a sophisticated crowd, though. It's not fair. So retaliation is the number one cause every single year across all labor agencies, not just at EEOC, at Waging Hour, at DOL, at National Labor Relations Board, which is why a lot of employee groups thinks that the charge numbers are lower than they should be, because retaliation is the number one charge. But disability discrimination generally is the number one underlying cause of discrimination every single year. And the dynamics of disability discrimination are changing so drastically, where we think about disability discrimination historically, what do we think about, employees with illnesses, employees with physical disabilities, employees recovering from all sorts of diseases. Keith Sonderling: And HR departments have gotten really good about the accommodations in that process, whether it's through [0:12:21.2] ____ JAN or a lot of these other services, that if somebody is missing a limb, you know exactly how to deal with that and what adaptive equipment you need to buy. But we've seen such a shift from physical disabilities to mental health in the charges that we've seen, to the point where if you look at all of our disability claims, right now, 36% of all... Americans with Disability act claims that come to the EEOC are related to mental health. And think about all the illnesses, all the diseases out there, everything that would qualify somebody for a disability accommodation, 36% of that is related to mental health. And the big drivers of that, the big three, which is almost 30% of that, is anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Keith Sonderling: Technically, our categories of mental health, anxiety, PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, cumulative trauma disorder and manic depressive disorder, and then kind of a catch-all. So out of the anxiety, depression, and PTSD, that's almost 29% of all the charges in the ADA last year. And to put that in perspective, in fiscal year 1993, anxiety, depression, and PTSD was 0.1% of the ADA charges. Now it's 30%. Right? So this is where things are going and there's a lot of drivers to where we're getting here. Keith Sonderling: Going back to the return to work, what we're now seeing is companies are mandating come back to the office four days a week, five days a week, and employees are saying, Well, I can't. Well, yes, you can. Get to the office. No, I have anxiety about my commute. I don't. I'm worried about getting the next virus if I ride the subway. Some of these cities are not safe anymore. And I have anxiety about potentially getting mugged outside of the office. Or I'm depressed at the fact of having to go back to the office and BS with my colleagues at the water cooler when I've been in my pajamas, locked in the basement and we've had record profits. Why are you doing this to me? Chad Sowash: He's been watching you. Keith Sonderling: Right? Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Keith Sonderling: You just look like that every day. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Wow. [laughter] Keith Sonderling: Haven't shaved in a year. All this stuff. Chad Sowash: See what we have to put up with. Keith Sonderling: But you know, that's they're coming, they're saying, why are you doing this? Now you're impacting my mental health and I can't, I PTSD about returning to the old way in this new work environment. Like, basically, why are you doing this to me? And employees are coming forward and they're saying, I can't come back to the office because I'm disabled under the Americans With Disability Act and you have to accommodate me. And here's where I'm seeing the biggest issue. For all of you in HR, your mandate, especially from these very large, well known companies, the CEOs on TV, the boards that are saying to the CHROs, we want everyone back in the office and get that plan back in the office. Keith Sonderling: So now in HR, you're being graded in a sense of how quickly you're returning people to the office. And there's a tension there with the ability to actually do your job and be empowered to say, well, if you are claiming you're disabled under the Americans with Disability Act, what is your disability? We need to engage in the interactive process and go through all that. But what you're seeing is such a rush to get in there where whether or not you're believing the employee, just not even engaging that process because you need to get everyone back to the office is causing a lot of claims under the ADA of not engaging that process. Keith Sonderling: And the reason I see that a lot of HR departments or companies are unwilling to do this is because they think the employee is going to win. So every time if an employee comes through and I have a mental health issue, I can't come back to the office, I want to work remotely, if you don't dive into it, you may think, well, the only accommodation we can do if we go through this process is to allow them to work from home. And that's not true. Say we both have anxiety and the analysis of what that accommodation, we both have anxiety, we go to HR, we both want to work from home, right? That's the only cure. Keith Sonderling: And the analysis is actually much different. Not only working with your own medical providers, with their medical providers, because of course they're going to come with the accommodation to work from home, from their provider. And it's going through that analysis saying, well, you have this type of anxiety, I have this type of anxiety. For me to be able to work with that, with an accommodation would be maybe noise canceling Bose headsets, for you would be working in a dim light area, right? So going through that process, which you all know very well may actually lead you to give them accommodation where they're allowed to perform the essential functions of their job with their disability absent working from home and actually coming to the office. And look, the employees may not like that, but from your legal obligation, that's sort of where it ends. And we're not seeing that now because of this just rush to come back. Chad Sowash: So no plan. Keith Sonderling: And these pressures. Chad Sowash: There's no plan. It's just get them in. Keith Sonderling: And the plan is going back to basics, to what you would do with any other type of disability. But there's just such pressures now on HR to do this and it's really driving a lot of the mental health issues. Joel Cheesman: I mean, forgive me for saying get off my lawn, but this sounds like a generational problem. Can you break down what we're seeing? Chad Sowash: I don't think so. Joel Cheesman: This sounds like a millennial problem. Keith Sonderling: Well, actually it's funny because the next driver of mental health is related to the Gen Z in the workforce. Joel Cheesman: Of course it is. Keith Sonderling: Which is... And that's the attitude I'm going to give you a prime example of. You do not want Joel interacting with your Gen Zs to do the interactive process. Joel Cheesman: You do not. Chad Sowash: I can second that. Keith Sonderling: Because the next driver of men's health is just this multigenerational workforce. I think there was a stat recently. There's more Gen Zs in the workforce now than boomer generations are one of them where they're really exploiting... Chad Sowash: Millennial. Keith Sonderling: Millennial. Yeah, it's getting pretty significant. And just the way they're working. Work has changed. They've always started on their phone. They're much more technologically advanced and they want a much different lifestyle and they're leading with their mental health, which other generations... Chad Sowash: Did not. Keith Sonderling: Never did. Chad Sowash: Stuff it down. Keith Sonderling: So what we're seeing now is claims from Gen Z related to their mental health that really HR departments need to be equipped with, regardless of how the claim sounds. So everything from... And I'll use Joel as the main manager here. So I'm Gen Z and I come to Joel and say, Joel, I have a lot of anxiety about my yearly performance review because I feel like I'm going to get a bad review and I need an accommodation not to have a yearly performance review. [laughter] Keith Sonderling: Please accommodate me. Joel Cheesman: This is when I say rub some dirt on it and get back. Keith Sonderling: Exactly. Okay, so we all laughed. Ha ha ha. And you're not going to laugh when the EEOC charge comes. And let me tell you why. As ridiculous as that may sound, and nobody's going to argue that it's not a part of your job to get a performance review. Or in all seriousness, we've all seen claims saying, I can't take more than one assignment at once, I can't work past 5:00 PM on Wednesdays because that's when I have my yoga classes. Just the absurdity of some of these coming in, which may sound ridiculous to certain generations, right? Like I can't take more than one assignment. Yes, that wouldn't have worked before. Or this, I don't want a performance review. Keith Sonderling: If you laugh it off and they're saying, it's related to, I'm anxious about this, I'm depressed about this, you still have to go through that process. As ridiculous as the claims may sound to you, if they're being genuine about it, you still have to go through that and say, is there an accommodation for not having a performance review? And the answer is going to be no, you have to have a performance review. Keith Sonderling: But if you completely blow by that process, and this is where it really takes a lot of training outside of HR, like you can sort of in HR, even though we all laughed, and I laughed too, at this accommodation, and you're all HR professionals, imagine what a manager somewhere in the middle of the country is going, at a factory is going to be there. Chad Sowash: Gonna sound like that. Keith Sonderling: Gonna sound like this guy and look like this guy. [laughter] Keith Sonderling: Maybe they'll shave, but... [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Damn, he wasn't like this. Chad Sowash: He was not like this before. Joel Cheesman: He's nasty. Keith Sonderling: You could like beat me up now. There's nothing I could do about it. Joel Cheesman: I know. Now you're fighting back. Keith Sonderling: Before, it would be a federal crime, so... [laughter] Keith Sonderling: But in all seriousness, it really goes to outside of HR now, going to those managers and really having that kind of generational training, or it's just going to lead to these claims, even though they weren't actually entitled to an accommodation, but they were entitled to go through that process. And the good thing is that's what all of you as HR professionals know best. It's just whether it's the remote work, whether it's these Gen Z issues, it's going back to the fundamentals of engaging in those processes, as ridiculous as it sounds to you. Because if you don't, you're really going to have no defense to that. Keith Sonderling: And then the other part of this too, which on the whole manager training outside of your offices as well, what we are seeing is that there's teams where, say, you have a group of five, a team of five people and a manager. So two of the five people request an accommodation to work from home. They actually have a reason to work from home. Doctor's approved. That's the only accommodation given. HR actually gives them the accommodation, which occurs. And then the manager and then the rest of the three members are in the office, and everyone's just sitting on their computers on Zoom or Teams, right, in a conference room because these two people aren't there, but everyone's in front of their computers or sitting in front of their office. It ends. Keith Sonderling: And the other employees say, oh, it's really not fair that Chad gets to work from home and we're here. And then manager Joel goes, Well, Chad, just... You claim you're crazy too. You can go get an accommodation. Right. Why don't you just go tell HR you're crazy? I don't want to be here either. But look, these are not trained HR professionals. And that's happening. And what that does, in a sense where that manager should be trained and say, there's a process to request an accommodation in this company, through our handbook, through HR. If you feel like you need an accommodation, you need to go to HR versus the reality of it, say, yeah, it sucks. I'm here too. I'm the manager. I don't want to be here. We're just sitting on teams. It's not fair either. And then that's going to be not only a disclosure of unlawful disclosure of medical information, violate, interfering with their leave. So you get to see how it can spiral out of control way outside of your HR organization, even though you've done everything right on that side too. Chad Sowash: What about all these people who were hired to be remote and they were disabled beforehand, and now they're being thrust back into the office. Keith Sonderling: Yeah. And this is another big question about, especially during COVID where a lot of... Especially, for tech companies. Chad Sowash: Well, we saw the other day that for individuals with disabilities, they're at the best hiring rate they've been. It's like seven... Keith Sonderling: Because of that work from home accommodation. Chad Sowash: Yeah. And then we've got employers saying, get the hell back in the office. Like, I wasn't in the office in the first place. Keith Sonderling: Yeah. And this goes to the point before where I said that even if you're getting outside executives, right, that have those very long contracts generally drafted by lawyers, that HR professionals generally don't see for the most of your employees, especially the ones that you recruited during COVID to work from here in Louisiana, when the company's in Silicon Valley. Those are just offer letters. And again, the employer can still change the job requirements. So you've seen people who've been out in Costa Rica living a nice life and saying, if you're not in the office in Oregon on Monday, you're fired. And they could sort of do that in that sense as well, because they can change that. So you're starting to see that as well. And employees want to know what their legal rights are there. Not many. Right? Keith Sonderling: But this is where if they say, well, I can't because of disability. This is... I wouldn't have applied to this job if I didn't have this accommodation. It's not really an accommodation. I wouldn't have applied to this job. And you have to start. They have to start that process fresh and saying, Well, even though I've been working from remote from home, that hasn't been an accommodation, it was just part of the job. I'm unable to return to the office because of this and going through that process. And again, you all see the news too. The fear here is that it's just happening so quickly across the boards. And when it's the CEO's on TV saying everyone's back in the office and they want it quickly, all this, these violations start occurring. Chad Sowash: So what about... Real quick. What about in the same vein, you have a lot of these employees that are not coming back because it feels like almost a forced layoff at some point where people are just going to quit. Joel Cheesman: You think. Chad Sowash: That's what companies are looking for, right? They're looking for, instead of paying severance, they just want them to quit. But there are employees that are out there saying, No, you hired me from here, I'm working from here. Fire me. Keith Sonderling: And they'll get fired. Chad Sowash: It just seems... Keith Sonderling: Unless they can show it has a disparate impact on a certain group or what we've seen or targeting a certain group, we just want to get rid of this team, and this team is mainly of this race, this national origin. You'd have to get into these more complicated, is there intentionality there or is there just [0:25:27.8] ____. Chad Sowash: Why you need a plan. Keith Sonderling: Right. I mean, this is really going through these. So you don't have that. And we'll talk about with some of that when we get into the technology stuff. For older workers and disabled workers, there's going to be significant impact there as well. But, yeah, to your point about having a plan and going back and as complicated as all these new challenges are, whether it was with COVID, whether it's with these working from home or as we'll discuss technology, it's really going back to the basics and going back to the boring part of what you've done. And these same processes just apply to these newer issues, but sometimes we lose sight of that. Joel Cheesman: So you touched on technology and we'll get to that in a second. The political winds are raging and I'm just curious, your take on a Kamala presidency versus a Trump presidency, what can we kind of expect to see at the EEOC? Chad Sowash: Talk about trends. Jesus. Keith Sonderling: Yeah, so I think that HR is going to continue to be in the spotlight and it's just really fascinating to see how these issues are now front and center in Washington, DC. It wasn't always like this. And you'll hear from Craig after. For most people going into these political positions like we did, working at the Department of Labor, working at the EEOC, it's not necessarily the most elite thing like going to the Department of Justice or Treasury or any of these other agencies historically, but there's just been such a switch in that where labor and employment issues are really top of mind in DC, and it started too with obviously President Biden being the most pro-union candidate and President. Keith Sonderling: And then even if you look at the Senate, the Senate Health, Education, labor and Pension Committee that oversees the EEOC, DOL, NLRB, Bernie Sanders is the Chair of that committee and that's a job he wanted his entire career in the Senate because it deals with health, education and labor. So there's just a lot of scrutiny now from both sides on employment practices, post pandemic. So I think it's going to continue with that. Keith Sonderling: I think that just the shifts of what the focuses are going to be are going to be different whether it's Harris or Trump and even different than Biden, where Biden, the Biden administration was just so heavy on traditional labor and unions and strikes and being involved in that process and unionization and you've all seen the explosion of unionization across industries that were the last you'd ever think to be unionized because they're the ones with the ping pong tables and the cafes and all this stuff were outside of the traditional where you would see labor. So I don't think if Harris wins, it's not necessarily that will go away, but I think there'll be a big shift for her from that kind of old school, like I like to say, old school Detroit Unions and strikes and unionizations to much more back in this world of the things that she was interested in like pay equity, racial discrimination. Keith Sonderling: More of the core practices here, I think will be in a much bigger spotlight if she wins with the paid family leave initiatives, pay equity initiatives and really going back and rooting out racial discrimination kind of focus in some of the gender issues there, where if former President Trump wins, you have a record to see what he did when he was in office. And it was a lot more technical business regulations that were occurring then and that will occur again, like dealing with independent contracting issues, dealing with joint employers issues, franchisee and franchisor liability, a lot of those more structural business foundation regulations to make it easier for businesses... Chad Sowash: Reinsert NDAs. Keith Sonderling: Well, maybe. Things like that. But no, I don't want to say. It's much more technical in that sense of what the initial priorities I believe over there will be, like the overtime threshold and things like that, just changing some of those. But across the board too, I still think there'll be a lot of interest too. And I think, even I'm sure it's been discussed in this conference, like with the diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives. I think both, whoever wins, it's going to continue where, if Harris wins, it's going to be still continue push on DE&I on one side. And if Trump wins, you'll see some of the advocacy groups having a DE&I push on the other side relating to some reverse discrimination claims. Joel Cheesman: How about headcount and funding? Do you see one candidate putting more resources into it versus another? Because under Biden, we've had more money and more resources put in. If Trump gets in, do you see that pulling back or do you see it... Keith Sonderling: Well, a lot of that depends on Congress too, and how much, on the makeup of Congress. If it's a Democrat like Congress, these agencies will get a lot more money even though they've been kind of flat the last few years just from dynamics. If Republicans control everything, what you'll see is probably more of a flatline budget, but the additional resources will go to compliance assistance and training. Less on the investigator side and more on the outreach side. So generally you see the shifts in Democrat administration, hire a lot more investigators, hire a lot more lawyers. Republican administrations, you hire more people to do some of the compliance outreach and less in the investigatory side. And you see those numbers going down on the actual amount of frontline... Chad Sowash: More education, less enforcement. Keith Sonderling: Generally. Leading with education versus enforcement versus in Democrat administrations, leading with enforcement and then doing the education after. It's been pretty consistent, no matter who the President was, going back decades, on how Republicans look at enforcement, how Democrats look at enforcement. Chad Sowash: Democrats are... Joel Cheesman: Should we get into tech? Chad Sowash: Yep. Go ahead and roll that beautiful bean footage. S?: How do you guys know what the hell you're looking for in the first place? S?: With a lot of companies saying, hey, wait a minute. We've never even thought about the dangers of what we just purchased. S?: Conversational AI is a transformative technology. S?: All you have to do is talk. S?: Let's talk about trust real quick, because you blew up the whole system. S?: But also for the candidates itself to not be discriminated against. And that's new, and that's a benefit. S?: I think the future looks seamless. S?: There's really a great opportunity here to give individuals a much better experience. Chad Sowash: So, as you can see, we take Keith Sonderling wherever we go. Jesus. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: He's the secret to our success. Chad Sowash: Yeah. So needless to say, we talk a lot about AI. And it was amazing because I had a Chief of staff reached out to me, of a EEOC commissioner, to talk about AI. And this is three, three years ago. Three, four years ago. I'm like, you're full of s***. EEOC doesn't know how to spell AI. This is not a thing. So it's hard to spell. [laughter] Keith Sonderling: I-A-A. Chad Sowash: So we sit down with Keith and we start having discussions and we start having these very... I've worked with the EEOC and OFCCP for 10 years plus, and I've never had these higher technical conversations. We're talking about mainframes, we're talking about basic stuff. So it was really, it was great. Had great conversations. And we're able to start talking about things on the government side of the House that I've been trying to get many of these conferences to talk about for years now. AI, it's coming, and now that it's here, everybody, they're having problems. Joel Cheesman: Freaking out. Chad Sowash: They're having problems. Joel Cheesman: Freaking out. Chad Sowash: And as you saw from the presentations the other day, you've got CEOs, 70% of those are like, yes, we're going full forward with AI. How many companies in here today have already started to institute automation and AI into your hiring practices? Keith Sonderling: I'm not in the government. You can raise your hand. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Keith Sonderling: It's fine. I can't do anything anymore. Chad Sowash: So thank you, thank you for all of you who did not raise your hands. I bet you are. I bet you already are and you don't even know it. Two weeks ago, we were in Scottsdale and we were talking to tons of major brands. You saw GM, Eileen Kowalski from GM there, General Motors, not a small organization, right? They did some amazing efficiency work with technology, AI, automation, saved millions of dollars. We were having conversations with the global VP of Talent Acquisition. No compliance people were around. Right. But she had to go through that process, even though again, a lot of the tech that we're seeing today is starting to automatically push automation efficiencies and it's just baked into the system. So this is for us one of the most important areas from an education standpoint. And that's exactly what Keith was trying to do. So... Joel Cheesman: It's full of risk. Isn't it, Keith? Chad Sowash: Why in the first place, why did you make that call? Why did AI matter for you? Joel Cheesman: Set the table for AI? Keith Sonderling: Because, when we talk about these trends where I started, I wanted to get ahead of it when I got there and say, what are the next big issues impacting AI? And it's very hard. Actually the next big issue is impacting HR. That's where I learned about AI, because it's very hard with all these things going on to focus on something in the future when you literally can't deal with what you have on your plate that day. And I didn't know anything about this kind of software, I didn't know anything about this whole industry. And that's when I learned through reaching out to a lot of people in the industry really how prolific it is being used within the HR function, not to, and this was 2020, 2021, not to displace workers in that conversation now, but just to actually do core functions that HR professionals have been doing, all with the promise not just to do it more efficiently and effectively than all of you humans in the room, but without bias. Keith Sonderling: And I was like, okay, now that's where we can get involved. Because a lot of the vendors out there at the time, if you remember early on, were just saying this is a bias-free solution to use AI instead of your human recruiters to get perfect diversity, equity, inclusion, to get... Chad Sowash: Famous last words by the way. Keith Sonderling: Hiring. And if you remember really early on, they were saying, and we're certified by the EEOC and OFCCP [0:36:01.7] ____, and they don't, EEOC and OFCCP [0:36:04.6] ____ doesn't certify anybody, as you all know. But using some of these old standard tests in the aggregate and kind of playing with that. So I would say this is worth getting involved. And you get involved and you realize it's just really every function that HR professionals do, there's AI software out there promising to do it better. And that's where I thought it was really important to get in because in looking at it and it's extremely complicated, so many people are just getting lost in how the technology works and trying to keep up with what is AI, how does it actually work in the HR function. Keith Sonderling: And what I found was all the vendors in this space and all the people investing in this space, they all have one thing in common. And I know, you know all of them was that they've never worked in HR. They're very smart entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley that sees HR as a function that they've only dealt with from the outside and saying, oh, that's something we can automate, that's something we can make a product to do better. The difference about using AI and HR versus other areas in your business, where they're coming from, is that when you're dealing with AI and HR, you're dealing with fundamental civil rights and that's the ability to enter and thrive in the workforce, provide for your family without being discriminated against by a human or an algorithm. Keith Sonderling: So that's really why it was so important to spend so much time here to go through each one of these softwares and tools and just to take a step back and where I've kind of just simplified all of this, is saying at the end of the day, all these AI tools that are being sold to you, that you've bought, been using, at the end of the day, they're, what is the employment decision you're using them to help you with, assist or make? Right? Because that is what we're going to look at and that's what the law requires to be fair. So what are the results of these decisions? And then we can sort of backtrack from there how you got there versus how it's compared to what your functions are now without using technology. But there's only a finite amount of employment decisions, right? Hiring, firing, wages, training, promotions, demotions, and that's really what these tools are getting involved in and that's what we regulate and that's what you all know. Keith Sonderling: So throwing in so many layers of technology has caused so much chaos and confusion, saying, we don't understand this, we don't even understand our function anymore because all these products and tools are being designed to do it better, but what are they actually to do? So I've kind of flipped the narrative saying it's no longer a question, are you going to use this in HR? We need to go back and rephrase it and saying, what are we using it for? What are our existing practices? How is this going to potentially make it better from removing bias? Or is it going to actually increase potential discrimination? And at the end of the day, what is the results of those tools? Because that's what the EEOC looks at, that's what the OFCCP looks at, that's what judges and courts are going to look at. Show me the results. Less about all the numbers, how you got there, but let's look at the results because that's what you all know and that's what the process you already have in place. Chad Sowash: Outcomes. Joel Cheesman: So we had some pretty high profile cases early on. Amazon had their own sort of homemade AI that they actually canceled because they did see bias in their efforts. We saw a HireVue case in Illinois and a lot of laws we saw getting passed and legislation. To me, and we talk about this pretty frequently, it seems like things have kind of died down, but I know that you live this stuff every day. Are we still seeing laws passed at a state, local level? Have things cool down? Should we expect some sort of federal guidance on this issue? Keith Sonderling: Yeah, and that's where I got involved early in just saying, well, so many people were hesitant about using this technology because, oh, all these new proposals and these new laws and we don't know how to comply with them or there's no federal laws yet. Maybe we can use it quickly. And that's just not true because at the end of the day what I've said is that there's an employment decision, right? And that's what's being regulated. Whether or not there's new laws from states, the EEOC is still regulating your use of AI or humans through the employment decision. Right? Keith Sonderling: And that's really ultimately what the law is always going to look at, but that doesn't ignore that there's a lot of pushes for additional requirements on AI, whether it's transparency, whether it's auditing, which is getting done by the states, which is getting even more confusing because in certain states like for Illinois was the first state to pass an AI law within HR saying it's almost impossible to use facial recognition stemming from some of the cases you mentioned. And you have to do all these Disclosures, it's just so difficult to use it. And then Maryland filed, then everyone knows in New York City they had their Local Law 144, which then required, if you're going to use it in New York City to do a pre-deployment audit and to do a yearly bias audit. So if you look at some of these state and local laws, what are they asking to do even in New York? Keith Sonderling: And I know there's a lot of controversy around it saying, okay, we'll do a bias audit. That's something the EEOC has encouraged and something a lot of you do anyway with all your other hiring practices as well. So as these states and local governments try to put new requirements in there or even what's going on in Europe with the EU AI Act designating the use of AI in HR as higher risk. Well, what does that require? It requires you, disclosure, doing a bias audit. So when states and foreign governments start poking around saying, okay, well how do you do a bias audit? Right. Well, tell us New York, how do you do a bias audit? Tell us Brussels, how do you do bias audit? Then saying, look to the EEOC's 1978 guidelines on uniform employment selection procedures. Keith Sonderling: So like, okay, thanks for nothing, right? They're dumping it back on us. But that shows where your strength is there too, because this is not new about how you actually do these underlying tests to see whether it's an employment assessment you're giving out or these AI tools have bias. And that's something you can get ahead of. So I don't necessarily fear a lot of these state and local laws. I think it causes confusion because in New York, the bias audit only needs to be done for hiring and promotion for race, sex and ethnicity. Keith Sonderling: So that could lull you into thinking that you're in compliance in New York because you've done that, but then for the federal government, if you're going to do an audit, the EEOC would then require the other protected categories, age, religion, and then also two, more than just hiring and promotion, termination, just the whole, all the employment actions too. So you can see where it kind of gets a little choppy there too. So I think at some point with all these states trying to get involved, it will even out where you're going to see a lot of the requirements are going to be, maybe disclosure to candidates, disclosure to your employees, requiring that audit. All things you could voluntarily do now, those are just how much do you want to get ahead of it in advance? Chad Sowash: So the fun part is that this is really, I mean, so if you've been a job seeker since the Internet, the process has become horrible. Takes half an hour to go through, actually apply for a job, but what we're seeing is, we're seeing a lot of this AI push is also starting to restructure the whole thought process around talent acquisition and how we go after talent. How many of you hire without resumes? One. How many of you have different hiring processes, technically going through your technical system for somebody going into a management position versus a different departments. Do you have customized? Okay, so not a lot of you. Chad Sowash: Get ready. That's the next step. If I'm using, if I'm hiring frontline workers, they're not going to get on a laptop. Why do you have me filling out a form? That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. They're going to have a chatbot. And guess what? They love it. GM was talking about how they saved millions of dollars by changing the process. They don't need a resume. They just need to know what? Are you meeting the requirements? Keith Sonderling: Will you show up to work? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Wow. Do you meet the requirements? We've gone so far overboard that many talent acquisition professionals can't fill roles. They're losing great talent because we've layered in a bunch of attorney stuff. Keith Sonderling: And I think... Audience Members: [0:44:10.7] ____. [laughter] Keith Sonderling: I mean, it's true. But you talk about the benefits of this because there's so much focusing on the risk. So let's just talk about that example now of, forget a resume, forget an interview with a person. Your entire experience is going to be on an app. And there's a lot of programs now, not just on the chat, that will do the entire interview through an app on your phone. And you think about what is the potential benefits of that is that the app can't see the color of your skin, it can't see if you're disabled, it can't see if you're pregnant, it can't see if you're wearing religious garb. Keith Sonderling: So, so many people historically have gone into an interview, whether it's on Zoom or in-person, and what's the first thing that happens when you walk in an interview? You literally see everything about that person the EEOC says you're not allowed to make a hiring decision in. And for disabled workers, and particularly that hiring manager may say in the back of their mind, how much is this person going to cost me? How much accommodation is it going to cost me? Pregnant. How much is leave? You're going to have to hire somebody else. And there's just been so many people who historically have not been able to get past that first step, even though they're qualified because of those biases. But the app can't see any of that. Keith Sonderling: And forget the resume. If it's asking you to do a real life scenario of what it's like to work there, then for the first time you're being able to actually judge that candidate not based necessarily what their background was, what the color of their skin, or where they went to school, all these inherent biases there, and actually seeing if they were able to perform the job. So there's just so many people that stand to benefit from this that historically have not been able to get past that first step because of the AI not being able to see that. But then of course, like anything else, I can flip it and tell you how that could potentially discriminate. It's really important to look at that as well, because people want to say it's the best thing and people want to say it's the worst thing, and it's neither. It's how you design it and how you use it. Keith Sonderling: So let's say some of these programs saying, here's a real life situation at our store. How would you respond to this? And a lot of times you have to dictate saying, here's how I would react. The customer is coming here, and here's how I've dealt with it before. And it uses natural language processing to go through your voice and rates you you on the words you say in the order you say them to the employer satisfaction. Again, a really good thing. But you go to the design of these tools which are out of your control, which is you're relying on a vendor to actually build these. Keith Sonderling: And for instance, if the person has a very thick foreign accent and it can't pick up what they're saying versus us who speaks fluent American English, that person with a really thick foreign accent may be giving a much better response than us, but it picks us up more than that person, so that's going to be national origin discrimination. Or if the person has a stutter or slurs, that could be disability discrimination at scale for all those people. So as you're giving these people now an equal opportunity, if the vendor can't account for that disability, can't account for that foreign accent, or to the example you gave before with the all women being excluded from the applicant pool because it was for a position that has historically, 99% of the resumes are males. Keith Sonderling: So if you're a female, you went to a women's college, you automatically got the lowest score. That wasn't a misogynistic intent on behalf of the algorithm because it wasn't designed properly to see, Well, there still must be some underlying skill to be able to do the job, male versus female, to be able to eliminate that. And that's a challenge for all of you because you're not designing these tools and you're buying them and you're relying on the vendor to be able to account for those protected characteristics. And if they can't, you all are 100% liable for that mass discrimination against those people with foreign accents or those women who were excluded. Not the vendor, all of you. Chad Sowash: And the thing is that we used to... Unless you're in California, where they might pull the vendor into that. But the hardest part is that we used to buy technology, set it and forget it. Put it in place, walk away. That is not going... The auditing process, the ensuring that we get a chance to actually take a look at outcomes very quickly, because the scale that happens is going to be much larger. What happens with scale, if there's any bias in that process whatsoever? Before, you might not been able to see it because it was so minuscule, but then you start to scale it up, bias explodes, not to mention things change. So now with this new technology, we're going to have to be more fluid. We can't just set it, walk away and forget it, put our processes in place and think that we're done, because that's going to bite you in the ass. Keith Sonderling: And you have to also... The way this whole industry is, and you guys have been in it much longer than I, that's, you raise a great point. They're selling it like other kinds of software that you buy across your organization. And within HR, where you're buying this to set it and forget it, to make it more efficient, and it just doesn't work when you're actually having it doing HR functions because as you all know, each individual job description, each individual applicant, they have different requirements, and you have to go through it that granular. And that's just a different way of how you design and purchase this software. Joel Cheesman: Keith, we've talked about the employer side this morning. I want to get a little freaky for a second. And things are going to get weird. All right. I mean... Keith Sonderling: They're already weird. Joel Cheesman: We're hiring robots in the metaverse who are... They look like alligators and whatnot. We have AI that we can be a video personality that is not who we are that may interview for us. People may interview and look like a woman of color and show up a white guy on day one. And like, this is going to happen. Does the EEOC have a North Star for this? Do they try to prepare for it? Like, how do you view the freakiness that is about to happen in technology from the job seeker side? Chad Sowash: And make it short so we can at least get one question. Keith Sonderling: Yeah, what kind of question is that? [laughter] Joel Cheesman: You know me. You know, there's got to be one [0:50:11.0] ____. Keith Sonderling: The bottom line is it's still going to be on you to have those policies and procedures in place to prevent fraud. Right? Because applicants can't commit fraud against you, just like they can't say they went to Harvard and they didn't. They can't show up on the metaverse. Chad Sowash: Fraud's fraud. Keith Sonderling: Allegedly a person that looks a certain way to get the job and then show up somebody else. So, that's where the policies come in place that if an applicant commits fraud using these tools. But that really goes on you setting the guardrails of what these tools can do. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Okay. Any questions? One question. We don't have a lot of time. If not, we're just gonna riff, and that's scary. Joel Cheesman: Come on. An EEOC commissioner. Chad Sowash: Former. Yes, ma'am. Joel Cheesman: See, I'm not the only one. I'm not the only one. Chad Sowash: Come on. Jesus. Audience Members: [0:50:52.4] ____ you say, hire them. Keith Sonderling: In your process, you have to have those disclaimers in there that... First of all, I mean, I don't know how many tools allow you to do that or if we're... This is down the road. It's really how you set the tone of using that kind of software to ensure that you're representing yourself. You're not doing anything that would mislead the employer to believe what your qualifications are or your... Goes across the board. Chad Sowash: And think of it. I mean, there are people that are... And this is very fringe case. Okay, he's very fringy. So there are people that show up and do interviews for people, and then somebody else shows up. That's very fringe. Right? We've had people taking SATs for people for how many years? I mean... Keith Sonderling: It's called fraud. Chad Sowash: It's the same s***. [laughter] Keith Sonderling: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: It's the same s***. Keith Sonderling: It's exactly right. Joel Cheesman: But you know, there's a lawyer out there thinking about this. The interview is a... Chad Sowash: He's following ambulances and yeah, I totally get it. Keith Sonderling: Don't commit fraud. Let's just leave it there. Chad Sowash: So at the end of the day. Anymore? No, no, no. Audience Members: I'll ask another question. So can you give us some examples of situations where work from home was a considered a reasonable accommodation? Keith Sonderling: Yeah, it's really dependent on the type of disability the employee... It's so granular, it's really tough where you really can't. There's no broad stroke approach to it. Like I said that example too where two employees are saying they have anxiety but the type of anxiety and the type of differences are completely the accommodation to be able to perform the job are different. And that's why all of you, it's going to take a lot of work to go in and work with the medical providers and work with your own medical providers. Keith Sonderling: I'm sure through your FMLA processes you have third party medical facilities that do those evaluations. It's really your appetite and it's the same thing with religion and having just gone through this, do you want to be in the business of questioning your employees' faith even though the law allows you to challenge to see if they really believe what they believe? That's a lot of time and resources versus here too where employee wants to work from home and it's related to PTSD, it's related to depression. Keith Sonderling: You could take it at face value and if that medical doctor or therapist, whoever they went to saying this is the accommodation, you can just approve it or you can say we don't believe you and we are going to send you to a third party which you're allowed to do. The problem is it's just the inconsistent application where you'll see the friends of the managers will be able to work from home and the people who actually may need to work from home don't get that accommodation because they don't trust them, they're not as good employees. And it always breaks down on racial differences, on gender differences. Keith Sonderling: And that's where you can really get in trouble not having those consistent policies of saying look, we're going to challenge every request for accommodation, we're going to send to a third party medical provider and we'll let them work it out. Or you know, there's a lot of services that do this as well versus we're going to do it on an individualized basis. So it's that consistent application. And that's more of a business decision that you need to work with outside of HR saying, how do we want to handle this? Do we just want to grant it, or do we want to actually go through our process to being able to see whether or not to challenge that? Chad Sowash: What is your risk tolerance? Keith Sonderling: Yeah, exactly. Joel Cheesman: Keith, thanks for joining us today. For everyone out there that may have a question for you that they don't want to put out in public, they want to know more about what the EEOC is doing, I know they have some AI guidelines that might be helpful to them. Where should they go? Keith Sonderling: Reach out on LinkedIn or wherever or find me in the hall. Joel Cheesman: Let's hear it for Keith Sonderling, everybody. We are the Chad and Cheese podcast. Check us out at chadcheese.com. You can find Keith on LinkedIn. Thanks for everything. Chad Sowash: We out. Joel Cheesman: We out. Speaker 5: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No. You hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

In this side-splitting episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast Does Europe , the boys, joined by the always-unfiltered Lieven, navigate the continent with the grace of a bull in a china shop. From sexy Belgian bureaucracy  (yes, you read that right) to the AI apocalypse  taking over the workplace, no topic is too wild—or too inappropriate. They'll unravel why Germany’s economy is as flat as yesterday's beer, dish out GDPR truths that’ll have American tech giants crying into their LinkedIn profiles, and throw in some bold predictions about AI being the next HR overlord. Oh, and startups? They're here to roast a few: will CoachHub, Popp AI, and Talentium be the next unicorns, or just another parade of LinkedIn buzzwords? Spoiler: nobody is safe from the snark. Grab your coffee (or something stronger) and prepare for laughs, gasps, and a crash course in European chaos! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:34.516) Three guys who are still waiting for their presidential pardon. Never convicted. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Europe? I'm your cohost, Joel Sickleaf, Detective Cheeseman. Chad (00:46.19) This is Chad Blue Monday, so watch. Lieven (00:49.423) And I'm busy bringing in, unifying, van evenuzen. Chad (00:53.006) You Joel (00:53.81) And on this episode, just grab them in the euro, sick leave detectives and who'd you rather? It's an episode that'll bring you to your shananananese, nice. Chad (01:07.192) So bad. You Joel (01:10.802) When I wrote that it was about eight o'clock at night and reading it at 9 a.m. in the morning doesn't quite have the same, same hit. But yeah, that's my, that's my axle Rose everybody. Lieven (01:19.929) Here it's... Here it's afternoon and I liked it. Chad (01:20.11) Especially if he had more bourbon. it was good. It was good. I like how you tied it back to Welcome to the Jungle. was very nice. we know. we know. we know. Joel (01:25.864) Alright. Yeah, I weave it. I'm like Trump. I weave everything in together to where it all makes sense at the end. I've already brought Trump up. For God's sakes. So he's officially in. People want to know what Europeans think about the Trump inauguration and what's coming. Leaving? Lieven (01:38.225) Trump. Chad (01:42.69) Mm-hmm. Chad (01:46.536) yeah. Lieven (01:51.121) I actually watched it and I must say I was surprised. I really thought during the election phase, I thought he was playing a role and he was trying to get the votes from those angry people and unhappy people and all those other people. And he was actually trying to get their votes, but he's going to play along. He's actually going to do it. It was creepy watching the whole thing really. And normally I don't like those cheap references to Nazi Germany because it trivialize. Chad (02:05.442) He was. Joel (02:06.771) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:08.49) yeah. Chad (02:14.402) Yeah, yeah. Chad (02:19.299) Yeah. Lieven (02:20.847) what happened back then. But if you look in this case, you can't get around the similarities. mean, it's like they're actually trying to make a 21st century adaptation of the whole thing with Musk pretending to be globals and showing his right arm and excitement, or maybe even Albert Speer, the one who did the government for Hitler. Anyways, so Musk was playing his role, and then they're actually Joel (02:21.243) huh. Chad (02:22.092) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:30.072) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:36.525) Yeah. Lieven (02:45.807) releasing all the Proud Boys, the Proud Boys who are like the Sturmabteilung in Germany, the brown shirts, which later became the black shirts and the SS. But there really are many similarities. talking about, we need Lebensraum, we want to expand our territory, and we need to take the Panama channel because we gave it to Panama, now the Chinese, they took it, so we need to take it back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The whole list goes on. Chad (02:48.622) Mm. Joel (02:50.334) Mm-hmm. Chad (02:52.067) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (03:04.532) Mm-hmm. Lieven (03:15.129) and signing those hundreds of, what's it called? Presidential dictates, executive orders, whatever. And just playing the big dictator, I was just astonished looking at it. I mean, in Europe we have presidents, but they don't have any actual power. mean, you have the parliament and the president is in charge, but his power is limited. But what this guy is doing, suddenly it actually felt like a new dictatorship. Chad (03:19.18) And yeah, Eos, yeah Joel (03:19.302) executive orders executive orders Joel (03:36.148) Mm-hmm. Chad (03:38.029) Yeah. Lieven (03:43.299) Okay, but you're the Americans and I'm not going to tell you how to... Joel (03:47.732) So are you literally thinking we're going to have boots on the ground in Greenland taking over Greenland and we're going to have soldiers in Panama take, like what, is that what you think is happening? Lieven (03:57.571) No, the Greenland. No, I can't. I just can't imagine that he would take Greenland without Denmark giving us consent. And by the way, Denmark will never give it, give its consent. Denmark are the Vikings. Remember? They're small, but are pretty tough people. I used to have a girlfriend in Denmark. know it. know it. Believe me. But yeah. And Sophia, if you hear this, I'm sorry. But I really am. Chad (04:08.846) No they shouldn't. Chad (04:13.293) Yeah? Joel (04:14.258) Let's put a pin in that one. Let's put a pin in that. Okay. Girlfriend in Denmark. Chad (04:15.756) Hahaha Chad (04:21.358) Eh. Joel (04:22.013) You Lieven (04:25.659) But back to Panama, that I actually can imagine that he would send some force because what's Panama going to do? Chad (04:33.454) Yeah, I lived right on the Panama Canal in the military. So I mean, I was there as in Fort, Fort Clayton in Panama. And so I got up every morning. I was on the third floor. First thing I saw on my way to the latrine to take a shower was the Panama Canal. The mirror floor is locked, watching big boats come through. And I couldn't believe that we gave it back to them, to be quite frank. So when it happened, it was like, holy shit, man, I can't believe that we're releasing this, although we did. Joel (04:53.107) Yeah. Chad (05:01.58) Right. So we made that decision. It did happen. So being able to go into a sovereign territory, which is what Panama is, and try to reclaim something. And then talking to Denmark about taking Greenland. mean, it just see this is the this is one of the biggest problems that Trump has is he doesn't understand strategy at all. It's all they're all specifically little tactics. Right. And OK, great. China's saying, yeah, please take Greenland. Take take. mean, Joel (05:03.444) Yeah. Chad (05:31.352) try to take the Panama Canal, right? But take Greenland because we're going to go and get Taiwan, which has the biggest chip manufacturer in the world. And guess what? That'll be ours. So I mean, Lieven (05:31.505) course. Lieven (05:38.789) and Lieven (05:42.703) And where is your moral superiority if you take Panama? Of course! Chad (05:45.496) Gone, gone. Well, it's gone now anyway. But I mean, OK, so from a European standpoint, I personally think it's good for Europe long term. And stick with me. As we saw with Russia invading Ukraine, it brought the European Union closer together. Now with economic hardships, the EU countries can't and they won't run to the US rather to each other to hopefully create a stronger, more stable European Union. So remember. The US is literally just 50 different countries. call them states, but there are 50 different countries that have been somewhat united for hundreds of years. Now, the EU is a collection of countries who've been around for thousands of years, but they've never really been united. I mean, you know, Ottoman Empire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Lieven (06:30.011) We've mostly, to be honest, we've been enemies. So I mean, you have different languages and it's not the same thing. Chad (06:37.754) It's not the same thing, although it can be the same thing from the standpoint of actually unification and stabilization. That's one of the reasons why you guys are not stable is because you don't look toward each other. You try to isolate in some cases. So if you take a look at the US again, one currency, one language, that's not going to not going to change in the EU, but it's a stabilizing force. And then people will say, well, what about Italy in Greece? Those guys are tanking us. Well, have you heard of Mississippi, Louisiana and fucking Alabama? For God's sakes, we have our own versions of that. Right. So I think this could be if leadership gets, know, gets their head out of the sand, could be good for Europe. And again, I'm just I'm trying to be trying to be positive, trying to be positive. Joel (07:23.676) You certainly will be forced to protect yourselves in a way that you haven't had to do since World War II and whether that creates more of a pre-World War II Europe where you guys kind of lick each other with little suspicion and what's going on over there, or if you guys unite and pull resources and military intelligence, et cetera. I like to think that it's the latter and not the former. Chad (07:28.258) Yeah? Yeah? Lieven (07:29.507) effect. Chad (07:46.433) Yeah, let's hope. Joel (07:47.86) but yeah, the good news, I guess, is you guys in some ways are going to be thrown out into the pool. And if you swim and you all swim together, it could be a very, very good thing, but unquestionably, you're going to spend more on military. you're going to have a, you probably have a lot of cheap Chinese goods that are going to flow into the country. If there's a trade war, with us in China, that's probably tough on local businesses. I know you guys have a real soft spot in your heart for the local businesses, but it'll be a, it'll be a time of change in Europe. Lieven (07:54.801) And I... a lot more. Joel (08:16.934) as it historically always does, we'll either rise to the top or it'll, you know, fall into warfare and, realignment. Lieven (08:25.233) And it's a fact we've been taking advantage of the United States military protection for 50 years, even longer. Chad (08:31.574) It's what the US wanted though too though. I mean, this was very much something we engineered. Yeah. No, of course not. Joel (08:34.854) It is. In return of controlling the oceans. Lieven (08:39.761) cars. And they don't want a strong Europe or they didn't want a strong Europe, why would they? So they were being our big brother and taking care of us and we happily took advantage of it, being naive. But now suddenly, we've got a problem. Joel (08:50.004) Sure. And what that does to entitlements and retirement age and I mean, lot of things are gonna, it's gonna be a wild time in Europe, man. It's gonna be a wild time in Europe. Chad (09:01.486) Well, I tell you, the thing is that Europe was able to, instead of spending on defense, they could spend on healthcare and they could spend on education. So now we take a look at the US, who was much less healthy and dumber than we were many years ago. If you take a look at the actual global standards, US isn't even in the top 10. We've got the best healthcare institutions, the best educational institutions, and yet... Lieven (09:01.616) No. Chad (09:30.744) We're not the most healthy. We're not the smartest, right? So it's one of those things. What's that? Yes. Lieven (09:33.753) But the happy few probably yes. The happy few probably yes. They have access to those health institutions and they probably have access to the best education, even though I don't agree that it's the best. Chad (09:44.718) That's what it is. It's access. It's access. It's access. I 100 % correct. 100 % agree. But I mean, but that that has really hurt the US because we spent so much on defense. We didn't need to spend that much. I mean, give me a fucking break. But we spent so much on defense. Then it cost us health care, education and prosperity to our people. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why they're so pissed off. Lieven (10:07.537) Probably. Chad (10:11.436) People aren't making the wages there. We've got 40 over 40 million people below the poverty line. They're looking for somebody to blame. And one of the things that Trump is really good at is blaming motherfuckers. Right. Well, and me, I didn't touch her. Right. See your horse. I mean, it's just it's like he's always making excuses. And the people who have much weaker fortitude, they're going to go along with it. Lieven (10:22.587) Blaming. So it's all. Joel (10:28.286) Yeah. Lieven (10:29.809) that Joel (10:39.368) popular narrative in the States is why are we sending Ukraine so much money when you have the LA fires and getting so little relief for that. the narrative in the US is more isolationists, more bad Europeans, more bad Asians. And so that's just going to be the theme going forward. Lieven (10:58.415) And I can even understand that. mean, why sending billions to Ukraine? It's not your war. I can agree with that. And you have bigger problems, probably local problems, which should be bigger problems. Chad (11:11.051) What happened during World War II when Sudetenland happened? Leaven, you remember that? Lieven (11:16.579) Everyone said... Okay, okay, okay, but don't do it again. Stop there. We don't want war. We don't want the war. Chad (11:19.374) It's all good, all good, all good, all good. What did Americans end up having to do instead of just spending money? What did we have to do? We lost American lives. So when we forget history and we forget what happened before, the money that we're sending is actually saving American lives. And it's also trying to, again, pull together a much stronger, hopefully, European Union. The thing is, though, when Trump's talking about like, Joel (11:20.126) Peace in our time. Lieven (11:42.928) Yeah. Chad (11:49.184) economics and stuff like that. It's going to be interesting. It's really going to be interesting because war, economy, I mean, there's so many prongs and he has a hard enough time, you know, focusing on one thing. It's going to be the plates aren't going to be spinning. Let's just say that they're all going to be smashed on the floor. Lieven (12:09.425) And the only promise he didn't keep seemed to be ending the war in Ukraine and they won. Now he's talking about six months and I need to talk to Putin. But he also, he gave me the impression he doesn't like Putin that much anymore. He thinks he's a loser anyway. So I think he changed his mind about the whole Putin thing. He used to admire him. He's a decisive making man and he's a powerful leader. And now he thinks... Chad (12:31.842) He'll get back to that. Yeah, he'll get back to that. Joel (12:32.564) Yeah. I think Macron had a really good, uh, I don't know if was an interview or a lecture that he did, but he said, quote, uh, the United States of America has two priorities. The USA first, and that is legitimate and the China issue second. And the European issue is not a geopolitical priority for the coming years or decades. So we're going to be focusing on Asia and the challenges there. You guys are going to have to like. Lieven (12:46.225) Mm. Joel (13:01.18) Spend money on defense and fill in the gaps. Yes. Lieven (13:03.345) we will belgium already belgium already bought 30 f35s or something Chad (13:10.701) Hahaha Lieven (13:13.051) So everything will be fine. Yeah. Joel (13:13.428) I love this. I love the spirit. And there were no, there were no tariffs in Europe that were brought up yesterday. It was only Canada and Mexico. So maybe you guys will be spared some of the, tariff pain. Lieven (13:23.107) Indeed, Chad (13:23.214) Those are probing issues. We'll see how those work and see how they actually impact the economy. The one thing that I thought was interesting is reading through some of the articles that we share in our group. Trump had said that he doesn't want to see any Mercedes-Benz on the street in New York. He's literally like trying to put the press on Germany. So Mercedes-Benz USA employs 1,400 people and that Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscalooga, Lieven (13:28.186) Yeah. Joel (13:44.414) Mm-hmm. Joel (13:53.63) Tuscaloosa! Chad (13:53.946) Tuscaloosa fuck Alabama. I try to forget that place produces the GLE. It produces a bunch of different automobiles exclusively for the world market in 150 different markets. Right. So that money is being made. Fourteen hundred jobs. Then you take a look at another German company where my cousin actually works at BMW in South Carolina. And as of 2019 the BMW Spartanburg manufacturing plant South Carolina had the highest Lieven (13:58.235) You Chad (14:22.542) production volume of all BMW plants in the world, producing about 1500 vehicles per day and has reportedly 11,000 employees in different locations across the US. Plus the CEO of Ford is driving a Xiaomi. Why would a big three CEO be driving around a Chinese made EV? We're seeing. a lot of different things in industries happening that is just, it's alarming to be quite frank. Joel (14:53.876) Competitive research, obviously, is why he's driving a Chinesey. Chad (14:56.418) Yeah, good luck with that. Good luck with that. Joel (15:00.414) Well, speaking of Tuscaloosa Chad, I hope all those Bama fans enjoyed Ohio State racking up another national title. Chad (15:07.852) topics. it's good to have another night. Joel (15:10.58) All right, too much Trump talk. No, shout outs today. Let's get to a holy shit. got, we got more layoffs. talked about a hay job last time, but blaming blaming challenges due to slowed growth in 2024 employment site. Welcome to the jungle is refocusing on core activities that achieve profitability. That's Latin for Chad (15:18.413) Mm-hmm. Joel (15:34.354) You're fired. think they're launching a voluntary separation plan in France involving 35 roles across several departments and ceasing operations in the Czech Republic. The company says such measures will allow the company to concentrate on high potential markets. you guessed it, the UK and the USA while innovating in recruitment, particularly with AI Chad, you can have anything you want, but you're better not take it from me. What are your thoughts on welcome to the jungle? Chad (16:02.914) So here's a quote over the past decade. We've explored numerous initiatives while these ventures have been enriching. Some have taken us away from our core mission, matching the right talents with the right companies. That's one of the biggest problems that I see startups having on a daily basis. They just don't have focus. And when they have new initiatives that pop up and let's just say a company comes in and says, will you build this for me? will pay you, right? Well, you can do that, but you're going to be using resources that could be more, you know, across the market with different brands instead of just one brand and you're putting all your eggs in one basket. We saw this with the programmatic side of the house with Amazon and Amazon went to one company and they bought that hell out of pay per click and then they pulled it all away and gave it to somebody else. And that first programmatic company went into dire straits. Same kind of shit happens, right? You can't put all your eggs in one basket. Number one. Number two, you have to stay focused. Then I go to YouTube just to kind of, you know, get more of a flavor of what these guys are up to. And they're talking about the UK and they're talking about the US and yada yada yada all their shit on YouTube's in fucking French. I mean, I not that I hate French, but for God sakes, at least you can have a French channel. UK channel, a US channel, but if you're trying to get into those markets, you better speak the fucking language. And for some reason, they're just not doing it. Joel (17:36.178) Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Joel (17:41.022) So this is definitely not a paradise city for some employees this past week. Sorry. I just couldn't, could not, could not, could not. What a, what a dumb name for a company. Like let's, let's just launch, some sugar on me.com and make it a job board. what you would, you got, you degenerates would like that obviously. or some shirt. Lieven (17:46.976) Nice one Joel, nice one. Chad (17:47.95) Not for my Michelle. Not for my Michelle. Chad (17:58.158) I do like that. I do like that. Lieven (18:01.179) Don't you cry tonight, Joel, Joel (18:08.198) So, so these guys raised 54 million. Lieven (18:09.913) Are you talking about untr-menschen now? Degenerates? It's spreading the whole fascist thing in the US. Anyway, sorry, continue. Chad (18:16.91) Ha ha ha! Joel (18:18.182) Again with the fascism, Levin. Again with the fascism. Lieven (18:20.047) Nah. Chad (18:21.038) It's just out there in plain sight. He can't do anything but talk about it. Joel (18:25.042) I know I'm very scared for Europe's opinion on the, the Trump administration. they raised a bunch of money. launched about 10 years ago. They raised most of the money in 2019, 54 million. made some acquisitions like they bought. I'm sure Paul Forster, former indeed a founder enjoyed that acquisition, but it was probably not the best acquisition you could make. they have probably hit a ceiling in France. They focused really. Chad (18:43.01) Yeah. Joel (18:54.738) really laser focused on France and it's a tough market. So if you've hit a ceiling in France, what the hell do you do? Well, you shut down Czech Republic, which probably was not a big market to begin with. I don't know if that was an acquisition or, or Joey bag of donuts had an office in the Czech Republic. So let's open up an office there. but that was dumb. Chad (19:08.354) Yeah. Joel (19:15.764) Your assets that you have in the UK and the US in comparison to France is kind of stupid. They have 697 associates in France and they have 133 in the UK and only 132 in the US. So this seems like a smart move to me. Let's shut down the things that aren't working or where we've hit kind of a ceiling or where we've saturated the market. And this is going to be a big story in 2025. It's companies in Europe. that are coming to the U S because that's where the dollars are. That's where the growth is. You're going to see a lot of these companies, try to salvage their business by coming to America. And this was simply, let's lay off a few people in France. Let's focus more on the UK and the U S, good luck with that. The history of job boards that have tried that is not very great, but, Hey, with the name like welcome to the jungle, what could possibly go wrong? I'd love to be on one of those sales calls by the. Chad (20:07.832) Shun-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-un-ease. Joel (20:11.09) Welcome to the what? You're with who? Lieven (20:13.617) Hello, it is I from Welcome to the Jungle. Joel (20:15.613) Leave in your thoughts. Chad (20:21.55) What do you think, Levin? So French companies buying Czech companies buying Ottawa's UK, was it not? Yeah. Joel (20:29.36) Ottawa's UK, which might've been their strategy to come to the UK. but auto was a brand like that was a startup. it's all millennial warm and fuzzy. It's like, kind of, what kind of focus do you have? Is it environmental? Is it career growth? Is it life work life balance? So it's very warm and fuzzy Gen Z, millennial job board. I don't know. It's Chad (20:33.614) Yeah. That was not a great brand. Chad (20:51.256) Are they on your &A board, Cleveland? Joel (20:53.885) Yeah. Lieven (20:54.831) No, no, no. Lieven (20:59.057) No, but to be fair I... Joel (21:01.224) You don't want the jungle to come to the house, house of HR. Lieven (21:04.049) We've got plenty of jungle, believe me. Sometimes I feel the monkey in the jungle. But anyways, I don't really know them that well. They've been around for 10 years, think. I founded in 2015 somewhere. But from time to time I hear about them, but I don't really know them. I never worked with them and I don't think any of our companies has them as a partnership. during the past 10 years, they're... Chad (21:16.974) Mm-hmm. Lieven (21:33.603) Situation has changed drastically. I mean, there has been a lot of consolidation going around the lot more competition the Way people are hiring is changing very fast has become a very technical very professional and I think the biggest companies Are the very creative companies are going to win and and I might be wrong because I really don't know them, but well but I don't think they're one of both and I feel after 10 years they need to change drastically or just close down in a and check here and in France and et cetera, and maybe do something else. Chad (22:06.264) Sounds like it's gonna be a shuddering of more than that soon if they don't get their shit together. Lieven (22:11.307) No, I'm afraid so. Joel (22:12.296) Yeah. mean, they, they tout, about 4.7 million people that use the site each month. I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration. That's a little bit of, you know, eat, eat your own dog food. But, we know that the job board business is a hard business. I mean, we talk about the public companies on a regular basis, the same companies that aren't public have to be feeling the same pressure where it's talent.com. Lieven (22:19.921) Hmm. Lieven (22:27.377) It's hard to check. Joel (22:39.602) Welcome to the jungle job and talent. Like they're all, think being challenged in this environment. We'll see how they come out. Chad (22:45.048) It almost feels like these these guys are trying to be a muse. And I mean, you know, the muse in the US where it's more media, it's more media, but it is job board and helping companies, you know, pretty much create their own portfolio of of of content that goes along with the job, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. And I don't know. I just I think as a creative agency, those are great. But unfortunately, you already have a bunch of creative agencies that are already there that have huge portfolios. Joel (22:50.056) Yeah, Warm and fuzzy. Chad (23:14.752) So, and there are all these other job boards that are out there in the first place that the agencies don't need to buy. I mean, they don't need to own, right? They just buy. So it seems incredibly redundant, unfortunately, especially in the US. They're coming to the US, a much different market than the UK or Europe overall. I think that's a huge mistake. Joel (23:21.811) Yeah. Joel (23:32.105) Yeah. I was trying to remember Chad, if I had ever seen welcome to the jungle at a conference and I don't think I have, have you? All right. All right. Chad (23:39.342) I don't think so, no. Lieven (23:41.604) No, me neither. Joel (23:46.384) Alright, no more jungle for us. Let's take a quick break and we'll play a little Hoodie-a-rather. Chad (23:46.509) Not this time. Chad (23:56.714) Okay, did you see the picture that I sent to you from the street food place here in Portugal? Yeah, it's called I poppy. Joel (24:02.958) the I poppy. Yes, I did. I'm sorry. It was, it was too early in the morning for me to comment. What it was it a product. got food food truck called I poppy and it was a Y poppy. All right. I love it. Just, just, just for that. I'm to play it again. All right, boys, you know, the game let's play a little who'd you rather. This is where I talk about two startups that have raised money recently and you guys. Chad (24:11.232) I know it was just a food, food truck, food truck. Yep. Street food. Yep. Hi, Poppy. Lieven (24:22.673) You Joel (24:32.104) compare and contrast and tell us who you'd rather. That's right. Who'd you write? Let's get to our first contest and it's Mackie, a Paris based conversational AI solution. They've secured 26 million euros, a lot of money in series a funding led by blossom capital. Mackie's AI agents promise to automate 80 % of the HR process, reducing time to hire by three X and cutting turnover by 20%. The funding will help drive global. expansion and you guessed it, US market growth. is Mackie. Next up and in this corner, have Talent Mapper, a London based HR tech company. They've secured 2 million pounds in funding. The company's platform is trained on 675 million career histories to analyze employee skills, aiding and reducing recruitment and training costs and promoting equal career opportunities. The investment will be used to enhance the platform. Chad (25:04.096) Mmm. Joel (25:30.022) expand the team and target new sectors like financial and professional services. is Talent Mapper. So Chad, you're up. Who'd you rather Mackie or Talent Mapper? Chad (25:39.476) I'm going to start with talent mapper. So internal mobility, strategic workforce planning, mentoring, succession planning and career mapping. They're all, all immensely important in building teams and stabilizing a company's talent lifecycle period. Period. The problem is that I don't believe most companies think that any of these are top tier problems for them. because they are sucked into the minutiae of the day to day instead of being in a leader's mindset, right? Not to mention a lot of consulting companies do this anyway. So they're just gonna go ahead and push it off, project-based stuff. Why do I need a platform for that? Mackey, on the other hand, are focused on a buzzword that's stronger than AI right now. Wanna take a crack at it? You wanna take a crack at it? Agentic, agentic, right? Lieven (26:23.375) Yep. Yay! Joel (26:27.346) I can't say. Chad (26:28.726) Why? Because the AI will be bundled into a specific area of expertise, into agents per se, who perform specific duties alongside their human counterparts. So imagine a recruiter interacting with the candidate and then switching their disposition in the CRM or the ATS. An agent can then take over and start online, you know, the on-site interview scheduling or even the onboarding process, right? That stuff, that gets companies hot and heavy and a little wet, right? They want that. I want that. Who'd I'd rather? I'd rather me some Mackie. Mackie all day, baby. Joel (27:11.508) All right. That's one for Mackie. Uh, I'm a little confused about what Mackie does. I'm glad you sort of encapsulated everything and framed it for me. Uh, they say on their website that they're a quote conversational AI agent for enterprises. And then they go on to really just talk about how they're an assessment tool for employers. So I'm not quite sure what they are. I thought maybe they're poor man's paradox. And then I think, maybe they're like a test gorilla kind of thing. Um, I think the confusion is a bad thing for marketing. And frankly, their marketing and the lack of focus for me in that space says a lot. Their copyright date on their footer is 2022. Like I know that's a small thing, but if your tech team can't update the date for three years on the footer of your website, to me, that is a symptom of a bigger problem that your tech team sucks and or they don't care. and or both. They have super few followers on all social medias. They haven't posted on X since 2022. somebody, the lights are on, but nobody's home in Mackey from what I can tell. So let's go to, let's go to Talent Mapper. I will admit they're both on a really good wave. Agente, Commerce, like they're all the buzzwords at Mackey are there. I also think internal mobility is a nice little wave to be on. Companies are really concerned about Uh, workers being engaged, new research, uh, a new study from Gallup came out saying that only 31 % of workers are engaged. 17 % of workers are actively disengaged. I'm not sure what that means. Are they just stealing the post-it notes on purpose? Uh, I don't know. Um, but, companies like recruiting is expensive. Companies hate it. They, they want to get more out of the people that they have. They want to keep the people they have. want higher retention. So I think talent mapper. Lieven (28:52.432) You Chad (28:53.87) They're taking naps. Joel (29:06.43) does tap into that. think it's a pretty good name, talentmapper.com. It kind of says what it does. It's a bigger market. You have more people concerned about their current workforce than they are maybe recruiting. I think there's going to be greater demand to keep the employees that they already have. And lastly, a small thing, but there's just more attentiveness to the details at TalentMapper. And to me, that says a lot. So for me, I'm going to go TalentMapper. As my hoot you rather, which means leaving is going to break a tie. What you got leaving. Lieven (29:36.901) Hmm. Chad (29:37.383) I gotta make a note real quick to change the date in our footer. Go ahead. Joel (29:42.194) We don't have 32 million euros in the bank. If we did, I promise the date would be... Chad (29:46.188) I just said I gotta make a note. Lieven (29:49.841) But maybe if we, if the three of us would put all the money together now. Anyways. Joel (29:56.18) 2022 is the foot, come on man. Sorry. Lieven (30:00.369) But you said they weren't posting on X since 2022. That's a good thing, not posting on X. Joel (30:06.61) All their social suck. just, I just pointed out X. LinkedIn's all right, but they should just focus on LinkedIn. Like most startups, like just pick one and make it, make it good. Chad (30:10.764) His favorite. Lieven (30:10.821) No. No. I'm- I'm going to, by the way, leave X today since the whole show yesterday X for me is it will be I'm an X user but Joel (30:25.982) Well, XX user, he's double X, not quite triple X, not triple X. Chad (30:26.286) And xx. Lieven (30:29.541) Double X, double X. Na na, naughty, But I'm with chat on this one. I think Talent Mapper might be the best company. You're totally right, y'all. But in the end, it's all about the right momentum. And agentics today are where you need to be. And if Mackie is able to do what they're claiming, then I'd rather be in Mackie's camp. And by the way, I'm working on the Chad (30:29.55) Join the club, Levin. It's warm out here. It's warm out here. Joel (30:34.012) Peace. Lieven (30:58.065) Recruitment Congress for 2026. We talked about it. I think Agendix will be the main thing. It will be the main team. I'm digging into it right now. Chad (31:00.642) Ooh, say more. Yeah. Joel (31:04.308) Chad (31:08.462) That's right. Yes! Joel (31:10.332) That's two votes for Mackie one for talent mapper. All right. Let's get to, let's get, let's get everyone as a winner. Everyone is a winner for sure. All right. Let's get to a sick leave detectives. it's not quite the Gestapo since we have a Nazi theme today. but Germany's rising sick leave is straining its economy. The increase in absenteeism, major problem apparently, has boosted business for private investigators. Chad (31:13.294) Everyone's a winner on chat and cheese. Lieven (31:16.482) Yeah. Chad (31:27.928) Not yet. Joel (31:39.838) who check on suspected fraudulent sick leaves. Chad, as someone who only gets sick when Levin invites us to the Moulin Rouge in Paris, what are your thoughts? Should we side story that one? Chad (31:47.981) I know. Lieven (31:48.024) Yes, chat. Chad (31:53.642) yeah, we should definitely side story. Okay, everybody. So we were unleashed Paris. And yeah, couple of nights I probably went too hard. And people were getting sick at the end of that. I think my buddy Chris long actually had gotten sick too. And we spend way too much time together. That's a problem. But yeah, no, I got sick and I didn't get a chance to go to the Moulin Rouge, which I love. I love I think I heard land with leaving was crying in the corner because because I did I just Lieven (31:55.921) You Joel (32:21.662) haha Chad (32:23.212) But yes, I'll be there next time no matter what leaving, but I didn't want to get you sick. I didn't want to get you sick. Lieven (32:24.785) But your charming, your charming wife did come. Yeah, so we didn't miss you that much. Chad (32:31.288) She's amazing. mean, she, she represents that. It's hard not to, hard not to miss me when she's around for God's sake. Lieven (32:41.137) You Joel (32:41.288) If Chad is, if Chad is passing on tits and ass, he's really sick. Like he's not, he's not faking it, but, this is apparently a pretty big issue in Germany. Chad, any of your thoughts on absenteeism gone awry? Chad (32:45.87) You Lieven (32:45.999) Yeah. Chad (32:54.098) Yeah, so this is a very interesting topic because nobody sees the Germans as a lazy society. I mean, it's quite the contrary. And you can always find fringe cases of a person who once stayed home to finish home renovations that will live on an office lore forever. Right. And but but I mean, these are these are fringe cases to for the most part. But the article makes pretty much the great sick seem like a concerted effort. But Klaus. Reinhardt, you can't get more German than that, Klaus Reinhardt, president of the German Medical Association, sees increased infections as the main reason for the record number of sick people. Quote, playing sick does not happen on a large scale, end quote. So what Klaus is actually saying here, paraphrasing kids, is that these people are not colluding in the great sick movement, right? So plus, Joel (33:47.636) Ugh. Chad (33:49.802) In the German culture, they understand the math of being sick, which we don't get in the U.S. If you're sick and you come into the office, you probably infect two to three more people, maybe even more. Right. Well, that makes instead of one person out sick, you got four or five, who knows how many that are out. Right. So Germans are encouraged to stay home as it's best for the business. I was reading one article where one company gave their employees six Joel (34:08.787) Mm-hmm. Chad (34:19.764) weeks of sick sick leave six weeks. So this is something that's common and they want them to get the job done. They want them to get their sickness out and they want them to get back to work. So I think this is kind of like a confluence of just shit and things happening in Germany. Maybe we'll call it the German flu. I don't know. Yeah. Joel (34:40.756) Slow news day, maybe. Slow news day. And you wonder why Germany's in a recession. For God's sakes, we've got absenteeism run amok in Germany. So German workers average, they average 15.1 days of sick leave last year. That's up from 11.1 in 2021. That's a study from DeSantis. Lieven (34:42.661) Hmm. Joel (35:06.386) You apparently can get a note from your doctor over the phone, which apparently is automated in some places. So we can't be shocked that people are taking sick days when all you have to do is say like, does is mine. I, Algon is whatever I'm trying. I'm trying to do German, but can I said something about my eyes? so, it's no shock that people are abusing the system. I don't know if it's a government system. I don't know if it's just the healthcare. mean, maybe leaving who's a neighbor. Lieven (35:15.601) Thank you. Lieven (35:23.801) Hehehehe Yes? Joel (35:36.328) can shed some light on this, it's obviously going to be a thing if you make it so easy and give people so many sick days through the year like Chad mentioned. Leven, what's your take on, yes, and German should be the last ones. If Germany's falling apart, there's no hope for Europe. Lieven (35:53.233) But thank God Spain and Luxembourg, Spain and what is it, Italy are taking over now. They're leading us. Portugal indeed. No, but I agree with Joel and I checked the surrounding countries, number of sex days in the surrounding countries and Germany actually is high. If you look at the Netherlands, there's about 12 sex days on average. And Luxembourg, did you even know Luxembourg is a country? Do you know Luxembourg? Okay. Joel (35:57.884) In Greece, yeah. Chad (35:58.158) Portugal, no, Portugal. Joel (36:21.278) Yes. Lieven (36:22.309) Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries. Very rich, mostly bankers. Anyway, so they have about 11, six days. So 15 is, if you look at it, 15 is a lot. But then again, indeed, it's like socially unacceptable these days to sneeze during a meeting. So when you're feeling ill, you are obliged to stay at home. It's a corporate policy. So the moment you got a cold 10 years ago, Chad (36:23.33) very rich. Yeah. Lieven (36:50.989) Nobody would stay at home for having a cold. You would just take your handkerchief and feel miserable during the meeting. But now people stay at home. And of course, it's kind of easy to stay at home. It's fun. And people got used to it, staying, feeling a bit ill and staying at home. But there is, it's not only that, there is also, and that's factor is long COVID and a significant part of the population actually still isn't as they used to be. They aren't feeling as they used to be. Apparently it's a lot and I don't have numbers about that. But there are plenty of reasons why the sex days are getting up. But in Germany, they're getting up fast. And the weird thing is, if there's one country in Europe where people really are into privacy, then it's Germany. People will get really angry if you take your phone and make a movie on the streets and someone is, you're filming accidentally someone, they got angry. Joel (37:38.238) Mm-hmm. Lieven (37:48.187) They don't like it. So privacy is a very big thing. So sending a private detective must be kind of the biggest insult you can get. So I think for a company doing that, it's like saying, okay, we want to fire you, but we give you the opportunity to, to leave yourself. I don't think people would appreciate it. Definitely not in Germany. So to all those companies, I don't think our companies would do this, but I'll check. Joel (37:49.47) Hmm. Chad (37:55.716) yeah. Joel (38:13.15) Germany is Germany is out of control and what better way to end the show than a joke With a German bit of flavor. Alright guys, what do you call an angry German? What do you call an angry German? Chad (38:27.148) German? Joel (38:30.164) A sauerkraut. A sauerkraut. Boys as always, it's been fun. We out. Lieven (38:31.665) great. Chad (38:38.67) We out. Lieven (38:39.096) Way out.

In this jam-packed episode, Chad and Cheese dissect the hottest topics shaping the world of work. From the end of resumes as we know them  to the uphill battle for MBA grads, they dive into how AI is redefining job hunting. Plus, they break down the strategic moves behind Shaker’s acquisition of Jobadx and DHI Group’s restructuring shake-up. And it doesn’t stop there: Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Meta drama, the ripple effects of a potential TikTok shutdown, and what it all means for job seekers, creators, and the workforce of tomorrow. Don’t miss this candid conversation packed with insights, shout-outs, and hard-hitting truths about the future of work. 🌟 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:32.116) clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Hey boys and girls, it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel, MAGA makeover cheeseman. Chad (00:41.523) This is Chad, video killed the resume star, so watch. J.T. O'Donnell (00:45.794) And I'm JT, what the heck did I get myself into, O'Donnell? Chad (00:49.247) That's a question. That's a good question. Joel (00:50.228) On this episode on this episode shaker ring things up Zuck gets intense and is twit talk in our future. Let's do this J.T. O'Donnell (00:51.118) you Chad (00:59.007) Hello? Joel (01:03.838) JT in the house. Doodle. You little devil. You little devil. Showing me, look, showing me. Chad (01:04.319) Uhhhh Chad (01:10.547) Ha Joel (01:15.012) He's showing me the beer. It's happy hour in Portugal. Freezing my tootsies off in central Indiana. Love it, love it, love it. JT, welcome. Welcome to the show, welcome to the show. Welcome back. Guess who's back, back again. Yeah. Chad (01:15.271) J.T. O'Donnell (01:19.074) He's hydrating. He's hydrating. Chad (01:23.635) Ooh. J.T. O'Donnell (01:27.032) Same. Chad (01:29.161) Welcome back. J.T. O'Donnell (01:30.232) Thank you guys. It's good to be here. Happy 2025. Hey everyone. Chad (01:33.791) I'm saying, real quick though, I gotta say your 2025 death of the resume, video takes the lead on LinkedIn, everybody has a hot take, which I think it's awesome, right? Because the resume has been dying for years, but we've seen tech really gain some momentum and speed. yeah, but everybody has a hot take on that. So good prediction for 2025, love it. Joel (01:39.559) It's hot. J.T. O'Donnell (01:48.536) forever. Joel (01:59.144) Money prediction, money prediction. it. Love the t-shirt as well. J.T. O'Donnell (01:59.95) Thank you. Chad (02:02.163) Money! Chad (02:05.971) Well, this one's for Joel though. Joel, I have it on good authority that you've already pre-ordered something and I'd like you to roll that beautiful bean footage so that you can show everybody. J.T. O'Donnell (02:08.396) Thank Joel (02:19.764) It took me a second to know what you're talking about. All right, let's go to what Chad's little joke is here. Chad (02:22.013) you know what I'm talking about. Chad (02:28.435) Highly realistic. She looks high. That's what you said. J.T. O'Donnell (02:34.254) exactly what I thought, 100 % what I saw, I was like. J.T. O'Donnell (02:44.651) The face is gonna drive me nuts. I just would be annoyed looking at somebody that has that look, that face. Joel (02:50.708) That's how my wife looks at me. I don't know if there's any connection. Chad (02:51.005) That face. Which is why Joel's already pre-ordered for. J.T. O'Donnell (02:52.974) No. Warning. Joel (03:01.168) I've ordered, I've pre-ordered for, for Fembots and you get a, you get an annual subscription to Bluetooth. so I'm set, man. I'm set. My 25 is going to be lit everybody. J.T. O'Donnell (03:06.039) Ugh. Mm-mm. J.T. O'Donnell (03:14.561) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (03:18.296) I don't know. The whole thing is disturbing. It's disturbing to watch. It's really disturbing. Yep. Chad (03:19.025) Okay. Yeah. Cut it. Cut it. Cut it. Cut it. Cut it. If you're not watching on YouTube, you just missed the animatronic little blonde that looks like she's high and apparently in need of some Bluetooth. Joel (03:20.18) You Joel (03:37.636) So JT, you're not threatened by the Fembots yet? You're not thinking they're going to take your job? J.T. O'Donnell (03:41.9) No, not really worried about. I'm serious, it was annoying to watch. I don't think I could stand in front of a bot that goes, you know, back and forth like that. That was weird. Chad (03:51.103) It's weird. Joel (03:52.212) But now we all remember the seventies. I mean, we've gone from blow up, you know, dolls to this. I'd call that progress if nothing else. you know, another 50 years, I don't know. think our species. Chad (03:59.507) Yes. I'd call that progress. J.T. O'Donnell (04:06.328) Where was the guy version? Why is it a lady? Can I just ask like, why is it a gal? Where's the guy? Chad (04:09.289) Yeah. Joel (04:10.696) The guy version sits there and listens to you and says, uh-huh, yeah, that's frustrating. Chad (04:15.967) And all you really need for that is an app. J.T. O'Donnell (04:20.12) while flexing, just promise me he's flexing when he's doing it, right? Like, eh, that's it, okay, well then when I see that, I might change my mind. Chad (04:23.731) The entire time. Yes, yes. Joel (04:23.826) Yeah, yeah, the eight. Chad (04:29.752) He's still gonna look like he's high, just so you know, because I mean, think that's actually one of the things that sells the animatronic robot. Joel (04:33.544) Much again, again, like the seventies, it's going to be a hundred, like girly mags to like the one play girl that's for women. There's going to be a thousand fem bots for the one, like male, male bots. J.T. O'Donnell (04:33.717) Hmm. Chad (04:45.852) What Joel's trying to say is there's not much of a market for the male versions. Let's just say that. Joel (04:50.644) What I'm saying is, is we are dead as a species. We are screwed. As soon as this thing is lifelike, we're screwed. We're dead. Remember the bill Burr caught, you know, like, there's no way this game can get any better. wait. Yes it can. Sorry. Jeez. This is going south quickly. So let's, let's get to some shout outs. JT, what you got? Chad (05:00.521) Yeah? Yeah? Chad (05:08.485) Anyway, shout outs, shout outs, there we go. J.T. O'Donnell (05:13.486) I get to this week, so I'll start with my first one and it's to Jerry Crispin. When you did the interview, it warmed my heart. He's an OG. He nerds out on his craft. He has no problem telling everybody that he's been in it 50 years and he's still so freaking curious about our industry, has a complete growth mindset about our industry. And I don't know, I just love the way he talks about it. It was a joy to hear. was walking the dog, cheering him on and it just, Jerry, I'm a fan. Chad (05:17.501) Yay! Joel (05:22.036) Mm-hmm. Chad (05:22.089) Yes. Yes. Chad (05:36.318) Yes. J.T. O'Donnell (05:42.936) That was awesome. Chad (05:43.785) Curiosity is his superpower, no question, no question. J.T. O'Donnell (05:45.944) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Joel (05:46.558) Yeah, and behind the scenes, he still emailed us this week saying, I'd really love to hear your guys' thoughts on X, right? Not the company X, but just a subject, whatever subject. So yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (05:54.188) Yeah, see, Chad (05:56.989) Yeah, things lined up. He's like, you guys should talk about this this year. I mean, it's so great because he's not just a part of the discussion. He is pushing the discussion. I love it. Still, still. J.T. O'Donnell (06:00.898) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (06:06.382) Exactly. Yeah. Joel (06:07.602) Yeah. Literally 20 years ago, was a much younger entrepreneur launching stuff in this space. And I knew about Jerry in the nineties when he was writing career crossroads. And he literally called me to say I was, he liked what I was doing. And it was literally like God had called me from down, from above. Like, really? You're Jerry, you're calling me. Like it was awesome. So yeah. Chad (06:19.495) huh. Chad (06:30.207) Joel, this is Jerry. J.T. O'Donnell (06:31.512) Thank Joel (06:33.556) He does have a God type thing going. of windstreaks, my shout out goes out to Doug Berg. Industry people will know Doug. He's the man behind Techies, Jobs to Web, Webclip Drop, which eventually became Zap Info acquired by Indeed. By the way, our first ever sponsor was Webclip Drop. So we have Doug to thank for this show. Anyway, he's... Chad (06:35.635) He does. That's great. That's great. Chad (06:43.475) Dougie. Fresh. Chad (06:56.521) Yeah. Doug and Peter, Joel (07:02.164) He's now chairman head of whatever company called Match2. It's a little bit of a mystery, but looks like you're embedding matching stuff into your ATS or your HCM solution. So I'm certainly going to be on the watch for Match2 and what they're doing. Who's involved with this and who's helping, Doug? Well, a few names like Elaine Orler, Jason Costello, and Chris Forman to name a few. I mentioned Techies, and I was curious because Chad (07:18.077) Mmm, love it Chad (07:24.585) Mm-hmm. Joel (07:32.052) Chad and I are around in the 90s anyway, and this was a, this is an old Techies commercial from the 90s, Chad. You'll enjoy this. Check, check this out. Chad (07:38.155) shit. Chad (08:07.327) you Joel (08:10.206) blast from the past. How hard do think it was to find a woman to be in that commercial? And do you think she was actually a techie? We need a woman. We need a woman back in the nineties. Not a lot of women. What you got, Chad? Chad (08:10.64) They don't know what I do. J.T. O'Donnell (08:11.661) Ahem. J.T. O'Donnell (08:15.607) my god! Chad (08:18.687) Back in the 90s. Definitely back in the 90s. Yeah, so friend of the show, big shout out to ex EEOC commissioner, Keith Sonderling. The guy deserves a velvet jacket by now. He's been on the show so much. Shout out number one for baby number two, which actually arrived during the holidays. Congrats, Papa. Congrats, Papa Keith. And number two for then gaining the nomination for Joel (08:38.548) Mmm. Chad (08:48.051) Deputy Secretary of Labor. So if confirmed as Deputy Secretary, Labor Secretary, Keith would be tasked with overseeing the DOL's nearly 15,000 employees and the agency's day-to-day operations. It's a good thing to know that we actually have somebody, possibly with some sanity, that's going to be on the hill for the next administration. So we can watch the circus and hopefully have a great ringmaster to watch as well. Joel (09:17.8) Do you think his association with us will have any bearing on how he does with the Senate? Chad (09:22.719) it's one of the reasons why I got in. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Joel (09:28.372) Good, good, good stuff. All right, JT, your final shout out for us. J.T. O'Donnell (09:34.617) So my final one is for Harvard MBA students. Yeah, so the study just came out that almost one in four of them can't find a job. That's the highest it's been in 10 years. Harvard's MBA program is the number one out of 98 schools ranked. 2022, to give you an idea, 10 % of those students weren't finding jobs. It's now up to 23 % in climbing. Chad (09:47.359) Wow. Mm-hmm. Joel (09:52.468) Mm-hmm. Chad (09:59.625) Whoo! J.T. O'Donnell (10:00.578) Just want to give people an idea. If you think the job market's bad, I know, I really want you to feel sorry for those MBA students, those Harvard MBAs. It's a job economy problem. the reality is that these people paid a lot of money for that degree, for that advanced degree. We talk about ROI, you're getting an MBA, return on investment. I don't think they're seeing it for the kind of money they're paying. And one in four are not going to get a job. The article goes on to say that, Joel (10:07.718) Is this a Harvard problem or a job economy problem or both? Okay. Chad (10:18.899) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (10:26.515) as well. J.T. O'Donnell (10:30.392) They're all taking lower paying jobs that they could have got without MBAs in order to get into the workforce. Chad (10:33.609) So it's really interesting because my daughter just moved from Budapest to Brighton so she could get her MBA. She's the youngest one in the class because in Europe, they want you to have experience before you go into the school. Now in the US, what do we do? It's a cash game, right? It's a cash grab. So all we do is we push these kids. like, undergrad, that's great. Now it's time to go get that MBA. It's all bullshit, right? And all the reason why we're turning these kids out with no experience and great education is all down to money. And unfortunately, it has nothing to do with their money and their ability to actually go and get into a six figure job right out of the gate, which they should be able to. But guess what? As Americans, we're focused on getting as much cash as we can out of the consumer as opposed to doing the right thing. And shout out to Kennedy who is the youngest in her MBA class in Brighton. So yeah. Joel (11:35.302) As someone with a kid entering college, I appreciate the commentary on that. Chad (11:40.261) So the thing that these young adults can do though is they can sign up for free stuff. They can go to ChadCheese.com slash free. What can you win? Look at that t-shirt that JT has on. Gorgeous, form-fitting. Yeah, it's like a hug from Chad and Cheese. That is provided by our friends over at Erin App. It's beautiful, feels good, gonna love it. Bourbon barrel. Joel (11:46.603) yes. Joel (11:54.002) Mm-hmm. Joel (12:04.884) Feels good. Chad (12:06.647) aged syrup from our boys up north from key yora that's right key yora bourbon bay i mean if you're have belgian waffles you're gonna have bourbon barrel aged syrup beer craft beer from aspen tech labs that's right lands on your front door along with possibly two bottles of whiskey two bottles of high class whiskey from van hacke and if it is your boat day then you could win some rum with Joel (12:08.358) you Joel (12:22.002) Hmm. Chad (12:36.223) Plum. Go to ChadCheese.com slash free. Register to win. Mm-hmm. Joel (12:43.782) That's right, Chad. Another trip around the sun for listeners, Jill Patterson, Tom Bertels, Paul Drake, Chris Gross Jean, Chanel Nelson, Jenny Olson, Michael O'Dell, G.J. Vosdorp, Joanne Lockwood, Rita Dushi, Roy Shoemaker, and Chris the Love Muscle Russell. All celebrating another trip around the sun. J.T. O'Donnell (12:44.118) Sounds good. Chad (12:49.427) Whoo! Chad (12:55.048) you J.T. O'Donnell (12:59.114) Mmm. Chad (13:02.493) Wow. J.T. O'Donnell (13:09.496) He's gonna kill you for that. Yeah, sorry Chris. Yeah. Chad (13:10.899) Which, no, he loves it. Everybody else is like, no, don't think. His wife's like, stop it, stop it. Yes, almost. Joel (13:13.682) He loves it. Joel (13:17.812) He loves it almost as much as Chad likes traveling. Almost, almost. Where are you going to be this month, Chad? And where are we going soon? Chad (13:27.623) Well, in early February, just a couple of weeks down the road, I am headed to Madrid. It's a Smart Recruiters, wait a minute, yep, Smart Recruiters, all hands events. There's gonna be a simulcast that we have, a gala, and whatever the hell else they wanna throw at me. So we're gonna have a good time in Madrid, coming back to the United States under protest, but I'm coming back. Transform is happening, that's right kids, The win in Las Vegas, March 17th through the 19th. Can't wait to get there. If you've never been to Transform, you got to check out Transform. It's a different feel. Yes, it's in Vegas. We always go to Vegas. There are a bunch of conferences in Vegas, but the win and Transform kind of put a spin on it. So really dig that. What do you think, Joel? Joel (14:10.676) Mm-hmm. Joel (14:20.222) about Transform. I dig the win. I dig Vegas. It's our first trip of the year. So we're kind of itching to get back out. Maybe not you because you're trekking Europe, but it's nice for me to get out of the cold, go to Vegas. Great people. We had a blast last year on stage with some great companies, talk and shop. We're looking hopefully to do some cool events, little cool extracurricular activities. Probably more on that later. But yeah, I'm I'm a fan. We are choosing quality over quantity a little bit more this year. And this is a quality conference for sure. Chad (14:57.801) What about you, JT? Have you been to this one yet? J.T. O'Donnell (15:00.142) not been, but I think I want go to Vegas for St. Patrick's Day. Well, I mean, did they plan that one right or what? You know, I don't know. Can I tag on last minute? I think I'm in. That sounds fun. Chad (15:05.439) Doesn't suck, doesn't suck, yeah. Joel (15:07.331) You Uh-huh. What's your... Chad (15:13.321) I know some people who can get you passes, I think. Joel (15:17.054) to the show. Yeah, not the Michael Jackson musical. Or maybe the Carrot Top Show. We can get you into that. We might know a few people to get you into that. yeah, maybe we'll see everyone in Vegas. Who knows? Chad (15:18.321) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (15:21.163) Ha Chad (15:21.833) Well, maybe. Who knows? J.T. O'Donnell (15:26.469) You Chad (15:32.539) Topics! Joel (15:35.78) All right, this is becoming a habit. got some to talk about. DHI Group is restructuring separating dice and clearance jobs and cutting its workforce by 8 % with $2.2 million in severance costs. But wait, there's more. Paul Farnsworth will now lead Dice while Alex Schilt heads Clearance Jobs. The move aims to... Chad (15:40.148) Layoffs? J.T. O'Donnell (15:40.334) Hmm. Joel (16:01.812) Save four to $6 million annually and that'll all come together by February of this year. Wall Street got a bit of a boner on the news. The stock is up roughly 25 % in the last month. Chad, your thoughts on the restructuring, the right sizing going on at Dice and Clearance jobs. Chad (16:22.313) I love how you talk about the stock being up 25%. What's the current share price, Joel? Joel (16:27.572) It's like 183 or something. Yeah, it's 233. 175, yeah. Chad (16:28.735) It's $2.33, $2.33. yeah, pretty much a junk stock. Anyway, anyway, DHI Group stock price currently at $2.33 a share. You gotta love hearing about failing CEOs getting a free pass while cutting heads of the hardworking employees. DICE has been the proverbial anchor around clearance jobs and DHI's neck for years. J.T. O'Donnell (16:40.238) Thank Joel (16:40.743) It's not Nvidia, for sure. Chad (16:57.607) Art the Dart Zeal failed to run both companies under one umbrella. So instead of axing art, they're restructuring? That's kind of odd. Seems like a friendly board playing into a, I don't know, diversionary tactic for an inept CEO to keep his job while others lose theirs. Plus, Paul, poor guy, will be the one with his head on the chopping block. J.T. O'Donnell (17:06.094) Mm-hmm. Chad (17:23.891) while Alex becomes the president of obviously a very thriving clearance job. So Dice's failing leadership and inability to move with the market has put them in this current position. Art's fault, guy still has a job. He's got other people to blame underneath him now. This is classic. This is very classic. All you CEOs out there, watch what Art the Dart is doing because this is classic distractionary. Joel (17:51.924) And watch ZipRecruiter follow suit in a few months for sure. If there's one thing Art does well, it's financial engineering. He did this a few years ago. The stock popped. It has since gone down. And this is his next move to re-engineer the company to get the stock price back up and going. Chad (17:54.695) Ian yeah Chad (18:02.363) and running. J.T. O'Donnell (18:09.326) Hmm. Joel (18:12.232) This is his, this is what he does. He doesn't innovate. doesn't create new products that people like. He doesn't do anything but re-engineer the company. It reminds me a little bit of remember when Sal was, was writing, riding the head chair at monster. They stopped innovating. They stopped doing anything that was interesting or exciting. It was all about the stock price. How do we re-engineer everything? And we're, it's just, yeah, it's just blueprint material for how to get your, your stock price up. when the company's really got nowhere to go and bad leadership. Chad (18:25.513) Monster, yep. Chad (18:32.562) spend that money. Chad (18:41.855) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (18:42.926) Yeah, I mean, it's in the playbook, right? It's in the boardroom playbook. It's written in the boardroom playbook that in order to make shareholders happy, all we got to do is restructure and cut staff. mean, literally every time a company does these types of layoffs, their stock price goes up. It's in the boardroom playbook. So they're just flipping to that page and going, I guess we need to institute this now. As the voice of the job seeker, it's sickening. I ditto everything you just said, Chad. It's frustrating to watch. Joel (18:59.476) Mm-hmm. Chad (19:00.095) Yeah J.T. O'Donnell (19:11.126) It's big bad business, you know, and I hope that more and job seekers get angry. We're seeing it on my side and I'm here for it. And I think hopefully the next generation is going to shy away from working for some of these companies that pull those tactics. Let's hope. Joel (19:27.412) All of those Harvard grads that you mentioned all know this strategy, by the way. So they don't need to hire them to do them. All right, let's get to some real news going down in our industry. Shaker Recruitment Marketing, good friend of the show, also from Chicago, has acquired Canada's Jobadx, another friend of the show. They're a programmatic job advertising service. Financial details not disclosed. J.T. O'Donnell (19:31.894) They do. Yeah, it's in the book. Chad (19:44.595) Mmm. J.T. O'Donnell (19:45.709) Mm. Joel (19:53.62) Side note, this may be the first acquisition involving two of our sponsors. We have a great track record of sponsors getting acquired or acquiring. This may be the first time, Chad, correct me if I'm wrong, the first time that two previous former sponsors have gotten together and gotten married. What are your thoughts on this marriage? Chad (20:00.969) We do! Chad (20:11.721) Yeah, depends. think because iSims has been, they've sponsored before and then they bought Candidate ID. It wasn't kind of like the same thing, but we do have a great track record. Great on pointing that out. Very solid with regard to sponsors. Getting money, exiting, &A, all that fun stuff. Anyways, anyways, Why buy job at X? Simple. Recruitix buys KRT, Raiden C buys Perango, and then AppCast buys Bayard. This move by Joe and the Shaker team only makes sense. Your provider becomes a rival. So do you continue filling your rival's pockets with cash? No. You buy a platform, get rid of the middleman who's taking a cut and provide the same service for a much lower cost and the ability to sleep at night now that Shaker is out from underneath the thumb of Avcast. So if you think about it, The market is splintering. We talked about it last week on the 2025 prediction, which is good for prices because those splinters are competitors and competition brings prices down. Plus, since the new service is wholly owned underneath Shaker, they can control pricing while focusing on helping companies with their hiring experience, their actual tech stacks, their CRMs instead of... building new platforms and spending money and then trying to keep that legacy tech going for CPH, CPC, CPQC. Those types of products, mean, Shakers is not interested in. So for me, it's smart and it was a must do. Now flipping the script just a little bit, when we talked to Chris Foreman about buying Bayard and pissing off partners like Shaker, we talked to him a couple of weeks before this actually happened. Joel (21:52.692) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:01.949) He said, quote, we endeavor not to piss off anyone, end quote. Well, Chris, you can check some people hard into the boards. That's a hockey reference that he used, by the way. You can check some people hard into the boards, but don't expect them not to get pissed off about it. This was a smart move. It's a great move for the markets. to be quite frank, I think... This could prospectively send AppCast into a tailspin, especially if more start leaving AppCast. Joel (22:33.62) Hmm. Yeah. Joe shakers not falling for the banana in the tailpipe on this one. And you know, Chad, I want to say that we interviewed him shortly after app cast, uh, acquired Bayard and he gave sort of the yearbook answer. You know, we do what's best for our clients, but, you and I, as we know Joe, he was internally talking about, okay, what's our plan B if they pull the rug, if prices go up, like if J.T. O'Donnell (22:35.49) Hmm, interesting. Chad (22:39.613) Not in this one. Chad (22:59.443) Gotta have it. Joel (23:01.3) Like they have, if they have control, what do we do? Frankly, there aren't a lot of programmatic solutions left. Uh, job edX is one of the last ones. Uh, one of the last ones that they could buy. So I, I imagine that this is, this is, this was probably a year in the works talking about it, strategizing it, getting a plan B, not being beholden to app cast and Baird. And so to me, this was a, a smart strategic defensive move by Joe. can still use. J.T. O'Donnell (23:07.095) Ahem. Chad (23:12.639) Like independent, yeah. Joel (23:29.95) click cast or any of the other solutions. But if the rug gets pulled out from under them, they can tell clients, Hey, we have our own, we own job at X like why they're similar or better. They can use it as a complimentary service. So I, was just a brilliant strategic move. whereas an ATS can always have an, marketplace where, okay, well they got bought by someone else. Well, we have a, we have a marketplace where we have other people that provide that service. An agency can't do that. J.T. O'Donnell (23:44.43) Cough cough Joel (23:56.626) Like he doesn't have a tech with a bunch of marketplace solutions. He's got to pick and choose the ones. So he's beholden if, if, if appcast screws them. So smart strategic move where they move totally off appcast. that'll be interesting. when we talk to him, when we talk to him next, we'll ask what, the plan is there, but, smart strategic move. Not surprising. well done. Well done, Joe, as usual, as usual. J.T. O'Donnell (24:03.693) Ahem. Chad (24:10.399) slowly. slowly. J.T. O'Donnell (24:20.376) Yeah. I'll just... Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (24:25.87) I have to say really quick, when you sent this, that you were gonna talk about this today, I immediately went back to the past podcast where you've been talking to both sides and everything you just said, I was like, they said that, they predicted it. So hats off to you boys for knowing what was coming down the pike. Very proud of you, very proud of you. Chad (24:39.647) Aww. Say more. Say more. Say more. Joel (24:40.468) you Joel (24:45.876) The bigger question is what's going to happen to Programmatic in the future, think, regardless of who they own, but it was a smart move. J.T. O'Donnell (24:48.525) Yeah. Chad (24:52.703) I think it's interesting because Joe can look at this through different lens than APCAS can, because APCAS has to worry about the tactical clicks that happen all the time, right? Because that's how they make their money. And they have to worry about the other side of the house on the Bayard's side to be able to help companies become more efficient and to be able to not set it and forget it, right? So they're fighting each other because if Bayard's doing their job well, then CPC Joel (25:06.473) Mm-hmm. Chad (25:22.791) starts to dwindle, right? If Bayard starts, yeah, if Bayard starts pointing and doing searches inside the applicant tracking system for candidates you've already paid for, then AppCast starts to dwindle. Shaker doesn't have that problem. They don't have that problem, right? It's not a two-sided marketplace for them. They're all focused on one thing, and that's that enterprise client. Joel (25:23.952) Mm-hmm. Yeah, price to the bottom. Joel (25:33.427) Mm-hmm. Joel (25:40.626) The, yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (25:40.672) Okay. Joel (25:46.408) The question to, yeah go ahead JT. J.T. O'Donnell (25:46.626) Raising my hand on this one. Yeah, I just, want to ask both of you this question. So we're watching all this acquisition, right? It had to happen. It forces everybody to up their game. I love watching it. But at the same time, we have this whole world of AI, new companies in stealth market, starting up left and right. And I just wonder how hard these companies are to work fighting these, you know, the devils they know and out of the blue out of left field is going to come something agile with no technical debt that isn't big that could just blow them all out of the water. I'm going to be honest, I'm seeing tech every day. I'm sure you are too. I'm like, what? Stuff in our industry is amazing to me. And we're in the infancy of this. So I'm curious if you think this big fighting and all this isn't even going to be worth it. Chad (26:28.905) Yes. Joel (26:34.916) Ooh, the relationships matter, JT. These agencies have really good personal connections with their companies. The companies trust them and the advice that they give. Technology comes and goes very quickly. I companies generally have a risk averse opinion about new technologies. So until, until Shaker tells McDonald's, yes, this is a tech that you should use. They're usually not embracing those technologies. Now it could be different this time, but I think companies will be really cautious about all these. J.T. O'Donnell (26:37.856) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Joel (27:04.626) new companies that are popping up. Do they have staying power? Do they get investment money? They're going to be pretty cautious about it. Whereas it's the smaller companies, the small businesses that like, yeah, let's roll the dice on this new stuff and see how it goes. So that would be my opinion on how agencies and the traditional companies look at new tech. J.T. O'Donnell (27:16.195) Right? Joel (27:27.038) Chad, you're on mute. Chad (27:29.905) As you were, think Shaker's pretty smart from the standpoint of, doesn't want to create new products because again, that is perspective, not today, but tomorrow will be legacy, right? They work directly with those vendors who are best in breed and that's their focus. So they become the expert in the space that literally can talk about any platform as opposed to like a radency. who's literally just gonna talk about their stuff for the most part, right? They're gonna talk about some other platforms, because they gotta throw it in there a little bit just to seem relevant and obviously, know, legit, but they're gonna sell their own shit. Joe's not really worried about that, which is really cool and refreshing, not to mention it's lightweight with regard to the tech question that you just had, because I don't have to stay up to date on the tech, because it's just distribution, that's fairly simple, but I can go out to my partners. Joel (28:07.924) Mm-hmm. Chad (28:27.046) and they need to stay up to date. Joel (28:30.056) What will be really interesting, Chad, and it's not really Joe's style, but what if he funds JabatX and says, release the Kraken and go straight after AppCast business and their market share as opposed to just being a defensive move? I would love to see Joe go right at AppCast, Ditka style, and see what they're made of. Take them on. Don't just be a defensive move. Be a little offensive. I'd love to see that. Chad (28:56.105) Well, and Chris actually said they only focus on enterprise customers at Abcast, and that is Joe's portfolio, right? So when they bought Bayard, who again, very focused on enterprise, that was a threat. So at the end of the day, beautiful move, smart move, and again, a company that's almost been around 75 years, Shaker, they're making smart moves. Joel (29:20.244) And congrats to the job edX folks. I know they've been working hard for a long time. Yeah, a mitten team. Good job. Good job. All right, let's go to some more news at a, actually, let's take a quick break. Let's take a quick break and we'll get back and talk about LinkedIn. J.T. O'Donnell (29:23.372) Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (29:23.401) yeah, emitting team, you guys kill it. Chad (29:32.147) Yeah. Joel (29:40.66) All right. What show is complete without LinkedIn or indeed we'll cover LinkedIn this week. LinkedIn has launched the following AI tools, something called jobs match for job seekers and an AI recruitment agent for small businesses. Both are currently free to use. These aim to simplify the job application process amidst high competition, leveraging LinkedIn's own AI and data. They're hoping this move will boost user engagement on the platform. JT, you're usually pretty opinionated. Chad (29:44.831) Ha J.T. O'Donnell (29:51.928) Mm-hmm. Joel (30:10.31) about job search tools. What are your thoughts on LinkedIn's latest? J.T. O'Donnell (30:10.67) Yeah. So the job search tool side of it is to deter people from applying. So right now you go there and see a thousand applicants in four hours and people are, you know, that's now going to the recruiter. The recruiter is now responsible for sorting through that. It's dysfunctional. We're talking to recruiters all the time that have had it. You know, they don't even want to post jobs anymore for this reason. And so LinkedIn has to come up with a solution. And the thought is, if I can show a job seeker, don't bother. You're not a fit. I can hopefully deter them from doing that. My issue and the thing that scares me the most is the number of AI tools that are popping up that are helping job seekers just automate their applications. mean, just last week, three different startups hit my inbox telling me, JT, we have the solution. We can apply to a hundred jobs overnight for them. I don't want that. I don't want that for recruiters. I can't believe they think that's a solution. They're clearly not from the industry. They don't understand how they're further breaking the system. So for me, I can see why LinkedIn's doing it. And I hope to some degree that debtors people for the job seeker, the bigger concern is you tell me to apply online. You tell me that's how I have to get a job. That's my channel. And there's no other way to do this. And yet I'm up against a thousand people or you're telling me I'm not a fit for any job. Pathrise came out with a study. I think it was last month. It said you have a 0.3 % chance. Chad (31:16.062) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (31:42.222) of getting called for a job when you apply right now on any of the platforms and that it takes like 294 applications to get a job on average. What other thing do you all do with a 99.7 failure rate and how long would you stick with that? So you can see why. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. But my point being that people are just going to automate it. They're going to continue to do this. So will they even pay attention to what LinkedIn is saying? Because Joel (31:46.024) well. Joel (31:56.816) Leave my marriage out of this, JT. Leave my marriage out of this. J.T. O'Donnell (32:11.348) uneducated job seekers end up spraying and praying. That's what they do. And there are just too many tools telling them that's what they should do right now and they don't know any better. It's a bigger systemic issue. think LinkedIn's trying to fix it. I just don't know how well it's going to Joel (32:31.348) JT, I've thought about this question for you for a while, and I'm sure there's a real simple answer. Why can't LinkedIn or whoever create a CAPTCHA system that eliminates the automated stuff? Are bots just too good at detecting and getting around that? Do companies not care? Because there's an incentive for them to get applicants, right? The minute they don't get applicants and it's like, well, we suck because someone else will get more applicants. So it's kind of a lose-lose situation. Why can't they just capture this or get something to fend off the bots. J.T. O'Donnell (33:03.512) So to your point, it's very sophisticated. The bots, they're able to get through. I also think there's this push and pull, right? They're making a lot of money off of recruiter seats that you spend a lot of that, right? So we want to give you enough candidates. We're obviously trying to get you the right candidates. Where I think they have done a good job is pivoted the algorithm. It's far less about your profile now. Your profile is like a resume. You could fake that all you want. Joel (33:15.092) clicks. J.T. O'Donnell (33:32.046) So let's not focus on that anymore. Let's use an algorithm and pay attention to what you're putting in your feed. How frequently are you posting in LinkedIn and how relevant is what you're posting is gonna determine that there's a far greater likelihood you are real. Other reason why they've got the clear thing up there now where they're trying to get people to verify. So I like that direction and putting it back into the job seeker to say, give the evidence that you are who you say you Joel (33:36.648) Mm-hmm. Joel (33:47.592) Okay. J.T. O'Donnell (33:55.842) do and you can do what you say you can do. And the reason I like it is because there's a whole lot of job seekers out there that want to switch careers, want to switch industries. And so a resume or a LinkedIn profile is useless because that's based on your past, not where you want to go in your future. So focusing on feed and engagement and participation is the future and why I predicted the death of the resume. We're going to need to get the current and immediate evidence from job seekers that they can do. Joel (34:05.363) Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (34:20.206) what we need them to do. We already do that through the hiring process. This is why hiring processes are now four to 12 weeks long and 17 interview rounds because of the amount of evidence we want before we hire them. And so when we lock into that, I think it's gonna be huge. This is why I'm a fan of LinkedIn's video tab. Whether people like it or not, that is the new first interview and the sooner you get over that and get on and start talking about your knowledge, you're gonna have recruiters coming for you and knocking on your door again. And I think that's what every job seeker wants. Joel (34:22.996) Mm-hmm. Joel (34:36.552) Yeah. Joel (34:48.838) That's nice advantage for LinkedIn, because job boards don't have that algorithm to know that stuff. Chad, any thoughts on the new tools from LinkedIn? J.T. O'Donnell (34:51.118) 100 % That's right. Chad (34:57.671) Yeah, well, think thus far we already know that their algorithms are all shit anyway. So conceptually, this is wonderful. mean, yay, the skies are opening. looks nice and blue like it is here in Portugal, but that's not the case. It never has been. We know how bad LinkedIn's matching was. They suck at it when they should be amazing because the amount of data that they actually have, as JT had said also, the content, the relevance, right? So... J.T. O'Donnell (35:02.222) You Joel (35:02.43) you Chad (35:25.021) Enter Microsoft and OpenAI, both great options, but how do they inject this tech into a 20-year-old platform? The features LinkedIn are creating for companies on the hiring side really are on the SMB side of the house and focused there because any company worth their salt already have a platform or seeking a platform that performs these tasks inside their own ecosystem. Recruitment AI agents will be embedded into core enterprise platforms by this time next year, easily, right? LinkedIn, once you addicted to their database of candidates and employers are starting to understand they've already attracted and paid for qualified candidates and their profiles reside in their CRMs and applicant tracking system. So agents will engage qualified candidates, ask them clarifying questions and continue to make their profiles more robust and engaged. I think indeed has a great idea, but once again, we have not seen them execute on the most easy part of it, which is taking my data, contextualizing it, and actually matching it to shit that I care about. Joel (36:33.96) Mm-hmm. Joel (36:43.316) Yeah, I didn't until I read the story in tech crunch. had no idea the weight of, of resumes that come into companies. Uh, so the data that I saw 9,000 applications per minute. Come into LinkedIn. Of course they have about a billion users globally. So they're a little bit of a victim of their own success. We get 9,000 applicants a minute. Most of those suck. How do we limit that? How do we improve quality? Uh, this is an attempt to do that. guess time will tell whether or not. J.T. O'Donnell (36:51.074) Yeah, it's bad. J.T. O'Donnell (36:55.096) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Joel (37:12.68) They are successful. on the business side, you know, when, indeed launched, have up to five profiles on your indeed account, said, they're coming after LinkedIn. so to me, this is like, maybe there was a gentleman's agreement that we'll stay in the enterprise stuff and you guys deal with, know, the jobs, job search stuff. And now they're sort of getting more competitive. So I think this going after small businesses, whether it works or not, where they put any kind of money into marketing this. Chad (37:25.074) Ruh-roh. Joel (37:41.62) Cause selling into small businesses is really hard, but it, to me, this is a, this is a strike out against zip recruiter who has abandoned their small business brand. They've totally like left that to be taken up by somebody indeed. Indeed hasn't really embraced it, but they have a good foothold in, that market. So to me, going after small business is what LinkedIn has left to kind of conquer, particularly in the, in the Americas and out in Europe. So Chad (37:50.138) idiots. Joel (38:07.518) Good strategies both, they can execute and get it right, I don't know, but I do approve of both strategies and getting more in bed with OpenAI. J.T. O'Donnell (38:14.668) Mm. Chad (38:18.121) Good luck. J.T. O'Donnell (38:18.872) Mm. Joel (38:18.908) Yeah. Good luck. And speaking of good luck, tick tock is, is tick tock and you don't stop. color me bad, Chad color me bad. all right. I'm sure you've, you've heard the news. Tick tock is set to shut down. it's us operations on January 19th. By the time you listen to this, it may be gone. January 19th of this year impacting some 170 million Americans. Unless there is a Supreme court intervention or bite dance and. Chad (38:21.321) Yes. And you don't stop. Joel (38:48.54) divest TikTok's US operations between Trump wanting to delay from the Supreme Court to Elon rumored to be a bitter to copycats like red note gaining newfound traction. This is one hell of a drama. Chad, what are your thoughts on TikTok? Chad (39:07.657) So I have a history lesson, kids, and this is going to be fun. This is going to be fun for most of us. For some of you, take notes because you're going to need this. Joel, do you remember Tipper Gore? You remember Tipper Gore? Remember the Parents Music Resource Center, aka PRMs or PMRC, the group that created the infamous parental advisory explicit content stickers that were supposed to kill record sales on any album displaying the sticker? Remember what happened? I do. J.T. O'Donnell (39:16.078) you Joel (39:25.224) Mm-hmm. Joel (39:35.358) Mm-hmm. Chad (39:37.307) Albums displaying the sticker had explosive record sales. NWA and Twisted Sister could probably thank Tipper and the PMRC for all of the, a good amount of their success. Let's just say that. What does this have to do with TikTok? Well, have you tried telling one of your kids no before? I remember all three of our kids were in middle school and high school and the school administration blocked everyone on their wifi from getting on social media. Guess what the kids did? Joel (39:41.972) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (39:42.027) Mm-hmm. Joel (40:04.989) Mm-hmm. Chad (40:07.293) This is before, it's probably about seven years ago, before you had the Express and all the different easy VPN systems. We were all using those really clunky fucking business ones every day that sucked. Kids found free VPNs, they got around it, they were on social media at school, right? Needless to say, people will find a way to get to TikTok. This is the new Printol advisory sticker. And this is, again, nothing more than a way of saying, Joel (40:17.662) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (40:32.919) Ahem. Chad (40:36.685) you love that TikTok? we're going to take it away from you. No, you're not. We're going to find a way in. Joel (40:42.482) By the way, if you had Tipper Gore on your bingo card, mark that off. I think it's the first time Tipper Gore has gotten a hat tip on our show. JT, what are your thoughts on the TikTok ban? Chad (40:45.464) hahaha J.T. O'Donnell (40:45.902) Yeah. Chad (40:49.348) J.T. O'Donnell (40:54.06) Yeah, I think I take it from a different perspective. don't think people understand how many people have that as a gig. TikTok is their gig. It's their side hustle that's making them full-time income. You are talking about hundreds and thousands of US solopreneurs out in the middle of nowhere making an income they could otherwise never make where they live due to TikTok shop views. And I don't think people, those individuals, aren't business owners in the sense that they're prepared for how to replace that income and what else to do. So you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people whose revenue stream is gonna shut off. And while I'm with Chad, they'll find another route that won't be overnight. And those people bought cars and houses and apartments and built lives around having this additional income in their life. And it's going away. And I see that on the TikToks that are coming through my feet. I mean, there are people that just bawling saying, I built this, worked so hard, I'm gonna lose everything. Now we all know, we've watched it for years. Facebook, they change algorithms on social platforms, all of a sudden you weren't making money, now you're not. But there's a massive group of people this is the first time that's happening to. And that to me, it just kind of breaks my heart. We are the country where you're supposed to have this entrepreneurial spirit and create things for yourself and hundreds of thousands of people have. And they're gonna lose it all when this goes away. And to me, it just seems wrong. You know, I love the app. It's been great to me. I've been able to reach a whole audience that not on LinkedIn, that's on TikTok that I can coach for free people I'd never otherwise get to work with and change lives. And that's just in job search. Like in every place that tool has taught and helped and let people serve audiences. And it's out. It's going to be gone. Something else will replace it. I know I'll survive, but there's a lot of people that are going to be crushed by this financially and emotionally. Joel (42:49.586) And as long as we're getting sentimental, JT, I never knew that bug fights and big booty Latinas could bring so much to my life as well. You mentioned the users that'll be impacted. Let's talk about a few more people that will be impacted by this. TikTok employs 7,000 people in the United States. I think their jobs might be at risk if it goes away. 60 %... J.T. O'Donnell (42:58.038) Mm. Mm. Joy. Chad (42:58.207) Joy. Joy. Joel (43:15.576) of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic. Those are big dollars coming out of the US. Trump is talking about an executive order as soon as he takes office to save TikTok. It's questionable whether he can legally do that or not, not that it's ever stopped Trump before. Would you be shocked if Elon Chad (43:21.769) Hmm. Chad (43:36.787) Hello. Joel (43:45.079) acquires and it rolls it, it rolls it into X like anything can happen. I haven't been to red note yet. J.T. O'Donnell (43:51.562) Yeah, that's, that's, know. I mean, I've checked out Red Note and the Elon Musk stuff is all, you know, just not true. That was the big rumors going around. I do think Trump will extend it or reverse it. I do. I mean, it helped him get elected. I do feel that he will do something about Joel (44:00.308) I mean, we'll get... Or maybe he makes it roll into truth social and truth social becomes tick. Like we've gotten, we got big meta energy from Mark Zuckerberg. mean, he's playing nice with Trump. this meta liking like this, this is a, this is a soap opera that's going to be really fun to watch over the next, over the next couple months for sure. J.T. O'Donnell (44:15.278) E? Chad (44:25.94) Yes. J.T. O'Donnell (44:26.616) Yeah, 100%, 100%. If you're pro-business, you try to figure out a way to make this work for all those small businesses. If you think, you know, in my opinion, there's just so many people out there. This is a gig, a side hustle that's helping them live their best life, you know, and so. Joel (44:41.908) There's so much money. I mean, know that Congress has gotten flooded with letters and emails about don't cancel TikTok. To be devil's advocate, I do think it is a propaganda machine or at least a potential propaganda machine for the communist China. I told Chad, said, it's going to take a Chinese military action to like really kill TikTok. I think it's going to be on the back burner. It's just going to slow roll. J.T. O'Donnell (44:58.69) Mm-hmm. Joel (45:11.764) It's going to be an ongoing thing until something like that happens. But yeah, it's going to be a fun soap opera to watch in 2025. And speaking of soap operas, we're going to take a quick break and talk about another great soap opera happening now in America. J.T. O'Donnell (45:18.21) Mm-hmm. Joel (45:32.18) All right, kids, let's talk about some big Zuck energy, shall we? Some coverage featuring Metta and its fearless leader, Mark Zuckerberg, this week include the following workforce reduction affecting some 3,600 employees, embracing Trump and donating $1 million to his inauguration, as well as throwing a party, ending their third party fact checking in the US, and even dissing Apple on Joe Rogan. J.T. O'Donnell (45:35.054) You Joel (45:59.218) JT, is this Zuckerberg hitting his midlife crisis a bit too early or is something else going on here? J.T. O'Donnell (46:06.734) mean, it definitely points to signs of that, right? Just the way you set that up, you have to think what's going on there with him. You know, it doesn't surprise me that AI is going to replace middle managers. We've been talking about this forever. I mean, if you did listen to any of the futurists over the last two years, they explained we're going to lose 70 to 85 million jobs. We're going to create 95 to 140 million jobs. The problem is there's going to be this painful time where that doesn't line up. We're in it. Joel (46:13.575) Mm-hmm. Joel (46:32.894) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (46:34.158) know, we're in it. We're going to continue to be in it in 2025. So seeing that from him didn't surprise me. Also what we talked about earlier, it's in the boardroom playbook. But the other stuff, I mean, it's wild. I don't know if it's a I've hit a phase in my life where I just don't care anymore. And I want to be who I want to be. And I'm tired of everybody telling me how to, you know, how to think how to act. mean, I don't know. It's certainly fascinating. It's very public, very public. Joel (47:01.652) And I didn't even bring up his visual appearance. Someone said he looks like a Chechen meth dealer, which I thought was pretty funny. He has visually changed quite a bit. J.T. O'Donnell (47:04.693) Right, thank you. Chad (47:08.755) Yes. Yeah. What a great gold chain, Mark. What a great gold chain. J.T. O'Donnell (47:09.484) You J.T. O'Donnell (47:14.894) You know, being famous, that's one of the things that we get to watch, right? You know, we watch all these childhood actors grow up and watch them go through the awkward years, you know, Britney and would we think any different that maybe he was protected all this time and now he's getting to a level and an age where, you know, he doesn't feel like he has to do that? I don't know, but we're definitely seeing something unfold. Chad (47:34.227) Yes. Joel (47:35.444) Chad, your thoughts? Chad (47:36.799) So it's funny because you talk about TikTok being a propaganda machine. mean, Facebook's already demonstrated it is the ultimate propaganda machine. Unfortunately, testosterone and Brazilian jiu-jitsu are making Zuck feel for the days of move fast and break things, that mantra that led Facebook into breaking society with Brexit and the 2016 election, right? They had to move past that. So what did they do? J.T. O'Donnell (47:46.712) Mm-hmm. Chad (48:07.027) Does anybody remember Cambridge Analytica? Remember? It really seems that nobody remembers how Facebook broke society. Facebook data was weaponized against its own users and disinformation propaganda campaigns. Yeah, we're talking about TikTok. Fuck you. Those propaganda campaigns would have been severely hampered by fact checkers. So fact checkers were installed and ramped up in a show of contrition, which we all knew J.T. O'Donnell (48:09.514) No, right? Yes. Joel (48:09.576) You do. J.T. O'Donnell (48:22.798) Mm-hmm. Chad (48:35.559) was just bullshit and Zuck was not feeling contrition at all. So fact checkers cost money. And of course they're never perfect. So why not follow in the steps of Trump's new VP, Elon Musk, and just do what he does. He changed Twitter into X, a Nazi porn bar. Thanks Kara Swisher for that one. And now it's time to turn Facebook into a Nazi porn bar. So this is what happens when we don't remember history. We keep We don't keep people accountable. If Zuckerberg would have faced criminal charges, whether he was, he, they, they stuck or not, right? They would have sent a message to the burly garkey. mean, nobody likes Zuck anyway, but I think he would look really good in orange. Joel (49:29.524) Breathe, Chad. Breathe. Breathe. J.T. O'Donnell (49:32.278) What's in that beer? What is in that beer? Chad (49:32.547) This might have to do with me getting kicked off Facebook and then having to pay to get back on Facebook. There might be some of that there, but also Cambridge Analytica, Cambridge Analytica. J.T. O'Donnell (49:37.195) Yeah, yeah. Joel (49:43.22) I was going to, I was going to go with Euro Chad is sort of coming in and into the final month of his, uh, European stay, but yeah, Chad's Chad's fired up today. Even the church bells in the background, aren't relaxing him at all. Um, yeah, Chad's Chad's very unhappy with Facebook. Uh, I'll tell you who's happy with Facebook are shareholders. Uh, and I think at the end of the day, Zuckerberg bows down to his shareholders and Trump in office. He's making nice with Trump. He's going into the X form. J.T. O'Donnell (49:47.086) The... Yeah. Joel (50:13.508) of fact checking or peer review. I don't have as big a problem with that. Unlike Chad, I actually use X and I think that the community policing is pretty good. And I do think there is probably some bias in human beings fact checking stuff, which they said they found. I'm not as angry about that as I think a lot of the people on the left are. Chad (50:32.479) Are you angry about Cambridge Analytica? That's the question. Because you're skirting the entire issue. There was an issue where data was weaponized. They put fact checkers in place to be able to actually skirt that. Yes, fact checkers were not perfect. Go fucking figure. But look at the scale I have to deal with. But when it comes down to having another Cambridge Analytica on fucking steroids with AI, are you cool with that? Joel (50:40.66) I- Joel (50:58.812) Am I cool with my data being sold to companies that will market to me? Chad (51:03.603) We're talking about disinformation campaigns. We're not talking about fucking marketing. Joel (51:06.682) Okay, which has happened since the days of yellow journalism. If you're not a smart consumer of content, then that's partly on you, frankly. Chad (51:10.717) So it's all good. All good. Chad (51:16.019) talking about pretty much all of America. Joel (51:19.538) that doesn't have the ability to filter what's real and what isn't and check facts and other sources. I can't control all of America. I can control me. I can control me. Chad (51:24.883) Where have you been the last fucking 10 years? You can't know, but we're actually talking to America, therefore, well, and Europe and so on and so forth. So to be able to say that you have no worries over it is cautionary tale for me. Joel (51:35.859) Right. Joel (51:40.372) If you don't think that everything about you is already getting molested by government and big corporations, like Facebook is a fly on the ass of the elephant that is your privacy being killed. Fixing Facebook is not gonna fix it. It's gonna take fundamental change across lot areas, which I don't have the time or the energy to worry about. J.T. O'Donnell (51:46.158) Right. Chad (51:54.387) So don't fix it. So don't fix it. Yeah, it's not a problem. Not a problem. Don't fix it. It's all good. Joel (52:07.654) I can worry all all about Facebook, but it's part of the problem. If you cure Facebook, you're not going to end. mean, privacy is not coming back and and all that like. Chad (52:18.975) How many people use Facebook? That's the thing. That's the thing. It's like it is the nexus for people to actually go get their news. And if the news is bullshit and it's disinformation, not everybody actually goes outside of Facebook to fact check. To be quite frank, most people don't go outside of Facebook to fact check. Joel (52:19.538) We just disagree. Joel (52:40.264) And that's my fault, why? Chad (52:45.361) Nothing like an old white man saying, is about me. Joel (52:47.334) I just... I don't... Joel (52:53.448) Mark Zuckerberg's God is money. If you're expecting corporations, better angels to show up, you're gonna wait a long time. Buyer beware has been around a lot longer than we have, and it still is pertinent today. J.T. O'Donnell (52:54.798) This is awkward. J.T. O'Donnell (52:58.926) This. Chad (53:04.319) I am pressing for people. No, yeah, but acquiescing is not the fucking answer though, is it? Is acquiescing the answer? Just go ahead and lay down and let them stamp on you because... Joel (53:16.562) No, education objective analysis, looking at multiple sources. Chad (53:22.171) Again, which is exactly what I said nobody fucking does, which is why we need fact checker on these platforms. That's probably it. Joel (53:27.252) I do, so maybe that's why I don't worry about it so much. I can only control me, Chad. J.T. O'Donnell (53:33.144) Chad, how do you feel about AI fact checking in? Chad (53:36.349) I think it's better than no fact checking. think having some type of, some type of filter in there. And again, nothing's going to be perfect, right? Not to mention human scaling isn't going to be that easy on a platform that big. So AI fact checking and possibly kicking down some of my things that they see not right, or maybe hitting me on, on messenger saying, you know, this is what we saw or what have you. I would rather have that than just a free for all. J.T. O'Donnell (53:38.071) Okay, so. J.T. O'Donnell (53:43.32) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (53:55.128) Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (54:04.364) I have to say, I wish there was a world where there was something outside of all these social apps that I could overlay onto it, right? So third party AI fact checking that they can't control, that I could then go, okay, put this over my Facebook, fact check for me, put this over my TikTok, put this over so that I control the fact checking. That's our issue. Because if you tell them they have to fact check themselves, this is what we have, right? We need... the ability to utilize a third party source to filter where we're getting our information through fact checking. So whoever's out there listening, go build that. That would be amazing. Chad (54:40.563) FairNowGuru at FairNowAI. Build it. Joel (54:42.516) Snopes needs an API to plug into all these sites and give us separate. And what is truth anyway, Chad? What is truth anyway? J.T. O'Donnell (54:47.53) Yeah, yeah, yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (54:53.314) I mean, and we live in the country that can, you know, build these things. So let's do it. Joel (54:59.412) Quickly though, this friendly debate with my son drenched friend there, the employee, the mid manager stuff, if I'm a developer, I'm scared to death. If I'm in college becoming an engineer right now, a computer engineer, I am scared to death. I don't know what you're hearing on your side, JT, but like I'm thinking pivot, I'm getting out of this profession, there's no future. J.T. O'Donnell (55:07.702) Yeah. 100%. Chad (55:15.711) grade. J.T. O'Donnell (55:20.728) Look. Chad (55:20.937) Mm. J.T. O'Donnell (55:23.054) I'm so tired of saying this like a broken record, but every single job should be looking at how AI is going to take a piece of your job. Every job. And people go, plumbers construct every job, whether it's going to be robots or AI. We are in an age where efficiency is coming. My question is you go wipe out all those middle developers. You go write about all middle management. This is what we're hearing now, right? Middle, middle, middle is gone. The only people you keep are the highest level. Joel (55:50.74) They'll die eventually. J.T. O'Donnell (55:51.092) So when they go, thank you. Who's replacing them? Where's the learning curve and what's gonna happen in between? Wait, so are we thinking ahead on that? Who's getting selected for that? No, because right now, let's save money and watch our stock price rise. Let's wipe people out. And that's what's happening. Chad (55:57.575) Not training them up. Yep. Yep. Joel (56:08.692) Mm-hmm. Chad (56:10.601) JT, we got rid of vocational schools. That was talent pipelining. We got rid of all of these things. Yes, which was talent pipelining. When companies tell you about talent pipelining and you start talking to them about, they have no fucking clue what that even means. No. Yeah. J.T. O'Donnell (56:16.31) Apprentices. J.T. O'Donnell (56:24.802) Mm-mm. I agree. Nor do they care. Joel (56:25.396) By the way, did you see Southwest Airlines halted their internship program? We're gonna see more of that because entry-level jobs and needing those kids to fill, that's going away on a big scale too. That's gonna be a story in 2025, internships going away or reduced. Can I lighten the mood with a dad joke? Would that be possible after we're gonna, it's so fired up over here. Okay. J.T. O'Donnell (56:33.413) 100%. J.T. O'Donnell (56:39.224) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. J.T. O'Donnell (56:45.558) I agree. It is way worse. Chad (56:49.798) I was hoping so. What took so long? Hahaha Joel (56:54.74) All right, all right. What's the difference between a tire and 365 used condoms? What's the difference between a tire and 365 used condoms? Chad (57:10.579) the rubber on a tire can be used over and over? I don't know. Joel (57:17.546) One's a good year, the other one is a great year. J.T. O'Donnell (57:21.578) jeez. Chad (57:22.909) It's an amazing year, I would say. Joel (57:25.246) JT, thanks for joining us. If you want to know more about Heretic, check out where. Where do you send them? J.T. O'Donnell (57:30.648) Please come on over to LinkedIn. I would love you to message me there. And of course, hit up work at daily.com. If you are a fan of the job seeker, all my recruiters, TA people out there, please care about the job seeker this year. Come see me. Let's talk. Chad (57:42.835) Work it daily. J.T. O'Donnell (57:44.362) Mm-hmm. We out! Joel (57:44.596) Go Bucks. We out. Chad (57:46.473) We out.

Gerry Crispin drops into the Chad & Cheese podcast from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, sharing 53 years of recruiting wisdom. From Johnson & Johnson to Roche and a boutique search firm, Gerry’s learned the ropes and always stuck to fairness. His advice? Master the basics, especially comp and benefits. Worried about AI replacing recruiters? Gerry’s not—he thinks it’ll make things smoother, not take over, but he's frustrated that Talent Acquisition leaders aren’t embracing AI faster. His parting wisdom: find a company that aligns with your values, stay positive, and take action. He’s still active with CareerXroads, spreading optimism and know-how. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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: All right, let's start with who are you and why are you here today. Gerry Crispin: So, I'm Gerry Crispin for those that don't know me and I'm a lifelong student of recruiting. I have been in this business for 53 years in various ways. In career services in college. In an executive search at Johnson & Johnson, at Shaker Advertising. All right, that's the only thing you get. Joel: Chad and I... We're both 53, if that makes you feel any older. You're welcome. Gerry Crispin: You were around after I graduated from college, but when I was in graduate school. Joel: It was a good time brother. Gerry Crispin: It was a good time. And I care about how we treat all the stakeholders in recruiting. That's been my interest for a life's work more in hindsight than foresight. First, you try to make a living and do stuff and then they ask you to do stuff and you go "No... No, I don't think I wanna do that." And I was pretty obnoxious about that at J&J. And fortunately, my bosses had my back. We had a Credo. And if we weren't treating employees right. If we weren't treating candidates right. I could step up and protect that. And it was okay. Now, I left J&J thinking I was gonna change the world, and lo and behold I found a company that didn't believe quite in that Credo. And that gave me an opportunity to become a contract recruiter with Roche, working for an executive search firm... A boutique executive search firm. And I learned something in every one of those. So I have no regrets on all of the changes. Gerry Crispin: The journey. The journey. Joel: The journey included 10 years with Shakers... Chad: Gerry's journey. Gerry's journey. So wait wait wait. Give us this. What is your sage advice for any listeners or any viewers that are out there? One thing one nugget that you think is incredibly important for everybody in our space to know. Gerry Crispin: I think you have to master the elements of what you have decided to make a living on. So, if you're in a job, and your job for however you fell into it, is recruiting. You better be curious about all the things that impact that. So if you find what's going on in rewards that they're telling me I can only offer this much money. You better start learning something about compensation and compensation theory. You need to be able to talk to that person in rewards and argue your case for how their language is. Marketing versus how we look at structurally about this and our philosophy of broadband, or we bring people in in the first quartile, or whatever the hell it is. You need to learn that. If benefits are something that is amazing for some part of the audience that you're trying to recruit then you could give a shit about it. You better learn a lot about those benefits and why they're important to them. Chad: You'd better give a shit about it. Gerry Crispin: I'll tell you one thing... Joel: Gerry what you're talking about sounds like a lot of work. Gerry Crispin: It is. But it's a joyful work. Joel: So that brings me... Well to my question we have some people we've talked to that are optimistic about the recruiting profession. Gerry Crispin: I am. Joel: Others that are not. You are. Tell me why. Tell me why you've just laid out all this extra work for a recruiter. Now tell me why you're bullish. Gerry Crispin: It's not extra work. I'll give you one more that I always did. When in every job that I went to. Every time I got promoted or went to a different job I job-shadowed the people who were going to be my clients. So if it was marketing, I went out on the road with salespeople, and I made that as a negotiable deal. You could not deny me the ability to do that. I used to go out on third shift and sit and watch assembly while I'm at work as in the middle of the fricking night and then get yelled at by the vice president of manufacturing. What are you doing spying on my people in the middle of the night? Then I go "No I need to learn enough to be able to do my job which is HR... Which at that time was HR and recruiting but optimism. I've got to tell you it's been waves of three steps forward two steps back. You know that. You've gone through enough of them and I've gone through many of them, and I don't know if we're in the two steps back at the moment. Some folks... Chad: It depends on the topic. Gerry Crispin: It depends on the topic and where it is. Yeah. Chad: It does. Gerry Crispin: If we talk about the promise of AI. It's tomorrow. It's not today. So, you shouldn't be sitting here getting rid of your recruiters waiting for AI to suddenly replace them all. That's bullshit. But long-term technology will help us capture and more reliably collect information from the people who are interested in our company. If there's 500 of them we should be able to get 500 of them to be able to compete in how they reliably talk to us. Maybe not humans at that point at the top of the funnel. But in a way that's fully transparent where we can say to them look you're talking to a non-human here but I am friendly. I will ask every one of the 500 people the same questions. I know how to probe in appropriate ways and I'm going to organize the data in a way that humans can make a better decision in the future with more reliable data about who goes forward. And if you want I'll come back and talk to you about what you could do to be more competitive in the future for this job or other jobs you might wanna apply for now. Gerry Crispin: But it's up to you. Now if we had something that could do that and there ain't nothing doing it right now but is that that far away? And if it is what is really gonna change? It may not be the quality of your decision but we might improve the quality of the candidate's decision. We're certainly going to improve the perception of the candidate about recruiting as a profession that actually offers something that's fair and reasonable as opposed to the doubts that many job seekers have now about how they're being treated by so many companies. And that's what makes me optimistic. Chad: Next question. Looking back in 2024 what has surprised you the most? Gerry Crispin: It's how slow TA leaders are in doing what they have to do to continue to learn. To upskill themselves. TA leaders should be at the forefront of upskilling themselves so they can help deal with that whole issue. And when I talk to TA leaders about what's going on with you and AI how confusing is it? They go it's still too confusing. And our leaders don't want us to use it. So we're just waiting. And I'm going "You're killing yourself." I said "You have to be fully engaging on your own on your own computer on your own phone and learning so that when we are able to do something you know what's coming. You have some sense of this. You're willing to get to the next level." So I think we're slow to adopt out of uncertainty fear that we're gonna be in trouble. And that's not... In my opinion, it's just not a great way to live. I think we should be embracing risk and enjoying it. Joel: You deal with some of the biggest companies in the world I think it's fair to say and you more than not most can talk to the question of having a seat at the table that we've talked about for decades. What is your take on the current state of HR having a seat at the table? Gerry Crispin: The folks in HR who don't pay attention to that, they just step up and do it. They already have a seat. They already have a seat. When I started with Johnson & Johnson, I sent them a note when they made me an offer and said, "Thanks." But the only thing that's really a problem for me is I really asked if I could get access to the computer. The computer in those days. That's a long long time ago. There was a computer building 25 miles away and there was a guy in charge of that. And he wouldn't let anybody like me coming out of grad school have access to the dumb terminal the one dumb terminal in the building that I was in, unless the president of the company authorized it. And my boss. Joel: The president of J&J. Gerry Crispin: The president of J&J. So my boss said oh we have accountants who come every single week and you can tell them what you want and in a week or a month you'll have a report. And I go, "No that's not the same thing. I wanna be able to go play and do whatever." So long story short and back to the relevance of this, I said, "I'm not sure I can come but I am waiting for another offer but I'll let you know in the promise of the next week." Two days later I'm told that I have access and please make a decision. And I said absolutely I'm there. So it took two years for me to find out that he went to his boss his boss went to his boss and so on and somebody... VP of HR or whatever, went to the president of J&J and said we'd like to get access for this kid who's just coming out of graduate school. Gerry Crispin: We think he's gonna do some interesting things in learning how we can make better choices and so on. And the president goes let me make sure I understand. You're in HR and you're telling me there's somebody deep in your organization who wants access to a computer. Our computer. And they go, "Yeah." And he goes, "Give him access but I wanna know what he does." Now I did do some cool shit but that gave me enormous power. And what I'm telling all leaders is you got to decide whether you're gonna take risks and step up and do the right thing. There are principles that your company should be living by and if not why are you there? It's not just about the money that stockholders make, it's also about how we treat employees. It's how we treat our clients and customers and the candidates that come in. So if you're not working for an organization that doesn't value those things at least aspirationally then you should get yourself out period. Find another job find another career. I'm here because I care about this and because there's a Credo on every door in relation to this. And that was a 1932 employer brand the J&J Credo, which I'd love anybody to look up. It's incredible. Chad: You heard it here first. Kids if you can't do it you can't step up. It's not additional work Joel, then get the hell out. That's Gerry... Joel: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. Chad: Gerry Crispin friends. Gerry, if somebody wants to find out more about you connect with you where would you send them? Gerry Crispin: They've got to be able to Google my name and spell it right. So it's Gerry with a G. G-E-R-R-Y Crispin C-R-I-S-P-I-N. And yes I founded Career Crossroads 20-some-odd years ago almost 30 years ago now. Dedicated really to understanding and sharing how we evolve recruiting into something that is a world we would like to be in ourselves. There's no sense in doom and gloom. There's no sense in pessimism. That's not the world I wanna be in. So I've got to be able to look at the world I wanna be in. Chad: That's it. Joel: Gerry. Thanks for hanging out with us always. Chad: Thanks for coming on man. Joel: Enjoy the rest of your... Gerry Crispin: It's a pleasure. Joel: Enjoy the rest of... Gerry Crispin: Thanks for having me. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

From the illustrious Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA—where coffee flows freely and buzzwords hang heavier than the Wi-Fi signal—Joe Shaker, President of Shaker Recruitment Marketing , dished out insights on his company’s magic touch in industry partnerships and advisory. Joe didn’t hold back: the secret sauce to retaining talent? He also acknowledged the current economic uncertainty (a polite euphemism for "wild rollercoaster") but reminded us that the talent war rages on—because apparently, companies just can’t quit hiring. Ever the optimist, Joe peered into his crystal ball and predicted that 2025 will be all about amped-up employment branding and retention strategies and of course, Joe couldn’t resist sprinkling in some tech prophecy, hinting at impending MarTech disruptions. These innovations, he claimed, will simultaneously woo candidates and streamline recruiter workloads—though probably not before we all survive another round of software updates and system crashes. Classic Joe, leaving us inspired and maybe just a little skeptical. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Thanks for hanging out. Who are you and why are you here today? Joe Shaker: Thanks for coming. Joe Shaker, President of Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Joel: And why are you here? Joe Shaker: I'm told to be here. Joel: Okay. Joe Shaker: I'm running a calendar. Joel: This is like a good... Joe Shaker: I'm still trying to figure out... Chad: When Gina says something, Joe shows up. Joe Shaker: When I show up. I'm trying to figure out how you guys got here. Joel: So, let's get to... Chad: No clue. Joe Shaker: No clue? Joel: When I say you here, let's expand it. I've known you for a long time, you've known us for a long time. At events, you guys have been, let's say, not aggressive. You've been classy, haven't gone overboard. You've been... You pull back, I guess, in what you could have done. This is the first event in a long time that you guys have really... I don't wanna say go all out, but you have taken it to another level. I assume that was by design, but why was that? Chad: I've heard the word chic. Joe Shaker: Chic? Joel: That's 'cause we're here. Chad: Yes. Joel: But yeah, chic. Joe Shaker: So, I have to give my hats off to the team, my team that put this on. Joking aside, I appreciate all that you guys are doing past as well as present and helping us today. To answer your question, Joel, we're trying to show the industry how we can be a true partner and advisor to our clients. Why this event? Also, I have to congratulate Jamie for, I believe, putting on an event that creates not just a conference but a community of bringing in some of the world's best talent leaders. I was able to spend yesterday at RL100 and Chad was there as well, but also bringing in some amazing partners. So, outside of the organizations that are here, walking around even I've learned some great pieces of information from many of the vendors in an environment that allows really a community and a culture to be built. And that's something that Shaker's always had for seven years. So, it just seemed like a logical fit for us if we were gonna do exactly as you said, come bigger, come bolder, this was the event to do it. Chad: One piece of advice in today's landscape, what would that piece of advice be to any listener or viewer in our space? Joe Shaker: Find good partners, whether it be me, whether it be some of my competition or whether it be some of the various different companies that are out there. I think our industry has gotten very complicated. There's a lot of different pieces that move on a constant basis. Chad: Now, is that complexity really necessary? Joe Shaker: Yeah, because it's not just, where do I run my ads? It's... We talked about it yesterday, how do I authentically build a message? What should that message be? Is also gonna differ depending upon the platform or the tools that you're utilizing to deploy that message to then even looking at conversion. So, doing this by yourself is a very difficult task. I am biased as I'm one of those advisors, but I'm truly saying my piece of advice is find that true partner that can help you navigate through that creative landscape, through the media landscape and through the conversion. Joel: You talk about the right partner but you obviously have a lot of the right employees, and one of the things that's always impressed me over the years is your ability to retain talent, to get some of the best talent. What's the secret sauce? Joe Shaker: My father gave me a great line, "Hire people smarter than yourself and get out of their way." My joy of my job, one of the things that I am really most appreciative of, is I get to work with some of the best in the space, past as well as present. I get to partner with some of the best and biggest organizations out there. And truly, I partner with some of the best organizations. And so, when I look at my job, I get to work with some of my best employees, I get to talk to some of the best clients and I get to talk to some of the best partners. And that's why too... One of the things you're seeing today is when we look at even just like our logo, like the three heads and changing our navigation, without my employees, without my clients, and without my partners, there is no Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Chad: So, looking back at 2024, we still got a little time to go but still looking back at 2024, there's been a lot that's happened. What surprised you the most? Joe Shaker: Surprised me the most is that in a state of the economy as well as politically, there's a lot of uncertainty and organizations are still hiring. They may not be hiring at the levels that any of us would wish for and companies still are trying to open up more recs, but we are still in an uncertainty. And in an election year, they're still hiring and I believe they are still hiring not just because of current need, but everyone knows what we got a little taste of in 2020, 2021, 2022 is the war for talent is here and it's only gonna get harder and they know how hard it's gonna be this year, next year and the years to come. Joel: So, let's talk about next year... Joe Shaker: Bears are gonna win the Super Bowl. Joel: [0:05:06.2] ____. Joe Shaker: Are we gonna go there? One and 0 baby, one and 0. Joel: God. Pretty sure I won our last bet on the over/under of Bears victories. So, I won't... Chad: We're looking forward now, Joel. We're looking forward. Joel: Yeah, I won't bring the Bears into this. 2025, more of the same, more hiring, greater... I mean, the geopolitical challenges that we have now are not gonna go away... Joe Shaker: They're not. Joel: But you see a much sunnier road ahead. Joe Shaker: I am optimistic and I also think you have to prepare. So, the organizations, as you look for the years ahead, continuing to invest in your employment brand to find ways to differentiate yourself, to increase retention, continue to market to either current clients... Well, we spent a lot of time, again, yesterday on future employees that are gonna work for the firm and then literally look at the data and don't lock yourself, don't be married to anyone and move to where the data dictates the money should move to. Chad: So, Shaker was a firm of column inches for a very long time, newspaper. Joe Shaker: Not that many people know what that is. Chad: Column inches. Yeah. If you don't know, look it up. What is tomorrow look like? The velocity of technology is dizzying in some cases. So, for you, in an organization like yours to stay up with it, number one, not easy, let alone all the heads of TA trying to do it themselves. What does it look like moving into 2025? Joe Shaker: One thing what have been said before, so much has changed yet so much has stayed the same. So, from the days of running, to your point, column inch ads, we still ran them in multiple newspapers across the US and then you read trains journals and you ran, obviously, even into radio and cable. It was a diversified media strategy then it went... It got real simple. You use one, two, maybe three sources. We're back now to running a diversified strat and pulling levers. The difference now though is you can be flexible. So, you don't just set it and forget it. And so, as long as you build out a diversified plan, put it out to as many places as you possibly can and then let the data dictate where it should go and also create that good experience. And that's where I believe you can use technology coupled with people in terms of making out what's gonna be best to deliver and convert those data points. Joel: You sit in front of a metaphoric dashboard every day about those data points, what's performing well, what's trending, what's declining. Give us a broad picture of what is working, what you see on the horizon and what do you see fading. Joe Shaker: Well, answer that in three different scenarios. You're gonna answer it from a creator perspective, you should see retention. So, if we did the brand and we did it right or your partner did it right, you should see an uptick in retention. And that's not something you're gonna see in three months, six months or 12 months. It's gonna take some time, but that data should dictate, did my message that I developed in my employment brand that I went to market with increase retention? Short term, to where I think you are going, CPC, CPAs, throw them out the window. We want quality applicants. My opinion of quality applicants is interview scheduled and our job should be filling out as many of those interviews as you possibly can and then time to fill them. But at the end of the day, it still is go back to when we were running column inch ads, cost per hires. But to judge your cost per hire and to drive it down, it's looking at the messaging, it's looking at the media and it's making sure we convert. Chad: From what you can remember, what was the most expensive full-page newspaper ad? Joe Shaker: New York Times. Chad: New York Times? What was it? Joe Shaker: $40,000. Easy, easy. Chad: $40,000 for a Sunday. Joe Shaker: And that's one category. Chad: One category. Joe Shaker: Remember, and you couldn't run an ad for multiple categories. So, if you were hiring engineers as well as running sales managers, it's two ads, $40,000, $40,000. And then if you wanted to run a paper... Right? Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Joe Shaker: Outside of the classified section, then you're paying on a CPM basis. Joel: All right, I'm gonna bring us back to the present day because you seem to be stuck in the olden times. Chad: Gotta make people remember. Joel: So, you talk about... Joe Shaker: I agree. Joel: I wanna know more about what you see. Where's the disruption gonna be? What do you see sort of on the upswing in terms of, oh, we need to watch that, whether it's TikTok or some social media or we hear a lot about AI. What are we gonna be looking for in 2025 to be like, I saw that coming? Joe Shaker: Conversion. I think personally, applicant tracking systems are not gonna go away but I think they're gonna continue to get pushed further and further back. I mean, walk outside this lovely tent, bias, but lovely tent that we have today, and you're gonna see a lot of great technology that is helping us convert leads and helping us make those leads then become applicants that ultimately will become hires. So, I think you're gonna continue to see disruption in the Martech sector in terms of other technology that just helps us create a better experience but then also lets recruiters be more effective. It's a win-win for not just the candidates, but also for the companies themselves. Chad: Well through that disruption, through that noise, you can always go to Joe Shaker. Joe Shaker: You can. Chad: Joe, if somebody wants to connect with you or part of your team, where would you send them? Joe Shaker: Come to shaker.com, we just launched it on Monday or feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. Chad: Beautiful. Joel: It's a wealth of information. Shaker.com. Joe, thanks for hanging out, man. Joe Shaker: Hey, thank you, guys. Joel: Enjoy the rest of the show. Joe Shaker: Hey, good to see you. S?: Now, we return you to our regular scheduled program in progress. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

In this lively episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, Joel and Chad reflect on their holiday escapades and revisit their 2024 predictions, celebrating the wins and roasting their misses with comedic flair. They’re joined by a stellar lineup of guests, including industry leaders like Matt Lavery, Emi Beredugo, Lars Schmidt, and more, who share bold predictions for 2025. The conversation dives into the future of recruitment, where automation and AI are reshaping the job hunt, and the possible demise of traditional resumes in favor of digital innovations. Predictions range from a wave of IPOs and European startups rising to prominence to shifting trends in programmatic ad spending. Packed with laughs, insights, and tech talk, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating the fast-changing world of work. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel Cheeseman: We're back. Podcast 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 Cheeseman: Oh, yeah, it's dry January, which means we're drinking all our whiskey without the water. Hey, boys and girls, it's The Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel, 51st State Cheeseman. Chad Sowash: And this is Chad. Get your hands off my tarot cards, Sowash. Joel Cheeseman: And on this week's show, predictions with a little help from our friends. Let's do this. Oh, we're back, baby. Chad Sowash: We are back. We're back. Joel Cheeseman: You look much more tanned and rested than I do. That's all good. Chad Sowash: So much more rested. Quick thanks to Sergei and Tricia. Real quick before we... Before we start blowing past this. Joel Cheeseman: Who are they? Who are they? Chad Sowash: Those guys? Those guys actually hooked you wonderful listeners and viewers up with our 2024 wrap up and our 2024 top ten topics. So we actually went back into the archives of 2024 got the best and brightest to be able to talk about the top ten insights and topics. So great, great stuff there. And then we took the top five. That's right. One, two, three, four, five. Top five episodes from Chad and Cheese. Got those sliced up and put together. And I mean, they did a great job. So thanks so much. Appreciate Sergei and the team. Tricia and the team. You guys do great audio, video all the way through. Thanks so much. Joel Cheeseman: And my local liquor store appreciates it because I was able to drink way more eggnog than I normally would because of that. Yes, I know they're listening 'cause they have to edit this shit. So, yes, Tricia, Sergei, thank you so much for all you do and giving us a little bit of a break. So what'd you do on the holiday? Chad Sowash: You first. You first. Tell me. Joel Cheeseman: Okay, fine me first. Well... Chad Sowash: You first. Joel Cheeseman: I think I mentioned the wife and the little guy. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: We took a little trip to New York, saw Elf on Broadway, did a lot of the other New York stuff that... Chad Sowash: That's awesome. Joel Cheeseman: Is certainly fun and then had some time off, did the holidays. My 85-year-old dad, wheeled him in, got him a new walker. He is very excited. It's funny to see a 7-year-old excited about toys and a 85-year-old as excited about toys. And then we took a little time, hooked up with the Canadian family in Orlando, did a little bit of NASA, did a little bit of R&R. Chad Sowash: Oh that's cool. Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: The Canadians are all fired up over Trump. It's very, it's very funny. Chad Sowash: Imagine that. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, as if any of this 51st state shit is gonna happen. But yeah, it's... It makes for fun with the Canadians when America's pissed them off. Otherwise, yeah, just took some time to relax. I mean, we're in eight years of doing this and we've got some big changes coming for next year... Chad Sowash: We do. Joel Cheeseman: Which will unfold as appropriate, but excited for 2025 and good to be back. How about you? Chad Sowash: Damn, damn, damn excited. So we had. Joel Cheeseman: Oh, and Ohio State is ready to play for a championship. Chad Sowash: Dude, knock on wood, knock on wood, knock on wood. They've been knocking it out of the park and hopefully they continue to do so. I tell you what, man, I had a blast. We had 10 in total people come to Portugal for Christmas. So. Joel Cheeseman: That's a basketball team. Chad Sowash: Family and friends. Few friends came over. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: We had a great Christmas here. And then we went to Marbella, southern Spain, for New Year's, which is bougie as fuck. It was funny 'cause Adam Gordon, as probably everybody knows, friend of the show, listens to just about every, if not all of our episodes. He responded back to me on WhatsApp. He was like Cadiz, where we went a couple of months ago and had a little Spanish flag and then had Marbella and had a little UK flag. And yeah, there are way too many fucking Brits in Marbella. That's for fucking sure. So anyway, it was great. Got to check it off the box. But other than that, had a great time. Drank way too fucking much. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: So I've scaled down a bit. I haven't gone dry, but I've scaled down a bit. Joel Cheeseman: I'm trying some alternatives, just just testing. Chad Sowash: What? Joel Cheeseman: There's some CBD drinks. There's some mushroom drinks. Chad Sowash: Oh dude. Joel Cheeseman: I'll let you know after a month of how this stuff works. But yeah, I'm trying at 53. I mean, come on, like you got to balance it. You got to compromise. We're not 25 anymore. So, yeah, I appreciate that. Chad Sowash: I like my two to one or one to one gummies. CBD... Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, you're a gummy guy. Yeah. Chad Sowash: Yeah. The THC dude. It's just so mellowing and relaxing and just amazing. So, yeah, I think I'll just continue to stay on that trajectory. Joel Cheeseman: And if you do two or three of really good stuff, it's a lot better than doing like six to eight of the shitty stuff. Chad Sowash: Oh, God. Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: So you kind of like, yeah, it's yeah, this will be interesting in 2025. Yeah. When... How can I sign up to be your kid? I get trips to Europe. I get trips to like sunny locations. Chad Sowash: No toys however. No toys. Joel Cheeseman: Do your kids thank you? Do they just bow down and kiss your feet that you're their dad? Chad Sowash: I mean, they love it. Don't get me wrong. And one of the things that Julie and I really wanted to do was instill wanderlust into all of them. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Because one of the things I mean, I would have never gotten out of the US if it weren't for the military. Right? I mean, especially when I was young, I was 18 years old. I was sent down to Central America and they started shooting at me. Other than that, though, it was great. That's the thing, though, is that I got to actually understand that, just because those people speak different languages than we do, just because they live differently, doesn't make them less human than we are. And it's really great to be able to get our kids over into Europe and really just understand that, hey, look, we're all just people and we should have more empathy. But also, it's really fucking cool when you can take them to Paris, you can take them to Madeira, you can take them to Marbella, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, no, it's good, but no toys. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: No toys. Joel Cheeseman: Well, viewers on YouTube will notice my Depeche Mode album in the background here. And I quote, I quote Depeche Mode when I say people are people. Why should it be you and I should get along so awfully? Yes. Chad Sowash: That's exactly right. Joel Cheeseman: We're all one people in this all world. Goodbye '24, here's to '25. I'm optimistic as hell. I know you are, too. We're gonna skip shout out. We are definitely shining a light on the sponsors that generously support this show. Chad, who we got? Chad Sowash: Well, I mean, free stuff. We were still giving away free stuff. And if you want a T-shirt, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see this gorgeous Chad and Cheese T-shirt. This is the last year's edition. I love it. These are sponsored by Air Nap. You can have bourbon barrel aged syrup from our friends up north from Kiora. Who else does syrup better than the Canadians? I say nobody. I say nobody. Chad Sowash: Beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, craft beer from those kids at Aspen Tech Labs. Whiskey, we've got a new whiskey sponsor kids. Van Hack. More Canadians. Joel Cheeseman: More Canadians. Chad Sowash: More Canadians. Oh, my God. And then if it's your birthday, you got to have some rum with plum, but you got to go to chadchease.com/free to register for all of the bounty of free stuff. S?: I can feel it all the way down in my plum. Chad Sowash: Yes. And plum is also, plum is also Canadian. Joel Cheeseman: Half Canadian. Chad Sowash: Okay. Sorry. Joel Cheeseman: So, yes. So 2025 birthdays. We're starting the month off right. We got Muir Macdonald. I wonder if he's Scottish. Muir Macdonald. Okay. Zachary Larson, Steve Jule, Cheryl Ford, Rob Art, Mark Katz, Peter Brooks, Mark Becker, Mark Fogel, Keith Sedlick, William Nolan, Nicky Don't Call Me Nipsey Russell, Reggie Martin, Angie Brooks, your girl, Athena Karp, and Peter Zolman, all. Yes. Square up the birthdays from this week. Chad Sowash: Well, and it's getting to the point where, guess what, kids, we're getting ready for events. Now, I've got a special little solo event that's happening in early February, since I'm already over here in Europe. I was asked by Smart Recruiters. They're like, hey, we've got an event. It's just, it's just a little ways to the east in Madrid. Would you like to come? I was like, well, yeah, I'd love to come. So I'm going to be early February at the Smart Recruiters All Hands event. We're also gonna do a simulcast. There's a gala, tons of stuff that that's actually going on. And whatever else they threw out me. So I can't wait to see Rebecca and the crew there. Chad Sowash: Then the first big thing. Conference of the year is at Transform March 17th to the 19th at the Wynn in Las Vegas and I know you love you some Wynn don't you. Joel Cheeseman: I love some Wynn, Steve Wynn my boy. Chad Sowash: That's what we've got going on thus far we'll start solidifying much more of what's going on at those events and then obviously we've got more events throughout the year we'll probably won't do as much as we did last year knock on wood. Joel Cheeseman: But rest assured you'll be sick of us by November of next year. One thing I won't get sick of though Chad... A little bit of a bittersweet moment for me. This is the final leaderboard from the fantasy football with Factory Fix. Big thanks to them. Great guys over there. Chad Sowash: Love those guys. Joel Cheeseman: I feel pretty confident saying that they'll be back next year to sponsor our unhealthy addiction. But this is your final leaderboard. I'm gonna go in reverse and save the champion for last. Chad Sowash: Good call. Good call. Joel Cheeseman: In the last spot, shocker. S?: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's not Scottish it's crop! Joel Cheeseman: Finishing with an unimpressive four and eleven record. Chad Sowash: Wow. Joel Cheeseman: Well, all four, I think he got in the first four weeks, and then his team just went to shit. Chad Sowash: The Jets have more wins. Joel Cheeseman: Adam Gordon finishes in last place, followed by Jen Tharp. Sean Horton. Sean, if we had another 20, 30 weeks, you might have made it up there, buddy. Jackson Dahlquist, Dean Aparro, last year's winner, Christy Lisbon, Laura Martinelli, Keith the Commish Sonderling with a nice push at the end, Dean the Daddy Mac Macrole out of Australia, who was in the number one spot for most of the season. Joel Cheeseman: You took him out. You took him out. You took him out. You took him out back. Chad Sowash: Boom! Joel Cheeseman: Stuck a Foster's in his face. Got him drunk. And he was no good on that last week. Which made you at third place. You get a medal. That's nice. I got second place. Which I'm not ashamed about. But our champion goes to Paradox employee David Stifle. Nice job, David. Homie got 200 plus points in the final week. Everyone he had, I think, had over 18 points, which is really unheard of. But, yeah, that is the final week and probably not the final sound bite of this. Chad Sowash: No, no. Joel Cheeseman: Thanks again to Factory Fix for helping us out. Well, with no further ado. Chad Sowash: Predictions. Joel Cheeseman: Predictions. So we got lots of news, which we'll get to next week. But this is the prediction show everybody. Everybody loves it. Chad, let's recap what we got right and mostly what we got wrong in 2024. Chad Sowash: Well, I'm gonna go ahead and go through yours first. Okay. First and foremost, your first prediction of 2024 was that there would be no IPOs. And I think that was a win. There was no, there was no IPOs out there. Joel Cheeseman: You made fun of me 'cause it was such a layup, but I'll take the win. Chad Sowash: You got on base. You got on base. Joel Cheeseman: Hey, my record hasn't been good. I had to get a W somewhere. Had to get a W somewhere. Chad Sowash: Well, here's another W. No new unicorns. I mean, I actually dug in, didn't see any new unicorns. Obviously, there are plenty that are out there, but ones that did get funding didn't push them to unicorn status if they weren't already there. Joel Cheeseman: Are you teasing me with two wins? SFX: Naughty, naughty, you teasing me. Joel Cheeseman: All right. I had to get one wrong, right? Chad Sowash: There's a lot of bunting happening here. Death of a unicorn, which that was a big swing because most of these unicorns have so much fucking cash from funding. So that was a no. And last but not least, which deserves a big boo, is the Browns won a Super Bowl. So you just took a swing on that one. Joel Cheeseman: There's always next season, Chad. There's always next season. All right, I'll take I'll take two and one or maybe two and two. Chad Sowash: So my first one, my first prediction for 2024 was two acquisitions would happen from some early stage startups 'cause I thought some companies would really want to get in there and buy them before they became too expensive. Number one was CV Wallet and number two was Poetry and neither one of them were acquired. Chad Sowash: Saw some great lift in 2024, but no acquisition there. Secondly, I said Twitter hiring dies, which I'm going to claim a win on because they acquired Lasky in May of 2023, right, Twitter/X. Chris Bake left in August of 2024. And it's basically on its own island of misfit toys at this point. I mean, there's nothing going on. So I'm going to claim a win because... SFX: 60% of the time. It works every time. Chad Sowash: And then last but not least, I predicted a dominant open AI-like player in the space where it was actually more of an open source AI scenario that was HR focused. And literally the closest that I think came to this was Poetry, being start up with Adam Gordon. Still, I don't think I knocked that one out of the park. So that's a no. Joel Cheeseman: Okay, okay. Pretty good, pretty good. Chad Sowash: Not bad, I think I got one, sort of. But you get an honorable mention. And let me tell you why, sir. Let me tell you why. Went back to 2023, and you predicted that Scott Gutz would be out at Monster. Now it took a little bit longer. SFX: Hauck toah. Chad Sowash: But it still happened, it still happened. Scott Gutz, out. Joel Cheeseman: Well, like I say, Chad, there are no wrong predictions, just not enough time to see them happen. Don't fall. SFX: They're not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe. Joel Cheeseman: On that one. All right, that is our 2024 recap. Mostly right, but some misses in there as well. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll get to our guests, a very high profile, oh yes. Very qualified individuals giving us their predictions for 2025. Chad Sowash: Now, let me go ahead and set this up for everybody. So Joel and I are definitely looking to do less work. Joel Cheeseman: But seriously, seriously, it is great to hear all of these different voices that come onto the show. They give us videos, they do a lot of stuff. And I mean, there's just so much engagement with the Chad and Cheese audience. I thought, what the fuck, man, let's do more of this. So reached out to, literally reached out to about 15 different people. And I think we got like eight or nine back, videos. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, that 500. Right. Chad Sowash: Yeah, and that was during like Christmas week, right? So it was a big ask for me and a lot of these guys came through. So thank you so much. Let's go ahead and start rolling some of that beautiful bean footage. Joel Cheeseman: All right, let's first get to Matt Lavery. If you haven't heard our interview with Matt Lavery from I think. Chad Sowash: It's amazing. Joel Cheeseman: September, it's fantastic. Matt is the global director of sourcing, recruiting and onboarding at a little company called UPS. Chad Sowash: Who? Joel Cheeseman: Let's hear Matt's prediction real quick. Matt Lavery: Chad and Joel asked me to make a prediction for 2025 and I'm gonna make it in the hourly entry-level space. I'm gonna quote my fellow Chicago South Sider, Clubber Lang, I predict pain. 'cause winter is coming. And it's coming 'cause we're gonna go mimic what we did during the early days of the pandemic. When you look at that workforce, entry-level hourly workers, three groups make up a large percentage of that workforce. New entries from US first, people who were born in the US 16, 18 years ago. Illegally legal immigration make up the vast majority of that workforce, a large percentage, I should say. Two of those three prongs during the early days of the pandemic were dramatically reduced. Legal immigration was down 400 grand a year. Matt Lavery: Illegal immigration was way down during those two years 'cause of travel restrictions. And the majority of people that come over here, they don't cross the southern border illegally. They come over on planes and they extend their visas. They don't, they don't go back. So with the new administration and what they're planning to do, we can see a repeat of that pretty quickly. We do get a little bit of a reprieve 'cause when you go back in time, look at 2006 to 2008, we averaged about 4.3 million people versus 4.1 the previous five years. But that's gonna be a short-lived thing 'cause what happened in 2009, the Great Recession, it wasn't the kind of recession where you just couldn't buy your kid the GI Joe, the Kung Fu grip. You lost your house. It was bad. Matt Lavery: US births plummeted below 4 million down to 3.6 in 2013, '14. So this could be a really difficult space for a long time. And we're gonna have to get our heads around it 'cause your recruiters, they're not gonna be able to find people. There's not gonna be a woman to blame. You're not gonna be able to find a Mexican cutie 'cause she got deported. Might find your lost shaker of salt. Better put booze in your blender and hope that frozen concoction helps you hang on 'cause I predict pain in the hourly entry-level workspace in 2025. Peace and love to all in 2025 and I'm out. Chad Sowash: My man. Joel Cheeseman: Telling you're Gen X without telling me you're Gen X. Podcast Intro: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: Jeez, Matt, awesome. Chad Sowash: Big props though to Matt, big Notre Dame fan. He's, I believe right now, on his way to the Notre Dame-Penn State game as it is because obviously whoever wins that hopefully will be facing, knock on wood, Ohio State in the finals. Joel Cheeseman: Huge fan. Have you seen his setup? Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: Like inflatable couches. Yeah. Chad Sowash: Tailgate oh yeah. Joel Cheeseman: He's a major fan. Chad Sowash: He is the fan. Joel Cheeseman: I've never wanted an old style so badly. I don't know why that is. I'm a little disappointed there was no over-under on the Cubs wins this season. Maybe he doesn't wanna talk about that, but... Chad Sowash: More than likely. Joel Cheeseman: I think he's, I think he's spot on. Chad Sowash: No question, no question. We talked about this in shows past and it's not just gonna be pain from the standpoint of not being able to find people, but also we talked about immigrants actually push in close to $100 billion in tax revenue into the United States. So this is gonna hit us in many different areas and we just have to realize, as he had said that building a wall's not gonna help. Most of these motherfuckers are coming over on planes and guess what? We need them. We need them. America's the melting pot. We always have been we shouldn't stop. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. The headline I read recently was a Republican civil war. You have Elon and Vivek wanting to up H-1B visas, which certainly makes sense to us, but you also have a Republican party or voter block that put Trump in to not do stuff like that. So it's gonna be tough. It will also, I think, expedite the acceptance of robotics automation because companies are gonna need a way, whether it's kiosk, ordering my Big Mac or something else. Chad Sowash: Gonna have to get fast. Joel Cheeseman: There's gonna be a lot of money pour in to the robotics and replacement... Chad Sowash: It has to happen fast. Joel Cheeseman: Of employees of AI. Well, thanks, Matt. We appreciate that. I mean, come on, you get Penn State. The Domer, if the Domers can't do that, we're in trouble, but there may be a house divided if it's an Ohio State, Notre Dame final. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. All right, let's get to our second guest prediction. This one's from Emi Beredugo If you listen to the show, you know Emi. She's gonna be on quite a bit more often. We're excited about that. She is a senior level recruiter and occasional co-host on this show. Let's see her prediction. Emi Beredugo: Hey, everyone. So here is my crystal ball prediction for 2025. TikTok isn't getting banned in the US. Now, I hear what the Biden administration is saying. They think TikTok is a massive security risk. They think TikTok is going to take personal user information, pass it on to the Chinese government, who will then use it to influence US citizens. Now, is this scary? Yeah, 100% it is. But here comes a plot twist. Enter TikTok's former nemesis, aka Donald TikTok hater turned saviour Trump. Now, this is the same Trump who in 2020 wanted to ban TikTok because China is bad. Well, look at where we are now. Emi Beredugo: His pivot is wild. Trump successfully used TikTok to get to a broader audience during his election campaign. I mean, the guy now has got 14 million TikTok followers and he's calling TikTok a platform for freedom of expression. And that's not it. Trump is convinced that a TikTok ban is going to benefit Meta, a company that he said was the enemy of the people. And look, he's probably right. I'm sure Meta is going to benefit from this. Ban TikTok and the US government is effectively handing a monopoly to Meta's short videos in Instagram and Facebook. But now he's saying delay the ban so he has time to negotiate a solution. Emi Beredugo: Why? Because he's the art of the deal guy. And you know he's already on the case. I mean, just look at how cosy he is with Jeff Yass. Jeff Yass is one of TikTok's parent company investors and he's a Republican Party mega donor. So do I think this has something to do with Trump's U-turn? Yeah, of course I do. I'm obviously questioning Trump's motives, but here's the thing. There are positives to keeping TikTok around in the US. 7 million US businesses, 1 million influencers and billions of dollars depend on this app. Ban TikTok and the economic fallout in the US could be huge. Now, obviously, we all know that Trump's about the economy. Okay, so I'm going to say it again. Emi Beredugo: TikTok is not getting banned in the US in 2025. So mark your calendars, America. In 2025, you're still going to be like me. You're still going to be scrolling at 2:00 AM in the morning, pretending that you're just going to stop after one more video. Now, Okay, I'm looking at the time. Excuse me, people. I've got a TikTok dance to learn. So happy 2025, people. Bye-bye. Chad Sowash: Oh, Emi. Oh, Emi. I agree with her from the stand point... Joel Cheeseman: This one's close to your heart, yeah. Chad Sowash: Yeah, I agree it's not going to go away. There's too much money, but I don't think it has much to do with the economy. I think it has to do with, as she had said, Trump's political leanings because he got money from TikTok investors. So that's what it has to do with. I don't think it has anything to do with economy. He doesn't give two shits about content creators and influencers or anything like that. He just cares about the money. Joel Cheeseman: This is fascinating to me. This was one of the few bipartisan bills that came through in Congress. There aren't many bipartisan bills. And what I've heard is people that are on the committee on this come out of meetings and research, saying that this is incredibly dangerous. But you have on the other side, Donald Trump, who is the self-proclaimed greatest social media character in history, who is part owner of a social media property. And you have Elon Musk, who has X, who would certainly benefit from TikTok being banned. Meta is getting in bed big time with the Trump administration. This is going to be one of the more interesting shows, side shows of the administration. Chad Sowash: Oh God. So many. Joel Cheeseman: I think ultimately it just gets put on the back burner. Court cases get pushed back or whatever. Chad Sowash: Kicked down the road. Joel Cheeseman: The only thing that changes it is if China gets frisky. If China goes into Taiwan, if China does something really militarily dangerous, we could pull the plug. Otherwise, I think it's just going to flounder around and be around and it'll be put on the back burner. So, yeah, I think 2025 TikTok will still be around. I think you should call your boy Jim Durbin, get another bet on the table, get another bottle of Eagle Rare in your cupboard and and roll with that. But yeah, it'll be one of the more interesting stories this year is the TikTok saga, the TikTok saga. Chad Sowash: We're not going to be short of interesting stories, unfortunately. Joel Cheeseman: Love that. Well, at this point, this show is the smartest Emi has ever sounded. But we're going to we're going to get smarter people. Chad Sowash: It's the next let's go. Joel Cheeseman: We are gonna go to Lars Schmidt. He's the founder and CEO of Amplify Talent, an icon in the industry. I think I can say that. And just an all around super nice guy. We'll miss his podcast in the future. But Lars, let's hear what he's got to say. Lars Schmidt: All right. When Chad and cheese reach out for recruiting predictions for 2025, you've got to heed the call. And this is what I think. I think that 2025 will see a return to in-person interviewing. And there's a reason for that. I think most of these predictions are probably gonna be tied up in AI. This has connections to it as well. In this year already, we started to see more companies using AI avatars in recruiting. Companies like Chipotle worked with Paradigm to create a avatar called Avocado. Clever. Yes, I know. And it's used to help candidates prep for interviews. EY is doing the same. Lars Schmidt: And you're going to start to see more companies actually bringing these into their recruiting process. And so as more companies are doing this, candidates are going to do that as well. We're gonna start to see more candidates using AI avatars to be able to interview at scale. And so that doesn't work for anyone. And I think more companies are going to be burned by this. And they're going to say, you know what, we just need to go back to basics, bring these interviews back in-house, human to human conversations and connections. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that in 2025. So hang on. It's going to be a wild year. And I think AI is going to be infusing almost every aspect of how we think about recruiting. This is just one of them. Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. Power to the people. You said Paradigm. I think you meant Paradox. Chad Sowash: Paradox. Joel Cheeseman: Just for our listeners. Yeah. Thoughts on Lars' commentary. Chad Sowash: Yeah, I love it. The thing I don't agree. We're not going back. It's just not going to happen. There's way too much success that's already happening. And we talked to many, many enterprise companies who are already starting to use better processes, automation and AI. So I don't think we're going to go back. Are there going to be some companies from an anecdotal standpoint that have great stories around their human to human interviews at some aspects of their company? I don't think it's going to happen from the top to the bottom. It's going to happen in swaths of jobs. So we're not going back, kids. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. I was talking to a former Indeed exec last year, late last year. And I was talking about just what's the biggest threat to Indeed? What do you see? Is it programmatic? I think we just talked to Apkast's foreman, Chris Foreman, and he said the greatest threat to Indeed is paradox. And I thought that was really, really interesting. And the more I thought about it, I thought he's kind of right. And it may be not paradox directly, but that movement, companies taking over the process. Chad Sowash: We'll get into that with my prediction down the road. Joel Cheeseman: All right. No spoilers, no spoilers. So I do think... Chad Sowash: I agree, though. Joel Cheeseman: Companies are going to go back. Where I do think there's risk is if we got to have a good capture system. We got to have a system where you can't just get blown up with AI job seekers and deal with that kind of flow. So as long as 'cause there's a job seeker side of this and if that gets crazy, we should bring, we'll have JT on many times this year to talk about some of the job seeker stuff. That needs a CAPTCHA system, that needs some sort of controls or else the rails could come off. But I agree. SFX: Like that escalated quickly. Chad Sowash: The money companies are saving, the man hours they're saving, like the efficiency, the black hole going. I mean, yeah, I love Lars and he's a people person to the bone. Chad Sowash: Agreed. Joel Cheeseman: But we are not going back, not going back. That was nice. He's got a better camera than we do too. I don't know. We need one of those big lights or. Chad Sowash: I don't want high def. Are you kidding me? I don't need high def on this. Joel Cheeseman: Hey, Lars, that looks like AI Lars. It's so nice. Chad Sowash: It could have been. Joel Cheeseman: All right, going from Lars, let's go to Rebecca Volpano. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: She's the VP of product marketing at Cielo. Speaking of robots, here's Rebecca. Rebecca Volpano: Hey friends, Rebecca Volpano here with my 2025 prediction. And I think that 2025 is gonna be the year of the robot. And so what I mean by that is I think that we're gonna see an introduction of a robotic workforce, not dissimilar to when RPA was introduced, but much more fun. And I think that it's really gonna make all of our lives quite a bit easier. So I don't think that generative AI is gonna take all of the jobs in HR and recruiting this year. But I do think that we're gonna be introduced to some new robotic friends. And so things that are kinda pushing me in that direction, Salesforce, for example, has launched their agents. LinkedIn has announced that they will be introducing some agentic AI later this year. Olivia, so Paradox is Olivia, has a generative AI capability. And Cielo might be up to something too. Rebecca Volpano: So more to come on that. But I'm definitely optimistic about the introduction of a robotic workforce, because I think who wouldn't want a robot sidekick? When I think about some of the most famous robots who are really kinda helping that main character or that hero, I can't imagine anyone really turning that down. So thinking about R2D2 would be awesome to work alongside. Or if you're familiar with or a fan of the Alien franchise, even some of the scarier Androids, I think I would trust with my inbox. Like Bishop absolutely answers the emails for me. Joel Cheeseman: My mind went to make it Megan Fox. I don't about you not R2D2, that's just me. Rebecca Volpano: And then when I think about some of the warm, fuzzy ones like Baymax in Big Hero 6, who wouldn't wanna be around that robot? So those are some of the examples that I'm looking to to kinda help us and guide us in the robots that we infuse into our HR and TA processes. And obviously, there are some that we'll watch out for as well. But would love to know who you'd love to have as a robot sidekick. And if you wanna chat about any of the other AI predictions or things revolving around HR and TA, please let me know. I'd be more than happy to have that convo. And I hope you all have a really great 2025. Thanks. Joel Cheeseman: The Sydney Sweeney bot coming soon to a Walmart near you. Chad Sowash: Well, you know what? You might as well go ahead and play Sean's because Sean's like butts up right against hers. And then we can just comment on those. Joel Cheeseman: All right little combo action. Chad Sowash: Let's do it. Let's do it. Joel Cheeseman: Chad calls inaudible. Here we go. Sean Behr: Chad and cheese. Great to be with you guys for your 2025 prediction show. I'm honored. And I promise you that we will have a beer sometime in our future and do another show together. But thanks for all the help. You guys have always educated the industry and keep us laughing and having fun even when things are stressful. As for 2025 predictions, I've got one or two here that I'd love to throw out for you. So the first is, I think 2025 is gonna be a year where the old rules finally die. I don't wanna say put the nail in the coffin. But I think we're gonna see some of that. So the first thing I'll say is I think you'll see about 20% of the Fortune 500 move to fully autonomous AI hiring, which sounds crazy. You know, a couple of years ago, we were super worried about AI and bias and all kinda things. I think you're gonna see 20% of companies in America start hiring frontline workers completely using AI. They're gonna use AI to source workers on different places. They're gonna match them, screen them, onboard them, get them started. Sean Behr: There's gonna be a lot of worry about what does that do? How does it work? And I think we're gonna see tremendous results. We're gonna see higher satisfaction from workers as we're able to find the right opportunity for them. They're gonna show up happier. They're gonna work harder. They're gonna feel better. They're gonna stay longer. They're gonna be more productive and companies are gonna be more profitable. So I think you're gonna see 20% of companies embrace a fully autonomous AI hiring cycle, at least with the frontline worker. I don't know about for all workers everywhere, but, you know, at Fountain, we're obviously exclusively focused on these frontline workers. Sean Behr: So AI hiring comes alive in a big way and you're gonna see the biggest companies in America start to do that, even though we are wondering, hey, how quickly are they gonna adjust to this? I think they're gonna move pretty fast. The second one I'll say is breaking the old rules is the old schedule, right? The other idea of like, hey, we're gonna come in, you're gonna be here from eight to four, eight to two, something like that. I think you're gonna see companies start to experiment with micro shifts. What do I mean? I mean, giving workers really, really bite sized opportunities to work. Maybe it's a two hour shift. Maybe it's a three hour shift. Maybe I can work from seven to nine because that's what works for my schedule. Sean Behr: And so I think you're gonna see some of that as well. You're gonna see this breaking of the rule of moving from a place where I have to show up for four hours that whole time. You're gonna see people show up for two hours, three hours, again, using AI to schedule all of this, but really matching supply and demand in an incredible way for workers and for companies. So anyway, those are my 2025 productions. Let's see how I do. Joel Cheeseman: That was Sean Behr, CEO and founder at Fountain. I'm sensing a theme here in our predictions, Chad. Take a side, the robots or the humans? Chad Sowash: Well, in 20% fully autonomous hiring, I think. Joel Cheeseman: That's bold. Chad Sowash: But I think it can happen, especially if you take a look at Fountain, Paradox and Harry. Those are like new age, you know. Tech stack platforms, applicant tracking systems, chatbots, so on and so forth. So, I mean, I think 20%, to be quite frank, within the realm of companies that are actually using those three platforms, I think 20% is low when it comes to those three platforms, because I think most of those companies are really going to press what they can do because they're going to want to get people in faster, want to be more competitive, and want to save a hell of a lot of money. And they'll be able to do that through automation. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. And Sean's probably speaking his book a little bit. His product. Chad Sowash: Of course. Of course. Joel Cheeseman: But he also has the numbers. He also sees what's going on more so than we do. So I think what was interesting there is you had sort of two different layers of it. You had Rebecca talking about literal robots. Things that lift boxes and pick out products and put them on conveyor. Like that is one level of the automation. The automation Sean's talking about is the hiring and the scheduling and the flexibility there. So, you have automation on two sides of that, which kind of are coming together. But I think he's right on and we'll get to JT her prediction. I don't want to spoil that, but... Chad Sowash: Let's do it. Joel Cheeseman: A lot of those frontline workers, you know, they don't have resumes. They don't have a LinkedIn profile. They don't have like a tradition. They're not going to mail their resume into the company like we did way back in the day. So, like this way of hiring people works for this demographic. So, if the market is going to decide where this goes, the market is saying, we want to chat. We want to have something that is frictionless or as frictionless as possible. And that's where we're going. So, yeah, I love Sean and love that his transparency on coming on the show. And we will definitely take you up on those beers at a conference near you. Joel Cheeseman: All right, let's get to Tim Meehan's prediction. Tim is the principal at Talent River Consulting and an old white guy like us. So, he's got to say something smart. Chad Sowash: Been in the game for a minute. Tim Meehan: All right, guys, I have two predictions for 2025 and perhaps in a change from the other themes here. Mine aren't these positive hoity-toity things. The first is that next year we'll continue to treat our candidates like shit. They'll continue to make hundreds of applications to companies and they won't hear back. They won't know why and they'll become incredibly depressed. The second prediction is that talent acquisition leaders will continue to be wholly unqualified, unable, and lacking the skills to make the business case for change to their CEO. Which is the only reason a company will continue to treat their consumers, their customers, their candidates like shit 'cause the CEO doesn't understand the math, but it is destroying their brand. Chad Sowash: Boom. Joel Cheeseman: Jeez, Tim. Chad Sowash: Yeah. So, hey. Joel Cheeseman: Cold war. Chad Sowash: I love, I love, I love. So, first and foremost, Candidate Experience, again, I think Tim is right from the standpoint of the macro, but from the micro, again, I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to keep beating the drum on Fountain, Paradox, and Harry. Any companies that are using them right now, they're being incredibly innovative and aggressive. And they are, and that's around candidate experience 'cause they're looking for speed 'cause we all know speed kills, right? So they're looking for speed. And then they're also looking to, and we've talked to these people, Joel, and this is the fun part. Chad Sowash: Don't worry, kids, it's going to be coming out. New AI sessions season. But we talk to companies that are enterprise companies who are saying, no, I don't just have a seat at the table. My seat is fucking warm because I am demonstrating business cases that nobody else in my organization can demonstrate. This is kicking ass and taking names. So these new technologies aren't just making it easier and better and more cost-effective, but they're creating business cases that are allowing our CHROs and our chief of talent or people to actually get at the table and own that fucking seat. And I love it. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. I think where he's right is there is still a situation of haves and have-nots. And the companies that we talk to are brand name companies. They're the companies that you shop for at Christmas and they're companies you see commercials for and have money and sort of the resources to do this. 80% of businesses are still small businesses. Joel Cheeseman: And that's kind of a lot of the hiring and where that goes on. I don't know at what point the Harrys and the Paradoxes cross over into smaller businesses. I don't know if they ever will. Maybe there are other solutions that'll adhere to small business to give them these tools. But I'm telling you that the Subway franchisee down the street, who I know pretty intimately, does not have any concept of what's going on with this stuff. So, it'll take time. But for the first time in our careers, we're on the right track of job seekers, candidates getting treated like people, oddly through technology, and companies being able to handle the flood of candidates, oddly enough through technology. Technology is making us more human, which is the point we've been making for a long time. So, Tim, thanks for your honesty. Brutal honesty, if you will. Chad Sowash: Love it. Joel Cheeseman: All right. We're rolling through these. Let's go to JT O'Donnell, one of my favorite guests on the show. She keeps it real. She fights for the job seeker. Chad Sowash: Yeah. I love it. Joel Cheeseman: Let's hear her side of the predictions. J.T. O'Donnel: My prediction for 2025 is the death of the resume and I am here for it. And before you come at me and say, Oh, people have said that before, I'm gonna tell you why it's really gonna happen in 2025. First of all, put your hand up if you're a recruiter in talent acquisition and you have seen a massive increase in these so-called perfect resumes. The ones that the job seekers are using AI to make them an exact match to your job description so they can try to get through your ATS system only for you to call them up and find out they're nothing what they said they are on paper. Yeah, those folks. Are you sick of them? Of course you are. Secondly, have you ever sat around and looked at 100 resumes in a row? You can't see straight when you're done and you can't make sense of them. J.T. O'Donnel: The death of the resume is here. What's gonna replace it? Video. And before you come at me with that, hear me out again. See, video is a way for them to authenticate themselves for you. Ever heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words? It's true. When you look at a picture, you can interpret a lot more. Video is worth a million. And before you say to me, I'm not gonna sit and listen to 100 videos. You're wrong. You do it all the time. It's called social media. That is why we are able to watch and go through at a much faster rate. Now, there will be AI tools that will read and listen and comprehend those videos and match people based on the depth of information that they shared. Think about that. You put together a job description. You put together the info and the skills that you're looking for, and it goes out and listens to videos for you and brings back the people that are saying the things that you need to hear so that you can watch and validate it and authenticate it. And now what have you done? The first interview. This is gonna hyper speed the recruitment process. J.T. O'Donnel: It is here. It is coming. So goodbye, resume. Hello, video. You'll thank me later. Joel Cheeseman: She's doing a brewing company, sweat pair, sweatpants... She's gonna fit in great on the show. She's gonna fit in great. Some brewings, I don't even own a pair of beer brewing sweatpants. Nicely done. Nicely done. Chad Sowash: It's 'cause they don't come in your size. Joel Cheeseman: That's just mean. I thought this was a brand new Chad in 2025. Come on now. I have fat pants. They're just not brewing. All right, man, here we go. Death of the resume again. Chad Sowash: Been talking about it. Joel Cheeseman: Every year. What you got? Chad Sowash: I think it's interesting that she goes to video and I think that there is a new opportunity with the video, especially being able to transcribe and then also start to get into contextualization context, clues, tone. They're gonna be different things. Video is not gonna be the only thing. There's gonna have to be a screening process up front with verification validation kind of pieces, which will take care of that. And then the next part of it, the video part, you won't have to worry too much about verification validation. That's already gonna be taken care of, but you'll be able to look at those other things, context, clues, tone, verification, context, clues that are for cultural fit. So anyway, I like it. We'll see if it happens. Joel Cheeseman: So literally we've had this conversation for 25 years, death of the resume, and you and I are old enough to remember visual CV and social media tools and like the death of the resume, and it's still here. So I'm not exactly prepared to bury the resume. I think JT, is living in like 2052 or something where they have beer, sweatpants readily available for everybody. But I am willing to say that we are seeing a splintering of the resume. It used to be resume was the only way that you could get in the door job seeker. Joel Cheeseman: That was the only way or fill out this application. And the pendulum is swinging to where companies have to go and communicate with the job seeker on their terms. So when you talk about factory workers, essential workers, frontline workers, they don't have a LinkedIn profile. The job case of like we're for LinkedIn for people who don't have LinkedIn, employers have to meet those folks where they live, how they communicate, how they use technology. Joel Cheeseman: And because of that, we're seeing tools like Paradox, Harry and others that we've talked about. So I do think there's an element of companies evolving to appeal to candidates on their terms as opposed to the company saying, Hey, the only way that you can apply to this thing is fill out this application or give us this resume. I still think that people are gonna have profiles. I'm still telling my 18 year old, you're gonna have to have a LinkedIn profile. I don't think that's gonna go anywhere, but LinkedIn is now more than that. They have video, they have short video, which no JT, is also very bullish on. Joel Cheeseman: So we're seeing a splintering of what it means to connect with candidates. I don't think it's the death of the resume, but I'm willing to say that it is a splintering of how things have been for a very, very long time. Chad Sowash: A smothering... Joel Cheeseman: A smothering and a splintering and a break in the action. When we come back, we'll get to our predictions for 2025. All right. All right. Real quickly here. We've got two predictions each. I'm gonna go first. My first prediction for 2025, Rippling goes IPO. So the battle between Rippling and Deel finally comes to a head in 2025 with Rippling jumping into the public market. First founded in 2016, they've raised $2 billion. So they're heading into year 10 of this journey investors, I think they're gonna start wanting some liquidity. So I think the IPO market also starts to loosen up. I think you're gonna see more companies come to the IPO markets on their last round. They had a valuation of $13 billion. Joel Cheeseman: I gotta think it's up to like 15 billion this point, which is pretty digestible by the markets. In April of last year, tech crunch asked founder Parker Conrad, who's still a jackass, but anyway, they asked him about the IPO to which he replied, "I definitely think it's a bit in the distance." This was an April which means that's laden for 2025. We're going public. I think that distance is closing quickly. I think Deel has a little more, they have a little more runway to not go public. I think Rippling has less runway to do that. So prediction number one, Rippling goes IPO and I'm excited to see a company well-known in our space finally go public and see how that goes. We thought it would be an ATS. I think it's gonna be a platform to rule them all. And it will be fun to watch your thoughts. Chad Sowash: Yeah. I think Parker Conrad's an asshole. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Other than that, I don't know if it's gonna 2025, 2026, but they're definitely gonna have to, they've taken over a billion in funding. So I think they have the runway. Will Deel beat them there? I don't know. I think they're pretty much. They're in a great position right now with their... Like 500 million plus ARR or what have you. So yeah, that will be exciting to watch. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. 2 billion. They're too big to acquire. They have to go. Chad Sowash: You're right. I'm just not sure if it'll be this year. Joel Cheeseman: Either way we can agree on Parker Conrad. SFX: You dumbass. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: By the way, he's still welcome on the show whenever he wants to come on. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. I'd love it. I'd love it. Joel Cheeseman: All right, Chad, what you got? Chad Sowash: So prediction number one, the Dam is gonna burst in 2025. That's right. Money will be flowing. Prediction number one, European startups will see funding that will increase 3x year over year in 2025, which gets us back to 2022 levels. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: So this from eu-startup.com as part of the step up startup project, the European commission are working toward fixing regulatory inconsistencies funding gaps and limited cross border cooperation throughout the EU. They're also building an interconnected startup network leveraging strengths of local ecosystems. To shorten it up, they are working because they understand that the startups are what's going to fuel their future. So Europe, mainly in the EU in this case are focused on helping startups in countries throughout the EU, just to become more straightforward from a standard standpoint. So what's going to be the driving force to push funding dollars to Europe? You might ask well Matt answered half of it. Chad Sowash: It's gonna be pain and chaos. Pain and chaos is coming to the United States. Immigration? That's our superpower. That might not be our superpower. Trying to bully sovereign countries like Canada, Greenland, Panama for the Panama Canal. That breeds chaos. That breeds pain for Americans. And the new freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater with the newest Facebook news amplify the chaos itself. And what do investors hate? They hate pain and they hate fucking chaos. So investors want a smooth ride as smooth as they can muster with a startup. So face it, there's already enough risk investing in a startup. Chad Sowash: So why enhance that risk without actual reward? Nope. That's dumb. Which is why many investors will start to see what you and I have been experiencing for years now. European startups are pretty damn innovative. And as America turns into a broligarchy where billionaires and bigger companies are just gonna stamp out the little guy it's going to be... My prediction. We're gonna see funding in Europe for Europe startups, 3X year over year in 2025. Joel Cheeseman: That's sexy. SFX: Yi papi. Joel Cheeseman: Broligarchy is a... Chad Sowash: Broligarchy. Joel Cheeseman: I like. I like that. Shocking you would have a European prediction now that you're full on native over in Europe. Chad Sowash: Europe Chad... Joel Cheeseman: I like that. And it'll be interesting to see, so much of the European money is from America. So we'll see how that flows. It used to be a time where Trump would say something about... Chad Sowash: I see more. Joel Cheeseman: A company and that stock would tank and people were freaked out. I don't know if they have a similar freak out. He seems to be going after countries now more than he does companies. But yeah... Chad Sowash: It's chaos. Joel Cheeseman: Buckle up, buckle up, kids. Chad Sowash: Chaos 2020. Joel Cheeseman: Trump is gonna be, jeez, interesting. All right, I like it, I like it. Let's go to mine. My next prediction is I'm gonna be at Chipotle a whole lot. SFX: Oh my God, I love Chipotle. Joel Cheeseman: Oh, sorry, that's from a different show. Let's go to my real prediction. ZipRecruiter goes private. ZipRecruiter goes private. We don't have the full numbers yet, but from 2022 to 2023, net income at Zip was down from 61 million to 49 million. And I'm guessing it's gonna be lower in '24 when they talk in February about their numbers from the last quarter this year. Total revenue in that time went from 904 million to 645 million. Free cash flow from '22 to '23 went from 21 million to 9 million. That's a lot lower than 21 million. The company went public in 2021, which was fun to watch. They closed on the first day at $26 a share. They're currently now trading under $7... So unless Recruit Holdings comes in and adds them as a third leg to the Indeed, Glassdoor triad. Chad Sowash: Possibility. Joel Cheeseman: I'm predicting they go public. I think there's a better chance that Apollo or someone like them comes in. Maybe it's CareerBuilder plus Monster plus Zip. In 2025, the new brand will be as creative as that and they'll create efficiencies. They'll fire Ian finally, which you'll enjoy. And they'll... Chad Sowash: Be too late... Joel Cheeseman: Go private. Look, Zip is a steaming pile of dog shit sprinkled with cat turds and something's got to save it. Either an acquisition or private, but they can't keep going on the road that they're going. And in 2025, they either get a sugar daddy or a life raft. Chad Sowash: I agree. I still can't believe because at one time they were on the right track. And again, it just seems like IPO threw them just out of whack and they've literally, they've lost their way. And I have no clue why Ian's still there. Joel Cheeseman: They lost the beef, man. SFX: Ma! The meatloaf! Chad Sowash: The meatloaf. SFX: Fuck. Chad Sowash: Good one. That was a very good one. Joel Cheeseman: Thank you. Chad Sowash: I'm gonna have to agree with that one too. Zip going private. My second prediction, this one kids, get ready to take notes. Performance driven, AKA, programmatic ad spending goes flat or drops in 2025. So I'm gonna use AppCast as a guide as they are definitely a market leader. I'm not picking on them, but they are a great example. Lemme line it out for you. So at one time AppCast ran nearly the entire programmatic job market for all of the recruitment ad agencies. Then we saw KRT was acquired by Recruitix. So KRT ejects from AppCast and so does their money. Chad Sowash: Ratency acquires Peringo, Ratency's out. But that's okay because AppCast still had plenty of other recruitment ad agencies that they could partner with. And then out of nowhere, AppCast buys Bayard Advertising and becomes a direct competitor with all of those remaining agencies using the AppCast platform. And then this week we see more diversification as Shaker acquires JobAdX. I believe Shaker's move is the epitome of what the rest of the market will be doing in moving away from AppCast to gain better margins and prices for their customers and not feed the beast and or one of their competitors. So a much bigger problem that they have, and we just heard from Matt Lavery, as we talked about on many episodes this year, companies like UPS and General Motors are using more advanced systems like Fountain and Paradox. And those companies are depending less and less on candidates from external vendors like AppCast. Why? Because those companies are reconfiguring their tech stacks and processes to re-engage candidates that they have already bought and already reside in their applicant tracking system. Chad Sowash: So here's an example. UPS hired over 125,000 people in just five weeks last year. Over 30,000 of those hires came directly out of their applicant tracking system, which means they didn't have to go external and spend additional cash. They already had talent in their database, so they used it. Furthermore, UPS had 35,000 additional hires who were former employees. That's over 65,000 of the 125 of those hires that happened without external help. And that is only the beginning, kids. Last year, we interviewed major enterprise hiring companies who are already flocking to this type of tech and process. And as Chris Foreman said in an interview we published earlier this week, AppCast's sweet spot is enterprise. Chad Sowash: That's because performance-driven ad buying is mostly enterprise companies. So quick recap. Recruitment ad agencies will deliver lower costs and more competitive pricing solutions for their customers. That's what we're gonna see out of Shaker, obviously. But return on less budget. Great returns, less budget. Chad Sowash: Number two, enterprise companies are starting to hire through their own databases, which means less dependency on external performance vendors. And last but not least, hadn't mentioned this yet, but neither TotalJobs or StepStone, both AppCast sibling companies, neither have fully embraced performance. And they're continuing to milk the duration-based market dry, which one of these days I think is gonna be a great case study along with Monster and CareerBuilder for innovators dilemma. But wrapping this up, I'm not picking on AppCast, but they are a market leader, and I believe that this is a microcosm of the performance-based job ad spending market. So in 2025, my prediction is, I believe we will see job openings continue to grow and programmatic revenues either flat or drop. SFX: You're not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe. Joel Cheeseman: And I would add, employers are wising up. The consumer is getting smarter. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: We've talked about job postings as commodities for a long time, and programmatic is the quintessential run to the bottom. It's more of a feature, I think, for most than not. The value was that there were so few of them, and I'm sad that Shaker bought them, 'cause that might have been a prediction that I would have had, is that somebody, an agency was gotten into the game. JobAdX is one of the few that are left. These are gonna be features. Look, I think a lot of companies have figured out if I'm on LinkedIn, and indeed, I'm covering 80% of the market, and this whole programmatic thing, I don't know. Joel Cheeseman: It's kind of a black box. It's sort of mysterious. I don't know if I need it or not. The experience sucks. Go to CareerBuilder and search for a job. It's all AppCast stuff. It redirects you everywhere. You have to register for everything. Job seekers have wised up. They know I'm gonna go right to the company site. This is where job boards are sending me anyway. I'm gonna figure out where that is. I think Google for Jobs has helped get people directly to company websites or get them to Indeed or LinkedIn, where they already have an account and they already trust sort of the experience. So yeah, I think that programmatic probably peaked with AppCast's acquisition of StepStone. But yeah, I like it. I like it. Chad Sowash: All right... Joel Cheeseman: I normally end the show with a dad joke, Chad, but what could be better than a dad joke? Chad Sowash: Stephen McGrath. Joel Cheeseman: Obviously, hearing from our favorite Scott. SFX: Welcome to All Things Scottish. Our slogan is, if it's not Scottish, it's crap. Joel Cheeseman: That's right. Stephen McGrath, our favorite Scott. He's the product experience manager at Poetry. The dude spends way too much time in the shower. If you follow him on LinkedIn, you know this. But let's hear Stephen's prediction to end 2025. [music] Stephen McGrath: Hi, I'm Stephen McGrath, the Chad and Cheese podcast, favorite Scotsman for three years in a row. A relationship built on nothing creepy and a very mutual appreciation for each other. Joel Cheeseman: Yes. Stephen McGrath: So my prediction for 2025 is simple. '24 saw the rise and implosion of AI into businesses. We have tools that are promising to revolutionize the recruitment process through that. But where it becomes really interesting for me is the companies that are going to implement co-pilot like tools into every area of their business. What does that mean? And I think it probably means that your company is going to know more about you than it ever has done before. And that's gonna affect things potentially, like bonus potential. It's gonna affect things like promotions possibly. It might even go all the way up to affecting how you exit a business and maybe even the reasons why. Those things that you thought were maybe incompetence now, if the co-pilot is running through that organization, it might have access to things and pick up on things. Stephen McGrath: And I think we might even start to see some lawsuits or things like that off the back of that as well which could be quite interesting. That might be a fairly doom and gloom one, but it's interesting to know that we might go back to the world where an employee is watched more than they ever have been and judged as a result of that as well. Joel Cheeseman: And we now know way more about Steven than we ever wanted to know. He's apparently a possible loofah guy, a loofah user. Who knew? Who knew? Man, keep drinking that chicken cock, baby. I like what you're dropping. Chad Sowash: I was wondering how his skin got so soft. And now we know, now we know. Joel Cheeseman: This business is about the people, man. I say this at every conference, everywhere we go, it's all the tech comes and goes, the company's come and go, but the people stay. Chad, happy new year. Here's to a great 2025. Thanks to our guest predictors. We'll see how they did in 2026 when we get together. Until then, we out. Chad Sowash: We out. Podcast Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast. The Chad. The Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar. Blue. Nacho. Pepper Jack. Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.

In this episode, we sit down with Chris Forman, founder of Appcast and the guy who apparently figured out how to keep his sanity while building a recruitment tech juggernaut. Spoiler alert: it involved avoiding the startup graveyard of “too many ideas, not enough sense.” We cover—Appcast’s humble beginnings as the industry's "rail builder," its glow-up via Stepstone’s acquisition (with "Daddy Warbucks" Axel Springer footing the bill), and the drama of the Bayard acquisition. Was buying Bayard a stroke of genius, or a Hail Mary pass to make Stepstone’s IPO look pretty? Chris tells us what’s what—and might even admit to annoying a few agency partners along the way. But it’s not all corporate chess. We dive into why the recruitment industry still struggles with the basics. (Seriously, why are we still overcomplicating “Does this candidate actually meet the job requirements?” with PhD-level nonsense?) Plus, Chris weighs in on why recruitment tech leaders might be facing their own "Blockbuster vs. Netflix" moment. Oh, and there’s a listener question that hits the nail on the head: What even IS Appcast?  An agency? A media company? A tech wizard wearing a recruitment cape? Chris dishes out the real talk on why Appcast is breaking the mold—and maybe some budgets—while shaking up the recruitment industry. Expect snark, surprises, and maybe a cheese joke or two (because apparently, Chris has a thing for dairy farms). This episode is perfect for HR pros, tech geeks, and anyone who loves hearing founders spill the tea on the behind-the-scenes chaos. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, my co-pilot, Chad Sowash is in the house, as we welcome Chris Forman, founder and current/outgoing CEO of Appcast. Chris, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad: It's the only way he'd come on the show. Joel: Yeah. He's going out in a blaze of incompetence on coming on our show. [chuckle] Chris Forman: No, guys. As I consider all the things that have happened in my career, I realize that there was a giant puzzle piece missing. Joel: A void. [chuckle] Chris Forman: And before, there was an emptiness. And so before I step away, I had to make sure that I checked all the boxes and... Chad: There's a hole in his heart. Joel: As he is laying on his bed of cash, he's thinking, "What does my life need?" [laughter] Joel: What am I missing in my life?" A little Chad and Cheese time. Chad: "I don't have enough idiots in my life. I need some Chad and Cheese." Joel: Well, Chris, some of our listeners will not know you, may not even know Appcast. Give us the elevator pitch on you and the business before we get into the Q&A. Chris Forman: Yeah. My name is Chris. I've been married to Angela for 31 years. We live on a dairy farm in upstate New Hampshire. Yep. Yep. Cows. And we have Guernsey cows, which, the cows right here, my grandfather raised them in Northern Ireland. And, let's see here, what else? We got four kids, two married, I'm a grandfather. We got two boys in the army. We got one 16-year-old left at home, and she's fantastic. And, life is good. We moved to New Hampshire 31 years ago because I married up. Angela is way smarter than me. She... Chad: Join the club, my friend. Joel: Yep. Exactly. Chris Forman: Went to Dartmouth Medical School, which is now called the Geisel School of Medicine. Do you know who Dr. Geisel was? Chad: No. Chris Forman: Dr. Seuss. He went to Dartmouth. Chad: Oh, stop it. Joel: What? Chris Forman: Yeah, Dr. Seuss. And so when he died, his wife... Do you know what it cost to get a school name at Dartmouth named after you? Joel: No. Chris Forman: $250 million. Joel: Oh my... Chris Forman: So anyway, it's now the Geisel School of Medicine. And when we moved up here, pizza was still ethnic food. So, I was like, "Babe, I love you. We're gonna be here for four years in one day." And that was 31 years ago. And now Angela is making cheese and keeping people healthy and... Joel: When does the Forman Library open up at Dartmouth? Is that... Chris Forman: Oh my God, no. [laughter] Joel: Now that we know the price tag. Chad: You missed the big one. He made the connection between smartness in our audience with Dr. Seuss. Joel: There you go. Chad: He's already threading the needle. S?: You're not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe. Chad: What's your favorite cheese? You guys make cheese? What's... Chris Forman: Yeah. So just to be clear, Angela's the farmer and she's the cheesemaker. She makes ricotta. Angela's family is Italian. So if you think about an Irish guy and an Italian, the fights are fantastic, there's all sorts of sparks flying in the air. S?: I'm happy. [laughter] Chris Forman: Cheese update. So she makes ricotta, also makes cannoli, unbelievable cannoli. And my job... Joel: Oh. S?: That's winning. Chris Forman: Yes, winning. Is I go and I sell this stuff at the farmers' market. Joel: Oh, nice. Chris Forman: So for the last couple of years, you couldn't get me on Thursday afternoon... Joel: Do you have a pair of overalls? Chris Forman: No, no, but I can dress it up. Joel: The CEO of Appcast at a farmers' market selling cheese. Chris Forman: Yeah, yeah. It's great. I'm good at it, man. Chad: Dude, he's in New Hampshire. That's all upscale shit there. It's all upscale. Chris Forman: I'm good at it. Joel: That's true. New Hampshire. Well, give us a bit on Appcast. Chris Forman: I will. But here's one thing. The jobs marketplace... If you're in jobs marketplaces like the jobs business, it's been a tough couple of years, guys. If Appcast and Angela's compounded annual growth rate over cheese sales, I probably wouldn't be retiring. And, there you go. Then maybe we would be doing the library at Dartmouth. Appcast. Appcast is the fourth business in recruiting technology that I've been a part of. It's been a fun one. Founded in 2014, investment thesis was pretty simple. Pay for performance job ads are awesome, unless they're not awesome. Meaning that it's easy to buy a posting that's a duration-based ad, and you give 300 bucks or 500 bucks or a thousand bucks and you get what you get, don't be upset. Chris Forman: With pay for performance, if you don't manage your campaigns and how much you spend, everything can run away, you get a whole ton of applicants that are on easy-to-fill jobs, none on the hard-to-fill jobs, you throw your budget into a trash can and light it on fire. So we decided to build software that made it easy for recruitment marketers to buy and manage performance job ads. And one of the amazing proof points of occasionally blind squirrel finds nut, the business didn't pivot, it's doing the same thing that it has done for a decade, just at a bigger scale, so now we're just over 500 people. And by objective measures, we buy more job ads and optimize more job ads than anyone else in the world. Joel: Are you on other places than job sites or, are you on association sites and news sites and that sort of proprietary information, that's your secret sauce? Chris Forman: Well, it's actually, it's not the... Everybody thinks it's the sites that are proprietary, it's not. This is a funny story. Two years ago, our head of marketing, Heather Salerno came to me and said, "We've been telling people for a long time that our job ads get distributed to 10,000 different sites. Have we checked that lately to make sure that it's true?" And I'm like, "So Heather, are you saying I'm full of shit?" And she's like, "No, no, but sometimes you're expansive." Chad: But kind of. But kind of. Yeah. Chris Forman: "So can we check it out?" We ran the data, and this was in 2022. We found out that we ended up getting job ad traffic from 31,000 different places that year. Chad: Wow. Crazy. Chris Forman: And we didn't even know it because there's something interesting about the job's ecosystem is, is it tends to be relatively incestuous, like job ads go in lots of... Yeah, yeah, go to different places. Joel: No shit. [laughter] Chris Forman: So yeah. But besides the traditional job marketplaces that we all know and love, there's lots of association sites, but also search, social, so this, the software is smart enough to know that when you've tapped out at a particular level, you can't get more of the type of person that you need, then you start to incrementally go to channels that are more expensive or... So here's... You guys wanna know the secret of why all this stuff really works? It's not the distribution list. Chad: Sure. Chris Forman: All right. We track... This is roughly right. It's got an 8 in front of it. Over 80% of the job ads that we buy for employers, we track not just to the apply, but to the hire. And so that signal... So, somebody clicks on a job... We have no idea who the applicants are. Somebody clicks on a job, they go to an applicant tracking system, they apply, we put a tracking code into the ATS, we get that tracking code back, and all that it tells us is candidate is dequeued, candidate is still in the process. Rockstar. And we actually can have it, give us seven different statuses if we wanted them. But it's a... That simple concept is hard to do, but it's a water filter. So when you're hiking, I... Angela and I like to go hike in the White Mountains. There's some long hikes. Joel: What's hiking? Sorry. What's hiking? Chris Forman: Yes, I know, it's heavy pack uphill. Joel: Is that like a quick walk up a hill? Yeah. Chris Forman: When you run into real hikers, they actually say, "Oh, you're going for a walk." And that typically means you're walking 30 miles up 10,000 feet of elevation. But there are places where you run out of water and so you gotta pull water out of a stream and you don't wanna do that. Giardia is no fun. And so you have a water filter that just pulls the water on out. Joel: Yeah. Chris Forman: It is so distilling, because here's the deal in the job ad world, almost every job ad click gets bought by somebody. Okay. The game is buying the right ones. There's that old saw that if you're at a poker table and you don't know who the mark is, it's you. So, in essence what the software that the folks have built is really good at making sure that our clients buy the right traffic and then let others buy the other stuff. Chad: We'll start thinking more forward-thinking in a minute. Chris Forman: Yes. Chad: But I wanna talk about, I think it's important that we take a look at how you started the company and then go to market. 'Cause... Chris Forman: Sure. Chad: As we talk to startups and other companies that are out there, they have huge missteps where you guys created the rails for ad agencies to be able to get into this market. So, what was the whole thought process behind that? Because you could have gone direct. You are now, but you could have gone direct at that point, direct to brand, but you didn't. You were like, "Look, we know that there's already infrastructure that's out there, they're called recruitment ad agencies." Right? Then you built the rails for them. Talk about that a little bit from a go-to-market standpoint and why that made so much sense, 'cause obviously it worked. Chris Forman: Yeah. A lot of times when folks talk to entrepreneurs and they think about why companies are successful, the conventional wisdom is, oh, it's the team. You get the right people in the room and all of a sudden everything happens. Chad: You're gonna say dumb luck. You're gonna say dumb luck, I can hear it. [laughter] Chris Forman: No, no, I'm not, but for me that was clearly the case. But if you take a look at the data, timing. If Appcast was founded a year earlier, or a year later, I don't think we would've been as successful as we happened to be. There was this perfect storm of the rise of pay for performance advertising, as well as the desire within the recruitment advertising world to create more fragmentation. So, if you're an advertising agency and all that you do is you buy one thing for your clients, what's your value? If that's all that you do is you are like, "I just go and I buy this, like this one box," and give you the box, clients are like, "Well, okay, well, maybe I can do that by myself." In advertising agencies, it's actually you get rewarded by bringing new ideas, as well as bringing, I guess to use the investing metaphor, a balanced portfolio. You're not putting all your stuff into one stock. And there was this, one of the things that happened when pay for performance came along is it led to this incredible explosion of job sites that were buying and selling traffic from each other. Chris Forman: And so, they were looking for a solution that would allow them to create higher value products for their customers. And for us, we had this thesis, but it was to build scale, it was a chicken and an egg. You needed money in the system for job sites to wanna integrate and play ball. And you also, to get money in the system, you needed job sites to play ball. And so, it was fairly logical from a startup standpoint, "Okay, we build something, let's go find folks that have a lot of money to spend whose interest are aligned with ours, and were interested in helping us build it." And that's what happened. And so, it made sense. But besides ad agencies, there's been a series of companies over time that adopted programmatic that were transformative. The gig companies came on in. First it was ad agencies, then gig companies, and then all of a sudden you got into e-commerce supply chain. As soon as COVID hit and all, everybody needed to buy stuff in boxes, all that money flowed. And it's interesting, almost at each time, one was starting to wane, the other one would pick up. And so, it was an interesting kind of bridge. Joel: Why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is, I think is what he's saying. Chris Forman: There you go. [chuckle] Chris Forman: Yeah. Podcast Intro: I'm just curious, Chad and I talk critically about job boards fairly frequently on the show. One of us made more than the other. I'm curious, what's your take on the state of the job board business? Chris Forman: Well, before I came up to the Upper Valley... Joel: He's choosing his words wisely, I can tell. [chuckle] Chris Forman: No, I'm gonna... This is an old Forman saw. I was a journalist on Capitol Hill. And the first press conference that I went to, I stayed up all night, I thought up my questions, it was just some podunk congressman's press secretary giving a briefing. Joel: Yep. Chris Forman: And I asked the question, she looked right at me and said, "That's a great question," and then proceeded to answer the question she wanted to answer, not the one that was asked. So, let's take a look at this through a couple of lenses. One, the state of the job board industry is it's been a tough couple of years in marketplaces. If you take a look at the publicly available data from publicly traded companies that are in this space, the hangover from the COVID go-go years is real. Whenever there's a retrenchment like that, the good idea fairy gets kicked out of the office and everybody gets back to work. And so, I think what you've seen over the last couple of years is a re-focusing on really figuring out what drives value for clients and doing a lot of that. You've seen big companies in this space decide to go do something and then pull it back or change it. And a lot of that is because it's like, "Hey, these aren't the go-go years where we can expect to grow 20% every year on the top line. We need to make sure that we take care of our customers. We need to make sure that we do the right things by jobseekers." Chris Forman: So one is, I think there's been a distillation of focus on performance and real business value versus getting out over our skis. Two is, Buffett always says that you never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Well, the tide has gone out and there's been a flight to quality. So, a lot of people that were endeavoring to innovate ways to fill pipelines aren't in that business anymore. And so there's, people's money has been flowing to the people that actually deliver value. Three, the needs of customers, at least at the enterprise level, have changed. So, if you are looking back in the '20s, or 2020, 2021, 2022, the overwhelming business problem that big companies had was volume. I called it the fog spoon business requirement. The only qualification was fog, breathing. And now, that's not the case. It's snap towards efficiency, and you're seeing organizations need less focus on what matters and what delivers value, and rethink their buying patterns. So, those are the big ones. And... Joel: If the industry was a stock or you buy, sell or hold, let's keep it simple. Chris Forman: Oh, buy right now. 100% buy. Yeah. Yeah. The overall demographics are on our side. Demands are on our side. And so, there's an argument that says AI is gonna disrupt the need for human capital. That tends to be an... Joel: Everybody. Chris Forman: Yeah. That tends to be an argument that's made by people that went to college that work in conference rooms. [laughter] Chris Forman: No, I'm... Well, I'm serious. I think that there's always this huge bias towards... Chad: With a professor before their name. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Forman: That's right. It's like, okay, well, guess what? An AI can't hammer a nail, or fix a toilet, or at least serve a good hot cup of coffee with a smile. Anyway. But... So that one lens is what's going on in the market and demand and how the organizations are responding. I think you're gonna see some consolidation. Okay. So, if you take a look at what... Joel: Seeing it now. Chris Forman: Yeah. JobGet and Snagajob, that was... Joel: CareerBuilder Monster? Chris Forman: Yeah, CareerBuilder Monster. Again, you're having a flight towards quality, the stuff that it needs to work through the system is working through the system, and capitalism is a full contact sport. Chad: Well, I think they ran into innovator's dilemma to some extent, because they didn't continue to innovate, they just sat on the pile of cash that came in. And Indeed flanked Monster and CareerBuilder and Snagajob got flanked by a bevy of other organizations. It's one of the things that we see a lot, not just in our space but in many other spaces. How are you and the kids over at Appcast, how are you going to stop that from happening to you? Chris Forman: Don't smoke your own press release. And trust me, it's really nice to smoke your own press release sometimes. Yeah. [laughter] Chris Forman: That's the point that I was making about people getting back to reality here, is that everybody was brilliant and everybody was smart in 2022 in our space. And now, it's a lot harder to go make a buck. And so taking care of the basics, interestingly, that starts with delivering measurable value. So, when we think about what we do for our customers, performance is number one. Not relationship, not any... It's, we need to be able to show provable performance. Number two, responsiveness. This is an old-fashioned thing, but when a customer picks up the phone, it's, "Yes, ma'am." And you pick up the phone on the first ring and you carry that metaphor through, it's a competitive market. And then the last thing is, is not being not nice. We're all people and it's nice to work with people that you like. And sometimes people just aren't nice in business environments. And I think that's one of the things that people like about Appcast is that, generally speaking, we compete like nobody's business. We play sticks up hockey. We're nice guys and gals, and so that works too. Chad: So you'll give somebody a bloody lip, but then give 'em a hug after the match, that's what you're saying? Chris Forman: Yeah. Again, I live in Northern New England, so all my kids were hockey players. We absolutely will check somebody into the board, 100%, and hard, but we don't get thrown in the sin bin very often. And so, that's part of the game. And there you go. One of the things I've relished is coming on the Daily Mail of job boards and talking to you guys about... You guys are pretty tough on Indeed and Stepstone. And... Chad: Let's get to that. Yes. Chris Forman: Can I share my perspective on this? All right. Chad: Oh, please. Oh, please. Joel: He wants to vent for a little bit. Chad: Oh, I love it. I love it. Yeah. Chris Forman: So, Indeed, let's start with Indeed. Chad: Sure. Chris Forman: These guys are really, really, really sharp. You talked about organizations that sometimes are very successful, then sit on a bunch of cash and smoke too many of their own press releases and don't necessarily keep up. The reality is, is that the partnership that I and we have developed with Indeed has been good and strong, but they... It's also an environment where sometimes our interests align, sometimes they don't align. But if you ask me who are some of the sharpest cats in this industry, it's these guys. They're thinking around the corner more than most anybody else I know. And so, one of the things that's coming up now is they've created... I talked about the value of Appcast is knowing every click, whether or not it converts to an apply and then to a hire. Indeed's going in the right... In the same direction. They're building pipes to be able to do that. And that's happening at Stepstone as well. But there's only a couple of organizations in the world that have the chops to go do that type of stuff. And if you take a look at where this industry is going, you just have to look at any of the publicly available decks that are out there, everything's moving towards the hire. Why? It's a $33 billion a year business and job ads globally. It's a $330 billion a year if you take a look at this more broadly from staffing. And so I sometimes think that you guys might be a little bit tough. And too... Chad: It's our job. Chris Forman: Yeah, I know, I know. Listen, the fourth estate has responsibilities and I get it. As an old journalist, in fact... Oh, hold on. Maybe my press card is here someplace. But... [laughter] Joel: He's got his press badge from 1992. Yeah. Chad: He's gonna pull out a sag after a card next. [laughter] Chris Forman: Anyway, I got it. I can't find it. Joel: Blockbuster membership card. Where's that? [laughter] Joel: Where's that, Chris? Chris Forman: But the... And I get that. And honestly, you guys serve... I'm not joking when I talk about the power of the fourth estate and the role that journalists play and, forcing industries and executives and policymakers to think differently. I think you guys do a really good job, sometimes a little Daily Mail-ish, but good. But now let me talk... You bust the chops out of my friend and boss, Sebastian Dettmers. And... Joel: Here we go. [laughter] Chad: We gotta talk about Indeed first. Just because you're sharp, you're a genius, doesn't mean that you're not gonna use that genius for evil, okay? They're squeezing... There's so much shit that they could be doing that they should already be doing. And I mean, you guys too, we should already be a cost per quality candidate. There's no reason for that. If you can go all the way down to the hire, which I will love to have a discussion around why it's stupid for us to actually go cost per hire, because we don't control, other than getting the candidate to the front door. And you want to be able to take responsibility for a shitty hiring manager? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, Chris. And then, going back to what Indeed could be doing and they're not doing, they're squeezing the industry. That's all they're doing. Chris Forman: I disagree. Chad: Okay. I appreciate that. Chris Forman: And, while I know some of our customers are unhappy with some of their partners, whether it be Indeed or LinkedIn or Stepstone in terms of like, "I don't like paying this bill." I get that. If you take a look at performance data around what delivers the most efficient value for enterprises in the United States from a hiring standpoint, in the vast majority of cases, it's Indeed. Chad: I'm not saying they're not dominant. They're using their dominance in a very bad way. That's what we're saying. Chris Forman: I'm making a different argument. What I'm saying is the data says, they deliver... If they were selling trucks, these would be the longest lasting, most affordable trucks in America. So the data says their product is really, really good. Now, will businesses use leverage if they have it? Of course, I'm not going to apologize or make a distinction there. But here's the other thing I'm gonna say is, Chris Hyams is one of the most ethical, straightforward people I've ever met in my entire career. And I do believe that leaders matter in companies. And so, I've had lots of conversations with him over the years and none of them have been about leverage and driving revenue and power, it's been about trying to do some good work. And so, take it for what it's worth. We're both named Chris, which clearly means that we have a deep relationship. Both of our first daughters are named Emma. So clearly, lots of checkboxes here. But they innovate, they skate hard, they have a product that delivers exceptional value. And the guy that's responsible for running that place is a good dude. Joel: Now, Chris, if you're gonna go there, let's be a little transparent. Indeed gets a lot of your spend, yes? Chris Forman: Yeah, because it earns it. Joel: Okay. Not that you're doing it for a financial gain, but defending them and also, we should let the listeners know that they get a lot of... Chris Forman: They're close partners. They're close partners. Yeah, but here's the deal. It's like, one of the things that we're doing in the ad agency business, you guys know this, that if you are buying media on behalf of clients, there's a standard commission, it's 15%. You do that. And then, this is an industry-wide practice. Incentives that come at the end of the year rebates based on how much you sell of somebody's stuff. We've never done those. We don't take them. We refuse them. It's in our contract. And so, it doesn't actually matter to me. The money's gonna get spent. The money will get spent because customers have a need. Whether it's Indeed or it's somebody else, I truly don't care. And... Joel: I just want the listeners to understand that there's a lot of, you said incestual earlier. So... Chris Forman: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We're the largest buyer of Indeed, I think in the United States. And so I get it. Joel: There you go. Okay. Chris Forman: But I also, we're starting to get to know each other. [laughter] Chris Forman: I can be pretty direct. Joel: No, it's great. It's great. Chad: We appreciate that. Joel: Let's talk Stepstone. Chad: Talk about Sebastian. Chris Forman: Oh, yeah. Come on. I'm gonna talk about Sebastian. [laughter] Chris Forman: Because I respect Chris, but Sebastian's a friend of mine and you guys are pretty hard. So a few things, all the things that I said about Chris, I feel about Sebastian, but he also is just one of the most genuine, nice people. He's also like a complete nutter, awesome power dork. He runs this giant business. He writes books. In fact, best-selling business book. Joel: Große, it's a dark German book. Chris Forman: In Germany. Yeah, yeah. [0:24:34.7] ____ It's kind of English and Deutsch, so it's kind of, you know, a slave. Joel: Big work, something, yeah. Chris Forman: Yeah, so it's about demographic stuff. He writes mathematical proofs and papers for fun. This guy is just like your best friend from high school... Joel: I don't know. Are we that tough on Stepstone? I know we have fun with them. Chris Forman: No, you're not. No, no, you're not. I'm just busting your chops. [overlapping conversation] Joel: Indeed we're generally critical, but yeah, Stepstone. Chad: What I've said on several occasions is I can't understand why a more evolved tech like Appcast is being controlled by a job board. Joel: Oh yeah. Chad: That just to me seems backward. It's like dropping a V12, which is Appcast, a V12 engine and a horse and buggy, which is Stepstone. So that to me is what I couldn't understand. Whether he was president or CEO or it didn't matter, it was just the dynamics of they were over you guys. And to me, that didn't make any sense because from an infrastructure and a long-term vision standpoint, we're not going heavy into the duration market, we're going into performance. We're going performance. Chris Forman: Let's talk about that for a second. Chad: Yeah. Chris Forman: So, when we sold in 2019, we sold a big chunk of the business to Stepstone. All right. And the employees, Angela and I kept the rest. And then we created a deal where we could sell the rest of the stock. There's no contract for me to stay. And this is my first rodeo. So, this stopped being about a paycheck a while ago. Chad: But you love this shit. Chris Forman: But there's also a reason why I became an entrepreneur. All right. I don't like working for knuckleheads. Right? I mean... Joel: We don't either. Chris Forman: Right. Exactly. Your life is too short. So, I'm still here. Now, why am I here? There's two reasons, but one of them is Dettmers. Okay. When you say Stepstone is over Appcast, that is a completely and utterly wrong definition of the relationship. Joel: Oh, good. Chad: In the umbrella of how the businesses actually are structured, we're saying Stepstone isn't over Appcast. Chris Forman: Stepstone owns all of Appcast stock. So... Chad: Okay. Chris Forman: And Stepstone is owned by Axel Springer, and Axel Springer is owned by KKR and all these type of stuff. But, what I heard in the question was, "Hey, there's this old-fashioned business and now they're the ones that are owning this thing and that's not cool... " It doesn't work that way. We've got a group of people that spend a lot of time collaborating and sharing ideas. We have total freedom to go do what we wanna do because it's just a different business. And so, I got four kids and the whole, "You're not the boss of me, I'm the boss of you." That... [laughter] Chris Forman: It's not junior high. I would also say that the discipline of running a marketplace business is very different than the discipline of running our business. Joel: I would assume so, yes. Chad: Especially in Europe. Europe is an entirely different dynamic, entirely crazy different dynamic than the US is. Chris Forman: And if you take a look at what Stepstone's marketplace business and you look at the marketplaces that have grown in the United States, we've got really big, maybe comedown, all that type of stuff. The dynamic with the Stepstone marketplaces are different, incredible growth, doing really, really well. And so, it may be fair to say that a marketplace business is not the newest business model, but I would argue that in terms of execution and whether or not they're operators, what makes Indeed great? They're operators. What makes Stepstone great is they're operators and they do it really well. Joel: Why Stepstone? Why 2019? And for critics that say you left money on the table in that deal, what would you say to them? Chris Forman: Well, and the last part of it is, is that I rolled the vast majority of my ownership and so the business became a lot more valuable. So, it turned out to be a pretty damn good thing. Joel: Okay. Chris Forman: And part of the reason why we did 2019 is there was some cap table dynamics, some venture firms wanted to have a big success, it turned out to be a great success for them. And so, there's always reasons why you do a transaction. And remember, I told you that I don't like having knuckleheads tell me what to do. Joel: Yeah. Chris Forman: Stepstone aren't knuckleheads and they gave us complete and utter freedom. So in essence, there was, it's like a friends with benefits kind of deal here. We got the deal done. It wasn't a private equity firm, which I'm allergic to, and they've been great and allowed us to be incredibly independent. Joel: They're not [0:28:55.6] ____ shy's and cops. That's good to know. Chris Forman: No. Joel: It's good to know. Chris Forman: Yeah. Zergut. Yeah. Joel: Zergut. [foreign language] Chad: Joel got his standard Deutsch in for this one. Okay. So let's... So yeah, I get it, Dettmers is a very smart, very good guy, understand that, still understand the dynamics. So when we're talking about all this fun stuff, then you had an acquisition of Bayard in July of 2023. Chris Forman: Yeah. Chad: So, big question. And you probably heard us talk about it. Obviously, Recruitics acquisition of KRT, Radancy's acquisition of Perengo. Did those types of moves really force this to happen? Did it force your hand to be able to go in this direction? Okay. Chris Forman: No. Actually, the reason why we did the acquisition was our customers told us that we needed to. Chad: How so? Chris Forman: We specialize in big, big, big companies. So, we don't really sell to people that have less than 2000 employees and most of our customers have 10,000 or more. And when we would be talking to these large companies about using our technology to manage their recruitment marketing spend, the reality is they said, "You guys do a great job. This is awesome. Awesome. We love it. We know that you guys are the best in the world at, let's say, optimizing job ads, but we got 20% of what we do that you guys don't do." And there's some other folks out there that do the whole thing, and they may be less good than you are on this part, but it's one throat to choke. We can just give them everything that we need to do. Chad: Yeah, but you had all the throats at one time 'cause you were working directly with all the other advertising agencies. So why piss them off and becoming a competitor? Chris Forman: Well, at the end of the day, we endeavor not to piss anybody off, and I don't think that we did. And I think that we... You can go talk to the folks in the ad agency business. Chad: Oh, we have, Chris, we have. [laughter] Chris Forman: We were very straight up and we didn't hurt... We didn't... We have a lot of power, we never use that, and we're all still very good friends. But I believe that Appcast can be not just a good business, and not just a good big business, but a very good, very big business. And the reality is, is that for us to get to that level of scale, you need to work directly with big employers. Chad: Well then also, at least we've heard, that Stepstone's poising for IPO, grab a portfolio grab like this seems smart to make everything look a little bit more, a little pretty too. Chris Forman: I don't know and nor could I comment on anything about things in financial. [laughter] Chris Forman: But what I... So... Chad: Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Chris Forman: The reality is, is that we needed to gain expertise. The clients that Bayard had were blue chip and world class. And then, the other thing is, is just an incredible group of people. As part of our reorganization here, we've elevated a bunch of people into very, very senior roles. And one of the folks that we pick, Andrea Abbott, she's now our chief customer officer, and she was the head of customers service at Bayard. She's just world class. And so we picked up an incredible group of colleagues, great customers. We filled in a patch of weakness for us from a product standpoint. And it's really led to an acceleration of our growth. And it was good. But trust me, all my hair nearly fell out trying to incorporate a 100-year-old company into us and... Chad: I can't even imagine. Joel: So I'm hearing, going back to your original statement of diversification, if you were a money monitor. So, I asked you the state of the job board business. What's the state of the programmatic business? Some of the criticism is, it's a race to the bottom. There's so many players. It's just how much margin can you squeeze out of this? The experience isn't great, if I'm citing another criticism with a lot of sites. Which I don't know if you have much control over, but even just some research for this, before this call, I went to CareerBuilder and I clicked on a job that I know was you. Before I clicked on the job, I had to put my info into CareerBuilder. When I clicked on the job, it ultimately took me to a corporate site and took me back to... The point is, I don't think the jobseeker experience is awesome in the current ecosystem of searching for a job. So I wanted to get your take on the state of programmatic, what's it gonna look like in three to five years? How do we improve the user experience? Or do you think it's not broken? Chris Forman: The user experience for jobseekers is still godawful. It's gotten mildly better with native apply capabilities and also an understanding on the behalf of some employers that there's a direct correlation between jobseeker experience and overall recruitment marketing efficiency. You know like that bing bang boom thing where you have to log into one site, go to another site, they push you over, that's actually, that's the marketplaces themselves doing that type of stuff and that's outside the control that we have. Theoretically, we could have a contractual requirement that says that you don't redistribute our ads. Policing that is sometimes hard, and with some we do that and because they tend to do things that are not great. But with others, it's kind of the coin of the realm a little bit. So there clearly needs, work needs to be done there. On the programmatic side, there's, I think you need to bifurcate programmatic solutions for SMBs and programmatic solutions for enterprises. Really what... Joel: Say more. Chris Forman: You can be a job site without being a job site. Let's say I go, in the SMB space, I wanna go and create a little site where you give me $200 and you post your ad with me. I don't run a marketplace. I just take your ad and I go and distribute it to a whole bunch of different places and get people to apply to those jobs and deliver you the applications. That's what I mean by you can be a job site without being a job site. That's super crowded, low barrier to entry, who knows, it's not a space that we're in because it's just not differentiated whatsoever. When you get to the upper levels of using software to buy and manage your performance advertising, there's only a handful of players that can do it. You've got most of the major ad agencies in the United States, a handful in Europe, mostly in the UK, and you've got a couple of pure play providers like us and others that do this for a living. Chris Forman: But if... It's, the comment that it's super crowded, it's less crowded than you would think. There's not a lot of people that show up on big RFPs or make it down selected when you're dealing with big, big, big companies, just because there's a depth that comes with it. Where's programmatic going? It's going down funnel, 100% down funnel. I agree with you. It is about the idea of paying job sites on a per hire basis, is in its current incarnation, the way the market currently works right now would be unfair because yes, it's at the whim of a hiring manager and an imperfect system. But... Chad: Unless your system hires them. And you're not, and you're not gonna be there. Or are you? Or are you? Chris Forman: No. No, no, no, no, no, no. Chad: Wait a minute, time out. Are we breaking some [0:35:57.3] ____ AI news here? [laughter] Joel: [0:35:57.4] ____. [laughter] Chris Forman: But what I can tell you is it's really interesting when you look at the data when we track the apply to the quality to the hire. Chad: Those are all great signals. Right? But they have nothing to do with control. Those are two entirely different things. You can actually manage and make your algorithm much tighter and much better because of those signals, but you have no control over the hire, Chris. So when we start talking about cost per hire, that to me is just somebody who's incredibly naive and doesn't understand what the process really looks like. Chris Forman: Okay. Well, I may know what the process looks like, so I'm gonna make an argument for... Chad: I know you do, that's what I'm saying. [laughter] Chris Forman: I'm gonna make an argument for you. All right? So, [0:36:40.2] ____ Joe always used to tell me that when you have a big problem, you break it into little problems. All right. So, let's break enterprise recruiting into the two most common problems that they have, high volume single profile hiring and one-to-one requisitions. High volume single profile hiring is math. It's total math. Hiring manager deviation... Chad: It's numbers. Yeah. Chris Forman: Is so small, it's just math. So, that represents a huge amount of money and spend. Could there be a CPH model for something like that, if in fact you had transparency between the publisher... 100%. Now, if all of a sudden you get into recruiting business consultants that are... Or they're not even in business anymore, boy, am I old, at Deloitte. Okay? [laughter] Joel: Enron's back, so yeah. Chris Forman: Yeah, yeah. Then all of a sudden, like, "Yeah, I buy where you're at." And so arguably maybe that's more of a cost per quality applicant thing, but it's... But what I'm telling you is, it's moving. Chad: Yes. Chris Forman: And what it looks like, unsure, but it's going that direction. Chad: Well, the thing that bothers me about it though, Chris, is that first and foremost that we talk about little problems where we have to move down funnel little problems, not go all the way to the end of the funnel and try to figure out that little problem. So the process, and this next piece of the process, we have cost per click, cost per application. Next one should be, at least in my opinion, cost per qualified candidate. Chris Forman: Yeah. Chad: Why have we not gotten that? That in itself should be the next at least big money surge for you guys, 'cause a qualified can's gonna cost a hell of a lot more than just an application. So why haven't we done that if the pile of money's there? Chris Forman: So, we've had a series of conversations with our clients. The people that want cost per quality tend to also be in the high volume or semi high volume space. So think families... Chad: Really? Joel: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. But then we say, "Okay, that's great. No problem. We can do that for you, but we're gonna price it with a premium." They're already using technology that optimizes to the quality price, the cost, our technology, if you tell us, "I wanna spend this amount for a hire or a quality applicant," we can land on that dime. All right. And then we go to them and say, "If you wanna move from let's say paying per click or per apply to paying for that, we take more risk." Adam Smith says we should get paid more, right? And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no, no. We want what we currently have, that really good price, we just wanna pay you on that. You don't get a premium for taking more risk." And we're like, "No, we're good." So, at a particular level, this is the nuance of it. Chad: So do you have that product? Chris Forman: Oh yeah. And listen, a bunch of the programmatic folks with certain clients will say that they are paying on the apply, but the definition of the apply actually is much more of a qualified applicant. So, that does happen. Chad: So it's somewhat of a pre-screen before you can actually apply in the first place? Chris Forman: Yeah. Or just, they've got really good knockout questions or, there's enough of a hurdle to go through. Chad: So why are all of these employers bitching and moaning and complaining about getting way too many unqualified candidates when there's actually options available? Do that just not... Do we need to educate the market more that they are available or what? Chris Forman: That's a different question. So paying for a quality applicant is different than getting more quality applicants as a ratio. Let's say I sent you a thousand applicants and two of them were quality and you paid me for those. We can do that today. If what you want is two quality applicants from four applicants and only four applicants, that actually is beyond the role that a lot of programmatic platforms do. That really comes down to... Chad: It's pretty edge case-y, isn't it? Chris Forman: Well, no, in a perfect world, recruiting should be one applicant, one hire. Sniperville, right, one shot, one kill. Chad: But you can offer up slates though. And if somebody says, "I wanna pay for 10 qualified candidates and those qualified, here's the qualifications." Boom. And then you can say, "Of course we can, here's 10 qualified candidates." Chris Forman: For small businesses, yes. But remember, the workflow in big businesses is through applicant tracking systems. What they want is they wanna pay for quality, it goes into the ATS, the ATS just accepts everything. And so you're still gonna have lots of applicants because chaff will come on in no matter how you pay for the applicant. Chad: Well, you can actually kick them out on the front end just through some basic screening. Can you not? Through the internet applicant rule, if they're not qualified, they're not seen as applicants in the first place. Chris Forman: But that's in the ATS. And as a programmatic provider, what we do is we take your ads, we put them in places to get people to apply, and we use data to ensure that they're on the right spot. What you're talking about is more akin to a native apply capability that you'd find on a marketplace, which is exactly what companies like Stepstone, Indeed, LinkedIn, are doing, is the reason why native apply they like. Not only do they get higher conversion rates, because they have higher conversion rates, the unit economics of it tend to be pretty darn good for them. They can use better targeting first to put better quality candidates into that funnel to deliver fewer that have higher quality. Chad: And they force more people to register in their database too. Chris Forman: Well, yeah... No, no... Absolutely. They talk about data chaff, and so there's chaff that comes out of any process and data is one part of it. This is one of those things where there's a lot of value created for everybody. So, is it coming? Yes. But the second thing that's coming in programmatic is insight. Not analytics. Insight. This is a problem for us. We got more freaking data and we have more analytics than any... It just comes out of our ears. Making it easy to understand about what the right thing to do is, is hard. And so, to give you a very simple example... Chad: Sounds like a consulting business by the way. Go ahead. Chris Forman: No. It should be an analytics business. We get asked all the time by our clients, "Does recruitment branding make a difference?" Okay? Chad: Oh, that's a good question. Chris Forman: So we're talking billions of dollars are spent on selling your brand, promoting the brand, not direct response. Just to be technical here, it's money spent not on direct response to job ads. And does it work? It's really, really, really, really, really, really hard to prove that. And there's a lot of people that say that they can. We can do part of it, but that's the next big thing because we don't do it great. And I don't think anybody does it great. Chad: And again, I get that. But the thing is, we are... And I talk to so many leaders in this space who are talking at these great visions of grandeur with PhD papers sitting in front of them, "Why can't we get the little shit done first?" 'Cause that's the stuff that matters. And it just feels like a redirect, Chris, when we start talking about these big things and I love it, don't get me wrong, 'cause we love talking about the future, but the little things, why haven't we gotten those done yet? And you say that... Chris Forman: What are the little things? Chad: You're saying that they're on the way. Like the cost per qualified candidate. When is that gonna be a product that everybody could be able to consume readily available for them? Those types of things. And it doesn't have to be that one, but just one that you guys are working on. Chris Forman: I'd argue, Chad, that in the SMB space, they have a bunch of these slate programs. And in the enterprise space, again, it's more of a, it sounds great on the top line, but again, if you're an employer that already is using technology to optimize your ad spend and you know what your cost per quality applicant is, the idea of paying more for that is actually a little bit hard. This whole premium pricing thing for greater risk is, it's economics and so it's... I don't consider that little. Getting registration pages off of applicant tracking systems, that's little and should be big. But, I think that there's a ton... We talked about $33 billion worth of spending in job ads. I bet 25% to 30% of it... We've improved the efficiency a ton. And when I say we, I mean the people that build software to optimize job ads, not just Appcast. I'd probably say we hit the disruption standard, which is a 30% improvement. I think there's another 30% that we just can't yet measure that whether or not it works. And so... Chad: There you go. Joel: Employment branding analytics. Sounds like a perfect product for an agency to go out and sell and an experienced sales team to go sell a product like that. Chad: I know one of those. Wait a minute. Yeah. Joel: Chris... Chad: Yeah. Hold on. I got one question. Joel: Go ahead. Chad: Oh, good. When are you two gonna get off the sidelines and go... Found something and go solve some of these problems? All right. Joel: This is our show. Chad: I mean, come on. Joel: We ask the questions. Chad: Been there, done that. [laughter] Chad: Been there, done that. Joel: Right, Chris, we really appreciate your time. I wanted to get to this. You're leaving the company, you're an outgoing CEO. January I think is your... When you say goodbye. Why step down now and what's next for you? Chris Forman: I set this date a long time ago. I don't know what I'm gonna do yet. Chad: Good for you. Chris Forman: And I am forcing myself to take some time to decompress because I've been doing the same job for 25 years and it's all I know, but I need to go do something that might actually have a chance of downgrading my business class ticket to hell that I've earned as a business person. So... [laughter] Chris Forman: I don't know, go teach high school history. Run for... Chad: Give back. Chris Forman: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's hokey. But I've been super lucky, and the reality is, is I've got some work to do to say thank you for that. But the other thing that I'm doing is I'm spending a lot of time with the next generation of entrepreneurs in our space. Like Katherine Allen at Flo Recruit or Omar at JobPixel or Alex at Kombo. There's some unbelievable talent out there right now doing cool and interesting things. Joel: Yeah, there is. Chris Forman: And so, if I can be the gray-haired guy that tells them all the mistakes that I've made, and hopefully they can avoid some of those, that would be great. Chad: Excellent, man. Thanks for coming on. It's been forever outgoing, incoming, doesn't matter, we're glad to have you, we're glad to have you on the show, man. Thanks so much. Chris Forman: Thanks, guys. Take care. Joel: Chris, for our listeners that wanna know more about you or Appcast, where do you send them? Chris Forman: Well, you can go to appcast.io, it's a website. If you wanna learn about the cheese, you can go to millbridgefarm.com. Joel: There we go. Chris Forman: And other than that, I think that's probably the best place. Joel: I eat all the cheese. Chad, that is another one in the can. Chris, we appreciate your time. Chris Forman: Thanks, guys. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Podcast Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast, the Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout-outs to people you don't even know. And yet you're listening, it's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar, blue, nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss, so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out.

Live from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Jason Pistulka—Assistant VP of Talent Acquisition Operations at HCA Healthcare—graces us with his presence to drop some truth bombs on recruitment. Spoiler alert: he's not here to hand out AI participation trophies. Jason throws shade at the industry’s blind faith in AI as a recruitment savior, arguing that maybe, just maybe, getting your operational act together would be a better idea. He spills the tea on HCA's branding game—giving their hospitals local names to charm their markets—and flexes their scale and healthcare cred like a boss. Oh, and remember the COVID hiring apocalypse? HCA brought on 200 new recruiters like it was nothing. Now that the chaos has died down, it all seems almost quaint. Jason also calls out vendors for struggling to grasp the size of HCA’s operation (hint: it’s big ) and says they need a crash course in "How HCA Rolls." He’s all about their talent transformation roadmap and teases some snazzy automation initiatives to make recruitment smoother and data capture less of a dumpster fire. As for AI picking candidates? Nah, Jason’s not buying the hype. But he’s here for automation that makes life easier, proving that even skeptics can be pragmatic. It’s an insightful chat—if you’re into operational excellence, vendor rants, and the occasional AI side-eye. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (cometh) Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Who are you and why are you here? Jason Pistulka: I'm Jason Pistulka, AVP of TA Operations for HCA Healthcare. Part of the reason why I'm here is because my office is two miles down the road. Chad: Convenient. Jason Pistulka: So yeah, p it makes it easy and speaking some of this afternoon. But a large contingent of the HCA team is here at the conference. Came last year. Enjoyed it. So yeah, it's on my regular conference tour now. Chad: Nice, nice. Podcast Intro: Well, especially since it's here. Chad: So right out of the gate, what... Moving forward into 2025, what piece of advice would you give your TA peers... Jason Pistulka: Sure. Chad: For moving forward in 2025? Jason Pistulka: To me the biggest gap that exists in almost every recruiting organization out there is operational excellence. When you look at lots of people try to bring a magic pill in to solve all their problems but most of their problems still come to lack of operational excellence, and there is no magic pill to solve for that. So mostly now everybody's promising the entire world with AI. How AI can solve everything. I say AI has two definitions, artificial intelligence or artificial ignorance and there's a lot of artificial ignorance being sold out there. A lot of people who had a simple keyword matching that they decided, we're gonna rebrand it to AI 'cause that's what the cool thing is. And so a lot of people I think are chasing phantom wishes to solve their problems that again, their long pole in the tent comes back to that operational excellence, whether that be within their own recruiting teams or within their hiring teams. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I'm waiting for that startup that has, we use no AI whatsoever on their website. I'm always intrigued in healthcare from a branding perspective. As an outsider, this hospital system, this system, this system. They all look the same. You're not Coke and Pepsi. How do you look at branding and separating yourself from the other options that are out there? Jason Pistulka: It's a multifaceted story with HCA because some of our hospitals do have an HCA brand on them but a huge portion of them don't at all. When you buy a great... If we were to buy Vanderbilt, we wouldn't wanna strip Vanderbilt off and slap HCA on. So it depends on what market you're in. If you're in Austin, we're St. David's. If you're in Denver, it's Swedish Medical Center. So in some cases our hospitals have a great brand. They're offering premium services that aren't available in other markets. Other hospitals are more of a community hospital and they don't have the same kind of pizzazz that a big name brand hospital can have. When we're selling to candidates though, the thing where we as HCA can sell is on scale and excellence. So as I like to tell people, HCA births more babies in Sweden and Switzerland combined. That means something to people. As a result, we know how to run a labor and delivery center like no other. And if you're in a community hospital in New Hampshire, you're getting the benefit of that company-wide knowledge. We have AI teams that analyze and can identify early onset of sepsis and things of that nature. Jason Pistulka: And all of that excellence is pushed out to the smallest of hospitals out there, which is why if you look at health grades for hospitals, our hospitals outscore the average hospital in the country and it's because of that operational excellence that we drive as an organization. Which is interesting on the HR side because we have leaders that are so used to data and excellence, and prove it to me that it makes us to have to be just as data savvy as they are in the clinical world. Chad: So in 2024, looking back, what surprised you the most? Jason Pistulka: It's hard to surprise me after COVID and dealing with... So if anything... Chad: Being in healthcare, I bet. Yes. Jason Pistulka: So if anything, I guess what surprised me the most is that we came back to a sense of normality. And so if you look at before COVID, we had about 25,000 open jobs. We peaked in COVID at 43,000 open jobs. We're back into that upper 20s again. We're back to more typical turnovers and everything else, and it felt like we wouldn't get there as quickly as we did. So I'd say that's probably my biggest surprise and that the market has improved significantly for us in employment. So normal, I guess is what's surprising me 'cause I've been stuck in abnormal for quite a long time. We hired... During our peak we hired 200 new recruiters in a year. So we were onboarding, onboarding, onboarding, onboarding and just running at such a pace that everything in comparison right now, I hate to say seems easy. I don't want our senior leadership to see that but in comparison... Joel: It's not easy. Jason Pistulka: In comparison to that, that was a stressful time. Chad: Yeah. I bet. Joel: We talk to a lot of vendors, people who are selling you stuff. You mentioned hiring a lot of recruiters. I'm sure you get a ton of calls. They're not hiring technical people the way they used to. The economy's slowing down in some places but healthcare is that beacon of money, that pot of gold that vendors want to get. Talk about how you filter the services with the number of recruiters you have. Is there a process? Is there a testing period? Talk about that. Jason Pistulka: The typical vendor does not operate on scale very well and they try to take... I was just having this conversation with Jeremy from RecruitBot, they try to take their model that worked in financial services or worked in IT where when I worked in that space, we were spending $10,000 a hire. And bring that model into healthcare where our cost is a fraction of that. We operate at a whole different level of efficiency and the recruiters carry a significantly different rep load. So you can't expect the same level of recruiter behavior and engagement in your tool when you're carrying 100 reps as you do with somebody who's carrying 15 IT reps. So they don't think about how that scales financially as well as actual adoption-wise in an organization. And they don't think about, how do you make that adoption happen across a huge team? I mean, we have 20-ish divisions of recruiters that sit all over the country and I compare to when I ran a team in the pit and we all sat in the pit and I could hear every conversation, I could drive everything. Jason Pistulka: It's completely different when you have to monitor and drive through data. So how do you provide the data and the guidance to a team like us to drive that? What we find is most people can't. What we do is we educate them on here's how we do it. We educate them on the needs and we build them capabilities, which is probably the biggest reason why so many people end up really loving being with HCA and valuing HCA is because we drive them to make them better. We typically break their software and we typically find all of their warts. So many of our vendors, we will identify problems before they know it's a problem because no other customer was big enough to hit it. 'Cause it only happens one out of every 5000 applicants or whatever. When you're our size and you get three and a half million applicants a year, that happens on the quite frequent. Chad: Yeah. Scale. Jason Pistulka: Yeah. So that level of scale ends up really giving vendors chops and see the world in a different way of how do you do change management, how do you do adoption, how do you build tools to do that? And so it's one of the things that I personally enjoy is being that product consultant back into them and here's why you need to think this way and here's the challenges of a large organization. Chad: So let's look forward to 2025. For you, what is gonna be your top priority? Jason Pistulka: My top priority, we're delivering a roadmap that's a talent transformation effort that we've been working on for two years and we're just coming into the piloting phase this fall and we'll start rolling out more broadly after the first year. I'm actually leaving the organization at the end of Q1, so I'm trying to get as much of that laid out before I do and get those tracks laid. Chad: Nice. Jason Pistulka: So a huge portion of what I'm doing at this point is trying to make sure that the organization is well positioned and this has been a multi-year process for me. Chad: Now, is this tech as well being rolled out along with this? Jason Pistulka: Yes. Chad: Okay. Okay. So that's a big undertaking. Jason Pistulka: It is. We have multiple avenues. One, we're going from a single workflow to multiple workflows in our ATS, which is a huge lift and shift. Chad: But smart. Jason Pistulka: Yep. We're doing a huge automation effort in onsite interviewing that we're using sense to do. And that is a custom build that we're doing that is going to allow recruiters to have most of it automatically driven right out of the ATS and capture really great data for us. Again, to recognize the bad human behavior that happens in the field. We've already rolled out BrightHire across our whole organization that we're using... Chad: Nice. Jason Pistulka: For a cooler quality across not just interviewing, they'll offer extensions. Chad: Really? Jason Pistulka: We're gonna start doing it for intake sessions... Chad: Awesome. Jason Pistulka: Et cetera because again, we're trying to speed the first conversation, quality of first conversation, speed the interview. That's what our whole impact is in this transformation effort. And it's been exciting and challenging. Joel: Automation, you talked about it from a recruiting side where most industries I think are fearful of automation. If a robot can flip burgers, you don't need a cook. But I feel like in healthcare I would wanna work in a system that had tools that would help me do my job better, take away some of the monotonous work. How do you as an organization or as a system think about automation and how does that tie into recruiting? You're gonna be working with the best tools with us, you're gonna be innovative. How do you look at automation from the big picture to the employee coming in? Jason Pistulka: In recruiting on the automation front, what I've found is so many people don't use the tools that they have. The number of... I solicited obviously for jobs. One of my favorite things to do is go out and apply for a job on their website. And when I see these major corporations that don't ask any job-specific knockout questions, don't do anything. And you're saying you're making your recruiters review every applicant and not only can you ask the question so I can stack, rank and mass disposition, but in most ATSs you can even automate disposition actions on those things. So people aren't using the basic automation that they do. So they're out there searching for AI. When I say you don't need AI, which some of the automations that you already have at your hands are so helpful. And so we've done a lot in that space. We've always been big users of knockout questions and things of that nature. We have a new function that's rolling out that's gonna be an automated compensation knockout for our recruiters that we custom built with our vendor. It's really cool. And then we're using Sense Journeys to build some automation follow-ups with people. Jason Pistulka: So we're gonna have automations that after an interview happens, say 60, 90 minutes delayed, will send a text to the hiring manager and saying do you want to hire this person? 1, 2, 3, 4? And then automatically updating the ATS what those things are. So none of that's AI. It's just all automation and using different things. And so, so many companies including HCA were skeptical of AI. Obviously there's a lot of legal issues with AI and how you're using it in applicants, and there's studies that are showing that candidates don't like or trust AI. And now with these... In these states where you have to say, well, here's how we're using it. I don't care for the AI on candidate selection just from the candidate experience piece and I kind of want to keep it out of that funnel. But that doesn't mean there isn't all kinds of automation that can make your recruiters faster, more efficient, more accurate and get yourself to better results. And those are things that we have pursued and we continue to pursue. Chad: 100% agree. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us. If somebody wants to connect with you or I don't know, maybe apply for a job, where would you send them? Jason Pistulka: Yeah, cool. To connect with me, I'm easy enough to find on LinkedIn and happy to accept that connection. If you just search for careers HCA, we will pop up. We are well advertised out there and we operate in 20 states so we've got a lot of jobs floating around out there. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

The Chad & Cheese Podcast 2024 Recap Show In this special year-end recap, Chad and Cheese revisit the biggest moments and most talked-about episodes of 2024. Packed with insights, hot takes, and snarky commentary, this episode delivers a curated journey through the stories that defined the HR tech industry over the past year. Featured Highlights: "ZipRecruiter is Lost" (March 2024)  "Workday Sucker Punches Eightfold and Beamery"  (March 2024)  "Bullhorn Strikes Back at Indeed" (June 2024)  "Monster & CareerBuilder Merger" (July 2024) "Indeed Tomfukery" (August 2024)  Chad and Cheese also hint at exciting plans for 2025, promising new voices, brash opinions, and more in-depth analysis. Whether you’re an industry insider or just love the drama, this episode is a must-listen wrap-up of a game-changing—and occasionally ridiculous—year in HR tech. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION COMETH Podcast 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. [music] Chad: Hey, listener, welcome to our 2024 recap show where we rip segments out of our most listened to shows of 2024. Here's number one, "ZipRecruiter is Lost," from March of 2024. Chad: Which is ZipRecruiter. And this is somewhat of a downer, especially if you are a client of ZipRecruiter. This next one comes from a friend of the show, Tim Sackett, where Tim writes, "Hello, Chad and cheese." No, just kidding. Joel: Hey dipshits. [laughter] Chad: ZipRecruiter, yeah. Hey, assholes. [laughter] "ZipRecruiter came out today, and is asking for price increases for current clients. Our current contract is roughly $92,000. And to keep the exact same products, they now want roughly $160,000. They aren't even a top source for us, so we'll be saying goodbye." So, Joel, is this really time for an increase? Joel: Well, if you do it right, anytime can be a time for an increase. [laughter] Joel: But this... Chad: Oh, so should they have done surge pricing? Is that what I'm hearing? [laughter] Joel: Well, I'm surging right now after talking about deal. [laughter] There's price increases and there's desperation price increases. Chad: Geez. Yeah. Joel: You gotta know how to boil the frog, right? You gotta know how to do it at a degree at a time. Look, Netflix is great at this. Netflix is a great service. But over time, before you know it, you're not paying $7.99 a month anymore. You're paying $14.99 and you're like, "What the hell happened?" But it didn't hurt, so you keep doing it, and pretty soon before you know it, you're paying $29 a month. And if they keep having Mike Tyson fight, it might be 99 bucks a month. But the streaks of stupidity, you don't just drop it at 73% increase or whatever it is on your customers. And I'm guessing Sackett had been a customer for a really long time. Chad: He had to have been. Yeah. Joel: I'm guessing, yeah. So, let's take one of our... Let's take a customer that's been around forever, that is a figurehead in the industry, a lot of people know, and let's stick him with a big price increase. And now he's gonna cancel and not come back, and tell all his recruiting buddies, "ZipRecruiter is full of shit." And then they're gonna think twice about using ZipRecruiter. I don't know how you walk back from this. It's kind of tough. We talked about their quarterly earnings recently. Life is not great at ZipRecruiter, and this is gonna make it a lot worse. You gotta learn how to boil the frog. As much as we love Indeed, right? They stuck the price increase in the terms of service like the new thing, made it look... Did it right at least. And before you know it, you're spending a lot more at Indeed than you would otherwise, but it doesn't feel like it because they didn't put a 73% increase on you overnight. So, bad move, another bad move, and the many bad moves that we talk about from ZipRecruiter on a regular basis. Chad: So, if you take a look at it, same product, almost double the price, at least Indeed is trying to fake, giving more value with the new price increases. We all know it's bullshit, but they're trying to fake it, right? We'll see if that actually passes. But we say it all the time. The SMB market is a bitch. It is. And that's where Zip, that's where they earned their bones, man, was on the SMB side of the house. Zip entered the enterprise market way too late. Bigger accounts, less transactional, and more sustainable, right? Expanding the total addressable market just isn't that easy, especially when you're going after it this way. Not to mention, they were spending much like, and this is very reminiscent of Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, spending loads of money on Super Bowl commercials for that SMB market to try to drive those single postings, those small job packs and whatnot. But that was more on the transactional side, spending that kind of money's just not sustainable. Chad: Now, Zip didn't do Super Bowl commercials, but they were the biggest, and I don't know if they currently are. They were the biggest spender in podcast advertising across the globe, right? So, again, to be able to meet the SMB market, you have to spend tons of cash 'cause you have to be on the top of minds of those small businesses. 'Cause they don't need you every day, right? Enterprise needs you every fucking day. So, they went kind of backwards at it. So, it's kicking their ass right now. Joel: Yeah, in many ways. And I know I've said this before, but they're a victim of their own success. They did such a good job of "Work for the small guy," "We're for that bar owner down the street that you went to school with," that "trying to pivot into enterprise, go public, try to be bigger than what you are" has bit them in the ass. And if they're giving these price increases to sack it, I can't imagine what the bar guy down the street is thinking about the price increases. Chad: Yeah. Well, and if you take a look at it, so when I was at Monster, 75% of the revenue that we actually received was from staffing companies. And Tim's a staffing company, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: So, I guarantee you what they're trying to do... Okay, let me knock on wood. What I think they're trying to do is they're trying to juice the staffing companies. Joel: Stick it to them? Chad: Yeah. They're trying to juice the staffing company and say, "Hey look, they can't live without us, so we're gonna make them pay." Well, I think what they're gonna find is that they can probably live without you. Joel: It's good for Indeed. Clip/SoundFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Chad: Some great moves were happening in March of 2024. Our number two podcast is, "Workday Sucker Punches Eightfold and Beamery." Check it out. Joel: So much for Workday acquiring Beamery, at least not yet. [laughter] Workday is acquiring HiredScore, an AI-powered talent solutions provider to enhance talent management. The deal aims to offer a comprehensive talent acquisition and internal mobility solution, leveraging responsible AI and focusing on human-centric decision-making. The acquisition is expected to be finalized by April 30th, subject to regulatory approval, of course. Chad, your thoughts? Chad: So, congrats to Athena Karp and the HiredScore team who stayed disciplined and focused on the problem they were solving this entire time. HiredScore never played the "we can do it all" vaporware tam expansion game, which I've always respected. I've always respected that. What this all comes down to though is one thing: Timing. We've seen some big names, Rush, Generative AI products into the market to meet OpenAI and ChatGPT. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all either launching GenAI into the market or they're taking steps to do so. So, how does a HiredScore cut through all of those big names and the noise? The easy answer is they can't compete long term. They can't with those big names and those deep pockets. So, this is a perfect time to sell, right? This is the perfect time to sell. The question is, why HiredScore? When we take a look at like the Beamerys and the EightFolds and some of those other companies that are out there, why HiredScore and why now? What do you think? Joel: Because AI bleeds into everything. And if you are a public company like Workday is and you're not talking about AI, introducing AI, using AI, profiting from AI, you're gonna be left; you're gonna be left out by the market. Shareholders and people who buy the stock are... I guarantee you, board meetings at Workday were like, "Where's our AI shit? Where's our AI? We need AI." [laughter] Joel: And somebody said, "Oh, well, we're working on that internally." And finally someone said, "Shit, it's not working. We need to at least buy something with AI in it, and we can announce on our earnings call," which wasn't awesome, by the way, "that we are now... [laughter] we've acquired this itty-bitty AI company." The market wasn't that impressed. Apparently, the stock... Well, it was earnings. I don't know. It wasn't AI but it was more earnings thing. Just, there wasn't a lot of people impressed that they had bought an AI company with 125 or 50 employees. But why did they do it? Because the market says, "If you're not AI, you're not with it, man. You're not hip." It's like the '90s: You need a dot com, you better have a website, you better have some e-commerce shit. It's just the future... The past is present now. Chad: And when ADP applies pressure like they have over the past few months, and being able to talk about the GenAI that they're putting out and the data that they're actually crunching, not to mention... We're talking about HiredScore has mature matching algorithms complete with what Athena would call "defendability" or "explainability," right? Which is something that Workday does not have. [chuckle] And one of the reasons why they're in court, which we'll talk about. Joel: Yeah. Chad: But this is also interesting from the standpoint of a buying binge. Does this start SAP, Oracle, ADP? Will the dominoes start to fall? And then you look at the companies that were sucker-punched in this case. Eightfold, they have close to $400 million in funding. Joel: Yep. Chad: Limited vendors out there can afford them. This is one that is off the table now. This is off the table. Now they're even limited more. Beamery, 223 million, right? There's no way in hell they're buying Beamery. Why? Right? And then the vendor that I think has the most risk that we've talked about, for a while we haven't talked about here lately, is Textio. They have $42.5 million in funding, but again, these are all companies I believe are at high risk with tech and the velocity that's out there today. If they don't sell, they're gonna be worthless. Joel: Yeah, yeah, you're: Clip/SoundFX: Just the team. Joel: HiredScore didn't take any official money VC-wise. From my understanding, they had kind of a sugar daddy or a few people that had money that kept them in the early days going. So, this was... Chad: Rich friends and family, yes. Joel: This was a sweet deal for Workday. Very little risk. Very probably small price tag compared to what you're talking about Eightfold. They do the deal. They probably get some employees. I think Athena's probably gonna move on after her year contract or however long she's there. I don't see her yet. Chad: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Joel: I don't see her enjoying her time at a huge ass company like Workday. Chad: [laughter] Yeah, yeah. Joel: And look, Google's Gemini, I'm sure you saw this, hit a huge speed bump with its graphics and producing popes that were Black and Vikings that were... People lost their minds. And this is Google. This is like, who was testing this? How did they not catch that? And so I think there's real questions about if Google can't get AI right, how can a little company in the workspace get it right? I have my questions, but for Workday, it was a market situation where, "Let's do little risk. We can say we have an AI company... " A lot of our network lost their minds over this deal. They're like revolutionary, amazing... Chad: [laughter] Yes, yes. Joel: And people that we both respect. And I would caution everybody and throw some cold water on this deal and say, look, if you think that Workday, a 20,000 person company, is gonna change after this acquisition, eh, I don't know. Maybe. I'll be surprised if they do. I think they're gonna fade into the ethos of Workday. They're gonna get thrown into this machine when they're used to this startup culture. I think Workday, this is gonna just be another day at Workday. It's a huge deal for Athena and her team. Hopefully they got paid, they can go do other things, go work for a big company like Workday. For Eightfold, it's awful. For anyone that's like Unicorn-ish AI thing, it's bad because the market didn't love this. Workday could have bought one of those companies. They obviously decided not to; took a much safer bet. I just, I think at the end of the day, Workday's not gonna change and HiredSolve is gone. Chad: Yeah. You take a look at any big companies... Joel: HiredScore, sorry. I get them mixed up. "Solve," "Score." Chad: You take a look at all of the big companies, let's just say the acquisition of Taleo. That thing's almost dead, right? And again, you see a lot of the bigger companies really suffocating a lot of the platforms that they've bought, and then they go away, right? Taleo is gonna go away. You take a look at Connexa, right? BrassRing... A lot of these big companies that were big in our space were acquired by larger organizations, and then they were just fricking... They were strangled. Not in the crib, by the way. But yeah, they were strangled. Joel: Acquisitions are hard. You get company cultures, you get politics, you get things that you are not used to. Look, we both applauded when Andreea sold Opening to iCIMS. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Would either of us say that iCIMS is greatly different today than it was when they bought her company? I can't. Chad: I would say from a technology standpoint, internally, yeah. Joel: Yeah? Greatly changed? [overlapping conversation] Chad: You've seen some of the things... Joel: You think so? Chad: What's that? Joel: Greatly? Like, greatly changed the business? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Okay. Well, maybe... Chad: Yeah, 'cause, yeah, you've gotta understand what that foundational platform actually did for a lot of the other platforms, right, that they were actually working off of already. So, yeah, yeah. You can see, that's the thing, is that if you have a HiredScore like this, and we can start to kinda push into the next Workday lawsuit, they needed to do something. Their AI was already on trial. Joel: Yeah. Or at least give the impression that we're doing something. We'll see. Time will tell if this really does change the company. And iCIMS is a much smaller company than Workday, by the way. Workday is a... Chad: Oh God, yeah, yeah. Joel: A big, big company. All right. All right. Well, time will tell, I guess, on this one. But we agree, Athena, great job. Great, hopefully, payout. And then in a year or so, you can go do whatever the hell you want. Good for you. [laughter] Clip/SoundFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: All right, let's go to lawsuits. Derek Mobley has filed a lawsuit against Workday, alleging that its AI-powered hiring software discriminates based on race, age, and disability, violating federal laws. Workday denies wrongdoing, stating it ensures its products comply with laws. The case highlights concerns about AI bias in hiring. But wait, Chad, there's more. HireVue has been partially relieved from a class action lawsuit in Illinois. The court dismissed claims that HireVue profited from selling the data, focusing on software sales instead. The case highlights legal complexity surrounding biometric-data-use in hiring. Methinks a trend is developing, Chad. What are your thoughts? Chad: Yes. So, Workday, we're just talking about it, hence the HiredScore acquisition. What Workday needs at this point is a show of contrition through this acquisition with a "will do better" statement, and then pay a pissy little fine. And thank the gods, this case was not filed in the EU. Because a 6% global revenue fine for Workday would've cost them $420 million. So, hopefully HiredScore helps Workday get through this shit together. So, I see this almost as an optics play as well. It does make sense from a tech play. I don't know if it'll actually work out that way for Workday, but we'll see. Show of contrition: "Sorry, we did wrong. We actually bought these guys over here who understand AI, they can explain AI," et cetera, et cetera. Now on the HireVue side of the house, collecting biometric data on candidates. Illinois was the first state to craft what I would like to call an "anti-HireVue" legislation. Right? Chad: And then Massachusetts, the plaintiff, Jesus, claims that CVS... This is not a claim against HireVue. This is what all companies should be aware of right now. The plaintiff claims CVS, not HireVue, CVS violated state law by subjecting him to an AI-powered interview, HireVue, that analyzed his facial expressions, eye contact, voice annotation, inflection, et cetera, et cetera. So, notice that once again, that was not against HireVue, it was against CVS. The bigger issue, I cannot imagine... See, we know people who work there. We know people who have worked there. I cannot imagine CVS would be happy with the prospect that HireVue is collecting biometric information on CVS' candidates. So, the question is, is that actually happening behind the scenes? Just because that the biometric data product isn't available, or at least I don't believe it is anymore, doesn't mean that HireVue doesn't have the capability to actually collect that biometric information. Chad: And that to me is the scary part if you are a CVS. Not only couldn't you be taken to court because of this, but wait a minute, are they collecting data that we don't know that they're collecting? And what are they using that data for? Right? So, then I reached out to a few practitioners and asked them about this, and they've freaked the fuck out. One said, it is going to be an interesting case to follow, as it could have huge implications on the tech space. No kidding. It's a fine line between... Listen, it's a fine line between biometric data collection, sentiment analysis, which we hear a lot of companies talk about, and lie detectors. Joel: The recent news that Washington really cares about this issue is promising. It's an election year. We've talked about the chaos that could ensue with deepfakes, phone calls from Joe Biden that aren't Joe Biden. That really scares politicians a lot. Well, guess who makes the laws? The politicians. So, in the last 60 days, they have moved really fiercely [laughter] to make sure that Meta and some of these big tech companies... Number one, it's illegal now to do that. So, the FTC now, if you're a candidate and you deepfake politicians, you could be in trouble. We're not sure what those penalties are, but at least the government has said that's illegal. So, the fact that the government cares about these issues, to me, is a good sign. I don't know where it will go or how fast it will evolve, but Washington has their attention on this issue. Joel: I don't know who's representing these these cases. I don't know if it's Dewey, Cheatem and Howe, and our friends Baron & Budd, but lawyers smell blood in the water. They smell an opportunity where they can go after companies. Like, "CVS has more money than HireVue, so let's go after them." Workday has a lot of money. LinkedIn, the lawsuit with them. So, I think it's more lawyers targeting, looking at these laws and saying, "Who can we get?" and "These are the top of the list." We need a healthy balance of laws so that everyone knows the rules. And we need, I think, a greater certification, a greater sort of third party that has everyone's trust that we're doing it the right way. Joel: And FairNow and companies like that, I think, are in a really great position to say, "Look, we've worked with the government. We have all the AI stuff. We're making sure that every company is dotting their I's and crossing their T's. So, if you take us to court, we are certified FairNow or whoever it is, that they can go into court and say, "Look, we're the law of the land. We're doing this the right way." Until then, it's still the Wild West. We're gonna talk about more and more lawsuits. More and more customers like CVS are gonna be worried about using vendors that have AI because they're gonna worry about, "Am I gonna be dragged into court because I'm using this vendor?" Well, yeah, you are. And by the way, a lot of these terms and services on these companies say, "If you use our shit, you're at fault if it goes to court." Like, "We're not at fault if you use our stuff." So, something's gotta come to a head. Chad: HireVue specifically did that. Joel: HireVue specifically. Chad: HireVue specifically did that, yes. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. And more and more will, because nobody wants to be sued. That's not fun. It's bad for business, so to speak. So, I think government giving a shit about this is a good thing. And companies that are dedicated to like "Let's make sure everyone's following the rules" or "Let's certify people" is a good thing. But until then, there's gonna be some stories like this, and more and more stories like this because there's money to be made. Chad: This next segment is from June of 2024 and is entitled, "Bullhorn Strikes Back at Indeed." Joel Lalgee and Tim Meehan step in for a great analysis on Bullhorn's Textkernel acquisition. Chad: This is a pretty big one. This week, Bullhorn acquired Textkernel, an industry leader in sourcing AI solutions, better known as one of the biggest vendors in the world for parsing and matching, which is not an easy fucking business. Plus, longtime sponsor of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Textkernel's, their HQ is in Amsterdam and they power over 2,000 customers globally. And these customers, for the most part, are big vendors that we all know and love, that we think are doing the parsing and the matching. They're not. Textkernel is the one who's doing it behind the scenes, including eight of the top 10 staffing agencies worldwide. We were just talking about staffing. A longtime trusted partner to the staffing and recruitment industry, and one of the companies who have performed the heavy lift for many of the biggest tech platforms in the industry. So, before we get into comments, Joel, let's welcome back the staffing and tech leader, Tim Meehan, for his thoughts. Tim Meehan: All right, guys. So, here's the deal. Years ago, I said that staffing companies had to become technology companies. I've worked for them and they don't understand. And now, acquisition from Bullhorn buying Textkernel, holy crap. The staffing companies and a lot of other techs are all using Textkernel to do their matching. Is Bullhorn gonna pull it off the market? And you want Textkernel, you want a matching algorithm, you got to use Bullhorn? That's gonna be a big game changer for the staffing industry 'cause if they're not using Bullhorn, they're gonna have to. And if they are using Bullhorn, quite frankly they've got them by the short hairs, and it's gonna force... It's like, what is that Japanese term? Seppuku. It's like it's gonna force them to cut their belly open. Either they become subservient to the Bullhorns of the world, or they become pure plain niche and they don't even try and do automated matching. Chad: So, there's a choice, Joel. There's a choice. [laughter] You can continue to stay with Indeed or you can go with Bullhorn. Sounds like they're gonna have tech. It could help out. What do you think? Joel Lalgee: As a former Bullhorn user, I feel bad for all the people who [laughter] are gonna have to use Bullhorn with that prediction 'cause I... Look, I think how you add on these AI tools and integrate is huge. Just in general, I think any AI tool, it all comes down to adoption and how people use them. And that's always the big question for me. Anytime I hear AI conversations, I don't even know if people are aware, the difference between automation and then AI, how to use tools, how to use these tools anyway. But I think it seems like a great move for Bullhorn. And obviously for Textkernel, it's gonna obviously open up more clients as well. But I don't know. I feel like Bullhorn has a better deal out of that one. What do you think? Chad: Well, first and foremost, I guess, say congrats to Gerard and the Textkernel team. This is the type of tech that has performed, as I said earlier, some of the heaviest technical lifts in the history of recruiting, which is why there aren't many successful companies in the space. A quick and brief history of Textkernel, in 2015, CareerBuilder acquired 60% of Textkernel, and they liked them so much that CareerBuilder, then owned by Daddy Warbucks' Apollo, went all in and they acquired Textkernel in 2019. Then, Apollo started selling off bits and pieces of CareerBuilder, and Textkernel was sold to Main Capital in September of 2020. Then, Textkernel expanded their footprints into the US by acquiring parsing and matching powerhouse Sovren in November of 2021. Chad: Now, I'm saying all of this because it's obvious that Textkernel tech is appetizing for many companies. The question is, can Bullhorn pull off an acquisition and technical execution of this size when players like CareerBuilder and Apollo just fucking fumbled the ball? The execution will be fucking massive. And I'm not 100% sure that Bullhorn can pull it off, but I hope they do. To Tim's point and our earlier Indeed staffing conversation, if Bullhorn isn't positioning themselves as an Indeed killer, they're doing it wrong. Staffing organizations spend tens of millions of dollars annually to attract candidates, and many of those candidates are already in their goddamn resume database. Chad: So, now, again, if Bullhorn is smart, they will use the parsing and matching in every resume in a staffing firm's database. As soon as a rec is posted, they'll match it to those candidates with a high degree of match. Then they should automatically be invited to apply through email, text, or whatever messaging they choose. That will then lessen the need for the Indeeds of the world, plus Bullhorn can reach out to candidates that are going stale, to nudge them to add skills, expertise, and just build up their profile. But like I said, it's gonna be a massive undertaking, and I'm just not sure. I'm sure we'll talk to Bullhorn, but I'm just not sure they're up to this task. It is big. Not to mention, will they make Textkernel under Bullhorn, or will they keep it as a separate product? Because they already have a humongous portfolio, and part of that portfolio are other applicant tracking systems, right? So, it's gonna be an interesting dance. What do you think? Joel Lalgee: So, you're saying then, so Bullhorn basically uses all of their resumes in all of their clients' databases as well. So, then when you open up a rack, it will match from not just your own database that you have, but everybody's, right? Is that what I'm hearing? Chad: I didn't go that far, but that would be smart if staffing companies, especially smaller staffing companies, could work together to actually build pools like data lakes, is really what it is. But, yeah, I don't think the Adeccos or the Randstads out there would do something like that. I think they have big enough databases where they don't have to. It'll just be forced to be able to go into their database and the candidates that they already have there. Joel Lalgee: Yeah. Well, look, I just... The one thing I wonder with everything right now is, in general, just outside of even staffing and recruitment, in general, everybody's mailboxes are being blown up. And candidates are the same way. They're getting the same... They're getting all of this. So, I just wonder if the challenge coming up is actual recruitment, and how do you stand out? Right? 'Cause I think finding candidates, to me, finding data nowadays is easier and you can do it pretty quick. But it's like reaching people, getting good with messages. Like you said, texting, calling, that to me, it's just, I don't see how we don't create a big problem with just candidates in general. Or what happens when candidates who are already... I do a lot of social media content. One of the biggest, one of the points that goes viral all the time is if I bash particularly LinkedIn and Indeed. If I say, "Are you sick of LinkedIn and Indeed? Here are three other platforms," those videos always go viral. So, I'm like, does this just compound? Do these tools, they just compounding that? And then how do you... Great, you found the person. How do you really even get a hold of them nowadays? That's what I'm wondering over the next year, 18 months. Chad: Yeah, so I think at the end of the day, first and foremost, ZipRecruiter had it right years ago. And then they just went off the rails when they went IPO. Joel Lalgee: ZipRecruiter had it right... Chad: Way back in the day. [laughter] Not lately, not lately. Joel Lalgee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chad: What they did was, they actually had this model where they would go into their database and they would literally, they would invite individuals who matched up against the requirements of a requisition, right? Made a lot of sense. What they were looking to do, and they never did, was just create slates, the ones that are higher match in quality, then just deliver 10, right? Instead of delivering 30 or 50 or 300 to a recruiter, which is not manageable. I really think that if you get a really good score match up against the actual requirements and what the skill sets that you need, what can happen at that point is a recruiter gets more time to actually focus on interacting with that individual, right? Joel Lalgee: Yeah. Chad: One of the things right now is way too much administrivia, not to mention candidates are going into black holes because recruiters don't have enough time to respond to all of them. And in this case, if you get 10 or 15, you can actually take the time to be more human with those individuals. So, yeah, I think they've already applied for a job within your portfolio of companies, so more than likely you have contact information. And if they're smart, they're getting phone number, they're getting Messenger, whatever their chosen form of communication is, and they're gonna be reaching out to them. Then, you've got, and this is the fun part, to get into the chatbots of the world, the Talkpushes, the Paradoxes and whatnot, that can actually help nudge candidates not just for the interview, but also for that first day at work, and to get feedback and whatnot. And from my understanding, and talking to Adam Godson when he was at Cielo, not just now when he's at Paradox, but when he was at Cielo billing these systems, their ghosting went down dramatically just from those little nudge messages, which is pretty amazing. So, I think there's great opportunity here. Joel Lalgee: I want to know with this validation of skills, 'cause I know skills-based hiring keeps everything up. Chad: That's hard. That's hard. Joel Lalgee: But I'm like, this is the other issue which I see is, on the other end, you've got candidates now that have tools as well that can make perfect resumes, they can match up to the job. At some point, where is the skills validation? And then how are you defining what skills are for jobs? How do you actually... Yeah, but for some of these jobs, you really need skills as well 'cause maybe that's... [chuckle] Chad: Yeah. These companies have to understand they've been talking about skills-based hiring forever and they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Because first and foremost, they don't know what skills it actually takes within that job. Because what they haven't done is they haven't actually taken a look at the tasks that are performed by that job on a daily basis. When you do that, you understand that a job is literally just an amalgamation of tasks, right? Joel Lalgee: Yeah. Chad: Can the individual perform those tasks? And then what are the skills that are tied to those tasks? There's tech out there today that can do that. Tadeo, which again, I'm an advisor for, just to be transparent out there. But they are more performance-driven. You have to demonstrate that you can perform that task in a simulation before, boom, you get that skill, right? So, it's becoming more readily available and understandable, but the companies have to do the job upfront of even understanding what the job looks like for the person who's doing it task by task by task, and then they can understand the skills. Until then, they're literally just bullshitting everybody, I believe. Joel Lalgee: So, I got defined skills and then they need it. I think right now they've got to get buy-in from candidates to get that data even. And I like the idea of inviting people to jobs. I like it when, like you said, when that idea first came out. I get invited all the time by LinkedIn to do different things. And it's so off every single time. So, I think they got to figure out a way of, "How do we gamify getting the right data even from candidates?" Otherwise, you're just gonna end up with just wrong matches on both ends. And then be like, "Yeah, it didn't work." Chad: LinkedIn's matching tech is shit. I mean, they have more data on me than anybody does. They should be able to match me up very well. And they do a shit job. Joel Lalgee: I get host of like Olive Garden, 'cause I have "podcast host" in my bio. I'm a hostess at Olive Garden. [laughter] But that's it. And this is where I think... One of the things I noticed with any kind of AI tools, one of the things I've noticed really quickly, is you have like one shot with users like myself, recruiters. And if they don't see, "Saves time, money," or "It works," you miss in that one shot. They just write you off as it not working altogether. And so this is where it's like, you have to... You got to deliver on that and... Chad: Yeah, you do. You got to remember, though, AI is a puppy. I mean, it's gonna piss on the carpet a few times. You got to give it a little grace, but here's where TA leaders need to stiffen their spine, and all of these processes are gonna be happening behind the scenes, and they're gonna be delivered up to the recruiters. So, this should not be a decision made by the recruiters. It should be made by leadership, right? Now, recruiters should be a part of the process to ensure that it actually becomes more fluid; we get the best data to be able to train on the right data for the right jobs in the right positions in the right regions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, we can't... And I'll just give you an example. At Randstad, we had so many people who had LinkedIn seats, who weren't even using LinkedIn seats. And we were pushing them off. Oh, we almost had a fucking riot. And it's like, "Look, you guys aren't even using this and money's being spent," right? Joel Lalgee: [laughter] Crazy. Chad: Yeah. So, it's just like, you have to stiffen your spine. And I was there and I was like, "Fuck those guys." I don't care. We can find new recruiters. If they can't use the tools that you're giving them and then they bitch when you take them away because they're not using them, it's... My point is, leadership has to lead, right? And they're not leading today, period. Joel Lalgee: Yeah. No, I agree, 100%. Chad: On that being said, I gotta say: Clip/SoundFX: Ma, the meatloaf! [laughter] Joel Lalgee: Yeah. Chad: This next segment is from July, Monster and CareerBuilder merger. So much juicy meat on this one. Give it a listen. Joel: Well, let's see, what could we possibly talk about this week as the first news item on the show? CareerBuilder and Monster are merging, Chad. I don't know if you heard about this. Led by Apollo, the deal aims to combine their strengths and create a stronger job board. Apollo will be controlling a shareholder, meaning Randstad who acquired Monster back in 2016 for $429 million, is essentially pulling out of the job board biz. The transaction, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close in Q3. Again, nice of them to announce bad news or interesting news or controversial news right before the 4th of July Holiday. Chad, I'm sure you have a few thoughts on the CareerBuilder-Monster merger as a former Monster employee. Chad: Yeah. And also former Randstad employee. Kind of weird. What happens when two dumpster fires merge? Well, and they create a larger dumpster fire. Every single day Randstad walks into a big client meeting. They talk about fusing technology into staffing and into next gen hiring. Now, when they leave those meetings, after they close the door, they can hear an eruption of laughter knowing that no savvy business person takes them serious after buying Monster. And instead of reviving the brand, they ran the tech, the brand, and the market trust right into the ground. Then you have Apollo Global Management, who acquired CareerBuilder and successfully chopped it up into little pieces and sold it for an estimated, Whisper is about 10x the investment. Apollo still owns the hollow corpse of CareerBuilder, its brand tech assets and candidate database, which they have failed to unload on a dumb sucker enough to buy it, right, or somebody dumb enough to buy it. Chad: So, on one hand, you have Randstad, a major staffing organization trying to unload Monster brand of yesteryear and gain back the prospect of not getting laughed at at client meetings, and when they want to talk about future tech. And on the other hand, you have Apollo who are trying to sell the bones, the cadaver, of CareerBuilder. So, don't be fooled kids. It's not a saver for Indeed and LinkedIn. It's just another Apollo scheme to sell two rotting corpses instead of one. That's pretty much it. It seems simple to me. And the whole timing thing, if they wanted to make this a big deal, two things. It came out on the Randstad press side of the house, and it came out before a big holiday, which, generally, you're trying to bury things. So, that to me is odd. Joel: Yeah. Clip/SoundFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Joel: So, quick question, we've been talking about Indeed getting into staffing, Recruit Holdings, obviously, and Randstad is a competitor to Recrute. Wouldn't it seem like they reviving Monster to maybe stick it to Indeed, or is this a "We need to really focus on staffing because Recruit Holdings and Indeed are coming for us, let's dump the dead weight"? Which obviously happened, but does that surprise you at all that with Recruit Holdings and Indeed coming after all the staffing firms that Randstad strategically didn't do something different than sell Monster 'cause they had that property? Chad: Yeah, I think Monster leadership finally found out that they're not a tech company and they have no fucking clue what they're doing in this space. They had Monster under its own umbrella and kind of shielded for a year or two, and they couldn't do anymore because the losses were so great. They were trying to do all this crazy product fluffy shit that just didn't equal revenue or the prospect of future revenues. So, I think literally this is just, "Let's get rid of this fucking dog." Apollo knows how to cut up in pieces and sell shit, that's what they do for a living, "let's give them this other carcass with the carcass that they have, and maybe two carcasses sell, who knows?" Joel: Well, here are my seven takeaways from the acquisition, Chad. Number one... Chad: Oh, God, is this Stepstone? [laughter] Joel: I promised myself I wouldn't. If it leads that way, so be it. But I do not have Stepstone in my seven thing. Number one... Chad: Okay, okay. Podcast Intro: This is big news for people of a certain age that have been doing this for quite a while. If you're under 40, this is a big nothing burger. No one of us, way younger than us, cares about this shit. Only old people like you, me, and Durbin, and Rothberg, and people like that really care about this stuff. So, number one, this is not a huge news in the big scheme of things. Number two, Scott Gutz is finally gone. Just like they did with Ferguson at CareerBuilder, it may take a year. He may transition to an advisory board guy, but Scott Gutz, as I think we've both been expecting or predicting for a while, will finally be gone. The CPA that's running CareerBuilder and crunching the numbers will be the leader of this organization long-term. Chad: He's a facilities management guy. [laughter] Joel: Whatever, man. He's a bean counter. Apollo loves that shit. It's like, "How can we squeeze more profit out of this turkey?" Number three, if you're currently an employee of Monster, you better be updating your resume, your LinkedIn profile. If you have a duplicitous position, that your time on this world is running out. Jump ship as soon as you can. Apollo gutted CareerBuilder, they're gonna gut Monster as well. So, if you're employed by Monster, keep that in mind and update your resume. Number five, oh sorry, number four. I love that they talked about regulatory issues, antitrust issues coming up in this case, as if this were 2004, there will be no antitrust issues. Chad: Maybe, yeah. Maybe 15... Yeah, 15, 20 years ago, yeah. Joel: That's silly. It's almost like, "We're so big, there might be issues." No, there's not gonna be any antitrust issues on this case. [laughter] Number five, the big question from a marketing standpoint is, do they keep both brands? Do they morph into one, and which one? A little bit of a prediction. But I think in the near term, nothing will change, let's call it a year. But I do think eventually the CareerBuilder brand will go away. Monster is still a decent brand. You can do something with Monster. CareerBuilder, there's nothing you can do. With Monster, you can kind of do some stuff, be cool, be hip, be edgy, connect with the kids. So, I think Monster is going to be the brand that they go with. Number six, I think they will, in addition to brand, condense all the jobs, similar to how Indeed postings are on SimplyHired. You're gonna see cross-posting. I think they'll probably try to increase the price on a double posting from that in that way. Joel: And number seven, I'm sorry, Chad, yeah, StepStone is gonna eventually be the choir of Monster [laughter] as it becomes one single brand. Or they could take this Turkey IPO, who knows? Roll the dice and see what happens. Or they could look at rinse and repeating, and saying, "Well, okay, ZipRecruiter stock is now $4 or whatever it's gonna be in two, three years. Maybe we buy ZipRecruiter and bring them in the fold. Maybe Talent.com, which has not made a lot of waves lately. Maybe we suck them up." Yeah, this is a rinse and repeat for Apollo. They've made seven to 10X, according to rumors out there. And why not continue the trend and just buy job boards, suck them dry, and then just feed off the revenue that's there? Because all these companies are in every budget for a lot of companies, and companies just approve the budget every year, and this money just keeps flowing in. It's a nice little cash cow. Chad: So, I have some listener comments around some of that. First and foremost, I gotta give props to Leah Daniels who said they're gonna ditch both brands and go with Jobs.com, which Monster owns. Then we had other listener comments and these were similarities between the Monster plus CareerBuilder. This is more like VHS plus Betamax. Friendster plus MySpace. PalmPilot plus Blackberry. Or your favorite Cheesman, White Castle plus Waffle House. That's right kids. Joel: Oh, that's sexy. Chad: That is what listeners think of this merger. And again, I think it's funny because there are some people that are pundits that are out there saying, "This is a data play," and I think that's the funniest shit ever. These companies do not have any data that anybody gives two fucks about and/or they can't get somewhere else. So, have a nice day. Joel: Yeah. Some perspective, these were one time both the number one site in the US if not globally. They were both valued at over a billion dollars. Chad: One and two. Joel: They both sold recently for about 500 million. What do you think the value is now? I'm gonna say, if they're at a hundred million, it'd be giving them a little bit more than they are probably worth. Chad: This one is called "Indeed Tomfuckery" and is from August of 2024. You knew Indeed had to make this list, right? Give it a listen. Chad: So, we've seen Indeed's traffic waning, revenues waning, new business models like CPA and CPSA waning and then imploding. Then we hear about Indeed Flex marching into temp staffing. Then Indeed announces charging for API calls at three bucks a clip. And now, wait a minute, and now the following excerpt of an email comes from Eric Epling, strategic partnership manager at Indeed. And that was sent to us from a niche job board. Eric asks, "Would you," the job site, they're actually asking the job site, "be open to a content for traffic exchange? This would mean that we, Indeed, may not be able to compensate you, but your job site would benefit from top tier jobs while we receive traffic from your platform. Also, please note that our strategy now focuses on," get ready kids, "healthcare, tech, financing and accounting, and transportation jobs." What do you think about this, Joel? Sound a little fishy? [video playback] Joel: So, a little history lesson, kids, 'cause I know that's what you come to the show for. [laughter] Outside of SEO, Indeed's backfill model was really what ramped up the company to a different stratosphere. There was a time when pretty much any job board had Indeed backfill. There were very few that didn't. They were the only one that really offered it. You got paid on a click. It gave you content where you didn't have content before. I knew job boards that fired their whole sales and marketing staff because they could just supply jobs through Indeed. And a big problem with job boards is we need jobs, we need employers. Well, Indeed came along and said, "Hey, you don't need postings. You can get them from us." And by the way, this was a really nice Trojan horse where everyone that put backfill had a little link at the bottom that said "jobs provided by Indeed" or whatever. And that jobs link, guess what, was hot linked back to indeed.com. Well, Google loves backlinks. So, basically Indeed, I won't say "tricked," but they leveraged all these backfill relationships to get better search rankings, which ultimately tanked every job board that had enjoyed SEO rankings in the past. Joel: It was very successful. I'm sure it was a pain to manage. There was probably click fraud. And fast forward to today, you have competition from the likes of Pando, Taoru, every programmatic solution out there. And they kind of ended it as far as... We talked about it. But then they launched these channels, healthcare, tech, and it's basically like a way to call their customers like, "Hey. Hey, hospital, regional hospital in Toledo. We have a new healthcare channel. You need to spend more money with us because we have these great partnerships." And now they want you to partner without money, as if they have content that can't be gotten anywhere else. Chad: Exactly! Joel: "Just 'cause we're Indeed, you should want to partner with us for no cost." Chad: Top tier. Joel: They've lost the script. They don't know what they're doing. It's more spaghetti at the wall. They have a few hits but mostly misses. None of this really makes sense to me. What are your thoughts? Chad: Well, first off, you, the job site, get top tier talent, AKA send your job seeker directly to Indeed for no compensation. No compensation. And then they force the job seeker to register, meaning, you just handed over traffic and a job seeker registration for fucking free. So, if you're currently receiving compensation from Indeed, how long do you think it's gonna last? That's the big question. Also, even if you are selling clicks to Indeed, they're paying you to siphon your job seekers and build their database, right? Back to the quote, "only focusing on partnering with healthcare, tech, finance and accounting, and transportation jobs." Siphoning job seekers from niche job sites are the key. Chad: Now, we've talked about this on the show for years. Job sites that are experts in specific spaces, they are much more valuable. In this case, Indeed sees that. They see your model, they understand your model, and they want to siphon it dry. They wanna drink your fucking milkshake, kids. So, at the end of the day, back in the day, Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, the general job sites ruled the world. Now, Indeed sees that's not the case, right? So, all of those organizations, those niche job sites, companies understand that quality is better than quantity. The market has shifted. The landscape has shifted. And, last but not least, if you are a job site and you need content, there are plenty of places to go to get great job content. And if you're not sure where, message me on LinkedIn. I will hook you up with some great contacts to be able to get you great top-tier content so you don't have to play this bullshit game with Indeed. Joel: Chad Sowash will make sure you do not fall for the banana in the tailpipe. Clip/SoundFX: You're not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe. [laughter] Joel: Oh, Indeed. Oh, Indeed. Chad: There it is, kids. 2024 is over. Joel and I are excited about all of the new voices we have planned and bringing you in 2025, along with analysis and obviously brash opinion. Thanks again for listening. We out. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Behold! A holiday spectacle so dazzling, so insightful, it’ll practically guarantee you a promotion (results may vary, void where prohibited, don't quit your day job). We've wrangled all our favorite (and some we just tolerated ) guests from 2024 to deliver scorching hot takes on the burning dumpster fire that is talent, tech, and recruitment. Think less "fireside chat" and more "dumpster fire chat." From AI’s inevitable robot overlord takeover of recruiting (will they finally fix the ATS? Don't hold your breath) to the thrilling return of the office (aka mandatory fun times!), we've got the scoop you need to maybe  survive 2025. Or at least have something to complain about at the next holiday party. Witness the assembled brain trust, including: Eileen Kovalsky from General Motors: Because even car companies need people to, you know, build cars. Adam Godson , CEO of Paradox: Hopefully, he'll explain what a paradox is without causing one. Jessica Rush , Chief Talent Officer: We're rushing to find the talent, people! Get it? (We'll see ourselves out). Patti Tabris , Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at ResultsCX: Because someone has to deal with the results. Stefan Premdas , Director, People Experience at sweetgreen: Hopefully, they brought snacks. J.T. O'Donnell from Work It Daily: Because you're going to need to. Julie Sowash , Executive Director and Co-founder of Disability Solutions: Providing solutions to problems you didn't even know you had! John Graham , the VP of Employer Brand Strategy, Humanity & Culture at Shaker: Because branding is everything, even when it's not. (He appears twice! Clearly, he's got a lot to say...or we messed up the guest list). Emi Beredugo : We’re not entirely sure what Emi does, but they’re here! Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze , Co-host from Europe: Bringing you takes from across the pond (probably involving better coffee). Matt Lavery , Global Director of Sourcing, Recruiting, & Onboarding: The man, the myth, the onboarding legend. Lord Wei , A Member of the Science and Tech Committee in the House of Lords: Adding a touch of British pomp and circumstance (and hopefully some actual wisdom). Rebecca Carr , CEO at SmartRecruiters: Because recruiting needs to be smart, obviously. Courtney Dempsey , the Head of Recruiting at Southern Rock Restaurants: Serving up talent as hot as their chicken. Chloé Rada , the Senior Director of Talent Attraction at ZoomInfo: Zooming into the future of talent (get it?). Dean Da Costa , Senior Staff Talent Acquisition at Lockheed Martin: Recruiting the best of the best to build…stuff. Mary Battle Broxton , Leading Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing at Tractor Supply Company: Because even tractor companies need marketing. 🎧 Smash that subscribe button NOW! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (cometh) Chad: Hey, what are you doing here? Okay, no, I'm glad you stopped by. You see here at the Chad and Cheese Podcast, Joel and I, we wanted to give you guys something special because you're the ones who make this. Listeners, our viewers, people who engage with our stuff and it's holiday season, so we're bringing you the 10 top, our 10 top topics for the year with some amazing speakers and just a lot of fun. And, yeah, we're kind of enjoying the holidays too. Again, you make the Chad and Cheese Podcast. You. And we really appreciate it. We love you guys. If you haven't signed up for free stuff, chadcheese.com/free. Free t-shirts, booze. We like to send our people stuff. So anyway, thanks so much from Chad, from the Algarve. We love you and have a wonderful holiday season. We will see you on the flip side. Podcast 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. [music] Chad: In 2024, the question of AI replacing recruiters was one hell of a hot topic. Here's Eileen Kovalsky, Global Head of Candidate Experience at General Motors. Adam Godson, CEO, and Jessica Rush, Chief Talent Officer over at Paradox, talking about recruitment with AI. Enjoy. Joel: The narrative of recruiting is going away or recruiters are being replaced. It's interesting to note that I didn't hear you say that any recruiters were let go in that process. But I'm curious from your perspective, will the skill set of a recruiter in the future GM look different? And what is that difference going to look like? Eileen Kovalsky: Absolutely will look different. Historically, our recruiters and they're fantastic, but their job was primarily posting and praying. I mean, that's what it was for a really long time. What it will be tomorrow and how it's starting to transform is we've added a significant number of recruiters that come with very specific technical recruiting experience from some big name competitors that I will not name. And they're not only on the hook for like help bringing that talent in, but also helping to educate our OG recruiters on here's how you sell to a tech candidate, 'cause the sell is different. Joel: Yeah. Eileen Kovalsky: They don't necessarily care about that we shut down in July and you maybe have a week off. They want to know that they can work flexibly and that they have cool tools and the technology is modern. And those are the things that attract them. And so it's how do you sell differently? And so that the role of the recruiter absolutely is changing. Again, I'm going to throw another cliche out there. They are now becoming talent advisers. They're advising managers, hiring managers and leaders on what's in the market. They're leveraging data that we have to say, "Hey, you're looking for this purple squirrel with pink polka dots." But guess what? There's five of them in the whole country. So let's talk about if we just took the polka dots away. Eileen Kovalsky: How much does that increase your your pipeline and can we train for those polka dots? And those are the conversations that the recruiters are starting to have. And that will continue to evolve because we can't keep doing what we did yesterday if we wanna succeed tomorrow. Chad: So we had Kevin Wheeler, a futurist, on the podcast a few months ago. Joel: Chad likes to name names if you didn't know that about him. Chad: It's out there. It's out there. Joel: It is out there. Chad: It's out there on ChadCheese.com. Anyway, so he actually said that he sees recruiters going away in the very near future because this technology is so damn good. So where do you sit when it comes to, I mean, recruiters just being flushed, being a recruiter yourself at one time, being flushed out of the entire process? Adam Godson: Yeah, I think it's easy to see that recruiting as it's done today, there will be less of it and it'll be different. Chad: So what do you mean by done today? Adam Godson: Yeah, so I think there are two types of jobs in the future for talent acquisition. There are gonna be people that design processes and orchestrate automation and set up systems that maybe serve as air traffic control and they design how these things work. There's going to be a second group of people that are on the phone talking to candidates, meeting with people in coffee shops, and they are convincing them to join. And they are the real recruiters of our industry. And I think what's gone are people that wish they were doing that, but are working their applicant tracking system, clicking buttons all day, wishing they were talking to candidates. So that version of recruiting I think does go away and I think we end up in this path. And what will drive that is competition. So for a long time people thought technology would replace things, right? Adam Godson: Back to the ATM machine. Well, ATMs are going to take the job of every bank teller. Guess what? There are more ATMs in the next 20 years after that. I'm sorry, there are more bank tellers in the next 20 years than ever before because you can run a bank more cheaply and have more bank branches. And so competition will make that work. So just like we will still have salespeople, the ability to go get the best talent, to go convince people to join will absolutely make recruiting as important or more important in the future to get the best people. But it will look different. A lot of the administrative stuff will go away. There will be system designers, technologists that do that. There will be people that really, really recruit. Jessica Rush: I think this is like the story of time. Technology always has done both. It's taken some jobs and it's created a lot of new jobs. So I think we'll just see more of that. And our CEO Adam talks about that the future of recruiting is really gonna be two types of jobs. One that's kind of the convince connect role and one that's the experience design. And we've really been operating like that for a while now, a paradox on our talent acquisition team. And so I do think that's the way where we've got a team of recruiters that spend their time talking to candidates, understanding what they care about, building a relationship, building trust and spending time coaching our hiring managers, partnering with them to really understand deeply their needs and the market and who's a great fit and providing that information. Jessica Rush: And then we have a team that really thinks about, "Okay, how do we use our technology and tools to create a better experience for our candidates, for our recruiters, for our hiring managers, for everybody who's involved?" So we're fortunate that we get to do that. And we're just always thinking about how do we continue to double down in those two areas? And but I really think that's where we're headed. Chad: Joel, that's AI putting the human back in HR. AI is here, so employer branding is dead, right? Well, apparently the importance of employer branding in tech driven recruitment became a very hot topic in 2024. Here are some of the thoughts of Patti Tabris, senior director of TA at Results CX and Stefan Premdas, director of people experience at Sweetgreen. Patti Tabris: We branded our program as Refer CX and it's a mobile app. Chad: Oh, that's awesome. Patti Tabris: They could go right on their phones. And that was part of what Aaron offered us when we decided to go with Aaron as our vendor. Chad: Oh, that's awesome. That's great. Patti Tabris: Branding it for the company, making them feel like they're a part of something company wide. It's on their phone. They could click in there and make a referral from anywhere. If they're standing in Starbucks and they're talking to somebody in line and they think they're a great fit for our company, send them a referral notice, talk them into applying. It's a great way to have people get excited about their job and their company. So something I'd love to throw out there that isn't, everybody's looking for the money savings, the time savings, all of that. But what we found is the company culture and what it added to our company culture is really exciting as well. Since we set up our referral program with Aaron, we've won five Great Place to Work badges this past year. And I think that has to have something to do with it. Joel: I imagine it does. Patti Tabris: They feel rewarded. They feel excited about the company. Joel: Talk about the branding, employment branding perspective. How has the changes in the business changed the brand or has it? Are you all in on what you're doing now or are you steadfast on we're Sweetgreen? It feels like a Patagonia type brand that you stay the course. What is the new technology meant to the brand? Stefan Premdas: It's actually an exercise that we're kicking off next year. We want to go through a full EVP. We realize that as a company, we're growing and maturing. We've just brought in a lot of new folks to the C-suite and the company's changing. The pace at which we want to grow is we're really kind of on that trajectory that we've always wanted to be in. I think our brand is... And I don't know where it's gonna land, but I have a feeling it's gonna land in. We are kind of a future first company. And if you want somewhere to grow, you can go from a team member to a general manager, our head coach, as we call it in sweet green, in three years. But then what does that trajectory look like beyond that? And that's what we're starting to figure out now. Stefan Premdas: Our investment into succession planning is really going to be the next future. We want to get to the 60%-70% internal growth, promotion growth. So I'm not exactly sure where it's gonna land yet. We still have a lot of research. We want to differentiate. We don't want to be another Chipotle. Chad: Diversity, equity and inclusion was under attack in 2024, and the uncertain future of DEI was on everyone's mind. JT O'Donnell, founder and CEO at Work It Daily, my beautiful wife, Julie Sowash, executive director and co-founder at Disability Solutions, plus John Graham. That's right, John Graham, VP of employer brand diversity and culture at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. They all had something to say about this topic. Give it a listen. Joel: But Chad and I have been talking about the death of DEI and companies abandoning it and the Supreme Court. And so it's a complex issue. But this week alone, Molson Coors said that they plan to cut supplier diversity quotas and DEI-based training programs, as well as sever ties with the corporate equality index of the LGBTQ plus advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. But wait, there's more. Ford Motor Company also joined in. This joins the likes of Harley Davidson, Lowe's and John Deere, who are scaling back diversity, equity, inclusion efforts. JT, what are your thoughts? And specifically, what are job seeker's opinions of what companies are doing here? J.T. O'Donnell: And you've talked about it here before. This seems to be so reflective of a market. When the market starts to contract and businesses are really looking at the bottom line, it gets really easy for them to say this just isn't necessary. And we've seen this before. We know it. Here's my silver lining. Here's what I truly believe as someone who works with so many job seekers and a lot of Gen Z. They were raised to look for inclusiveness. They've been exposed to this, talked about it, want to see it, question when it's not there. And I just have to believe and want to believe that as they become the next generation of managers and business owners, that that will just be organic to them. J.T. O'Donnell: In the same way that all the women that I know will now immediately look and say, "Is there a female on the board? What's the female leadership look like?" We took a long time for us as women to pay attention to that and to call it out. And I think that these generations are going to call out that diversity, I hope. And I certainly am going to nurture that every step of the way. It's a big part of what we coach to. So hopefully that'll help on the back end. Julie Sowash: As the winds change, companies use that as an opportunity to retract. And I know there's pressure in the market and I know I am very protective and very covetous of my brand. I built it. It's my baby. I understand. But it's sheer weakness to see these Fortune 100, Fortune 1000 brands pull back because they're scared of a little political change. You're in or you're out. And it's okay if you're out. Just be who you are. Don't try to pretend that you're into DEI. Don't try to pretend that now you're not into DEI because the political winds change. Be true to who your organization and your culture are because it's whiplash for the job seeker. Julie Sowash: And it's this like fake hope that companies give that that fake like illusion of hope that we're finally going to get pay right. That we're finally going to build our pipeline so that it's Black, Brown, LGBTQ and disabled. And then you just pull the sheet right out from under our feet again and we start over. Joel: Give me your take on the current state of DEI. A few years ago, it was like, yes, that's a good thing. Let's do it. It became politicized, weaponized. John Graham: Sure. Joel: Companies stepped back, didn't want to touch it. What's the current state of that issue? John Graham: Yeah. So I think we're at a point where DEI is now going through its own rebranding. And if you're a student of this space, you know that for the past 60 years, there's been a series of progressions and regressions. It's just a natural ebb and flow. When you start making progress, people will pull it back. But the key is you're incrementally moving forward. I think we're at a point right now where we're being honest about what can change, what people are willing to change. And then what can we do within that construct? What are we doing within the context of employer brand recruitment marketing? John Graham: How honest are we gonna be about our culture? What are we going to do as a company as far as what we're donating to or not anymore? And some companies have made headlines for pulling their commitments back all the way. Based on pressures from activist investors, perceived risk for their consumer bases, whatever the case may be. The challenge is that the issues for the people who are most marginalized didn't go away because a company rolled back its commitments. So they're gonna have to contend with it in some way. Chad: So automation's effect on workforce dynamics was another big topic. And friends of the show, Emi Beredugo, Senior Manager Recruitment Enablement at Elastic, and our friend Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze, Group Chief Digital Officer in Public Affairs at House of HR, had something to say. Check it out. Joel: Google CEO revealed this week that AI systems now generate more than a quarter, that's 25% for those of you at home that don't know what a quarter is, of new code for its products with human programmers overseeing the computer generated contributions. Does that mean current AI models are capable of generating flawless high quality code that developers can just insert and forget? Likely not. But does it mean fewer employees needed for said coding? What say you, Emmy? Quarter? 25% of all new code out of Google now is automated. Should programmers be worried? Emi Beredugo: Oh, should they be worried? I would still say no, going back to the fact that it helps to increase productivity. It helps to speed up the process, but it won't replace a human. So I don't think tech people need to be necessarily worried in terms of their roles going. But I do think that there will be an increasing need for those people within the tech world to upskill themselves. They're going to have to develop new skills to stay competitive in the marketplace. Roles are changing. So whether you're in product management, UX design, even customer education, all of those roles are still gonna have to need a higher level of understanding of AI functionalities, particularly because their clients and customers are becoming more savvy around AI as well. Chad: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: I'm less optimistic. Maybe Lieven can talk a little bit about Europe and some of the challenges that Germany and a lot of the continent is facing. Personio was a German company. A lot of their initial clients were in Germany. They are trying to grow here in the US, which we've talked about. But yeah, ultimately, we're gonna talk about this a lot. We're gonna talk a lot about, especially public companies, headcount reduction, stock price goes up, boats and hoes, rinse and repeat. And it's gonna be a theme that we talk about quite a bit on this show. Lieven, what are your thoughts? Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze: The whole personial thing. If people are talking about efficiency, I always wonder how is indeed AI going to impact that? And he didn't mention people are being replaced by AI. But if you read between the lines, it's kind of something like that. British Telecom, they were very clear about it. They fired 5000 people and they said we are going to replace those people by AI, first line help desk people, et cetera. So this is going to be a constant in the near future, I think. Chad: In 2024, CEOs started forcing employers back to the office. Is it good, bad or insignificant? Well, Emi, Joel and I, we had a few things to say about this. Give it a listen. Emi Beredugo: Worryingly, I'm seeing more and more organizations, especially the bigger ones, sending a not so subtle message to their employees. That message is, get back to the office or wave goodbye to your promotion. Now, here's the thing. Despite all the data that's supporting flexible working arrangements, I can't shake the feeling that if we are not careful, these return to office mandates might become the norm rather than exception. So why is this happening? Well, companies are thrown out all kinds of reasons, from better collaboration to improve connectivity and an environment where employees can actually grow their skills more easily. But is that actually the truth? Now, I like to think it's what I call executive nostalgia. So this is where senior leaders, they yearn for the good old days of water cooler chats, and maybe they're reminiscent about how they built their internal networks and rose through the ranks because of this. Emi Beredugo: But times have changed. If these execs want their organizations to keep succeeding, it's not their employees who need to conform. It's actually the leadership who need to change. They need to change their mindset. They need to upskill themselves so they now know how to lead a flexible workforce. And why do they need to change? Well, first of all, there isn't enough data out there that shows that in-office work leads to better outcomes. In fact, there's loads of data showing that they aren't even leading to higher profits. And there's also plenty of data showing that forcing employees back to the office can have a detrimental impact and can actually hurt productivity, morale, retention. So who is it impacting the most? Well, carers get hit hard. Not everyone has the help to juggle caregiving responsibilities. So if you force them back into the office, this just adds unnecessary strain. Emi Beredugo: Introverts struggle. Crowded office spaces, they just aren't energizing for everyone. For some they are actually really draining. Neurodivergent employees lose out. So many neurodivergents thrive in environments where they can manage their own time in a quiet space and work from home setups often enables their best work. Then you've got people with disabilities. Accessibility in a home setup can sometimes be far better than navigating a commute to the office and a office that even if they go to might not even fully accommodate their needs. And then you've got the commute themselves, those people who live far away from the office, that return to office mandate isn't just inconvenient. It's actually exhausting and wasteful. So if organizations know all of this, why they doing it? What's the point? I mean, surely they're not that stupid, are they? Well, if you ask loads of employees, that answer is clear. Emi Beredugo: It is a lack of trust. Some leaders just don't trust their teams to be productive if they can't physically see them. And here's the reality. Most of the time people are commuting to sit at a desk, throw on their headphones and do exactly the same work that they would be doing if they were at home. So, make it make sense. And let's not gloss over the fact of what some people are actually quietly thinking. Some people believe that a few organizations are using return to office mandates as a sneaky way to reduce head count. And that's called quiet firing. Forcing people out the door without having to physically fire them. But if they keep doing this, if they keep eroding trust, these organizations are just gonna be running on borrowed time. So here's my message to those drive turkey companies out there who are enforcing return to office mandates. Fix up, get better, listen to your employees, change with the times. Build trust. Let go of all these outdated models of what work looks like and focus on what actually matters. The results. Joel: A new survey by Blind shows that 73% of Amazon employees are considering leaving due to the new five day work week policy starting in January of '25, highlighting significant dissatisfaction in potential turnover, especially among senior staff. Another 80% said they know someone who is already looking for another job because of the new policy, while 32% said they know someone who has quit because of it. Chad, shit's getting deep, deep at Amazon. What are your thoughts on these numbers in this poll from Blind? Chad: Well, there's definitely some reports saying that this is literally just trying to push people out, so this is kind of like a forced layoff without having to pay the severance. But if that's the case, do you think Amazon thought nearly 75% of staff would eject? I don't think so. So Amazon's woes where they are burning through entire populations of warehouse workers, and are also losing billions of dollars in revenue because they don't have the people in the warehouses to do the job, will now be shifting over into the Amazon office space. Amazon is really good at technology. What they're really bad at is people and being human. And this, this could shock Amazon very quickly. Joel: Yeah. So you know when Trump won the election in 2016, and probably 75% of Democrats at least said they're moving to Canada if Trump gets elected, this reminds me of that. Of course, the number of people that actually did move to Canada was probably in single digits. A lot of people were just venting. A lot of people were mad, which is what they do on Blind, by the way. They vent. It's kind of anonymous. Like I can talk shit. I don't think we're anywhere near 70% of Amazon losing that many people. It does show dissatisfaction with like, we don't wanna go back to the way it was, and they are gonna lose people for it. Maybe they can pick up all the OpenAI people that are leaving the executive suite over there. But yeah, Amazon has an issue. They wanna automate as quickly as possible. The C-suite, like being disgruntled. Maybe it is partly they want to get rid of people because they're getting rid of people anyway with automation and robotics. And maybe this is part of that strategy. I don't know. But shit's kind of weird at Amazon right now. Chad: Immigration was a major topic in 2024. How does it impact the economy and workforce? Well, Matt Lavery, Global Director of Sourcing, Recruiting and Onboarding at UPS, plus, Lord Nat Wei, a member of the Science and Tech Committee at the House of Lords had some pretty relevant insights to share. Check it out. Joel: What are your thoughts on immigration as a whole and how it impacts UPS? Matt Lavery: I'd really like it as they brought people in, if they would give them eligibility to work easier and faster. Because we're an E-Verify company, everything gets tracked. I can't hire a lot of the folks that I want to. We wanted to get involved in the Afghan peace when that came in a few years ago when that started, but they weren't eligible to work right away and it was hard to get them on board. It was a chore. So I think when we do these things as a country, we should be able to get these people jobs if they want them. Because in my mind, if someone wants to work here and earn here and pay taxes here, God bless you. Let's go. Because the amount of talent that we need, again, I'm an X, you guys are Xes, I think too. We're not gonna... We don't have enough of baby boomers for these jobs. I wish they would all retire. That's just my personal... Joel: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And get the hell out. Matt Lavery: But, and make more opportunity for some other folks. But we do have... We're not like Europe yet, where we have negative growth. But we're slowing down. So we need to bring in people who wanna take, quite honestly, some of the lower end jobs, but build themselves up. And again, we have a country that can do that for them. Let it work that way. Give them to opportunity to work, earn a living and create a family. Joel: When you talk about population collapse and immigration, part of what... Part of closing the border is those folks become a drain on the system. They become either welfare recipients or government responsibilities. Are you outlying a future where can we train people so quickly that an immigrant can come in and within six months, a year, be a high skilled laborer? And is that part of the solution? Should we open the borders and just educate them much more quickly because we have these systems or do you think we're gonna continue in this death doom spiral of no immigration aging population? Is this technology part of the solution? Lord Wei: Yeah. I think there's a need for nuance. So first of all as the son of migrants, this whole putting all migrants in the same box, there are different kinds of migrants. If a migrant comes from a village somewhere and comes straight to the UK, that might be a drain on our finances. It might be a humanitarian thing to do, but there's a lot of investment you need to put into them and their family. But you've also got migrants from other parts of the world who are amazing. They could be doctors, they could be, filling all kinds of roles that we can't ever hope to fill. And I think the way we do this sensitively is kind of go, well for everyone we bring in to do that, we've gotta train a local person,'cause often and often in the same town where we send the migrant so that the impact on the local population isn't gonna be Oh, they're taking all our jobs. Lord Wei: No, you're benefiting, 'cause we're gonna train you both in AI and in future in the robotic AI by the way. 'Cause a lot of these jobs are fruit picking as well. They're carers. There's gonna be a shift as well, I think in future where you're gonna have automation in those physical roles as well. And so it's gonna be a really interesting world. And some of the best paid work is gonna be how you design that to work in those environments, to both be doing the work, making sandwiches and then figuring out how the robot can also make sandwiches. I was actually working on a project where they were trying to figure out how to get robots to make sandwiches. Joel: Get sandwiches and sausages, making... Lord Wei: Yeah. And guess, this is the really funny thing. Guess the thing they couldn't get the robots to do, which they're still, they haven't cracked, which is they can get the robot to butter the sandwich and like do this to the sandwich. But when you pick up the chicken, you need to kind of, or ham, you need to distribute it on the sandwich really quickly. And they found that the human workers could feel with their hands, the exact right proportion of chicken to put down much better than... 'Cause the robots can't feel yet. So I think it's gonna be a hybrid world where some of us are filling chickens or interviewing candidates. The robots are slapping on the bread or doing the scheduling. Joel: The robots also don't eat the sandwich. So they're not the customers of the sandwiches. Chad: Shocking layoffs happened in 2024. And of course, Joel and I, were not gonna keep our mouths shut. Take a listen. Layoffs. Joel: Layoffs. Chad: God damn it. Joel: Some big ones this week. Some big names cut some heads recently. Intel let go of 15,000 people. Didn't they just get some taxpayer money to compete with Taiwan semiconductor. Anyway Match Group, the company behind Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid and others, which by the way, had downloads fall 12% globally, is cutting 6% of its staff, blaming TikTok, of all people. And industry stalwart, iCIMS said goodbye to 69 of their associates, which equals about 5% of their workforce if my math is correct. Chad, what are your thoughts on all this head cutting? Chad: Yeah. Intel, when Nvidia is printing money, Intel apparently is burning it. It's been outflanked and apparently rushed a buggy product to market. If a CEO is gonna chop that many heads, he's gotta chop his own. It's all there is to it. So this is just ridiculous watching a CEO well up and say, oh, really hate to let this many people go. Well, you're the first one that should go. Give somebody else a fucking turn for fuck's sake. Tinder, wait a minute. They have live streaming services? They have live... Were they trying to become OnlyFans? Why the fuck would Tinder... [automated voice] Automated Voice: What are you doing Step bro? Chad: Whomever signed off on that shit should definitely be gone. And then on the iCIMS front, major leadership changes, CEO, CPO and CTO. And one of the things I've learned in being in any organization from the US Army to Randstad, is that whenever new leaders come in, they change shit. It's all there is to it. Sometimes there are moves, and from my understanding, rumor mill says, ME is gonna get hit in the next week or two. This is, I think, just the start of the arranging of the furniture in the new iCIMS house unfortunately. Joel: I'm glad you said House and not Titanic. That would've been very, very foreboding. Geez. That would've been very foreboding. Chad: I'm nice. Joel: $8.5 billion of government money went to Intel to like build a company that was gonna be world class and compete with the semiconductors in Taiwan. You mentioned Nvidia. What in the hell is going on? There's gonna be like Senate hearings. There's gotta be some accountability for that because that is fucked up. Chad: Orange jumpsuits, baby. Orange fucking jumpsuits. Joel: You can't take $8.5 billion from the government, and lay off 15,000 people without some explaining to do. So that's a major screw up. And we got some layoffs talk about. Well, quick update. We talked about Career Builder plus Monster, that's their official name now. Real creative. CareerBuilder plus Monster. AIM Group is reporting that the layoffs hit about 200 employees, roughly 15% of the workforce. So that was sort of highlighted. And Toptal, a company that Chad says no one knows. So anyway, this might be news for you, just the name of the company. The self-proclaimed world's largest fully remote workforce has laid off a whopping 70% of its engineering team affecting roles across software engineering, data science, and design in multiple countries like the US, Ukraine and Poland. Chad, any thoughts on updates on layoffs? Chad: Yeah. Just a continuation of last week with Monster. That's not anything we should be surprised with, but I do have some insider knowledge that we were talking about. Whether they would have two databases, two types of tech, et cetera, et cetera. Nope. From my understanding, again, this is a rumor from the inside, they're going to go to one platform, one tech platform, and then they'll more than likely merge the candidate databases into that one search platform. So try to make it a big bad CareerBuilder plus Monster. On the Toptal side of the house, it was funny because just literally last week, one of my friends was asking me about them because they were pretty much being dragged into conversations about prospectively being on a leadership team and I was like, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Chad: They're so far behind the rest of the competition that's out there, it's just not worth it. It literally isn't worth it. And then this information comes out, I'm like, holy shit. Talk about dodging a bullet. But yeah. Yeah. That a lot of this doesn't surprise me. We're gonna see a lot of the smaller players who haven't evolved fast enough. They don't understand how to partner and build, they're gonna get flushed down the toilet. And that's where it feels like Toptal's going. Tech continued gaining velocity in 2024. John Graham and Rebecca Carr, you know her. She's the CEO at SmartRecruiters. They both had something to say about tech trends in 2024. Joel: Jumping back to technology real quickly. 2024, what were the tech trends that stood out to you? You do a lot of vendors, so I'm sure your take on this is pretty interesting. 2024. John Graham: Yeah. So this year it's been a lot of, Automation AI has been the buzzword in everybody's tech platform. But I think getting to candidates faster, whether it be through your recruitment marketing efforts, getting better higher quality candidates through automation, storytelling and video. A lot of video platforms and ambassadorship for existing employees to be amplifiers of the brand. So I think we've seen a lot of that this year. And it's really a circle back to maybe like 2016, '17, where that was sort of emerging. Now we're having a renaissance, technology's becoming better. But interestingly enough, I think we're gonna see more of that. We're gonna have to. Joel: You touched a little bit about the marketplace vendors, new products and services. There are more companies that make it easier to build apps onto marketplaces. Just curious about your trends, what you're seeing, the amount of growth, any kind of cool technologies that you're seeing being built onto SmartRecruiters that we should pay attention to? Rebecca Carr: Yeah. There's actually, some of the coolest and most interesting to SmartRecruiters are the people doing things that are workflows we know won't ever go away, but have just made that workflow a lot better and a lot cleaner for everyone else. So as a good example, we have a partner in the Netherlands that is essentially building a new agency portal. Who likes agency portals? Nobody likes agency. I have an agency portal. We haven't touched it as a product team in 10 years. Joel: Wow. Rebecca Carr: But agency recruiting is just what happens, especially in certain markets. So we've got probably 40, 50, 60,000 agency hires that are made a year through our platform. These types of apps and experiences are things our customers latch onto immediately and provide impactful business value and also better learnings. I think some of those are the ones that are ultimately gonna, you know, benefit from this moment of consolidation in HR tech. 'Cause someone like me, it's an easy value add. I can like sunset my code from the past that I was never gonna invest in anyway. I can give better experiences. I can drive better adoption. So in this case, this company was called [0:36:50.4] ____. They were really cool, cool thing. But there's a bunch of little ones like that. Rebecca Carr: We're working on a lot of... With a lot of partners that use design systems to embed in our UI. So Visier is doing this with us right now. HiredScore is using some of our stuff to embed. So those people that are, again, not just saying to me, "Hey, I want an iframe in your UI, which isn't gonna help anybody. I actually wanna find a way to like funnel my data to you through a user experience that people are going to engage with." I am finding that they're getting the most attention from some of the big vendors. Chad: In 2024, what surprised you the most? Here's some practitioners. Courtney Dempsey, Director of Digital Recruiting at Southern Rock Restaurants. Chloe Rada, Senior Director, Talent Acquisition and Operations. Dean Da Costa, Senior Staff, Talent Acquisition, and Mary Battle Broxton, Employer Branding Manager at Tractor Supply Company. They all had things to talk about. So in 2024, what has surprised you the most? Courtney Dempsey: The great stay. Chad: The what? Courtney Dempsey: The great stay. Chad: The great stay. Courtney Dempsey: Managers aren't leaving, and those that are lifers have already expired out in our side of the business. So the influx of retail that I'm seeing right now, is about 85% to our lack of 15% of actual people that work in the restaurant industry. That was extraordinary to me. Chad: Yes. Courtney Dempsey: So we have to coach on how to read a resume from the bottom up now versus the top down. Chad: So 2024, what has surprised you the most about this year, this far? Chloé Rada: The emphasis on internal, like activating your employer brand internally and the need to partner and be in lockstep with your people success teams and your people operations teams. I really am going at this from... And this is very different from like past organizations, where we're developing our internal road show together. Not like, here is the brand, I want you to deliver it. Like how can we activate this internally and making sure that it matches the employee experience. That to me is very different. So, it's kind of like a little bit of like internal comms I'm playing here, but then also really relying on our, the people success team to help us make sure that it's matching the promise. Chad: So 2024, what surprised you the most this year? What's happened this year? Chloé Rada: What surprised me the most I think is the, what's the word? The false statement when AI started becoming big, that some companies were like, we got AI, we don't need as many recruiters. We don't need this, we don't need that. And then it took, what, I think just now they're starting to realize, yeah, that's not the truth. You still need, you might be able to make things quicker. Recruiter or source might be able to handle a few more wrecks. But again, AI is not going to, at this point anyway, be able to replace it. And so what amazed me is that the companies were thinking that given we've... It seemed like every seven years something comes out and they think, oh wow, we don't need as many recruiters and sources now. And then they find out they're wrong. It seemed like every seven to 10 years that happens since I've been in the industry. Every seven to, Oh, we got sourcing tools now, we don't need as many recruiters, eh, wrong. Oh, we got CRMs, we don't need as many recruiters. Eh, wrong. And that's what amazes me is that companies continue to make the same mistake over and over and over again. You would think they've had learned by now. Chad: So we're coming into Q4, right? What has surprised you thus far about 2024? Dean Da Costa: 2024 has been very interesting. I think we've seen a lot of change within the traditional or more of the employer brand speak. We've seen a lot of companies pivoting from things that we placed an emphasis on during the COVID timeframe. So what's been surprising to me is how companies are starting to pivot and to be a little bit more authentic about who they are in their hiring experience. Chad: Finally, a little advice for 2025 from Chloe Rada, Courtney Dempsey and Dean Da Costa. Looking toward 2025, what advice would you have for your peers moving into next year? Chloé Rada: Don't be afraid to build the plane as you fly it. So I always like to think about things kind of from like a process standpoint. Like don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And it's okay to fail and find a safe space where you can do some trial and error and have some risks. So I think find a place that you can feel comfortable being yourself and then also allowing yourself to fail first. Chad: So let's look forward real quick into 2025. What advice would you give your peers, in the new year? Moving into the new year? Mary Battle Broxton: Embrace technology. Chad: Embrace technology. Do they have a choice? Joel: Say more. Mary Battle Broxton: I think there are a lot of people still fighting it. Look for companies that have open API. I cold call a lot of open API companies and I ask to beta test them and see if we can integrate their open API systems into the current system that we're utilizing, which is Paradox. I love LLMs. It's like my bestie. I like, I am... Chad: This is your time then? Mary Battle Broxton: This is my time. I'm a one woman show. I love... Podcast Intro: Did you love them when they weren't cool or before they were cool? Mary Battle Broxton: I had to teach myself. So I was Python back in the early days of that, as did Professor Chuck taught me how to follow data and I just kind of rolled with it. And I listened to your podcast and any company that talks ill of another company, I'm like, I'm absolutely 100% calling them, because they obviously don't like them for a reason and I will become their best friends. So we make sure we integrate that too. Chad: Moving into 2025, what would that advice, that one point nugget of advice be? Dean Da Costa: Learn. Don't accept norms. Break out of the boundaries. Don't just do the simple and easy because guess what? Everybody's doing the simple and easy. And you're looking for the same people and why? Get out of it. And I can give an example. Somebody was looking for a bunch of people that had a particular certification. They went to LinkedIn or as Stevie DV calls it, the Blue Devil, didn't work out so well, asked for help. So I went out and found a website that has listing of every CCIE certified person and sent it to her. And then I scraped it and sent her the whole list. Don't do the norm. Think out of the box. That's the only way you're gonna succeed. Great. There's AI. We'll get into that later, but you can't trust it totally. So you have to use it. Double check it, triple check it, and then you're good. Chad: That concludes this cavalcade of industry experts and topics from 2024. Thanks again for spending time with the Chad and Cheese podcast. If you have a topic we should address in 2025, come on over to Chadcheese.com and contact us or just comment on Spotify or YouTube. While you're at it, hit the subscribe button and feel free to tell your friends and your peers. Chad and Cheese always here for you. Come get some free stuff while you're at it. Happy holidays. Podcast Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuggle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Broadcasting live from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Tim Sackett—dropped some truth bombs with Joel Cheesman about the cringe-worthy mistakes corporations make in their talent acquisition hustle. Oh, and guess what? Sackett's cooking up another  book, creatively titled Talent Fix Volume 2 —because one wasn’t enough. Expect fresh content, hot takes, and, presumably, a few digs at HR's favorite buzzwords. Sackett didn't hold back on the AI hype train, either. Turns out, he's underwhelmed by the industry's cutting-edge "meh" when it comes to applying AI in TA. Meanwhile, corporate America is flailing with performance management as everyone adjusts to the post-pandemic reality of low unemployment. Spoiler: leaders are still allergic to honest performance conversations. Fast forward to 2025, and Sackett has a bold prediction: recruiters won't just recruit anymore—they'll transform into talent advisors , focusing on team dynamics and playing corporate therapist. Vendors, take note: Sackett thinks it's your job to coach TA leaders through this glow-up. No pressure. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (cometh)

You may know best-selling author Dan Pink for well known books like "When," "To Sell is Human" and "Drive," but you've never heard him like this. A must-listen for subscribers. Enjoy this Nexxt exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. Jim Stroud: Hey. Jim Stroud here, and you are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast, HR's most dangerous podcast. It's awesome. It's colossal. I listen to it every day. You should too. Jim Stroud: All right, that's it. What? Wait, you said $20. 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: Rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. Keep that podcast rolling. Rawhide. Chad: Yes. Joel: Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, everyone. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Today is a very special day for me and our listeners because one of my favorite authors of all time and favorite speakers of all time is on the show today. We all know him as Dan Pink. Chad: Yup, that's right, that's right. Joel: If he's one of Chad's favorite authors, it must mean that he adds illustrations in his books. Is that true? Chad: Of course, yeah. Especially in The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. There was a lot of illustration in that. Dan Pink: Oh yeah. Chad: But, Free Agent Nation, a big one. My favorite, A Whole New Mind. Drive because I'm in sales. To Sell Is Human, and today, we're going to do a lot of talk around When. But, until we get ... Give us a second first, Dan. For all of our listeners who don't know who you are, give us a little synopsis of Dan Pink, will you? Dan Pink: Well, you just gave a great synopsis of Daniel Pink because I'm a writer who writes books, and you've just named all of them, and they're books that I think go straight to a lot of stuff that you all talk about, which is work, how it's changing, how we can do it a little bit better, what sorts of skills do we need, how do we motivate people, how do we configure a workplace that where people get good stuff done. Joel: Would you consider yourself a futurist, Dan? And do you prefer Dan or Daniel? Dan Pink: Dan is good, and I do not ever consider myself a futurist. Joel: Fair enough. Because you are the quite the Nostradamus on some of these books. You wrote the Free Agent Nation in 2001, and it seems to be coming true. Has it come true in the way that you thought it would? Dan Pink: That's an interesting question. Yes and no. That book talks about the rise and all these people who are working for themselves, and at some level, I underestimated it, particularly the forces that were contributing to it as I tried to explain what was happening way back then. That book's like 18 years old. Chad: Yeah. Dan Pink: When I tried to explain what was happening then, I said here are the things that are going on, and I talked a lot about not only this ... It was a mix. It was kind of an intriguing mix of personal desire, self actualization, people wanting to be themselves, those kinds of very heavy psychological factors, but that was enabled by technology. Dan Pink: I totally underestimated the technology. When I wrote that book, it was a totally different world technologically. I mean, it's kind of mind boggling to me. I mean, there were not smart phones. There was not social media. There was barely wifi. There was not widespread broadband. Joel: Were eBay resellers the inspiration for the book because that's about the only thing I can remember back in 2001. Dan Pink: Yeah. So, the technology has enabled this in a really, really powerful way that I did not really envision. Some of the other forces, basically the changing nature of firms and people's desire, in a world where they didn't have any job security, to do work that they actually cared about and that was actually an expression of themselves, those things are continuing. Dan Pink: A hundred years ago, I worked in politics, I think that book is a case of what we sometimes say about politicians is that she was ahead of the voters. Chad: That's right, that's right. Former Al Gore speech writer, correct? Dan Pink: Back in the pre-World War I days. Chad: So, you don't consider yourself a futurist, but yet, another book you wrote, I think it was in 2005 or 6 or something like that, A Whole New Mind. And you talk about automation abundance in Asia, which are smacking us clearly in the face today, is it not? Dan Pink: They are. So, that book makes the argument that the skills that are most in demand are changing and that it used to be these more metaphorically left brain skills, logical, linear, SAT spreadsheet skills. Today, those are necessary, but they're no longer sufficient, and it's a different set of abilities, more 'metaphorically right brain abilities', artistry, empathy, and inventiveness big picture thinking. Those are the ones that are most important because it's fairly easy to outsource and automate those left brain reductive, routine algorithmic skills, and we see that happening big time. Dan Pink: Again, let's talk about what I missed if you're interested in that. What I missed there was, what I underestimated was how quickly technology would be able to do certain kinds of these right brained tasks that I thought were way far off in the future. Joel: So, Chad's always giving me grief about not being a very good salesperson. So, I have a question about your book, To Sell Is Human, the Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Talk about that book and how all of us really are sellers and how Chad should shut the fuck up. Dan Pink: Well, I don't know if I'm going to weight in on that second point, but I can tell you what the book is about. The book is ... I'll make a determination on whether you shut up when this conversation is a little bit more fully formed. Dan Pink: That book says if you look at the guts of what people actually do on the job, it's very different from what job descriptions say. This is probably intuitive since you guys spend so much time in this world, but I always had this suspicion that what people actually did all day, when you actually, if you were to follow them around and watch what they did all day, and then look at their 'job description', there would be a pretty large gap between those two. Dan Pink: One of the things in particular that I was curious about is that I had this hunch that people are basically selling and persuading all the time, no matter what job they're in, whether they're in sales or not. So, what I found in doing some of this research was that if you look at the lived experience of people at work, if you actually look at what they do when they come into the office and do their work, a big portion of it is kind of sort of like selling. Dan Pink: So, one idea in that book is that, like it or not, we're all in sales now. There are still, even in a world of automation, an extraordinary number of people in sale sales even today. But, one in nine people in the U.S. workforce are in a sales function, but the other eight or nine are also selling in some sense. Dan Pink: But, the other curious thing here is we're doing it on a remade landscape. It used to be that if you were to sell, persuade, you were doing it in a world of information asymetry where the seller always had more information than the buyer. Today, that world is disappearing. Now, buyers have not as much information as sellers, all kinds of choices, and all kinds of ways to talk back. Dan Pink: So, the idea here is hey, we're selling all the time. We're doing it in a new world. How do you do it effectively and ethically? Chad: So, going toward and keeping the sales conversation going, your book Drive, an entirely different book. Today, Joel and I talk about purpose, which is why people go to work and how, in most cases, drive behind the drive doesn't mean that it's actually dollars and cents. There's more than just that. Chad: So, the commissions behind sales really don't motivate people as much as the purpose and passion do. So, what was behind that book? What was the impetus behind it? What made you write about that? Dan Pink: What got me interested in and to answer your question was if we are moving ... was basically in its predecessor book, A Whole New Mind, which is that if it's right that we're moving to this world where people are doing things that they haven't been doing before, where they have to be empathic, or they have to be artistic, they have to be creative, how do you motivate people to do that? Dan Pink: I went to the research to look at what the science told us about that. What the science tells us about motivation, in general, is very different from what many organizations and many companies believe. As I said, Chad, it's a little nuanced. It's fairly nuanced in that it's, at some level, money is a little bit of a head fake when it comes to motivation. Dan Pink: What we know is this, to make it as straight forward as possible. Fifty years of social science tells us that certain kinds of rewards that we use in organizations. Psychologists call them controlling contingent rewards. I call them if-then rewards, as if you do this, then you get that. If you do this, then you get that. It turns out that if-then rewards are very good for simple tasks and very good for tasks with short time horizons. They're extremely effective. Human beings love rewards. You dangle a reward in front of somebody, they focus, and that's good if the task, you're just following a recipe, like following a set of steps and if the finish line is very close. Dan Pink: However, the same body of research tells us that if-then rewards don't work nearly as well for tasks that require more conceptual thinking, that are more creative, and that also have longer time horizons. The problem in organizations that we use if-then rewards for everything. Dan Pink: So, what we should be doing if we're going to follow the evidence is using them for jobs that require simple task and short time horizons, but coming up with something different for tasks that require more complex thinking and longer time horizons. I think what's interesting, sort of the connective tissue that you are all pointing out here is that if you look at sales today, particularly B2B sales, it's not simple. Chad: No. Dan Pink: It's very complicated. I think that B2B sales today is essentially management consultant. You're going into a company, and you're trying to figure out what are the company's needs, how do I understand that company's business, what are their pain points, what are they missing that I'm seeing based on my own expertise, and how can I fashion a solution that is right for them? Dan Pink: So, for that kind of more high-level management consultant style work, and especially if you're dealing with much longer time horizons in B2B, heavy heavy commissions is not that great of an idea in the same way that we don't pay McKinsey or Bain consultants based on commission. We say these people are serious professionals and serious experts, so what we're going to do is we're going to hire great people. We're going to pay them well, and we're maybe going to have some variable comp tied to some reasonable measures, but we're not going to say that every single person in sales is purely coin operated and that sales is this kind of dumbed down profession where the only way people will perform is if you put a quarter in the slot. Chad: And there are connective pieces there though, right? The individual had to feel like they were getting paid a fair wage, so there was that kind of connection. What other connections were there as well? Dan Pink: When you say connections, in what sense? Chad: So, in the sense of if you did want to go away from 'commission/bonus'— Dan Pink: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, here's what we know as a general set of design principles for compensation, and again, there's a lot of variance from place to place and circumstance to circumstance. It isn't a case where there's a very simple recipe that applies in every situation. Dan Pink: But, what we know is this. First of all, money is a motivator, and one of the things that bugs me is that people maybe look at that book, Drive, and say, "Oh, money doesn't matter." No, I say many many times in there, money matters. Money matters a lot. It just matters in a slightly different way. Dan Pink: One of the things that we know is that, again, for relatively simple straight forward tasks, getting people to think about money is effective. If I want someone to stuff envelopes, I should pay them per envelope and give them a bonus for every 500 envelopes they stuff. I'm going to get more envelopes stuffed that way. Dan Pink: But, if I'm bringing somebody in to consult with my business, I don't want them thinking about the money. I want them thinking about my problem. I want them thinking about the work. So, what you want to do in those cases is pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so they focus on the work and not on the money. Dan Pink: Once you do that, they're all kinds of things that you can do. First is you get people a sense of sovereignty, a sense of self direction, autonomy. You help them make progress and get better at something that matters, mastery. We know from the work of Teresa Amabile at Harvard that the single biggest day to day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work and, as you guys suggested earlier, we also know that if people have a sense of purpose, that can be a motivator. So, you pay people well. You offer these other kinds of motivations. Dan Pink: Now, as I said before, I'm not four square against any kind of variable comp, but I think that if you're going to offer variable comp, the structure of it should be fairly simply, transparent, and key to things that really matter. One of the things that happens is every salesperson knows is that you have these commission schemes or even other kinds of incentive comp schemes, and people figure out how to gain the system. So, the designers of the system then make the system more complicated, and people figure out how to gain that. So, they make it even more complicated. Dan Pink: A lot of these incentive comp structures end of needing this giant administrative apparatus to run it, to monitor it, to litigate disputes about it when, in fact, you can do something cleaner and simpler. Pay people well. First of all, hire great people. Pay them well. Offer autonomy and mastery and purpose, and if you want, offer some variable comp that's very simple, transparent, and tied to metrics that matter. Chad: Amen. Joel: Dan, we love criticizing millennials on this show, and I want to pick on Drive for my question. Did you find any differences in terms of what drives the generations, or are generations just a bunch of baloney? Dan Pink: Well, that's a great question, and there's differences of opinion on that. I am of the opinion that I'm more leaned toward the baloney side of the spectrum. I'll tell you why without trying to empty the room of your listeners here. Dan Pink: When you look at the research on generations, there are two different phenomenons going on here. One is called, is the cohort effect. The other is the time of life effect. A cohort effect means that wow, I'm a Generation X guy. Generation X, Xers are different from Baby Boomers, and they're different from millennials, and they're different from Gen Z. The cohort, the group of people who are around the time that you were born, are fundamentally different in their approaches to life and work and blah blah blah blah. Dan Pink: There's also something. The time of life effect says, "Hey, listen. When people are 30, they typically act in this way and do these things." When people are 35-ish, they typically act in a way and do these kinds of things. My reading of the evidence is that the cohort effect is woefully, woefully, woefully, woefully oversold. I think that it's one of those things where our cultural view of it is very stark, but the evidence beneath it is very flimsy. Dan Pink: So, to me, what you have is you have every incumbent ... I believe that every incumbent generation since the beginning of human civilization has looked at the generation coming behind it and said, "Ah, they don't work very hard. They're complainers. They didn't have it as rough as I did. They're soft." And I don't think that there are massive, massive material differences between the generations. Now, that's just my point of view. Intelligent people will argue the other side of it. Joel: It's commercial time. NEXXT: Okay. So, we've already established texting is probably the best way to connect with candidates, right? Plus, Nexxt's stats show 73% of professionals are open to receiving job opportunities via text , and with a 99% delivery rate , you cannot go wrong. NEXXT: Those are two big reasons why you've got to love Text2Hire from Nexxt . That's right. Text2Hire from Nexxt, with the double X, not the triple X. Nexxt has over eight million candidates who have opted into receive jobs via text, and you and your clients need qualified candidates . NEXXT: Nexxt can help you find and target qualified candidates who have opted in for job opportunities via text. And, in today's competitive market, you need an edge to reach qualified candidates faster . You need Text2Hire from Nexxt. NEXXT: Just go to chadcheese.com , and click on the Nexxt logo to learn more about how you can gain a competitive edge with opt-in texting. Text2Hire from Nexxt, it just makes sense. Chad: It's showtime. Chad: So, here is a big difference, Dan, and we're going to switch to your— Dan Pink: And I think there is one big difference, but we can get to that. Chad: Yeah, no. We're going to get to it right now. In your book, When, if you think about it, Boomers went to college, and they weren't strapped with a crazy amount of debt verus millennials, who are living in their mom and dad's basement because they have $100,000 in debt. So, the opportunity for Boomers and Xers were much different from that of millennials. Chad: So, in your new book, in When, you talk about this. So, dive deep into that if you would because timing matters. Dan Pink: Yeah, that's a really good point actually. It actually wasn't what I was going to say. I was going to make a less intelligent point, but thank you for rescuing me. Dan Pink: So, what that research shows is there's some very intriguing research. I's in economics. About how important the condition of the economy is the year you graduate from ... These are from people who graduate from college, from college graduates. How much the economic conditions when you graduate from college, how those have a profound longterm effect on your earnings power. Dan Pink: What this research shows is that if you take two people. Person X, I don't want to say X and Y here. Person J graduates in a recession, and person K graduates in a boom time. Let's say that each of these people are fairly similar. They're smart people, graduated near the top of their class at the University of Maryland with a major in accounting or something like that. Dan Pink: On average, the person who graduated in the boom economy will be outearning, and you look at them 20 years later in their careers, 20 years into the careers, the person who graduated in a boom economy is going to be outearning the person who graduated in a recession, 20 years later. The cause of graduating in a recession can be upwards of several hundred thousand dollars in lifetime earnings. Chad: Well, let's put this to another level. The idiot who graduated in a boom economy is probably going to make more money than the standout who— Dan Pink: Maybe. Chad: Yeah, possibly, who graduates in a recession. Opportunity and timing means a lot, or at least, that's how I read into it. Dan Pink: Yeah, that kind of comparison is tougher. But basically, you take somebody. Let's take a mediocre talent graduating ... If you're a mediocre ... For all the mediocrity listening to your show, if you are a mediocre college graduate with not a lot of brain power or skills, make sure you graduate in a booming economy. That's my advice to you young men and women. Joel: Do you guys remember the old Saturday Night Live when Eddie Murphy goes on and says, "Life is luck. You're either lucky, or you're a bum." And his driver comes out, and he says, "Your car is ready, Mr. Murphy", and he says, "Thanks, Sammy." He says, "Sammy went to Harvard." Do you guys remember that skit? Chad: Yes. Joel: No, okay. Nevermind. Dan Pink: But, I mean, here's the thing. The deeper point is really, really important is that we have, in the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about who flourishes and who doesn't, we leave out two very important factors. One of them is where do you start from? And the other one is just pure unadulterated luck. Dan Pink: I think about this all the time. If you take, I'll use me as an example. So, I grew up in central Ohio. I grew up in a middle-class family in central Ohio in post-World War II, 1970s and 1980s America. My parents both had a college education. I won the birth lottery. If I had been born in Guatemala to people without a college education, who knows where I would be today? Chad: Right. Dan Pink: Do you know what I mean? Joel: Are you a Northwestern grad that roots for Ohio State? Dan Pink: Oh, that's a more important question obviously, and I am absolutely not a Northwestern grad who roots for Ohio State. I take the purple and white over to scarlet and gray. Recording: Boo. Joel: Why are we talking to this bum so much? Chad: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. Dan Pink: The problem is that Northwestern never beats Ohio State. Chad: No, no. But, they have a pretty good school though. So, let's keep talking about the kids since we're talking about Ohio State and Northwestern. In the book, you actually, and I'm going to try to correlate this to the workforce, you actually said that more recess is best. What about in our work schedule? Dan Pink: Good point, yeah. Chad: Can we have a better attitude? Can we get more out of our workers if we just allow them to relax more often like the research showed with kids and recess? Dan Pink: Yeah, it's a great point. There's a whole line of research about breaks. What we know, in general, about breaks is that breaks are more important than we realize. Breaks matter more than we realize. This is something that this whole conversation about what all the things that I got wrong. This is something else I got wrong in my own life in that I was always someone who believed that the way to get more work done, the way to get better work done was to power through, that breaks were for amateurs, that professionals didn't take breaks. Chad: That's what Xers did because we had Boomers telling us, "Get off your ass and go to work." Dan Pink: It could be. Yeah, absolutely. But, when you look at the evidence, the real science of people who have looked at human performance, it turns out that that's totally, totally, totally wrong, that powering through is not the best way to get more work done and better work done, that I actually it completely flipped in that the truth is that professionals take breaks and amateurs don't take breaks. Dan Pink: So, what we should be doing is actually taking ... I'm not talking about going crazy and having four hour breaks every afternoon. What I'm talking about is actually building in a few breaks into our work lives because we are going to feel better, and we're going to do better. What we know about breaks from this research is that we have some good design principles for effective breaks. Dan Pink: We know that, for instance, something is better than nothing. So, literally a one minute break is better than no break at all. We know that social is better than solo, so breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own. We know that breaks should be fully detached, not semi-detached, so you shouldn't talk about work. You shouldn't stare at your phone. We know that breaks outside are better than inside, and breaks where you're moving are better than breaks when you're stationary. Dan Pink: So basically, what this says is that we would have, across the U.S. workforce, no joke, we would have greater productivity, greater satisfaction, and greater engagement if everybody in the U.S. workforce, each afternoon, took a 15 minute walk outside with someone they liked, leaving their phone behind, and talking about something other than work. That would be a productivity enhancer for the U.S. workforce. Joel: Now, Dan, as a guy who loves a good nap, are you including naps in these breaks? Dan Pink: Well, you know what? I looked at the research on naps, and you know what? I was anti-nap, and now I'm not anti-nap. Naps are— Joel: I like Dan now. Chad: I'm not going to be able to get anything out of Joel now. He's going to have three hour breaks and naps. Dan Pink: Here's the thing. Let's go back to the science here. What we know about naps is that the ideal nap is actually very short. The ideal nap is between 10 and 20 minutes long. But, nap longer than 20 minutes, and you begin to develop what's called sleep inertia, which is that groggy boggy feeling you get when you sleep too long. But, a 10 to 20 minute nap in the afternoon is very, very good for us. Joel: I agree. Dan Pink: But, again, you have to hit that sweet spot. Less than 10 minutes doesn't do you any good, and over 20 minutes, it does you some good, but it actually comes with a negative. The sweet spot is between 10 and 20 minutes. Joel: So, for a guy with smaller kids or younger kids, and Chad has kids but they're a little older. For those with younger kids, you seem to have a pretty good grasp of the future of jobs and your book on right brains and timing. What advice and what kind of road should I be steering my kids down as they get older and look to join the workforce? Dan Pink: Yeah, that's a hard one because it's hard to predict. We don't have any idea what the job, the specific jobs are going to be. So, I'm not going to say, "Oh, your kid should be lunar hospitality consultants because we're going to colonize the moon and put hotels there." That's nonsense. Dan Pink: I think what we know is we know at the level of skill that your kids and my kids who are older but are going to be in the workplace for a long time, they're going to have to do things that augment machine intelligence rather than compete with machine intelligence, which tend to be more of these right brained things, discernment, judgment, creativity, those kinds of tasks. Dan Pink: I think beyond that, there are a lot of these so-called, I hate the term, but it shows you what kind of prison we're in and how constipated we are in the way that we think about this, is what are called 'non-cognitive skills.' So, what you want is you want kids to be curious. You want them to know how to learn. You want them to be able to ask good questions. You want them to be persistent and have grit and have a growth mindset, that those kinds of habits of the heart, particularly curiosity, grit, and learning how to learn, those are going to be as important as any specific particular skill. Chad: Talk about age and well-being because there's this dip that happens. We're really happening in our 20s because we have no clue what's going on in the middle of life, 30s, 40s, 50s, early 50s, and we have this big droop because we're not meeting expectations. But then, it skyrockets up. So, tell us a little bit about this mid-life crisis droop thing. Dan Pink: Yeah, this is something that researchers all over the world have found. When you look at people's sense of well-being, sense of satisfaction, over time, it's exactly as you said. It's shaped like a gentle sloping U. People are happier in their 20s and 30s. It starts declining in their 40s, hits the bottom in their 50s, and then rises back up. Dan Pink: I think what's curious about this is that the scholars who have investigated this have found this in something like 70 countries. I don't think we know why exactly it happens, but it does seem to be a part of the lived experiences as human beings in the 21st century. Dan Pink: As for the reasons, again, we don't know the reasons for sure. Part of it is that it could be dual pressure. So, at that age, people will often have kids and aging parents, so they're squeezed on both ends. It could be that there's a certain kind of reckoning that people tend to have at that part of life in that they realize, "Hey, wait a second. I'm been climbing the greasy pole of this company, and wait a second. Only one person gets to be CEO, and it's not going to be me." Or you're a writer and watching to be seen. You think, "You know what? I'm probably not going to win a Pulitzer Price in my lifetime." Again, a totally hypothetical example. Dan Pink: At some level, early on, our expectations are too high. In our 50s, sometimes our expectations are too low. What you see is that when people in their 60s and 70s, in general, are actually fairly happy and satisfied. A reason for that is that they have matured into doing things that are meaningful to them. They have, in many cases, some really, really interesting research from Laura Carstensen at Stanford, they actually have a very different approach to their friendship networks. That is, they have gotten rid of a lot of their friends and concentrated on the people whom they're closest to, and that's a big source of satisfaction. Dan Pink: So, I just think it's something for us to think about, particularly when I'm at the age where I'm basically the smack dab bottom of that U-shaped curve. Joel: In the new book, after each chapter, you have what you call life hacks. What were the inspiration behind those, and what were maybe one or two that you would like to highlight for the interview here today? Dan Pink: Well, the inspiration was is that you can write about science. You can write about research. You can write about ideas, and that's cool, and that's interesting, and you want people to learn. But, if you just leave people hanging there with nothing to do about it, then I think you're doing your readers a disservice. Dan Pink: I certainly feel that way about certain kinds of books. I'll read the books, and I will say, "Wow, it's a big idea book. Wow, this is interesting. Wow, what a persuasive argument. Wow, I'm looking at the world in a different way." Then, I say, "Wow, I should probably do things differently", and the book ends, and I have no idea what to do. Dan Pink: So, each chapter ends with what I call the Time Hacker's Handbook, which is a set of these tools and tips. There are gazillions, not gazillions, but there are dozens and dozens of them. One of the things that people seem to be interested in is I have a whole chapter on how our brain power changes over the course of a day and some guidance on what's the right time to do certain kinds of cognitive tasks. Dan Pink: But, one thing that people seem really interested in is exercise. What's the best time of day to exercise? Here, in the Time Hacker's Handbook, there's some good evidence-based advice on the best time to exercise. It's very simple. You should exercise in the morning if you have certain goals. Exercise in the late afternoon into the early evening if you have other kinds of goals. Dan Pink: So, morning exercise seems to be best. I think the greatest advantage for morning exercise is it gives you a ... Exercise and aerobic and even strength training, it gives you a very significant and enduring mood boost that can last 10, 12 hours. So, if you exercise early in the day, you get that mood boost throughout the day. You exercise, say, at 7:00 at night, you're going to sleep away some of that elevated mood. Dan Pink: Another thing. Exercise in the morning seems to be better if you want to form the habit. I think that's because people are less likely to get interrupted or distracted at 7:00am than at 5:00am. Then, exercise in the morning seems to be slightly better for weight loss, although again, yeah, the research on weight loss, it's really hard to lose weight basically. So, I don't want to oversell that proposition there. Dan Pink: That said, exercise in the late afternoon or early evening has other advantages. First of all, it's a better way to avoid injury. There are fewer injuries later in the day. That's probably because of body temperature and the fact that you're literally warmed up. Again, it's an N-of-one, but I did a race a couple of weeks ago that started at the insanely early hour of 6:30, and it's the only race I've done that ... because I like to run half-marathons. It's the only race that I've done that I didn't finish because it started at this insanely early hour, and I ended up injuring my hamstring, probably because I wasn't sufficiently warmed up. So, it's better for avoiding injury. Dan Pink: People who exercise later in the day report enjoying it more. For some people, morning exercise is just miserable. That's how I feel. I like afternoon exercise so much better. Then also, there are actually performance benefits if you're interested in that. Late in the afternoon and early evening are hand-eye coordination is better. We have higher lung function. There's some interesting effects on speed. Speed is greater. Chad: Excellent. Well, Dan, we appreciate you taking the time. Dan Pink: Thank you. Chad: As I said, you literally are a legend. One of the guys that I love, when you have a new book come out, I always get it. The new book is When, the Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. If you want more of Dan, you can always have more of Dan. He has a podcast called Pinkcast. You can go check out ... You're going to love this, Dan. His TV show that he did in 2014 called Crowd Control, or just go to danpink.com. Any other way that they can get more of Dan Pink, Dan? Dan Pink: That's great. If you go to my website, danpink.com , I also do a bi-weekly email newsletter that has all kinds of reading recommendations, and also, every week, gives people that, what you mentioned, that Pinkcast, which is a very short 90 second video with a science-based tool or tip. Joel: Always be closing. Chad: Always be closing. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Ema: Hi, I'm Emma. 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. #DanPink #motivation #sales #generations #Millenials #Xers #Boomers #productivity

Welcome to the Chat and Cheese Podcast's holiday extravaganza, where HR gossip meets holiday cheer — and no one is safe. It’s like your company holiday party, but with more alcohol and fewer awkward dance moves (maybe). Holiday Coal Recipients: The Master of Deception The Corporate Grinch The Kings of "Almost There" Holiday Heroes: The Billion-Dollar Badass The Pop Powerhouse The Viral Appetizer Wizard Final Thought: Whether you’re running from accountability or running the world, Chad & Joel see you. In a year filled with corporate antics, unlikely successes, and viral cheese pulls, they’ve made their holiday list — and checked it twice. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:27.893) AWWWEEEEEE YEEEEEEEEAAAAAHHHH! Joel (00:34.254) Yeah, we're making a list and checking it twice. Who's ready for some naughty and nice? Hi kids, this is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Shitters Full Cheesman. Chad (00:46.626) This is Chad, give me some of that mulled wine. Sowash? Joel (00:51.48) And on this week's episode, a little naughty, a little nice, and Santa's little helper makes a guest appearance. Let's do this. Chad (01:03.672) So Julie would not be happy right now because we are, yeah, take a look, because we're matching and whenever, yeah, yes, yes, and whatever. He will never match me. Just so that you know, listener, this was not planned. This was not planned. I don't even match with my wife. She wants to wear like matching track suit suits and shit like that. Not doing it. So for all the listeners out there who are not watching on YouTube, Joel (01:05.654) Why's that? Joel (01:10.806) It's this. Joel (01:19.064) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (01:30.146) Yeah. Chad (01:32.472) Joel and I are wearing our factory fix Mary fix miss Little ugly sweaters, which are not sweaters Tell him about tell him about these sexy factory fix sweaters that aren't that aren't ugly quality Joel (01:35.784) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Very, very sexy. Joel (01:47.444) Yeah. I mean, a sweater as I assume all of our listeners have worn a sweater at some point in their life. the wool even caught, whatever the material is tends to be kind of itchy. doesn't really stretch or move with you very well. These look like sweat sweaters, but they're, don't even know the material. It's like a rayon stretchy athleisure. I could go jogging in this if I ever jogged, if someone was chasing me. Chad (01:52.354) Mm. Chad (01:56.34) itchy. yeah. Chad (02:09.148) At leisure? Like you ever jogged. If Taco Bell was at the front door, you would jog to the front door. Joel (02:17.09) This would be the sweater I would want to Yes. If the ice cream truck turned into the Taco Bell truck and drove down the street, I might get my track shoes on. Otherwise, not so much. Chad (02:33.371) shit. So what's going on? What's going on this holiday season at the Cheeseman household? Joel (02:38.638) Yeah, we've got, you know, this is listeners know my, my oldest is 18. So this should be the last, like he has to attend Christmas. So, divorced, so we don't get the big kids, my daughter and son, till later in the morning, which leaves my seven year old to like grit his teeth and open one or two presents and wait for his brother and sister. So that'll be, that'll be challenging. Chad (02:45.73) poll. Chad (03:08.76) Mm-hmm. Joel (03:08.814) dad, who lives nearby, as a lot of, know, we'll come and hang out with us. We'll watch basketball and eat really good stuff. did talk my wife into making a beef Wellington, which is probably my favorite thing that she makes. So doing that. then, this weekend, I didn't, I don't think, know, this, the wife and the young guy, we're going to take a little weekend trip to New York. Chad (03:15.501) Yup. Chad (03:21.778) that's nice. That is nice. Chad (03:27.402) huh. Chad (03:34.109) well that's Yeah. Joel (03:34.734) We got some points on Delta. got some points on the hotels. We're like going to take a really cheap. I haven't been in New York in like five years. It's one of my favorite cities. So looking forward to that. The little kid gets to the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, all that good stuff. And we're going to go see Elf on Broadway or off Broadway, off or on Broadway. I don't know the difference. I don't really know, really know musicals. Yeah. Got to see the tree and all that good stuff. And then, Chad (03:42.776) Mm-hmm. Chad (03:48.354) That's awesome. Yeah. yeah, yeah. Go to Rockefeller. You gotta see the tree. yeah. Mm. So awesome. Joel (04:01.966) A couple of days after Christmas, we're all driving down, not my dad, but all the kids and us were going to Orlando to hang out in an Airbnb with the Canadians, her family, and her parents. pray for me on that one. Pray for me. Pray for me on that one. A lot of kids and adults and a lot of alcohol. It could get ugly. It could get ugly. How about you in Portugal? Chad (04:10.68) Okay. Chad (04:19.924) in or yeah Orlando or Lando. Yes, yes. Well, we actually have family and friends that are coming here to the Algarve for Christmas. So plenty of paddle Christmas Eve dinners plan Christmas brunch Christmas dinner Christmas hikes. So a lot of kayaking just stuff. Joel (04:32.366) Mm-hmm. Chad (04:46.486) Right. We got we and obviously a lot of drinking. Right. So they so then we're to be hopping in the van. That's for Christmas. We're going to spend Christmas here. Then we're going to be hopping in the van and taking everybody to Marbella on the southern coast of Spain for New Year's. We've never been there. Really excited to go there. We just went to Cadiz about a month or so ago. And that was amazing. So we're really looking really looking forward to that. And I mean, just plenty of food, drinking activities, love having family and friends here to share a little slice of. Joel (04:53.89) Mm-hmm. Chad (05:16.172) The Soosh paradise. Joel (05:17.71) Did you say Christmas hiking? Chad (05:20.536) You gotta see it's it's it's a beautiful. It's a beautiful beautiful scene beautiful scene. It's a gift to all your senses Joel (05:27.128) What is that about? and, and are we at peak peak euro Chad? Kind of like from here on out, it's, it's the, the, does the clock start ticking to your time back in the U S Chad (05:37.168) haha See, I don't know because never been here before. We now have residency so we can come and go as we please. Before I had to stay out, right, for a certain amount of time. So I can come and go as we please. I guess the listeners will have to kind of like chime in and let me know if American Chad, US Chad comes back, comes creeping back. Joel (05:45.964) Okay. Yeah. Joel (06:03.042) Well, let me lobby the listeners right now to say, keep Chad in Portugal. We like Euro Chad. Euro Chad is cool, laid back. He's, he's all good. He's all good. I'll lobby the listeners for that. Chad (06:14.9) I don't have US news to watch over here, which is great. It's easier to get away from, let's just say that. Joel (06:20.074) And, and, and I can lobby a lot of the listeners because I'm sending free shit to the listeners on a regular basis. Chad for the no shout outs this week, cause it's not your nice, Chad, let's, let's tell the listeners if you haven't signed up what they're missing with free stuff from Chad and cheese. Chad (06:24.726) Ha ha ha! Chad (06:28.736) Yes. Chad (06:37.856) Really simple kids, if you don't go to chadcheese.com slash free, you can't win. This is how you register. T-shirts by Aaron App, they're not those scratchy ones. They're the nice, soft, silky ones that feel like a hug from Chad and Cheese. Bourbon barrel aged syrup from Keyura. We're not doing shout outs this week, so we gotta double down on the Keyura. Hence the syrup. Joel (07:00.472) That's right. They're, they're from Canada, Chad. I don't know if you mentioned that or not. Hence the maple syrup. Chad (07:07.692) beer by Aspen Tech Labs, craft beer sent to your doorstep, craft Aspen Tech Labs. Two bottles of whiskey from our friends at Tex Kernel powered by now Bullhorn. And if it's your birthday, you get a little rum possibly from Plum, but you gotta go to ChadCheese.com slash free to register. If you don't play, you can't win. Joel (07:21.898) Mm-hmm. Joel (07:32.012) That's right, Chad. Some listeners are celebrating another year around the sun. I'm just going to finish out the month for all the birthdays in December. got Holland McHugh, Jack Mahoney, Monica Evgy, Nick Bradford, Allison Padgett, Michael Smith, Mike Polatic, Fazla M.T.S., Tina Davis, Angela Aguilar, Jeffrey Tainton, Nick Hutchinson, Kim Gray, Max Armbruster, Alex Micklin, Lex Kramer, Chad (07:32.319) Chad (07:36.152) Mmm. Chad (07:46.667) Joel (07:58.734) Phil Larkins, Ali Raza, Christina Lowry, Craig Rhodes, he's on the 25th, that sucks. Daniel Gailey, Jonathan Martinez, Kelly Hervnick, Dom Rafidi, Kerry Corcoran, Dan Lockhart, Molly Mulvey, Curtis Pixel, Nicky McKee, Herard Mulder, you mentioned Tex Colonel. And last but definitely not least, my father celebrates. Chad (08:02.904) Ooh, wow. Yeah, that's like. Chad (08:19.138) There he is. There he is. Mm hmm. Yes. Will the man cheeseman. Joel (08:26.734) 85 years on planet Earth. This week actually so happy birthday to them and shout out quick shout out to all the people posting the pics of t-shirts asking for liquor like we love we love the shares on LinkedIn so keep keep that up. Chad (08:33.399) Awesome. Chad (08:38.06) Yes. Chad (08:42.282) I you were going to say post and pics of tits. I was going say I didn't see those, so can you forward those to me? Joel (08:51.63) Which brings us to more naughtiness. Chad (08:57.047) Yes. Joel (08:58.722) Fantasy football with our friends at factory fix. Thanks for the Christmas sweaters. Well, the regular season is over Chad, which leaves us with the playoffs. All right. Our championship semi-final. is the final four. If you will. We've got David Stiefel versus Dean, the daddy Mac Mackerel, who's been running away with this. He is the favorite at this point. then we've got to match it. Got it. Yeah. yeah. Chad (09:04.289) Mm-hmm. Chad (09:10.082) for. Chad (09:18.329) Ooh. Yes. Takes one bad week though. Takes one bad week. Yes. Yes. Joel (09:26.478) Any, any given Sunday, I'll tell you a fantasy will kick your ass. and then, and then it's you and me. I don't know how that happened. It's not rigged people. We don't have, we haven't hacked Yahoo fantasy. it is totally organic. And then we've got our best of the worst playoffs. We've got a Dean apparel last year's champion. she's, she's still fighting there at the bottom. She's going to go against Laura Martinelli. And then the second matchup we've got. Chad (09:33.558) I don't know. Chad (09:46.392) Champ, yeah. Joel (09:52.686) Kristy Lisbon versus Keith the commish Sonderling. He's heartbroken that he didn't quite make the semi-final of the championship round. Yeah. Yeah, that was. Chad (09:56.344) I smashed his ass last week. it was horrible. I almost scored 200 points. He was barely, I think, over 100. So yeah, it was bad for him. Joel (10:07.99) Yeah. Yeah, that was rough. And then we got the, the bottom, the bottom for, the big losers. we got action Jackson, who was the factory fix representative. He's at number nine, Sean Horton. Here's a who he started from the bottom. Didn't quite make it to the top, but he's not the big loser that we thought he might be followed by Jennifer Terry Tharp. And of course the man who loves the bottom, if you know what I'm saying, Adam Gordon. Chad (10:24.664) Ha ha! Good job, Sean. Jen. Chad (10:35.064) You He's our favorite bottom. Joel (10:38.21) Who's, who's blaming all of it on the fact that, punters don't make it into fantasy lineups and he couldn't draft the Scottish, Scottish punter for his team. anyway, there's no next year for you, Adam. Sorry. you have to win it to be back in. You had your shot. It's over. go, go back to rugby. Yeah. Maybe McGrath will let him in and see if he can do better than last. Chad (10:50.104) That's awesome. That's awesome. Chad (10:57.516) Get McGrath in next year. Chad (11:02.456) Yeah, we'll see. We'll give Scotland another chance, not you, Adam. That was horrible. That was bad. That was bad as Jasper last year. my God. Naughtiness. Joel (11:06.486) Yeah, see if, if he can do better than last place for God's sakes. Geez. No shit. No shit. Well, let's. Joel (11:19.852) Let's get into some naughtiness. That's right. If you're listening for the first time, here's, here's how this is going to work. Kids, Chad and are both going to talk about some of our naughty and nice lists. we have a guest, naughty, naughty Lister and, that's it. That's the show. there's not a ton of news this time of year. So this is a fun way for us to just sort of get off, get off our chest, some assholes, from the air and, and highlight some, some good folks. So. Chad (11:23.256) I'm done. Chad (11:38.273) It's easy. Chad (11:45.592) Some good folk. Joel (11:48.204) My number one naughty, Illit Raz. Who the fuck is Illit Raz? Well, this year's naughty for me is kind of a part two. Listeners will probably remember last year's Jive Turkey show, which included Junco. Well, the dumpster fire continued to rage in 2024. So let's do a little recap for listeners of Junco in 2022. Chad (11:53.302) again. Chad (11:56.888) Mmm. Chad (12:00.928) Yes. Joel (12:13.422) Junco was riding the DEI train high on the hog. raised 25 million for their quote unquote automated sourcing tool for underrepresented candidates. They had raised a total of $38.5 million. They had a really who's who list of investors, people from Etsy and high profile names, et cetera. So let's go to 2023 when they made our turkeys list. Raz, the founders accused by the board of having Chad (12:19.384) Mm-hmm. Chad (12:35.394) Yeah. Joel (12:43.214) quote, engaged in a grary egregious, unethical, and fraudulent conduct after an investigation found that she had allegedly allegedly misled investors, regarding the company's actual customer list. she made up a few like Walmart and some high profile names. Apparently, that's, that's something you shouldn't do as a founder. Don't tell your investors you have, have clients that aren't, aren't really your clients. Now let's go to 2024. Chad (12:49.738) Ouch. Ouch. Chad (12:54.871) Hmm. Chad (13:10.679) Good call. Good call. Yes. Joel (13:12.984) where the naughtiness is kind of coming to a head. Yes, there is more. The SEC, yes, that SEC has charged Raz with securities fraud and wire fraud for allegedly defrauding investors and misleading them about core aspects of the company. But wait, Chad, there's more. There's more. The US Attorney's Office is getting into the game. They've announced criminal charges with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for Raz. But wait, Chad, there's more. Chad (13:20.194) Hello. Joel (13:42.606) There's even more to this naughty, naughty story. Raz is suing the company, suing the company for $300,000 in not covering her legal expenses. So let's recap. Chad (13:52.235) Okay. Joel (14:02.176) Illit Raz is very naughty. She is an Israeli. We think she's an Israel. She's an Israeli citizen. Chances are she won't be coming to the US anytime soon because there's a lot of people out there that are not falling for the banana in the tailpipe. And hopefully this is the end for her. Chad (14:09.452) Citizen? Yeah. Chad (14:25.346) Weird. Joel (14:25.388) stealing from investors. By the way, we knew at least one employee that was laid off. A lot of people were impacted. She scammed the whole system and she is naughty, naughty, naughty. Chad (14:31.01) Yeah, yeah. Chad (14:40.702) Yeah, it sounds like a orange jumpsuit is coming her way. Joel (14:45.004) Yeah. Do they wear orange in Israel? I don't, I don't know exactly what's going on. Chad (14:48.6) I don't know, but if they extradite her, and I think we do have extradition with Israel. Joel (14:53.324) Yes. Yes. Israel does play nice. Does play nice. Although she's probably pretty small fish in the big scheme of things. Although the SEC and, justice department are pretty, pretty big deals. All right. Well, let's, let's get past the naughty and get to some nice for me this year. show Wang, show Wang makes my nice list. So who the fuck is that? Well, she's the 35 year old co-founder and chief revenue officer of deal. That's D E E L one of our. Chad (15:02.828) Mm-hmm. Joel (15:22.072) favorite companies. You've probably heard of them if you listen to the show. She's also now number 39 on Forbes richest women list with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion. $1.2 billion for some context, that's the net worth of Madonna, the queen of pop. Everyone will know who Madonna is. Less than five years after its founding, Chad (15:31.736) 39? Chad (15:47.788) hope so. Joel (15:49.582) A deal surpassed 500 million in revenue. I think they're up to 700 is the last quote I think you get out there. They've made some incredible acquisitions. After moving to China, after moving to the US from China at the age of 16, she sold scooters at flea markets in high school. Then she went to study robotics at MIT. She co-founded an air purification company before founding Deal. Did I mention she's only 35, by the way? Chad (15:51.948) Good. Chad (15:56.457) Mm-hmm. Yes. Chad (16:16.898) Jeez. Joel (16:18.562) She also hires too. talk a lot about founders who should be hiring all the time. She personally interviewed the first 400 employees at deal to quote, help cultivate and maintain a consistent corporate culture. Youth. She's an immigrant. She's a woman. She's a bad ass for all this and more. Wang makes my nice list for 2024. Chad (16:21.976) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Chad (16:33.367) Yeah. Chad (16:42.42) Nice whoo, that's a big one. That's a very big one. Well awesome Joel (16:47.266) That is a big one. think deal may make my predictions list, Chad. That's coming out soon. Deal might make my predictions less, but let's get to your first nice of 2024. Chad (16:51.158) Yeah, imagine that. Yeah, imagine that. Chad (16:57.644) Well, well, my on my list coincidentally is another female on that list that you were just talking about. I believe she's she's probably close to number one. Yes, Taylor Swift is on my my nice list. Nobody saw this coming. I get it. I totally get it. One of the reasons why I picked it. But here are some things that I think everybody should know. This from People magazine after 149 shows, Taylor Swift touring confirmed to the New York Times that over 10 million Joel (17:07.864) Mm-hmm. Joel (17:12.27) Mmm. Chad (17:26.136) people attended the Eris tour and that it sold over two billion in total ticket sales making it the best-selling tour of all time and double the gross ticket sales of any other concert in history or should we say herstory. In addition, Swift scored big with an accompanying Taylor Swift the Eris tour book. Imagine that, which sold over 800,000 copies in the first two days. making it the most successful publishing launch of the year. And Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Music all announced that Swift was the top streamed artist of 2024 and had the top streamed album of the year. Now, over the past two years, Swift gave out 197 million, almost $200 million in bonuses to people working on the tour. Joel (18:23.416) That's nice. Chad (18:23.424) including truck drivers, caterers, instrument tech, merch team, lighting, sound production staff, assistants, carpenters, everybody, the riggers, the hair people, the makeup people, wardrobe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Again, all this from people. Last but not least, I may not listen to Taylor Swift, however, I can identify an amazing business person when I see one. Plus, according to Apex marketing, Swift has effectively, this is gonna tear me up, man, effectively generated an additional $331.5 million in brand value to the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL. A game you and I both know and love. It's close to our hearts. However, it's not only the NFL that's profiting from Taylor Swift, her effects, right? Joel (18:56.492) Mm-hmm. Joel (19:11.799) Yeah. Chad (19:19.532) those brands associated with Swift are now benefiting from our influence as well, which means obviously they're gonna amplify it a lot more money. I don't have to attend a stadium tour, listen to Swift on Spotify, or even be a Chiefs fan, which I'm not, I enjoy watching them, but I'm not really a Chiefs fan, to respect and admire the business savvy and real impact, not just the US GDP kids. Joel (19:19.566) Mm-hmm. Joel (19:34.552) Mm-hmm. Joel (19:46.168) Yeah. Chad (19:46.626) but the surge in economic activity for her tour in the UK has estimated to have injected one billion pounds into the UK economy. She is a global fucking whirlwind, which is why Taylor Swift makes it to my nice list this season. Treat your people well. 200 million. Joel (20:04.781) Yeah. Joel (20:09.354) And the UK, the UK, the UK needs a little help these days. for sure. Now my, my wife, as you, as you know, I mentioned, went to Toronto to see, Taylor and yes, she, she takes over a city. I know here in Indianapolis who hosted a super bowl, not that long ago. the, the economic impact that she had on the city was greater than the super bowl, when it was in town and you. Chad (20:13.986) Yeah. huh. Yep. Yeah. Chad (20:23.694) it's amazing. Chad (20:31.352) Huge. Chad (20:35.394) It's crazy. Joel (20:35.662) You may not listen to Taylor, but if you're on Apple music, I know you're Spotify guy, but Apple music will, you can follow people in your friends list. So my, my wife and I are of course friends on Apple music. If I look at my friends playlist, it's all like for a while it was all Taylor Swift. I could not avoid, avoid, avoid Taylor and her many, many albums. Chad (20:46.466) Mm-hmm. Chad (20:53.495) That's awesome. And I have to say by proxy, mean, Julie and Kennedy did go see Taylor in Wembley. So, I mean, yes, the knock-on effects pretty much just about every household somehow, some way are being influenced, either spending money or spending time, engagement, because of Taylor Swift. And this, to me, is just, again, I listen to her music, but I don't have to. She kicks ass, man. my God. Joel (21:26.638) She kicks ass. And speaking of ladies who kick ass, let's take a quick break and we'll get to some more naughtiness from our friend, JT. Chad (21:27.704) She kicks ass. Yes. Joel (21:42.822) All right, Chad, we decided that hearing from us was just not enough this year. We had to get a little bit of a guest host come in. So, JT, who our listeners know, will get to know better in the future, chimed in with a couple of her Noddy. She was not able to donate her opinion for the Jive Turkey show. So here is JT's contribution to the Noddy list. Chad (21:43.17) That's such a great sound effect. Chad (21:50.274) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:02.176) Or nice. Chad (22:59.16) home. Joel (23:03.054) She is concise. She got two in 50 seconds. It'll take us, it'll take us an hour to do a, do three or four. Chad (23:06.292) she's not playing games. She's not playing games. She just gave us a lot of homework is what she did. I'm going to go ahead and start out with the BLS stuff and then we'll just, we'll go to AI after that. So first and foremost, JT, 2009 was much worse than it is now. Okay? If want to talk about 20 years ago, mean, 2009 was much worse, especially on the white collar side than it is right now. So for years we've talked about, I mean, in her defense, we've talked about how the BLS needs to change their bullshit survey methodology, which started in 1915. Yes, 1915. And they need to move toward a more real time or near real time data effect, right? So companies like LinkUp or Aspentech Labs provides nearly real time jobs data as they are constantly monitoring scraping job data directly from corporate sites. The BLS can always adjust their report real-time numbers against the UI, which is the unemployment insurance numbers to make their adjustments. So hell, even if they kept this stupid survey, injecting real-time jobs data into the fray just makes the data sets better. So yes, the BLS jobs data, which reported 818,000 jobs, fewer jobs between April 20, 2023, Joel (24:20.494) Mm-hmm. Joel (24:29.432) Yeah. Chad (24:31.736) in March 2024, so within a 12 month timeframe, which it's about an average of 68,000 less jobs per month during that year, marking the largest downward revision in the last 15 years. But as reported by senior economist Dean Baker, the revision means we still created a net positive 2.1 million jobs or 172,000 jobs a month. So let's be clear. The revision makes the job market less strong, but not weak by any stretch of the imagination. And in the end, yes, we need to move past these stupid survey methodologies that are 100 years old, but also keep the big picture of what's really happening with jobs in full view. That's very key. So love what she packaged there, but she made me do a hell of a lot of homework, Joel. Joel (25:06.839) Mm-hmm. Joel (25:31.576) Sounds like you and JT might have a conversation at some point about all this stuff. Yeah, no one has their finger on the pulse of the job seeker and sort of their opinion and what they're feeling quite like JT. I think that's the tip of the iceberg on the other point that she made with automated two ways, right? Job seekers coming in with AI and employers. Chad (25:34.466) we will. it's gonna be great. I love her. She's great. Joel (25:57.034) using AI. I've seen some really bad examples of AI, particularly with video, in the interview process. She has way more knowledge than we have on what job seekers are using to like get through pre-screening and get into, the ATSs of companies. But yeah, she's, she's spot on and saying, if the data is not good, it's hard to make decisions, whether it's up or down. It needs to be correct. And when, when a company like links up, link up gets acquired, it's no Chad (26:04.738) Yeah. Joel (26:24.374) It's no shock to us because the data is better than what we're getting out of out of the government. So kudos to a kudos to JT and happy holidays to her as well. Let's get on to your. Chad (26:36.088) Yeah, no, I wanna hit the AI segment that she actually talked about. So, I mean, we're in the very early stages of AI adoption or recruitment, and unless it's blatant, it's really hard to call it misuse. And here's what I mean. Currently, we're in the early editing process for the AI sessions, season two and season three. And after having those conversations with TA leaders and revisiting, or, Joel (26:40.844) Hit me. Hit me. Chad (27:03.852) through production, through the production process, listening again. I have to say that I couldn't disagree more with JT about experimenting with AI. Remember the black hole? Everybody seems to forget that over the last 20 years of applying for a job, we had this black hole problem where companies cut recruiting resources or didn't flex when they had hiring to be able to have more Joel (27:13.006) Mm-hmm. Chad (27:31.638) more people actually scale. Now we're hearing amazing stories from General Motors, Rallies and Checkers, Essentia, Healthcare, UPS, who literally just hired 125,000 people in five weeks, These hiring companies are not shying away from AI. They're doubling down. Why? Because they want the black hole ages to be gone and they're using more advanced tech to do that. Will they have some bad choices. You're goddamn straight they will. Will those bad choices be better than the black hole? You're goddamn right they will be. Joel (28:12.952) Did you say Chipotle? I think they're on the AI train as well. Chad (28:18.68) Ooh, they are. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Joel (28:22.22) Yes, you and JT will have a few things to talk about. 2025 is going to be hot. It's going to be hot on Chad and cheese. We're just getting started kids. All let's get to your next your next nice or is this your first nice second I've lost track. What's your nice? Chad (28:25.11) I love it. Chad (28:34.369) yeah. I can't, no, my first nice was Taylor. Second nice is the influencer economy. The influencer economy, let's just say over the last few years we've talked about TikTok. Over the last few months we've talked about influencers, especially when companies like AppCast and Adzuna are focusing on leveraging social now and in the near future, but. We've seen vendors and hiring companies try to leverage social media for over a decade and they just can't get it right. So what was missing? I think we know now, the JTs of the world, right? The influencers. So this from an article in Men's Health, quote, you're gonna love this because it's about Chili's. Chili's is currently seeing a spike in sales. even as we're living in a time where many fast food and fast casual restaurants are struggling to lure customers in the door. And the company has an appetizer combo that has gone viral on TikTok to thank for it. How? Well, it seems this might have all started with TikToker Irene Kim, who has 500,000 TikTok followers recorded on TikTok reviewing Chili's Triple Dipper Appetizer. Have you tried that yet? You haven't tried that yet? Okay, okay. I'm sure you will though. Triple Dipper Appetizer. And when she bit into the much larger than average cheese stick, which I can't believe you haven't had yet, the cheese stretched longer than her arm was, right? So the post caught fire with over a million views. And since then, the Triple Dipper is a very inexpensive. Joel (29:55.136) not. I have not. Yes. Joel (30:09.425) huh. Chad (30:18.872) appetizer. So everyone can get out there and play these reindeer games. They're buying the triple dipper. And then they're doing their own version of this on TikTok to the tune of listen to this kids over 150 million million 150 million posts about the triple dipper. What's the impact? Let's face it, chili has chilies has been on the ropes for years now. with rising costs and low customer traffic, but the success of the triple dipper helped Chili's raise its revenue forecast from 4.55 billion up to 4.75 billion in their forecast. So what's missing from our effects in trying to leverage social media in the past and recruiting? It's influencers. And now we have the influencer economy. Sure, have your CEO say a few words on TikTok. Joel (31:06.978) Mm-hmm. Chad (31:17.344) now and again, that's great. But if you want real traction, collaborate with influencers to create cool stunts and or motions that can get your brand product services or even job openings in front of engaged audiences. The cool thing is Irene has five hundred thousand followers. Somebody like JT who's in our space. She has one point. I think it's one point to one point four million followers. So if you're not looking at the influencer economy, Joel (31:38.071) Mm-hmm. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. Chad (31:46.688) and you want to use TikTok and you want to use Instagram and you want to use socials, you're doing it wrong kids. You got to get into the influencer economy. Joel (31:57.836) All this time I've been doing it wrong, Chad. I've been putting social shit about indeed. I should have just been recording my lunches. Just record my lunches and I become a social media success. Chad (31:58.132) Naked my nice list. Chad (32:07.744) You can eat your lunch while you're talking about Indeed. you can meld. there's melding. there's melding. Joel (32:12.264) hybrid influencing. There you go. I'm all about it. All about it. Well, let me let me take a pause to grab a snack and we'll be right back with my final naughty of 2024. Chad (32:20.312) Mmm. Joel (32:28.974) Are you having fun, Chad? I'm having fun. This is a fun episode. I like this one. Chad (32:31.468) This is always fun. The naughty and nice, the turkeys, they're always fun. Especially when we can inject a little JT into it because she's always a blast. Joel (32:38.67) huh. It's also great because we know no one will listen to the show during the holidays, so we can just be totally stupid. All right, let's get. Chad (32:43.796) shut up. Shut up. Okay. Joel (32:49.454) Let me get to my last naughty of 2024. Okay. My naughty goes to Gerald O'Connor. Who the fuck is Gerald O'Connor? Well, he's the CEO of Impact Plastics. What the fuck is Impact Plastics? Well, you might remember we talked about them. The company allegedly kept employees at work while Hurricane Helene flooded the company and took seven lives to date. The stories are heartbreaking. Chad (32:58.04) Who? I don't know. Chad (33:09.89) Dushbag. Joel (33:18.702) Google it if you want to ruin your holiday. But there's no question, Gerald O'Connor, who should definitely be in a jumpsuit that's the color of orange next year makes it to the top of my naughty list. I'm going to share a story. This was in Tennessee. This is a local news story about what happened. think it can kind of encapsulate what happened much better than I could have a listen or look. Chad (33:21.818) Don't do it. Don't do it. Joel (34:00.373) after. Chad (35:35.512) Imagine that. that. Yeah, yeah. we're doing so much to help. You're full of shit. Joel (35:36.76) Imagine that. Joel (35:42.528) It took weeks to find some of the people that died. I mean, this was bad. We talked about it when it first happened. was a father, many kids were impacted, families, as you can imagine. He was able to text as the waters were coming up. He couldn't escape. ended up, he was able to text his daughter. His last text was, love y'all. And that was it. Like how awful is that? Like CEOs need to get a grip. They've lost the script. Chad (35:45.463) Yeah? Chad (35:52.834) Yes. Chad (36:01.73) Yeah. Joel (36:11.202) Keeping workers at work when there are natural disasters happening, this is a story that's become too common in our show. And it's a disgrace. It's a disgrace. Chad (36:20.758) And how'd that fucker make it through? How'd the CEO make it through? If he's there, and again, this is a leadership issue, if you're gonna be there in demand that somebody's there, you're ass better be there too. Joel (36:27.629) Yeah. Yeah, he allegedly snuck out one of the lawsuits had it in there that he sort of snuck out before I got too bad. Chad (36:34.806) Well, I'm gonna tell you right now, he doesn't look incredibly physically fit, so there's no way in hell he swam out of that bitch. Joel (36:43.374) He'd look great in a speedo though. I will say that he probably would look great in a speedo. All right, well, that's pretty naughty, Chad. I don't know if you can one up that, but give it a shot. Chad (36:43.672) Hahaha Chad (36:49.334) Let me know that he had a single. Is that done? Yes. I had to focus on an industry naughty and something that I've been railing on for all year and I'm going to continue to do it. I have a group for my next naughty. That's right. Indeed, Zipper, Kidder and AppCast are on my naughty list for not already injecting cost per qualified candidate into the fabric of how companies find and pay for qualified candidates. Yes, cost per click. Joel (37:11.246) Hmm. Chad (37:26.706) in cost per application were good steps to move away from duration-based models and focus more on pay for performance. I agree. But let's be frank, CPC and CPA not have any real controls in place to measure quality on the front end. When the seeker hits the apply button, there's no control, right? Joel (37:49.39) Mm-hmm. Chad (37:50.444) Are there algorithms that receive signals from the applicant tracking system to better help target future campaigns? Maybe so, but I've already paid for that fucking candidate that's not qualified, right? So after a company has paid for a load of unqualified clicks or application, which means the company has to waste time digging through all of these candidates, which is not better than what we had back in the old monster days with duration based, right? So cost per qualified candidate. should already be a standard in the industry, but why isn't it? I think here's an example. Monster didn't change their model until well after Indeed was on the scene and kicked them off the top of the mountain. Why? Monster was distracted by the massive amounts of cash they were pulling in and they didn't guard their flanks, unlike Netflix, who understood that mailing DVDs would one day be overtaken by streaming. Yes, Monster did buy FlipDog, but they didn't put enough real energy into it to run parallel businesses. So it's easy to understand that money distracts from threats and changing a legacy model, it's not an easy task. I understand that. But fast forward to today, indeed, Zippercruter and AppCast are happily talking about quality. It's all they talk about, right? But they're also... Joel (38:55.992) Mm-hmm. Joel (39:11.854) Sure. Chad (39:14.774) taking the much easier transactional cash instead of screening and delivering quality. So indeed, ZipRecruiter and AppCast have a choice. Do they build tech that will help identify unqualified candidates from qualified and then charge those companies a premium for qualified? Or wait until somebody else figures it out and buy them. And it feels like the latter is happening. Joel (39:34.552) Mm-hmm. Chad (39:41.56) Why is indeed AppCast and ZipRecruiter on my naughty list? Well, leaders are supposed to innovate. So let's hope in 2025, we see the big dogs actually do some innovation and ZipRecruiter. No, I'm not talking about Phil. Joel (39:53.912) Mm-hmm. Joel (40:01.934) Zip made my honorable mention, we're not putting in there, but for their stock price, their COO leaving, their CFO leaving. and their innovation is an embarrassment and the CEO is still there. Maybe he'll make our prediction show. I don't know. You'll have to tune in. Chad (40:07.104) Okay. yeah. Chad (40:12.566) And they're seeing hope still being there. Still being there. You don't know how many ex zip zip recruiter people have reached out to me over the past year as I've started to talk about this and go, yeah, no, you're right. He should have gone a long time ago. Joel (40:26.883) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. 25 is looking to be as equally naughty and as equally nice for a lot of people. But speaking of nice, Chad, my dad jokes are a huge hit, which brings us to this week's dad joke. This one, this one's a little naughty. got inspired by the, by the show. All right. What, what do Santa Claus and Bill Cosby have in common? What do Santa Claus and Bill Cosby have in common? Chad (40:36.024) Hmm. Chad (40:43.608) Are you in your brain? Okay Chad (40:58.574) Does it have to do with the jello pop? Joel (41:01.4) They both only come while you're sleeping. Chad (41:04.536) that was OK. That was good. was bad, bad. But good, yes, it was a little naughty being being roofied is not a little naughty. Joel (41:08.814) That was pretty good, right? It was, it was, it was a little naughty, but you know, for this show. Joel (41:21.256) you had to go there. You had to go there. Happy holidays, everybody. Thanks for listening. It'll be business as usual as we head into 25, but for now, naughty or nice, we out. Chad (41:31.97) We out.

Live from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Chad & Cheese corner Audra Knight , the employer branding wizard at Foundation Medicine, to spill the tea on how companies can stop being boring and actually build a brand people care about. Audra preaches the gospel of internal communications, because apparently, it’s not enough to just have a logo and a “We’re Hiring!” post on LinkedIn. She dishes on the art of getting your employees to share their stories without bribing them (much), making your company seem like a place where people want to work—not just survive. Audra also marvels at the endless buffet of fancy branding tools out there, hinting that maybe picking the right ones is better than throwing spaghetti at the wall. Her secret sauce? Listen and watch to find out! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Who are you and why are you here? Audra Knight: So my name is Audra Knight and I lead employer branding for Foundation Medicine, which you mentioned in the Boston area. And it's a company that I'm, feel so lucky to work for. 'Cause it truly is mission driven. Like every company says they're mission driven. And I was sold that in the interview and I was thinking let's actually see what it's like. But it really is like I just did a story about two of our account executives that are in remission from cancer themselves and now they're going out and helping with cancer care and it's just, it's so inspiring. Joel: So what is the mission specifically? Chad: So in moving forward into 2025, what advice would you have for your peers out there? Audra Knight: For employer branding peers? Chad: Yeah. Audra Knight: I think making sure you're doing more than just recruitment marketing. Chad: Okay. Audra Knight: 'Cause there's so much more I think you can do with your role. Especially partnering with internal communications. Like they're having all these stories about employees, make sure you're both having the stories and they're ensuring them or your stories are going internal and external. And I think we can also help with internal mobility, which is getting really important. Chad: Yes. Audra Knight: Because like the younger generation. Joel: It's just surprising, right? Because it should have always been important, but now it just seems to be incredibly important. Audra Knight: Yeah. And I think in our role we can really help with that. Chad: Yes. Audra Knight: Like I've built internal portals where I can help market, if you have rotations or I've seen companies that are doing like gigs and I think anyway that someone, maybe they can't be promoted every year, but they can still grow and you can help market that as an employer brand person. So not just thinking externally but thinking other ways you can also help internally. Not just advocacy too. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I love that you're actively communicating with internal communications and marketing. And I think a lot of organizations are challenged with, well this is TA or HR, this is marketing. Chad: Silos. Joel: Stay away from each other. But you haven't, talk about how that happened and how you engage on a regular basis. Audra Knight: So that's one thing I learned like early on. 'Cause I have had struggles in the past with like marketing understanding the work I'm doing. So as soon as I got in this company I was like let's go. I'm going right to marketing, I'm going right to internal comms. External comms is somewhat separate and just becoming besties. And explaining right from the beginning like this is what I'm doing and this is how it's a win-win for both of us. So like we can partner on this advocacy tool we have, I'm gonna give you content 'cause you are always looking for more content. I'm gonna help promote your content. And just making it right from the beginning like, we are a team, let's work together. And it's just so, so useful now. Like they come to me and be like, what about a story on this? Or they, and I can go to them and we just have this, I feel really thankful but I did make sure that was a priority. Chad: That's amazing. That's amazing. So in 2024, looking backward thus far, what has surprised you the most? Audra Knight: I think just being here today, seeing the amount of different tools, 'cause I, when I started in employer branding, you had a dusty old ATS, and if you wanted, let's see, if you want, like a CRM, there was like four. And you're like, okay, which of these four am I gonna buy? And now it's like I don't even know where to start looking, in a good way. 'Cause you can be really picky. And I remember if you wanted an employee generated video tool that wasn't even a thing. And now I'm, they're just everywhere. There's so many different options. But tools are so important to our role. Can I give a shout out to mine 'cause they're here today. But, I have quite a few, but Clinch Talent is what I've used now first seven or eight years. Chad: Okay. Audra Knight: And I really can't imagine doing my role without it. Because again, the metrics I'm getting from them, I'm in the tool like every day. I'm building new webpages, the external, internal. And people are seeing that. And I have total like control of our careers website and the blogs. But I couldn't do that with a dust deal, the ATS. So I think if, I think if you have any kind of budget, put it just in the right tools and you don't have to have a massive budget, but. Joel: You're in a very competitive space. You mentioned some of the tools. Talk about the messaging, how you differentiate. What platforms are you leveraging that are successful for you? Audra Knight: I think the trick is knowing how you're different. And I do see, I feel like some agencies come in and then they build this beautiful like tagline and employer brand and you, it looks like every other, so that's the challenge, I think. So I think really if you have an agency like work with them, how actually are we different or I think you can do that internally, which is what I have done. And so first I'll work with like the recruiters of the different functions. Then we will build like a pitch like an EVP per function that we feel like is the sell and what actually is different. So like for mission, that is really important for software engineers because they could work anywhere where it's not mission driven. But we don't push the mission as much in our medical teams and our RD teams 'cause they are probably working in oncology space in the missions. There's some of a great mission either way. Audra Knight: So you, so knowing that, and then after we feel like we have our pitch, we bring that to the leaders of the function or different people in the function and say, do you agree and actually have a workshop. So not just an email 'cause they're busy, they're not gonna write back and be like, but if you have a workshop and be like, go through it. Do you agree with these pitches? Are there things that we missed? And then I actually took that and built with Clinch, a whole like internal tool where employees, because also I think we talk about recruiter enablement, which is great. Chad: Yes. Audra Knight: But what about hiring manager enablement? Like employee enablement. So that's what I'm trying to do. And it's a tool so that any employee or any hiring manager come in there, go to their specific division, see their own EVP that we created just internally for free. And then videos that we've, from our video tool where they can just take 'em, copy and paste, post it to LinkedIn and share the content. Chad: So in 2025, what is your major priority? Audra Knight: Ooh, that's a good question. I think looking internally more because we are a little bit slower, like most people we're hiring just at the moment. So thinking about how I can add value, internally in other ways. And just being really specific to, on our hiring needs, the ones that we are hiring that are critical, how can I get in there, create content, whether that's a blog or a video, and then make sure that gets shared by the right people in scene. Audra Knight: 'Cause I've seen people that create this beautiful thing and they just like post it on their company LinkedIn channel. But I'll be like, we'll do that. But then I give that to the leaders of that function and be like, copy and paste. I would love it if you personalize it, but you might be busy or not have the time. So here's just really easy. You make sure every employee that is in that network, they send this out on their LinkedIn and of course make sure it's trackable. Joel: How do you look at diversity, equity, inclusion and how are you coordinating with marketing to make sure that message is cohesive and packaged for the community? Audra Knight: Yeah. It's really been interesting to see how some companies are putting less effort into that. But I think either way, as an employer, brander, you have to think about your content and weaving it in. But only if that's true. Like if you honestly aren't a very diverse company. Do not be just interviewing and asking for videos for your ERNs. Audra Knight: And then the person comes in and it's not very diverse. So just making sure it's, you are thinking about it and talking to different people in the ERNs. But it's also very authentic. So those people that are saying that they actually truly believe you're diverse and it's just got to be real. 'Cause I feel like I'm seeing some companies that are like, we're so diverse, and they're not. Chad: And if there's anything we know about Audra, she's real. Audra Knight, thank you so much for sitting down with us. If somebody wants to connect with you or maybe, I don't know, apply for a job. Audra Knight: Or be in the band? Chad: Or be in the band. Audra Knight: Yeah. Joel: Or be in the band. Chad: Or be in the band. Where would you send them? Audra Knight: Yes. I think I'm the only Audra Knight on Link... Or easily searchable on LinkedIn. Chad: The coolest name. I love, love it. Audra Knight: Yes. Awesome. Joel: Did I mention I was in first chair in sixth grade for saxophone, so I may be auditioning soon. Audra Knight: Very cool. Our boys are playing piano now and percussions. Chad: That's amazing. Audra Knight: So I'm thinking we might have in the band, we'll have a pianist and a drummer. Chad: Excellent. Joel: A new Chicago. Let's do this. Audra Knight: Awesome. Yep. Joel: Thanks Audra. Audra Knight: Awesome. Thanks for having me. Joel: Enjoy the show. Audra Knight: Awesome. Podcast Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuggle heads instead, now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Live from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Julie Sowash, executive director of Disability Solutions, braved Chad & Cheese’s snark-fest to talk AI ethics, hiring underdogs, and why “data transparency” isn’t just corporate jargon. Julie dropped recruitment wisdom about balancing tech with actual human  connection (wild concept, right?) while reminding companies that “diversity commitments” aren't seasonal trends like pumpkin spice lattes. She also dished on HR's 2024 reality: market consolidation’s crushing vibe and why DEI needs more than a LinkedIn post. Through it all, she stayed real, passionate, and even threw in some love for her co-hosting hubby, Chad — proving that even in HR, romance isn’t completely  dead. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 0:00:00.0 Podcast 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. [music] 0:00:25.2 Joel: Who are you and why are you here today? 0:00:27.2 Julie Sowash: My name is Julie Sowash. I'm the executive director and co-founder of Disability Solutions. I'm here because I am presenting tomorrow on ethical considerations in AI, on Friday after everybody has an awesome time tonight. And yeah, just a lot of learning, making great connections, got to participate in the RL100 yesterday, which was really fantastic. The inaugural US event tonight, it was great. 0:00:55.1 Chad: So, looking forward, what advice would you have to your peers in the next 12 months? 0:01:03.3 Julie Sowash: I think it's really two things. And they're the same two things I say every time and that's because things like at their base level don't change, right? Recruiting is not rocket science. I know we like to pretend that it is, but it's not. It's human-human connection, it's using technology efficiently, and it's using our data to know what we need to get done. And what's working and what's not working. And so every single time I meet with senior TA leaders, senior HR leaders, I get really intimidated when it starts because I think, oh my God, these guys are gonna have it all together. It's gonna be the one that makes me look like I have no idea what I'm talking about. Inevitably, every time that we still don't have the basics, and the basics is the data. And so, that's really the first thing. And I think the other thing is trying to be a little bit more proactive and less reactive to the environment around them, right. I mean, we've got to go like COVID, George Floyd, we had this really kind of resurgence into the humanity of the world, into how we're gonna make hiring more balanced. We're gonna bring in diverse talent. We're going to do all of these things and talk a lot of talk. 0:02:21.8 Chad: Shit, yeah. 0:02:23.9 Julie Sowash: And then conveniently, as the winds change, companies use that as an opportunity to retract. And I know there's pressure in the market and I know I am very protective and very covetous of my brand. I built it. It's my baby. I understand. But it's sheer weakness to see these Fortune 100, Fortune 1000 brands pull back because they're scared of a little political change. You're in or you're out, right? And it's okay if you're out. Just be who you are. Don't try to pretend that you're into DEI. Don't try to pretend that now you're not into DEI because the political winds change. 0:03:09.8 Julie Sowash: Be true to who your organization and your culture are because it's like it's whiplash for the job seeker. And it's this fake hope that companies give that fake like illusion of hope that we're finally going to get pay right? That we're finally going to build our pipeline so that it's black, brown, LGBTQ, and disabled. And then you just pull the sheet right out from under our feet again and we start over. 0:03:37.3 Joel: So you are presenting tomorrow. Is some of this the focus or some of it sounds like AI in recruiting and bias around that? What's the focus? 0:03:46.4 Julie Sowash: So I think that I'm generally optimistic about AI for our community and the diversity community in general, just because we are having good conversations. I'm actually pleased at the maturity of the conversations that we're seeing at this event, online, and in other places. And so I get to present with FairNow and we're gonna talk about why it's important? What are some of the key components of ethical considerations in AI? Why it's important to underrepresented communities like mine? And then how do we make sure that once we get that in the seat and we get that in place, that we can actually start to move in the right direction and make sure that we're continuously moving in the right direction? 0:04:34.7 Julie Sowash: I'm excited about conversations around synthetic data sets, greater transparency, real time data. And I think the biggest thing that I've heard kind of and I'll say knee jerk again, but that's probably not the right word is companies going, we cannot use AI because there's too much risk because our data is not clean. The reality is that it's not possible to have clean data right now. You have to have tools, partners, and data to drive in what is gonna be a better data set. And we have a starting point and we move incrementally forward. And there's nothing wrong with moving incrementally forward instead of just saying, I can't do this because it might create risk for myself or my company. We need to be excited about what the future holds with AI and really have good governance and good behaviors out of the gate so that we know that we're doing the right thing and that we're using the technology and the data properly. 0:05:34.7 Chad: So looking backward... 0:05:37.9 Julie Sowash: Yeah. 0:05:38.0 Chad: 2024... 0:05:37.9 Julie Sowash: Yeah. 0:05:38.7 Chad: What surprised you the most about 2024? 0:05:42.6 Julie Sowash: I think it's been the constriction in the market. The labor market is incredibly strong. The US economy is incredibly strong. And I think that we're starting to see some attempts to consolidate parts of the HR tech market. And that's a little bit what's driving layoffs. It's what's driving margins down. It's what's driving budgets down. And it's not really as realistic to the actual market itself, as in the COVID money is kind of drying up. And now we're making decisions that we should have been planning for a lot earlier. And some companies are looking again how to raise profits by squeezing out middlemen and other people in the market. And sort of the dismay, I guess. It's like it's January and I'm hearing, hey, the market's gone to hell. Everything is a mess. 0:06:35.8 Julie Sowash: There's 10 million open jobs in the US. We have the lowest inflation in the world. Nothing was bad, right? But we talk ourselves into these panics because we haven't built and thought proactively to what the market's gonna look like in 18 months or 30 months. And that's really what I would love to like see HR leaders do better, right? How do we talk to our C-suite? And you and I got to talk about this yesterday with the RL100 is if you know that you need more money, you need to make a business case for how that money's gonna get to you. You can't just go to, hey, let's build a great EVP and a great career site. We don't need other marketing dollars. We don't need other attraction dollars. That's not, that's not right. 0:07:19.6 Julie Sowash: And so we end up selling ourselves short instead of saying we need multi-touch attribution, we need multiple channels to get in-front of the talent that we need, and we need to be doing it regularly because hiring is gonna ebb and flow. That's part of it. And so we really need our TA leaders and our HR leaders to think more holistically, and further down the timeline than right now. 0:07:42.4 Joel: Yeah. I know that you live this every day, the diversity question, the inclusion question, and it sounds to me like you're, you're creating a picture of the mental hurdle is hard for companies to get over, but I would guess that a lot of companies want to be inclusive. They want to attract a wider net of folks, but maybe don't know how to do it. For those folks that are looking for tactical examples or success stories, what do you tell them to get to that place? 0:08:11.9 Julie Sowash: Yeah. Again, I mean, it's not rocket science. You have the numbers in your database, you know where your candidates are falling out. You don't need to for me to bring you a Pepsi, right? Who we've helped hire 4,000 people with disabilities. You don't need to see that. What you need to do is spend the time and your data and really be thoughtful about your funnel, and then go through it and see where there are opportunities and know that there's not always gonna be an opportunity to hit the metric you want, but we need to be moving forward incrementally because this is a lifetime's worth of work. That's what I tell my team every single day, is we have to figure out how to keep moving the needle, even though the needle's never gonna move as fast as we want it to. 0:08:58.4 Chad: So 2025, looking forward, what is your number one priority? 0:09:04.3 Julie Sowash: My number one priority is continuing to push DEI belonging and not letting it go, because some people are uncomfortable with it, not letting it go because it's not the hot, sexy thing to do right now. This is our job, right? This as DEI professionals is my job to always be the broken wheel, right? To always be pushing because as long as underrepresented communities are not well represented in the C-suite and the leadership and the TA departments, we're never going to get to equity. So, I'm just gonna keep pushing the envelope, making some people mad and saying that brands need to be true to who they are and not try to play this back and forth game. 0:09:46.8 Joel: So the big question is, what's the best thing about being married to Chad Sowash? 0:09:51.8 Julie Sowash: Have you seen him? Case closed. 0:09:53.0 Joel: [0:09:54.8] ____ Oh that. [laughter] 0:09:55.8 Chad: Thanks. Appreciate you stopping by. 0:10:00.7 Julie Sowash: Is that not what I was supposed to say? [laughter] 0:10:03.5 Chad: That was perfect. That was perfect. If somebody wants to connect with you for professional reasons, where would you send them? 0:10:10.7 Julie Sowash: LinkedIn. Julie Sowash. You can find me there. All the socials. Also, disabilitytalent.org. 0:10:18.6 Joel: Thanks For hanging out for a little bit, Julie. Enjoy the rest of your day. 0:10:21.6 Julie Sowash: Thanks guys. 0:10:22.6 Chad: Thanks. 0:10:23.3 Podcast Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuggle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

In this episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, The Boys welcome Noelle London , founder and CEO of Illoominus , a people analytics platform so cutting-edge even Workday took notes (literally). What starts as a casual chat about ghost tours and crazy Thanksgiving uncles quickly escalates into a snark-filled showdown on the merits of AI-powered HR tech. Highlights include: Debating the correct number of vowels in “ Illoominus ” (seriously, buy those domain misspellings). A deep dive into cleaning up HR’s “garbage data” with AI (because spreadsheets are apparently the devil). Chad’s poetic ode to “dirty data” and Joel’s plea for Delta Airlines perks. Noelle pitches Illoominus like a seasoned pro, blending tech jargon and trying her hardest to dodge the dreaded "firing squad". Does it work? Listen to find out. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:21.97) that's right, kids. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast and this is Firing Squad. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house as we welcome Noel London, founder and CEO at Illoominus.com. Noel, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad (00:32.258) Hello. Noelle (00:43.374) Thanks. Thanks for having me. Joel (00:46.214) Glad you're here. So before we get into the nitty gritty of the business stuff, introduce our listeners to who is Noel London. Noelle (00:55.534) Well, hi everybody. My name's Noelle London. I'm the founder and CEO of Illoominus. I'm sitting here in Savannah. I'm being convinced by these two to try and go on a ghost tour later on. I'm on my way to Thanksgiving in Charleston. I guess that could be also referred to as the firing squad Thanksgiving as well. So enjoying the weather and hopefully it's not gonna rain on me too much over here. Chad (01:08.728) Mm-hmm. Chad (01:17.496) Thank Chad (01:25.39) Do you have a crazy uncle? Because everybody has a crazy uncle they go to Thanksgiving with. you have a crazy, or do you have multiple crazy uncles? That's first question. Noelle (01:32.186) We've all got crazy uncles, right? We've all got crazy uncles, but no, this will just be the small family that's getting together. So it'll be fun. Chad (01:35.232) Okay, good, Good answer. Good answer. Joel (01:44.946) And speaking of crazy, crazy uncles and family members, you forgot an interesting note about you. You are a Longhorn at some point in your educational journey. Do you have a favorite Matthew McConaughey quote or movie or something you'd like to share as a personal antidote? Noelle (01:55.188) Indeed, hook Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chad (01:55.574) Noelle (02:03.962) not, I'm really bad at celebrity knowledge, but I will say watching, was it the Lincoln commercial that was like the Super Bowl commercial where he was tapping the steering wheel and it was just really awkward. That's probably one of my favorites. Chad (02:15.842) Mm-hmm. Joel (02:22.094) Okay, you gotta work on that Matthew McConaughey story. That's not, all right, let's get to this. Let's do this thing, Chad. Tell Noel what she's won today. Chad (02:22.146) He's very, he's, he's a very awkward kind of guy. Yeah. I'm more of a Wolf of Wall Street guy. Noelle (02:27.874) Yeah. Chad (02:33.582) Well, Noel, welcome to the firing squad. This is how it's going to play out at the sound of the bell. You are going to have two minutes to pitch Illoominus at the end of two minutes. We're going to hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q and a be sure to be concise. Are you going to hear the crickets, which means tighten up your game at the end of Q and a you're going to receive either one of these three from Joel and myself. Big applause. Better than a Debbie Boone sick single. You didn't just light up my life. You lit up this podcast. Big things are gonna come in your way. Golf clap. Man for man said the best. She was blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the light. Now I have no clue what that means, although we're not actually sure what's gonna happen with the luminous either. Last but not least, the firing squad. Noelle (03:21.272) You Chad (03:25.452) Willie Nelson sang it best. Turn out the lights, the party's over, shut it down, try something new. This is not the thing. Noelle (03:29.242) You Chad (03:33.464) You Joel (03:33.51) Noelle, are you ready to pitch the firing squad? In three, two. Noelle (03:36.384) Let's do it. Let's do it. Chad (03:38.605) Yes! Noelle (03:43.098) Hi everyone, at Illoominus' we are an AI powered turnkey people intelligence platform that sits on top of, integrates and gives context to HR data within and across companies. As the role of HR continues to change within organizations, what we're doing is empowering leaders to unlock the full value of their HR tech stack and to help them finally make strategic and dynamic business decisions. I've seen this problem firsthand while I was leading HR tech partnerships at Accenture. I saw that the HR tech landscape was full of point solutions. On average, those companies had over 16 different tools and they weren't designed to talk to each other. So many HR leaders weren't equipped to understand what was actually working and what was not. At Illoominus, we think that now is the time for strategic HR. And so we've built an easy to implement way to unlock the full value of your HR tech stack to show business impact. Our platform equips people leaders to clearly understand their entire employee journey across sourcing, hiring, engagement, promotions, and retention. We integrate across your critical HR tech stack to provide cross-tool learnings and help you to answer questions like which sources of candidates are more likely to stay. Not only are we interpreting key insights across your data, we're actually helping you to understand your peer data and that strategic context for decision-making. We're bringing people analytics to the middle market. We're targeting people leaders and people analytics teams at retail, tech, sports and entertainment and hospitality. And typically we work best with companies that have about 500 to 15,000 employees. We're working through annual subscriptions based on a company's total number of employees. After less than 10 days and for less than the cost of a full-time employee, we're seeing that our customers HR data is finally starting to work for them. And thankfully you don't have to take our word for it. We're proud to work with some awesome companies like Monumental Sports, Shnucks Market, Techstars, Cox Communications, Greenlight Financial and others. Our roadmap at Illoominus. Chad (05:51.412) Ooh, she was rolling too. Joel (05:51.474) Thank you, Noel, for that pitch. It was pretty tight. Yeah, I'm sure you'll find a way to get that in. All right. The name.com gets you points. It's a lot of letters. A lot of letters in Illoominus. How'd you come up with it? I get the illumination in your data. So what were the names that didn't make the cut? What's the genesis of the brand? Noelle (05:52.11) We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. Noelle (05:57.698) Yeah, for sure. Noelle (06:03.586) Lot of letters in Illoominus. Noelle (06:13.656) Yeah, well, you're right. With Illoominus, I think we're considering starting a spelling bee pretty soon so that we can make sure that people can actually get it right. And the domain was available, and it's all about illuminating data, illuminating us. We were finding that so many organizations didn't have access to visibility and actually understand what was happening across their data. So that's what we're born to do. Chad (06:23.96) Can I buy a vowel? Noelle (06:42.478) We recently were excited that Workday named their AI tool Illuminate. So we know we're on the right track. Joel (06:51.716) Okay, how many misspellings.com do you have of Aluminus? At least five, right? Tell me at least five. Noelle (06:56.48) man, we need to though. We have a lot of misspellings. We don't have them and we're gonna get on that. Joel (07:06.258) Okay, need those redirects because not everyone is smart as Texas grads, So, found in 2022, pre-seed of $500k. What have you done with the money? Are you looking for an official seed round? Talk to me about the money. Noelle (07:11.662) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Noelle (07:25.598) to you about the money. So we raised Precede Round a little bit over a year ago. We'd been listening to our customers. We went to market with a product and with paying customers early in 22. We'd been listening to those customers. They were beginning to tell us, hey, you touch all of our HR data. And the reality is we are still living in spreadsheets on the side. We'd been listening to our customers. So within that funding, what we were able to do is bring in a tech team from Unicorn Company Sales Loft that took their tool from the lowest performing part of the product to the highest performing part of the product and to relaunch our platform to be the turnkey people analytics platform that we have live today. So. Joel (07:48.604) Mm-hmm. Noelle (08:10.776) What we've been able to do is, I was telling you about my Delta headphones early on, we're extremely capital efficient company. We've been able to get pretty far on a small amount. What we're looking to do is as the market opens up next year, go back out for our seed round. Joel (08:30.002) Tell me about Techstars, the importance, what is it, why should we care? Noelle (08:35.736) You should care, because Techstars is also a great customer of Illoominus'. But in addition to that, Techstars is a three-month accelerator program. Companies that want to gain credibility, get some initial investment, sign up for Techstars. What that allows you to have access to is a global network of mentors that you can get expertise. They've been on the journey. They've built companies. You can go to them with things around pricing or product roadmap, that type of thing. They are an incredibly valuable partner to us and continue to be and helping us to build brand awareness and get access to great global mentors. Chad (09:23.254) Excellent, well tell me a little bit about your HR experience and then also leadership within Aluminus. Noelle (09:30.722) Yeah. So in terms of my background, most recently I was over at Accenture Ventures leading our Ventures team. So we were making investments into HR technology companies. While I was there, essentially was going into Fortune 2000 companies, bringing HR software to them. There were a couple of really big market signals that was one, when I would walk up with my pretty startup logo map to an HR leader. Oftentimes I was noticing this thing is full of point solutions. They're not talking to each other. HR is being asked to play a more strategic role. They were asking us to help them play a more strategic role. And the reality is that all of the interesting data points were living in different systems. So one, that was a really big thing that we saw as a market signal is none of these tools are talking to each other. It's hard to actually understand, you know, what works, what doesn't. But then the other thing is that most of those companies, unless they were the Coca-Cola's of the world and had 300,000 employees, they couldn't actually afford to have the top line tools on the market that were built for a Fortune 500 company. So, you know, it meant that, hey, I'm a middle market company, but I can't afford to build a team. I can't afford to have a Fortune 500 level tool. So it means that I'm just living in a spreadsheet and with some duct tape. So those are the big things that we saw as we were talking to lot of HR leaders is, you know, what was within the market was working for, you know, the one person of companies, but not really for the rest of everybody else. Chad (11:06.04) Give me a quick and easy answer around the leadership of your organization. So what other founders, who else is actually there to provide support and experience back to you? Noelle (11:18.168) Yeah, for sure. We are so fortunate at Illoominus to have a great team of individuals who have worked at unicorn companies. They have built companies and exited them. Individuals like actually my former leadership coach Courtney Swafford is leading our community over at Illoominus. I'd worked previously with our head of marketing at a previous startup that we'd worked at together, brought in some of again, sales lofts leadership on the reporting and analytics side around data and around technology. What I'm really proud of is in terms of those investors that you were talking about earlier, we've got some amazing people and leaders around us that have built companies. So. That means it's James White, former CEO of Jamba Juice. He's on about seven different boards right now. The founding team of MailChimp, like Eric Munz, their CTO, their first engineer, Joe Yule, are around us as well. So not only has our team built incredible companies and impactful companies, but also the leadership around us has been... their every step of the way because they've built companies and exited companies themselves. Chad (12:35.064) So it sounds like you're in favor of being the one analytics program or platform to rule them all. How deep are you currently into the talent cycle? Obviously, you've got talent acquisition, you've got talent management all the way through. There's a big loop or infinity loop, whatever you want to call it. How many touch points are you all the way through the talent cycle? Noelle (12:59.416) Yeah, there's always more that we can touch, right? And I think that where we are right now, as I mentioned earlier, I mean, there's over a dozen different tools at a lot of these companies. The reality is that if you think about an S curve of data and like, you know, how advanced is your data program at your organization? The reality is that there's really about four pieces of critical HR tech stack. Chad (13:02.904) Mm-hmm. Chad (13:14.36) Mm-hmm. Noelle (13:24.728) That's going to be your HRAS system, talent acquisition, engagement, and performance and pay. So what we do is we start with that critical tech stack. We bring that data together and by us being able to touch those data points, we can go anywhere from sourcing, hiring, promotions, engagement, retention, slash attrition. What we are showing right now is that full employee journey in one place. Chad (13:33.944) Mm. Noelle (13:48.846) And then I think what starts to get really interesting is that because you see that employee journey and you're able to filter down to understand how that's changing across the organization, then we start bringing in things like L and D data, benefits data to start coming in as almost initiatives that are helping to improve your overall employee journey. So there's a lot of places we can go and we see just massive opportunities and continuing to build in data points. Chad (13:58.062) Mm-hmm. Noelle (14:16.014) But for now, the reality that we're finding is that the majority of companies that we're working with at our place in the market don't have those four pieces of information and critical information talking to each other. So that's really where we've started. Chad (14:31.983) So we recently talked to Rebecca Carr as the CEO over at Smart Recruiters. And she said one of the biggest issues that they have is that, I guess you could just call it dirty data. I mean, the data is not the same from system to system. It doesn't make sense. It's not contextualized. So when you're talking about this huge TAM that you're trying to figure out, because you're talking about salary, you're talking about promotions, talking about internal mobility, mean, all those things. Noelle (14:36.9) Okay. Noelle (14:42.734) Yes. Chad (15:00.534) And I'm sure with AI, there's a lot of prediction that's going to be happening. How in the hell do you pull all of this together with such a broad TAM with literally just a garbage pile full of data at this? Noelle (15:13.37) I love this question because this is the really big thing that we're tackling alongside our roadmap. Like we were all at HR Tech together a couple of months ago. Every single talk that you went into was buzzword over buzzword about AI and somebody's like slapping AI on top of a platform. But the reality is like underneath that's Chad (15:20.044) Mm-hmm. Chad (15:32.13) Mm-hmm. Noelle (15:34.638) that's a real challenge for HR leaders, because they're going to use the slapped on AI and the underlying data foundation that you just mentioned is total garbage. So it means that when they're coming out and saying, like, look, I'm leveraging AI, those results are not trustworthy and accurate. What we're doing, and I think the real opportunity is like we talked about this S curve and the reality is a lot of HR leaders may be saying that they're in a different place than they actually are on maturity and readiness for AI. What we're doing in our roadmap is to improve the underlying data foundation for our customers. So making sure that the data that's, you you said in the garbage pile, like duplications of data, typos within the data, maybe people are using different codes on things like, you know, attrition reasons that we're creating that strong data foundation of, these are the definitions for how we look at data, and hey, here are things that you can improve within your data. That means that as we're adding in more AI-driven insights, more of those proactive features, the data that's coming from Illoominus is trustworthy and accurate because we're actually improving the data quality on the backend. Joel (16:54.864) The first time, but not hopefully the last time, that dirty data gets mentioned on our show. Noel, talk to me about the competition. Noelle (17:06.872) Yeah, the reality is where we see competition most often right now is typically with a company that thinks that they've got to build it on their own. So it means that, you know, the reality is most organizations are tracking the same things. Sure, there are some things that need to be updated and configured for your business or, you know, customized for your business. But the reality is what we run into more than anything else is the idea of DIY, DIYing the data, of feeling like I want to have data-driven insights. So I think I need to build something within Tableau. I need to build something within Power BI, and I need to start from scratch. And the reality is, while that might sound like a nice initiative to get off the ground, the reality is you're ongoing having to maintain those data connections. Joel (17:41.169) Mm-hmm. Noelle (18:01.156) data definitions of like, can we agree on what quality of hire means for an organization? There's so much ongoing work that maintains those. Yeah. Joel (18:09.618) Let me ask it differently. How are you different than Vizier, for example? Noelle (18:15.746) Yeah, mean, Vizier is the type of solution that let's say you're a what's a what's a good organization. Let's say you're a Google and you're eight hundred thousand people. Something like a Vizier is going to be a really good solution for that because it almost is like having a PhD in data science or it's supporting your PhDs in data science. The reality is that the most organizations actually don't have that type of expertise or busier developers in-house to make that type of solution work for them. It's a great solution if you've got a built-out team and if you need that level of insights. But for the majority of companies that don't have that, what we've built is a solution that's really meant to put data in HR's hands, not necessarily in a data scientist or IT's hands so that... Joel (19:05.714) Mm-hmm. Noelle (19:10.83) there's more data-driven insights living within HR and that there's an opportunity to leapfrog some of those organizations that don't have the resources for a tool like Vizier. Joel (19:22.738) So real quick, name names, who is a competitor that you, you're going to get an RFP, who are you competing against? Noelle (19:28.494) Sometimes what we see is something like a workday prism that's gonna be within, that somebody thinks is at that level. Again, that's going to be a much heavier solution that's going to be more expensive than something like an Illoominus. And the reality is most organizations, we have workday customers, most of those organizations may need an HR tech stack that... is more disparate because they have use cases that workday is not necessarily the right fit for. And so what we're doing is saying, if you use workday, great. Use the tech stack that helps you to get the job done and the work done best. What we're doing is simply making sure that all of that is connected to each other and helping to tell the broader context across those various tools. Joel (20:16.978) Talk to me about sales and marketing. How are you pounding the pavement, calling customers? I marketing wise, do like that you are really, I don't want say you're ignoring social media, but we talked to so many startups that have like every single social media and they have like three posts that were four months ago. So what are you doing marketing wise? I mean, like in Google ads, I don't see you if I search people insights platform. How are you getting the word out? How are you driving sales? Noelle (20:43.704) Yeah, I mean, we're, I would say on Go To Market, what we've done is we've been going to HR leaders and building their relationships with HR leaders directly. What we launched about two years ago was a community of chief people officers that we bring together regularly to talk to each other and to support each other. So we're doing invite only round tables, bringing HR leaders together to have real conversations and talk about how to solve real problems. And that what we're finding is about 30 % plus of our pipeline is coming exactly from that. People are saying, so-and-so just called me on the phone the other day and said they were dealing with a similar challenge. I want them to be at the next round table. I think that they'll really benefit from it. So we've been building trust, building relationships with HR leaders, and that's been our primary driver to date. Virtually $0 on sales and marketing at this point. Chad (21:36.748) So how are you taking all that? Chad (21:42.318) That's what we're looking for. Okay. So how are you translating HR data into business case data? Noelle (21:48.954) Yeah, what we've been able to do is because we're able to connect different sources of data together, what that allows us to do is answer business questions. So for example, I mentioned to you earlier, retail is a big industry for us. Retail, some of our customers were experiencing what they call quit quitting when we first started working with them at exponential levels. So losing about 70 % of employees every single 90 days. Chad (21:56.078) Mm-hmm. Noelle (22:17.21) When we first started working with those kinds of customers, this is like a small mid-sized retailer, they were losing 70 % of their employees every 90 days. That was costing them about $100 million every single year. We walked into that situation and what we were able to do is help them to understand certain metrics like quality of hire. So if you think about, if I lose 100 people a week and my strategy is to hire 150 people, because we're able to pull that ATS data together with the performance data and the attrition data, we can start to say which sources of candidates are bringing you quality hires. What that means is that your most expensive part of your employee journey is training, hiring, and onboarding somebody. And so by us saying what's working and what's not, it means that you can start to shift your focus into things that are actually working. The other thing is what we've been able to do alongside them is help them to understand Chad (22:46.286) Mm-hmm. Noelle (23:15.32) why people are leaving. So they're so focused on the hiring side, which is also super expensive for them. How do we actually shift the focus into understanding why are people leaving? Because we're bringing together that engagement data next to attrition data. What that helps us to start understanding and what we've been able to build through proactive attrition models is starting to show things like scheduling hours. How many? Chad (23:22.083) Mm-hmm. Noelle (23:39.482) hours is the ideal number of hours so that a frontline part-time worker is actually more likely to have longer 10 years. So because we're able to tell more of the whole picture by bringing the data together, instead of these data points living in different systems and not really being able to make sense of any of that, that's how we start to say, hey, HR is the most expensive part of the organization. Chad (23:39.875) Mm-hmm. Chad (23:58.862) Mm-hmm. Noelle (24:03.566) How are your dollars working for you and how are we making sure that where your investments are going are most impactful? Chad (24:11.564) So define quality of a hire, number one. Number two, since it means so many different things to so many different people and just take a look at how Sherm defines it. They have no fucking clue. So at the end of the day, are you creating standards or trying to create a standard in specific industries or how are you actually looking at this problem? Because it is a problem. Noelle (24:17.39) Yeah. Yep. Noelle (24:33.23) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think standardization is a really big opportunity for us. It's also one that people are spending way too much time on the semantics of how do we define something as opposed to, OK, how is that helping us to do the work? On something like quality of hire, yeah, we're not necessarily going off of the shirm definitions. And we do. create definitions when somebody is walking into the platform and they get that data definition, that library, if you will, of calculations. But on quality of hire, there's a lot of different industries and you would define it differently in different industries. What I can say is just going back to the example that we were just talking about is who is more likely to have a longer tenure? Chad (25:07.662) Mm-hmm. Noelle (25:26.35) And it's not necessarily there's pieces of it and we're not saying it's just the source of where that individual is coming from. But what we do want to begin to do is begin to learn about if somebody starts as a bagger, can we start to understand when people are moving from that role into another role within the organization? We have all these really interesting examples in retail of people that started as baggers and they end up in C-suite. Chad (25:35.032) Mm. Noelle (25:54.522) executives and that is a but anecdotal piece of information that we have right now. What we're doing is starting to say, can we look at that transition of a bagger into some other role within the organization and start to understand what is happening there and why is that happening? Chad (26:13.12) Okay, so go back to the the go to market real quick with regard to sales and partnership. How are you guys actually going after sales? Are you going direct? Are you actually going through white label types of partnerships? What? Where are you guys actually gaining ground to try to try to build your portfolio? Noelle (26:30.362) Yeah, it's going direct right now. So we go direct to chief people officers typically and at times now some COOs within those industries of retail sports and entertainment and hospitality. What we're finding is that referrals are our biggest source of new customers today and we're going direct. I think there's a huge opportunity. We are a SaaS platform. We're not doing consulting. Chad (26:56.994) Mm-hmm. Noelle (26:58.638) you we're not doing the change management and yeah, that's a huge opportunity within this work as well is how do we actually do the change management around a platform like Aluminus. But to date, we haven't been doing any of those types of channels. I think that's what I was doing at Accenture and that's a big opportunity for us ongoing outside of referrals outside of the chief people officer round tables that we're doing now in that community. The other sources, we do have some partnerships with other HR tech companies like a Lattice and a Greenhouse of being a part of their marketplace, which allows us to add additional value to their customers that are also trying to make their systems work with some of these other systems. Chad (27:45.698) Gotcha. Marketplaces are to some extent somewhat easy to get into. The big question is very close partnerships so that you can actually start working with some of those bigger platform companies where they're town acquisition, they're HCM. When do you think that you're going to actually start moving in that direction with regard to go to market? Because obviously going direct to a company, that's one thing you get a lot of feedback, you get a lot of information, you also get a lot of recommendations. But when it comes down to actually getting portfolio penetration, the way that you do it is through partnerships. When are you guys going to start moving? Noelle (28:21.838) Yeah, we're, mean, right now we're still going direct. I think we will do the partnerships when we find the right partners for us. It's something that we've explored in the past, but looking for those right partners. So that is something that in the next year or two, we'll be doubling down on even more. Joel (28:41.426) What's the greatest threat to the business? Something that comes to mind as we're talking, know, LLMs, companies just being able to dump their data into this thing, ask the chat bot like the questions and have them answered. But you live this every day. What are the main threats to the business that you see? Noelle (28:59.544) Yeah, it's a good question. I think the biggest threats that we see to the business are probably, I mean, right now it's awareness of, as I mentioned, you know, we're very cost effective, capital efficient. So right now I think that the biggest thing that we're seeing is, you know, we need more people to know about what we're doing at Aluminus. So That's probably what I would say is the biggest thing. I'm not as, in terms of LLMs, chat, GPT, these other innovations that are coming out. As I mentioned, we were at HR Tech together and I think hearing about a lot of those innovations. But I think the way that we're approaching of bringing people along the journey for AI and supporting them in readiness for these types of solutions is something that we're hearing from our customers and hearing from our community is very differentiated. Joel (30:07.666) your geographical footprint? it US only or do you have customers in other countries and what does that look like growth wise? Noelle (30:13.378) Yeah, we're now global, but the vast majority of our customers are going to be North America based, but they are going to have a global footprint. So they're going to want to be able to look at international data and, you know, geographically how the employee journey differs. Joel (30:33.362) Chad, this sounds really, really expensive to me. I'm a little scared of the price tag. Now, well, let us know and our listeners know, what am I going to pay for this service? Noelle (30:43.438) Yeah, so the good thing is, again, we're a SaaS solution. And so what we've been able to do is build this in a way where we're sharing those learnings and we're distributing the learnings across companies. We do a per employee per month price point for Luminous. We're typically working with companies one to two years at least at a time. But we cost less than the cost of a full-time employee for an organization. So we're really able to leapfrog organizations to having both access to their own data, but then the learnings and the improvements across customers. Joel (31:29.84) It's an answer. There weren't any numbers in that answer, but it was an answer. All right, Noel, the Q &A is over. Are you ready to face the firing squad? Chad (31:32.957) Hahaha! Noelle (31:40.174) I am. Joel (31:41.65) All right, get her Chad. Chad (31:43.64) She's excited. All right. Right out of the gate, as I'd said earlier, this is a huge, huge, huge tam. There's so many issues. The data's dirty. You're looking at people data, which focusing on attrition, salary. There are whole platforms that are dedicated to one thing, pay equity. Right. And you're doing salary, internal mobility, performance, quality of hire, quality of source. But I mean, this is a small list compared to what you guys I'm sure are focusing on. So trying to get one of those right is going to be tough. But but I got to say. First and foremost, Noel, one of the things as I advise or I'm actually brought on as an advisor. Number one thing is the founder. I like you. I like your background. I like how you're talking about data, capital efficiency. As soon as you said that, I almost fell in love. AI is a commodity. Data is queen and you're digging into that dirty data and making sense of it. LLMs can't get into these walled gardens, data lakes, data oceans. They can't. Not enough focus is happening in this space. You can be a vizier pilot fish and make a killing. Core platforms don't want to build this. Partnership, partnership, partnership. Noel, you light up my life. You give me hope. This is a big applause. Joel (33:14.66) Almost fell in love. Almost. Not quite. Not quite there. Yeah. Chad (33:15.148) Good job. Noelle (33:17.29) wait, that was the golf clap. That was a really good golf clap. Chad (33:21.654) No, that was a big applause. That was a big applause. Joel (33:21.874) No, that was applause. That was a rousing applause. That was a rousing applause. And when he says background, he doesn't mean your actual background, which is very cool. Kind of a real Southern esque background. so one of the things in Chad mentioned, we talked a lot of startups and, and TA folks and a consistent challenge is making sense of what all these fucking SAS tools that I buy are doing for me. Noelle (33:23.457) that was a big pause. Great. Chad (33:30.446) Yeah Chad (33:51.074) Yes. Joel (33:51.43) They're telling me what they're doing, but I don't really know. I'll take them at their word. I'll believe them. You have a really good triangular strategy of saying, we're unbiased. Give us the data. We'll give it to you in an unbiased way, in an objective way. And then you can make your decisions on what kind of vendors you use and who you renew with. I think you're going to save companies a lot of money by not just blindly re-upping with a service that they don't really know what the hell they're getting. for their money. So I think you're solving a very real problem with a lot of companies. If you can start talking about how much you saving companies based on not having to re up, services that they're using, I think that's, that's a, that's a huge win for you. You're growing out of a way that I like, you've taken very little money. your bootstrapped you underscore that you're using a free Delta headphones on this call. Chad (34:47.296) Ha ha! Joel (34:49.106) I think you're just showing off a little bit. headphones don't cost a lot. Yeah. There you go. Shout out to Delta. Shout out. She wants the diamond status. Everybody she wants the, if you're listening Delta, she's willing to trade an Illoominus. Illoominus license. Yeah. Illoominus license for a diamond diamond, status. so you're growing in a way that I like your team is small. It looks like about seven on the website. Noelle (34:50.308) Shout out to my hometown airline. Chad (34:53.72) Too, too far, too far, too far. Chad (34:59.16) Ben 10 bucks, Noel. Noelle (35:02.18) Chad, you were wondering earlier how you're gonna get diamond. I'm just saying. Sponsored over here. Joel (35:17.69) Now there is, there's a little fear of me. You you spent some time in Texas. There's a Texas phrase, all cat, all hat, no cattle. you gave me some answers that were non-answers. You kind of danced around some stuff, which makes me a little fearful that what are you hiding? What, what, why wouldn't you tell me pricing? You have a marketing person, but you're not doing marketing. like a little witty, leery about that, but I do think that the problem you're solving. is so big. I can't name any competitors really, which is why I kind of pushed you on that. And then either you're bullshitting me or you really don't have many competitors. are an acquisition darling. Some big fish is going to eat you up. You have not taken hardly any money. So your investors are going to be very happy. You're going to be very happy when that day comes. So for me, yeah, aside from the straight shooter, issue and what am I really, you know, what am I getting from you, Noel? I don't have any cute illuminating comments like Chad does. He's good at that, but I as well. I'm gonna give you a rousing applause and on the doorstep of Thanksgiving, we'll probably air this in Christmas because of the Noel thing. I think that'd be cute, but give thanks to your double rainbow big applause for Illoominus. Now for our listeners who want to know more about you, maybe find out what your pricing actually is. Where would they go? Chad (36:31.01) Hello. Noelle (36:38.116) love that. Chad (36:45.944) Good job. Noelle (36:53.112) Go to our website and I'll spell it for you so that you don't have to be a really good speller. It's I-L-L-O-O-M-I-N-U-S.com. If you guys wouldn't mind putting in the show notes. Go to our website. We've got demos up there. Schedule some time with our team and we'd love to learn more about what you're focused on for this year and if we can help. Chad (37:05.923) Of course. Joel (37:16.114) Yep. And she's going to go out and buy like a dozen misspellings of Illoominus.com. So don't worry about how you spell it. That's right. Go daddy's going to be happy. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out. Chad (37:17.079) Love it. Noelle (37:21.058) That's what I'm going to go do for the rest of the day. Thank you. Chad (37:21.134) Do do it quick Chad (37:30.518) way out Noelle (37:31.361) Thank you.

AUDIO VERSION In this riotous episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, Joel and Chad cover everything from sleep-deprived dog tales to the latest "Skynet Lite" drone news out of New Jersey. Spoiler: It’s like a Black Mirror episode, but with more traffic violations. They dissect corporate stress management—or lack thereof—with a jaw-dropping story about a company firing employees for  being stressed. Nothing says "we care about mental health" like a pink slip for looking frazzled at the water cooler. Next up: AI in recruitment and marketing. Translation: robots deciding your job future while probably judging your LinkedIn photo. They even squeeze in a fantasy football update, proving that even AI can’t predict how badly your QB will tank this week. The boys also tackle AI in education via Khanmigo, a platform designed to help teachers personalize learning—or, as it’s known in schools, "please make grading less soul-crushing." Rounding things out, they ponder the job-crushing potential of AI, the soft skills hiring managers actually want (hint: it’s not being good at Excel), and whether nuclear energy can power our TikTok-fueled future—or if TikTok will be banned before the next viral dance craze. It’s a wild ride through tech, trends, and corporate chaos—with enough snark to power a small city. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:25.984) Awwwwwwwwe YEAAAAAAAAAAH! Joel (00:32.454) As cuddly as a cactus and the other is charming as an eel. Hi kids, it's the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Mystery Drones Cheesman. Chad (00:37.538) Yes. Chad (00:43.906) And this is Chad, you're stressing me out. Sowash. Joel (00:46.996) And on this episode, branching out is TikTok out and what you talking about. Let's do this. Chad (00:55.064) Willis? Joel (00:57.824) That wasn't a very good Gary Coleman, circa 82 different strokes, was it? Man, I am tired today. Here's why. Little story. So the wife is out of town, which means sometimes Peepers gets to come into bed and Peepers has the Jimmy leg. He snores, he farts, like he's a nightmare to sleep with. But at 13 years old, which I think is like 94 in human years, Chad (01:00.91) Let's do this, Willis. Chad (01:12.302) parties. Chad (01:25.196) You allowed it. Yeah. Joel (01:27.44) I can't, I don't have the heart to kick him out of bed. So I just have a shitty night's instead of, kicking the dog out. don't know if that's, that's, you know, that's, that's humanitarian that I am, but I slept, I slept really poorly. In addition to that, are you, are you seeing this news about the drones over in New Jersey? Are you getting that in Portugal? Chad (01:40.046) appreciate that. Chad (01:43.885) Yes. Chad (01:51.394) I am not. I am not. Joel (01:53.172) The news is freaking me out, Chad. First we had aliens in the ocean. Okay. We had people go in front of Congress, talk about alien ships in the ocean. And now we have drones over New Jersey, apparently other parts of the world. We're not shooting these. The government doesn't know what they are. We can't shoot them out. Apparently they disappear if we get too close or something. It's just really, really weird. We don't know. That's the problem. Some congressmen said they think there's a mothership. Chad (02:16.75) Are they alien drones? What the, mean what? come on. Joel (02:22.496) an Iranian mothership that's launching these things. The Pentagon said that's bullshit. People are saying China, people are saying the aliens are finally here and they're, they're hooking, they're, they're setting up in New York, the tri-state area with drones. It's just, it's, and these things are apparently as big as a car or a truck. These aren't like the recreational drones that your kids got for Christmas. Like these are huge drones. It's really creeping me out. Yeah. It's the, it's the end of the, the end is near. Chad (02:25.164) Ha ha ha ha! Chad (02:35.992) with drones. Okay. Chad (02:48.866) Really? Wow. Yeah, no, that does end of the world as we know. Yeah, no, I've been watching a bunch of YouTube videos about how Ukraine has beaten the shit out of Russia with drones. I love it. You got like Mattel toys that are taking these T-90 tanks out. That to me is the coolest thing ever. This little thing, a little block of C4 on it right into the crease of the turret and a multi-million dollar tank. A dud. That's pretty amazing. So yeah. Joel (02:52.639) telling you. Joel (03:07.072) Mm-hmm. Joel (03:13.45) Mm-hmm. Joel (03:17.246) Yeah, they got drones look like birds. got like it's the, the, the, the world of warfare is going into some weird places and I'm not sure it's, it's great for humanity, but anyway. Chad (03:25.837) I know this. not that, none of this is going to be great for humanity, kids. None of it. None of it. Joel (03:33.384) Yeah, let's just get to shout outs, which you know is sponsored by our friends. Chad (03:38.526) at Kiura. Joel (03:39.864) up north. That's right. Keora, the key to, solid and inexpensive text recruiting. That's I just made it there. Tagline the key to text recruiting, text recruiting. What do you got? I got, I got, I'm to go first for shout outs because I gotta, I gotta come back from the, the, ledge a little bit. there's a, there's a new documentary on HBO or max, whatever you prefer to call it. It's on yacht rock. Chad (03:42.07) Mm-hmm. Yora. That was nice. The key to Yora. Yeah. Okay. Chad (03:57.774) You Chad (04:02.2) Do tell. Joel (04:04.84) It's called yacht rock documentary and documentary is spelled D O C K like dock of a boat, I guess. But if, if you lived around the late seventies to early eighties, mean, Steely Dan Toto, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, like I smiled half the episode. It like just the memories, the cool laid back California, just the sounds. mean, Michael McDonald with the hair and the beard, Chad (04:06.944) Nice. Chad (04:20.11) Christopher Cross. yeah. Joel (04:33.962) Just a really great feel good documentary if you remember those times. Yeah, you gotta watch it. I highly recommend it. Yacht Rock documentary on Max. Check it out. Chad (04:37.311) watching that that's for sure. Chad (04:44.928) Yeah, the Christopher cross a guy who looks like you but has the voice of an angel. MTV MTV is what killed that man's career because he looked like baby Ui. But he had a he had a great voice right and MTV I mean, Joel (04:50.836) Ha ha ha ha! Joel (05:01.288) And the industry, you're kind of spoiling it, but they talk about the demise of yacht rock. was, it was MTV. Like if you didn't have the look, if you couldn't perform on camera, if you weren't Duran Duran or Madonna, like you were out. So, but also a little bit of, a little bit of spoiler. a lot of the Toto guys were responsible for a lot of the thriller, and Michael Jackson's career. So there is, there is a link there. I won't spoil it, but, you gotta check it out. It's pretty, if you like music history, it's also very. Chad (05:04.366) yeah. Yeah. Chad (05:12.11) Luckily Kenny Loggins was a good looking guy. Yeah. Chad (05:23.723) really? Okay. Okay. That's good. Joel (05:31.508) Very interesting. yeah, shout out to Yacht Rock and the Yacht Rock documentary. Chad (05:32.86) yeah, nothing. Nothing but a good yacht rock playlist on Spotify kids go check it out. Yeah. Well, my shout out goes to workplace stress. Why? Because it's a problem Joel. It's a problem. Recently. Yes, madam and in house spa service was in house spa service was seemingly concerned, concerned about the Joel (05:40.94) yeah, totally. Totally. Joel (05:49.376) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:56.288) Ha ha ha ha! Chad (06:01.28) workplace stress of their employees and it's understandable because 62 % of Indian employees experience burnout, which is about triple the global average due to work related stress and poor work life balance. 12 billion working days are estimated to be lost every year around the world to anxiety and depression. That's 96 billion working hours lost. Productivity gone down the drain because people are stressed the fuck out. So Yes, madam, did the only prudent thing that you should do. You should survey your employees, find out who needs help. Well, yes, madam did that. And just after receiving the results, sent the following email from yes, madam's go figure, very empathetic HR manager, which was then leaked to linked in, quote, recently we conducted a survey to understand your feelings about stress at work. Joel (06:32.256) Mm-hmm. Chad (06:57.398) Many of you shared your concerns, which we deeply value and respect as a company committed to fostering a healthy and supportive environment. I love this already. We have carefully considered the feedback to ensure that no one remains stressed at work. have the difficult decision to part ways with employees who indicated significant stress. This decision is effective immediately. Impacted employees will receive further details separately. End quote. Wow. Apparently, yes, madam solution to high stress for 100 employees was a you're fired, because losing your job isn't stressful at all. No, wait, no, it's stressful as fuck. So yes, madam denies they fired or laid off anyone. wait, Joel. So yes, it's just a misunderstanding. Right? Like, again, the just a couple of excerpts, kids. Joel (07:29.93) That is not a happy ending, Chad. That is not a happy ending for those employees. Joel (07:57.472) Mm-hmm. Chad (07:57.646) quote, we have made the difficult decision to part ways and quote, and quote, this decision is effective immediately and quote, neither of those two sound like go to the spa for a day, right? So yes, madam, was this a, was this a stunt? Did they care? Who knows? It's just, this is, this is, this is the asshole of the week kids, the asshole company of the week. Joel (08:10.816) Mm-hmm. Joel (08:22.078) Yeah, yeah. And we actually have the message before Grammarly, Nye stood up a little bit. Chad (08:27.926) You Good day, ma'am. Joel (08:34.174) Jeez, that is fucked up. All right. my shout out, a second shout out goes to artisan, artisan AI. We've talked about them on the show. They are the company that is creating AI, workers. So your sales staff, your customer service staff, this is all going to be automated by a company called artisan of one of the many, but anyway, they have ads running now at bus stops and billboards in San Francisco that have digital people. Chad (08:37.118) Exactly. Chad (08:55.534) Crazy. Crazy. Joel (09:04.028) With the message on the ad that says stop hiring humans, artisan, et cetera, et cetera. Now. So critics are coming out. Reddit apparently is blowing up. people are calling this a dystopian nightmare, but Chad, I call it good marketing. Good marketing is, is marketing that enrages people, gets people on, on X and Reddit and gets everyone fired up. so for my, for my take, shout out to artisan, the startup. They raised about a million and half dollars. say they're on their way. Keep your eye out on these guys. Stop hiring humans. Add. know it. I know it gets your heart heart all, all excited for sure, but yes, it does get attention whether you agree with it or not. Artisan. Chad (09:44.28) Yeah. Yeah, apparently, yes, madam and artisan have the same PR agency. So so we're not traveling, but we are traveling. And if we weren't traveling, shaker recruitment marketing would be powering the travel. But in lieu of travel, we always do free stuff. So doesn't matter. Free stuff by Chad. She's got to go to Chad cheese.com slash free. What could you register to win? What Joel what t shirts? Joel (09:51.956) You Joel (10:13.882) so much goodness. Chad (10:15.79) T-shirts the beautiful soft cuddly t-shirts that are Chad and cheese t-shirts that are sponsored by our friends at Aaron app bourbon barrel aged syrup they're so so amazing on the waffles by Kiara Beer craft beer by Aspen Tech Labs. Love those kids whiskey two bottles two bottles you can buy Tex Colonel Birthdays if it's your birthday and you want some rum Joel (10:29.888) So good. Joel (10:34.505) Mm-hmm. Chad (10:44.492) You can get it from plum. That's right. Plum.io. Got to go to ChadCheese.com. Flash free. Joel (10:53.45) That's right, Chad. Some listeners are celebrating another trip around the sun, including Matt Miller, Kim Stewart, Lars Kuz, Chaz Johnson, Patrick Hodgdon, Lana Schuman, Craig Anderson, Bob Scruggs, Paul Gunderson, Brandy Dawson, Tanya Truelove, Charlene Williams, Natalie Coxworth, Matt Stubbsy Stubbs, Alen Bailey, Anub Gupta. Chad (10:58.434) Mm-hmm. Chad (11:14.466) There he is. Joel (11:16.87) And some chick named Julie, so wash happy birthday to everybody celebrating another year. What'd you guys do for her birthday? Chad (11:19.948) There she is. There she is. Went out to eat, sat and enjoyed Portugal. I mean, it's what we do every day. Every day is Julie's birthday. I mean, that's just the way it is. Joel (11:34.752) By way, remember Monica Evgie, Evie, whatever. So she messaged me this week and said, if by chance I'm on the giveaway upcoming, I'd really love some of that syrup. So Kiara making a difference in Monica's life. A little bird tells me she might get some maple syrup here pretty soon. Yeah, she might get some goodness. Which brings us Chad, one of my favorites. Chad (11:38.768) yeah, yeah. I take them, okay. Chad (11:49.05) Hahaha Chad (11:53.526) Yes. She she might get some maple syrup. That's nice. Yeah. Joel (12:03.594) parts of the show, although it's, it's in the fourth quarter fantasy football by our friends at factory fix. we're going into the final season of, of the regular season. After that it's it's playoffs baby. Top four next four. Like it's, going to be interesting. So here's your leaderboard going into the last week of the regular season. Dean, the daddy back macro man, the guy from down under just keeps, he stays, he stays on top. man from down under. Chad (12:09.102) There it is. Get ready. Chad (12:15.742) Mm-hmm. Playoffs? Chad (12:25.516) Mm-hmm. He's killing it. Killing it. I know. I know. Joel (12:32.228) I I'm sticking out number two spot followed by you with a bullet coming up at the number three spot. David Stiefel, Keith Sonderling, Keith could be the upset guy. If he wins this week, he could move into that, that playoff position. the commissioner might have his best trick safe for last followed by Laura Martinelli, Christie Lisbon, action Jackson, Dalquist, Dina, para for pyros number 10, Jennifer Terry. Chad (12:36.258) What? Chad (12:42.542) It could be. It could be. Yeah. Yup. Chad (12:56.236) Mm-hmm. Joel (12:59.336) Sean Horton, here's a who stays at that 11 spot and scooping up the shit at the back of the parade is our friend Adam Borden, apparently. Joel (13:12.0) Apparently some things out of Scotland are crap. Stay away from fantasy American football to our Scottish friends. But that is another week of fantasy football brought to you by our friends at factory fix, which rolls us right into. Chad (13:25.582) think I play the Commish this week. Atopics! I think I'm playing the Commish this week. Joel (13:33.364) Who do you have this week? Joel (13:38.034) Okay. So if he wins, does that drop you to like the fifth and he comes now? No chance. Okay. Well, anyway. Chad (13:39.148) I think. No, nope. Nope. Yeah, no, no. I have the second most points in the league at number three. yeah. It's all about luck and timing, baby. Luck and timing. That's right. Joel (13:48.862) Yeah. And I have the least amount of the playoff teams currently, but you gotta win. You gotta win, man. You gotta win. All right. Let's, let's go into some education as if our show hasn't been educational enough. from a recent episode of 60 minutes con Migo, con an AI tutor is now in 266 us schools. Chad (14:01.198) Chad (14:05.952) Mmm. Yeah. Joel (14:13.0) It offers rapid lesson planning and interactive learning by encouraging critical thinking over rote answers. It's been tested for its ability to provide feedback, detect plagiarism and personalized learning with plans for integrating advanced vision technology. This tool aims to revolutionize teaching by providing time-saving benefits and tailored educational experiences while maintaining the importance of human interaction and education. Sounds too good to be true, Chad. What are your thoughts on Chad (14:40.568) Mmm. Joel (14:42.752) Han Migo and the AI in the classroom trend. Chad (14:47.638) So have you ever used Khan Academy? It is fucking amazing. I remember when kids were in middle school and high school and they'd have homework questions. And in many cases, I would pull up Khan Academy to search for the type of math equations or what have you. And we would solve them together. Because to be quite frank, you know, I was rusty, right? And whenever your kids come to you with questions, you want to at least try to help, right? Well, I knew I didn't. I was rusty. I needed a little Khan Academy, so I used Khan Academy and it was fun for both of us. It was really cool experience. So I am a huge fan of Sol Kahn. And let's just put it this way. I'm going put it out in the universe, kids. Sol Kahn should be leading the Department of Education in the US. He created Khan Academy in 2006 where he used recorded videos of himself teaching how to solve math problems for his nephews. Joel (15:30.761) it out there. Chad (15:44.94) And then he scaled it to help teach math and science to thousands via video with math, engineering and computer science degrees from MIT. He's not a dumb guy. genius was amplified with money from the Gates Foundation, allowing Khan Academy to reach millions. Right. So now Khanmigo is being piloted by 266 school districts in the U.S. providing teaching assistance for teachers and personal tutors for kids. We have an education problem in the US and in many countries all over the world. We don't have enough teaching talent. Those teachers are being stretched way too thin with bigger and bigger classes. And then, in their off slash downtime, they need to create lesson plans that could take hours, days, maybe even weeks. So having the right people in place to guide the tech and then allowing LLMs to learn then scale support as teacher assistants or tutors is exactly what AI was used for. We hear about all these bad, deep fakes, hallucinations, but what about the great stuff? This is the great stuff and we need to have more humans like Sal Khan doing the good work. This is, think, one of the best stories of 2024. Joel (17:04.96) That's nice. So necessity is the mother of invention. And here's a few numbers for you. There are currently 55,000 vacant teaching positions in America. 270,000 of those are filled by under qualified teachers. The annual salary for a teacher is 8 % less than the average wage for all workers in the country. a recent survey of teachers, 40 % of them say they're Chad (17:16.012) Mmm, yeah. Joel (17:34.782) looking to leave the profession in the next two years. So we need something teaching our kids. And if we're not going to pay people like the rock stars they are to teach, which doesn't seem like something that's going to happen. I've called for it on the show quite a, quite a bit. They should all get six figures coming out of college to teach schools. if local state governments don't want to pay teachers, they should be able to find a way to pay. Chad (17:41.432) Yeah. Chad (17:54.344) hell yeah. Joel (18:03.072) I think it's $15 per student to have this technology in the classroom makes a teacher's job that much easier, much more interactive and engaging. It's able to get in front of every student and be a friend. The ability to track students are having a hard time, which ones are having a hard time. It's basically bringing AI, what we talk about in the workforce, into the classroom. Who's struggling? Who's excelling? Where do they need help? Who should I focus on today? All that AI and that data comes in. Chad (18:07.948) So. Joel (18:31.028) to teaching, which makes it a lot more efficient. I love the visual stuff. Like to be able to watch you, you know, the, the, the, where's the brain go? Like, excellent. goes in the head. Like where's the liver? You know, it's on the other side. so this is the future. has to be because we're not going to pay teachers what, what we should, but we can find ways to pay for, for technology. my hope is that it dem dem dem democratizes. Chad (18:40.056) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (18:57.888) Education. so our rural kids, urban, know, urban inner city kids that don't have good teachers, two full classrooms, don't get any attention, is, hopefully going to happen. I do have some fear that the equipment that you need, which isn't crazy, right? You need desktops, know, you need laptops, need a tablets. A lot of school districts don't have the money to have those things. rural districts. Chad (18:57.954) Yeah. Joel (19:25.632) Broadband internet is not common in a lot of rural areas. 25 % was the last number I saw. 5 % of urban areas don't have broadband internet. So some of those things have to happen for this to really come to fruition. But again, like you said, if we're going to spend money, it's a lot easier to spend money on technology and the equipment to do those things than it is to hire people and keep those people happy in a job. The one criticism or the one nuance I think of this is that Chad (19:46.2) scales. Joel (19:54.44) The examples they had on 60 minutes were pretty much the sciences. So it was math, was biology, was kind of stuff like one plus one equals two. When you get into stuff like history, the social studies, the things that there's nuance around, I wonder how the technology can give you different aspects of different events in history, right? Because things can be looked at differently. So I'd like to see it in that. in that aspect of education, but there's no question that for our kids to be educated, something has to happen. And it looks like AI for all its scariness that is permeating society. If we can educate a lot more kids and get them on the road to success, I think that is a fantastic thing. this is a feel good story for sure. If you haven't seen it, go to YouTube, search 60 minutes. Chad (20:34.274) Hmm. Chad (20:49.934) it's awesome. Conmigo. K-H-A-N. Yeah. I mean, so we can, I think, pretty much all agree that one plus one is two, right? And so the math and science stuff is pretty solid. The hard part is... Joel (20:50.666) Conmigo and it's about 15 minutes of good stuff. Yeah, for good stuff. Chad (21:06.158) You know, the the the history around, you know, very volatile figures like Hitler or things of that nature. Right. When you have individuals who are out there who are like, well, he did some good stuff, you know, so I can see why they haven't gotten into that. And they might not. Right. They they they they just might not just because of, you know, how how flaming. Bullshit is happening all over the place. Yeah. Joel (21:18.922) Yeah. Joel (21:24.532) Mm-hmm. Joel (21:32.256) Sure. Well, this is the story in Florida, right? you know, I, I can tell you, Chad, I, I had the fortunate, setup of, in Indiana in fifth grade, get Indiana history in Texas in seventh grade, you get Texas history. the book in Texas is about that thick and Indiana it's about like that thick, but that's a different story. And I can tell you that the description of slavery in Indiana history is just a little bit different than the description of slavery. Chad (21:44.142) jeez. Mm-hmm. Chad (21:51.053) Yeah. Chad (22:00.493) I'm sure it is. Yeah, in the South. Joel (22:02.248) It is in Texas. So how is AI going to handle those nuances throughout history will be interesting. Chad (22:09.076) Mmm, it will be, much like. Joel (22:14.686) What you talking about Willis? Let's talk about what jobs Chad, what a London based job search engine founded in 2019 will launch in the U S in January of 2025, appointing Angie Brooks X ad Zuna to lead the organization. Brooks with 25 years in recruitment will hope to enhance ties with recruiters and drive us growth. The platform will introduce AI job matching, of course. Chad (22:16.354) Yeah Who? Who? Joel (22:42.546) offering curated job selections to improve what they say is better efficiency. Another senior hire is planned for January, 2025 to aid this expansion. Chad, what's up with what jobs? Chad (22:56.974) Angie Brooks is a player man in our space. She's a player. I mean back in the early aughts. She was with True Star Solutions. Remember those guys out of Indianapolis. Then she was with Next for 10 years and then she obviously did some time in Edzuna. Now I've never heard of what jobs until recently but it's as you'd said a London based company. So I reached out to some friends in the UK for some insights. I mean a company trying to break into the US has to Joel (23:05.29) Hmm. Chad (23:26.124) be a known entity in the UK, right? Well, the answer is no. My contacts knew little to nothing about what job, and it's pretty simple to understand because Europe is a duration-based market. They haven't gone all in on performance-based. So here are the three problems I'm saying for Angie and the crew. Problem number one, they are a performance-based platform in the UK, a duration-based market. That's an issue. They're selling a product to a market that just isn't buying. Problem number two, they only sell CPC, which is a signal that they're just looking for a money grab and or that's just another signal that their tech is prehistoric. Only been around from 2020 though. Problem number three. They want to come to the US, which is where they should have started. And the timing is not great. So there's light at the end of the tunnel. We've seen performance based companies like Sonic jobs start in the UK and successfully cracked the US market. The big difference is that Sonic is much more than basic PPC. They're providing advanced tech and brought on advisors who knew go to market and how to properly crack the US market. everybody in the US does Joel (24:33.535) you Chad (24:41.972) CPC. That's fucking table stakes. So what's so special about what jobs? We've also seen companies like Vonk who are duration and performance based. Vonk tried crack in the US market, hired some great US talent, and then in the very short time found themselves sounding the retreat horn back to the European shores. So I really hope that what jobs has a big funding round. Joel (24:54.163) you Chad (25:10.952) that they're preparing to announce along with this other senior position because if they want to come to the US, they're going to need a lot of cash, going to need a lot of cash. Joel (25:16.17) Mm-hmm. Joel (25:26.196) Or they could just hire art zeal from dice and then it's, and it's all gravy. It's all gravy from there. yeah. Tell me if you've heard this one before. I don't know. Auto new vo now talent.com jobs, careers, job.com ad Zuna. mentioned a few, apparently there are 10,000 job sites. this is per Chris Foreman, that cast who we interviewed recently. Like it's really, really hard to have a job board. and cut through the noise and the clutter and make an impact. Like, was it, mean, well, 30,000 sites, I think, but I think he's, said 10,000 job boards. and I don't, don't, Angie Brooks can walk on water. I like show me the go-to-market show me the money. Show me what you're going to do to spend because they are as, they are as traditional a job site as I've seen in a long time. Like they still have the links at the bottom of like every. Chad (25:59.342) thought he said 30,000. I think he said, yeah, I think he 30,000. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Chad (26:22.318) Hmm. Joel (26:25.298) every location, every job, like all the SEO stuff. so like you have your job cut out for you no matter what. indeed in LinkedIn kind of have 80 % of what's going on. That leaves the 20 % left for you. and you're coming into this market out of the UK, hire some people, but you better spend some money. You better spend some pounds. You better get some sterling. You better like drop some coin. and then it's just a game of like keep Chad (26:39.096) Mm-hmm. Chad (26:50.35) Mm-hmm. Joel (26:52.97) keep spending because once you stop spending the traffic dries up and the attention and the jobs dry up as well. I Okay, we'll see. Good luck. Good luck, Angie. Angie must love getting hit in the head on a regular basis because that's what she's going to deal with, is these guys try to come into the market for sure. Chad (27:08.27) Well, she is in strategic partnership. So yeah, that's kind of part of the job. Joel (27:16.274) I mean, who's she partnering with? Facebook? mean, shit better be huge. They don't, and they don't even have a TikTok presence, Chad. What kind of job board today that wants to break into America? It doesn't have a TikTok. TikTok platform. Jeez, jeez. Chad (27:21.646) yeah, I don't know. Chad (27:26.647) god. god. Joel (27:36.436) Good luck, Angie. Good luck. What's up? What up? What jobs? We'll be right back. Joel (27:46.976) All right, Chad, from one company to another. And this one, this one is not out of England. They are out of Canada. Chad (27:58.286) Grenada. Grenada. Joel (28:00.052) Hiring Branch, a Montreal company focused on evaluating job candidate soft skills, has secured 3.5 million USD in a Series A funding round. The funds will support expansion into markets in North and Latin America, Asia and the UK. Founded in 2014, Hiring Branch specifically uses AI to assess soft skills through interactive voice and chat, aiming to reduce the need for traditional interviews. Chad, your thoughts on this deal? And did you bring your Montreal Canadiens jersey to Portugal? Chad (28:32.398) I did not because it's heavy and I don't need something heavy on when it's nice and warm here. First off, reached out to Beth, you know, friends with the the peeps over at hiring branch love them to death in a study entitled accurately measuring soft skills, large language models versus hiring branch quote hiring branch ran a series of fine tuning experiments using the Dilbert machine learning technology. No, that's not. Joel (28:33.194) Okay. Joel (28:43.996) Yeah, yeah. Chad (29:01.208) Dilbert's that's distill a Burt distill Burt. Yeah, I'm using distill Burt to measure what the accuracy it's soft skill predictions would have on different various data sets while equipped with billions of variables large public data sets led to poor accuracy results. Meaning there wasn't enough data for an algorithm to learn to detect soft skills accurately, end quote. So Very simple. We've talked about this story before. In this very early era of mass AI adoption, it's starting to become clearer and clearer that the large language models are powerful engines, but the training data sets are the rocket fuel. And without the right fuel, your engine just doesn't perform. So yes, hyper-focused point solutions will easily outperform massive LLMs, at least in the very early era of AI. The key for all of these vendors is to do exactly what hiring branch is doing. Hone in on your expertise, find a market that will buy it and then sell the living hell out of it. And wait, wait for that &A hiring department to come knocking. Wait, hopefully many of them come knocking because as we've seen the shift in tech, Joel (30:13.376) Mm-hmm. Chad (30:27.254) There are going to be many less companies who want to become quote unquote a platform and they're going to be just a killer point solution that's going to be gobbled up by some of these bigger Goliath platforms that are more legacy, although have a shit ton of cash. Joel (30:39.028) Mm-hmm. Joel (30:45.376) Did I mention my wife is French Canadian in the, in the opening? Probably did not. yeah, I, I'm a little biased in the sexiest language in my opinion, probably French. God. so yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm biased. I like, I like the gang and hiring branch. we've done at least one event. I took my wife out to Montreal. They took us to a Canadian's game. Like very nice people. Stefan is great. Chad (30:47.598) I didn't sound Canadian. Chad (31:00.482) deal with Columbia. Chad (31:13.218) Yeah, Canadians. Joel (31:15.552) I, I first, I met a company in 2003, think, called Psymax who did assessments and they, and they, they spewed all this thing about algorithm and science and PhDs and it felt like witchcraft to me then. And it still feels kind of witchcrafty to me now. when I look at tradeify plum hired score, like tradeify to say, we just, show some images and we can like, Chad (31:30.062) Mm-hmm. Joel (31:45.566) That all seems so witchcrafty and beyond, guess, sort of my P brain. But the proof was in the pudding. Companies use this stuff and apparently retention goes up, hiring is faster. I did love the initial messaging from a hiring branch. was like, fuck interviews. Still have the t-shirt, got a t-shirt from them. Chad (32:05.189) Yes. Yeah. Now that's great PR. Joel (32:09.906) If it's good stuff, Evan white, shout out to our friend, Evan white, for that one, probably. And, Beth as well, marketing person there. if it works, it works and companies love this shit. Like if you can take out interviewing from the process and these guys have a way to do it with assessments, I mean, obviously paradox, everyone is kind of trying to do this. If they can do it and do it well, there's a market there for it. There's like, there, there are companies that will do it. And I think there's a huge amount of runway for growth. Chad (32:29.239) Mm-hmm. Joel (32:37.244) And to me, that is probably driving what is going on at this company. mean, Canada, large landmass, 30 some million people, like it's, California. So if you can get a little, little fuel to get this thing out into more of North America, the UK, I love the Latin America angle was really interesting as well. Like you can scale this thing up and make a real business. So I, although I don't claim to understand all the shit that goes on in these assessments and testing tools. I do appreciate the growth rate of what's going on and what these companies are doing. I say party on Wayne, party on Garth. This is good stuff, as far as I can tell. Chad (33:16.61) Sounds like a land and expand when they're doing the, or the talk about Latin America and those types of things where they actually have clients, obviously, that are either Canadian or US and they're expanding into different markets. So just again, for our friends at Hiring Branch, don't start getting salespeople into Latin America. Don't fucking do it. Just focus on Canadia and the Americas. Joel (33:23.253) Yeah. Chad (33:43.026) And then expand where those companies, those new clients take you. just for friendly advice. Joel (33:47.646) Yeah. Yeah, I do keep in touch with Stefan occasionally. I know he's in Asia a lot. mean, Asia is like a third of the population. So that's a huge opportunity. Chad (33:58.991) Bangkok? What's he doing over there? Joel (34:05.324) geez, speaking of Latin America. All right, let's go. Let's talk about, let's talk about Metta. One of your faves. Metta is exploring nuclear energy for its AI projects, targeting operational reactors by the early 2030s, aligning with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. AI's rising energy needs and carbon-free goals drive this initiative despite nuclear safety concerns and historically bad PR. Chad (34:07.011) my god. Chad (34:14.638) Mmm. Joel (34:34.106) the inflation reduction act offers nuclear incentives, but these might change under Donald Trump states like Utah and Texas are backing nuclear for its carbon benefits. Chad, what are your thoughts on the growing need and adoption of nuclear energy? Chad (34:50.094) So I mean, a question to chat GPT takes about 10 to 30 times more energy than a traditional Google search, depending on its complexity. Training a large language model like OpenAI's chat GPT, for example, uses nearly 1,300 megawatts. hours of electricity that the annual consumption of 130 US homes and by 2026 it's estimated that collective generative AI models will use more energy than all of Japan. Now, Microsoft recently announced that CO2 emissions has risen nearly 30 % since 2020 due to data center expansion and Google's 2023 greenhouse gas emissions up 50 % higher than it was in 2019. So we want to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but the use of and development of AI isn't slowing down. So we need to have something done. Something has to be done fast. Well, I mean, unless you really like, you know, crazy weather patterns, flooding, cyclone bombs, atmospheric rivers, and know, shit like that. Which which I'm not a huge fan of. I'm not a huge fan. So what happens when Microsoft, Amazon, Google Meta and other massive corporations start pulling more and more and more energy from the grid? Well, neighborhoods have to use rolling blackouts because I mean, some of these guys are talking about creating their own. Joel (35:59.88) Mysterious drones in New Jersey, yeah, that kind of stuff. Chad (36:20.994) but you know they're gonna be tapping into the local grid as well. So I mean, would the demand be too much and drive energy prices higher? That's something that they've actually seen is that the demand's been too high just for nuclear and they've had to go back to fossil fuels as a secondary, which boosts the prices. So we're really going to have to be smart about how we do all of this this power plant, whether it's you know, whether it's wind, solar, it doesn't matter what it is. Is nuclear the answer? Fuck man, I don't know. But we're talking about single data centers that would require power of a major city and some companies like Google are planning to build, like, again, their very own their very own power plants. But to me, AI is not slowing down, it's consumed faster. We've got to feed it, but we're running out of data. We're running out of energy. What's next? I mean, this to me does nothing but bring more fucking questions about where are we going? And it's kind of scary. I think the drones is that's a a that's that's a fun, happy story compared to this shit. Joel (37:33.618) Aliens in the ocean Chad aliens in the ocean Chad (37:37.614) This feels like feels like the matrix. It does. Joel (37:39.572) Yeah. Weird times, weird times. So I a couple angles on this. you know, speaking of yacht rock and the seventies and early eighties, I mean, you, you and I remember a thing called three mile Island. we were at an age where we didn't understand it, but people were scared to death and there was a lot of news about it. there was a movie called silkwood, I think, that came out, to that a few years later, we had Chernobyl, which scared the shit out of everybody. there's a great. Chad (37:47.983) Hahahaha Chad (37:52.44) Yep. yeah. Chad (38:07.63) Ukraine. Joel (38:09.12) series on that as well, a movie that you should watch. And then Japan had one a few years ago. So the PR on nuclear is awful. But the thing is we were using technology from the 40s, 56s, really old shit to power these things. There's another documentary that you should watch. think it's called In Bill Gates Brain. It's about Bill Gates and some of the things that he invests in. And one of those things is nuclear energy. I mean, we've made incredible strides in making it safer. There's no meltdown, apparently meltdown risks now. So it's way safer. And if you look at the carbon emissions, zero, like you can't be a pro environmental person and not be open to nuclear. From what I can tell, and this isn't my expertise, but wind, solar, it's just not going to get us there by itself. And what you mentioned with AI and the amount of power that's taking, like you need something, you know, You need something on steroids and nuclear seems to do that by not, you know, and not kill the earth. in the, in the process, we haven't even talked about what crypto is doing, in terms of energy, the energy to mind shit again, not, my, not my expertise, but we're using a lot of energy and technology and we need something to do it. I'm, awful. I'm all in on nuclear. think it's, think the, fear, the fear is, is, is unnecessary. so I'm all in on that. The second, the second angle of this is. What does it mean for jobs? So I did a little research. Apparently each new reactor supports up to 7,000 jobs during the construction phase. And a single operating nuclear power plant employs between 500 and 800 people. So we can employ a lot of folks. And by the way, because of the PR factor, I don't see a lot of automation in power plants that are nuclear. I don't see a lot of people signing up for no humans at the power plant. Now they're going to be augmented. They'll be supported. They'll be supported with AI, but I don't, if something bad happens and we go, well, there's nobody there. Like it's all automated. there's going to be some, some splaining to do, when the public, yeah, Homer will be there with some, with some donuts. so, so I, I think there's going be a lot of jobs. think America can kind of lead, this area. know. Chad (40:06.067) just wait. just wait. just wait. Chad (40:19.138) Homer Simpson will be there, it'll be fine. Joel (40:31.37) parts of, parts of Europe and other parts of the world. think France has 80 % of their energy is nuclear. So a lot of, lot of the world is embracing this and we should as well, because frankly, lot of the big tech companies are here, using, using all that power. Tik TOK is also, in America, but maybe not for much longer, Chad, maybe not for much longer. when we come back, we'll talk about the future of tick tock in America. Joel (41:04.16) Maybe Jim Durbin just missed it by a few, a few years, Chad. you may not be able to doom scroll on TikTok much longer unless the social media company finds a way to stop a new law from going into effect in America. The rule, was signed into law in April requires TikTok to break ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance before January 19th of 2025 or It will be banned if it doesn't comply. Chad, what are your thoughts on the future of TikTok in America? Chad (41:38.508) Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this before and the answer has always been money, right? It's it's going to it's going to fix itself because of the money in it. And from the numbers that Tiktok shared, we would lose a billion dollars on day one. Just America, just America and influencers. People are making money day one, a billion dollars. Think of not having Taylor Swift around. mean, that just that that hurts my heart thinking about something like that. But just like thousands and thousands of many tailors. anyway, yeah, I mean, there are there are security risks. There's no question, right? There are security risks. We have to be able to take care of those. have to we have to be able to ensure that, you know, again, we don't have data that's being siphoned off, much like the American company Facebook had. Right. So this is not just a tick tock China problem. This is a social media problem. The reason why we focused on TikTok is because they are Chinese and because of of by dance. And what will will Trump do when it comes to this? Well, he'll he'll look, I'm sure, to try to make a deal. But he's not going to care about those influencers. He's not going to care about that money coming into the country. He's on his last term, OK, he's not vying to get that next term. Joel (42:35.84) Mm-hmm. Joel (42:57.364) Mm-hmm. Joel (43:03.539) Lame duck. Chad (43:03.726) So he's just going to do whatever the fuck he wants to do. And it doesn't matter if it impacts you or not. So at the end of the day, I think there's going to be a lot of work that needs to be done from individuals to be able to lock down the security side of the house. And once that's out of the way, if this means it's bought by another company or what have you, or at least, you know, the we have data centers in the US, then great. But it's going to have to get figured out. I don't think it's going to get figured out by Trump. Joel (43:40.906) So my prediction is there's still a TikTok. It will be divested and it'll suck and it'll slowly start being shit because China's not going to let the algorithm go. They're not going to like give the keys to that golden goose. So the brand TikTok will live. It'll be owned by some antiquated shitty company that probably gave a of money to Trump. Chad (43:58.594) Mm-hmm. Joel (44:06.376) And it will slowly just degrade to a point where everyone moves over to reels or wherever. so I do think it will survive, but it will not survive in the state that we currently know it. It will just sort of wither on, on the vine. you mentioned money and that's a huge part of it. think Trump doesn't want to piss off a lot of the investors and people that are behind tick tock that are frankly in the U S. but he also doesn't want to piss people off. A lot of his young, young influencers that, are backing him love tick tock. He's not going to piss them off, but if, if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, this is a opportune time to make friends. I think the market believes that if, if it doesn't get banned, it's going to be greatly, crippled. Meta stock is up over 80 % year to date and they, they are in the position to benefit if tick tock. Chad (44:39.15) It would just push them to a true social. Joel (44:59.806) gets kicked out of the company. And by the way, Chad, dropping in the, on the new sites today, we're recording on a Thursday, meta just donated $1 million, to Trump's inaugural fund. that $1 million may buy. Zuck and met us some nice, some nice, you know, some nice influence with, the new president. know, I know Zuck has met with him. So Zuck is jockeying, to get on Trump's good side. Chad (45:07.213) Mm. Chad (45:22.798) Imagine that. Joel (45:28.71) And a million dollars goes a long way in an inaugural celebration to get Trump on your side. So I think politics comes into this, money comes into this, but ultimately TikTok as we know it is going to, is going to fade into the ether. So, build up those followings on reels and Instagram kids, because that's where the future is in my opinion. Or blue sky. Is that the new one? What, what, what's the new one you're on? Is it blue sky? Chad (45:49.614) That would be sad. Chad (45:53.4) Blue, yeah, it's pretty much just a Twitter clone. It's a happier version of Twitter. It's a less Nazi version of Twitter. Joel (46:01.408) All right. Well, Jesus, it's been one interesting episode. think the only thing that can save it is a fantastic, fantastic dad joke. Chad, are you ready for this week's dad joke? It's inspired by, inspired by nuclear energy. So it's, it's gotta be, gotta be good. Chad, what, what did the nuclear physicist have for lunch? Chad (46:14.698) Okay. I have faith in this one. Chad (46:24.344) Good. It's gotta be good. Joel (46:28.84) What did the nuclear physicist have for lunch? Joel (46:35.648) Fish and chips, fish and chips, get it? Chad (46:36.92) vision. Chad (46:40.706) I was just saying fission, that goes with nothing. Yes. And chips, apparently chips. Okay. Yes. Joel (46:43.08) Yeah, Fission chips, Chad. That's right. That's right. drones and aliens in the ocean, kids. We out. Chad (46:49.966) We out.

Welcome back to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast,  where Chad and Joel serve up spicy takes and recruiting truths hotter than a Nashville summer. This week, they wrangle Courtney Dempsey, the tech-savvy maestro behind Southern Rock Restaurants’ hiring empire. With 160 restaurants and a hiring strategy sharper than a deli slicer, Courtney spills the secret sauce: targeting job seekers while the rest of us are dreaming about tacos at 3 AM. Hear how she uses LLMs like they’re her personal AI attack dogs, outsmarts bigger competitors with zero chill, and recruits AARP members because, frankly, Gen Z already got their fill of side hustles. If you’re not advertising your dishwashing gigs like prime-time Super Bowl spots, you’re doing it wrong. So, grab your headphones and brace yourself. By the end, you’ll either want to revolutionize your hiring strategy or question all your life choices... possibly both. And remember, in this game, speed kills.  But in HR? It also hires. Warning: Side effects of listening include spontaneous outbursts of laughter, strategic epiphanies, and reconsidering your entire recruitment budget. Proceed with caution. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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. [music] Joel: Thanks for hanging out with us today. Who are you and why are you here? Chad: That's helpful. That's helpful. Courtney Dempsey: That's a very... It's a loaded question. [laughter] I appreciate that. I'm like the token non-TA person here. And we're the largest licensed franchisee in McAlister's Deli. And we're located here in Nashville. Chad: Very nice, very nice. So, let's look forward real quick into 2025. What advice would you give your peers in the new year, moving into the new year? Courtney Dempsey: Embrace technology. Chad: Embrace technology. Do they have a choice? Joel: Say more. Courtney Dempsey: I think there are a lot of people still fighting it. Look for companies that have open API. I cold call a lot of open API companies. And I ask to beta test them and see if we can integrate their open API systems into the current system that we're utilizing, which is Paradox. I love LLMs. It's like my bestie. Chad: This is your time now. Courtney Dempsey: This is my time. Chad: Yeah. Podcast Intro: I'm a one-woman show. Joel: Did you love them when they weren't cool or before they were cool? Courtney Dempsey: I had to teach myself. So, I was Python back in the early days of that, as did Professor Chuck taught me how to follow data. And I just kind of rolled with it. And I listened to your podcast, and any company that talks ill of another company, I'm like, I'm absolutely 100% calling them. [laughter] Because they obviously don't like them for a reason, and I will become their best friends. So, we make sure we integrate that too. Joel: So, what are some tools technologically that you find invaluable in your everyday life or business? Courtney Dempsey: Speed is essential. In the QSR... [overlapping conversation] Joel: I said tech, not drugs. Courtney Dempsey: Tech? Joel: Okay. [laughter] Courtney Dempsey: Oh, you have to be... Chad: Or Keanu Reeves. [overlapping conversation] Courtney Dempsey: You have to be fast. Joel: Speed kills. Chad: Yeah. Courtney Dempsey: Yeah. You wanna be methodical in your approach, but I will run you off the road 'cause I have to. And we're a mom-and-pop shop. We have 160 restaurants. I can't compete with the larger organizations, but I sure try. We average between 2,900 and 4,000 applicants a week... Chad: Wow. Courtney Dempsey: With 20% spend. We save almost $2 million in ad spend, and 80% of that is organic. Chad: How do you do that? Joel: Yeah, how'd you get... Say more about how you're doing that. [laughter] Courtney Dempsey: I might have to come on your show the next time. Joel: 'Cause you can't open that box [laughter] without pouring a drink. Chad: Just give us a little bit. We'll do an extended version later. Courtney Dempsey: I think if you utilize LLMs, you're able to target the exact audience that you want at the exact time. So, I can tell you within 100% accuracy that Wednesdays at 8:00 AM today, for instance, was the perfect time for me to advertise for all of our restaurants in Missouri. What I don't advertise is more than one position. I coach down hiring is critical. So, if you're running or advertising for a shift lead, whether that person is qualified to be a shift lead or not, they're gonna apply for it because the money's better than an hourly. So, you lead with your best foot forward, and you trickle down from there. Chad: Wow. So, in 2024, what has surprised you the most? Courtney Dempsey: The Great Stay. Chad: The what? Courtney Dempsey: The Great Stay. Chad: "The Great Stay." Courtney Dempsey: Managers aren't leaving, and those that are lifers have already expired out in our side of the business. So, the influx of retail that I'm seeing right now is about 85% to our lack of 15% of actual people that work in the restaurant industry. That is extraordinary to me. Chad: Yes. Courtney Dempsey: So, we have to coach on how to read a resume from the bottom up now versus the top down. Joel: I love your attention to the strategic element of timing. I assume that speed to connect is very important to you. What are you finding is the most effective? Is it SMS text messaging? Is it iMessage? Is it WhatsApp? Is it phone? What mediums are the most effective for you to get that sale, get that lead quickly? Courtney Dempsey: So, for us, we utilize Paradox, obviously. So, the conversational aspect of that is critical, the constant engagement. And then we utilize Indeed. I do all my advertising with some exceptions for XML scrapes. I will say that 85%, and we just did a data poll on that 'cause I love data, I love analytics, that 85% of our applicants are between the hours of 12:00 AM and 5:00 AM. So, just the engagement process with that has been critical. The speed of posting those ads, knowing the attention span of our applicants are less than 72 hours is the fly time of our runs. I don't want to oversaturate the market with our ads. We only have 160 stores, so I wanna make sure there's no market fatigue. So, I'm very strategic on the days and times that I post and when they should expire out. And then I have our competition chasing us, trying to figure out how it is [laughter] that we're doing. And as long as it fits in on a device, so I don't do any garbage. You're a dishwasher; I don't need to list out the 75 plus pages. [overlapping conversation] Joel: Sounds like your totally automated. You got the right ads at the right time, and you have an automated 24/7 communication device to get them whenever they come into the door, which I think is impactful. Courtney Dempsey: But I also realize that unless it fits on the phone, then the applicant is not gonna go scroll through a job description. So, why would I have to advertise a job description? You should be leading with benefits, the culture, and then close out with the culture. I want you to work for us, so I'm selling you on our company. And then the reception, we've captured a higher rate for us now than most companies... Joel: Are you leveraging video? And if so, how? Courtney Dempsey: For our managers, we are. It's not mandatory. For our management applicants, we do encourage them to upload a video, a 30-second to a minute-long video on why you want to work for our company. And I will say the engagement on that, it's about 50/50. We just introduced that within the last 90 days. Chad: Nice. So, in 2025, what's your main priority? Courtney Dempsey: To maintain our 100% perfect record of fully staffing. I'm more open into more OpenAI. I just think that that's just the way of the future. The more layers you can add within your own platform. Because you're only as relevant today as you were yesterday. You can't become stale in this space. You have to be more creative, and you have to target more traditional markets that you want to. For us, we're not targeting Gen Z anymore. The Gen Z market, we've oversaturated, we've infiltrated. I'm intentionally targeting AARP members and veterans. Chad: Wow. Courtney Dempsey: We want an adult in the room, in our space. We need an adult in the room. Joel: Speed kills, baby. CREAM, Cash Rules Everything Around Me. [laughter] Thanks for hanging out with us today. For our listeners and viewers who want to connect with you, learn more about employment opportunities, where should they go? Courtney Dempsey: LinkedIn, Courtney Dempsey, and I'm with Southern Rock Restaurants. Chad: Thanks, Courtney. Courtney Dempsey: Thank you, guys. Joel: Enjoy the show. Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

John Graham, Shaker’s VP of Employer Brand Strategy, Humanity & Culture , hit RecFest USA with a mic drop on recruitment marketing and employer branding as we careen into 2025. His talk? A mix of AI hype, DEI drama, and a reality check for those clinging to the idea of "jobs for life" like it's still 1985. Graham’s big reveal: employer branding is less about forever  and more about for now , pivoting to a launchpad for career development instead of a golden handshake into retirement. He also dove into AI, calling it both the hero and potential villain of recruitment. Sure, it’s reshaping strategies faster than you can say "algorithmic bias," but Graham threw some shade on humanity, pointing out that we’re not exactly bias-free either. His advice? Play nice with AI but keep an eye on it—like a toddler with scissors. DEI got a spotlight too, but not without acknowledging the current rebrand it’s enduring thanks to political tug-of-wars and corporate-level ghosting. He tied it all up with a forecast for 2024 tech trends: automation, AI, and video storytelling are set to dominate, but the focus will still be on keeping things human-centered. (Spoiler: robots are cool, but people still like people.) And if that wasn’t enough, Graham’s closer was basically a call-to-action to stalk—er, network with —Shaker online. Updated website, LinkedIn, the works. Because nothing says "modern employer branding" like a shameless plug. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (cometh) 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: Who are you and why are you here? John Graham: I feel like you've asked everybody that question. Joel: We've been given some standardized questions. John Graham: I'm John Graham, vice president of Employer Brand Strategy Humanity and Culture at Shaker and I help our clients think about their employer brand strategy from end to end, not just the pieces and the parts. How does EVP connect to EB connect to RM and everything in between and how do we bring it to life in a way that makes sense for your organization and your culture? Joel: And you presented earlier today. Talk about that presentation. John Graham: I did. Yeah. We were talking about the predictions for 2025 as far as recruitment marketing and employer branding. So getting thought leaders from Visa and AutoZone to share their perspectives, things that they're working on now, what did they see as the challenges? Of course, AI was a conversation as it was in every conversation, but also the DEI landscape and how that's shifted significantly and how do you brand in the context of a company that might be rolling commitments back. How do you get leadership, the disconnect between leadership experience and the frontline experience, and how do you bridge that gap with employer branding? And I think we also spoke about not looking at bringing people in for lifetime careers but more so being a launchpad for the career that they need now. And if they go somewhere else, awesome, but take this goodwill of the brand with you and the values and the opportunities that you got to grow. Joel: You mentioned AI being a hot topic, and yes, it indeed has. John Graham: Yes. Joel: Are we as branding organizations, putting too much trust, faith in technology and not enough about the human part of our business, or there are companies bringing both together for two great tastes that taste great together? What's your take on that? John Graham: Yeah. Oh, I think you nailed it. I think we have to be cognizant of the balance between humanity and technology. You can't depend too much on technology because you're still dealing with real people and you can't give all of your agency away to an AI, Gen AI chatbot, any of that because it might not be right. So I think what we are reconciling now is which bias are we comfortable with. Obviously there's bias in AI because people made it but there's bias in people so we can't trade off one for the other. The question is which one are we gonna be more comfortable with and accept what comes with that. So yeah, I think we need to inject a bit more humanity in and leverage AI as a tool not as a surrogate. Joel: One of the more fascinating things that I've learned in the last few months particularly here at this show is we went from a period where the black hole is bad, having applicants apply and not hear from us is bad. John Graham: Sure. Joel: Now let's automate it where they do have a conversation. That's good. But now it's swinging to okay, that's bad because it's not authentic, it's not human, it's not real. It can be one or the other. Where do we go from here? Do we scale human beings? Does the AI get that much better that we don't know the difference between a human and a rope? You're nodding your head yes. John Graham: I think that's gonna be the move. Yeah. Joel: So tell me what does the future look like? John Graham: It's going to be indistinguishable at some point where you won't know if you're speaking to a human or not and that's good from an efficiency perspective but that's also meaning you're replacing human beings. So there's gonna be a balance of it. I think with every era of technology and technological advancement it's a reduction or an augmentation of the labor force. You saw it with the change, with the advent of automobiles, assembly lines. Every progressive advancement, it removes some of the manual tasks from it but then it creates a whole nother industry that didn't exist before. And I think people forget that. That yes, some things might go away but it's gonna create a whole bunch of opportunities in places that we don't even know yet. Joel: Give me your take on the current state of DEI. A few years ago it was like yes, that's a good thing, let's do it. It became politicized, weaponized. John Graham: Sure. Joel: Companies stepped back, didn't wanna touch it. What's the current state of that issue? John Graham: Yeah, so I think we're at a point where DEI is now going through its own rebranding and if you're a student of this space, you know that for the past 60 years there's been a series of progressions and regressions. It's just a natural ebb and flow. When you start making progress people will pull it back. But the key is you're incrementally moving forward. I think we're at a point right now where we're being honest about what can change, what people are willing to change, and then what can we do within that construct? What are we doing within the context of employer brand and recruitment marketing? How honest are we gonna be about our culture? What are we going to do as a company as far as what we're donating to them or not anymore? And some companies have made headlines for pulling their commitments back all the way, based on pressures from activist investors, perceived risk for their consumer bases, whatever the case may be. The challenge is that the issues for the people who were most marginalized didn't go away because a company rolled back its commitments so they're gonna have to contend with it in some way. Joel: Jumping back to technology real quickly, 2024, what were the tech trends that stood out to you? You do a lot of vendors so I'm sure your take on this is pretty interesting. 2024. John Graham: Yeah so this year it's been a lot of automation. AI has been the buzzword in everybody's tech platform but I think getting two candidates faster whether it be through your recruitment marketing efforts, getting higher quality candidates through automation, storytelling, and video. A lot of video platforms and ambassadorship for existing employees to be amplifiers of the brand. So I think we've seen a lot of that this year and it's really a circle back to maybe like 2016, '17 where that was sort of emerging. Now we're having a Renaissance. Technology's becoming better but interestingly enough I think we're gonna see more of that. We're gonna have to. Joel: Let's talk about that. We took a step back. Now let's look forward. A year from now what will the tech trends be that we talked about? John Graham: Well I think AI is going to get smarter. I think that there's going to be... While the advancement of the technology is inevitable I think you're also gonna start to see more of a double down on human-centered experience. So it's not just going to a conference and setting up a booth. It's what experience are you creating for specific demographics, different functions, different roles outside of the vendor floor and in a more intimate space so that people can start really building and establishing relationship. Joel: Okay. So you say AI will be smarter. I guess it'll be left to find out if humans get dumber in that process. John Graham: It's possible. Joel: But thanks for sitting down with us. For those listeners and viewers that wanna connect with you or learn more about Shaker where do you send them? John Graham: Shaker.com, first and foremost. We have a brand new site. It's gorgeous. A lot of good information and you can always find me on LinkedIn. Joel: Shaker.com. John Graham: That's it. Joel: Easy-Peasy Nacho Cheesy. John Graham: My god. Joel: Thanks man. Enjoy the rest of the show. John Graham: I appreciate it Joel. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favourite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuggle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

In this episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast , Joel and Chad serve up a smorgasbord of topics, starting with their culinary misadventures at Chipotle and a deep dive into their latest tech crush. They don't miss the chance to bask in their own glory, flaunting Spotify's year-end wrap-up that confirms their podcast's meteoric rise—because who doesn't love a good pat on the back? The duo then tackles the TikTok-driven surge in social commerce, likening it to a modern-day QVC for the swipe-right generation. They brainstorm ways for LinkedIn to spice up job applications with video content, because nothing says "hire me" like a self-taped monologue. The conversation takes a somber turn as they discuss LinkedIn's recent layoffs and the slow decline of the ERE conference, reminiscing about the golden days of recruitment. They delve into the shifting landscape of sourcing, highlighting the fierce competition between Rippling and Deel in the global payroll arena. Rippling has been pulling what some might call "snake moves," aggressively targeting Deel with marketing campaigns. It's like watching two tech startups in a WWE match—who knew payroll could be so cutthroat? PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:31.672) two guys you wouldn't want to touch with a 39 and a half foot pole. Hi kids. It's the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel presidential pardon cheeseman. Chad (00:42.164) And this is Chad, snakes on a plane, so watch. Joel (00:45.036) And on this episode, Rippling unleashes the snake. Is ERE adapting or dying? And Walmart bends over for newly elected president Trump. Let's do this. Chad (01:01.364) So how's the weather over there, huh? How's the weather? As you can see. 16, Freezing, baby, freezing. That's just, that's not nice. That's not nice. Joel (01:01.578) What's up, Chad? It's freaking cold. Let me check my app. 16 degrees, 16 degrees Fahrenheit here in central Indiana. It's good time. Yeah, you look much more comfortable. Do I dare ask what the temperature is in Portugal right now? Chad (01:18.58) Mmm. Yep, round 70, round 70. It's the skating around that, around there. It's nice, yeah. First part of December, first part of January, it's during the day. It'll drop at least 20 degrees at night, but it's wonderful. Joel (01:29.474) Yeah. Joel (01:34.684) huh. Yeah, these are the days where I need a warm barbacoa bowl to keep me keep me happy. Chad (01:41.707) Hahaha Joel (01:47.726) By the way, I have a Chipotle story that is relevant to our business. I went into Chipotle this week. I know that shocks you. And I go to check out, I'm wearing my paradox swag, my jacket, coat, windbreaker, if you will. And the guy at the register says, do you work for paradox? And I was like, well, that's weird. And I said, but I'm a friend of paradox. Chad (01:47.902) Grubhub. Imagine that. Imagine that. Chad (02:01.274) Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's very nice. Yeah. huh. Chad (02:11.385) Ha! Joel (02:15.206) And, the guy says, yeah, we just implemented paradox, as our hiring system. And I said, well, how's it going? He said, he said, well, we had a few bumps with the, the scheduling at first, but we've, we've, we've worked that out. and we really like it. And I said, do the job seekers like it? And he said, yeah, they seem to like it a lot better than filling out an application and submitting it. liked the chat. So that's my, that's my, that's my newly found friendship with my local Chipotle. I go in with my paradox and hope that I get a free. Chad (02:20.668) No shit. No shit. Chad (02:25.822) Mm. Chad (02:34.388) Black hole, yeah. Joel (02:45.228) burrito at some point, but other than that, not and no one. I don't think that's ever happened to me in 25 years in the industry. Like no one's ever said, do you work for ISEMS or do you work for some random, you know, vendor? that was, that was kind of exciting for me. Chad (02:46.674) Yeah, no shit, right? Chad (02:53.106) Yeah. Chad (02:59.89) Yeah, only fans. Yeah, so. So, yeah, it doesn't it doesn't surprise me that you were in Chipotle, but it does surprise me. And that's really cool that down at the store level, they actually know the product. I mean, that's that's really fucking cool. Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. And you're right. I mean, if you go through a lot of these older kind of like legacy applicant tracking systems like we've been talking about a lot of the franchise, they don't use them. Joel (03:14.69) The brand. Yeah. Joel (03:30.094) Mm-hmm. Chad (03:30.268) They just don't use them just because they weren't made for it. So that's really cool. out to Good Swag and Paradox. Okay, I'm gonna hit my first, I'm gonna hit shout outs. And shout out is going to be to Spotify year end wrap up. Kids, you see these all the time. You love these. You know you love them. This one's for the Chad and Cheese podcast. I just love how Spotify wraps up all of their staff. Joel (03:35.224) So exciting. Chad (03:58.99) and they make them look sexy. It's just great marketing mechanism for them. And here is some stats that they've wrapped up. Spotify is wrapped up for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Are you ready? Drum roll, baby. Give me drum roll. Got a drum roll? Joel (04:10.798) I'm ready. Hit me with those amazing, amazing, amazing numbers, I can't wait. Chad (04:16.106) Hahaha So we had great numbers last year, so I thought this year they wouldn't be as great. I was wrong. 121 % increase in listeners. 340 % increase in streams. So we're not just getting listeners, they're listening a lot. 31 % increase in followers. We're a top 10 show, a top 10 show for 3,000 plus fans. Joel (04:29.304) Wow. Joel (04:36.078) Damn. Joel (04:42.392) Mm-hmm. Joel (04:46.019) Yeah. Chad (04:48.498) We're a top five show for 2500, nearly 2500 fans. And we are the number one podcast for 832 of you beautiful people that are out there. You're make me cry. Gonna make me cry. I told myself I wouldn't do this. Joel (04:53.474) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:07.83) That's that's over 800 people that need therapy immediately if we are their their number one show, you know, you know, it was, it was the year of the podcast we saw in the presidential presidential race. And for whatever reason, podcasts are having a moment. I mean, if you break that down with our reach and you know, the conferences that we attend, the media properties that we, you know, have that we know well, like Chad (05:10.484) This is therapy. This is therapy. Yeah. Yep. huh. Chad (05:28.297) Yeah. Chad (05:31.7) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:36.78) We're as competitive in terms of attention as probably any of those entities. mean, if you stop to think about how many people come by our booth on a weekly basis to see us and hear us and listen to our sponsors, like that's, it's kind of a big deal. think that what really comes into play with podcasts is a level of trust and engagement that's so personal. Chad (05:44.476) yeah. Joel (06:04.078) because you're in people's ears. mean, now we're more in people's eyeballs, which I'm fearful of, but, it's, an amazing medium. mean, no one really blogs anymore. you know, they do, but it's, it's just not what it is. mean, tick tocks are kind of the next thing, that, that you'll see a lot of, engagement with, but yeah, it's, pretty amazing. This road that we've been on, we're like a eight year old overnight success, but it's, I'm, I'm impressed. And that's just Spotify. Chad (06:21.364) Mm-hmm. Joel (06:33.122) I mean, Apple music is our number one source of traffic. So if you take those Spotify numbers, multiplying by two, that's kind of where we're looking. And I think, did you read the demographic breakdown? Chad (06:33.64) Yeah, yeah. Chad (06:45.65) Yeah, demographic breakdown was generally on the higher age range side. So, I mean, we are getting don't get me wrong, we're going to have the entry level, the recruiters, we're going to have some of the you know, the ones who who want to get into leadership roles. But for the most part, they're on the older side. So they're going to be more the the leadership side of the house. And go figure decision makers. Joel (06:53.496) Yeah. Joel (07:00.046) Yeah. Joel (07:05.806) But we're also, I thought it was very, it was pretty even. I didn't feel like we skewed really old. I thought we had a good demographic connection. Maybe that Spotify has a piece of that, but. Chad (07:12.849) No. Chad (07:16.468) 35 to 54 is like, that is like the mage. Now that's two demographics, but they were, yeah, that was, was, that's our sweet spot. Joel (07:20.812) Yeah, that's the sweet spot. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're a, you if you're looking to get in front of an audience, that's the audience everyone wants to get in front of. So, so good. Good on us. Good on us. We're hiding checks. So speaking of winning, my, my shout out goes, goes to social commerce. I had a lot of time this holiday week and to surf, the socials and I was, I was just so impressed with social commerce. Chad (07:32.786) Write in checks, big boy. Those are the ones who are writing checks. Joel (07:55.18) I bought my first thing on tick tock mostly because I just wanted to see that how the experience would be. I mean, it's like, it's like QVC personalized for you. And the it's amazing. Like the algorithm, like what you watch the products that they present to you. What I'm sure as you buy more and more stuff, they give, they put more and more of that in front of you. and it's so easy. It's like, Chad (07:57.789) Okay. Chad (08:05.948) Really? Chad (08:15.07) Mm-hmm. Chad (08:18.642) Gets it tuned. Yeah, I bet. Easily. Joel (08:22.872) Click to pay, click pay done shipping. They send you updates. It's fantastic. And we talk Amazon, but I'm, I'm not searching. They just like present it to you and you go, that's pretty cool. Like, it's 50 % off today. Like, yeah. And there's a clock counting down of how long that deal lasts, which is total bullshit. And I know that, but I still fall for it, Chad. Chad (08:28.84) very Amazon-like, kind of like one click. Is that what you're talking about? Very Amazon-like. Yeah. Chad (08:39.27) You want this? You want this? Yeah, yeah. Chad (08:45.72) huh. Yeah, of course. It gets me every time. Joel (08:48.91) We talk a lot about the threats to Google and their market share and perplexity and AI, if more and more shopping goes to TikTok, and I looked up some numbers because I was interested, the influencer marketing hub predicts that by 2030, social commerce revenue is expected to reach $6.2 trillion. Chad (08:53.459) Mm. Chad (08:58.938) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (09:14.412) dollars worldwide. It's a fracture that now so it's gonna grow immensely but if you do more and more of your shopping on social media and less on searching on Google that's gonna be a big hit to Big G. anyway, shout out to Social Commerce. I'm rarely impressed these days about something but they have nailed this. And I gotta think if you're linked in Chad (09:22.611) Mm-hmm. Chad (09:36.468) It's scary. Joel (09:39.638) And you're launching these shorts now and these videos, which I think is cool. Like I get, I get on these shorts on LinkedIn. I'm like, where the hell am I? I don't even know. And I, this is LinkedIn. They need to create a quit, like a one click apply with your LinkedIn profile. So companies can put on videos about like, if they know you're a manager of something, then they show you manager of a company locally to you. Like, here's my job. If you want to know more, apply now click here. Chad (09:47.444) Hahaha Chad (09:59.444) Yeah, yeah. Joel (10:04.898) Like LinkedIn better do this because this is the future. think this, the idea of searching is fine, but like showing people and targeted opportunities and just let them click and apply. Like that's, that could be huge for them. Chad (10:11.23) Yeah? Chad (10:19.378) All they have to do is buy job pixel and it's done. Joel (10:22.21) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chad (10:24.016) Next question. mean, I mean, seriously, the the the I mean, we're both advisors. OK, so don't get me wrong, kids, we're just we're getting it out there. But seriously, if they bought a platform like JobPixel, it's already ready. It's ready already. All you have to do is go in there, have somebody, know, who's a nurse talk about the nursing job. Click below. Boom. You know, put in the requirements, do all that stuff. And obviously you can still do the normal text based stuff, but do the video stuff. I mean, what the hell? I mean, why not? Joel (10:52.386) Yeah. If you want to get in front of passive job seekers, the people that aren't searching jobs, give them a video, show them the company, show them the job, entice them and say like, Hey, apply now. What do you got? What do you got to lose? Chad (10:56.34) Mm-hmm. Right. Chad (11:04.83) Well, do that on LinkedIn and then also go to people like JT O'Donnell, who has over a million followers on TikTok and have her say, hey, my viewers, have her talk about the job and have influencers do it too. I mean, this is a new market that we really have to be focused on. Video, snackable content, it's just, it's so sexy. And again, from a relevance standpoint, as you had said, Joel (11:23.704) Sure, yeah. Chad (11:33.818) It's going to deliver up. when you have influencers who have the kind of weight that like a JT has, holy shit, man, that's an all day thing. Joel (11:41.73) Yeah, yeah, I'm sure Flockety, our friends at Flockety are thinking of something similar as well, integrating into LinkedIn. TP, TP, almost as good as free shit from Chad and Cheese. Chad (11:45.845) Tracy Parsons. yeah, she'd kill that, yeah. I tell you what. Nothing's good as free shit from Chad and Cheese. And here's why kids, because you all know that those sexy t-shirts that you see being worn that everybody talks about, they talk about because they feel like a hug from Chad and Cheese. Those are provided by our friends at Air and App. Bourbon barrel aged syrup. This is, and it's got to come from Canada because that's where the best stuff comes from. Kiora, that's right. Kiora. Joel (12:05.198) Hmm. Joel (12:20.347) the 51st state, Canada. You did see that right, Trump on Canada. Chad (12:27.378) No, no, I don't. I don't want to go down that road. Jesus Christ. Joel (12:30.318) Well, you know, know, Justin Trudeau went to visit Trump to kiss the ring. and apparently Trump, Trump joke that they, Canada should just be the 51st state and Trudeau could be governor. then, and then Trump posted a picture of himself on a mountain with a Canada flag, Canadian flag. It says, Canada. Anyway, sorry. Yes. Our friends at Canada, maybe the. Chiara. Yeah. The maple circle still tastes great. Chad (12:35.71) Yeah, go figure. Chad (12:49.352) Anyway, Kiora, yes. Yes. Also, also sponsors a shout outs. Beer, craft beer by Aspen Tech Labs. That's right. A whole box craft beer. You're love it. Aspen Tech Labs. Whiskey from our friends. Two bottles of whiskey from our friends at Tex Kernel by Bullhorn. And birthdays. If it's your birthday, Rum with plum. Win some high value rum from plum. Go to ChadCheese.com slash free. Joel (13:24.044) That's right, Chad. Some lucky listeners are celebrating another trip around the sun. By the way, December, think we're going to up the game a little bit on the giveaways this month. We're going to like crank it up a little bit on the niceties. So get, get ready kids. we'll up our game for that, but here, here are some of the birthdays being celebrated. we got Frank Wittenauer, Mary Kelly, Michael Cox, Nathan Budziak, Terry Kaler, Stephen branch, Andy Parker, Kyle Pollard, Joey Lee. Chad (13:24.231) In the Plums. Chad (13:35.752) Yeah? Huh? Joel (13:51.906) Michelle Sumrall, Jim D'Amico, Scott Williams, and Julie Loniman. Hope I said all those correctly. Celebrating another trip around the sun. Happy birthday, everybody. And that brings us to. Chad (14:03.902) Happy birthday. Fantasy football from the factory fix Joel (14:09.646) Fantasy football by factory fix. That's right. We're, we're heading into week 14. I believe we have two more weeks, I think, till the playoffs start. here's how your leaderboard shakes out. got Dean, the daddy Mac mackerel, the, man from down under showing us how to do it here in, here in the United States. Number two is your boy right here. Stick sticking, sticking with that number two spot. Number three, David Stifle for Chad sew wash clinging onto that final playoff spot for the. Chad (14:17.62) Mm. Chad (14:25.588) Killing it. Killing it. Chad (14:31.379) Mmm. Joel (14:38.68) for the championship. Keith, the commissioner's Keith, the commissioner's Sonderling kicked my ass. last week, shout out to him for that. Christie Lisbon, action Jackson, Dalquist, Laura Martinelli, Jennifer, Terry Tharp, Dina, Perot for Pyros, Sean Horton. Here's a who and bring it up, bringing up the caboose. That's right. Chad (14:40.328) Not there yet, not there yet. Joel (15:05.612) That's right. Adam Gordon, from Scotland at number 12 of 12 players. And that is the factory fixed leaderboard for fantasy football with Chad and cheese starting to wind down. If, if Adam loses, I'm thinking we need to have for the first time the loser gift we got. Can we buy a kilt that says loser on the front of it and have him wear that around Glasgow? Chad (15:12.423) Aw, poor guy, poor guy. Chad (15:21.169) yeah. Chad (15:27.65) Hahaha Chad (15:33.076) you know we wouldn't wear it. That wouldn't be cool. That wouldn't be cool. Joel (15:36.558) Stephen would wear it, but yeah, it's probably a little bit too. Chad (15:41.012) We still have to figure out the Steven tattoo thing. Okay. So let's focus here. Let's priorities. We got to get Steven a tattoo. That's what we got to do. Joel (15:45.56) Sorry, sorry, that's right. good time with the Scots. Good time with the Scots. Let's talk about some news, shall we? Chad (15:54.312) Yes. Topics. Joel (15:59.762) we got some, yeah, you know, some layoffs that we missed. Layoffs are a good time to have a press release during Thanksgiving. People kind of miss it, but we didn't miss this one. LinkedIn laid off 202 employees over the last two weeks, representing roughly 1 % of the company's 18,000 or so employees. LinkedIn spokesperson, Greg Snappy. Chad (16:01.972) Hmm Chad (16:07.913) Yeah. Joel (16:23.81) That's a cool name. Greg Snappi confirmed. The cuts occurred in engineering and customer support. He said to the information quote, we're among changes within teams to align our organizational structures and work to our strategic priorities and to support our customers. quote. Chad, any thoughts on the recent layoffs at LinkedIn? Chad (16:24.372) Heh. Chad (16:29.716) Hmm. Chad (16:46.516) Nope, just gonna have to keep an eye on this because it could be one of those that just continue to draw out. So you see 1%, 1%, 3%, 5%, you know what I mean? I have to take a look because alignment, yes kids, I'm using air quotes, alignment doesn't happen generally in one cut. Joel (16:54.819) Mm-hmm. Joel (17:04.396) Yeah. There are two schools of thought on, on layoffs. It's, one you do like a 30 % cut and you're done and you get on with your life. And then there's this slow drip, where you have, have different, I don't know, you drip out, you drip them out. And to me, this was sort of Latin for, we're automating and these are folks that we don't need, but we're not going to cut them all at once. And those are customer service and engineering. And when you hear Amazon talking about, need fewer engineers. Chad (17:10.772) You Hmm. Joel (17:34.03) And when you talk about Klarna eliminating customer service, I'm sure Microsoft got on the phone and said, Hey LinkedIn, let's eliminate some of these positions. Don't do enough to scare everybody, but just do enough to make us feel better about the future. So yeah, I'd say let's, let's keep an on this. was shocked. It wasn't more in terms of the percentage, but Hey, that's, that's easy for me to say the 202 people that lost their job. It's a pretty big deal to them. So if you need Chad (17:34.356) Mm-hmm. Chad (17:52.804) Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (17:59.932) It is. It is. Joel (18:01.166) If you need some good engineers and customer support people, LinkedIn, just put a few in the pond, everybody. Joel (18:13.098) All right, Chad, you got you got some gossip for us here. ERE, the OG of conferences, they've been around since 1998. You got word that they might be might be sunsetting SourceCon, one of their fabled conferences. What did you hear from the grapevine? Chad (18:17.908) Mm-hmm. Chad (18:24.169) Jeez. Chad (18:28.403) Mm-hmm. Chad (18:34.302) Well, let's say we'll get to that in a second. I want to get a little nostalgic first because remember when ERE was one of the must attend conferences in our space. mean, everyone used ERE networking tools. They read their articles, they commented on the articles, they shared the articles, attended. Everybody attended the webinars. mean, ERE was the place for TA professionals to attend events and get their daily dose of HR and recruiting news and gossip. Joel (18:38.254) Mm-hmm. Joel (18:43.47) Yeah. Chad (19:02.416) ERE was a central part of the recruitment industry. What happened? Before we get into the SourceCon stuff, what the hell happened? Joel (19:13.966) so full disclosure, I used to write for ERE as a contract, publisher. I've known Dave. mean, you and I both went to these early conferences. I mean, I started going in around 2005. The timing of it, was really good. mean, they were willing to embrace bloggers and video stuff. They, sort of like where Sherm said no, ERE said yes. And the, it, the it crowd came to ERE. They had a blogger. Chad (19:22.994) He's a guy. Yeah. Chad (19:31.582) Yeah. Joel (19:42.668) You know, reset or like area with beanbags and shit. So it was just, it was just the thing. I guess this would be like a fourth iteration of the conference. Dave left, didn't leave, but he, sort of passed the reins, handed the reins over to someone else and around the great recession time who turned it into sort of an executive, event where they said, Chad (19:46.046) Yeah. Joel (20:08.524) no more bloggers, no more part, like no more fun. Like we're going to be a real serious event and have executives and we're, we're going to make more money in the process. And maybe they did, maybe they didn't, Dave came back and then revived it sort of to it's, it's tried to get back to where it was. they bought source con, they bought TLNT, they bought, Chad (20:30.356) Mm-hmm. Joel (20:31.5) Not level 42. That's the band from the, from the eighties, but they bought, they, they acquired some folks, the candies they just acquired. So they've, they've been smart about, acquisitions. What happened? I don't know. I mean, they're working at so many things, right? Like their blogging plat, their articles primarily, and it's a world of podcasts and video and shorts. they've, they've sort of. Chad (20:33.684) Ha! Chad (20:58.504) That surprised me that they didn't go down that road faster. I mean, because it's content, right? mean, content's content. So it really surprised me they didn't go down that road faster. Joel (21:02.018) Yeah, I mean. Joel (21:07.554) Yeah, the content. mean, they've never really sort of re-engaged with the thought leaders or the people that are going to be doing videos from the shows and everything. They just kind of lost the mojo. The kids moved to Unleashed, they moved to RecFest, they've just sort of moved. And I think that ERE is kind of the cockroach of the recruiting conferences. And what I mean by that is like they survive. Chad (21:14.131) Mm-hmm. Chad (21:25.353) Mm. Joel (21:36.354) Dave I've known for a long time. He's a smart guy. He's, he's an old TMP guy, from the nineties and monster. mean, again, this thing launched in 98, he bootstrapped the whole thing, took it like zero one, you know, one to 15 employees. he's been able to adapt to this stuff and survive. I reached out to him to task what was going on. he said quote about some of the rumors you were hearing and particularly about source con, Chad (21:45.908) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:02.868) God. Joel (22:05.486) which I don't know if you want to get to now or cause you, you were asking what happened to ERE, but, so the rumor is SourceCon is going to be sunset. I said, Dave, what's up? He said, quote, those rumors are incorrect. And while we were making some big changes to SourceCon next year, it is an evolution that is necessary because the role of sourcing and TA is rapidly changing. I'm excited about where we are headed as a business. He also said, quote, we're going to be issuing a press release in a few days about what's going on. Chad (22:07.368) Go ahead, yeah, hit it. Yeah. Joel (22:34.518) with SourceCon. Look, sourcing is not what it was when he bought SourceCon. It's automated. I mean, it's just a different animal. And I've got to think that that conference, the numbers going to that conference have shrunk significantly in the last, since COVID. Okay. Chad (22:42.75) Yes. Chad (22:48.692) I have more on that. I have more on that. So first and foremost, the blog post October 6th, 2009 is when the acquisition, at least the announcement of the acquisition happened. That was 15 years ago. And we are now receiving reports that the last SourceCon event struggled to get 100 attendees, where in the past they got an upwards to 800. So is sourcing changing? Yes. Has it always changed? Yes. Sourcing was a different animal pre-internet. Resume databases change sourcing. Then search engines change sourcing. LinkedIn changed sourcing. Sourcing continued to evolve, but does this next evolution of sourcing involve humans? It feels like David Manster believes humans are going to be weeded out of the sourcing side of the house and you can't sell tickets to robots, right? So sourcing was a full-time job when you had to dig into file cabinets. It became even easier when you could access the goldmine of candidates on the internet, resume databases, niche communities, that kind of thing. But now tech is making that full-time job a split second task. Tech can source and match a database of millions of candidates in seconds. So instead of having to dig into that filing cabinet full of resumes or build a Boolean string for purple squirrels, the algos are prompt engineered. and perform that once full-time job in seconds. So is this an evolution? At first I was like, it is dying, but yeah, I mean, I think it is an evolution and you're seeing big numbers go to much smaller numbers. Again, something that used to be a product right now is turning into a feature. Joel (24:16.878) Mm-hmm. Joel (24:34.358) Yeah. And, and fewer companies that are selling it. Right. mean, in the, in hay day of source con, the exhibit hall was full of people that we have more profiles, we have better search, we have integrations as such. Like we've talked in Nausim about the companies like higher tool and higher, like that have either pivoted totally or gone out of business. And those are all sourcing tools. So the, the people that could carry the, know, that could fund these things. is down significantly in addition to people that would actually go to learn sourcing. Sourcing used to be, know, Shallie talking about how to use AltaVista to find people in a haystack or how to like, how to like scrape a company's about us page to get people that are executives there. And that's all gone. So, and, and by the way, like when someone like Adam Posner, the POScast that we know well, when, he goes on LinkedIn and says 80 % of recruiters are going to be gone in five years. Chad (25:12.02) Yeah. Joel (25:31.746) I don't know if he's right, but if it's half that, that's a big cut into attendees in these conferences and companies that are selling to them. So, I mean, I suspect all conferences either have a really great niche like rec fest has a, it's a party, right? It's just a good time. it's relatively, they don't, they don't want to be too huge. They're like a really good size, but yeah, if you're, if you're not intriguing, engaging, doing something different, people have limited budgets. have limited conferences that they can attend. They're going to go to the one that is the most fun, where the most heat is and where the most energy is. And right now that's, that's the challenge that Dave Dave has with his conference is how do you make it something that is a must go to event? Cause they haven't done that in a while. Yeah. Good luck. I'm a fan. like Dave, ERE you, you and I are old timers. Remember the glory days of all that. Yeah. Or Chad (26:06.504) Yep, where they learn the most. Chad (26:15.688) Good luck, buddy. Good luck. No, they have not. Chad (26:23.614) Been a long time since I've been to an ERE though. It's been a very long time. Joel (26:27.446) or invited. I've, I can't remember last time is like, we want you guys, we want who, who do we need to get? Who's, who's the list? Who's the list? So anyway, rippling and deal. Yes. This is where the heat is. so, next up a news. Don't buy snake oil, says a new landing page at rippling.com calling out competitor deal. It goes on to say, quote, Chad (26:29.874) Either way. Chad (26:36.69) Yeah. The list is rippling in deal. That's the list. Joel (26:55.874) deal often claims to be a one-stop solution for all your global payroll needs, but their customers pay the price for gaps beneath the surface. Play this game to find the differences between deals claims and the reality of their product, which leads you to a game where you create a snake. didn't even, I didn't totally understand it. but you create a snake and you point out lies or fabrications. so anyway, Rippling says, Hey, tired of playing games. Chad (27:05.406) Hmm. Chad (27:22.13) You eat the lies, yeah. Joel (27:25.198) get a demo of our product, Sea Rippling in action. Chad, the Trumpification of our business is happening. This used to be out of bounds calling out competitors like this. But what are your thoughts on the growing Rippling deal? I don't know. What are we gonna call it? Battle? Scuffle? Yeah, sure. Chad (27:44.344) scuffle. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting because rippling has about 2 billion in funding and deal has 679 million. Yes, the difference rippling 2 billion but but with a B and deal 679 million that still a lot of money no matter what right. But reports and we actually have have heard reports, and Deal has said that they are at about 600 million ARR. And the estimate for Rippling is 350 ARR. So you've got a company who has maybe got about a quarter the amount of funding that you do. And they're outperforming you, right? You are a challenger brand when you should be, because you have a bigger war chest, you should be the big brand. So usually the challenger brand is the one who does this kind of stuff. And we've seen this in the past where not in our space, but Pepsi called out Coke for the Pepsi challenge, the taste test, right? And that's how you try to elevate your brand to that leader, that leader's brand, right? We're better than they are. Here, take a test. In this case, I mean, these guys, Rippling, the company with two billion in funding attacking deal, which should make everybody think obviously that deal is the Coca-Cola in this, in this conversation. mean, hell, Rippling's chief revenue officer posted the drama on LinkedIn. Again, wanting to make this stunt receive more awareness, more public awareness, but also by sharing the head of American sales from deals comments that they actually had in the chat that said, a dick. yes, it was unnecessary. was, it was, it was, it was stupid. It was stupid. And yes, the, the, when you're the number one on the top of the mountain, you don't, you know, you don't have to turn around and tell them to eat a Dick. They're already doing it because you're beating their ass. So just a little leadership and, and, and marketing, recommendations are kid, but let's be clear. I mean, both companies are doing incredibly well financially. Joel (29:36.844) It was an icon penis. It was an icon penis, by the way. Joel (29:50.03) Yeah. Chad (30:02.846) But from the outside looking in, if Rippling is pulling these kinds of stunts and expending resources, specifically attacking Deal, Deal looks like the big dog, the market leader, while Rippling is using their own brain power and tech resources to recreate a horrible 1980 style game. To me, it fell flat on the Rippling side and it just made Deal look better. Joel (30:27.179) huh. Chad (30:29.488) If the dude hadn't done the eat a dick comment, I think they would have definitely came out on top with nothing to talk about, but you know, things happen, humans happen. Joel (30:42.37) Yeah. So I reached out to Elizabeth Diana. That is her real name. Communications at deal. And she said, she said, quote, we're just focused on building for our customers and not on unnecessary noise. End quotes. think that was a pretty, pretty prescient comment. Yeah. No, there was not a. Chad (30:46.674) Okay. Chad (30:58.676) Under that was it eat a dick, Diana? Instead of sincerely Diana, was eat a dick, cheeseman, Diana. Joel (31:07.746) huh. Yeah. Yeah. No, I forget what my gift gift reply was, but I don't think it was, it was that like you say Coke and Pepsi. My, my analogy was, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, while you had the Beatles making great records, not really talking shit. mean, John Lennon talks of shit, but like you had a band that was just creating great records. Then you had the stones, which is sort of dangerous. You know, the kids that were naughty, like they had a separate brand. And to me, this feels like. Chad (31:15.412) Ha Joel (31:37.858) You know, if you're, if you're the clean kid, it's deals may be your thing, but if you want to live a little faster, if you want to like come hang with the cool kids, we got the games and the funny stuff and that I like come, come over to rippling. you're right. mean, deal deal we've talked in like many times they're all cylinders. They make great acquisitions. They're, profits are, are doing very well. mean, both these companies will probably go public at some point. And then we'll really know exactly what's under the hood. but until then, Rippling has to make noise. They have to like make waves. They have to get attention. I mean, we're talking about it. that's what they need to do. But their founder, Conrad Parker or Parker Conrad, sorry, is a jackass. his, his LinkedIn profile literally says customer support. he's just, he's just a jackass. He's in sort of the mold of Elon and some of the other. Chad (32:22.014) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (32:34.528) CEOs that we talk about, but for some people that's hip and some people that's a buying decision. He fucked up Zenefits. Is this the early stages of him fucking up Rippling? I don't know. It's not a good look. It's a bad look from where I sit and I don't see corporate America embracing this stupidity. Chad (32:36.105) Mm-hmm. Chad (32:41.641) Yes. Chad (32:55.292) Know your audience, kids. Know your audience. Joel (32:59.214) know your audience. And speaking of audience, we're gonna take a quick break. Listen to the sponsors, kids, because there is no show. There is no show without the sponsors. Chad (33:14.206) Holy shit. Joel (33:14.222) All right, Chad, take two of these and call me in the morning. A new study published in the journal of the American medical association or JAMA as the cool kids call it demonstrates, first time we brought up the journal of the American medical association on the show, demonstrates the potential value of LLMs in clinical diagnoses from the study. The LLM alone demonstrated higher performance than both physician groups indicating Chad (33:26.494) Jam-o, baby. Joel (33:43.874) the need for technology and workforce development to realize the potential of physician, artificial intelligence, collaboration, and clinical practice. In short, the bots outperformed the humans. Chad, this one really caught your attention. What are your thoughts? Chad (33:53.086) Mm. Chad (34:00.754) It's not only that the bots outperform the humans, but the humans who were equipped with the bots didn't use the fucking bots. So control group number one was the LLM group. They were the they were the physicians who had the large language model. They scored a median of 60 or 76 percent, 76 percent. The conventional ones, the ones who just continue to do business like they always do. 74 percent. So it wasn't that big of a deal. The large language model by itself. scored 92%. So if group number one actually trusted the large language model, they would have scored significantly higher, but the humans didn't trust the tech. if an LLM has 92 % accuracy rate diagnosing patients, who out there still believes that an LLM can't source screen and schedule interviews for open recs? mean, how many times could companies, how much time could companies save? in the hiring process if you allow the tech to just do those three simple tasks, source, screen, schedule. Another Harvard working study entitled Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier showed that consultants using GPT-4 completed 12 % more tasks, 25 % faster, and produced outputs 40 % higher in quality compared to those not using the AI assistant. So If you're still out there in Chad and cheese podcast listening land and you are still in denial, this is when I got to ask you to do go to the sessions.ai. Okay. That's where we actually sat down with Eileen Kowalski from GM and she talks about how they are already doing this and it's working. Right. So we can't be in denial anymore. And the thing that really gets me here is these are physicians, healthcare. Joel (35:57.678) Mm-hmm. Chad (35:57.842) We could do so much with this. Imagine what we could do also on the recruiting side. You gotta trust it. You gotta trust it. Joel (36:07.746) Yeah, these guys went to these guys and gals went to school longer for longer periods than the most recruiters that I know and still get it wrong. Look, there's some there's some jobs that I can't imagine being fully automated. One is doctor. One is pilot and dentist like anything that like and maybe stripper that that shouldn't ever be automated. So you're right. If if we get to a point in humanity and society where we say, you know what? Chad (36:23.965) Nah. Yeah. Chad (36:28.68) Talk about OnlyFans later. Joel (36:35.276) I got a little ache. want the X-ray. Tell me what the robots say I have. And that's more trusted than what the doctor looking at it says. Certainly the doctors that augment, are going to be probably the most successful, but you gotta trust the debt. gotta trust the robots, right? It sounds like there's a, there's a God complex with doctors, which is not surprising where they say I'm smarter than a robot. and these, this, this data says, no, not, not exactly. so do doctors get to a point where they trust the data and then just, Chad (36:54.236) Of course. Yeah. Joel (37:04.952) follow suit with the, with the patient. don't know. But yes, if we can get to a point where that stuff, and I've been in a Waymo, I'm totally cool with no taxis, drivers, the actual people, like let me get in a car and go where I want to go. recruiting is screwed, long-term because back to the ERE thing and back to the positive, like if 80 % are gone because of this stuff, like that makes it really hard to have a conference. makes it really hard to have products and services beyond a few. Chad (37:21.492) Hahaha Joel (37:34.016) And it kind of makes it hard to do a podcast because robots don't listen to podcasts from what I know. But our listener numbers say people want to know what's going on. What is AI going to like, how do I adapt? How do I learn how to like survive in this world? Maybe that's part of the reason why we're getting a lot of increases in listenership, but you're right. If, if healthcare goes down the road of like, let, let the robots know, what we're doing in 60 minutes had a great story about people that are in. training robots and what cancer looks like and and a, you know, a, a picture and what like certain things. So like, this is where we're going. I think it's, it's for the best. If we can get healthcare quick and easy based on whatever, and the robots could tell us, the OMS can tell us like, I think that's a good world, but it's going to scare a lot of people for sure. Chad (38:23.112) It will, it will. Joel (38:26.25) It will scare a few people. Almost as scary as what Walmart did this week. Walmart has announced changes to its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, continuing a trend among US companies that we've talked about quite a bit on the show. This decision comes amidst legal victories against DEI programs by conservative groups. And a broader corporate retreat from DEI initiatives, including companies like Boeing, Ford, Harley Davidson, et cetera. Walmart shift includes moving away from the term DEI to quote belonging, reflecting a strategic adjustment in response to legal, political, and social dynamics. Chad, I'm guessing you have a few thoughts on this move by Walmart. Chad (39:14.772) I do, but I'm actually going to talk about an expert in this space and her thoughts, because she actually wrote about it last week, and that's my wife, Julie Sowell. She wrote an article called Walmart from Rooster to Chicken. And here's an excerpt. So quote, let's be real. Walmart isn't as clueless as their public statement would suggest. They aren't bowing to public pressure because they care about the public's opinion. If they did, Joel (39:23.907) Yep. Chad (39:42.816) They would then know that most Americans support DEI efforts and prefer to spend money with companies that promote diversity. No, Walmart's retreat isn't about responding to the public. It's about a business decision to scale back on DEI and in anticipation of less enforcement of affirmative action under the incoming administration. They've used the classic excuse of, quote unquote, responsiveness to backtrack on something that they never really believed in. It's all about cutting operational costs so they can fatten up their shareholders' pockets in the next quarter, as you can see in their Q3 earnings report. Classic, classic chicken move, end quote. And she's 100 % right. I I couldn't have written it any better. Whenever, wherever companies believe they can cut corners and throw money back into the bottom line, they're going to do it. And if companies believe they could not be held accountable for workplace fairness and equity, they're going to cut all control measures. And that's what's happening right now. So it's going to be interesting to see how companies actually rein in to ensure that there is fairness and there is equity, because that's how people stay longer without really putting a quote unquote program in a box called DEI. So will Walmart do it or will they just let everything flow to the wind? I guess we'll find out. Joel (41:10.092) Yeah. The answer to all your questions, my son is money. and Julie obviously hit, that one, that nail on the head. what really surprises me about this is Walmart's for everybody. I mean, I like if Harley Davidson says, fuck DI, I mean, it's, it's a tough machismo business. Like most of their buyers give a shit, but everyone shops at Walmart. like it's for everybody and why there isn't what I find interesting. Chad (41:18.355) Yeah. Chad (41:23.764) Yeah. Joel (41:39.982) is there's no voice, there's no voice or entity saying don't shop at Walmart because they don't embrace DI. However, there is a really loud voice, on the other side saying this company embraces DI don't shop there boycott this company service, cetera. And there's a guy named Robbie Starbuck. I don't know if this name rings a bell to you, but he has a huge social media presence and his sole existence is Chad (42:04.788) Uh-uh. Joel (42:09.72) calling out companies, ask, you know, tell talking about boycotts, et cetera. And, if, if you're not familiar with them, this is a Bloomberg story. a Bloomberg tech talk, a reporter that has covered this story and has some really cool insight. want to play that for the, for the audience and for you. Chad (42:15.273) Mm-hmm. Joel (44:20.206) Fear, fear. This is gonna be a 2025 narrative. Business is getting on Trump's good side and he's really good about striking fear, tariffs, merchandise more expensive. What scares Walmart to death is if they can no longer be the lowest cost provider for goods and services. And they wanna not be on. Chad (44:21.812) Yeah. Chad (44:33.748) 2025, 2026, 2027, yes. Joel (44:47.214) Trump's target list, tariff list. Like Apple did a great job of getting iPhones out of the China tariffs. Like they got a pass because Tim Cook played really nice with Donald Trump. And I think a lot of businesses that get stuff from China are going to bow down to Trump. And this is going to be a story for the next four years. Chad (45:09.502) Kiss the ring and fill the Bermuda bank accounts. Joel (45:13.71) It'd be nice if there was an opposite of Starbucks on the other side, but there really isn't, unfortunately. All right, let's take a quick break and OnlyFans, we haven't talked about that in a while. Joel (45:32.206) All right, Chad, it may be, it may be about time for us to announce our only fans page based on some of the numbers that are coming out on this stuff. Sophie rain, a top content creator on only fans has revealed her earnings for one year on the platform. You ready for this? one year, 43,477,695 and one cent. thought the one cent was fun. if she went to Hollywood. The only three actors who could currently boast having a bigger bank account increase than her would be Tom Cruise, Margot Robbie, and Adam Sandler. OnlyFans is getting out of control. Chad, what are your thoughts on Sophie Raine's $43 million year? Chad (46:19.054) I think she's just one of many that we've talked about already. Yes, there are porn stars that are making money on OnlyFans, but we've also talked about teachers and nurses leaving their jobs and making mad cash on OnlyFans. The growth of this platform is mind blowing. And according to Variety, OnlyFans has record revenues and profits in 2023 fiscal year with a total of 6.63 bub-bub-billion in payments. made during that time with a total of 4.12 million content creators. Over 4 million content creators and the average payout to OnlyFans creators is about $1,300 a year. yes, if you want to be a part of that crazy 4 million with some kind of fetish that you want to do, that's entirely up to you. But you keep me out of it, Cheeseman. You keep me out of it. Joel (46:57.87) Yeah. Joel (47:14.938) I want to highlight what you said there. The average income for a creator is $1,300 a year. So by and large, there's a million, about 1.4 million Americans on the platform. so it's not a sure thing that you're going to get rich off of being a creator and only fans, because if 1300 is the average, there are people making $2. I mean, there are like, there's like a really low end. Chad (47:24.777) Mm-hmm. Joel (47:45.326) You know, I guess that nose hair, fetish that knows our fetish isn't catching on. like I thought it would, it's funny. I dug into this a little bit. there are some other stars, porn stars, creators that are calling her like calling bullshit on some of this. apparently she says one fan tipped her $4 million. does that pass the sniff test? I don't know. $4 million for a tip, for being on video. they, they, There's also like a big uproar right now about how OnlyFans is fucking with the porn industry. The porn industry is in trouble because of OnlyFans. Sure. You know, as far as I can tell, Pornhub is doing just fine with views and money. Yeah. Chad (48:30.044) It shouldn't be a problem. can move. They can move over to another storefront. mean, it's yeah, it's just weird. It's you got, you got to go to where the people are at, right? We went to Google. Now we're going to tick tock and we're going to, you know, we're going to chat GPT. mean, things evolve. Joel (48:35.286) Yeah. Yeah. Joel (48:40.387) Yeah. Joel (48:47.342) Yeah, you know, to me, it's, it's just for people, for you and I in a generation who saw their first boob in a Playboy more than likely, like the world that we live in now is so surreal to me. And it's sort of, it's a little bit sad that there's so many, like you can get this stuff for free, but people are paying whatever to see this shit. Anyway, it's, it's a Chad (48:57.948) Mm, yeah. Chad (49:03.848) Rest. Chad (49:13.044) And that $4 million tip, who knows what other deliverables outside of just the OnlyFans stream, right? You never, I mean, you just never know. Joel (49:17.516) Well, yeah, I that's true. It could. Joel (49:23.146) It could be a backdoor to prostitution. I did. said back. Yeah. I, I, yeah. I said back door everybody. Chad (49:27.024) Or who knows? Who knows? Chad (49:32.66) Ha! Joel (49:35.38) All right, Chad, until we have the AI look like real people, I guess OnlyFans will continue to hit the ball out of the park. Which brings us to our dad joke of the week. Are you ready? Are you ready for the dad joke of the week? Chad (49:36.712) Yes. Chad (49:47.602) Hmm, as ready as I can be. Joel (49:55.798) What would the Terminator be called in retirement? What would the Terminator be called in retirement? I'll be back. would the Terminator be called in retirement, Chad? Chad (50:08.742) I don't know. Shit. The extra- Joel (50:09.548) The Exterminator. Get it? The Exterminator. Chad (50:15.188) That's bad. That one is bad. We out. Joel (50:15.839) We out.

Brace yourselves: The Chad & Cheese Podcast  is back, this time with retired Lieutenant General Russell L. Honoré—who proves you can train and lead half a million troops and  drop some epic truth bombs on HR, AI, and America’s obsession with cheap stuff. In this spicy episode, we cover: HR Meets Boot Camp: General Honoré schools us on why leading people isn’t about asking, “You’re good, right?” and walking off like a clueless middle manager. Robots Can’t Cook Gumbo: Automation might make life easier, but it’s not making you a killer bowl of Cajun deliciousness—or fixing that flat tire you’re whining about. Recruitment Woes: From the Army’s “12 teeth rule” (yes, you read that right) to recruiting Gen Z kids glued to their phones, the General doesn’t hold back on what needs fixing. Boomers vs. Gen Z: Growing up poor meant fixing TVs with tinfoil and watching The Lone Ranger  without a picture. Now? Kids need a new flat screen if the remote has dust on it. Mental Health Wake-Up Call: Spoiler alert: If your employee mentions seeing floating elephants, maybe don’t just tell them to get back to work. Sprinkled with Honoré’s signature wit, biting honesty, and a dose of “adapt-or-die” wisdom, this episode delivers laughs, snark, and some much-needed perspective on leadership in a rapidly changing world. Strap in, folks—it’s time to break things (figuratively) and rebuild smarter. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Podcast 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 & Cheese podcast. Joel: All right, let's do this. We are The Chad & Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joel: Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house, and we are privileged to be chatting with retired Lieutenant General Russell L. Honoré. General, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. General Honoré: We'll see. [laughter] Joel: Yes, we will. It's a very low bar in HR for danger. Your level of danger is much different than ours. General Honoré: Y'all have grown up a level where you can associate HR with being dangerous and humorous. That's normally not associated with HR. Joel: They don't. Chad: Which is, yeah, which is why we stick out, which is why we stick out, yeah. So, being a general, US Army, there's a lot to do. You cover a lot of different bases. Today, you talked a lot about HR, 'cause obviously you're in an HR compliance kind of conference, but you felt at home in talking about all of those different things. In coming up through the military, how much did you actually have to deal with personnel, HR, those types of things? General Honoré: Because the Army is about people. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: They get paid minimum wage, that swear and to defend and support and defend the Constitution. That work for about $12 an hour, get deployed all around the world, get their ass shot at. Chad: I know. General Honoré: I have to move frequently. So, the Army's about people. Chad: Yeah, and you moved 25 times, didn't you? General Honoré: It's about mission. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: It's about being on a damn team. So, yeah, I mean, I'm comfortable in this space, not that I know what civilian HR do any more than what I picked up in my graduate courses, but it parallels, it deals with the issues of people, whereas a mission commander, it starts with the people, end with the people. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: If you don't get a mission accomplished and the information that's coming to you from being with the troops, watching the troops, listening to your grapevine, you got your chaplain, you got your sergeant major, you got your NCOs, and then I've always practiced leading by walking around and asking the soldier, how's it going? Then shut your damn mouth and listen. General Honoré: Or how you doing? Whereas I saw a lot of my contemporaries, how you doing? You're doing good, right? Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Well, they answer the old question. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: They're not interested. They ask the question out of... Chad: They're leading it in the witness. General Honoré: Right. How's the child? Good, right? As opposed to, how's the food? Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: How's your room? And listening, and you get a pretty good feel for what's going on in your unit because if you're listening, the troops will tell you. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: I mean, as I said, we asked a lot for them to raise their right hand and support and defend the Constitution of the United States and we're prepared to put them in jail if they don't do it. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: But they do it willingly, at minimum wage, in the outdoors, all weather condition. So you better hell to know people if you're gonna be an effective leader in the Army and you better hell respect your people. Chad: So one thing real quick, when you were your highest command, how many soldiers were under you at that point? General Honoré: We were training and mobilizing a half million troops a year. Chad: Half million troops, okay, so... General Honoré: And over about four years. Chad: Okay. General Honoré: It was every National Guard and Reserve unit that got mobilized or went through sustainment training. We did it in First Army, that was our mission. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: And my ultimate mission was to respond to disasters like Katrina. Chad: Right. General Honoré: But my day job as First Army Commander was preparing troops to mobilize and deploy. Chad: So as you say, going down to talk to the troops, I know, 'cause I was one of those little E2, E3s and the general come down and talk to us. General Honoré: Yeah. Chad: You think of it on the CEO side, 'cause you're the CEO of that company at that point, right? As a brigade, battalion, or battalion brigade. That's scary, right? You really don't wanna say anything that's gonna screw up your day, right? How did you get personable enough to get real with that soldier, knowing that you were the CEO and they are literally just entry-level maybe two, three years in? How did you make that personal connection? 'cause that's important. General Honoré: Remember you were young and inexperienced at one time. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: And how can you connect with that soldier? One of the days I would say, where are you from? What would come out of your towel? Football players cowboys. Just a couple of leading questions. To get to the soldier, to talk about them. And you can see some that will stay away from that because they didn't wanna tell you. They may be embarrassed that they came from a very poor or very humble, but most of them will tell you. Mom, a single mom with four kids. I was the oldest one and I decided to come in the Army so I could help out. And that's okay. I mean, I was poor, came from a family of 12, but I think that gives you an attribute. And I see in a lot of kids compared to, when you're poor, you learn how to fix shit. Chad: Yes, you do. General Honoré: So you learn how to adapt. Like when I was growing up, we initially had two TVs, one with sound, one with a picture. And the youngest and the dumbest would hold the aluminum on the antenna so we could watch the Long Ranger. You adapt and overcome. You walk in the room now and the kid will say, hey, we need a new TV. General Honoré: There's no picture. Shit, we watch TV all the time with no picture 'cause you couldn't get a... You just listen. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: It's not like you couldn't figure out Long Ranger's about to pop somebody in the ass, you know what I mean? You just listen. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: You adapt 'cause the story is still there. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: It's either that or listen to the crickets on the front porch. But we come from a generation... I come from the boomers raised by the greatest generation who were raised by the silent generation. The silent generation was some hard song bitches, boy. They were born in the pandemic in World War I, survived that, survived the depression and fought World War II. Chad: Obstacle, after obstacle, after obstacle. General Honoré: So you don't tell the silent generation like, well, I think I need two tires. I need a whole set of tires for my car to walk out. They say, boy, you need one goddamn tire. That's all you need I mean. Oh, you don't tell them, well I had a flat tire, I need a new set. No, they say, hey, let's fix this. Let's take that tire off, we're gonna fix it. Same thing with the greatest generation. Would you walk up to a Gen Z and say, what's the problem? I need new tires. Why? 'Cause I got a flat. Well, bullshit. I was raised by the greatest. Let's go fix the one tire. General Honoré: Then we'll go from there. But it's a different how each generation adapted and the impact it made on society. And as a boomer, the greatest generation, they didn't have much patience for you 'cause what the hell are you complaining about? Chad: Oh, it feels like the boomers, we were raised by boomers, so it feels like that's kind of like my dad didn't have much patience. General Honoré: No, we put a case of whoop-ass on you. We'd put you in the back of the station wagon with no seatbelt on and smoke a god damn cigar while we were driving down the road. We didn't give a shit. We drank too much, cursed too much. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: We'll tell you to go take your ass outside and come back when it get dark. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Or when we turn the light on, you can come in. Go find something to do, drink out of a hose. Go find something. We ain't giving you no god damn cold drink, you know? Chad: You're clearly a fan of people and you made a comment about automation that you're not such a fan. I think it was something around a robot can't make a good bowl of gumbo. What are your thoughts on automation and where the world is going with more automated tools and AI? General Honoré: I think we gotta adapt. The first 10 years ago, everybody was pissy as hell about the robot, the robot taking the job. Well, the robot didn't take nobody's job. They made something, they made something better and they made some things quicker, but we're still standing. There's a lot of... I could take you back a generation and tell you what technology. When you look at the Ninth Ward that was all destroyed during Katrina, all those poor houses, every four houses empty. And one time the Ninth Ward was a middle-class neighborhood because it was a longshoreman. Chad: Okay. General Honoré: They got paid well, but it was all brick, bolt, freight then. Pallets, big bags. Then along came the container. When the container arrived, it destroyed the Ninth Ward. The guy lost his job. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: That's a clear case where technology didn't bend and it broke it. Chad: Decimated the entire class. General Honoré: And by the time Katrina came, all those guys had aged out and the kids and grandkids owned their homes and they couldn't take care of them properly. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Multiple heirs to the property. But when I was 12 years old, it was a straight up middle-class neighborhood. People had cars, they had a grocery store in every corner, a barbershop and a deli and garage. It was a functional community. General Honoré: And by the time Katrina hit, it was one out of every four houses were abandoned because when that economy transitioned and left them in the city of New Orleans, when they transitioned the port, they tried to go to a tourist economy. That's how we ended up with the Superdome. That's how we ended up with the convention center and had the World City Fair thing here. General Honoré: When you go from a job, union job with benefits to their kids being in the entertainment field, either playing music or working in hospitality, putting them drinks out, cooking. Chad: More commercial. General Honoré: Those are minimum few benefits. Chad: Right. General Honoré: And it changed the community. So when you go from that as an example, when we modernize the ports, to go to containers where you do the same thing all with machines where you had 50 men, you might have two spotting the machine and the thing go about. We've done okay with that because it reduced the cost of ship and handling a product. And we like cheap shit. America like cheap shit. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: We do. General Honoré: We don't care where the shit come from long as it's the cheapest stuff we can buy. We like it. And when the robot came up, there was a lot of discussion about how many people it was gonna take. General Honoré: Well, I've been in automobile assembly line still a lot of people out there working. But what they're doing now is they're doing all the sub-assembly breakdown 'cause that shit's arriving in America already made, but it got to be unpacked. So where you lost people at $25 an hour, you got five working at $18 an hour. General Honoré: Less skilled, but you got... And then you got to seal the packing and send it back because it's not cost effective if you don't use it again. So the robots doing the tap, tap, tap, but to get that robot to do that, all that stuff has got to be in place for multiple countries and multiple packaging. Some of it's plastic, some of it's cardboard, some of it's all kinds of stuff. General Honoré: And all that has to be put back in the container and sent back to make the business profitable. So we go now to AI, which is more of a knowledge based thing. And I don't pretend to be an expert on it, but basically it's just a collection of word salad of information. And it's a pretty damn good job. You went into CP Chat and said, tell me about this chat group, this HR chat box. It'll put some shit out about you. Chad: Easily, yeah. General Honoré: And all it's done is it's done a collection of adjective, verbs, and pronouns. Chad: And it's made contextual sense out of it. So you sit on boards, correct me if I'm wrong, boards of companies, and you obviously advise CEOs and boards and whatnot. So what are you seeing out there now with the landscape? Obviously the election's coming and a lot of people are waiting and they're kind of on pins and needles to see what the hell happens. But beyond that, what do you see in the landscape when it comes to business? Is it as robust as we're being told? General Honoré: I'm not quite sure I understand your question. Say it again. Chad: So the economy. General Honoré: The economy, okay. Chad: Right. And you're talking to these CEOs and whatnot and getting vibes from them on what's actually happening. Some are telling us that literally, we're waiting for all hell to break loose or the dam to burst. One or the other, depending on who get... General Honoré: Okay, let's start at the top of the food chain. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: The stock market is just continuing to grow. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: And value to investors. It's only done in a pretty secure environment where people feel pretty secure about investing in it and continue to bring value. I think some of our... During COVID, we went through this with all the essential workers and what happened when they did show up. Let's say a food chain. It was always screw them. We'll pay them $12. What happens when they don't show up, bro? Chad: And we saw what happened. Pie chain got busted. General Honoré: So you see all over town now, you see food chains that pay you $17 an hour to go flip burgers. I think what it is, it takes you 22 to break even in the economy. Chad: Yeah, depending on where you're at. General Honoré: And then that's even short, yeah. So you go... I went to Popeye's last night and bought a couple dirty rice, what they call ke six fucking dollars. General Honoré: And that's ridiculous. You can buy a whole chicken for $6. And this is just rice with chicken livers in it. Joel: Popeye's is good, but it's not that good. General Honoré: I'm I right? They are good. So they have said, well, we're gonna pay our workers more and we gonna pass the price on. And that's fair enough. But the price of fast food and it's starting to buy them, it don't make sense for people to pay $8 a night. There's people like me that remember... When the hamburger was 50 cents. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Now we paying $3 for a plain hamburger at McDonald's. Chad: You're lucky. General Honoré: Wait a minute. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: It is not correlating. Chad: Yeah. That's what happens when we... General Honoré: People are starting to back off from them. Chad: Yeah. When we have a McDonald's on every show, on every corner, that's what happens. General Honoré: You look at the big wall or the big drug stores. They're closing them. Some of them are left and right. And you say, but when they were building all of 'em, did it make sense to put 'em a mile apart? Who the fuck was thinking about that? Chad: Right across the street from each other. Yeah. General Honoré: But you go back and you figure out them. Somebody was grabbing real estate. They were grabbing real estate. They bought out the competition, in some cases all they were doing was grabbing real estate and now they sat on prime corners. And every small, now I saw that they gonna close a thousand stores. They cash it out on real estate, moving that product to, they have four stores in the town. They'll go to two, sell the real estate. So as a part of the market, I don't understand, but back to AI, I'm not afraid of it. Wish I knew more about it. But as with all emerging technologies, humans adapt to 'em. It's like there's a story we told used to tell about change. The guy who made buggy whips made the best buggy whips and carriages in New York and England. And people would order them from all over the country. Then Henry Ford come out with the goddamn car and he see, so Charles, you need to adjust your prices on how many buggies and buggies you continue to make. He was a tycoon. They had to take up money to bury him. 'Cause he wouldn't change. He kept building them. He wouldn't change. They had to take up money in the family of the bury him. Chad: But we've always been taught, and I heard different today that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And we're in a different age, which is. General Honoré: Then they broke. You gotta fix it. You gotta break it. Chad: Yeah. You gotta break it, right? If it ain't broke, break it. General Honoré: Break it. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Because you gotta keep up with change... You can't act like people are not sensitive to what they get their paid and their benefits. And you got, some companies are real asshole. They're pushing people out in their 50s, 'cause that's when women get sick all of a sudden, hey, we are zeroing your position out. The fuckers know that she's subject to breast cancer or, and that's the kinda stuff that scare me when AI might pull up, is people that might have some co-mobilities 'cause they go after women like that. Now, did this eliminate their position because that drags out the cost that they gotta co-pay. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: And them fuckers are doing that left in right now. And your non-union soft skill jobs like education, medical and that's the piece that scare me where they can use AI and screen out. By the time this employee gets 60, they need to be gone because of coming to co-mobilities. Or by the time they get 45. And the way we do it, we eliminate the job. Joel: I've always been fascinated, I'll let you out on this. Recruiting is hard. Recruiting for a job that you might die is particularly hard. Chad: Especially hard. Yeah. Joel: What is the military secret sauce to recruit young men to come work for them? General Honoré: The greatest story we had is connecting with a young person who, uncle, father, brother, mom was in the military. They're already sold by the time we get 'em, the majority of our recruits come from somebody was in the family, was in the military. Joel: This guy. Chad: So the thing though is that the army has been missing their recruiting targets, right? So that's how we used to do things, right? And we need to break it. How do we break it? That's the hard part. General Honoré: You know what the standard was for World War II to be in the Army? Chad: Probably not much of one. General Honoré: You had to have 12 fucking teeth. [laughter] General Honoré: And [0:17:14.9] ____ a World War. Joel: Are you serious? That that was it. 12 teeth. General Honoré: Yeah. Didn't have to read to be able to see, but your dental plan is you had to have at least 12 teeth. Chad: And today? General Honoré: It's like you gotta have high school diploma, pass the GT and no fat on your ass. You gotta be able to do run and do so many pushups. And I said for years the Army Bill Soldier. Chad: Yes. General Honoré: So you give me a kid that so weight, no problem. Chad: I'll knock 40 pounds off his ass on heartbeat. General Honoré: We'll deal with that. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: But they weren't taking them because they were overweight or they couldn't do 50 pushups. That's so we teach. Chad: We're being too selective is what you're saying. There's no reason. General Honoré: A head up in the air. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: The economy was bad. The COVID hit people, retracted kids graduate on Zoom and shit. They lost that connection. The recruiters lost some contact. They stopped listening to grandpa's story. All that kind of made a dip. All that made a dip. And I said, hey, we built soldiers. I don't give a fuck what kind of shape they in. If they got a willing mind, we'll take 'em. We'll work with 'em... General Honoré: What kind of kid gonna sign up to you and say, I'm gonna submit to you in pre-basic training with the promise. If I make it to it, I'm gonna allow you to put me in 22 more weeks of hell. Without a phone, without my girlfriend, without my wife, without my car. I want that some bitch. Chad: Oh. Yeah. And it is one I the best public service program we have in the United States today because we take a bunch of these kids. I was one of 'em. 18 years old, six days out of high school. I was at base training? General Honoré: We're still doing dumb shit. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Oh, you smoke marijuana. You shouldn't have come. Get the fuck outta here, man. General Honoré: We had to get to drink a quarter whisk every night and you gonna tell his kid if you smoke marijuana, he can't come in the fucking Army. Fuck you. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: And they started that. Oh well, can we get the three urinalysis test to make sure stand still yet. Get the fuck past it. Half of the Congress smoke weed. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: And still smoke it. Chad: Yeah, common sense approach. General Honoré: But you tell the kid, hey, oh, you admitted to smoking weed. Oh, we can't have you in the army. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: It was another one. I felt good last week when I was division commander, I had a major in my aviation battalion. Who investigation had started before we left, but it was an administrative thing. So he came on the career doing a good job. Then the package catch up with him, his wife submitted to the CID and the MPS, a video of him doing a homosexual act. We had to discharge that fucking major. Chad: Why? General Honoré: 'Cause that was a rule at the time when that was a don't ask, don't tell. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: Well, what'd he do last week? He said, Hey, fucked up. We fucked up. You can give me honorable discharge? You come back in, go apply for your veteran's benefit. But we knew what the law said. Chad: Yeah. General Honoré: You think I wanted to get rid of that agent? Chad: Oh, hell no. Yeah. Does he mean... General Honoré: I didn't know it I saw him. I'd flown with the guy I didn't fucking know. But the rule was since the shit came up with the tape and all that, because it was, but if you tell, you had to go. So, I mean, we've evolved as a nation, obviously. So that being said, when you talk about recruiting, you talking about retention, you talking about we gotta evolve in World War II. We took him in, we got em. We gotta take 'em as we got 'em. General Honoré: These kids have been through a lot. They survived COVID. They've been through, up and down the economy. They've seen their parents go through all that fentanyl shit. That shit is that shit. Fucking police depart, man. You got three or something died. They, you know how many widows and babies and moms and dads and 300 a day. General Honoré: And we were losing that many in a war. The country would be going crazy. We lose 20 a day of suicide and we still ain't solve that problem 'cause we don't recognize mental health as an illness. If you say, I got a 2D, okay, go ahead on Joe. Go get that two taken care of, boss. I ain't feeling good today. I'm seeing fucking little elephants floating around in the air. Well, fuck you, man. Go to your desk. Get to work. What the fuck are you talking about with elephants floating in the fucking air? General Honoré: Fuck you, get to work. You know, I said, my knee hurt my knee playing basketball last night. I need to go say, okay. He come in and sit. Chad: Go TMC. General Honoré: Man, I'm not feeling well. I feel like I wanna hurt myself. Oh man. Go see the chaplain. Go see the priest. We don't recognize. All we missed the nonverbal cry for help. Why is this guy yelling and screaming at everybody? This is not him or her? What's going on here? We don't pick up on it. We don't pick up on it. And we didn't act on it. Chad: We gotta care. And that's where, going all the way back to that first question is you're a people person. And that's where you are focused in on. So these things obviously make sense to somebody like you, but a lot of people who only care quarter to quarter profits to profits. They're not focusing on the people. They're just trying to focus on the profits. General Honoré: Well, that's still their own fault. That still their own shortness and organization that spend more time on process and on procedure in people will fall short. Joel: Well, general, it was a privilege to sit down with you today. Thank you for your service. That was retired Lieutenant General Russell Honoree, Chad. That's another one in the can. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Chad: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast, the Chad the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs to people you don't even know. And yet you're listening it's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar blue nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any who, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or whatever. You listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.jetcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese is so weird. We out.

Forget the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade—this week, The Chad and Cheese Podcast  serves up a sizzling platter of Jive Turkeys! Join Joel "White Meat Cheeseman" and Chad "Pass the Stuffing Sowash" as they skewer the year's most cooked-up corporate blunders and baffling business missteps. From public companies stuck in reverse to CFOs selling shares faster than leftover pumpkin pie, no turkey is safe. Highlights include Art "The Dart" Zeile's impressive ability to keep a stock price as flat as a pumpkin pie crust, and ZipRecruiter's epic dive, complete with CFO fire sales and an AI "savior" named Phil (spoiler: Phil can't save this feast). But the real cranberry on top? Chad's fiery rant, while Joel carves into the corporate trend of quietly rebranding DEI while corporate support slips away faster than gravy on a dry turkey. Add a sprinkle of international flair with guest contributors from Emi in the UK, Lieven in Belgium, and Mo from Hawaii where they are dishing out their own "turkeys of the year," and you've got a buffet of biting humor, sharp insights, and (of course) dad jokes about cranberry sauce blushing. Enjoy! 🦃 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:30.424) Gobble Gobble and pass the mashed potatoes. Hey boys and girls, it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel White Meat Cheeseman. Chad (00:39.569) This is Chad. Give me that stuff and so watch. Joel (00:43.31) And on this week's episode, forget the Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade, we've got all the jive turkeys you need. Let's do this. Joel (01:03.862) Yeah. That obviously from trading places for the kids out there that don't know it. one of the few Thanksgiving era. go watch it. Jamie Lee Curtis is worth, worth the whole show. If nothing else, Jamie, curse and Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd are pretty good too. Yeah. So I woke up to 29 degrees here, Chad, in, in the Midwest. You look like you're a little more comfortable there in Portugal. Chad (01:03.995) So close to Thanksgiving. Chad (01:12.859) you don't know it, go watch it. Chad (01:21.989) Yeah, they're not, they're not. Chad (01:31.633) Yeah, it's a little sunny here. know, so, we're ready. It's, it's currently what we'd like to call 20 degrees. That's in Celsius, my friend. It's around 70, 70ish, but it's, it's pretty nice. a nice little walk out by the boardwalk today. Last night actually had kind of like a pseudo Thanksgiving with all my, my buddies who I play paddle with beer, burgers, just. Joel (01:46.509) Yeah. Chad (01:59.065) a bunch of food, but we have a real Thanksgiving coming up with a couple of Americans and then also just a variety of people from different countries happening on Thursday. Joel (02:07.32) Yeah. That sounds like a friends giving chat. Sounds like you had a friends giving. Now were those turkey burgers? No, no. Yeah. Chad (02:11.541) yes. Chad (02:15.011) No, no, we've got turkey coming, turkey coming. So yeah, we just had the burgers. Joel (02:21.496) So you know in the States, Turkey is all over the place. Every grocery store, it's easy to find. Is it tougher to find in Portugal? Yeah. Chad (02:24.796) yeah. God. yeah, and you're not going to get those big genetically altered like, Joel (02:31.63) Yeah, the steroid freak turkeys. Yeah. Chad (02:36.869) You're not getting those. You're not getting those. We don't have pardons over here. We don't need any of that shit, right? Because we're, you know, just, you know, turkeys on the menu, just not off. Joel (02:43.692) Yeah. so many turkeys, they have free turkeys places like spend a hundred bucks. We'll give you free Turkey. Like there's tons of free stuff. I'm almost thinking like we should give away free Turkey on the show, but I think the, the, shipping of that would be way too much of a headache. So we're sticking with the easy stuff. in case you guys don't know this, this, this is our drive Turkey episode. we'll explain exactly what that means later, but this is a little bit unconventional. We're going to skip shout outs. Chad (03:09.745) Please. Joel (03:14.33) and we're going to, guess, pimp our sponsors here real quick. So Chad, not free turkeys, but we've got free stuff. Tell them what they can win by signing up. Chad (03:21.051) free stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking about maybe next year doing, because we can do Instacart, do free turkeys through Instacart. Anyway, we'll talk about that. Joel (03:31.136) If you'd like to sponsor that, please message us. Chad (03:34.595) Talk to us, talk to us. If you want to win free stuff, kids, you to get a chadcheese.com slash free. You can win t-shirts, those glorious chad & cheese t-shirts with ERIN App on the back, sponsored by ERIN app, bourbon barrel aged syrup from our buddies up north. That's right, Canada at Keeyora. Then we have beer from Aspen Tech Labs, craft beer delivered to your doorstep. That's right. Joel (03:36.046) Talk to us. Chad (04:03.247) Be careful, you might see Cheeseman dropping off beer. Whiskey, two bottles of whiskey, two bottles from TextKernel slash our friends at Bullhorn. And if it is your birthday, it is time for rum with Plum, but you can't win unless you play chatgeez.com slash free. Joel (04:09.654) yeah. Joel (04:15.326) yeah. Joel (04:26.094) That's right, Chad. Celebrating another trip around the sun listeners, Mason Wong, Nicole Adamson, Chris King, Neil Dunwoody, Deborah Schoggingarten. I probably mispronounced that. Frederick Patton, Thomas Toomey, Anan Natarajan, Dina Perrofer-Piro, Steve White, Claire Davis, Connell, Michael Goldberg, Susan Burns. Chad (04:36.465) Excuse me? What? Chad (04:49.349) Yes. Joel (04:49.354) And Alex Murphy, I'll celebrate another year around the sun. And by the way, Chad, we've been crushing the bourbon giveaways lately. We are crushing, like people are getting some good shit is all I'm saying. We've, we've upped our game on that bull horn and bull horn and text kernel. Thank you. Chad (04:54.182) Yes! Chad (05:03.345) It's all we do. mean, great craft beer, the best syrup, the best beer, the best whiskeys, the best t-shirts. I mean, come on kids. That's why you gotta go to ChadCheese.com slash free. It's pretty simple. And also the best football results. Unfortunately, last week just sucked ass because it was bi-week. But, but, but it obviously didn't hurt me as much as I thought it Joel (05:14.53) Yep, yep, and after, yep. Joel (05:22.198) It was my week. Yes. Joel (05:27.404) Yeah, I need some of the good bourbon, cause I, I took a little hit this week. I slipped from the number one spot again, factory fix, endorsing and sponsoring our unhealthy habits. this is your leaderboard heading into, I don't know. Was it week 13? We got three weeks left until the playoffs. your leaderboard looks like this Dean, the daddy Mac Mack roll. The man from down under is on top, ladies and gentlemen, showing us, showing us Americans how to. Chad (05:52.101) Killing it. Killing it! Joel (05:56.098) how to do this thing. I fall to the number two spot. Still pretty comfortable with my playoff chances. I was beaten by number three, David Stiefel, this week. Yeah, yeah. But the week is tough. This is a tough week to win. You got a lot of people off this week. You're in the number four spot, Chad, with a bullet. liked what you did this week. Kristy Lisbon, Jennifer Terry-Tharp. Chad (06:13.159) yeah. yeah. Joel (06:23.456) Laura Martinelli, Keith the Commish Sonderling. got him this week. Number nine, Action Jackson Dawquist. Number 10, Dena Pero for Pyros. Number 11, Sean Horton, here's a who. And my God, who is it again? And the. Chad (06:34.544) Ooh. Chad (06:40.523) not again. Joel (06:45.214) Adam, if you need help, go to YouTube. It's a new site search, search fantasy football help. And it'll tell you how to like take someone from a bench to the starting lineup. It's not, it's not rocket science. My friend here's, here's to you. It's an international sandwich. got Aussie on top. got Scotland on the bottom. Embarrassing, embarrassing the country, country greatly. Well, okay. So normally we would do news here. Chad (07:00.303) It's simple. Yeah. Chad (07:04.475) Click a button. Joel (07:14.498) But our jive turkey show, we're mixing it up this year. First of all, I want to say, what is a jive turkey? in the course of bringing on some guests this year, we've learned that maybe not everyone knows what jive turkey is. So AI, I went out to chat GPT and I said, define jive turkey for me. so it, so it's slang popularized in the seventies. and it means basically someone who's full of shit. I added the shit. It's more like full of it. Cause chat GPT is proper like that or. Chad (07:19.505) Yes. Chad (07:27.258) especially in Europe. Joel (07:43.136) not genuine, AKA someone or something that's just a sucker. That's just like, just bad. Okay. So, so this year, we're going to do two turkeys each, Chad and I, and we brought along, some of our, our friends in high places or low places, depending on who it is to, to chime in on their turkeys, their jive turkeys, from this year. we've got leaving. Chad (07:43.163) Yes. Chad (07:48.945) Ooh, I'm gonna get you sucker. Chad (07:55.345) Mm-hmm. Joel (08:08.344) From house of HR, if you hear, if you'll start your show, you definitely know Lieven. And he was on our weekly show a week back. got Emi Beredugo again, another, consistent guest on the show and, Mo Clough cloth. Did I say that correctly? Clock cloth. Clough. Yeah, just Mo. That's all I know. Mo Mo is what I know. Chad (08:23.534) Wiley Clough, just Mo. We're rebranding her as Mo. That's the rebrand. Joel (08:33.376) I like it. It's easy. I like easy, Chad. I like easy. I like easy. All right. And without further ado. Chad (08:34.565) Okay, that's good, Chad (08:44.411) Turkeys! Joel (08:47.214) All right. So I'm going here. my first jive turkey of 2024, the artful Dodger Art, The Dart, the modern art masterpiece Art Zeile CEO at DHI, more commonly known as dice or clearance and or clearance jobs. we'll focus mostly on dice here, cause that's the main property when art took the reins back in 2018, the stock traded at around a dollar 75 a share today, Chad. Joel (09:17.034) It trades, wait for it, at about a dollar 75 a share. in six short years, ART has been able to move the stock, not whatsoever. So way to go, way to go ART. Yeah, let's see. What's more, the CFO just left. The whole thing is riddled with incompetency. They've published in 2024, a total of, wait for it Chad, five. Chad (09:29.541) He's done nothing. Chad (09:37.105) Cheers. Joel (09:45.966) Press releases, they've done five press releases as a public company in 2024. And the last, the last PR that they dropped was in April. So I don't know if they've just took, took the year off or what. while every tech company on the planet is getting more efficient, DICE has increased its operations staff in the last year, almost a hundred percent operations, not development, not sales. Joel (10:12.584) operations. Yeah, that's, that's kind of a mystery to me too. in 2023, they had a market cap of $145 million today. That market cap is $84.5 million. And I'm not really good at math, but I know that 84 and a half is less than 145. yeah. So art art has had six years to turn this thing around. Chad (10:22.257) Mmm. Chad (10:37.371) Yeah, no, you'd be right, you'd be right. Joel (10:42.326) And it's still a pile of steaming dog shit sprinkled with cat turds. this, this jive turkey is totally cooked. Unfortunately, no one wants this job. So it looks like we're stuck with art for the foreseeable future, but this jive turkey is to you art. It's, fun watching the demise of a once great job. Chad (10:53.681) No. Chad (11:05.018) I wonder what his salary is because, I mean, they've done nothing, so he deserves nothing. I mean, seriously. Joel (11:18.252) Meanwhile, on the quarterly earnings report. Chad (11:24.24) Alright. Joel (11:24.494) You're still invited on the show art. If you want to come on the show and talk to us, you're more than welcome to, to defend yourself. Chad (11:31.631) Yeah, yeah. I want to know. I want to know about the first time he said he'd come on the show and then he ran out the back door at TA Tech. Anyway, anyway, OK, my first one done and this is might be a surprise to you, Joel, but my first jive turkey goes to zip recruiter. Yes, that's no surprise. No surprise whatsoever. Joel (11:48.661) Yeah. Chad (11:56.433) As you all remember, reported by the AIM group earlier this month, ZipRecurters revenues declined by 25% year over year with a net loss of $2.6 million compared to a net income of $24 million in the prior year quarter. Zip recorded its second net loss in three quarters, while competitors like Indeed are reporting gains. Then last week, you're going to love this, Timothy Yarbrough, Zip's EVP and Chief Financial Officer, we know them as the CFO, sold over 6012 shares of Zip Class A stock, which adds to the amount that he sold in October when Little Timmy sold 6013 shares. October, November, selling, selling, selling. So when the CFO starts selling off shares and tranches, like this, you got to wonder about the health of ZipRecruiter or maybe, or maybe he's just buying a super deluxe Joel Cheesman-like swimming pool for the backyard. Who knows? But remember kids, remember kids, we're not financial planners or experts here on The Chad and Cheese podcast, but the optics aren't great when Zip is poising for stock buybacks, revenues are experiencing a downward spiral. The CFO reportedly sold shares in October and November plus... There's no way in hell Zip's AI powered savior, Phil, can save ZipRecruiter from me giving them a jive turkey this year. Jive turkey goes to ZipRecruiter. Joel (13:36.75) Definitely jive to come on recruit holdings write a check write a check bring them in the fold zip recruiter glass door and indeed the trifecta for sure You failed to mention Chad and I had to check this because I knew this was on your list of jive turkeys You remember the talent all-stars podcast that that's a recruiter launched this year. Yeah, how could you forget? It's it's lighting up the the airwaves. It's lighting up the airwaves So so this thing launched in August Chad (13:39.739) Hahaha Chad (13:44.398) don't do it. don't do it. Chad (13:55.885) my god! my god! This is the president, right? Joel (14:06.11) August, this is a public company with about 1500 employees. As of August, they have 17 ratings on Apple. They have six ratings on Spotify, which means the kids love it. The kids are loving the podcast. And on their YouTube podcast channel, they're generating after 11 videos, I think, an average of a hundred views per show. And they did one with FedEx that was sort of the lion's share of views. Everything's in that. Chad (14:33.267) wow, yeah. Joel (14:34.446) Everything else is in that 35 to 50 kind of range, but they should be really proud with what they've put together. They must be emailing all their employers and all their job seekers to check out the show because they're getting such traction on this podcast. If you want to learn how to do a podcast, we're available. We'll take your money. We do advisories. We'll do some consulting. We'll help you out. We'll help you out. Don't worry. Don't worry. Chad (14:50.417) I just love how. You Chad (15:00.177) It just blows my mind. just like any, like anybody wants to listen to a CEO or a president or anybody in the C-suite, right? Talk about their stupid fucking company every month. I mean, they just don't, right? It's all bullshit. It's all fluff. Nobody cares. But you're right. For them not to be able to at least harness all of the marketing power that they have. Joel (15:10.2) president I think is, I don't know who's doing it. Mm-hmm. Joel (15:29.848) Mm-hmm. Chad (15:30.043) They look like total idiots. They look like total fucking idiots. So yes, that's just an additional on top of the jive turkey list. Joel (15:37.176) They look like total jive turkeys, Chad. And with that, we'll take a quick break and come back to our guests jive turkeys of 2024. Chad (15:40.121) Hahaha Chad (15:46.182) Yes. Chad (15:52.421) All right, I'm excited about this. Joel (15:54.338) I love the guests because it means we do less work. I love it. Yeah. The fact that we can get some other voices. I mean, what I meant to say was it's nice to have some diversity of thought and some new, new opinions on here. so. Chad (15:56.145) I love it. Chad (16:06.041) Except for Sergey and Trisha who do all the production work they've got more work to do now. We love you guys. We love you. We love you. Trisha deserves not a jive turkey but a nice big plump jive turkey and so does and so does Sergey they both they both deserve it. All the trimmings. Joel (16:11.062) Yeah, that's true. Yeah, they're listening. Happy Thanksgiving Trish. Joel (16:23.372) Yeah. Yeah. Celebrating Thanksgiving. I'm sure there and, yeah. So, Emi Beredugo, is up first. you know her from guesting on the show for a couple of years. She's out in the UK. So we wanted to get a little international flavor with our guests this year. So from the UK, this is Emi Beredugo. Chad (16:36.411) Love her. Chad (20:55.671) Amen, sister. That's what I'm talking about. Joel (20:58.158) Emi Beredugo everybody. Chad (21:00.689) She hit all the points. She did a really good job and hitting all the points. The thing that drives me crazy about this is that she was right with regard to managers needing to train up and to learn. mean, we've got to evolve not just as workers, but also as leaders. And they aren't. But it's also exposing all of these companies who are not focused on outcomes and completion of tasks. and projects because those can be done anywhere. Not to mention you can also see if it's happening or not anywhere. And I'll finish up with this. Spotify chief HR officer, CHRO, Katrina Berg stated, quote, you can't spend a lot of time hiring grownups and then treat them like children, end quote. Joel (21:34.734) Mm-hmm. Joel (21:47.214) I like that. And in light of Spotify, a few other companies that are tech companies are doing the remote only, Shopify, Airbnb, Deal in our space is also getting some, some highlights from that. So shout out to them for doing the right thing. And let's name some names. Emmy's way too polite. And by the way, our show sounds so much smarter in a British accent. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Let's, let's talk about Amazon's Andy Jassy. Chad (22:12.017) Thank you, Ami. Thank you. Joel (22:16.462) let's talk about Disney's Bob Iger, JP Morgan's Jamie Diamond and your favorite the D to the JSAW Goldman Sachs, a few of the companies that are mandating back to the office. So we'll name a few names and don't forget Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who is blaming Google's decline on work from home while some others tech companies are doing, are doing just fine with all that. So thanks to Emmy for, for chiming in. Chad (22:25.893) Not that guy. Chad (22:32.859) Mm-hmm. Chad (22:37.137) I'm an idiot. Yeah. Joel (22:44.632) I don't know who you want next. want Lieven? A little Lieven love? Let's do, or let's do, let's do Mo. Let's do ladies first. Maybe give me some Mo. All right. Mo is, Mo is in paradise apparently. she's in Hawaii. All right. Let's hear from Mo. Chad (22:48.731) Give me some Mo! Chad (22:56.955) She's in Hawaii. Joel (24:02.019) Mm-hmm. Joel (26:04.888) Why do you hate seniors, Chris Hyams? Why do you hate seniors is what I want to know. Yeah, he is one. He's way over the hill. What's funny about this is indeed try so hard to be like the Marvel heroes, the Avengers of diversity. And they end up looking like the destroyers of diversity. So come on, man. Come on, man. I love that she brought up, yeah, did they just get caught? Chad (26:10.417) He is one. Apparently he is one. Chad (26:26.257) Yeah, bullshit, saying the quiet part out loud. Joel (26:37.038) and they have a crisis comms team, why don't they call us? Like, why don't they, like, I don't get it. Why? We're not that bad. We're not that bad. Chad (26:43.045) They, yeah, they know better. They know better. Yeah, I think, well, it's that and thanks so much, Mo, for taking Indeed, so I didn't have to, but I definitely have to point out the failed programs that they had this year that they tried their ass off of PPA, PPSA. But kids, I want you to know, and this is what I tell my kids, when you start, stop learning, you're dead. I mean, you're done. Your brain atrophies, your body atrophies, everything, you got to. to keep learning. So don't listen to Indeed and their 18 to 25 year olds who are writing content over there who got caught with their pants down. Joel (27:21.718) And keep living large like Moe. Good Lord. How much I used to be, I used to want to be you. Now I want to be her for God's sakes. All right. Let's, let's get to our favorite, favorite Belgian, Lieven what's he got to say in regards to his Turkey. Chad (27:24.821) yeah. Way to go, Mo. Joel (33:06.254) All right, here we go. Chad (34:04.057) Way to go, Lieven. Joel (34:04.238) Stupid shit from a Europeans point of view. Gotta love that. Chad (34:07.633) Yeah, well, I mean, so it's interesting because just what Emmy was talking about, but this is at a different angle, right? So you have you have companies who are saying you got to get back to work. And that is for there are a variety of reasons why companies are doing that. But the Dutch government's doing it for a singular reason, and that's because they want more taxes. So why don't they change the tax scheme if that's the issue as a chart, as opposed to trying to force people back into the damn office? That's just weird. Joel (34:36.009) Or make it more appealing for people to immigrate and easier to immigrate to the Netherlands. That might be a solution that would work. think that may be on your agenda for a conversation after we come back from the road, but Europe's going through some shit like higher retirement age in France. England's not letting anybody in every, all the people are leaving because they don't want to be, they want to be in the EU and not in the UK. So all kinds of fun stuff that you are living from Portugal in the EU. Chad (34:40.867) Hmm, hmm. Who knows? Who knows? Chad (34:59.158) huh. Yep. Chad (35:03.261) in the EU. Joel (35:06.062) Well, thanks to our guests. appreciate that. it's a little bit of flavor on jive turkey episode here. Let's take a quick break and Chad and I will get to our final jive turkeys. Chad (35:11.787) Ha Joel (35:21.986) All right, Chad, hit him. Chad (35:22.201) All right. Save the best for last, kids. So this one is going to be very clinical. OK, so sharpen your pencils and listen up. My last jive turkey ghost is something that seems to be on the horizon with the next administration and will directly impact recruiting, retention and funding infrastructure just for starters. So my last jive turkey goes to mass deportation. What's the estimated cost? of deportation, mass deportation, a one time 315 billion estimated cost for mass deportation includes, includes arrests, detention, legal processing and deportation. Not talking about the fucking optics that are going to happen, kids in cages. The longer term plan will cost $1 trillion. What's the impact? This is the thing that really matters guys. According to the American Immigration Council, mass deportations could have significant economic impacts, potentially reducing annual GDP by 4.2 % to 6.8%, which means we'd be negative GDP. Negative GDP. How do we lose GDP? Another great question. Thanks, listener. Here's a quote from an employer that hits home. Quote, everything is the wild, wild west. Just watch and wait for a state wide mandate for e-verify. And then hiring is about to get very, very expensive. And a long-term recovery will be catastrophic if you, talking about employers, aren't stacking your bench and protecting home base, you're going to be doomed." End quote. So what's being said here? How are employers going to backfill positions when the people just aren't there? The aforementioned reference to hiring getting more expensive is really simple. the supply of talent is lower, there aren't enough people in America to do the job. You're going to have to start getting into bidding wars and cost is going to increase substantially. Also, California, Texas and Florida house 47 % of the undocumented workers. Only, almost 50 % are in three states. and guess what kids? Chad (37:43.131) California is ranked number one in GDP for the United States. Texas is ranked number two in GDP for the United States and Florida is ranked number four in GDP for the United States. Why is that? Well, fuck guys, immigrants are the US superpower. That's why we've made it so well so far and we were able to bounce back after the pandemic. Here's a great example though. This from the National Immigration Forum, the construction industry required over a half million new workers in 2024 alone to meet development goals. Construction is one of the key industries that cannot satisfy their labor needs with only native born workers. Roughly 30%, 30%, 30 % of workers in the US construction industry are immigrants. In states like, California and Texas, number one, and number two, the share of construction workers are 40%. Immigrants, 40%. So let's talk about tax base. This from the Institution of Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Nearly. $100 billion in taxes. $59.4 billion go to the feds. $37.3 go to state and local governments. So that money will be sucked out of your local communities. Meaning less funding for police departments, less funding for fire departments, less funding for schools, health services, and roads. Again, just to name a few. And as you always say, Mr. Cheeseman, Joel (39:32.088) So. Chad (39:32.429) Who will do the work and pay the necessary taxes when a big cohort like, I don't know, the boomers leave the workforce and start collecting social security? That's a double whammy. Leaving the workforce, we need people. Social security, that's money going out. We don't have revenues coming in. So who's going to do the work? Who's going to pay the taxes? We're pushing $100 billion in tax revenues out of the country and we will not not have enough workers. Joel (39:43.63) Mm-hmm. Chad (40:02.085) to cover those jobs and the loss in revenue. last but not least, remember when COVID hit and we didn't have enough workers to work the docs and the supply chain fell apart? What happens when we don't have enough workers to work the docs because we deported them? My Jive Turkey goes to mass deportation. You think it was scary having immigrants in the US? Well, it's about, it's fuck around and find out time kids. Joel (40:12.825) Essential workers. Joel (40:35.64) By the way, Chad didn't mention our interview with Zeke Hernandez. I'm showing the book here if you're watching us on YouTube, but if you haven't read The Truth About Immigration by Dr. Zeke Hernandez, we encourage you to read it and also listen to our interview that we did with him just a few months or weeks ago. Chad (40:37.841) Yes. Chad (40:51.739) Believe the numbers, don't believe the bullshit. Joel (40:56.302) Don't believe the hype. That is Chad's last and final jive turkey of 2024. So my last and final jive turkey of 2024. Chad, one of the more interesting stories that we've talked about on this show is the sort of journey from Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the movements, COVID, DEI, taking a front seat in the Chad (41:19.067) Mm-hmm. Joel (41:24.962) the dialogue that we've had on the show and with our, with our guests. And that started taking a turn for the worst, last year, but it kind of has hit a crescendo in 2024. we know that the, the Supreme court struck down affirmative action and we kind of predicted on this show that not only colleges, but corporations and other entities would start taking that as a, as a, as a. as an okay, a green light to trash DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. to name names, and we've talked about a few of these on the show over the past year, Tesla, of course, Walgreens, Anheuser-Busch, Disney, Bumble, of all places, American Airlines, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, Walmart, of all people announced today that they would be canceling Chad (42:01.211) Mm-hmm. Joel (42:17.07) their, budget for DI and some of their, staff along that. And like some of these, get for political reasons, like John Deere, it's just their customers don't want it. So they do it, but Walmart is for everybody. So for Walmart to like dis, disassociate themselves with diversity and inclusion, to me is just a really sad state of affairs. Obviously Donald Trump is back in the white house. So I suspect this will continue to be an issue in 2025. Part of the good news is, and we've talked to some folks on the show about how this is still going on. People still approve of it. It's just being rebranded by companies. They don't want to say DI. They want to say something else. Johnny Taylor, your boy at Shurm was in the headlines this year, I think is changing it from DI to D &I. Okay. Sure. So, so for me, like the big jive turkeys are all the companies that are abandoning DI. Chad (42:54.715) Mm-hmm. Joel (43:15.942) and promoting it and publishing it for political reasons. That's a sad state of affairs, but that is the state of affairs in America, everybody. We got a lot of jive turkeys. Joel (43:34.668) Which brings me to my Thanksgiving inspired dad joke, Chad. Are you ready? Why did the cranberry blush? Why did the cranberry blush? Chad (43:34.779) Good stuff, man. Jesus, yes. Chad (43:48.473) No clue. No clue. Joel (43:49.526) it's a good one. Why did the cranberry blush? It saw the turkey dressing. Happy Thanksgiving everybody, thanks to our guests for chiming in. We out. Chad (43:59.385) Gahhh! Chad (44:03.727) Yes, we out.

In this episode, Chad and Joel explore the multi-layered world of tech with a focus on Google’s recent “velvet hammer” message to employees. The Halloween-themed all-hands meeting at Google featured CEO Sundar Pichai in costume, discussing cost-saving measures, a slowdown in hiring. But Google isn’t the only tech giant making waves. The duo also covers LinkedIn’s money-printing success with its latest revenue growth and new AI-powered hiring tools, exploring how these moves may shake up the job market and add pressure on competitors like Indeed. They touch on LinkedIn’s expansion into India and Brazil and its efforts to monetize the job-seeker experience, which may signal the platform’s future direction as it solidifies its foothold globally. The episode also dives into broader tech trends, from the hybrid work debate to the latest study showing that hybrid schedules boost job satisfaction and retention. Chad and Joel discuss why some companies are still pushing to bring employees back on-site despite data showing the clear benefits of flexibility—and how these trends could affect the tech workforce’s morale and productivity. To wrap up, they touch on the unique responses by U.S. expatriates and the wealthy looking to relocate post-election, highlighting immigration attorneys who report a surge in wealthy Americans exploring citizenship options abroad. With immigration as America’s “superpower,” they discuss the broader implications of these shifts on the workforce. Whether it’s AI displacing tech roles, LinkedIn’s continuous growth, or the push for remote flexibility, this episode unpacks the layered changes shaping the tech industry. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel (00:31.49) Ohhhhh yeah, two guys who would rather be at a dance party with Beyonce. Hey boys and girls, it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel Grover, Cleveland Cheesman. Chad (00:35.766) Yes. Chad (00:42.337) And this is Chad Deja Vu, so watch. Joel (00:45.346) And on this episode, LinkedIn keeps printing money, Google takes ghosting to a whole new level. And wait a minute, let me check my notes. Was there an election? Was there an election recently? I don't, let's do this. Chad (00:54.423) Huh? What? Huh? Huh? Chad (01:03.959) Whew, man, that's deja vu all over again. Joel (01:06.516) It's the end of the world. Chad, you look fine. Good God, Living your best life. Living your best. Chad (01:13.197) yeah, look at where I'm at, I'm in Nazaré, Portugal, which is, for anybody who's watched the Netflix series, that's where the 100-foot waves, the biggest waves in the world, literally, if you're on YouTube, you can see me pointing. They're right there, literally, right there. Yeah, it's pretty freaking amazing. So we're here in Nazaré for a few days, going to Cachecaix. Joel (01:19.598) Mm-hmm. Chad (01:37.891) for a few days and then hopping over to Spain, Cadiz and Gibraltar, which it's funny because Portugal is about the size of Indiana, right? So it's kind of like, you know, I'm visiting Louisville and Cincinnati, but, know, it's, it's, it's, it's Cadiz. It's Joel (01:37.966) Mm-hmm. Joel (01:55.362) Yeah, Kish Kish, Bloomington, you know, what's the difference? What's the difference? You are, you are a poster child for the expat movement for sure. You are living your best life. Chad (02:05.584) man, just great timing. That's all it is. It's just great timing. Joel (02:09.218) Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's rainy and gloomy here in, the Midwest. I'm sure you'll appreciate that being in the sunshine of, of Portugal. So, election talk, we're gonna, we're gonna be inundated with, the Monday morning quarterbacks, the autopsy reports. but what, what, what's your take? What was it like watching from Portugal? the European vibe. what, what's your thought? What are your, Chad (02:19.307) Mm-hmm. Yeah? Chad (02:37.153) Mm-hmm. Joel (02:38.316) What's your take on the election and the results? Chad (02:41.387) I mean, the American people have spoken again. I mean, it is what it is. That's why we hold elections. But it's funny because I've received more messages this morning, probably because they're up earlier and I'm five hours ahead of you. But I received more messages from Europeans than I have from Americans. I don't know if that's because Americans are in the feudal position in the corner somewhere. I don't know what that's all about. But I have received Joel (02:54.606) Mm-hmm. Chad (03:11.187) many messages. about yourself? Joel (03:12.362) Is it, is it, are you okay? Is it, what are your thoughts? Are you super like, is it like for your mental health or is it just for like FYI, like information from an American about an American election when the Europeans contact you. Chad (03:25.759) Yeah, no, mean, at the end of the day, they were like, wow, you really saw that coming. I'm sure you're glad you have a place in Portugal. And it's like, I mean, yeah, I mean, that was going to be the transition no matter what, right? But you know, whether that hastens the transition or who knows, man, but you know, it's one of those things you luckily I have a wonderful wife who focuses on contingency planning. And so here we are. Joel (03:32.016) huh. Joel (03:52.366) You're so healthy. You're so healthy. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of meltdown going on here, in the U S as you can imagine my, my very, very liberal Canadian wife, isn't having her best day of the year for sure. that'll be an interesting thing to deal with. You know, was, I was reminded literally, 30 years ago, 1994, there was the Republican revolution. Do remember that the contract with America, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans taking over. Chad (03:54.199) haha Chad (03:58.027) I'm sure, I'm sure. Chad (04:03.868) Mm-hmm. I'm sure I'm sure yeah Chad (04:18.224) Mmm, yeah, Newt Gingrich, yeah. Mm-hmm. Joel (04:21.038) taking over Congress and everything. The world was going to end and change and this is a new morning in America. Well, guess what? Clinton stayed in for another term. The Republicans lost seats in the House and Senate. This is kind of what we do in America. If you don't like it, you got two years to try to make a change. But I remember sitting with my grandmother who was, who was an icon in Bartholomew County, politics back in the sixties and seventies and me thinking like, wow, this is a really big deal. And her saying things really don't change a whole lot. Don't get too excited about what just happened. And as I age, she's kind of right. Like this, the ups and downs happen. I mean, as far as the autopsy on the election, I first thought of it as sort of tactical. Chad (04:51.852) Mm-hmm. Joel (05:17.858) the errors that she made. You know, I said when she first picked a walls that she might regret not picking Shapiro if she loses Pennsylvania. I was shocked to see, it looks like Michigan's going to go red, even though the labor unions, the Sean Faines, those initiatives. so, and also I thought that she could have made a better effort to gain or gain the, or engage with Nikki Haley voters. think there's 20 % of Republicans of which I probably put myself in that bucket. of we don't really connect with the Trump MAGA stuff, we're like we're McCain, Cheney type Republicans. And I thought that there was an opportunity to win those people. And I felt like there wasn't much, like I received no direct mail about, Hey, if you're a Nikki Haley voter, consider, consider Kamala Harris. But I think it goes deeper than a tactical issue. Well, for money, they could ask for money. Chad (05:53.675) Mm-hmm. Chad (05:59.819) Dude, I know, I was one of those at one time. I was one of those at one time. Chad (06:13.152) Not in Indiana, yeah. Joel (06:17.31) our money spends just as good as anyone else's, but I like, I think it's just, it's just deeper than that. I said on last week's show with Emmy that this felt like angry men versus scared women and whoever was going to come out the most, the most was going to win. And clearly the angry men came out and I was surprised to see black men, Hispanic men come out in the numbers that they did. So I. I think ultimately it's going to be good for the Democrats. know, look, it's, it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. You don't, can't get the clothes clean unless you have an agitator and like your favorite, you know, the best disinfectant is, is sunlight. think that this is a good opportunity for the Democrats to reboot. They have a good bench. They have good young talent. Like let's throw them in the game and, see, and see what happens. So I think ultimately it's going to be good for the Democrats. But it's going to be painful if you're not a fan of Trump and Trumpism and the MAGA movement, because with the Senate swinging and the House and then SCOTUS, like Trump's going to get his way for the next two years. So buckle up and hope for the best, I guess. It'll be fun fodder for the podcast. Chad (07:19.833) yeah. Yeah? Yeah? Chad (07:28.471) Well, it's funny because to your comment, if you don't like it, well, CNBC, an article actually entitled, record numbers of wealthy Americans are making plans to leave the US after the election. Apparently, as Twisted Sister once said, we're not going to take it. And as immigration attorneys are seeing a growing number of wealthy Americans making plans to leave the country. Among the attorney cited in the article, David Lesbrance, managing partner of Les Brands and Associates, an international tax and immigration firm, said the number of Americans hiring his firm for possible move overseas have roughly tripled over the last year. Now here in Portugal, they have pretty much done away with the golden visa or the, I guess you can call it, buy your way to citizenship program. But if you're looking to invest, you may want to take a look into the citizenship programs in another country in the Caribbean Islands, which are a great place to check out. Demonica, the island of Demonica, if you invest only 200,000, you have an option to actually be a citizen. St. Lucia, you've heard of that one, 240,000. St. Kitts, 250,000. 235,000 for Grenada, 230,000 for Antigua. Or if you just want to spend a little bit more money and you want to try some other countries, Turkey, Malta, or Austria are also on the list, they're just a little bit more expensive. you know, we'll see. We have options, especially the people with money definitely have options. Joel (09:03.63) You got it. Joel (09:07.63) People with money always have options. So shout outs, as I think you've already started, are sponsored by our friends at Kiora Text Recruiting Made Simple. And by the way, those guys are from Canada. Chad (09:20.379) Yes. Chad (09:26.679) They're probably more scared than we are. Joel (09:27.134) And I, and I get to hear for four years about how we're moving to Canada. So, Canada is going to have a special place in my heart and the Trump administration. but my first shout out goes to draft board, draft board, Chad, a, former firing squad, interview. if you haven't checked that out, go to Chad cheese.com search for it. and you'll find it. I think I gave them the guns. don't remember exactly, what you did, but, I got a email. Chad (09:39.967) Okay. I remember those guys. Chad (09:53.259) Double guns, I think. Joel (09:54.73) I think double guns is probably right. got an email from them, but they are pivoting, out of the business. What they did was if you remember H three jobster refer.com Zubka yet wire Z karma one LinkedIn referrals, et cetera, et cetera. The idea of like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to shotgun my network and they're going to apply to jobs. I'm going to get rich on people applying to jobs that I market, for companies. The idea, although a good one, and I said it in firing squad, it never. Chad (10:05.366) Mm-hmm. Joel (10:24.168) fucking works. Stop it. Stop the business of affiliate programs for sharing jobs and getting paid. Draftboard is just the latest loser in this game. Don't do it folks. Don't do it. We're here to give you public service announcements and save you a lot of time and money. They raised $4 million and it's all probably down the tubes unless this pivot works out and we know how pivots pivots usually work. Chad (10:39.393) Don't, don't, don't. Chad (10:45.495) Mm-hmm. Joel (10:54.924) Yeah, they don't. They don't really work that often. Chad (10:57.377) was actually January of this year. So I mean, it hasn't been a full year since we actually talked to Josh. And yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing from startups over and over and over is that they have founders coming outside of the industry into this industry. They don't have the experience. They don't have the knowledge. They don't have the connections network. They don't have any of those things, but they do have the money, right? Silicon Valley money in many cases. Joel (11:00.365) Mm-hmm. Chad (11:24.167) And they think that is going to make them bulletproof. And unfortunately, that's just not the case, which is one of the reasons why if you are not from this industry, you need to find people, advisors who are in this industry to be able to help and guide you through that kind of stuff. So unfortunately they had a pivot. Good luck. Yeah, possibly. Joel (11:34.296) Mm-hmm. Joel (11:41.71) Some old guys with historical perspective is always nice. Some old guys that remember 2003 are nice to bring into the mix if you can. Chad (11:52.107) Possibly. I wasn't pitching us, but yeah, possibly. Next shout out, I'm going to share this one. You're going to love this, is to Bradley Clark and Stephen McGrath for Chad and Cheese Listener Made Art. Here's Bradley Clark's version, which Bradley created after listening to our Immigration Myth Busting podcast with Professor Zeke Hernandez. Bradley said the episode with Professor Zeke was, Joel (12:13.688) Mm-hmm. Chad (12:19.507) One of the best podcasts he's heard in a while. Aw shucks, Bradley. That's sweet. Now, he is now. Now I gotta go back and I've gotta find the other one, cause this is fricking hilarious. Then we have, then after I posted Bradley's great art skills on the socials, not to be outdone by a Canadian, our favorite Scott. Joel (12:23.835) he's Canadian though, so you got to take it with a grain of salt. The nice comments. Joel (12:34.391) You Chad (12:45.321) Steven McGrath posted the following Chad and Cheese art, which is a great segue as Steven has agreed. I think you know this, to get a Chad and Cheese tattoo in 2025. So we're gonna need a promotion around this event and we might use this art. We might use this art for his tat. This might be the tattoo. This might be the tattoo. Joel (13:04.878) Are you saying this is the tattoo? Joel (13:11.0) Ahahaha! Joel (13:17.006) and that crazy motherfucker would do it too. Holy shit. God. Chad (13:20.701) he would do it. He's already got the go ahead from Natasha. Natasha said he can do it. So if she said he can do it, he can do it. Joel (13:27.896) That's almost as good as free shit. Almost. Almost as good as free shit, Chad. Chad (13:31.113) It's it but it's not because if you do want free shit and obviously you want to have The cool shit the Chad and cheese send right to your doorstep t-shirts from Erin app the nice I mean they feel like butter on your skin. They feel like a hug from Chad and cheese t-shirts from Erin app bourbon barrel aged syrup for our friends over at Kiara beer craft beer craft beer from Aspen tech labs love those guys Joel (13:58.318) Yes. Chad (14:00.639) whiskey from two bottles by the way two bottles of whiskey from Tex Colonel aka bullhorn and if it is your birthday there's an opportunity when rum from plum if you go to Chad cheese.com slash free and register if you don't register you can't win Joel (14:18.07) You can't win. got to be in it to win it. All right. Celebrating another trip around the sun. It's a short list this week. Dale Gran, Graham Ferguson, Lewis Gleishner, Jarvis Carell, David Roddy, David George, Eric Clemens, Kayla Campbell, Bill Glenn, Steven Grover, and Chris Campbell celebrating a birthday this week. Thanks for listening and have a few on us. Chad (14:30.871) guys. Chad (14:37.653) Ooh, nice. Joel (14:46.744) Traveling other than Chad's Hopscotch is around Bouncing all around the place. I don't know if he'll be able to get any football at games while he's while he's in Portugal I think he's got a nice nice connection there that he's circumventing the the authorities so he'll probably Uh-huh I don't even know what that is. What's a Jodgy stick? What is it? Chad (14:50.869) bouncing all over the place. Chad (15:01.481) yeah. yeah. Chad (15:05.953) I do. Dave Ralph is hooking me up with a dodgy stick. a dodgy stick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah. You know that anything that's dodgy in Europe is, you know, that's kind of dodgy. It's not quite right. yeah, it's not quite right. So you get a fire stick and then you jailbreak it and then you get like all the programs on it and... Joel (15:21.582) in Ireland for sure. Chad (15:31.159) Every single at least I don't want to say European, but I do know that just about every single Brit I know Has one of these dodgy sticks and and you know a good good Irishman Dave Ralph. Thank you, sir. We'll we'll get that dodgy stick taken care of soon Joel (15:38.51) Mm-hmm. dodgy stick. Joel (15:48.65) so you do get to see football. So aside from seeing, Ohio States, fantastic went over number three ranked Penn state. you see your NFL game. let's get to our fantasy football leaderboard, fantasy football. course, you know, Chad is sponsored by our friends at factory fix. let's, let's, let's get to it in first place, second week in a row. Chad (15:51.41) Mm-hmm. Yes. Chad (15:58.069) Uh-huh. Chad (16:08.407) The Actory Fix. Joel (16:16.064) It's me motherfucker. It's me. Number one again. That's right. Followed by Dean, Dean, the daddy Mac mackerel, David Stiffle, Jennifer, Terry Tharp, Chad, so wash in the fifth spot. You're right there in the chunky middle, not getting too cocky, not falling behind. That's good. Followed by Keith Sonderling, Christie Lisbon, Laura Martinelli, Dina, Perot for Pyros, Axon Jackson, doll quest. Chad (16:18.731) Whoo! Rigged. It's rigged. Chad (16:29.611) Mm-hmm. Yep. Joel (16:42.474) Adam Gordon, as much as he wants to be at the bottom, Sean Horton, here's a who just loves that last place spot. Boy, I'll tell you, geez, he loves that. loves it. All right. Can I make it three weeks in a row? You got to tune in next week to find out that is factory fix sponsored. Chad (16:49.781) He does. He enjoys it. Chad (16:58.293) I just looked at who you were playing. I think you can make it. Yeah, I think you can make it. Yeah. It should be an easy week. It should be an easy week. Yeah. I think it's bottom third. It's bottom third. I can't remember, but it's bottom third. Yeah. No. No. Joel (17:03.63) Who is it? I haven't even looked. Who is it? No names. We're not mentioning names. But we do mention names in the... Chad (17:20.551) Topics! Joel (17:23.95) All right, let's talk a little hybrid, shall we? A six month experiment with over 1600 employees recently showed that hybrid work had no negative impact on productivity, performance, or promotion rates. Instead, it significantly improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by a third, particularly benefiting non-managers, women, and employees with long commutes. Managers initially skeptical about hybrid work. have revised their views. They're having some second thoughts, finding it actually increased productivity. Chad, Chad, they might've been listening to us. How do you feel about this news on hybrid work? Chad (18:06.263) Yeah, I think it just makes sense. I think it's a duh moment. I think it's a treat your employees like adults moment. And again, for more context, jump a little bit deeper into this. The study happened over six months, as you'd said, from August 2021 to January of 2022. The study participants were chosen randomly and divided into on-site work groups and a hybrid work group. They either went into the office every day or they went in on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. So this is a hybrid where you were able to work twice two days from home. Now, quote, once one of the things that you said, no differences in productivity, performance review grade or promotion. So a hybrid schedule led to measurable improvements and higher jobs. Obviously, they were happier at the end of the day. And then a third higher retention rates. What don't you want to do? I don't want to interview more people. I don't want to hire more people. don't want to replace the stud who literally just wants to work from home or she wants to work from home. I want them to be happy. then there was another article in Fortune that outlines a new study that reveals where jobs with work from home options have better stock returns. Again, productivity, retention, and happiness equals money. Right? to me, again, this just seems like a no brainer. I don't know why companies keep fighting it, but we're still watching companies fight this. Why? Joel (19:45.868) All right, so let's do some auditing for a second. Hybrid work, productivity, up. Employee satisfaction, up. Fears in the C-suite, unfounded. Cost efficiency, up. Work-life balance, improved. Health and wellbeing, improved. Inclusivity, improved. So... Chad (19:51.713) Mm. Chad (20:00.033) You Chad (20:09.867) Yes. Joel (20:12.046) Remind me exactly why we're being forced back into the office. yeah. It's Elon's morality question. we're being immoral by not coming back into the office. look, the data's out. the excuses are getting fewer and farther between, the, the bottom line is if, if you're a company not embracing work from home, hybrid work, then, I don't know, Jean, Jean Walter might have. Chad (20:18.908) yeah. Chad (20:30.369) Mm-hmm. Joel (20:41.424) message for you. Chad (20:48.075) The thing for me was that some of the contributors, the contributors that really helped success in this experiment was top management supported it, even the CEO, right? So they wanted to see what was going to work best, right? So they supported hybrid work. They supported work in the office, whatever they were doing at that point. So the company also... made its hybrid work days consistent across the team. Again, this is not a willy-nilly kind of thing. You come in when you want, come out when you want. There's gotta be some structure to it. And I think structure sets expectation for human beings, because that's what we like. We like structure, we like expectations, because we like to know when we're supposed to be in. So it gives some semblance of freedom. And thanks for, you know, treating us like adults half the time. So, you know, at the end of the day, I've said it before, we go from remote back to return to office. We try to take gas engines and go directly to electric, right? We try to do all of these things and this knee jerk reaction. Why don't we try hybrid? Why don't we try hybrid and try to maybe walk it into remote or try hybrid and try to walk it into electronic vehicles, right? I mean, that to me, As human beings, we just need to stop the knee-jerk bullshit. Joel (22:17.144) Yeah, I think, you when this, as this issue has unfolded, I've always thought that you're going to have companies that are full, full on office. You're going to have people that sort of hybrid will do the office three days a week at home, two days a week, and then you'll have your businesses that are full remote. And to me, what, what this is evolving to, if you're doing it right is all three. So based on what your employees want, you have an answer for that. Chad (22:29.409) Yeah. Joel (22:42.688) So if you have a 25 year old recent grad that wants to like engage with people, be in the office, then they can do that. If you, if you have people that, yeah, I want to go into work, but not every day, I want to have Friday to myself, or I want to have Monday to like recover from the weekend. They can do that. If you want to go live in Burlington, even though our offices in Boston, you can do that too. I think the most successful companies will have an answer for all three of those groups. and I think that we're slowly unfolding and evolving to that reality, which I think, is great. And these data points support, all of those, all of those trends. I, I'm happy and divert diversity, inclusion, helping women, people with disabilities older, like everyone wins in this and the technology is there that you can do it and not lose and you'll make more money and be more productive. So I. Chad (23:21.515) Yeah. More experiments. Chad (23:31.756) Mm-hmm. Chad (23:37.685) Yeah, Well, if you take a look at it, if we do crack down on immigration and we don't have as many people coming back or coming to be able to drive work and actually support work in the US, because immigration has been our superpower, every single other country, Joel (23:38.67) I got nothing man. Joel (23:46.722) Yeah. Chad (24:00.381) and or group of countries, their inflation's higher. They haven't been able to snap back as fast. We were able to snap back incredibly fast. And one of the biggest contributors is immigration because we had people to do those jobs and get right back into this job. So if we start to push that back, we're going to have to have something that fills those roles, right? Not all of those roles are hybrid and or remote roles, but there's going to be there's going to be some movement. of talent from here to there. And there's going to be a need to be able to look at some those hybrid roles more. Joel (24:34.072) You don't have to come to America. We'll employ you in whatever country you are is a powerful mass message. And it's something a lot of companies are going to have to come to grips with because yes, immigration will be a topic at least for the next two years. So, so get used to that. let's take a quick break. This is an abbreviated show cause Chad and I have been up most of the night, if not all night watching the election and getting drunk, hung over drinking too much coffee. So we will be right back after this message. Chad (24:38.251) Here I am. Chad (24:42.87) Yeah. Chad (24:47.263) Mm-hmm. Joel (25:06.134) All right, Chad, let's talk a little LinkedIn. They reported a 10 % increase in revenue for fiscal first quarter reaching $3.23 billion with growth across all business lines. Looking forward, LinkedIn anticipates a similar revenue growth rate in the next quarter. CEO Satya Nadella of Microsoft highlighted strong user growth in markets like India and Brazil. Chad (25:09.12) Mm-hmm. Joel (25:34.048) and introduced LinkedIn's AI powered hiring assistant that Emmy and I talked about last week. Chad, what are your thoughts about the money printing machine that they apparently have at LinkedIn? Chad (25:46.571) And by the way, I love me some Emmy. She did such a great job. I feel feel I feel so comfortable just not being on the show every now and again. You're going to have to take some time away so her and I can can spend some time, by the way. OK, so quick, quick quote from the actual article. Member growth continues to accelerate with markets like India and Brazil, both growing at double digits. That that's pretty amazing. Although there's got to be some more Joel (25:49.23) You Joel (25:52.717) Mm-hmm. Joel (26:10.296) Mm-hmm. Chad (26:15.527) long-term growth that that LinkedIn is looking at and they are they're looking at total addressable market expansion which means LinkedIn is rolling out a new coaching feature in LinkedIn learning that uses text and voice to enable users to practice skills such as delivering performance reviews having conversations and work-life balance right so so we've talked about this but the the most important thing about this is that we have the business revenue stream And then we have the individual revenue stream. And LinkedIn makes a good amount of money on both sides. And we don't really have many platforms that are out there today. Take a look at Indeed. Indeed does not monetize the job seeker, right? LinkedIn monetizes the job seeker. I'm not a big fan of it, but when you start to actually create these types of features and or products and services, I think it makes more sense, right? Just a resume, right? A resume writing thing. Big deal. Anybody can do that now with the chat GPT. But what about the coaching side of the house? I think for me, this is good for LinkedIn, at least from the standpoint of taking a long-term look. We see all these emerging markets, India, Brazil, growing double digits. And then we're also doubling down on something that we're doing well already. And we're increasing the TAM there. So good on LinkedIn. Joel (27:17.624) Mm-hmm. Joel (27:39.394) Yeah. You know, you and I talked pretty extensively a few years ago when they were, I don't know their, their monopoly plan, the monopoly plan to crush everything that's innovative around using, Hi Q obviously is a case that we talked quite a bit about. one of the, risks that we said was there is look, if, if, if LinkedIn crushes all innovation, all competition, Chad (27:49.801) yeah. Chad (27:53.739) Mm-hmm. Yep. Joel (28:09.538) they're going to be a sewer of non-innovation because they're going to have the field to themselves. Fortunately for them, they have an easy button called OpenAI and Microsoft's relationship with that technology. And I think that you're seeing the AI, the hiring assistant, anecdotally, everyone that I've talked to and recruiting that uses it, likes it. I know we've been on the ATAP. conversation where people are using it and liking it. And now they're taking that to another level. They're growing. they're growing into other countries. think India is a huge market. South America, think is going to blow up. Africa is next. So Africa is still there. you mentioned the learning piece, which is, think. Exciting, but ultimately I feel like in the bigger picture, LinkedIn feels. like a social network that hasn't lost its shit. I don't feel like they've gone off the deep end with political stuff. they've, they've implemented a tick talky type, video product, which is pretty good. I'll click on a video before I know it. I've gone through like 50 videos and it's about like recruiting and marketing and it's content that is not what I get on, on tick tock. So I'm, I'm more engaged than ever with LinkedIn. recruiters seem happier with LinkedIn than they have been in a while. So I, I think this is full steam ahead, for LinkedIn. I think indeed should be a little scared if they actually turn the spigot on job search and giving companies that, that power. yeah, we're going to continue to see profit tries it at LinkedIn. Things are good. and I don't see any reason why the train and the good times won't keep going. Chad (29:59.435) Yeah, so the learning side, upskilling, that's big right now. It's gonna continue to be big. again, I see them aligning on the upskilling side and there can be a couple of different things. You've got the enterprise license for your current employees or you have the individual license for somebody who just wants to do it themselves. But yeah, when it comes down to the TikTok side of the house, yeah, they're starting to... Joel (30:02.904) Mm-hmm. Chad (30:26.879) implement some of those things, which is great. I really would love to see them finally use the data that they have access to on the profiles to be able to understand, contextualize, and give me jobs that make a god—that don't make sense. That don't make sense. They send me—they send me crap all the time. So if they can utilize— any one of these parsing matching types of systems that are out there, the text kernels of the worlds, the dax, the dachshunds of the worlds, or maybe even create a large language model within open AI, then great. But Jesus, man, you gotta do better there. You gotta do better there. Indeed's not doing better. So you gotta, and you've got all the tools to do it. Joel (31:14.542) And by the way, if they happen to slip in the occasional big-booted Latina in their video feed, I won't complain. I won't complain. Chad (31:18.696) Ha ha ha! Chad (31:22.677) Yeah. Joel (31:26.402) We'll be right back. Joel (31:32.68) All let's have a little Halloween back to the future on this one. During a Halloween themed all hands meeting, Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai in costume, discussed cost saving measures and head count efficiency. So a little awkward for a Halloween themed hands on meeting. They addressed reduced hiring. Chad (31:37.249) There it is. There it is. Joel (31:56.92) due to economic conditions and a focus on AI. Chad, this is a whole new level of ghosting. What are your thoughts on Google's all hands, all Halloween, all the time, serious meeting with employees? Chad (32:12.872) So this article comes from our friends over at HR grapevine. If you're not subscribed or what have you, it's one of the, one of the sources that Joel and I actually tap to be able to do this show. but yeah, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he, he called on Google Googlers to quote unquote, strive to do more in 2025 and beyond as a part of, as a part of the push for greater efficiency, which you said earlier, tell me that's not a thinly veiled threat, right? Then Brian Ong, VP of Google recruiting, spoke on changes to Google's hiring at a time when many tech employers are reallocating significant resources toward investment AI. His comment then, quote, there is a reality to it. We are hiring less than we did a couple of years ago, end quote. So that's interesting because We've known and worked with people at Google over the past couple of decades. And it's all about resources for them. So when Google deemed their talent acquisition products, Google Hire and Google for Jobs API, were less of a revenue driver than Google Cloud, they reallocated resources and shut down the TA products. That's what happened, kids. So for years, for years, There seems to have this constant reshuffling of talent and resources from product to product. So for me, Sundar's thinly veiled threat and Brian Ong's same as paraphrase, AI is here for your job and it's not safe. That to me is the velvet hammer. They're literally coming out and they're being nice and fluffy. saying, but you got to strive to do more. yeah. I don't know if I said or not, we have AI. It's the velvet hammer. Google's Velvet Hammer. Joel (34:10.136) So the CEO wore a t-shirt that said error 404 costume not found. How dorky was that? And the CFO wore a re no, I don't, I don't. And the CFO wore a Reggie Miller, Indiana Pacers, a Jersey, which I thought was, kind of funny. but yeah, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall, with the CEO, everyone, dressed up very, very awkward. Chad (34:19.944) You have that t-shirt, though, right? Chad (34:30.443) bad form. Joel (34:39.714) Look, techies are scared, man. I mean, these people aren't stupid. They hear the Amazon queue stuff. They hear the, the jassy stuff around how many, how much money in man hours they're saving with, with AI and coding and development. They hear the, they hear the quarterly earnings reports where they talk about 25 % of all new code at Google. is generated by an AI. If I'm a techie that says your job is in jeopardy and they kind of sugarcoated it like, no, we like find new product projects. You may not need 10 people, maybe you need eight, but it's not going to stifle, innovation and opportunity. But look, these people aren't stupid. mean, they kind of see the writing on the wall and they're concerned about it and they're scared. People at Google live a pretty good life, right? And they have for a long time. And once you start shuffling that deck and, and, know, the shuffle in the chairs on the Titanic, people get scared. And it came out in all places at an all hands meeting where the CEO was wearing an arrow error for a, for costume, not found t-shirt, like how, how Silicon Valley, if you love that show that's straight out of that, that fucking show. Yeah. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Well, Chad, I'm Chad (35:46.487) Halloween. Yes. Chad (35:57.793) Jassy, again, the Iron Fist Sundar the Velvet Hammer. Joel (36:03.054) I don't have a good joke, Chad, but I'm gonna throw joke in since we're still on Halloween. What is a mummy's favorite kind of music? Chad (36:07.146) Okay. Chad (36:14.271) rap and roll? Rap? Joel (36:16.194) just rap. Yeah, rap, rap, rap. Rap and roll is not a thing, old white man. Enjoy Portugal, enjoy the waves. I'm gonna take a nap. We out. Chad (36:22.233) Okay, I thought it might be new. Chad (36:28.213) We out.