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Alex Murphy is a gnarly veteran of the recruitment technology industry. Will his Jobsync.io pitch have what it takes to win big applause or a shove in front of The Chad & Cheese's FIRING SQUAD? Make sure you stop by and say hi to sponsor, Talroo. Especially if you're in search of candidates and need to get the best bang for your buck! Call Talroo today! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides comprehensive website accessibility testing with personalized recommendations to enhance usability for people with a variety of disabilities or situational limitations. Chad: Talroo was focused on predicting, optimizing, and delivering talent directly to your email or ATS. Joel: So it's totally data-driven talent attraction, which means the Talroo platform enables recruiters to reach the right talent at the right time and at the right price. Chad: Guess what the best part is? Joel: Let me take a shot here. You only pay for the candidates Talroo delivers. Chad: Holy shit. Okay, so you've heard this before. So if you're out there listening in podcast land and you are attracting the wrong candidates, and we know you are, or you feel like you're in a recruiting hamster wheel and there's just nowhere to go, you can go to talroo.com/attract. Again, that's talroo.com/attract, and learn how Talroo can get you better candidates for less cash. Or ... Joel: Just go to chadcheese.com and click on the Talroo logo. I'm all about the simple. Chad: You are a simple man. You'd be poo without Talroo. Announcer: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Chad: Whole other level. Joel: Ah, yeah. Dude, Firing Squad in December seems a little awkward. Chad: Awkward? Joel: Because it's the holiday season, it should be full of cheer. So I feel like you have a disadvantage, or actually an advantage, by doing a December Firing Squad. Chad: No, I think this is one of the reasons why you bring on a gnarly veteran of the industry, so that hopefully we don't have to shoot his ass up. Joel: A grizzled veteran, we'll get to this as well, but a winner of the Unleash Worlds startup competition, so ... Chad: That sounds fancy. Joel: This is his to lose, basically. Let's welcome to the Firing Squad Alex Murphy. Alex, what's up, man? Alex: Hey guys, thanks. I don't' think that I've ever been described as gnarly, so I appreciate that intro. Joel: You're gnarly, dude. Chad: You're welcome. Rad, gnarly. Joel: Chad veers into Spicoli country every so often. Alex, you're searching with a lot of companies, I feel like. But we're here to talk about JobSync. Do you call it JobSync IO or just JobSync? What do you prefer? Alex: Just JobSync. Joel: Just JobSync, okay. Chad: How hard is it to find domain these days? Alex: You know, it's interesting. I guess if you put IO on the end or any of the other extensions, it's a whole lot easier than the .coms. Joel: That was one from the no shit files, Alex, thanks for that. It's a lot easier than a .com, kids. Okay. Alex: No doubt. So you see a lot of people just putting "the." So thejobsync.com, I guess, could probably be there. Joel: The resumator. Alex: The resumator, the monster board. Chad: The monster board. Alex: The Chad and Cheese. Joel: No, we aren't that smart, so we just went with chadcheese.com. Alex: That's good. Joel: Keep it simple, stupid. All right, Alex, for those who don't know you personally, give us a little elevator pitch, and then we'll get into the Firing Squad and talk about JobSync. Alex: Sure. So almost 20 years in the space, I was a cofounder at job.com back in 2001. I was at Beyond before they became Nexxt with two X's. I was there for eight years, ran traffic and user acquisition and business development, went out on my own in 2016 and started a handful of companies, and do a lot of consulting and advising for other companies as well. Joel: And I'll throw in that you're an unapologetically lover of Indeed. Can I throw that in there as well? Alex: Sure. Yeah. Joel: Okay, good. Alex: I think Indeed is ... I would say that my love of Indeed, if you will, is really just mad respect. I think what Ronnie and Paul did in the early years in terms of focus is a real lesson for anybody who wants to start a company. Stay very, very focused on a simple value proposition and just keep executing. And what are they, 15 years on now and worth billions of dollars? I just think that what they've done is really, really respectable. Joel: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: Discipline means something. And then after you've sucked everybody in, then you just fuck them all. Joel: Fuck them and fuck them, right, Chad? Chad: That sounds like the Indeed way. Joel: And on that note, maybe we should get to the rules of the Firing Squad. Chad: So Murph, here's what's going to happen. You have two minutes to pitch JobSync. At the end of two minutes you're going to hear the bell. Thank you, Joel. Then Joel and I are going to hit you with rapid fire Q&A. If your answers start rambling, they get boring, or what have you, you're going to get hit with the cricket. At the end of Q&A you will receive one of three grades. First being big applause, means we love your shit. It's awesome. You should do more of it. Number two, the golf clap. You can definitely do better, okay? Joel: Or as Murphy calls it, the crapper clap, because it sounds like you're in a bathroom. That's good. Chad: Or last but not least, the firing squad. Ouch. That's when you need to pack up your shit and go home, that's all there is to it. So that's Firing Squad. Are you ready, Murph? Alex: Definitely. Joel: All right, in three, two. Alex: So just to set expectations, JobSync is not about AI, machine learning, or big data. Instead, what we are about is fixing the friction in your job advertising campaigns that result in far fewer applicants than you should be getting. Appcast, the large programmatic job ad platform used by many agencies and thousands of companies, did a study of over 93 million apply clicks last year and found that only 5.5% of those clicks resulted in an actual application. And on some ATS apply paths, it's actually much worse. This is because the process for candidates leaving career sites like Indeed takes them to an ATS where they have to reread the job description, get through the CRM signup form, and then figure out how to get past a login request, create an account, and then go through a really long apply process that often ends up in a black hole. Alex: All this friction is in fact avoidable by simply using the native apply solutions offered by many leading career sites. Many people know this as an easy apply or a quick apply. Ultimately these just end up in an email inbox and gives the recruiter just a name and a resume, rather than a full and complete application. Alex: So what we do is we create a deeper integration, an integration that includes screening questions, compliance questions, EEO, e-signatures, and delivers that application directly into the ATS. In short, we mirror the application process that would take place on the ATS but have it take place on the job board instead. This results up to an 8X increase in applications. We work with ATS's such as Success Factors, Taleo, Connects, and Brass Ring, with large job boards like Indeed and Facebook, and we're integrated into programmatic solutions. Joel: Thank you, Alex. And for those who want to know more, you can find out more where? Alex: On jobsync.io. Joel: Very good. All right, I'm going to start the Q&A. Alex, you are a longtime veteran, as you mentioned in your opening. What was it about this idea that really made you say, "Oh yeah, we got to do this shit"? Alex: So you mentioned the Unleashed competition. And Matt Charney was one of the judges in the talent acquisition one, and he asked, "Has this really not been done?" And the answer is, it's not been done because it's actually really difficult to connect large enterprise ATS's into job boards and get the Q&A to work out properly. In terms of why to do it, the conversion rates have just been declining year over year for the last 15 years since ATS's became much more important. And the value for job boards has been diminishing because of it. So from our perspective, when we got started on this, it really centered around focusing on end outcomes for customers trying to generate enough applicants, and they otherwise weren't able to. Joel: So you're doing it for the job boards. Alex: I think we're doing it, actually, because there are three different winners, if you will, in terms of stakeholders in this. The process of applying on an ATS is terrible for a candidate. They don't get responses back, and it takes an awful long time. Employers don't get enough candidates that are highly qualified that are a match for that job. And job boards, they're not getting the credit that they deserve when they actually generate applications. And the reason, or we should say, when they generate interest from candidates, because they're sending those candidates to an ATS that ultimately don't end up applying for a whole variety of reasons. So I think there really are three different constituents, if you will, that all win by having a tightly integrated solution. Joel: Fair enough. Chad: I've heard from talent acquisition professionals for years that they use Indeed because they need candidates, but Indeed blasts a shit ton of unqualified candidates at companies. And making this process easier will make it even more unmanageable than what it is today. So how does this actually fix the problem of candidates actually going into a black hole, versus being able to actually get more qualified candidates into the funnel? Alex: Yeah. So there are a couple of different questions there. So Indeed blasting lots of candidates, and many of which are not qualified. So the candidates that make it through an ATS apply path, they get to that CRM form, they figure out how to get past the login, they go through the 30-minute, 40-minute signup or application process. Those candidates are professional job seekers. Chad: In most cases. They don't have a job right now, so they have time to actually make it through that shitty apply process. Alex: They end up on one of these ATS's that says, "Log in," and they understand that there's actually a little tiny link in eight-point font that says, "If you're not registered, click here." They've got all the answers to questions in a file where they can copy and paste it in. The opposite of that is the person who's relatively on the fence about whether or not to even start to apply to a job. They're gainfully employed, they're busy, they are actually what the employer's really trying to engage and find, is that person that they want to move over. That person, A, doesn't know where to go, and B, is not going to spend 30 minutes getting through an application process. So in an effort to try to find more qualified candidates, making the process easier has the greatest impact on, actually, the most qualified candidates, because those are the least likely to get through your existing flow. Alex: That's part one. Part two is, there are a lot of people that have figured out, "Oh, if I go use the easy apply function and just take it in by email, then I can get everybody." But the problem is that the candidate doesn't remember applying to your job. They haven't answered any of the screening questions that actually help you filter. And basic screening questions. "Do you have experience in this field? Are you licensed? Do you have a certificate that's necessary to do it?" Like in truck driving land, "Do you have a CDL or not?" is a really important question to be answered that takes about one second to answer. That's not contributing to the 40-minute problem. So if you get these easy applies, they more often than not just bombard recruiters' email inbox. The company doesn't know what they're actually getting, and that problem is not better. Better is actually ending up in the ATS, a couple screening questions done, properly handled compliance, EEO, etc., so that you actually make sure you're adhering to the rules that you've set forth when somebody applies through your ATS. But you're getting them in and they're actually going into a formed recruiter workflow. Chad: So why is the QA/QC off for integration on this? Why is it so hard? You would think that applicant tracking systems would want to ensure that their clients are getting more qualified candidates. And they're not because of this shitty apply path. Do the applicant tracking systems not care? Or do the job boards or the job sites need to really apply more resources to this? And this is your version of, you don't need more resources, you just need JobSync. Is that what you're trying to make happen? Alex: Yes, is the simple answer to your question. Chad: Okay. Alex: So on the ATS side, the reason why it's difficult is that every customer implements their applicant tracking system in their own way. So that can get down all the way to the point of, field names can be changed in some applicant tracking systems inside the actual data structure. So there's literally a custom implementation done for every single customer. That's part one. And then the way that they implement it. Let's just take EEO questions. Some customers put EEO questions up front at the beginning of this screening process. Some put it on the back end. Some sprinkle them in between. And that can happen in one way with one customer on Taleo Enterprise and in a completely different way with a different customer that also uses Enterprise. And then Success Factors is different, and then Brass Ring is different. Alex: And even in a more standardized ATS like Greenhouse, you have customers that have different workflows that they want to apply, and they have different communications that they want to send. And so when you try to do a one size fits all, it makes it very, very difficult once you get into mid-market and certainly into enterprise-sized customers. Chad: So the big problem here is the client. The client's the one who's mucking this whole thing up, is what I'm hearing. Alex: Yeah, so it's funny. Three or four years ago I would have said, "I don't understand why there's so many different applicant tracking systems." Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Alex: And the reason there's so many different applicant tracking systems is because of the client. But it's because different companies have different needs, because different companies have different people that have their own point of view on how they want to compete for talent, how they want to compete with their product, and so they implement their own process. And those applicant tracking systems are point solutions. They often start as a single point solution for one customer, and then they get other companies that look like their original customer, and then that all of a sudden becomes an ATS for healthcare or for sales or for trucking. You get very, very specialized solutions, but yes, it is because clients have different needs, but I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing. It's what makes the process of engaging, for a candidate, they're going to find themselves happy working at this company because of that interaction. And the technologies ... Thanks, Joel. Joel: Alex, I'm curious about employer branding. And companies, as you know, spend a lot of money on their main site, social media presence, online video, etc. And it seems to me like the one-click apply process, even though it does have some layers to it, is sort of hurting companies that want to get their employer brand out there and get people to their own website, maybe retarget them in advertising. What is your sense on companies in the future with this? Because I do believe this will become more standard, the one-click apply, but I do think it does hurt the employer brand process. Agree or disagree? And what does the future look like for employment branding with solutions like yours? Alex: So I think that place to start is, one-click apply definitely doesn't engender any kind of awareness of the brand themselves. You need to have a little bit further to go, answer a few questions, etc. In terms of the investment that companies make into their brand with career sites and video and so forth, those are good things. Candidates often go to a company's career site to do research. They go to Glassdoor, they go Google, they go look at Yelp if they're in the restaurant business, or other review sites. People do research. But in terms of actually capturing the lead, which is what an application is, you want to recruit and capture that lead where the person is. Indeed, Neuvoo, Facebook. These platforms are catering to what people expect from a platform experience, which is to interact with the forms and to apply inside the platform rather than having to leave. Alex: So it is a way to capture more candidates that are interested and then to start a communication stream where you build that brand. So more of the branding elements become downstream CRM function to continuously nurture that candidate, rather than up front, thinking that you're going to send them to a career page where they're going to end up getting lost and then not converting. You've misused, if you will, the tools. Joel: And I assume you agree that it increases the importance of branding within the job description, right? Alex: Very much so. And I think that if you look forward two years from now, there are a lot of companies doing things that are really interesting with making the job descriptions much more interactive, the introduction of video and so forth. Putting all of those assets onto the job board, kind of like what Monster Studios is trying to do, I think really brings it all back to, make the experience really great where the person is, rather than trying to bring them back to your corporate site experience. Chad: So what's the difference between JobSync and Rethink? What's the partnership? How do you guys work together? Alex: So Rethink Data does a lot of the deep integrations into ATS's. We're leveraging the years of those integrations coming together. JobSync is dealing with the job distribution component part. So the way that this works with an Indeed, with a Facebook, with Neuvoo, is the application requirements go along with the job so the entire apply process can take place on the job site, within the framework of the job site's tool. Rethink Data and the smart form works as a widget that hosts the apply form and works on behalf of the job board, essentially in real time. So it's just different solutions depending upon what the job board wants to implement, ultimately. Chad: So more on the distribution side of the house, is that what I'm hearing? Rethink's more on the intake and you're on the distribution? Alex: So we use Rethink for the ATS and the application delivery portion of the integration. Chad: Right, so intake, right? Alex: It's more like delivery of the application, call it fulfillment, I would say. Chad: Gotcha. Alex: On the job management side, it just depends on how the job board is going to set up. So Rethink has, as an example, CV-Library is a large client. There's a smart form widget that sits on the Indeed apply process that delivers the candidate from CV-Library. Whereas within Indeed they don't use a form, they don't allow for the form. The actual application experience takes place natively inside of Indeed using their native apply solution, which is Indeed Apply. Joel: Curious about data, Alex. What are you seeing from clients in regards to more applies, quality of applies improving where you've implemented this solution. What are some data points around success? Alex: We had a trucking client come online in November, and it increased their ROI by 3X, the number of applications in their campaigns by more than 3X. We had a restaurant company come on, and they went from zero to hundreds of applications a day in Facebook. The data shows, depending upon the job site, you can get up to an 8X increase in applications. That's in part because, for example Indeed, Indeed looks at, with their quality search team, what the application process is for an external link. And so if you have a cumbersome application process, or one that doesn't work on mobile, for example, you're just going to get far fewer applications than you otherwise would if you used their Indeed Apply tool. So enabling that just simply is, really for a lot of jobs, it's the difference between having visibility and not having visibility. Joel: And talk to me about integration challenges. You've mentioned Neuvoo, now talent.com, as well as Indeed. Are there certain sites that you'll never be able to integrate with? I'm thinking, obviously, about Google For Jobs. Will we see at some point a one-click apply within the Google For Jobs system? Will LinkedIn play with your solution at some point? Alex: So Google For Jobs, will they do a one-click? I could see that. I try to think about, in terms of where they're going to go, what are they doing in other verticals? Because I think Google For Jobs mirrors a lot of the things that they've done with respect to, say, travel and real estate and other verticals. I haven't seen them do lead gen or form submittals. The closest to that, I guess, was Hire, and they tried that for a little while, got a couple thousand clients, and said that wasn't good enough. So I don't know where they'll go. Alex: With respect to LinkedIn and their easy apply solution, I think that we'll end up working with virtually any job board that does an application process on their site, and then work with that customer to add steps if they need additional information. So in LinkedIn and pretty much anybody else, because we work on behalf of the customer, we're going to help the customer get a higher return in terms of applies per dollar spent on their advertising campaign than they currently get. Chad: Excellent. What kind of analytics do you actually provide back to the client today? Alex: I like to think of our solution as being a login-free solution. In the HR tech space, the average person that's working within talent acquisition is logging into more than 10 different systems. They don't have to log into our system ever, so we're not providing a specific analytics solution for them, if you will. However, what we do for them is we make sure that the attribution, in terms of source of candidate, is 100% accurate. Rather than relying on cookies and pixels, we actually take the data that comes out of the job site, whether it's from Facebook or whomever, and we can, with 100% certainty, assign that candidate as having come from the source that they came from. So they know with precision where their candidates are coming from, and ultimately then where their hires are coming from, and then ultimately what the return on investment is with their various job ad campaigns. So I guess, in a simplistic way, we make their analytics much more reliable. Joel: Let's talk about pricing and endgame for you. You want to be acquired, you want to go public as a nice little lifestyle business? Have you taken money? Do you plan on getting some investment dollars? Alex: So we've bootstrapped it the whole way. We're probably not going to take any outside investment capital. I think we'll continue to bootstrap it. It is a nice business from a lifestyle perspective, because it's got a very strong recurring model with respect to customers. They sign up and they don't have a real need to leave. From a pricing perspective, we start out at just $200 a month, it covers their first 100 jobs, and then we have a utility pricing model behind that, which is a cost per job. Companies that are hiring for thousands and thousands of positions are spending a few thousand dollars per month. They see on a cost per application basis that we can drop ... We have one client, for example, where the cost per apply by using our service is 90% less than than they get in a CPA market. So they don't have any incentive to leave, if that makes sense. Joel: It does. Alex: Ultimately, endgame, we'd like to continue to deliver value for customers. And if that happens on a continual basis, we'll get more referrals. And either we continue to run it for years or we get rolled up in an acquisition. I could see that happening for sure. Joel: Right on. And on that warm and fuzzy note, Alex, it is time to face the firing squad. Are you ready? Alex: I am ready. Joel: Chad, you got him. Chad: You got it. So Alex, I have to say, this is going to be short and sweet. This is a problem that we've had since, it seems like, the dawn of Internet recruiting time. And to be able to see, obviously, somebody from the space who understands some of the biggest problems, and this, I believe, is one of the biggest problems, and taking that on along with Rethink, just makes a hell of a lot of sense. It's a "keep it simple, stupid" kind of platform, login free, pricing is easy. So from my standpoint, I don't know, unless you screw this up immensely, I don't know how you can't get acquired. You get big applause. Joel: All right, congratulations, Alex. Okay, now it's my turn. I'm going to echo everything that my baldheaded colleague just said. And we'll add that I've been talking about one-click apply being a huge deal for a long time. I think that it plays really well into the mobile apply problem, which we've had for a long time. When Google came out with Hire, I sort of opined a lot that Google will have a one-click apply everywhere. You'll have a Google resume or profile that you'll be able to use to apply to everywhere. Well, they've shut that down. So I think it leaves the door really open for solutions like yours to come in and really take away the friction that currently exists in a lot of the apply processes. Joel: I will add that chatbots are trying to solve some of these problems. So I could see a day where the one-click apply takes on a chat now kind of solution, where you go through and apply with a chatbot as opposed to uploading a resume. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. But I think the one-click apply is in a very good position to be the go-to for most companies. We see Indeed really fall in love with it. LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, I believe, as well. So this is a trend that you're getting on really well. I agree with Chad that you'd really have to fuck this up to not be acquired at some point. The fact that you've bootstrapped it is fantastic. It gives you leverage to do whatever the hell you want. If you want it to be a lifestyle business for the next 10 years or so, I think you can do that. So for me, it's not just the holiday season, I'm not just feeling warm and fuzzy. This is a big applause from me. Good job, Alex, and good luck in the future with this as you roll it out. Alex: Awesome. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Joel: You bet. So again, for our listeners who want to know more about you guys, or if there's a special deal for chadcheese listeners, you can throw that in as well. Where would they go? Alex: jobsync.io. Look forward to everybody getting in touch. Joel: Fantastic. We out. Chad: We out. Alex: Thanks, guys. Announcer: This has been the firing squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E.com. #jobs #UX #ATS #jobboards #FiringSquad

The only thing warmer than the chestnuts roasting on our open fire is the heat coming out of the world of recruitment. This week, the boys 1) uncover breaking news from the deadpool, 2) discuss another programmatic solutions acquisition 3) Colin Day gives Google for Jobs some iCIMS love 4) HackerRank scores a pipeline and... 5) chat-up how making Uber drivers in California FTEs might not actually be the best thing since, well, Uber. Enjoy, and show sponsors JobAdx, Sovren, and Canvas some holiday cheer! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps businesses find qualified candidates with disabilities for their job postings. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Aw, yeah. We're back for the weekly show. It's the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse. Chad: Ho-ho-ho. Joel: Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, you naughty bunch of boys and girls. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Stockings-on-the-Fireplace Sowash. Joel: Love it. On this week's episode, iCIMS Colin Day preaches, HackerRank acquires. Grab a candy cane and shove it in your piehole, Rudolph. We'll be right back after we pay for a few of these damn presents. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com, that's S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: That's right. Joel: Ho-ho-ho. Speaking of dinner... Chad: Yes. Joel: ... tonight, first shoutout, the Chad and Cheese annual holiday party... Chad: Here it comes. Joel: ... goes down tonight in lovely Fishers, Indiana, this year. Chad: We're going to pregame at your house, right? Then we're going to go eat the expensive food, maybe cigars or something. Who knows what'll happen after that? Joel: Yes, you've got that all correct. Who knows where the night will take us? Selfies will be had, sharing will be done. People will probably feel like they were there with us, tonight. Chad: I feel like they always do, which is why they bring us along with them, everywhere they go. Joel: Yeah. And somehow, they keep tuning in and keep wanting to see shit. Anyway, my first shoutout, I'm always excited to see where our annual holiday party takes us. Chad: Yeah. Well, first shoutout for me, and this is a double shoutout... First off, Kelly Robinson gets the first shoutout, first and foremost, because he couldn't believe that we had to be reminded just how good Mariah Carey was, #blasphemy. Kelly, to be fair, man, Joel can't remember what he had for dinner last night. That he remembered Mariah Carey was a feat upon itself. Chad: A bigger shoutout was the measure of alcohol, whiskey aplenty, that Kelly, RedDot Media, and the people over at Pager, the content app, actually sent to us. It was a 12 Days of Christmas, which means we have 12 days that we will be.. Joel's already shared his. I'm going to, after Christmas, the 12 days after Christmas I think is when it starts, I'm going to start the daily regimen of sharing those whiskeys online, social media, and we'll probably talk about it on the podcast, too. Joel: Yeah. No way could I wait for that. Kelly is on a full-on arsenal of our livers, and I love it, for one. Did know he was such a Mariah Carey fan, didn't quite put that together. But, yeah, this is a company called Flaviar, I think, is how you pronounce it, but they're sort of a Birchbox, Stitch Fix. What's the company you're using now? Chad: Hyde Closet. Joel: Yeah, Hyde Closet. High Closet? Chad: Hyde, yeah. Joel: Okay. So, you get regular tastings and whiskeys and things like that. This was sort of a 12 days, sampling each day. I've had three of them already, and they're quite delicious. This is over three days, by the way. I'm not a total drunk. But, yeah. It was great. He has upped the game for everyone who's looking to get on our good side with liquor. Chad: Yeah. I'd like to say, this has been a great year for the Chad and Cheese Podcast when it comes to schwag and liquor. Bayard sent us both whiskey. We had Recruitics send us beer. Shit, Talent Nexus sent me beer for three months, or something like that. So I mean, we've had ample amounts of schwag, high quality schwag, and alcohol, and we're looking forward to 2020 because we believe that's how you guys can actually up your game. Joel: Yeah. We better get more sponsors, because the cost of liver transplants has gone up as far as I've been reading in the news. I'm going to give a shoutout to Rich Lucas. Rich heard our podcast last week, in regards to Monster sending out spam sales messages. Apparently, he got one from Glassdoor and wanted to share that with me. So, Rich, shoutout to you, man, for sharing that with us. Glassdoor, get on that spam train, baby. Chad: It's that time of year, people. It a cue for, everybody's doing everything they can to kind of squeeze- Joel: Make those numbers! Chad: Yeah, make those numbers, people. My next shoutout is to Sylvain Oppizzi over at neuvoo, soon to be Talent.com. This week, I personally, and I'm sure you did too, received a ton of messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, text messages, from last week's shred about neuvoo buying Talent.com, and also because of the Adzuna Shade podcast. Thanks so much, guys. We really appreciate you listening. Chad: Not to mention, this is also funny. Doug Monro, who was really the focal point, the co-founder at Adzuna who was throwing shade at neuvoo, just couldn't leave well enough alone, which I appreciate. I love the engagement. But, on LinkedIn, Doug actually responded with, "Ha, ha. Bang on, guys. Thanks for the free psychoanalysis, and appreciate the free Adzuna namechecks. Based on your feedback, we're thinking of rebranding as ChadAndCheese.com." That's because we're ChadCheese.com. "It looks like that's available." Chad: My response was, "Of course, Doug, you're welcome. Thanks for reminding me, because we already own ChadAndCheese.com to redirect the domain, along with other domains like DangerHR, DangerousHR, and DangerousPodcasts, all dot-coms. And you can see that they're all easy to remember and spell, unlike Adzuna." Joel: Surprisingly, I got an email from Adzuna, which was a holiday e-card. Chad: Me, too. Joel: Yeah. We were added to the list. Chad: I love it. Joel: Not opted-in but, hell, whatever. I was half expecting to flip the card and get a middle finger or maybe a big pile of shit or something, but it was just a photo of the employees. So, thank you for adding us to the list. Chad: Again, we totally love that, Doug coming back, interacting with us, just kind of throwing barbs every now and again. That's cool shit. We enjoy that. And so, yeah, Doug's on the holiday list. I mean, anybody who can take that kind of shit from us and come back and give us shit, I love it, good stuff. Joel: Speaking of holiday lists, our Chad and Cheese holiday cards have been going out. We're getting some early feedback. One of my favorites was Susan Vitale, who totally got our stepbrothers themed postcard and replied on Twitter accordingly. Susan, as always, you're on top of your sense of humor and your pop culture and your meatheaded comedy. So, shoutout to you for that, and happy holidays to you and your baby and family. Chad: Yeah. And I think for Susan, next year, you and I might do a Golden Girls version. That would be awesome. Joel: Yeah. A lot of stuff is on the table, man. We can do a Wham thing, like one of us in a Choose Life t-shirt. I mean, there's a lot of ways we can go with this. Chad: Yeah, yeah. This is just beginning, people. Also, thanks to Josh, Quincy, and many others who sent us messages this week, and also the person who said that in the photo, the caricature, I look like white Obama. Well played, well played. Joel: Dude, I laughed so hard when they were like, "I thought that was white Obama," and you were like, "Obama's a good-looking guy." I thought... Anyway, that's fine. James Ellis, again with some feedback, he found inspiration in the German Krumpus, which is something that I think eats children that are bad during Christmas. I'm not up on my German folklore, but leave it to James to throw eating children and connect it to our postcard. Thanks, James. Chad: Yeah. I think it's Krampus, but I could be wrong. Joel: Krumpus, Krampus, whatever. Chad: Whatever it is. A big shoutout to Charu Malhotra and also Tabatha Ward. Thanks for connecting on LinkedIn and listening. And also remember, if you're a listener out there, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, we even have a Chad and Cheese Facebook page, but overall it's very important that you subscribe first. Whether you're listening on iTunes or Google Podcast or Spotify or Crowdcast, whatever it might be, just go and subscribe and you'll get Chad and Cheese in your daily- Joel: Sorry, kids, still no Chad and Cheese TikTok account. Maybe that's something we can look at in 2020. Chad: Ooh, that's a good call. Big shoutout to Evergreen Podcast, baby. Joel: Ow! Cleveland's own. Chad: That's right, that's right. In January we will also be launching a new series of podcasts called Voices. Why? Because many of the people that are out there, who are influential, are also behind the scenes. We wanted to be able to raise them up and get some awareness to those individuals in our industry. So, look for the new series within the actual Chad and Cheese umbrella. Just subscribe at Chad and Cheese, and you'll notice new Voices podcasts that are actually series. Joel: (singing) Chad: 'Til Tuesday, baby. Joel: Let's get to the news. Chad: This one is pretty sad. Joel: What is it? What, WTF, JWT, WT, NSW? I don't know what's going on here. Chad: Yeah. RIP, so rest in peace to Wunderman Thompson Employ, also known as WT Employ, which was also known as JWT Inside for years, well-known in the industry. We were actually turned on to this by Steven Rothberg. He received an email and thought, "Wow, this is kind of weird shit." I hadn't heard from JWT in forever, and it's because they were actually merged with another organization and they created Wunderman Thompson. Chad: Overall, I'd never heard of this organization or WT Employ, so when I heard that they were shutting down I was like, "So, what? I don't even know who the fuck these people are." Well, they're JWT Inside. I don't get it, overall. They were fairly prominent in our industry and they had a ton of services that they provided, again, to their clients, but it seems like they really don't want to focus on the employment sector. This is actually a quote from a high-ranking individual at WT Employ. Chad: I pretty much ask, "Is this true, that you guys are shutting down?" The response was, "Unfortunately, yes. That is true. Our offering apparently doesn't align with Wunderman Thompson's new leadership vision." It's interesting because, as you and I talk to cult brands, everything they talk about is how the people inside the actual employment piece matters so much. But Wunderman Thompson, which is a big, flashy type of advertising company, that's not where their focus is going to be. Joel: Yeah. You know, someone needs to write a book on the recruitment advertising industry because, you and I are old enough to sort of remember the days of how much they made on display ads in the newspaper and how the business was pretty much an order-taking business, it was a schmoozing business. Companies chose agencies based on how many lunches they got, how many special parties. I mean, there wasn't a lot of thought around what these business... Joel: There wasn't a lot of creativity in terms of business. And then the internet came along and job postings became free to $100 a posting, and then agencies couldn't make the money. So then it was like, "Okay, well, let's be a tech company." So you saw firms launch their own ATSs and their own shit. Right? And then 2008 happened, the world ended, and then it was like, "Let's change our name. Let's change direction. What are we going to do? Let's get acquired or acquire." Joel: And then now, you're in this weird place where some of the ones that have been around for a long time, you know, the shakers who are making smart decisions, and then others like JWT, the old days, changed to JWT Inside, now it's WT Employ, now it's going to be gone. But, the whole history of agencies is really fascinating. I think a lot of younger people that are listening have no context to where these things have gone in the last 20-25 years, but there's been a ton of disruption and chaos in the agency business. Chad: This actually says something, right? When we see companies like TMP, Symphony, Shaker, Recruitics, you see these companies that are actually acquiring, thriving, building, I mean, this is the industry to be able to... not the industry. This is the economy to be able to build in this industry, but those organizations are all focused on the employment... Chad: JWT Inside, which became WT Employ, did all the things that you would think that they would do, employment branding, experienced strategy, recruiter toolkits. I mean, there's so many things that they actually did but, I guess overall, in the grand scheme of things, from their quote/unquote, "leadership vision," the employment piece just doesn't play that big of a part, so it's dead. Joel: Yeah, which is ironic to your point that employment and marketing in general are getting closer than they ever have been. And I think both of us agree that they will, at some point, unite in ways that they haven't in a long time. Maybe the timing is really bad to shut this thing down. Chad: Yeah. And/or the leaders in that organization aren't focused on a holistic type of a brand for their clients. And maybe they will partner with a TMP or a Shaker or what have you, to be able to bring in that piece. Who knows? But if they're not going to have it, their clients are going to get it somewhere. Joel: Yeah. So, you believe it'll be more holistic, where there's employment brand, we're just building an entire brand for the company and employment will be part of that. Chad: Well, and that's the thing, is that I don't think it works that way. I think you definitely have to think of all experiences. And no matter whether the individual is coming to your career site or coming to buy something on your site, the interactions are different but yet they're the same. They should feel like the same. You should still feel like a customer and taken care of, if you're applying for a job. Chad: I don't think that they're probably focused on that. They're probably focused on the bigger revenue items, as opposed to employment. Even though employment, I believe, is really the foundation of where all of this goes in the first place. Joel: Well, WTF, WT Employ, RIP. Chad: Bye-bye. Joel: Colin Day, who is not going bye-bye is also in the news this week, for a video that he posted. What's up with that? Chad: Colin, he's been doing these videos. I love seeing Colin out, representing the brand. I think as they talked about Colin stepping away from being CEO and being chairman, that he would actually have more time to do some of these types of things and really be an evangelist, more than anything else. Which is, you know, he deserves after the amount of time that he actually led the organization, to kind of step back and be that evangelist. Chad: But anyway, he did a video he posted to LinkedIn. He focused on a couple of items. First and foremost, one of the things that we pounded away on one of our podcasts... right when we got back, I think, from Arizona, the iCIMS Influence Conference... was the average unfilled job costs an employer $680 per day. Say that again. The average unfilled job costs an employer $680 per day. If the chair is empty, that's costing the organization something. What is it? iCIMS was able to boil it down to $680 a day. Chad: Go ahead and extrapolate that out to all of your positions, et cetera, et cetera, and you start to get an opportunity, I think, to go to the c-suite and say, "This is what we're losing on a daily basis because we don't have what we need to do our job." And overall, the broader economic scheme is $160 billion drag on the economy. Being able to push that kind of data out, right out of the gate, to be able to help employers, I think, become better storytellers is incredibly key. Joel: Yep, for sure. I, in addition to that, love Colin pounding the table on the Google for Jobs issue. We've talked about that on the show as well. But, we get a lot of job board insight from people that we know, that traffic has plateaued or it's declining, the impending death of Google for Jobs. And, if you listen to Colin, it's a completely different story. I think his story is one that we should listen to, more so than job boards, because he's actually at ground zero of where companies want candidates to go and job seekers to go, which is their own career site. Joel: The fact that he's seeing growth, gradual growth... I think one exit we said in the last podcast from the show... and Susan Vitale, a CMO, echoed this... was that Google for Jobs is just like this marching army on all the competition. Where Google for Jobs, last year, was maybe sixth in terms of traffic to company sites, it's now number three, I think. Would anyone be surprised if, next year, it's number two? Would anyone be surprised if, the year after that, it's number one now? That's what we're seeing from Google for Jobs. Joel: So, when you get an ATS that's willing to put itself out there and give that information to the marketplace and say, "Indeed CEO be damned," because, if he calls me and says, "What the hell are you doing," I think that's great for the marketplace and great for companies, and good on Colin Day for putting his neck out there and having a voice. I think it's fantastic. Chad: Yeah. I think on the Google for Jobs, I mean, we've already been through this story once before with Google and SEO. How do you rank better? How do you do this better? I think first and foremost, what you need to do is align yourself with vendors who give a shit. I mean, that's number one because, if you're with a applicant tracking system who literally just does not, they don't give a shit about whether jobs are on Google for Jobs, let alone whether they're ranking well, that's a problem. And so from that standpoint, obviously iCIMS gives a shit. Chad: And then you take a look at smaller companies that start to focus on being able to help ranking. We actually had a Firing Squad with Jobiak, with Venkat from Jobiak. So I think that you're going to see companies like this start to gain steam because, you know as well as I do, talent acquisition professionals are hearing Google for Jobs for the first time, believe it or not, and they're saying, "What the fuck? How, first and foremost, do I get my jobs there?" And then the next question is going to be, "Okay. Well, my jobs are in there but I can't find them. How do I rank better?" Chad: It's going to be something that actually matters because, a couple of different things. First off, it's Google. I mean, let's just put that out there. And number two, they're sick and fucking tired of Indeed. That's what it is. It's one of those opportunities to be able to get away from the dark arts of bullshit that you have to deal with, with Indeed. Joel: Yeah. Typically, ATSs don't care until their clients make them care. Right? It wasn't until Jobs to Web and other services, DirectEmployers, their program, take our jobs and optimize them for Google, that ATSs finally said, "Okay, we need to do this ourselves. There doesn't need to be a layer in-between us and Google." Joel: Hats off again to iCIMS for having the vision to say, "Look, we're not going to wait around for our customers to say, "Hey, get us on Google for Jobs," and get engaged with Google. They just went ahead and did, and they've been a leader in this space for a long time. Hats off to them. Ultimately, every ATS is going to have to say, "We need to be in Google for Jobs. What's the schema that we need to adhere to?" Joel: iCIMS is kind of leading the way, and the Jobiak and companies like that are helping spearhead that movement, and that's all good for Google and good for employers, direct employers, especially good for ATSs. Not so good for job boards probably, in the long run, and not good for Indeed, but hell, the market is the market. You either adapt or die. Chad: Agreed. Joel: Well, speaking of adapting, Canvas, one of the top adapters in our marketplace, let's hear from them and we'll talk about some acquisitions and Golden Bees? Amber Ferrari: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen, and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvas bot is at your side, adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Amber Ferrari: Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser-focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at GoCanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's GoCanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: That's Amber Ferrari, everyone. And it's funny, I just checked my Twitter and Amber just got our card. She Tweeted it on Twitter. "Best card yet. Thanks for the holiday card, Chad and Joel. Here's to no coal for you, this year." And she took the picture, it seems like, out of their new offices possibly. Are they on the Circle in Indianapolis? Joel: They are, yeah. Chad: Oh, damn. That's good stuff. We also need to get up there and make sure that we get Aman, his trophy. Joel: We're trying to schedule that. They've been kind of elusive. Hopefully, they'll listen to this podcast and- Chad: They're busy. Joel: Straight up. So, a quick real life story. I was on a call for Ratedly, my little side project, a solopreneur issue. The company I was talking to just purchased Jobvite as their ATS and Canvas was a major part of that decision, so good on Canvas, good on Jobvite. Apparently the integration is working. Chad: Yeah. Well, again, it's one of those things where, if you have the features and you have the productivity tools that companies want and need, it just makes sense. Chatbots, texting, I mean, all the way through, programmatic, they're going to want to listen to you because that means they don't have to buy a shit-ton of other layers to try to integrate with your system, that should be integrated already. Joel: Yep. And speaking of acquisitions and integrations, let's talk about acquisitions. Chad: (singing) Yes. Acquisition out of France, people. Figaro Classifieds acquire Golden Bees. Okay. A shoutout to Eva Zils, over at OnlineRecruiting.net and Nathan over at AIA for sending this our way. But, Figaro Classifieds, they acquired a majority stake in the programmatic job ad tech provider Golden Bees. Figaro is pretty much just like a sexy Craigslist. I mean, it's a classified system. It looks good. It's easy to navigate. And go figure, they have jobs. Chad: It makes a lot of sense, especially knowing that Figaro Classifieds is part of the Figaro Group. It's a large media company with many print and online titles and, apparently, it's comparable to a company you might know, called Axel Springer, who owns StepStone, who bought Appcast. Joel: The Germans. Chad: Yes. The Germans are doing their thing with their online publications, their StepStones, their programmatic with Appcast, which we thought, I think was probably one of the best, if not biggest buys of the year, the acquisitions of the year. And then these guys, Figaro- Joel: (singing) Chad: ... goes in and they buy Golden Bees. Now, we've never heard of, I've never heard of Figaro or Golden Bees, but this seems like a play to try to stay at least in-step with the market in Axel Springer. Joel: Sure. Is this five programmatics in the last quarter, I guess, of this year. Chad: Yes. Yeah, five or six, jeez. Joel: Jesus. Let's try the programmatic fucking advertising solution and get acquired next week. Chad: Yeah. There's always one in Germany that we don't talk about. I think it's called Compana, or something like that, just because it was so small and we haven't heard of it, but I think there are six programmatic companies that have been bought, at least within the last five months. Joel: Yeah. And I love that as you and I live this stuff, we get news every day, tips every day. We're on this all the time. I love it when something passes our desk, like, "Who the fuck are these guys," because it's such a big world and startups and companies are all over the place, and we can't even keep up with this shit. So, it's just really nice. Like Golden Bees, I was like, "What is that? Oh, programmatic. Okay, Figaro Classifieds. Okay, got it. Cool." That's always nice. Joel: And it's nice to see the global impact of what we do and what we live every day get just more and more influential in people's lives. I think it's great. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Well, in one of the statements they made, the company wanted to move toward performance-based advertising models. This is the thing, and this is what we talked about with StepStone hopefully being able to surge, at least in Germany, and then obviously break through those boundaries throughout all of Europe into what's already happening in the U.S., but to be able to really drive performance-based advertising throughout Europe and beyond, and then also hopefully start to catch up to what we're doing here in the U.S. Joel: All the technology is not happening in the U.S. It's happening everywhere, and that's a great thing for everybody. Now we just need more robots in more countries to take over. Chad: Yeah. All we need to do is, all we need are robot heads, 10 guys, everywhere. Joel: That's right. All right, closer to home, another acquisition, HackerRank. Enjoyed our conversation with their CO, but they've made a really cool acquisition that really feeds well into their business in Mimir? Mimar? I don't know how to pronounce it. Chad: Mimir. Joel: Mimir, sure, let's go with that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, Mimir is basically software for teachers who are teaching technology, engineering, development, all that good stuff. It's essentially a cradle-to-grave strategy where HackerRank takes these kids, or funnels them, to being students, to now being full-fledged developers, and now getting them into the workforce. I think we both agree this is a great acquisition and feeds really well into the funnel that HackerRank needs to keep their database full of functioning professionals, for clients to pay them money to get them into the door and into their companies to employ. Chad: Yeah. For those who don't know out there, HackerRank, and this is from their website, "The market-leading technical interview platform to identify and hire developers with the right skills." Now, we've known HackerRank as more of a practicing and coding for interviews, but they're really focused heavily now on trying to parlay that into getting these individuals pipelined into companies. Chad: Now, Mimir, which I think Mimir, instead of having professors in the classroom, you could have a 10 guy head do this. Anyway, it provides the tools for instructor- Joel: Again with the robots. Chad: ... provides the tools for instructors to effectively teach computer science courses of any scale without... Pretty much, overall, it's great from a scalability standpoint. It has all of these courses involved in the actual platform, itself. So, here's the beautiful thing, as Joel had said, cradle-to-grave, they are working with an enormous amount of organizations of which UCLA, Purdue, Oregon State, Michigan State, working with corporations like Google. They have 15,000-20,000 students already using the platform. Chad: This is pipelining. This is what pipelining is, people. When you actually take people who are doing what you need them to do, and you can pipeline them into your jobs, these are the types of organizations you need to get involved with. Now, let's say for instance, on the teaching side there are gaps, from a coding standpoint, or maybe languages or what have you. That's where you work with Mimir to be able to add those into their repertoire, right, into their course collection. Chad: And, guess what? You start pipelining them through HackerRank into your fucking jobs. I mean, from my standpoint, it's great that a company like HackerRank, and I think Vivek, and I think what they're doing over there is just outstanding, but to be able to see something like this, I think, is fucking genius. Joel: Yep. Mimir had raised about $2.5 million in a Series A. It's safe to say this wasn't a crazy acquisition so, from an out-of-pocket expense, probably very reasonable. And what they'll get back from it is probably on the plus side. Overall, we really like this acquisition. And I think from what we know of Figaro and Golden Bees, that was probably a good acquisition as well. Chad: Yes. When talked to Vivek, we talked to them a little bit about this. He said, "No, not right now, but it's something that we're looking at down the road," apparently, just a few months down the road. So, great job, Vivek, and big applause to the whole team over there. Joel: Big applause. Speaking of acquisitions, and ones that should happen soon, let's get a word from JobAdX and we'll come back and talk some freelancing shit. Chad: Oh, yeah. JobAdX: So, how's the hiring going? Find those purple squirrels? JobAdX: With applicant after applicant, it feels like I'm just getting further from hiring the right candidate. I've got tons of applications, but none of these candidates are even close to being the right fit. Volume is great and all, but my small team doesn't have the time to sift through hundreds of mismatched applications. I want more relevant candidates, not just more candidates. JobAdX: Well, get this. JobAdX has been helping small to medium businesses get their job ads in front of targeted active job seekers by matching your jobs to a candidate based on their search behavior across a vast network of niche job sites and talent networks. And the best part, it's self-serve. No sales reps, no chatbots, no spend minimums. Just fill a form with your name, number of jobs, and a budget you're working with, and voila. JobAdX: Your ads are now shown over a growing network of 150 job sites. Better yet, those company videos that showcase the value of being part of a small team can have a new home now, within your ads, helping you stand out and share your vision proactively. Wait, what was that? JobAdX: Oh, I just signed up for self-serve with JobAdX. What were you talking about? JobAdX: That fast, huh? Jumpstart your targeted recruitment with JobAdX today. Visit JobAdX.com and click that Get Started Risk Free button. It's JobAdX.com. JobAdX, engage, attract, employ. Joel: We have three interesting stories that came out this week on freelancing. I'm happy starting with whichever one you'd like. Chad: I'd like to start with the high-paying ones, first. Joel: Sure. Chad: CNBC actually put out the highest paying freelance jobs of 2020, where you can earn $90,000 or more. MBO Partners actually put out a study, and more than half of full-time independent workers say that they feel more financially secure in their current roles than they did with traditional jobs. We're talking about freelancers, here. Chad: And, they listed some of these jobs, which is interesting because you never thought corporate law would be a freelancing job, right, but it is. Corporate law, contract law, management consulting, ERP, CRM, software... that made sense... data visualization, machine learning, the deep learning, all that fun stuff that we talked about, especially around AI. Here's one that I thought was crazy, presentations. Joel: I was going to mention that. Yeah. Chad: Presentation designer and writer, hourly rate, $50 and hour, annual rate prospectively $100,000 a year. Joel: Yeah. What caught my imagination on this was that, yeah, you have sort of the high level stuff, AI, data shit, stuff that a lot of people feel is out of reach, but you had a good amount of stuff, presentation designer, I think there was email automation, marketing support, stuff that you don't have to be a genius to be able to do and make good money at. I think that that was what stood out to me, was freelancing is moving from high level programming stuff to just about anything. Joel: If I am someone looking to make extra money, or even, "What are my career choices, moving forward," I think that the freelancing route is opening itself up to just about everyone. That alone is pretty exciting. It creates tremendous challenges for full-time employers and how they interact and engage with freelancers and contractors and full=time employees, and how that all works out. But it's clear, this is where the world is going and companies need to adapt if they're going to thrive. Chad: So, there's a resumes and cover letters job category. Sample careers is, professional development writer, career coach, cover letter and LinkedIn support. So, Tim Sackett can get on the career coach bandwagon and knock us out. Joel: There you go. Chad: About $90,000. I mean, it's interesting to see, as you had said, just the span and type of positions that are available out there, to be able to help people. Joel: Yeah. I think that the major hurdle for most people is healthcare, and the inability to get that. If that hurdle ever goes away and we either have universal healthcare or whatever that looks like, I think the world becomes very interesting and amenity to want to be freelancing goes through the roof. Because, like you said, I could freelance and have 10 clients that I'm getting $500 from a month, versus one employer where, if they let me go, I'm out of a job. Right? Joel: I can work on 10 different projects, 10 different companies, 10 different things. That, to me, is a lot more appealing. It's the healthcare issue that I think is really stopping a lot of people from diving headfirst into a freelance nation. Chad: Yeah. No, it is, and it is stifling innovation. If people actually had an opportunity to step back, away from their job that they hate, and they got to do something that they loved, yes. Would there be a bunch of failures? There's no question. But, out of those failures, would there be innovation born? Of course, and I think that's one of the problems, that we are still living in a system that was built decades, shit, a century possibly, ago. Joel: Sure, Industrial Revolution. Yeah. Chad: We need to think fashion-forward and what is better for people. When Japan has a four-day work week and they see more productivity out of that, is that a long-term scheme? I don't know. These are the kinds of conversations that we should have, so that we understand that we don't live to work, you know, we work to live. Joel: Yeah. And I think that could segue nicely into the California law, right, that we've talked about, and treating freelancers or contract folks as full-time employees. Uber's at the forefront of this, and we'll talk about their Uber Works initiative, as well. But, I think there's good intentions in government saying, "Well, these folks need full-time benefits and they need to be treated as full-time employees, but we are starting to see stories out of California where freelancers are having work dry up because companies just say, "Fuck it," and "We're not going to deal with it." Joel: I'm not saying that's every freelancer and every company, but we're definitely going to see growing pains as we legislate some of this stuff. And at least in this case, another story from CNBC was, this freelancer was starting to see jobs dry up for the simple fact that companies had to treat him differently than a contractor. Chad: Yeah. I think as companies look for loopholes on how to do things cheaper, how they can get things done faster, these are going to be the growing pains that we have to deal with, especially when it comes to protecting employees. And if they're not seen as, quote/unquote, "employees," there's no protection around that. That's just total bullshit. We have to actually take a different look and different measures in how people are actually treated from dollars, cents, flexibility, and benefits. Chad: Like, we were just talking about universal healthcare. I mean, is that something that a company should be bestowing up on their employees, or is that something that everybody should have? I mean, I think it's fairly easy. Everybody should have healthcare. That just makes a more healthy society. Joel: Yeah. I don't think this law happens if people have healthcare, because I don't think freelancers are clamoring for benefits if they have healthcare. How many people stay at their company for healthcare? Chad: Well, and we could call that a ball-and-chain, too. Joel: Well, going back to Uber, they're trying to make money. And so, there's a story out as well, they'll have their opening... This actually came out today. They're going to be aggressively going after Uber Works in Florida in the coming months, which kind of makes sense. Florida is probably not going to have legislation for full-time employees. You have the Super Bowl dropping in February, so it's a good time to get freelance work that way. Joel: But this goes beyond driving a car, to your service industries, your people that don't necessarily drive around to help service folks. And this sort of goes to the whole theory of... Amazon used to be a book company. Right? You thought of them only as books. As Uber tries to grow into more revenue opportunities, I think they're hoping that they go from being a car service to being an entire work platform, which would be interesting. Certainly, they'd have a competitive advantage, just by brand and by, I guess, scale. What do you think about this move to Florida and kind of amping up their Uber Works initiative? Chad: I think it's interesting because Uber Works, at least what we've learned thus far, it's not a platform like Uber, from the standpoint of, you can't go in there and actually find people. It has to be facilitated through a partnership with a staffing company. That is one of the layers that Uber wants to get away from, is being able to point at these people and say, "Oh, they're employees." Right? Chad: Now, in Florida, I don't think that's currently a problem, but long-term it's going to be a problem, which is one of the reasons why they're looking to partner with staffing companies. So, I'm really interested to see how this model matures. Even if it does, I think it could because smaller staffing companies don't have the resources and/or budget to be able to build infrastructure like the Uber app or any of the Uber technology. Will they actually buy into it? Or, will a Job.com model come around and actually win the day? Joel: Yeah. It'll definitely be interesting. I think we both agree that, as long as they don't get rid of the scooters, we're okay with whatever happens. Chad: That's right. You leave those jump scooters alone. And Lyft, I love the Lyft scooters, too. Joel: And potentially die is a good thing. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a thing, too. Joel: But, yeah, freelancing shit, it's all the rage. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Walken: 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 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. It's so weird. Walken: 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. #WundermanThompson #JWTInside #EmployerBrand #Brand #EmploymentBrand #Uber #Lyft #Hackerrank #Mimir #recruiting #iCIMS #GoogleforJobs #Google

Everyone wants to know! Who was naughty and/or who was nice in 2019? Special guest Bill Boorman joins The Chad and Cheese on stage to announce their 2019 Naughty and Nice lists on stage during TalentNET LIVE in Dallas. They cover who was naughty and who was nice in the world of HR, recruiting, tech, and workforce? Gotta listen to find out. Thanks to Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas for filling our listeners' stockings with Chad & Cheese podcast throughout 2019! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Chad: Ho, ho, Happy New Year and all that jazz. Welcome to 2019's final Chad and Cheese podcast and lucky for you, it's our naughty and nice show. Recorded live onstage at TalentNet Live in Dallas with special guest Bill Boorman. He'll be the one speaking in drunken pub English. Enjoy. After this, word from Amber Ferrari and Canvas. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text. And so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvas-Bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. 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 snarl. Bottle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: This is the Chad and Cheese. Yes. This is going to be a live broadcast. It's going to be fun. This is more festive than I expected it. If you've ever heard the Chad and Cheese podcast, you know that you're in for a treat. If you've ever heard Bill Boorman, You know that this is going to be crazy and insightful. Chad: Crazy. Joel: All right, ready to go. Chad: Oh yeah. Did we push record on this? Chad: Oh Yeah. I think we pressed record. Joel: What's up everybody? Who knows of the Chad and Cheese podcast? A few people hopefully. If you don't know, Chad and I, I'm Cheese, that's Chad. This is our special guest and British diplomat, Bill Borman, who is joining us today. If you don't know about the show, we do a weekly Roundup of news, usually about vendors, who's going out of business, who's buying whom, Chad: Who sucks. Joel: [crosstalk 00:02:47] We do a shark tank show. We do deep dives into everything from AI to automation, to programmatic advertising, Chad: And we're not safe for work. Joel: So everything. So every year, we're only two years old, but we have this tradition of [crosstalk 00:03:01] around this time of year we do a naughty or nice list. We went to Craig and said, hey, we think this would be fun in a live format. Hopefully it will be. So each of us has two naughties and two nicies and we will run through them, starting with Chad. Chad: I like to thank Batman, my man Batman who actually already dropped the F bomb. So you broke the ceiling. Joel: You fucker. Chad: We appreciate that. We are not safe for work podcast. We are not five stars on iTunes because we piss people off. It's kind of a thing, right? Joel: Unlike the other presentations today, we are not five stars. Chad: We're not five stars- Joel: And we are proud of it. Chad: And just so you know- Joel: We are not for everybody. Chad: Anyway, Joel: Cheese.com for more information. Subscribe today. Chad: Subscribe today. Yes so we're going to jump in straight into the naughty, because that's the kind of podcast we are. First off, the first naughty thing I want to talk about, that for this year was McDonald's voice-activated bait-and-switch bullshit that they pulled. Remember that, right? If you don't know the story, McDonald's is actually voice-initiated. They're using Alexa and Google assistant to be able to start the application process with the job search slash application process, which did, guess what? Took you to a text message that took you to the application process, which was the black hole under a new name. Joel loves it though. Go ahead Joel. Joel: Okay, let's carry this, carry here. Carries out hobnob. This is a great point. Who, who of you remember the first iPhone? It sucked, right? 2G, the battery lasted for 12 minutes. Chad: Comparatively, yeah. Joel: It sucked, right? So in Chad's world, [crosstalk 00:04:44] the iPhone should have been buried and never improved. Chad: Never said that. Joel: You remember the first Tesla, right? It went up in flames. It sucked, right? So in Chad's world, the Tesla should have been scrapped. A driverless cars were running over people. So that'll never be a thing in your world. Chad: People are running over people. Joel: That can't be improved. Things that start out here can eventually get to here and be okay. So maybe next year this will make your nicey. Chad: So if you don't care about your brand experience for your job seekers, they do whatever Joel says, because he does not give a fuck. Joel: Apple kept hiring people after the release of the first iPhone. Chad: Because they were the only phone out there, dude. The only smart phone out there. [crosstalk 00:05:25] I think it is not a smart phone. Joel: We don't have to get into the pros and cons of smart phones. [crosstalk 00:05:31] Yes. Our global guests chime in on this. Bill: Absolutely right on the nasties for me. Exactly what McDonald's did was, they thought bought a hotel, they spent one million bucks on the lobby and nothing on the rooms, which actually creates an expectation of a great experience and made it worse. Joel: Do MacDonald's have rooms in Britain? [crosstalk 00:05:51] A little private eatery. Chad: I was talking about the Tesla, shut up. Bill: Geez boy, that's what, Joel: See you're on the Chad side of this. That is shitty and it shouldn't go anywhere else from here. Bill: I think the principle of if you're going to change, you should change. If you're going to change the experience, you have to change the whole experience, not pieces of experience. Because then you make the expectation that the experience is going to be great- Joel: And a bigger question- Bill: And what is shitty is worse. Joel: Can we expect in the future, Hey Alexa, find me a job in Dallas, to be a thing. Bill: Absolutely. Joel: Okay. Do we all agree on that? Bill: Oh, yeah. Joel: We can all agree that this is just the first step- Chad: they need to get that the first step should have been a test market much like they do with everything else in their industry. They choose a test market, they see if it sucks and if it does, they fix it. They will dish it out globally. Bill: They don't play their employees. Joel: The iPhone wasn't released in Cupertino for a month to work out. Chad: Yeah, they did. They had test pockets. Joel: All right, Bill. Bill: So my naughty is the breakdown of trust in society for content. When I spoke here 10 years ago as the closing keynote, which Craig may have mentioned. I've changed a little bit, so you might not recognize me, but the key thing was, I remember the Edelman index said that we trusted social media at that time, eight times more than we trusted content from what was previously trusted sources. Fake news. When we look at that now, let's almost, that's in reverse like we do, it's very hard. The breakdown in trust in content, basically means it's very hard to produce content which is trusted. It's at the point where stories are not important. It's Tellus, which- Bill: I was a bit naughty. So, and I think that, we better explain that for radio, Chad: that was fine. That was cardio. Joel: His antlers fell off. We're in costume. Bill: For me, naughty is the breakdown in trust that we've had in society with content, which by the way, we thoroughly deserve. Joel: And then do we trust employers? Certainly not, right. Bill: They are full of shit. So you know, the employer branding department is generally the department of propaganda, you know? Joel: That's why review sites exist, because people trust- Bill: Yeah. But who, who leaves a review on a review site? Only an extremist. The only people who review- Joel: Seven to one, I think. Bill: But the other people who review anything, either love it so much that their opinion is invalid or hate it so much that their opinion is invalid. The people we really want to hear- Joel: Silent majority. Bill: People in the middle, who say it's okay, that's who we want to connect with and they're silent because we don't create a place for them to have a voice. That's why they don't [crosstalk 00:08:27] Joel: Down to some cerebral shifts. Chad: That's why we have him here. Joel: We keep it to Alexa and McDonald's [crosstalk 00:08:33] Joel: So my first naughty is I'm going to go sort of corporate and this is an alleged story. I don't want to call guilt out because no one's been convicted. No one's going to jail. But, so there's a company called Crowded. Did everyone did interviews with Crowded Customers? Joel: Okay. So Crowded for those who don't know, their mission in life was to revive the dead of your ATS. Right? So if you had someone apply five years ago, Crowded's job was to email these folks, get them re-engaged, new jobs that were available. Maybe what they applied for was a miracle today. Chad: Nurture them. Joel: Yeah, nurture them. It was a good idea. Chad: No. Joel: Good idea. We interviewed Howie Schwartz, the CEO in the first year that they got started. So anyway, this past year, how he was allegedly embezzling money from the company, they raised about $3 million. The whisper number I heard was in the hundreds of thousands that were embezzled. How he's gone from the company, all the executives are gone and they have since been acquired by another company. Never to be heard from again. So it's kind of sad, naughty to have a company that had some promise, some bad people up at the top. They make my naughty list for the alleged embezzlement [crosstalk 00:09:58]. Bill: Nice idea for delivery. Joel: For executives executing, yes. Chad: Excellent. So we're going to go to nice now. So my first nice is around acquisitions that have been happening all over the place this year and to name names, TMP by themselves had four acquisitions, Symphony talent obviously just bought Smashfly programmatic, went on that fricking fire sale this year. I mean we had first, out of the gate, Appcast was bought by Stepstone, ClickIQ, Indeed. Indeed never makes my nice list by the way. Just so everybody knows. Perengo Joel: Did you make it to anyone's naughty list ? Is Indeed on anyone's naughty list? Bill: No. I love ClickIQ, by the way. So. Chad: You would [crosstalk 00:10:42]. Bill: Would be nice to reach them. Joel: Full disclosure he owns half the company, Chad: You would, and then Recruitics, interestingly enough, a tech company, turns around and buys an ad agency. I mean, we're seeing a lot of everything that's going on. And then the applicant tracking system side of the house PageUp at PageUpPeople.com, they just bought Clinch.io or Clinchtalent.com, iCIMS bought Jibe and then we had this huge fricking K-1 roll-up with Jobvite, $200 million given the job bites, so that they can go on a shopping spree and they bought Telemetry, roll point and our favorite, Canvas. Yeah. So Bill knows a little bit about the K-One roll-up, because. Bill: I was in that deal. Chad: He was under the sheets, Bill: Under the sheets of that deal. Oh I think what that really brought to us is the creation of how can we bring technology together. I think it's a kind of halfway between naughty and nice as examine make it work. I think the principle in the idea, very passionate about it, that we can get everything from CRM to programmatic, to chat bot, to communication in a- Chad: interestingly- Bill: Platform for one single code. Joel: The acquisitions spanned many different technologies- Bill: Many different technologies. But interestingly all with the exception of probably job like all with point solutions. So I think what they're showing us is, what we actually want, as what we would call core function or core function within our CRM or within our ATS or within a platform. So the rollup is really towards core platform. The challenge is going to be in the execution. Joel: Does the code work together? Is it neat? Bill: For me, the nice bit is that the naughty bit is, it's kind of half and half on that at the minute, see what happens. Joel: It's much more about features being added as opposed to customers being added or geographies being added. Whereas the old days where job boards would buy each other to sort of claim, you know, estate claims in certain parts of the country. Bill: There is a bit of buying customers. There's always a bit of buying customers. Craig: That was exactly what the rig, well they on the recruiting side, that's exactly what [crosstalk 00:12:50] Joel: The agency side. Bill: I think the programmatic, while he's a lot more interesting because of what it's showing us is programmatic is becoming a core feature of whether that's,- Chad: And I think- Bill: This is the way in which ads you're going to be well- Chad: And I think that's the only way that we move the needle though, because HR and TA is not going to move toward the performance space as fast, unless it becomes core. Bill: And it has to become, course. I think what it vindicates in the acquisition is, this is something that customers want as, and all of us should want as, core features. We shouldn't be buying ads in the old school way [crosstalk 00:13:28] of paying for a banner or where we just shouldn't be doing that, you know? Otherwise we might as well get our app. Joel: What do you think this is interactive. Joel: It's commercial time. JobAdX: So how's the hiring going? Find those purple squirrels? JobAdX: With applicant after applicant it feels like I'm just getting further from hiring the right candidate. I've got tons of applications, but none of these candidates are even close to being the right fit. Volume is great thought, but my small team doesn't have the time to sift through hundreds of mismatched applications. I want more relevant candidates, not just more candidates. JobAdX: Well, get this JobAdX has been helping small to medium businesses get their job ads in front of targeted active job seekers by matching your jobs to a candidate based on their search behavior across a vast network of niche job sites and talent networks. And the best part, it's self-serve. No sales reps., no chatbots, no spend minimums. Just fill a form with your name, number of jobs, and a budget you're working with. And voilà, your ads are now shown over a growing network of 150 job sites. Better yet, those company videos that showcase the value of being part of a small team can have a new home now within your ads, helping you stand out and share your vision proactively. JobAdX: Wait, what was that? Oh, I just signed up for self-serve with JobAdX. What were you talking about? JobAdX: That fast? Huh? Jumpstart your targeted recruitment with JobAdX today. Visit JobAdX.com and click that. Get started. Risk-free button. It's JobAdX.com. JobAdX.com: Engage, attract, employ. Chad: It's show time. Chad: So, so nice. Nice, nice, nice. Bill: So my nice is Chatbots. So I'm disclosure. I do- Chad: Chatbot? Bill: As a lead advisor with Jobpal on product. But one of the things we've learned from Airbus is we're seeing real- I think we're beginning to see real user case is the things that we talked about before and we're beginning to understand what they are. The really interesting thing with the Chatbots is when we give people an option of talking specifically about the Airbus example right now our rollout just did a case study on, when we give them the option of talking to a person or talking to a technology, 95% of people choose the Chatbot. They ask 1.8 questions and the 1.8 questions can be divided into very specific, it's not chat. Chat is misleading. You don't, it's not about asking you how the weather is or stuff like that. Bill: The questions are very much either functional, how do I apply, where do I apply, where do I upload or information. What's the salary? Joel: Where does it go? Bill: Very, very specific and I think we're actually beginning to see the benefit of that. The other real interesting bit of data I'll give you out of what we see out of Airbus is the more Senior and the older the candidate, the more likely they are to choose a Chatbot over a person, which I think is the opposite of what we were expecting when we started tracking. Joel: What was the percentage on the choice of Chat bot over human, Bill: Well it went to 95% within two weeks and literally how we run it is the only way you get a chatbot to work properly is to run a human alongside it for six to eight weeks. Joel: To learn- Bill: Collect, learning, learning stuff, but actually, in top of the funnel, the preference is overwhelmingly to get the answers from technology and the questions that are asked a very direct. What job pays the most money? Is there going to be drug screening in this interview process? Now, things that literally, stuff like that, which is a yes or no, but determines whether people are going to apply or not. And I think they've looked on it and said the chatbots are the bullshit meter. It's like the machine's not going to lie to me. The person will. Joel: I think what's great about chatbots made my, I guess number three in that list, but when we hear about startups, we never really know what's going to catch on and what, what will and what won't. And when chatbots came out, we were both very skeptical I think, about this. But the numbers are clear from what Bill talked about and history plays this out, right? Job seekers are so tired of the black hole applying to a company, never hearing back. They're much happier talking to a robot, than not talking to anyone at all. And then on the employer side, instead of repeatedly, you know, answering the same questions, you can automate that process and it just works for both and the numbers and the engagement. Put that out. The other thing I would add is anyone ever been ghosted in an interview or you know, like everybody, right? So chatbots had been described as anti-ghosting magic, because there's something in the engagement there, that keeps people- Bill: I think it makes you challenge 21-piece. I think the other thing you need to think about when we're talking about chatbots is there is in the talent space there's probably only one or two pure chatbots. So most of what we would consider to be chatbots are actually taskbots. They're the Wade and Wendy, the AllyO's they're designed to do specific pieces of the puzzle rather than the engagement. So a chatbot is UI. That's usually experienced user interface. So think about it that way and don't think about it in terms of task. If you want a task bot, go get a task bot. Craig: It also helps alleviate some of the mobile apply problems of the past as well. Joel: So I'm going to move on with my nice list, if that's okay with you guys. Joel: So my nice list, first one is one platform to rule them all. Chad will disagree with this, but I think more and more, and I think the Microsoft-LinkedIn marriage has sort of sparked more interest in this. I think Google getting into the game, although they killed them [crosstalk 00:19:21] but there was a dream of sort of Google would be this ATS job posting sourcing tool. One thing to rule them all, Chad mentioned the acquisitions. You had job by buying you know, pieces to be one platform. You had iCIMS do something similar. You have all these ATS is building out marketplaces similar to you know, your iPhone app store where if you like this feature they have an app for that ATS. If you like this company's solution you can add it on to the ATS. So my nice list was instead of, you know, having different solutions, different tabs, open, different things that you're using all the time, that we're moving toward one solution to sort of bring in all the things that you do for recruiting. So to me that made my nice list this year. The one platform, the one stop shop. Bill: I would add to that the one stop shop is equally the integrated marketplace and the products I'm really interested in seeing how it flies at the moment is a company called Talent App Store, which separates out Onepoint solutions by API, so you can buy single use for what you want in all kinds of products and a genuine vendor marketplace. So I think when we get that through one interface, that's where I see [crosstalk 00:20:36] Joel: the hurdles to build apps for all these ATS is needs to be- Bill: The best features will always be point solutions from startups. Always. Craig: The only way that we get to that one platform is through a marketplace. That's the only way not going to roll up all of these- Joel: Your bearishness is on one company saying we're going to do it off. Craig: Yeah, I don't think, I don't think that's the case ever. Bill: CRM and ATS is becoming a single thing with no middle way bit, so you've got, you know everyone from like Avature who were a CRM building and- Craig: It becomes core, it becomes core. Joel: And ultimately, the applications are your future acquisition. So you had iCIMs with text recruit. They learned that through that application that texting was really a solid solution for recruiters, so they just went out and bought it and brought it in house. Bill: So we got recruiters saying, I only really want one. I at least want one screen and one place that I go, I don't want to have to go lots of different places that don't really join. Joel: That's where We're removing. Yeah. Nice. All right. Next to going back to naughty, it's my favorite. Anybody seeing the new Amazon commercials, the one that made them look all happy and fun and they're paying for my college and all that other fun stuff. Craig: Yeah. It's almost like a political, you know, opponent who is spending $30 million to be able to get there. You know, the Bloomberg effect, right. Spending a lot of money to try to win something. What they're trying to win here is optics because if you've been paying attention on the Amazon side of the house, they've been testing and using haptic bracelets where you will get buzzed if you're far too far away from your workspace. Your quotas are so crazy that they have employee pissing in trash cans. I mean, so you have these things happening. They're happening, they're reported, and guess what? Now we have a campaign where we're trying to go ahead and just [crosstalk 00:22:25] Bill: That's exactly what happens. They end up on the best places to work. The Best Places to Work Awards are generally for the top 10% of employees and not the 90% percentage turn up and do, do you drive the vans or make your burgers or serve you coffee? They're not consulted in the survey. Joel: You're with me on this being nasty. Bill: I'm with you on that, but my one, which is fairly closely tied into that is really what we've seen through the use technology and convenience. We as consumers demand more and more convenience and in convenience we demand things like Airbnb that make it easier for us. Uber, any of these businesses, Amazon, quick delivery, Deliveroos, deliver meals. We guarantee that what technology has done is, it's made our life easier as consumers and screwed the employee at the bottom of the chain. Joel: We don't want to say how the sausage is made [crosstalk 00:23:20] Bill: is the guy who's getting paid to do the sausage. Chad: always talking about the sausage. Bill: Is now self-employed and paid by productivity, has no sick-pay, has no pension, has no, anything else. The only way we're going to change that is as consumers. So as consumers, we need to start saying, I'm going to forego a bit of convenience because I'm really not happy with exploitation of people. Joel: Or it'll get regulated. Bill: And the last thing I want is the government running my internet, by the way, that's last place I want to go. Joel: Yes, 2020 will be very interesting. Chad: It will be very interesting. Bill: I think my naughty was I'd take it because I want to keep it nice and short. I'll take it from the, if everyone saw the Sacha Baron Cohen talk on the top of that, when they were talking about when Sacha Baron Cohen, if you haven't seen that, I recommend you do, is talking about the internet said that if Facebook was available in the forties Hitler would have bought ads and I think that's kind of the way we've got to think about the place we're at now. Joel: Yeah. His quote on that was your, you're provided the right of free speech but not free reach. Bill: Not free reach. Chad: Really. That was interesting. Yeah, you should definitely check that out. Okay. Joel: It's commercial time. Sovren: Sovereign is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products and now based on that technology comes Sovren's, artificial intelligence, matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second, receive more results that provide candidates scored by fit to job and just as importantly, the jobs fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: It's Showtime. Joel: So my, my last naughty here, my payroll, HR, any, anyone out there a client of my payroll, HR. So this is a, there's a special layer of hell for these guys. Michael Mann, I want to make sure I got the facts right here. So again, this is still legit because the FBI is still investigating, but so Michael Mann is CEO of this company. They had 5,000 customers representing 250,000 employees. They basically just pulled the whole company. They had $35 million in salaries in their accounts, that disappeared. When companies tried to call to ask what's going on, the phone lines had been cut, according to story, their social media profiles had been wiped. So from all perspectives, this guy took the money and got the hell out of Dodge and you had 5,000 companies screwed, not being able to pay their employees. So these are real people, with real problems, not getting paid. And these guys top my naughty list this year. Michael Mann, MyPayrollHR. Allens T back off. Chad: And I can't agree more on that. All right, so the last time through. Nice. Right. This is it. So I changed mine. Just so you know. Joel: We're almost done guys. Chad: So who, who's, who's seen the, the, the talking robot head 10 guy. That's, that leads, that's my last nice. So as we- Bill: You already liked them because they flew you to Sweden [crosstalk 00:26:47] Joel: Full disclosure, right? Bill: They bought you. Chad: This just made it to my list. Chad: So as we take a look at technology and what we're comfortable with, this is something that is really hard to be comfortable with. I mean, literally it's a head that can see you, talk to you. It's not animatronic by any way. You can check it out on YouTube or whatever. But it is, it pushes us further. Right. Do I think that we're ready for it now? No. Some companies will be, they're not trying to roll it out globally. They're doing it by company, by company. Bill: Are already companies actually using it? Chad: Yes. Bill: Because it's a fantastic marketing tool. But everything I'm seeing is very literal [crosstalk 00:27:30] Joel: Reporters love it. Bill: Yeah, but I'm not seeing a lot of it actually being used. Joel: They've got a long road ahead, Chad: So from my standpoint, yes, we're definitely friends with the organization, but to be able to see, one of the reasons was they [crosstalk 00:27:42] me, so we were so interested in what the hell they were doing that it pushed technology even further- Chad: Everybody else is talking about. Bill: It's a really important point, I think with this, if we forget about it being a plastic head, [crosstalk 00:27:55] what we discovered from the chatbots was for instance in the Airbus case where we gave it a name and call it Betsy, people started thanking it, and when we put a person on a screen asking a question, we're asking for a transaction, we got a lot more engagement. So whether it's a plastic head, I think the point of when we humanize our technology, however we do that, there's a real important place there. I just don't think Max Headroom interviewing [crosstalk 00:28:21] Joel: Did you bring up bias? Unbiased recruiting in that as being a good thing. Chad: I didn't because that's going to go down a rabbit hole that don't want [crosstalk 00:28:30] Bill: By bias recruiting, yeah? Bill: So my last nice one is what we're beginning to learn about your brand. Your brand is, what we found is actually, people are not following employment brands. Bill: Candidates... I tracked seven million applicants through AllyO and looked at their online behavior. They're not following employer brands, they're not consuming videos, they're not watching companies. So it's easy to say, well, should we actually ditch the employer brand? Is that waste of money? What we found is, applicants are applying for eight times as many jobs as they ever did and they're really only looking at four things, which is job title, salary, location, and disqualifies, not qualifies. What would stop me being successful? The reason when you investigate that is, they are not expecting to hear back from you. They're really not. So they're expecting that I'm going to apply, never hear again. I'm not going to get emotionally invested in a brand. However, once, so it would be easy to say, should we then ditch employer brand and just look out and use the programmatic stuff and do that. Bill: Reality is if you track the digital behavior and anyone can argue with me, but if you get to bring me some data, because that's all I'm interested in. In God, we trust, everyone else bring data. So when you look at the numbers, this is the reality. Once they get a positive response, they're all over the employer brand, they're all over the glass tool. So we need to rethink and they look at it through the lens of the job. Employment brand through lens of the job, not through the lens of the company. I think that changes the dynamic that says we need to be investing our time and effort in delivering content through jobs. Whereas at the moment, most of our time and money is spent delivering and interaction. But I think it's, now that we know this, and you can download the white paper, now that we know this, I think it will start pointing us in the right direction for next year. Joel: Don't you think some people do have a short list of companies that they want to work for them? It's not just about- Bill: People always have a wishlist of recognition, but the reality is if they have companies they want to work for, they are and we have to date it, approves that. They are more likely not to apply to them because they don't think they're going to be successful. When people have this, these aspirational companies of what a wonderful, fantastic place that is, they very rarely apply. Sometimes the biggest branding problem those places have, and I've worked with a few like certain [inaudible 00:30:55] the biggest problem they have is actually getting people to apply, because they believe there will be a job for them at the end of it. They almost think, Oh, I could never get a job at Google because I'm not good enough or I'm not in that box. I think the other thing is if you go companies like Google, they'll say, look, this is our problem. Bill: Facebook tell me the same thing. Our problem is everyone who applies for a job here is a fanboy. They all love what we do. They're not the people we want to hire. The people we want to hire, I think, actually what we do is pretty shit, let's fix it. Because the problem is, we can attract fanboys. We can't attract people who hate us. The people who we want and the people who hate us, because the people who hate us, other people who will relate [crosstalk 00:31:33] Joel: It's totally a different look at how you focus your employer brand. Bill: That's exactly what it is, applying for a job in the current market is exactly like voting. You're not choosing the company, which is the best place to work. The company were you think you will be happy ever after, you're choosing the one which is least shit. So our job in our branding is to position ourselves as not quite- Joel: IT's the least[crosstalk 00:31:57]. Bill: The least shit, that is our job. [crosstalk 00:32:01] Joel: So my last nice and then we're done, Craig. Bill: He looks very relieved about that. Joel: Absolutely, all right. All right, snowflakes. Donald Trump made my nice list this year. I'll tell you why. Okay? We are in the attention business here. Okay, so we're all old enough to remember recessions, right? There's been two in my working career. I know that some of you are too young to remember. Bill: Dennis remembers The Depression, so don't worry about that. Chad: Things did fall apart, right? Bill: It's a depression doubter. Joel: So I've lived through two. One really, really, really bad. And there's, there's no, regardless of how you feel about Trump, this is the best economy [crosstalk 00:32:48] and you do, you will have a voice, Sir. Joel: This is the best economy that we've had in our lifetimes. Recession is not in the horizon. There's been no inflation. Regardless of what you care about Trump, this has been a really good year for everybody. Joel: We're hiring people. People are selling you stuff. People are getting hired. I mean, everyone is enjoying the current economy. And I'm saying regardless how you feel about Trump or the White House or the impeachment, you know, government isn't doing shit to fuck up our lives. They're fighting with each other. Enjoy this time of prosperity, because 2020 things could get a little bit weird. Chad: So this is nice. This is coming from a white guy. Joel: The Trumpster made my nice list. [crosstalk 00:33:28] Bill is disgust. Bill: Oh, so there was only one good thing [crosstalk 00:33:35]. About Trump or about Boris Johnson, who's our own kind of. Chad: Trump. Bill: Shop Trump, pound shop. I'll explain it later if you'd like. He understands. So this is, this is what it is. The one good thing about the world political situation, globally, take Brexit, but everything it is, is it's got people engaged again and it's got people angry again. So for me, the thing is people are now beginning to think, I need to vote, I need to make a difference, I need to change things and I need to have a voice. And I think if nothing else, that cathartic effects of getting people reengaged in politics is going to be a good thing. I just don't like the pain we have to endure in the process. Chad: In checkout and also check out, there's a, there's a new index that's out there called the job quality index, which is for shit. So we're creating all these jobs, but in the last 30 years, the actual quality of the jobs have gone to shit. So yeah, if that's the kind of world economy you want to live in, that's awesome. Joel: Let's talk where there aren't any jobs at all. [crosstalk 00:34:32], see how you feel about that. [crosstalk 00:34:31]. Bill: For the few and not the many. Bill: We have created many jobs were people have to do three to get by. So we'll just, we'll move on that. But I think overall, if you really want to know what I really think about the situation. It'll cost you two Margaritas tonight. Chad: and that my friends... Chad: And we that, we out. Bill: Thank you. All Joel: Cheers. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast, with Chad, and Cheese. BRILLIANT! They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. 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, but one cheddar. Hello, nacho pepper jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you listen the podcast, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out. #TMP #KRT #Recruitics #Perengo #Programmatic #PageUp #Clinch #StepStone #Appcast #Indeed #ClickIQ #Tengai #JobBrand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand

Christmas is over, and business is business! The boys cover items this week from Indeed-owned ClickIQ and Monster's BetterThing. Better who? Exacty. And, as it that wasn't enough, Chad & Cheese discuss their Top Tens from the decade. Balls will drop on this first show of 2020. Enjoy, and make Sovren, JobAdx, and Canvas your New Year's resolution. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides comprehensive website accessibility testing with personalized recommendations to enhance usability for people with a variety of disabilities or situational limitations. Joel: Oh, yeah. 2020 Happy New Year. Christmas is over and business is business. Welcome to 2020 I'm Barbara Walters. I mean I'm Joel Cheesman. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm here with Chad, the man, Sowash. Chad: Hello. Joel: Merry New Year everybody. On this week show Monster gets out of a better thing. ClickIQ shows us up and we both go through the decade's top 10. Get ready for balls to drop. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Chad: Finally. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you at the center while Canvas Bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Canvas: Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: So I feel after reading the intro, I'm either really out of practice or I'm still drunk from the holidays. I can't figure out which one. Chad: Probably a little bit of both. Joel: We'll go with that. So apparently [crosstalk 00:01:46] come next, if I remember correctly. Chad: That would be correct. Joel: SHOUT OUTS! Chad: The holiday card idea that we had actually went off pretty well. I mean, I have received, not going to go through all of them for God's sakes, but emails, messages, Facebook messages, just a ton of people laughing and sending pictures of them holding the card, it up on their door or something like that. But they enjoyed the Chad and Cheesmas card. Joel: It was a lot of fun. We had a good time with it. And I will have a mini rant here for a second. If two meat heads with no budget can come up with something fairly creative, then shame on the companies that actually have marketing departments and simply sent out a basically a template email with a shining star or a dancing reindeer or whatever saying happy holidays, blah blah blah. Because that's just straight up lazy people. Chad: Yes. That is totally lazy and not to mention as we talk about engagement, I wish we had all of the addresses for all of our listeners. That would be a shit ton of cards. We probably couldn't afford it, but still we could get some out to touch all of those people, but we only got the bad touch on about a hundred of them. Joel: There was a lot of bad touching going on this year. Yeah. Maybe next year we'll set up a landing page, say, give us your mailing address and you'll be sure to get a Christmas card from us. Chad: Oh, yeah, man. That was always fun. Joel: Holiday card. I don't want to offend anybody. Chad: Call it what you want. Joel: We're all ho ho hos as far as I'm concerned. Chad: That's right. And that leads me to my first shout out again to Kelly Robinson because he gave us the gift that keeps on giving. And I'm not saying the clock people, I'm saying he gave us the 12 days of Christmas Whiskeys of The World, which is an interactive calendar and how do you interact with this calendar, Joel? Joel: You drink, I think. Chad: Yes, you drink the calendar. There's a box it has 12 different whiskeys and bourbons and scotches, all that stuff to have different whiskeys and every day you pop out a new one. There's this really cool card that tells you what the whiskey is and it has this really awesome tasting glass and you enjoy that whiskey of the day. And that my friend was, again, we talk about- Joel: Going above and beyond. Chad: ... marketing. Right? Joel: Cutting through the clutter. Chad: Yeah. I feel like an idiot. We did a stupid fucking card. People loved it, but still this, this is the shit. Good job Kelly. Joel: We don't have the budget for alcohol for everybody as much as we would love to do that. Yeah. Kelly. That shit is dope. Everyone else take note. We love liquor. Chad: Sounds good stuff. Joel: We also love hot cocoa because Mya, my first shoutout, sent me a mug of hot chocolate with a mug and some chocolates I think, which was nice. You got the same thing I assume. Chad: Yeah, I've got the same thing. I thought it was possibly, I might not have gotten the bourbon that was supposed to be with it. I mean because that that is totally on brand for Mya, but you have to know who you're trying to engage people. So yeah, it was definitely, I love Lacy, Vinita and AL, sent us a card, it was handwritten. That is special. It's even more special when you have some bourbon in it. Joel: Flavor profile was what I was thinking of in my last little shout out. Yes. If it was on brand, it would have had coffee and a little bitty Jameson for some Irish coffee to go with the holidays. Nevertheless, I did milk my new year's hangover with a nice cup of Joe in my Mya coffee cup. So, muchos gracias, Mya. Chad: Just finished my first pot of coffee in that Mya cup. It's a pretty big fucking cup. Joel: Speaking of Irishman, a shout out to Adam Chambers, our favorite, I don't know globetrotting Irishman who's currently in Mexico. Firing squad alumni. He was very nice. Sent me a nice note for the holidays and much for the love we gave him on the show. So Adam, wherever you are man, shout out to you buddy. Chad: That's right. Appley chat all over the place. Big thanks to Roy and Jenae from Smart Recruiters for the cards. Again, handwritten picture, chocolate bars. I didn't see any bourbon in this one either. Again, I appreciate all of the time you guys are taking, but just take a little bit more time in a little bit more money and send bourbon with that and it'll be perfect. Joel: Yeah, and thanks for getting me Smart Recruiters. I appreciate that. Shout out to a company called Divvy. I got hit up in LinkedIn, Divvy is offering $100 if you'll just demo their products, which I did not do, but if you're going to get your product in front of people, offering them $100 is a decent way to do that. Divvy this shout out's for you. Chad: They pay you to go through their demo. Joel: Correct. So instead of paying for leads, they just say, "Screw it. We'll give you a hundred bucks if you do a demo with us." Chad: Yeah. I don't even want to get into that. A big shout out to our peeps over at Evergreen Podcast. They got us into the insideradio.com bulletin or whatever it was. It was Chad and Cheese along with Jim Stroud and the talent cast. Yeah, we're doing some big things in the podcast world and 2020 is when it's going to get better. I think we said it once before, but we'll say it again. Look for the Recruiting Future podcast. That's right. Matt Alder and all the steeliness of his interviews coming to Evergreen and the podcast network. Joel: That man is so sexy. Chad: Sexy. Joel: If you're in Cleveland, Chad and I will be making a John up your way early next week for who knows what the hell. We're going to meet up with evergreen and talk strategery and other stuff, but I'm assuming little Johns around town will be had and we will probably be breaking some laws in the process. Chad: It's a standard. I think so, yes. Shout out to go figure, Steven Rothberg, he shared the story with us. The story was a US government study confirms most face recognition systems are racist and asks, "How does this affect 10 Guy?" And overall I can't tell you 100% I have the answer to this other than 10 Guy in its current form doesn't record video or analyze the actual voice itself. It just wants to be able to recognize a face so that it can zone in on you and have a conversation, eye to eye contact like you normally would. Chad: But that being said, I think we should actually get Ellen and Charlotte on a pod to talk about this subject specifically. Not as much as we're on 10 Guy but around this subject. And do they see this actually happening possibly for 10 Guy in the future, facial recognition? Joel: And it should be done in downtown Stockholm if we're going to do it. Also to Rothberg, congratulations. His Minnesota Gophers, a defeated the Auburn Tigers for the first 10 plus months season since 1905 or some shit. And Rothberg is getting pretty big for his britches. He's talking trash about Wisconsin and Ohio State. It's the gophers dude, relax, relax. It's not going to be a trend. Chad: You take it when you can get it, my friend. Take it when you can get it and just think if you would have won against the Badgers, then you would have been able to play Ohio state, watch them get their ass beat. So just be happy that you didn't have to go through that. Joel: Good point. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Shout out to Alex Murphy and Jason Roberts, Alex Murphy for Firing Squad, Jason Roberts, those were published sometime during Christmas break. If you haven't listened to those, I encourage you to do so. They were great interviews. Chad: Good stuff. Not to mention we did our naughty and nice onstage with Bill Boorman and that was a fun time as well. Joel: Doesn't get naughtier than Bill Boorman. Chad: It does not. Joel: Don't forget James Butcher, am I pronouncing that right? Chad: Boettcher. Joel: I never get that right. Chad: Boettcher. Joel: It's Canadian, so I can be excused for that. So my last shout out goes to Drones. I don't know if you caught this or not, but Times Square, New Year's Eve was partly patrolled by a bunch of drones. So we talk a lot about drones and automation robots on the show. God help us. Drones are policing Times Square on new year's Eve. Chad: They're not actually policing Times Square, it's not like- Joel: I just meant patrolling. Is there a difference? Chad: It's just like having cameras, like CCTV. It's just that they're all over the place. It's just providing additional data points for the actual human beings that are actually policing the streets. Joel: Yeah. I didn't mean to suggest that it was Robocop style. Drones were arresting people, but they are helping police. Police folks that are acting like idiots on New Year's Eve. Chad: Just want to make sure we made that clear to the listeners. Joel: Ready for the news? Chad: Let's do it. Joel: So ClickIQ has a few items that we need to cover. What would you like to talk about first? Chad: Well the cool thing about this is that we give plenty of companies a hard time. We could even say we fuck with companies a lot. Joel: It's done out of love. Chad: And we do provide the love where we see that necessary as well. And many of those companies try to ignore because they think that what we're saying is just going to go away. And it just continues to come back. ClickIQ and Richard over there, Richard Collins said you know what? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: His parent company now is indeed who they always try to ignore. They don't. And we know and we know they don't ignore because we hear shit that they actually say, which is awesome. But anyway, when it comes to Richard, Richard is like, "No, fuck this dude. I'm going to call those guys. And we're going to talk all their points through and from my standpoint I have to give Richard big fucking applause, and any company that if they want to provide opposing viewpoints to some of the things that we're saying about maybe some of their strategies or their tactics or what have you, have the actual chutzpah to say something to actually come back and have a discussion and a conversation. Because when you are not a part of the conversation, guess what? We dictate what the fucking conversation is. Joel: Yeah. And and not only just their point of view but also corrections as was the case with these guys. Chad: So let's talk about some of the points that Richard actually he hit us up with. And then we have some other data after that too. Number one, ClickIQ is not hiding data from users. One of the things that we actually were provided with were screenshots from actual talent acquisition professionals that were using the platform. And what we were told was that was probably an earlier beta model. The dashboard before only showed, and this is why we thought it was an issue, it only showed or the screenshot that we saw only showed Glassdoor and Indeed and it forced you to go to another tab to actually see more data. Chad: So that's where Joel had actually said, "Okay, so this is almost like a Google trick where Google was hiding data in Google analytics at one time. It looks like they're hiding data." In this case, Richard showed us that they're not hiding data. They do have kind of like a do it yourself dashboard where you can create your own dashboards and reports, which was pretty cool. Joel: And wasn't the list algorithmic based on like the amount of traffic that each one delivered? Chad: It was your highest, so if indeed was your highest, it was definitely going to be on there. But it didn't necessarily have us. So he was showing us some different reports where it wasn't. Joel: We talked to them after our Chad and Cheese holiday party. Some of the events are a little blurry for me. But yeah, I remember it being much fare than a than we had discussed initially. Chad: Yeah. And the number two item was that ClickIQ is not an indeed buying house because it just doesn't make strategic sense. If you think of it from more of a strategic standpoint as opposed to the tactical for Indeed. Yes, Indeed would love to have somebody else out there Programmatically selling their wares and boosting their specific revenue goals. Although if you think of it from a strategic standpoint with ClickIQ, they're making money off their competitors. So that makes no sense whatsoever. Why piss off their competitors because they're fucking making money off their backs right now. Makes no sense, right? Joel: Yeah. Competitor money is fun money for sure. Chad: And those aren't Richard's words. That was me just going ahead and and translating what we heard. Last but not least, number three Neuvoo, pretty soon to become talent.com and ZipRecruiter are still engaged. What engaged means, I'm not 100% sure yet, although at least the feeling that we got out of it was that the money is too good to pass up. So the reason why companies like the ZipRecruiters or the Neuvoo's or anybody are a part of these platforms is because it's another way for them, like an agency, to get out, get penetration and make more money. So overall the money is too good and there's no way in hell they're going to turn down that check. That was kind of like the feeling that I got. What about you? Joel: Money talks and bullshit walks for sure. Although we are seeing or hearing about cracks in the pavement if you will, at least regarding ZipRecruiter. I've actually reached out to ZipRecruiter for some clarification on this. Their PR guy's on vacation. So as soon as we hear we'll let you know. But at least this source tells us that ZipRecruiter may not be playing in ClickIQ sandbox for much longer. Chad: Yes. And I've also reached out to several and I've gotten the thanks but no thanks kind of response back. Kind of like, "Yeah, we're just not going to talk about that." Companies like ZipRecruiter and Neuvoo, all those other companies, they're going to have problems with integrating with ClickIQ knowing that Indeed will have access to their client data. Chad: I mean, imagine Indeed reps rolling into a presentation with competitor data, right? I mean specific competitor data. Now I know that as Richard said, this does not make sense with their longterm strategy because in this model, competitors doing well actually make money for ClickIQ and overall, Indeed. Although we all know how that works in real life. Chad: The optics versus what is reality and what's actually really happening. So I think what we're feeling is most of these competitors saying, "No, fuck that man. I am not giving my client data to ClickIQ/Indeed." Right. That's how they see it. "I'm not giving it to Indeed." So I think there's going to be a lot of work for Richard and team over at ClickIQ to be able to separate themselves from Indeed. Joel: Word to the wise, when you acquire these companies and they rely on competitors to fund them and make them successful, like you're going to hit some speed bumps. The company you bought might not be as valuable if big competitors jump ship because they don't want to share data or they feel threatened or don't want to share money with the acquirer. It's also word to the wise to employers to know that when big companies or competitors start buying these services that it's not necessarily going to be the same service a year from now that you had today and be a smart consumer and make sure that you're aware of who's buying who and what's going on. And hopefully those listeners out there who tune into us don't have that issue, but a certain ones do. And it's a definite word to the wise that things change in this industry when things get acquired. Chad: Yeah. And this is a, a quote from somebody in talent acquisition. So this isn't a vendor, is "They're pitching, that's ClickIQ is pitching as completely unbiased, which we all know is bullshit." Now again, we're not just talking about the Neuvoos or the ZipRecruiters or what have you, who actually feed in and help ClickIQ and Indeed make money. But we're talking about the people at the end of this pot of fucking gold who supply the money. Chad: So overall this is a huge optics problem. And the biggest question is how do you separate yourself? Because they have been this industry's biggest and best Trojan horse. How the fuck do you get away from perspectively being the new 'Indeed Trojan horse?' That's the hard part. Joel: Just don't be acquired. Chad: I'm talking about ClickIQ now. Joel: Yeah. I don't think you can. And even if you can, I don't know if anyone would believe it. Chad: Luckily Richard's new car probably has him sleeping better at night. Joel: Yeah. He mentioned his Aston Martin a few times, so yeah. That will cushion any blow for sure. Chad: Again, we really appreciate the transparency that Richard provided having this discussion and going back and forth. I truly believe that they're trying to do everything they possibly can to be 'unbiased.' The hardest part is the optics piece and being attached to somebody who was known as the industry's biggest Trojan horse. Everything that he showed us was spot on. It looked pretty fucking magical to be quite Frank. So yeah, big props to him and thanks for adding clarity around those different areas. Joel: Thanks Richard. We appreciate it. Monster in the news. It's been a while since we've talked about them. Chad: There's a reason for that. Joel: They're shutting down BetterThing.com or something. Chad: So this one really blows my mind because this type of app looks like the exact avenue Monster and all the rest of the industry should be heading down. There's no uploading of resumes. This is for trucker. So you scan your CDL, you actually scan your CDL, the barcode for your CDL. Jobs are delivered via the mobile app. You click and schedule an interview straight from the app. The messaging allows the drivers to get questions, answers. There's no applications, no service, no searching. So what the fuck happened here? This seems like what Monster needed to be able to really, not just in trucking, but to be able to start to use this for trucking and then bridge it into something bigger. And the different industries like nursing or what have you. Joel: And by the way, I hear trucking's huge and really profitable. So yeah. Chad: I don't understand. Joel: Getting out of that was a mystery. But I think it goes back to all of the the reorg up top, the layoffs that happened. I mean, they're just cutting what they believe is fat. That's the only reason I can find. But for this start shutting things down. Chad: Yeah. But to this sounds like an actual product that they created, right? Joel: It's own URL, right? BetterThing.com. Chad: Yeah. It's their product. It's an app that was created and it's not somebody else's tech, I don't believe it's somebody else's tech. Much like the video, the Monster Studios platform, which they were trying to push heavily. Again, I think from a strategic standpoint, from a vision standpoint, I think Scott Guts is an incredibly nice guy. The guy also has done amazing things in the travel industry. I'm just not sure, I think it's kind of like he was airlifted into the Titanic after it hit the fucking iceberg. Joel: Yeah. Our source said this was shutting down on December 31st I think? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah, the site's still up. Chad: Yeah. I think it was paused on December 31st. Definitely reach out to Scott and team. I mean there are actually a handful of my contacts that were on the product side that aren't there anymore, product and sales side that aren't there anymore. So yeah, they've been scaling down. The big question is, what's Randstad going to do with this smelly fucking egg? Joel: Well, that sounds like something for our prediction show that's coming up soon. Let's get a quick word from JobAdX and we'll go through our top 10s for the decade. That sounds exciting. Chad: Not a bad egg, that JobAdX. JobAdX: So how's the hiring going? Find those purple squirrels? With applicant after applicant it feels like I'm just getting further from hiring the right candidate. I've got tons of applications, but none of these candidates are even close to being the right fit. Volume is great and all, but my small team doesn't have the time to sift through hundreds of mismatched applications. I want more relevant candidates, not just more candidates. JobAdX: Well get this, JobAdX has been helping small to medium businesses get their job ads in front of targeted active job seekers by matching your jobs to a candidate based on their search behavior across a vast network of niche job sites and talent networks. And the best part, it's self-serve. No sales reps, no chat bots, no spend minimums. Just fill a form with your name, number of jobs, and a budget you're working with. And voila. Your ads are now shown over a growing network of 150 job sites. JobAdX: Better yet, those company videos that showcase the value of being part of a small team can have a new home now within your ads, helping you stand out and share your vision proactively. Wait, what was that? Oh, I just signed up for self-serve with JobAdX. What were you talking about? That fast, huh? Jumpstart your targeted recruitment with JobAdX today. Visit jobadx.com and click that get started, risk-free button. It's jobadx.com. JobAdX, engage, attract, employ. Joel: Yes. For falling into that top 10 list. An epidemic that happens every time this year. Chad: It's so much fun. Joel: Yes, it is a lot of fun. Chad: But this one isn't about 2019 though. We're starting an entirely new decade, so we actually spent a little time to be able to break down. We want to break down, at least from our stupid male brains, the decade. Joel: Yeah. I came to you and said, let's do like nine for 2019 and nine things that made the year and you said, "Fuck that dude. 10 the whole decade. Let's do it all." And I said, "Ah, shit. I actually have to think about this." Chad: 10 for 10. Joel: We just went in our corner and figured out 10 things that sort of defined the decade. We're both coming at it from a little bit different angles, but hopefully both will serve as entertaining to our listeners. So as the oldest should go first, I'll let you start things off. Chad: That's nice. Yeah. Joel's going to be more focused on the industry specifically. Mine's going to be more broad based. Number one job growth. In 2010 we started to finally feel positive job growth. After 2008 and the immense hit on our economy, we started to see the actual job growth we're still experiencing today. One of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this is because economies don't turn on a dime. Chad: Yes, Trump can tweet and it can affect a stock in the short term, but the decisions made 10 years ago is what drives our economy. So the decisions we're making today, that's what's so important because that will impact our economy, not just not in the next five minutes, but in the next 10 years. So going back all the way to 2010 that's when we started to experience coming out of that hell of a hole that we were in and started to actually see job growth. Joel: Isn't it amazing too that there are generations of workers now who don't even know a time of like job growth? Chad: Yeah. Joel: All right, my first thing, and then we'll go to 2010 Monster buys HotJobs. Speaking of generations, there's a whole generation that doesn't even know what HotJobs is. If you took a transport back to 2010 HotJobs was pretty well known as the number three player in the industry. They were one of the first Superbowl ads, they were a big brand, they were acquired by Yahoo. And in 2010 Monster coming in and buying a HotJobs for I think around $225 million, which is really peanuts when we think about what Indeed went for a few a years later, which I'll also get to in my list, they also got as part of the deal, Monster, they were the exclusive jobs provider I think for three years after the acquisition deal. Joel: But to me this sort of set the table for what would become the awareness that jobs were a commodity, the value of them was sort of limited. Obviously Yahoo was kind of fire selling some stuff at the time. Carol Bartz was in charge and she was selling off a lot of assets. But this sort of started the ball rolling to me and was worth noting that this started the decline of job boards, the value of job boards and what would become valuable as we sort of journeyed through the 10 years from 2010 to 2019 Chad: Yeah. Really hated to see a brand like HotJobs go the way that it did because it was there. It was the chief competitor of Monster when we launched on January of '99 when OCC and the Monster board came together. HotJobs was really our prime competitor. So to be able to see them go down. That's again, it's one of those things that happens. CareerBuilder took their place. There's always somebody to take their place. But yeah, it's not something I really wanted to see happen. Joel: Yeah. And most people thought HotJobs would really almost leap frog Monster and CareerBuilder once the Yahoo deal happen. That did not unfold as people thought at the time. Chad: Number two, a more broad based. Joel: Number two. Chad: Number two, is streaming services exploding. As we see technology get faster and obviously video is huge on the web, we start to get these devices that allow us to stream. So I remember then you probably did too back when we were a kid and Home Box Office was announced. That was a huge revolutionary step at the time. Right? Joel: We're talking about HBO, correct for those..... Chad: Yeah. Joel: Just to make sure the kids keep up with what we're talking about. Chad: Yeah. So HBO showed what kind of high quality programming could be developed and then Netflix just blew it out of the water with shows like House of Cards. Now and moving and what we saw launch in 2019 but I believe is going to be the new big level changer is Disney+. I think they're going to take content to an entirely different level and changing the program dollar, the programming dollar aspect into a much larger merchandising and traditional box office sales play. But we saw that start to happen in the last decade. So us being able to transition and transform an entire industry happened and I think, at least in my eyes in the last 10 years. Joel: Do you remember the Quickster debacle? Chad: No. Joel: So Netflix initially started a site called Quickster that was going to be its streaming service. So they were going to have the mail in CDs as Netflix and then they were launching Quickster as their streaming service. Wall Street hated it, customers hated it. The world hated it. And they actually didn't even own the Twitter handle Quickster. So the idiot who owned that thought he was going to get rich. But they ended up going back to just Netflix and killing the Quickster brand, which was not very old. Joel: And Netflix just evolved into a streaming service. Although I do think you can still get CDs by the mail through Netflix. I haven't done that in like a decade. But the Quickster debacle was kind of a fun side note there to the Netflix story that I thought I'd bring out for everybody. Chad: That's awesome. Joel: So my number two on the heels of Monster buying HotJobs in 2012 Recruit Holdings, a little known Japanese company to most Americans acquired indeed.com. The amount was never disclosed, although the rumor, the whisper number was around $1.5 billion. Which makes a lot of sense. Allegedly they were also looking at Monster at the time but really liked Indeed's business a whole lot better. I think Recruit had some great foresight and coming out of the recession and saying, "Hey, what is going to be the future? What's what should we buy now to get a leap on where the world is going?" Joel: And Indeed's sort of nicely scaled model plug it in any country pretty much in the world played a lot to their strengths. So to me like that was a changing of the guard, moving away from traditional job boards to more sort of search engine based scraping technology for postings and jobs. Obviously Indeed had a huge leg up on SEO at the time. It was getting a lot of their traffic for free. So recruit holdings, making that move in 2012 definitely makes one of my top 10 stories or things that happened in the last decade for sure. Chad: Yeah. Too easy. My number three in June of 2015 the Supreme court of the United States makes same sex marriage legal. This, from our standpoint in the actual office in the workplace as employees, we start to see equity. That's a big key actually allowing people to come to work as themselves. And from my standpoint to be able to understand as all of these technologies that we talk about all the time, none of that matters if we're not treating the people the way they should be able to be treated. Being able to allow them to come to work as them their whole selves. And this in June of 2015 was a big decision, which again was only by one vote. Joel: We're at an age where we've sort of come full circle with sort of this issue. And I think if you had asked both of us at 15 years old and let's say the mid 80s, would we be at a place today when we looked forward back then? And I don't think I could have imagined the world progressing at such a pace as it has. I'm sure for those that that live with this reality, it hasn't happened soon enough. Joel: I can remember the AIDS epidemic and I'm sure you, you do as well. Reagan wouldn't even say the word AIDS or HIV on television. So I think this is noteworthy for the simple fact that good God as human beings we're not so awful all the time. We can evolve, we can be understanding, we can be transparent, we can talk to one another, we can cross borders. So, yeah, I applaud you for bringing this one up because it is super important. Joel: And at our age we've seen such a progression and evolution of this issue that it's really heartwarming and the fact that we even have an openly homosexual candidate for president who's doing very well, just shows like, jeez, maybe we're not so bad as humans. Chad: Yeah. And a quick connection. It was interesting because Joe Biden on meet the press in 2012 I think it was, he actually said, "You should be able to love who you love." And that's really what kicked this all off because the next step was, okay, now we have to go to the administration, we have to go to the president of the United States, press him on this. And that's when, I mean there, there were things that were happening before that, but that's when the dominoes really started to fall. And that's interesting because yes, we do have Pete Buttigieg on the stage along with Joe Biden who was the VP at the time. Joel: So number three for me, I have written down here social media meltdown. So I'm going to go back in time a little bit. Facebook comes out is huge. Twitter comes out, LinkedIn and they all open their platforms, right? They all have APIs and at the time I don't think anyone who built these platforms thought, "Oh it could go away." So we had a tremendous advent of companies. I wrote some down Branch Out who I'm sure you remember. But many of our listeners won't raised a ton of money, was built on the back of Facebook. Everyone who was around at the time remembers spam galore with job postings and it just got really crazy. Joel: Monster jumped into it with BeKnown. They had a Branch Out competitor. I remember so many Twitter applications and companies TweetMyJob, TweetAJob, JobsOnTwitter. I mean it was like just craziness. And even LinkedIn was a very open platform for awhile. I remember sites like Cube Duel where people could pull employer data, pull your coworkers data. So all these companies were built on social media platforms and at a flip of a switch, a lot of these companies just went out of business. Joel: And that was a real eyeopener from a development standpoint but also business standpoint in terms of how should we build things going forward. And fortunately things like the mobile infrastructure with app stores haven't been the same kind of API surprise or platform surprise that some of these companies have. But a lot of companies came out in the mid-decade if you will talking about leveraging social media and a lot of those companies went down in flames because they were beholden to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And we haven't seen such innovation since because of that. Chad: I remember having a conversation with Gary Zukowsky who was really the one man band at TweetMyJobs to an extent. CEO, founder, chief bottle washer. And I was a VP who handled our partnerships and really the tech side of the partnerships for direct employers. And my question to him was, "Your entire business is predicated on Twitter. What happens if they shut you down?" He said, "I'm screwed." Chad: I mean, seriously understanding that and understanding that your horizon is probably shorter than what you really think it is. So get a great product out there and then sell that fucking thing. And that's what he ended up doing to Career Arc. So yeah, I mean that's the thing for any of those startups out there. If you're building off of somebody else, you have to understand that there's a lot of risk. Joel: Number four. Chad: Number four, marijuana legalization. Marijuana is legal in 11 States for adults over the age of 21 and legal in medical use in 33 States. Joel: Don't forget, our friends in Canada. Chad: Legal marijuana sales began in Illinois just yesterday. So the 1st of January. And from our standpoint as we start to better understand the effects first and foremost, which I think that's one of the reasons why we are legalizing from medical and also from recreational use, we're starting to loosen those regulations, not to mention the tax base off. That's going to be pretty high. And the amount of jobs that can be created out of this. I mean this is a boon for jobs for tax base and overall for countries who do embrace something like this. Joel: Sure. And don't forget the opportunity for a whole new batch of job boards to come out. And as we look at job sites and platforms that we've talked about on the show I think we both agree that starting a job board in Toledo today is a bad idea. Starting a job board for pot jobs as well as I guess we agree healthcare and sales might be a good idea. Chad: Not so bad. Joel: This is going to be a whole Wild West shit in the next 10 years. It'll be really fun to talk about and report on. And if a Democrat gets in the White House, it could happen really fast. Chad: Yes, it could. Joel: My number four, Monster and CareerBuilder selling this past decade. I think that if you had asked us in the first decade of the 2000s what kind of valuation, what kind of price tag? I'll say pre 2008 how about that? The price tag that these sites would have gotten 10 years hence would be North of the billion dollar mark, if not the four to $5 billion Mark. And they both sold for pennies on the dollar at around five to 600 million from reports that came out. Joel: This was sort of the death knell of these sites. And although CareerBuilder seems to be playing with house money at this point, they've sold some assets, Monster they gave it a go for a year or two and have really since cut back. You ask almost weekly what is Randstad going to do with these guys? And I'm not sure they know. But the acquisition of these companies was definitely newsworthy in the last 10 years that I should bring it up in this top 10 list. Chad: Yeah. I think both of these organizations are a tale of what happens when you're Blockbuster. Right? And you don't understand that you can become a Netflix, right? You feel like what you're doing is always going to be a part of the human routine. Joel: It's also really interesting to think about companies that have sort of trended upward over the last 10 years. The LinkedIns, the Indeeds and not help but think either CareerBuilder or Monster could have been either one of those businesses, right? Number five. Chad: My number five is that in the last decade, at least from my standpoint, there's been a bright light shown on pay inequity. So as workers we feel like we're getting a shaft on many occasions, but we don't have any recourse. We in many cases, don't even know if we are because there's no transparency in organizations. Chad: But we were having a recourse. I mean with with the death of unions, who's going to fight for the actual worker to actually attain pay equity? In the last decade, I believe we've heard a message of pay inequity louder than ever before. At least it's one of the things that being a dumb white guy, right? Maybe now I'm just starting to listen. Maybe just in the last 10 years, I just started to hear this. But nonetheless, we know pay inequity is real with white women making 79 cents on the dollar. Black women making 67 cents on the dollar, Hispanic women making 58 cents on the dollar compared to white men. Chad: The gender gap also exists where black men are making more than obviously black women and Hispanic men are making more than a Hispanic women. But from our standpoint, just last month in December, we reported on Starbucks eradicating pay inequity altogether with nearly 300,000 employees. They are almost like the shining star on the Hill with a cup of coffee. So it's my hope and I know there's still has to be a lot of noise. Chad: A ton of ally ship that needs to go behind this and and I know that this year, next year, this decade we will continue to push this hard because I know for a fact my wife works harder than I do, if we were doing the same job in the same position, there's no way in hell she shouldn't be paid the same amount that I am. Joel: Your wife quite possibly works harder than the both of us but that's neither here nor there. I think on this issue with the rise of the gig economy and we both agree that that's going to continue to trend upward. All of the studies out there point to that, how does the gig economy support or pushback gender equality and pay equality issues? And I think that's something to watch in the next decade. How that all unfolds. We're seeing California with legislation will undoubtedly see other States with legislation around the gig economy and how that impacts all colors and sexes of people. Chad: And as talent acquisition leaders who are out there, it is your job to press for this. Period. There's no other way or any other person or any excuse to hide you from the fact that this needs to happen. It happens in steps, it can't all happen at like Starbucks, obviously that didn't happen overnight. But this is something that that needs to happen and it will take your leadership, not just leadership from the standpoint of pay equity, but I don't think that we will see companies making these types of moves without more women in leadership positions. Joel: No pressure. My number five is mobile, mobile, mobile. There's no doubt that the growth of mobile devices, particularly smart phones, has had a tremendous impact on employment and searching for jobs and messaging and communication, et cetera, et cetera. If you look back at 2010 when we were talking about mobile traffic, when we were talking about mobile applies for most job sites and ATSs, we were in single digits, maybe within 15% or so with high active professions like healthcare or trucking where people are on the road. Joel: Fast forward to today and mobile has the lion's share of both traffic and applications. We're seeing businesses pop up and technologies to help support mobile applications. We just talked to at Firing Squad, Alex Murphy and his company trying to solve a little bit of the mobile apply problem. But there's no doubt with everyone pretty much having a smart phone, particularly in North America, Europe and developed countries that mobile has been a huge impact on job seeking. Joel: And I think it goes back to its roots of people don't want to search at work because they'll get caught. They want to do something that they think is private from their boss. They want to do it on their time, they want to do it while they're watching TV or at lunch. And the mobile devices have supported that desire and will continue to do so. Whether in the future it's watches or glasses or VR or whatever, mobile will continue to be a big part of employment. in 2010 to 2019 we really saw that come to fruition. Chad: More of that to come. Joel: I think so. And speaking of badass technologies for the future, let's hear a word from Sovren and we'll both get to our last five. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com that's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: Number six. Chad: Number six. Okay, so my last five because my first five are really pretty heavy. My last five are going to be fairly light and they're all going to be movie oriented and a little quicker. So my number six was Ford versus Ferrari. It's one of those tales from a historical standpoint, you just don't get the insights into. And to be able to see something like that on the big screen, Matt Damon, Christian Bale, it was an amazing movie that I will probably see a dozen times. Joel: And I have yet to see it. But you have inspired me to do so many times by asking me, "Dude, have you seen Ford versus Ferrari yet? Dude, have you seen Ford versus Ferrari yet? Dude, have you seen Ford verses Ferrari yet?" So I will definitely see it even if it's by the time it comes out for rent on TV. Keep in mind I have a two year old, so going to movies is usually a challenge. Joel: My number six I'm going to keep with industry shit and bore people to death while you do fun movies, is chat bots. Kind of going back to the mobile growth of how to apply via mobile. Chat bots sort of succeeded in the cross between mobile and apply. Because the growth of mobile and the growth of chat and messaging was irrefutable. However, how do you apply via mobile became something that companies tried to fix and particularly talk to the guys at paradox, chatting on a phone is akin to basically applying online. But instead of uploading your resume, it's more in the form of a conversation. Joel: Job-seekers like them because they actually get to interact, they don't feel like they're being dumped into a black companies. Employers enjoy them because it saves time and energy and money, not answering the same questions over and over and obviously vendors are profiting from this trend. I don't see chat bots going anywhere in our industry. In fact, I think that they will probably be more and more omnipresent and more and more vendors will come out. I think ultimately in the near future, the first one will be acquired. I kind of laughed at the 100 million plus number, but I'm sort of coming around. Chad: Yes. And from an acquisition standpoint with like the Myas and the Alios of the world getting anywhere from 30 to 60 million, it's definitely going to have to be North of 100 million. Joel: Yeah. Or they're going out of business and I don't see that happening. Chad: Yeah. That's where you'll see the companies like the talk push of the world or even some of the little smaller like guys who knows? I think there'll be much faster movers. Joel: Yeah. Some are very well positioned. Chad: So number seven going to go, this isn't too much of a lamb. This is pretty easy. Back in 2012 the Avengers came out. And they wouldn't have been something that I actually thought about if this year End Game didn't come out. To be able to go all the way through that whole saga, it just made it that much of a foundational movie because of everything that it produced moving forward. Joel: And by the way, no one likes a good superhero movie like Chad Sowash. Chad: That's right. Joel: And any of those that make your top five list has got to be pretty good because you've seen all of them multiple times. Chad: And Julie's a new fan too. Joel: Oh well that's good. That's good. So my number seven sort of piggybacking on chat bots, Programmatic advertising. We remember the days of like, okay what job boards are we going to use, what budget for each? Negotiating contracts for every job board, who's better for what yada yada yada? It was a really archaic process back in the day to post jobs. And marketing definitely set the tone in terms of how they programmatically put ads online and what sites and the budgets and a cost per click and cost per acquisition. And that business model was destined to make its way into the job posting business. Joel: And we've seen it happen. Obviously we've talked on the show extensively around the Programmatic fire sale that's been going on. AppCast started the party 75, 100 million depending on who you listen to in terms of acquisition. We've seen five or six in addition to them in the last year or so also being acquired. We're destined to see Joveo, PandoLogic, JobAdX, all these others get acquired. We're destined to see more drama around what data is being used, who's seeing what, who's buying whom, et cetera. So Programmatic for sure was, was going to make my top 10 list for the year. And there you have it, Programmatic. Chad: There will be a big wave wants an applicant tracking system, buys a programmatic company. Joel: But there aren't many to buy. Chad: That's true. Joel: So for you kids out there wanting to start a company, start a Programmatic advertising solution. Chad: Number eight, Blackfish. So this was a documentary that again, it was one of the many that made us think deeper and harder about the shit that we found fun and cool. Shamu, right? [crosstalk 00:52:45] When we grew up, we want the SeaWorld. Hell, we both grew up in Ohio, how we want the SeaWorld and Aurora. I don't know how many times I went to see Shamu, but to be able to really see the dark kind of like underbelly of what's going on, not just with this flick but also with documentaries or series like Dirty Money, The Explained series on Netflix, the the new if you're into that, the health segment. There are so many of these rotten, The Game Changers, those types. Content is everywhere and this type of documentary/series content is pretty amazing. Joel: Blackfish was fantastic and for stockholders of SeaWorld, it was a huge wake up call to get the hell out of the stock because I think it just totally tanked in the years following that movie. And the business was transformed forever because of it. Chad: Yeah, no more Shamu. Joel: All right. Number eight, I've got Indeed. Okay. Indeed didn't buy glass door. I mean semantics. Okay. Recruit Holdings, Indeed's parent company bought Glassdoor, but let's be honest, it was to combine the two to create essentially a moat or hopefully create a moat for the onslaught of Google for Job. Price tag, which they actually did talk about was I think 1.5 or $1.6 billion. It was a huge acquisition for a site that's basically user generated reviews on companies. Joel: But it's been, you talk about transparency, Glassdoor and Indeed in terms of their reviews have been huge on employer branding, companies being conscientious about how they treat workers. Yeah, Indeed, Glassdoor partnering up through Recruit Holdings to me was one of the most newsworthy things that happened in the last 10 years from a lot of different perspectives. Chad: Nice. So on to number nine. Joel: Number nine. Chad: The Social Network dropped in 2010. Dude, I thought it was fascinating to see pretty much how a company like Facebook, at least in a storied way, was built. And it was, from my standpoint, it wouldn't have probably been in my top 10 if I'm not anticipating volume two. With Cambridge Analytica and those types of things. Right? So I think there's something more to be said. This story is definitely not over. Joel: I live one of those quote from that movie every day. And it was, "Dating you is like dating a StairMaster." And that's sort of like doing a podcast with Chad Sowash. It's sort of like being on a StairMaster all the time. All right, number nine for me, these last two are easy. Google gets in a head first dives into our industry and arguably that was the tsunami that nobody wanted, that was making money off of job postings and everything else. Joel: Google launched a job board or job site, essentially an Indeed for Google, if you will. Job aggregation called Google for Jobs. They launched a job search API that counts over 4,000 companies and job boards using their technology to search for postings on their site. They launch an ATS, which they have since sunset to the happiness and gladness of a lot of ATSs out there. Joel: But there's no doubt that when Google got into this game, it was big, it continues to be big. Talking to Collin Day at iCIMSs Google just marches on as a source for traffic. I believe you said a year or so ago, it would have been at number six or seven for most companies. Today it's a solid third place in terms of driving traffic to iCIMSs clients. Google for sure made the top 10 list in terms of the decades most intriguing news. Chad: Yeah. And I think what will fuel some of a Google's popularity is the hatred for Indeed. Number 10, I have a Jordan Peele duo. Because the dude is genius and both the movies that he's put out Get Out in 2017 and US in 2019, I thought were spectacular. They really looked at horror movies in an entirely different way. I thought they were both amazing. Joel: So my wife went to the, she didn't go to the movies, but she was near a movie and there was a line out the door, which you don't see a lot anymore. Growing up the Star Wars and there are certain movies where people waited out. But there was a line and she was just really curious like, "Why in the world is their line?" There's no Disney movie out this week. There's no, or whatever it was. And it was Get Out. Joel: And she had never really even heard of it and I had never heard of it. There was no big marketing blitz for this movie. It was a great movie. It organically took over. It was sort of like a Blair Witch sort of thing where the folklore around it and the buzz was just so much that the thing grew out of control. The second movie I liked a little less, but I could see where you would pair the two and make that a combo deal because they were both exceptional. Chad: And I will see them again. Joel: So number one for me, it's obvious. You could probably tell me what it is. It's Microsoft buying LinkedIn. Chad: Ding, ding, ding. Joel: For $26 billion. Totally, crashed the whole system. Cats and dogs living together. This thing set off huge amounts of money to come into our industry and startups. It got Google's attention to get in. It got Facebook's attention to get in. Valuations of companies in our space went through the roof. George LaRocque has a job because of it, tracking all the money that's going into this thing. LinkedIn was already a juggernaut in terms of recruiter resource, budget. Joel: Now it's teamed up with Microsoft. We're just starting to see the power of those two and what it can mean in terms of the office suite, sourcing job posting more and more finding candidates. I mean, to me this is the 800 pound gorilla and I drank the Koolaid like nobody's business and I will probably continue to drink the Koolaid through 2020 to 2029 and they'll probably make my top 10 list when we're talking about this in 10 years. Assuming you and I can get along for that long and still have a podcast. Chad: And off of that, we are interested to see whether SCOTUS will accept LinkedIn's HighQ case, right? Taking it from [crosstalk 00:59:32] the ninth circuit. So that that is also something that's interesting from a data perspective. Which again, probably it might be on the prediction show. Who knows? Joel: Who knows? We'll try to do it. It's been a fun year. It's been a fun decade only as only the podcast has been around for two plus years of that. I'm excited for 2020 and beyond and we out. Chad: Let's do this. We out. #Technology #Indeed #ClickIQ #Linkedn #Movies #PayEquity #MarriageEquality #Economy #jobs #Marijuana #CannabisJobs

It's not every day you get to talk to someone who's been in the online recruitment industry as long as Chad & Cheese have, but that's just what happened when the boys got a chance to chat with David Webb of Brightmove, an ATS you've never heard of (the company is hoping to change that), but is popular with users. We got Webb to open-up about everything from automation, how job seekers will apply to jobs in the future, and even how Indeed's one-click apply feature is royally screwing over employment branding efforts. Enjoy this Sovren exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire.​ Sovren: Google, Lever, Entelo, Monster, Jibe. What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren Technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job. While others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com, S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo. Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh shit, it must be Monday. Chad: Yeah, it's fucking Monday all right. Joel: Where's my cup of coffee? Here we go. Here we go. David: You guys work on every national holiday or just Veteran's Day? Chad: Just Veteran's Day. Yeah, that's it. Joel: Well, Chad being a veteran, he's blessed this show. Yeah. I wanted to take the day off like every day, but Chad said, "No, we're recording." Goddammit. Oh shit. Joel: Yeah, it's Monday kids. Chad: It's Monday. There's no second take. All right people. Joel: Monday morning. Chad: And we have David Webb, CEO of Brightmove on, and I'm going to read this because Joel, you're going to find this funny as hell. This came from David's PR lackeys over there. David Webb is a man with a plan and an expert in all things recruiting and recruiting technology, especially ATS. He is the CEO of Brightmove, which is doing ATS differently by pairing it with large scale RPO. David: I didn't approve that, but it is technically accurate. Chad: All right Dave. So let's get it from the horse's mouth on this instead of from some PR lackey, for goodness sake. Who is David Webb and why should anybody care? David: I'm the DJ Cool Herc of applicant tracking systems. I'm one of the original guys from 1995. Chad: OG. David: Yeah. Before that was even a word I think. But when I was in college, I got a job with a visionary guy and we built one of the first job boards when Dice was still a BBS and Monster was still a staffing company. So that should say it all. Joel: You've seen some shit. Chad: What site was it? David: It was called computerwork.com. Chad: Computerwork.com. When Monster was still a staffing organization. When was this? What year? David: 1994 and 1995. And for all the nerds out there, we built the site and PL sequel. And yes, that is a procedural language for database reports. Joel: So do you remember Job Web and all that shit? David: I don't remember that one. There wasn't a community. There wasn't even applicant tracking systems per se as a service. Joel: There were spreadsheets if that and filing cabinets. Chad: Yeah. We were coming from the days of filing cabinets and newspapers. So nothing was really electronic at that point, right? David: People dreamed of a day when you could trade stocks online. Chad: Yes. So this brings us to a part of what we're going to be talking about today is your new movement of trying to help everybody believe that ATS is badass, and nobody believes you because everybody hates their ATS. So tell us why this new propaganda tour ATS is badass. Tell us why this is so big. Joel: We've had 25 years to get it right. What's the deal? David: So the deal is there's kind of three different audiences that you have to cater to and build business rules around. You have the recruiter, you have the hiring manager, and you have the job applicant. And it's kind of like three enterprise systems rolled into one, and you're trying to make something that fits everybody's business model. And that's just hard. I've worked on enterprise systems for large banks and large distribution companies where we did credit collections of $900,000 an hour and ship 10,000 orders a day out of a warehouse. And those were simple compared to the applicant tracking system. Joel: Now for a long time the problem with applicant tracking systems that I saw was that they all had to be customized for each client, which is really not how software works. Are we finding some resolution or solutions to that problem? David: We use instead of building a kind of a workflow that everyone had to fit into, we built a workflow definition system. So we kind of cater to how you do business instead of forcing you into a certain way of doing your recruiting. But having said that, if you're still outside of that realm, maybe you should look at the applicant tracking systems and how they're helping successful companies recruit and be open minded to changing your process a little bit. Chad: That's the biggest problem though is that... So let's go back in the days of RecruitSoft before they became Taleo. RecruitSoft was a standardized platform. It was still client server at the point, but it was a standardized platform and that's how they were selling it. And that's the only way they sold it. Only until, I don't know, five, 10 years later they started doing customizations because they saw the big money on the wall. Chad: The thing is that if you do go through those customizations, especially the amount of customizations you need from client to client to client, it breaks the whole damn system. Not to mention process efficiencies suck because we're trying to jam late 1990s, early 2000s process methodologies into technology. Chad: So what you're talking about with regard to being able to manage all these different processes for the different people, that's always going to change because we, the software providers, talking about you guys, you aren't actually taking a big enough stand and all you're doing is just waiting for the money to come in and you will customize anything. So it's never going to change. David: Some people take that approach, and what you described is a problem with software architecture, not a problem with the business model. So I'm familiar with what you're talking about. There's some other companies that I did some work for and every time they brought on a new customer, they'd spin up a new copy of the code and they customize it and they'd run it. Well that doesn't scale and that's not how Brightmove works. We have one code base, and when we need to customize something, we designed the software so that that customization can or cannot be applied to the other customers or configured for everybody in the community. So I see that more of an architecture problem than an industry problem. Chad: But here's the big problem. You've been around for 15 years, I've never heard of Brightmove. And the last one, what was it? I think Ongig came out with the top 50 ATS's, and Brightmove isn't on it. So yes, you're talking about how you guys are so fashion forward, but nobody knows who the hell you are. So from an adoption standpoint, that's the only thing that matters, right? David: Oh yeah. Chad: So you've been around for 15 years. Why aren't you the big dog? iCIMS has been around about the same amount of time. Everybody knows who they are. Why don't they know who you guys are? Joel: Well, they've just hired a PR firms. So they're on their way. It's all good. David: No, that's a fair question. And you're not wrong. I'll tell people the same thing. The reason why is because we were founded by a bunch of nerds who are really good at writing software and we suck at public relations and marketing. Like my degree is a computer science, not podcasting or social media. So it's the company has to evolve. David: And I bootstrapped this thing at night while I had a full time job or two full time jobs. So I could have gone out and raised a bunch of money and done it a different way, but I didn't know what I didn't know at the time. So what I did is I hustled and now I have a company and now I have marketing. And nobody owns any of this except for me and my original business partners. So we're in the driver's seat going forward. David: It's just two different ways to get to the same point. We took the long way, but we're still in control I guess is one of the perks of that. Joel: Give me your take on sort of the state of the ATS business. Having so much experience in history in this thing, I got to think you have some interesting perspective on where it's been, where it is and where it's going. David: It's commoditized for sure. And there's too many mediocre players, and people are starting to be dishonest about the features that they have and calling automation AI and calling machine learning AI. There's going to be a new breakthrough. I don't know when it's going to happen. We're obviously working on it in our labs and trying to figure out what that differentiator is going to be, but something's going to have to change. I think everyone's kind of in flux waiting to see what's going to happen with some other kind of ancillary companies like LinkedIn and Google. Obviously Google Hire threw in the towel. You guys did a show about that. So I don't know if that's good or bad signal to the industry. Joel: So you mentioned a lot of the things. You mentioned automation and commoditization, which I think are things we've talked about on the show as well. I'm curious also mentioning LinkedIn, my take is everyone sort of wants to be that one platform to do everything in recruiting, hiring, whatever it is. So you see Jobvite acquiring folks, you see iCIMS acquiring, you see obviously LinkedIn, the 800 pound gorilla. What are your thoughts on sort of your own company's sort of desire to be that one platform? Who's doing it right? Is that where the world's going to go or does everyone have it wrong? What's your take? David: We don't desire to be the one platform because once you try to do that, you become mediocre at everything. And what we're trying to be is the best recruiting platform for PEOs, RPOs and staffing companies. And if there's another company that does something better than us, we just want to integrate with them, and we want to give the customer the freedom to choose the best of everything out there and just have it all work together. David: We do the same thing as consumers of CRMs and email marketing tools. We might want to pair HubSpot with MailChimp or some other platform because they do something really well. And I think if you try to do everything, you're not going to be good at everything. That's the pattern I've seen. Chad: Agreed, agreed. Point solutions are ruling everyone's top of mind now though, right? So nobody's talking about the applicant tracking system. Talking about chatbots, talking about programmatic, talking about candidate nurturing RMPs. And then they're all around the buzzwords with AI, RPA, ML. How can your system, your applicant tracking system, start to get some of that mindshare? because there's so much happening out in the market right now, how can any ATS gather any top of mind whatsoever with all the noise that's happening out in the market right now? David: I think the honest answer is you have to guess well because nothing is certain, and if you integrate with the right person early on and you pick a good one, you can be... And they take off, you can kind of ride that integration as their recommended platform. It's probably close to impossible to keep all of your integrations up to date with every possible point solution out there. Very cost the prohibitive. The customer would have to absorb a lot of that and they don't want to do that. So I believe a lot of it is luck and then having the skill and the staff and the resources to respond to things quickly. And that's kind of what we've always been able to do. Chad: Well that sounds like that's your model though is that you don't want to be everything to everyone. So therefore you have to partner with those point solutions to be able to ensure that there's an RNP that's there, there's a chatbots that's there. You have the opportunity to help your clients get there. But instead of buying them the iCIMS and the Jobvites of the world, you're partnering with them. But they're still incurring what you were just talking about those fees. So how do you get out of that? There's a we don't want to be all things to everybody because we're not going to be good at all of them. Totally understand that. But then there's the other side that you just talk about, the actual cost impediment to possibly changing to another ATS like Brightmove because you do have all these point solutions that you have to integrate and it's going to cost to be able to do so. David: Yeah. So doing integrations with everybody out there isn't scalable. So what we do is we create a core developer platform and an API that's versatile and easily consumable. So you can kind of share those as you start to do your integrations. So that's one way we do that. The other thing we've done is we've taken our data knowledge and our big data knowledge and we're kind of revolutionizing the way that you move between applicant tracking systems. And that's a pretty painful process right now depending on where you're going to and where you're coming from. And we're trying to get that data migration down to hours or days instead of months. So that's another approach we're taking there to reduce that cost of making the switch. Joel: So you don't charge for integration. Am I hearing that correctly? David: That's not true. If we have an integration already in place, then we do not charge extra for it. Now you might have to pay a text messaging company for the account to do the integration or you might have to pay MailChimp for the email marketing account to do the integration. But we don't say... Joel: So if I'm a text recruiting startup, what would it take for me to integrate with your solution? David: I'm sorry. If you're a text recruiting... Joel: Text recruiting. Well, whatever chatbot, text recruiting solution, whatever software I wanted and I wanted to integrate with your solution, what would that take for me to do that? David: We'd give you a list of our event publishing, web hooks and a list of our web service rest callbacks. And that would be everything you would need to get your input and output from Brightmove to integrate. Joel: So I wouldn't have to write a check. David: Not to Brightmove, not to use the things that we already have. Joel: Okay. Can you help me understand why eight? Because to me the future of like building applications onto ATS is the way that they're going to be the one platform that people trust and use. But they seem to make it so difficult, whether it be cost prohibitive or tech restrictive. Do you have any take on why they sort of make it so difficult to integrate? David: I don't. We try not to make it difficult. I think a lot of times we talk to other companies to do integrations. A lot of times there's just a lack of understanding about how an integration works. I think a lot of times salespeople sell things that companies don't have and then that makes things uncomfortable when it comes time to execute. Chad: Shocker. David: So the world has not changed. Joel: So fair enough. So I want to talk about you mentioned metrics in one of your earlier answers, and one of the things I love about ATS is you guys really know sort of the metrics on the ground in terms of what's driving traffic to job postings. We hear a lot or talk about the death of job boards and what's taking place there. What's sort of your insight in terms of what's driving traffic to job sites, what's really working and counter to that, what's really dropping off the cliff, if anything? David: Sure. So I'll start by saying if you're a staffing company or a recruiting company and you don't know the answer to that question, you should take a look at Brightmove or another system that is measuring those things for you because you can't make intelligent decisions about how to change your job advertisements or where to pay for that advertising unless you know the answer to those questions. David: This is one of those areas where there are point solutions, but this was so important to us we actually built our own recruiting analytics module. And what we've seen in measuring our customer's data and looking at the numbers to address your question directly is that we see a big drop off on direct applications on your company careers page and a very high increase in the number of applications through the bulk apply systems like ZipRecruiter apply and Indeed apply. So a lot of people applying to the jobs aren't seeing your company brand at all. They're just kind of saying, search for this. There's a hundred. Do you want to apply to these with one click? Yes, I do. And then off it goes. So those are the patterns we're seeing. Joel: Just so everyone's clear, this is sort of the one click apply, right? So I'm on, I'm on Indeed. I see a job I want apply now with your Indeed account. I click, I click apply. I don't even go to the corporate site. The application goes right to the company through your ATS. And I don't even have to go to the company site. That's what I'm hearing, correct? David: That's correct. Chad: So here's the question though, back to the integration piece. Your site says real time job posting integration is only available for a Monster in CareerBuilder. So David, 2010 called, they want their job distribution model back. But seriously, what type of job distribution engine do you have in place? If you do have these one click applies and they're built in, I would assume those are partnered solutions. Did you build those yourself? Tell us a little bit more in depth about that. Because if you're just doing realtime postings to Monster and CareerBuilder, that's kind of lackluster compared to competitors, right? David: Well, I'm limited to what those other companies can handle. Right? Chad: So ZipRecruiter and Indeed can't handle realtime postings? David: They do feeds. So it's near real time. I mean, they can request a list of all of our current jobs anytime they want. And I think they pull about every six hours. Those guys have a lot of volume and it's a math problem. It takes them hours to process all of the new feeds that they pick up. So that's not to say that those antiquated job boards that have been around for a long time are the only ones that we integrate with. There's a whole lot, but those are the ones where if you make the change on the screen and click save and go refresh it on their site, you'll see the change right away. But the like Indeed and ZipRecruiter, that's not how they really do it. They prefer feeds of all the jobs of all the customers. Chad: Gotcha. Gotcha. So totally get that from that standpoint. If you are doing feeds, how many feeds are you doing, and are you also pushing over to programmatic? So the performance based, not just the duration. David: Not pushing to programmatic. I'm not sure what you're talking about there. Chad: So do you know programmatic based, performance based ads, right? David: No, sorry. Not familiar with that. Chad: Okay. So this is probably something you should be very on top of because we're talking about going out and having performance based ads like Google AdWords on Indeed. I mean, just pretty much... Not all of the job boards have those, but most of them are moving toward. Not to mention we've had four programmatic job companies, advertising agencies, whatever you want to call them, have been acquired in just the last couple of months. So this is very big in our space right now from a technology standpoint, programmatic distribution, performance based versus duration. Joel: So Professor Chad has given you your homework, Dave. David: All right. And I'm giving my homework to somebody else. Hey, like I'm a delegator. I know what you're saying, and I try to keep up with everything. And it's probably impossible for all of us to keep up with everything. Chad: Just need to listen to Chad and Cheese more. [crosstalk 00:20:18] Joel: Slow the podcast, Dave. I'm going to let you add on this. Because you've been around for so long, we rarely talk to someone around longer than we have been. I want you to get out your crystal ball and tell me what applying to jobs looks like in five to 10 years from now. And I also want you to give me some insight because we're hearing the R word recession bounced around quite a bit. Are you seeing anything in terms of fewer jobs posted or is there anything on your side of the table that you see would be a red flag for the economy? Joel: So number one, what does the future look like for applying? And number two, what is sort of the macroeconomics look like? David: If it's okay, I'll answer this in the reverse order. So, the macroeconomics right now is that there is no slow down. As far as I know, the unemployment rate is not going up or hasn't been reported to go up. The number of jobs that we're distributing and hosting has not gone down. And the beauty of the macroeconomic economy or sorry, the macro economics of the ATS industry is that it doesn't really matter to us because the ATS is still a vital part of recruiting. So right now we have a lot of jobs and not very many candidates. And that's important from the job advertising and attracting viewpoint. David: The converse is that you have few jobs and you have even more applicants to every job and that's where you really need a good ATS to help you filter to the right one and the best one. So either way, we really don't see from our business a drop or a rise as those things change. David: As far as the future of applying to jobs, man, I sure hope it gets more personal and not more robotic. So I'm all for automation. I love efficiency. I think that you're going to see new jobs created out of automation and as far as applying to jobs go, maybe it's not through your web browser, maybe it's through your phone. Yeah, I'm not really sure. Chad: When you say over the past decade and a half, two decades, applying for a job has sucked for candidates in the first place because they just go right to a black hole. Joel: Sounds like they just click one apply and they're done with it. Chad: Okay. I'm still asking my question. So if you take a look at being more personal and SHRM actually did a survey for job seekers that said they would rather be engaged by a chatbot than go into a black hole. So from that standpoint, isn't the technology, whether it's bots or it's a black hole, which one would you choose? David: I think that people saying that technology is a black hole is a misconception of the technology. If you think technology and recruiting is a black hole, either you're not qualified for the job that you're applying for or you're applying at a crappy company that doesn't have good recruiters. There's no excuse with today's technology that there can't be a dignified response to everybody that applies to a job, even if it's thanks but no thanks. David: So if you're not getting callbacks for the jobs you're applying to, I would say take a good look at your resume, make sure it's up to date, make sure it's accurate and authentic. Don't try to spam the system. ATS, like Brightmove, look for crappy resumes and filter them out even if they have all the keywords for that the job's looking for because that's how we save recruiters time and money by helping them get the right candidate to the top, not the not the one with the most keywords on their resume. David: So hope that answers your question, but I don't think the technology is to blame. It's a garbage in, garbage out kind of ecosystem. And that applies to the recruiters and also to the job applicants. Chad: Humans are to blame, people. Joel: I like that answer. Chad: Humans are to blame. David: Blame for everything. Everything's our fault. Chad: Of course it is. We're the ones driving it. Chad: David, thanks so much for coming and taking our Monday morning. All of the anger that we had, we took it out on you. Really appreciate it. And if somebody wants to find out more about you and more about Brightmove, where would they go? David: Thanks for having me guys. Website's the best place, Brightmove.com and we're all over the standard social media channels. And you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for David Webb, Brightmove and hopefully I'm the first one that comes up. Chad: Excellent, man. Joel: Thanks, Dave. We out. Chad: We out. David: Thanks, guys. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #ATS #Brightmove #Programmatic #process

It's January. And you know what that means: Predictions for the New Year. Joining Chad & Cheese this week is long time predictor and industry icon Tim Sackett. What's in store for Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and more? You just gotta listen. You'll also find out how the boys did in their 2019 predictions (hint: THEY SUCK). Enjoy this Sovren, JobAdx and Canvas sponsored goodness. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps corporations tap new channels to find qualified talent in the disability community, manage culture change, leverage federal and state hiring incentives, respond to a changing regulatory environment, and strengthen their workforce through diversity. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. It's a new year. What's up Chad? Chad: Another day in paradise, man, I'm just back from Cleveland. Aw shit. Joel: Hello Cleveland and hello Tim Sackett, our special guest. Tim: What's going on boys? Chad: Sackadomis! Joel: You ready to do some predictions? Tim: Sackadomis is here. Joel: It's a sack attack for 2020 baby. Tim: I'm right off the boat from Cayman islands. I've got my Speedo on. I'm ready to go. I shaved my chest like a man. Joel: J Lo and A Rod are on the bow side. Let's pay some bills, and we'll get to our 2019 rehash and go into our 2020 predictions. Gang, we'll be right back. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com we provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren: software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: I already know what this episode is going to be called. Teabagging 2020. Tim: There we go. Right off the bat, Chad: Right off the bat. Tim: We're the audience. Chad: Thinking of you in a Speedo. Come on. What else could we call it? Tim: Yep. You and your wife both. Chad: I don't know how I'm going to get that out of my brain because it's so lovely. Joel: Tim we haven't talked to you. How was your holiday? Tim: It was tremendous. I literally sat on the beach for a week and drank frozen drinks and had a [crosstalk 00:02:16] wonderful time. Joel: You left the beautiful scape of Kalamazoo for beaches and drinks with umbrellas. Tim: The grayness of Detroit and just went South. Joel: I can't hate on that. Chad: I can't hate that on that at all, and then we, what do we do? We get in the car the first thing out of January and we drive to Cleveland. Joel: Which was beautiful by the way Chad: It was pretty nice. Joel: Which is pretty much beautiful for Cleveland. There's no snow in January, so it's lovely. Chad: Yeah, and all we had to do is listen to sports talk-radio on the way. Listening to guys with these stupid predictions about who's going to be the Cleveland coach. It was fucking ridiculous. Tim: I still think Baker can be our guy. I love Baker. Joel: I still think we can get Belichick. I think we can do it. We can get Belichick and McDaniel and Tom Brady for next year. Tim: You trade Baker for Belichick and Brady and then that's straight up. And your first round 2024. Chad: All we need to do is make sure that we get Giselle a heated driveway. That's all we need to do. There won't be snow in their driveway. They'll be happy. It's like these guys are coming up with some of the shit. Joel: That was literally part of the discussion. Tim, when Butch Davis moved there from Florida they bought a heated driveway so his wife wouldn't have to shovel snow. Tim: By the way. I want that now. I'm calling somebody right now. I'm like, "Wait a minute. How do I get one of those?" Chad: By the way, just so you know, there's snow that goes beyond the driveway that you still have to fucking drive in dumb asses. Oh yea, just don't want us to plow the snow first and foremost. If you make that much money, you don't shovel fucking snow. Tim: No. Chad: Ever. So that being said. [crosstalk 00:04:03] We want to jump into the 2019 predictions, and the first thing we talked about, I thought it was funny that Tim asked if this new guy at Ohio State was the right choice. Joel said that he didn't think so, and that a bigger name would actually come along. And I thought he deserved the up. They killed it last year and the guy was under Urban long enough. I thought Ryan Day would kick ass and take names. Tim: But he lost, he lost a big game. He's not even in the National Championship game. Joel: Coaching clearly lost it. Chad: Not to Michigan state, he didn't. Tim: No. So he's probably on the hot seat I would be guessing, down in Columbus. Joel: I would say no, not after his first year. I'd say he's okay. So let's jump through with... Tim had the first, and we'll go again with Tim this year, but he said with the softening of the economy, he thought assessment science would be big in 2019. Tim: Man, still on that. Joel: Yeah, I don't know about that. I think assessment science and facial recognition got kicked in the nuts by [crosstalk 00:05:16]. Sound effect: "Game over, man! Game over!" Chad: I'm still a believer. Joel: Still a believer. Don't stop believing. Chad: So, Joel's first prediction was one of these CEOs get fired either Monster's, Scott Gutz, Dice's, Art Zeile or Irina at CareerBuilder. They are all still in the [crosstalk 00:05:43]. Joel: I'm not sure that today we've confirmed Irina is still there. I still might be right on that prediction. Tim: Let's say, everyone's still on the hot seat. Joel: And by the way, everyone but Scott Gutz is gone at Monster, [crosstalk 00:05:56]. So I was really close on that one [crosstalk 00:05:58]. Chad: Yeah you were close, yeah. Joel: But ultimately- Tim: He got out in front of it and fired everybody else. Got the board to give him another year. Chad: My first prediction was that the "candidate matching" becomes standard. Tim: That's, that's a big no. Yeah. Oh, Lillian is still alive, unfortunately, and for some reason "candidate matching" is not something that has been received by the core platform. Joel: We suck at this guys. Tim: Yeah, I know. I can't wait to do our 2020. Chad: I'm still a big believer in that "candidate matching". Tim: I am too. I really am, but still. Chad: My second pick was Microsoft acquires Upwards. Tim: Yes. Oh, wait. Chad: Joel's second prediction was ZipRecruiter files for IPO, which means you can't use that this year, Joel. Joel: Yeah, I'm going to be earlier than that one. It'll be this year. Chad: Tim's next was the consolidation of the event space. There's too much conference event going on. [crosstalk 00:06:53] Shit's got to consolidate. Tim: It seems like every, it just got bigger. It got bigger. Chad: Pretty much every idiot in the world now thinks they can run a conference. It's like "I have a conference tomorrow in my office. It's me and like five people that work for me". Tim: You don't know how many people say, Oh, "Chad and Cheese. You should have your own conference". Chad: You can just go fuck off. How about no? Tim: "The Chad and Cheese Conference at the Olympia Club in Vegas". Joel: That conference is poolside at Hooters in Vegas. Tim: Spearmint Rhino. Joel: $20 door fee for the K. Chad: The last productions: Joel said LinkedIn wins against hiQ. Joel: Jury's still out because it's going to the Supreme Court this year. Tim: God damn it. Yeah. I don't think Supreme court's actually going to take it. Chad: My last prediction was Google For Jobs displaces Indeed as the number one source for candidate traffic and a caveat Jobiak gets acquired. Neither one of those happened. And last but not least, Tim came up with this out of left fucking field. Gen Z consulting explodes. Tim: Definitely. Oh wait, no, I saw a 90 year old woman at the last conference. She was a Gen Z consultant. Joel: Does that count as exploding? Tim: I'm going to go with "no". Joel: So no explosion. [crosstalk 00:08:22] 2020 can't get any worse, that's the good news. Tim: I'm very excited about our predictions for 2020 I think we should think a little bit harder about them during this next commercial break to see if we might want to change them at all. Joel: Let's take a break and we'll get to 2020. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvasbot is your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine-learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Canvas: Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser-focused on recruiter success. Request a demo@gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: I can't not dance when that commercial comes on just because of the background music. Joel: I want to know how many Bitmojis Tim is fired off this morning alone. Tim: I can tell you what my Canvas Bitmoji is on point! Little red hair, spiky- Joel: That shit's on fleek! Chad: Oh, you're going to explain that one to the kids. All right, so as we like to do here on the show, we like to, first and foremost, push our guests out into the spotlight and allow Mr. Sackett to do the first prediction because we like to make fun of him first. Joel: Yeah. This is the middle-school dance where we throw Tim out to the dance floor and let him start the party. Tim: By the way, on my IG stories, when I was in Cayman, I'd have a little dancey on the bow of a boat and let's just say alcohol was involved. Chad: Cayman's. Alcohol. Boat. Tim: Yeah. Joel: Speedo, Tim: Well, no a Speedo, but you know. Chad: Naked groups! Tim: So my first one, and this is hard for me because I know we have such a personal kind of strong relationship between Indeed and I. So I think, Indeed is going to cut- Joel: In jail. Tim: Indeed is going to cut free organic traffic to the UK staffing vendors just like they did to the U S staffing vendors in 2019. 2020 UK get ready! Take one. Joel: So Indeed peeps sticking it to everybody in 2020. Tim: Hey, it's business, right? Joel: It's for the quality of our users, Tim. Tim: What they found out was, if you actually cut that free traffic to staffing firms, turns out staffing firms will actually pay to get it back. And so, it's not really about search quality, it's about "will you pay?" All that stuff. Chad: Yes. Yeah. Tim: So they're going to continue. Joel: Here's my Indeed prediction. We all get a stuffy of the new Indeed groundhog this year as a "we love you". Tim: I can tell you I won't. Chad: Yeah, no you will. You will because Chad and cheese are going to be dedicated this year to actually having an Indeed groundhog with us on the stage. Joel: We're working the hottest sponsorship of 2020 with the Indeed groundhog. You just wait, buddy. Tim: Are you guys going to meet you in live Chad and Cheese for interactive? Chad: Oh yeah. I don't see that happening. I could see that happening so yes, I I'm surprised. I'm surprised that staffing companies in the UK will be surprised and caught off guard when the rug is yanked out from underneath them when they are forced to actually pay for traffic. Tim: Because the U.S. ones are still surprised. I still get U.S. staffing people calling me, asking me if I figured out how to get the free stuff back and I'm just like "never coming back". Chad: Dude, they're making more money because what they did was get you on the heroin drip and then they ripped out the heroin from underneath your feet and then guess what? Charged a shit ton of cash for it. That's how they work it. Sound effect: "Game over, man! Game over!" Tim: Hey, by the way I'll say this: Indeed still works. We still pay for it for some things. We still sponsor some things. I'm not saying that it doesn't work, I'm just saying I wasn't happy to have to pay for it. Joel: I hate paying for results and money. Tim: It turns out really good recruitment, marketing, cost of money. Joel: Is it my turn? Chad: Finally, let's go. Joel: All right, so I got to start with Google and get progressively worse on my predictions. I'm definitely committed to rehashing last year and not getting any of these things right. So let's roll the dice. I'm going to predict Google For Jobs monetizes this year specifically they unveil a pay-per-click model where people can highlight jobs, get them positioning on searches, et cetera. But yeah, Google starts raking in the dough. And I also think to rehash Chad's from last year, that traffic continues to march on and what the hell they surpass Indeed for a lot of companies in terms of referrals for candidates. So Google For Jobs has a big year and starts making bank in 2020. Tim: We saw for iCIMs clients that Google For Jobs is the number three traffic source happening in 2019 so that- Joel: Yeah, I mean they, they leapfrog from like five or six to number three. Tim: I think it was sixth. Joel: Yeah. So it's going to continue to be good for Google and bad for everybody else. Tim: Well Joel, with that do you see Google shutting down indexing Glassdoor to kind of push that even farther? Joel: The reviews or the jobs? Tim: Because that's how they basically shut down Indeed, right? Joel: Indeed chose not to be indexed. It wasn't Google. Tim: Whatever. Chad: Dude, if they do that, if you've got, you've got to think of the antitrust ramifications around that. Google has to play on a level playing field with little piss ants like Indeed. Joel: The question should be, "does Glassdoor shut off feeding jobs into Google?" Tim: Yeah. Joel: I would say "no". Most of the reports I hear are that Indeed is duplicating jobs onto Glassdoor and then posting them on Google For Jobs there and just standing firm on the "no Indeed", but getting through the back door with Glassdoor. So no, I do not believe glass door will shut off the spicket. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked if Indeed acquiesces and says, "fuck it. We're going to put our jobs on Google For Jobs too". Chad: Boom. All right, prediction number one, I'm going to say, so they're going to be multiple chatbot acquisitions this year. So this year at CES, a new tech firm out from STAR, the actual Samsung Technology and Advancement Research labs called Neon demonstrated their chatbot, also called Neon, which is a humanistic type of a chatbot. So it's kind of like 10guy to an extent, but onscreen with real people. This tech puts deep fakes to shame. Chad: Imagine having a rendering of your CEO interviewing every single candidate that walks through the door or interviews remotely, or maybe just staff members. Imagine renderings of them doing the same thing. Now from my standpoint, this is what I said in our Naughty and Nice podcast. 10guy and this type of technology pushes more adoption for everything behind it, right? So this is going way out on a limb. It's incredibly cool. But companies are going to be, "wait a minute, I don't want to go that far". Chad: Not going that far is a chatbot is just your regular traditional can-do-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-shit-chatbots. Right? And I see companies going through and there will be multiple acquisitions. This is the year that dominoes start to fall. The acquisition dominoes start to fall for chatbots. Joel: Some I'm going to throw in my 2 cents and say that Maya is the first to go and it's for a 100 million plus dollar price tag. Tim: Bam. Chad: And that's big. I think that Maya has to go for more than that because they've taken what, 30 million-ish or so? So I think they're going to have to go for more than that. But I do think that again, this conversation is going at Moore's Law speed and that is pretty fucking amazing. Tim: My 2 cents is Tengai is going to invite me to Sweden and take me skiing, because you guys didn't get to go skiing. Joel: That would be an awesome viral video by the way. Put some skis on that thing and roll it down the hill. Tim: I'll just carry her right in my arms. It's like me and Elin going down shooshin with Tengai. Let's do it. Hook that up! Chad: You can't even pronounce the robot's name right. They're not bringing you to Sweden. Tim: I don't speak Swedish, sorry. Here's the thing, Chad. If I would have gotten invited to Sweden, I would pronounce that thing correctly. Chad: All right. All right. All right. We're moving on to prediction number two and I get to start this. I get to start this round off. I'm going go pretty bold and it's not really that bold. ICMs acquires a programmatic company. In 2019 we saw the rise of programmatic with TMP, Symphony KRT, Recruitics, Indeed StepStone. They all have their own programmatic solutions. I see that spanning to core applicant tracking systems. Chad: We've also talked to ICMs and talked to Collin and really, I mean a lot of the leadership there and programmatic was a part of the conversation and they're looking intently at programmatic organizations and there are still plenty, not a ton, but plenty of programmatic organizations that are out there or at least companies that have programmatic tech. Next, JobADx, Recruitology, Joveo, Pandologic, VONQ. And that's probably half of them. Joel: And that's your bold prediction. Who doesn't own a programmatic solution by the end of 2020? Chad: First off, I don't know if you were here during the 2019; I'm trying to play it safe so I actually get one of these fucking things right this year. Joel: That was as bold as; remember the one where you're like "Monster and CareerBuilder make a comeback". That was our first show. Tim: It was, yeah. Chad: It was. And neither one of [crosstalk 00:19:02] I mean, what the fuck do you want to me? Joel: Fair enough. The need to get one of these things right is fine. So ICMS buys... somebody. Chad: A programmatic. Yeah. Joel: With that, I'll say that with my second prediction that Monster gets sold. I think Ron Stott is tired of it's turkey. I think that there's no growth. They've laid off everyone, almost everyone that's important. I just think they're going to get out of the job board business. They're going to go; they're going to call up Indeed or ZipRecruiter or whoever and say, "what do you give us for this dog pile of shit? and Monster is no longer a Ron Stott property at the beginning of 2021. Tim: Hey, the three of us might be able to put enough money together and just take it. Chad: That's a good point. I've got a buck 50. I've got a buck 50. I think it's interesting that we just learned that at the end of last year they shut down their betterthing.com app and that technology I think is pretty revolutionary for CDL and obviously the logistics and drivers. But yeah, if they can't make something like that work because they're not putting enough focus and priority around this new type of tech to be able to grow it and the perspectively widen up the bounds on it. Not just logistics, not just trucking but also nursing and so on and so forth. If they don't have the leadership and the vision to be able to understand what is a good fucking piece of tech and what they could build a future business off of, they deserve to fucking go down. Joel: I'm just waiting for their Instagram for jobs revolutionary product. I've been hearing about that for two fucking years. Tim: I will say the Monster Studio thing is brilliant. We know video job description; you're getting way more interaction, way more traffic, way more applies. Chad: Dude. They don't own it. They don't own it. It's not their shit. Tim: But it is really good. Chad: Well it is good! Thank the Australians for that shit. Thank VideoMyJob. Monster has nothing to do with that being a good product. All they did was put it on their back and carry it and say, buy this, and they're getting us a margin off of it. They're not building tech. Tim: You try to make video job descriptions easy. It built into a platform. That's the hard part, right, so whatever. Joel: Subset prediction: VideoMyJob acquires Monster. There you go. Chad: Very nice. All right, Tim, I think we're on your number two right? Tim: I'm going to go... I'm going to save my best one for last. I'm going to double down on last year's and say we're going to see the end of human-to-human interviewing as we know it in 2020 because of unconscious bias, because humans just suck at interviewing. Modern assessment science. It's machine learning and AI, especially at volume. There's no possible way ever I would allow a hiring manager... If I ran Walmart and I'm hiring $10 an hour people, no human would ever interview another $10 an hour hire the rest of my entire existence in this world. Tim: The tech can do it way better, way more efficiently than we can as humans. In 2021 I'm going to come back with a great high vine example of this is working out well. Joel: But you're calling for an across the board no face-to-face interviews ever at the by the end of this year. Tim: For high volume hourly hiring. Okay. All right. Let's get that. Let's get that. Chad: What he's really doing is he's putting a stake in the ground saying he wants to go to Sweden. Joel: He's making a bold prediction. Tim: I'm just saying if some certain company in Sweden would have me out skiing, you might be able to turn this thing up in 2020. Joel: We get it, man, just buy a ticket. Chad: Yeah. Jesus. Tim: You've got money, brah. Chad: I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure they'd love to have you. Joel: And speaking of money, let's take a quick break to pay some bills and we'll come back with our final three predictions. Tim: Boom. JobAdX: So how's the hiring going? Find those purple squirrels? With applicant after applicant and feels like I'm just getting further from hiring the right candidate. I've got tons of applications, but none of these candidates are even close to being the right fit. Volume is great and all, but my small team doesn't have the time to sift through hundreds of mismatched applications. I want more relevant candidates, not just more candidates. JobAdX: Well get this: JobAdX has been helping small to medium businesses get their job ads in front of targeted active job seekers. By matching your jobs to a candidate based on their search behavior across a vast network of niche job sites and talent networks, and the best part, it's self-serve. No sales reps, no chatbots, no spend minimums. Just fill a form with your name, number of jobs, and a budget you're working with and voila, your ads are now shown over a growing network of 150 job sites. Better yet, those company videos that showcase the value of being part of a small team can have a new home now within your ads, helping you stand out and share your vision proactively. JobAdX: Wait, what was that? Oh, I just signed up for self serve with JobAdX. What were you talking about? That fast, huh? Jumpstart your targeted recruitment with JobAdX today. Visit jobadx.com and click that get started. Risk-free button. It's jobadx.com. JobAdX. Engage, attract, employ. Chad: Oh he's a big fan of the JobAdX ads because I know I can take a piss break. Tim: Because you like to make a fake laugh going on [crosstalk 00:25:00] . Joel: That fast, huh? Chad: Oh okay. So we're starting this round off with Tim. This is your last one Tim so make it count. Tim: This one for sure will be measurable. This is a black or white, going to have it or not. So I'm a huge fan of employee referral technology on like Rolepoint, like Jobvite. This year my prediction is going to be Teamable which has employee referral technology is going to be purchased by enterprise HCM vendor. I will say it's going to be Workday. And I say that because if you've been to T-Mobile site lately, it's kind of like the lights are on but no one's home. Like they hadn't updated their social profiles in like three months. They have that an old VP of sales still listed. And I know they're out of our media is like the main people that they probably don't even understand that if I hire some people in San Francisco that stopped showing up to the office three months ago, but they suck at marketing and sales, but their product or technology is super good and I think it's an easy buy for an HCM vendor. It has that [crosstalk 00:26:17] got a recruiting platform. Joel: That's a solid, put-your-Sackett-out-there and make a prediction. I like that. Referral engagement continues to be hot. Someone's got to start buying these companies eventually. Tim: Rolepoint. Chad: Right to your point, last year, Jobvite, you know the whole point in Teamable... who's going to go out there and buy the ghostship of Teamable? That's the question. Tim: So Workday has their whole investment thing where they throw some money at them and then they bring them into the fold and make it like a quick little easy integration. I think that's the play. Workday says, "Hey, here's 5 million, can you actually hire someone that knows how to market?" and then you know, boom, it goes big. Joel: And then you're ours. I like it. I like it. All right. I'm going to go with the acquisition trend here as well. With my third and last prediction of the year, I believe in contrast to my prediction from last year, that Zip goes IPO. I think recruit holdings backs up the Brinks truck and buys ZipRecruiter and hopes of creating a triumphant defense against Google For Jobs and Indeed Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter. So to 2020 Recruit Holdings buys ZipRecruiter and owns Glassdoor. Tim: God, I hope that doesn't happen. Chad: Oh, I hate that idea. Joel: Really? Why? Chad: I mean Zip by far is the best job board on the market right now. They're just killing it. They're cost effective. The traffic is great across the board. Chad: They're doing really, really good and I think partly because they could't care less about what's going on in the industry. They really focus in on their tech and so if Recruit comes in and buys them, I could just see that thing be a trainwreck. Oh, go IPO. Joel: Or you want to predict IPO, Tim? Tim: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Chad: Yeah. I think Zip definitely can give the Indeeds of the world a run for their money too. To be able to see that brand get sucked up by Indeed I think would again would create hopefully a vacuum where somebody else would step up, but I just don't see that in this industry. I'd hate to see Zip pulled in by Recruit. Joel: Well, we probably all agree that with the amount of money that Zip has taken, they've got to do one of the two eventually. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: And this should be the year that they do it. Chad: Hoping for the IPO side of the house. Tim: By the way, I think you guys are the only podcast that doesn't have a commercial arm in the history of all podcasts. Joel: At this point, we're not going to take her money just for pride. Chad: We'll never hear a ZipRecruiter ad on this show. I mean we're putting a stake in the ground by the way. Tim: Ziprecruiter, call me at (517) 644-5014. You can own my brand. Chad: He'll sell out to anyone. Joel: As long as you throw in a ticket to Sweden. He's all yours. Tim: That's exactly right. Chad: All right, last one. Geez. Okay, so I actually crowd sourced my last prediction because I thought that our listeners and people that we talk to might have an idea for prediction. So the first three people who got back to me, I actually sent this out broad scale to about 20 people. First three people that got back to me. The very first one was Tom Kenny, the former CEO of SmashFly, the guy who again made it happen and SmashFly to actually get acquired by Symphony Talent. Chad: His prediction- Joel: Speaking of honey destinations and drinks with umbrellas in them, Tom's probably enjoying both of those right about now. Chad: His prediction was AI is going to bite everyone in the ass. The higher view case is just the tip of the iceberg. I think of it this way. If companies have black box tech making the decisions they can't understand or even defend what's going on with regard to the decisions that are being made for the candidates that are actually coming in. The courts won't like it and obviously the regulators won't like it. And here's a quote from Tom: "it's not going to be the solution everyone thought it would be. The hype will drag down companies and industry is going to smarten up around what AI can do and what it can't do. And when it comes to making these types of decisions behind closed doors wrapped up in a black box that looks like it's going to be problematic". Joel: Well good, Tom with a thoughtful answer. Government as well. By the way, should we make a presidential prediction? Maybe think about it and we'll revisit at the end here. Chad: Yeah, let's see that. Joel: All right, keep going. Chad: All right. So then we have Dennis Tupper who is currently the director of programmatic at Cross Country Health. We did a podcast with him kind of like a Indeed rumor podcast. He was over at Kelly Services for a while. He believes and he's going to piggyback on what Joel said, Google For Jobs starts monetizing. It makes sense. Is this the year? That's the question. Is this the year that Google starts to monetize? Dennis and Joel believe it is. Joel: Was Tupper the first one to reply because he loves you. Chad: He was not. Tom was. Tom doesn't have anything to do right now. His wife said "get a job and get a hobby" because he's bothering the hell out of her. She's like, "you get out of the house, right?". The guy with no job responded, "let's go do it". Tim: Tom, let's go to Sweden. Bring your skis. Joel: These are in order of response. Chad: Yes, these are an order of response and then the last, last but not least, believe it or not was Richard Collins, the founder and CEO of ClickIQ, now owned by Indeed. Chad: We're not going to boo Richard. Richard's a friend of the show. Joel: I didn't do it after Richard. I said I did it after Indeed. Chad: Oh that was an Indeed boo. Okay. A major job board goes bust. So I believe you've either the CareerBuilder or the Monster. We definitely see the bust happening and Richard wanted to call that one out. Tim: We had a hope-free show conversation about what constitutes a major job board now. Joel: Nice. And you're like, is that really major? Is that a major job board? Yeah. Now all right, those are good. Those are solid. Chad: Not too bad from the Peanut Gallery. Really in enjoy those guys and appreciate them throwing some stuff at us and my fucking Facebook messenger is lighting up right now for all those other people. Joel: And if you want a prediction and next week show, shout-outs, just #chadcheese and we'll- Chad: We really forgot about the biggest prediction for 2020 on the Chad and Cheese podcast network is the biggest podcast that you guys have signed that you're bringing up that you're bringing in? Chad: Which one? Tim: They're all big. Chad: HR famous Tim Sackett, Chris Dannon, Jessica Lee come in to the Chad and Cheese network. Tim: [crosstalk 00:33:26] That's the kind of shit that we bring to the people. We bring the big voice. Tim: Prestige Worldwide. Yeah. All right, Trump will win because the Dems have totally F'd this up and they can't find a candidate and our, or a combination of two candidates that are going to beat him. I would love to see a P in like Elizabeth or somebody together as a Dem candidate. They could beat them. I don't think two old white guys like Sanders and uncle Joe are going to beat Trump. Like why? how can the Dems even come up with those as candidates? I don't know. Chad: Okay Cheeseman. Go ahead and talk about your Trump. Joel: All right. No, I'm not picking Trump. I'm going to throw a little curve ball on this and I'm going to go Bloomberg in 2020 Here's why. He's already polling third in Iowa where he's not even going to be on the ballot. He's got more money than God. He's going to run a Superbowl ad. All these candidates are going to run out of money after Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and Bloomberg's going to like roll on Super Tuesday and take the nomination and win the presidency. Now that's a prediction boys and girls. Tim: It is a prediction. Chad: Wow. Tim: Bad like most of yours. Chad: That's a great prediction. But I'm going to say that one of the things that's really hard to root for Democrats is they don't know how to fucking win. They don't know how to win. They get in their own way, they don't speak simply, right? There's so many things that are fucked up about what Democrats do, but the thing is Democrats actually give a fuck and they care about people, not the dollar and, and I think my prediction is that we see Pete Buttigieg poll in Kamala Harris, and that would be the super team that actually makes this shit happen. You see those two go into a room against anybody that Trump... Face it right now. Mike Pence in the corner in the fetal position right now with his thumb in his mouth, because he's fucking afraid of what the rest of his life is going to look like as a quote unquote Republican after this fucking scorched earth bullshit that Trump has running. Chad: So I think if you bring somebody as strong as Kamala Harris in, that's going to do it. Joel: I didn't think that Chad could out-bold mine, but he did. Tim: Here's how Pete wins. He brings in Oprah. Oprah as president. Anybody, who brings Oprah in, wins. Joel: Oprah and Michelle Obama in a co-VP role? Tim: Anybody who brings Oprah in, wins. Joel: You heard it here first people. Trump, Bloomberg and or mayor Pete and Kamala are running the free world in 2021. Joel: And with that, another prediction show is over. And we out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast with Chad. The cheese. 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, but 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. So weird. We out. #predictions #Technology #Indeed #LinkedIn #iCIMS #chatbots #Chatbot #ZipRecruiter #Monster #Careerbuilder #Programmatic

Hello, Cleveland! And hello Mark Jones, Senior Vice President at Alexander Mann Solutions, who came by the Evergreen podcast studios in Cleveland to talk shop, covering everything from RPO in the UK vs. USA, best marketing tools to attract candidates and whether Counting Crows or Billy Paul does a better "Jones" rendition. It's another can't miss Nexxt exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Joel: We can just go right into it. Chad: You just talk about your erectile dysfunction mic. Joel: Yeah, my mic has some ED issues. It fell. He took a blue pill and he's back up, so we're all good. We can get on with the show. Chad: For all of our listeners, I mean, they have to understand why you had an ED mic in the first place. We are actually in Cleveland, Ohio. Joel: Hello, Cleveland. Chad: Hello, Cleveland. Cleveland, Ohio, at- Joel: Winter in Cleveland, what better destination is there? Chad: ... the Evergreen Podcast Studios doing our ... We've never actually- Joel: We're at the mothership. Chad: We're in isolated rooms and I mean, this had better sound fucking awesome. Joel: The only thing missing is the straight jackets, I think. The walls are padded. That's the only thing missing. But we are enjoying some quality, Cleveland brewed, Great Lakes beer. Eliot Ness, if you've ever had it you know what I'm talking about, if you haven't, you should give it a shot. Chad: How have you not had it? That's the question. Joel: Sold all over the Midwest now. Chad: And that is compliments- Joel: Sorry, Canada. Chad: ... of Alexander Mann Solutions, by the way. When you come to Cleveland, you have to go to Great Lakes Brewing, because it is- Joel: Delicious. Chad: ... yeah, it's delicious, but it's like, the brewery. I mean, it was before microbreweries were big. Lovely. And we have Mark Jones, senior vice president. Is there anything after that? You're just a senior vice president, I mean, that's big, because you don't have anything after it. If you were senior vice president of finance or something like that, you would have an area responsibility, but in this case you're responsible for everything, just being as VP. Joel: He can't be that important if he's here with us. Mark: Kind of. One of the things that's different is job titles are different, where, in the UK to the U.S. Not many people realize that, but SVP kind of is the right level. I've been with the organization for 23 years and- Chad: You're the number two employee, right? Mark: Yeah. Joel: Damn. Chad: I mean, you've been with these guys for over 22 years? Mark: Yeah, and I signed a 40, can you believe it? Joel: What's the appeal? What keeps getting you up in the morning? Mark: AMS has been brilliant to me. I mean, I think here I am sat in the studio with you guys. Joel: This is the perk of a lifetime, isn't it? To be online with us. Mark: Absolutely. Who would have thought that I would have been sat in a studio in Ohio, in Cleveland, being minus temperatures outside, when I started my career? But I think, Alexander Mann Solutions, we kind of invented RPA many, many years ago, back in the UK. What keeps me up really is, is that I have fun. I have fun every single day. We are an organization that have been helping tons of organizations around the world. We hire tens of thousands of people, permanent and contingent workers, around the world. And I've been really lucky with AMS because I've had a different job every couple of years, but staying within the organization. Joel: The real question is, are you a tortured Cleveland sports fan at this point or are you still Premier League? Mark: Wow, so the great thing about being here is that I can watch every goddamn game on the Premier League. Saturday morning for me is like, get up, coffee, and I can just watch, literally from 7:00 AM through to 1:00 PM, it's all Premier League. Joel: Who's your team? Mark: I actually support Wycombe Wanderers, and they are in English League One. Currently, top of League One. My dad, my uncle, my granddad were all massive fans of Wycombe Wanderers, which is a small team where I grew up. But if I had to have a Premier League team, it would be Everton. I've always supported Everton. But I am a Cleveland sports fan. Joel: Really? Mark: Do you know what? I'm a sports mad. I can't play sport. I was literally rubbish at school playing sports, but watching it, I love it. Joel: That means garbage for our American listeners. Mark: Yes it does. One of many things that means different things in different sides of the pond. I wasn't very good at playing the sport, but I absolutely love watching sport. And I've been lucky enough in my time here in Cleveland to go to World Series. Never thought I'd see that. Joel: Nice. Mark: Sadly, it didn't end very well. Joel: Game seven, did you see? Mark: Yeah, that home run was just amazing. Joel: Fucking Cubs. Chad: That hurt, yeah. Mark: Rain. I mean, who knows. So yes, I am a tortured Cleveland fan because that rain shower cost us the World Series. I was lucky enough to be at game three of the NBA when they were two nil down, or two zero down as you would say, to Golden State, and they came back and won that series. Joel: Classic series. Chad: That was pretty sweet. Mark: It was great. Apart from the Browns. Even this year, everyone was saying the Browns are going to be great, so this year I went to my very first Brown's game against Seahawks. Guess what? They were winning 14 zero up, and they threw it away. Joel: Oh, yeah. Lost that one. Chad: Yeah, that's a Brown's thing to do. Joel: So you've been here 12 years and you just went to a Brown's game? Chad: Not 12 years. Mark: I've been here seven years. Chad: He's been here since 2012. Joel: It only feels like 12 in Cleveland. Mark: But the ball is the wrong shape for me, you see, on a football. Chad: So you came in 2012. Now, from my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, this was supposed to be a short term jaunt for you. You were supposed to be here for a small amount of time, but you're still here. What keeps you here? Mark: Yeah, it was meant to be two years. In fact, I said to my wife, 18 months. Actually, it's a funny story- Chad: Got her. Mark: ... but I took my wife to this spa- Joel: I'm sure you're still paying for that. Mark: ... and we had this great time and I thought, right, she's just relaxed enough that I'll say, "Let's go to the U.S. for 18 months." Do you know what? I've been really excited about what this market has to offer. AMS has historically been more of a UK focused organization. We've brought a massive push into North America. I think the market is right for change. And I think what we're doing is slowly tropping the market. So I'm really excited. Mark: We've grown the organization here in North America to literally nothing seven years ago, to, we've got about 200 people in Cleveland and about 650 in the U.S. now. Chad: Wow. Joel: I'm going to get the hardball question out of the way. Chad: Oh, good god. Joel: Then we can talk about real stuff. Mark Jones, do you prefer the Counting Crows, Mr. Jones or the Billy Paul, Mrs. Jones? Chad: This is a hard question, but make sure you answer this one right. Mark: Mrs. Jones. Chad: There we go. Billy Paul. Mrs. Jones. Joel: Good answer, Mark. Mark: And yes, I had that in my wedding. Chad: Nice. I know I love this guy. Things going on. Joel: The British sense of humor never fails us. Chad: Here's the question. You break it to your wife, she's at the spa, going to the U.S. can be, in some cases, incredibly beautiful and wonderful. Not that Cleveland's not, I'm going to put that out there. But, when you're pitching the U.S., is she automatically thinking California, Florida, I mean, something more tropical, or what was she thinking? Mark: Well, naivety. I had no idea where Cleveland was. I just knew it was somewhere between Chicago and New York. We had no idea. Do you know what? When I arrived with the family, two kids and a dog- Chad: Oh wow. How old were the kids? Mark: At the time they were five and seven. Chad: Wow. Mark: And a dog who is blind. Not good. We pulled up into two feet of unplowed drive. This was January. Two feet. And I fell, literally, ass over tit, which is UK's expression for falling over, and that was it. Welcome to Cleveland. So the weather sucks. The weather does suck. There is definitely- Chad: It could only get better from there though. Mark: Exactly. But great people. And great people actually have enabled me and AMS to build a business, because they want to succeed, they want Cleveland to be great, and they want to see success. Chad: Here's a big question when it comes to markets. I mean, not just here, we're talking about moving from the UK to the U.S. What are the biggest differences you see, especially when it comes to RPO and the industry, what are the biggest differences between across the pond and over here? Other than, obviously there's a shit ton of money. Mark: Well, that money actually drives behavior. I think the U.S. is a little bit more, "I want it now and I want it quick, and if you can't deliver it, somebody else can." And I think that's different to what we were used to in the UK, which is a bit more relationship led and a bit more around quality. I think one of our strengths is quality, but that's really hard to get across when you're sat in front of a human person that just wants it done quickly. Chad: Everybody says it though, right? Mark: Exactly. What does it mean? I think the procurement life cycle and just the aggressive sales nature is different. I think that's one thing. Joel: I want to get a little retrospective here, real quick. We're heading into 2020, we're there already. 2019, what trends, maybe news items, what stuck in your mind when you look back at 2019, in terms of the industry? Mark: I think probably how well the industry is doing and just the continuation of the bull market and the very low unemployment. And then, what does that lead to in terms of being able to find talent for organizations? I mean, good people are always hard to find, but it's not just good people, it's anybody. A lot of what we do for our organizations, whether it's call center or whether it's help desk staff or whether it's a project manager, good people are still hard to find. So I think I wasn't sure whether that was going to continue all of 2019, and I'm not sure it's going to continue in 2020. I think there's a lot of stuff on the horizon. Joel: Have you seen budgets rise significantly going into 2020? Your clients? Mark: No, the opposite actually. Joel: Reductions in budget. Mark: I've seen organizations start to tighten the belt. Joel: Interesting. Chad: Which means you have to get much more efficient to be able to pull in that business. And that, going to the next question around chatbots. You have the queen of chatbots- Joel: The queen. Quincy. Chad: ... actually on staff, who we've talked to on a couple of occasions. Joel: We've got drunk with her on a couple of occasions too. Mark: It's mandatory. Chad: I can't count- Joel: She can drink both of us under the table, by the way. Chad: ... the amount of times I've been drunk with Quincy. But talk about, I know it's different, not that it's better or worse, but what's the difference between talent in the UK versus ... because you've worked on both sides, right? So there's got to be a huge difference between working here in the U.S. I know it seems like, you have to have it now. Are the people that you work with here in Cleveland, was that a huge culture shift for you? Mark: I think there's always a culture shift, just by the nature of some of the cultural things that are different. Actually, funnily enough, one of the things was, to start with, people didn't understand my voice. I was constantly saying things and people were looking at me and saying, "What did he just say?" Chad: Is he speaking English? Mark: Exactly. Joel: You need to speak American over here, Mark. Mark: Exactly. And actually, you dismiss it but it's kind of there. Another thing that happened is that we need to embrace America and American ways of working. Our organization has changed over the last seven years, where we have more infrastructure now in the U.S. than we've ever had before. So that's different as well. And that didn't happen overnight, because there was, "Well, we can do this in the UK." Well you can, but we're better to do it here in the U.S. I think that was different. There's definitely some cultural changes, but the quality of people, the same. The same either side of the pond. Chad: What about on systems? And I know, I was in RPO on the Randstad side, RSR side, for a while. Mark: Who? Chad: And I know that across the pond, you want to make sure that you're really focused on what the client's needs are, so you're not going to provide them with a templated stack, let's say. That's something that we do here in the U.S. We try to template a stack and try to really focus on heavy efficiencies. You see it off, I'm sure you see it from a bunch of your competitors. Has that been a huge change, to be able to change over to a templated stack? Or are you really just saying, "AMS does it well because we customize better for you?" Mark: It's a great question and I think you are absolutely right. I would completely agree that the stack is more standard and we see that across the board. We see organizations that, "Well, the stack says no, so you can't have it." I think that's probably not the way that we tend to do business. We tend to customize things. We have a Hive, which is basically our internal pool of tech talent, that are certified and we can leverage them, we can use them. Some of our clients have different firewall requirements or different needs, so we stick with the talent in the Hive, so to speak. But generally speaking, we tend to customize. That brings different challenges, in terms of efficiencies and sometimes cost as well. Joel: I'd like to dig into that. You guys have some great case studies with some customers and things that you've done for them. MassMutual here in Cleveland, I think they have a footprint here in the Midwest. Talk about what you guys did for them, both strategically and maybe tactically, to give our listeners a sense of what you guys do and what maybe they should be looking to do in their own recruitment. Mark: Sure. We've been working with MassMutual since, I think 2016. It's a full outsource where we are supporting them, supporting all permanent hiring coast to coast, but they do have a big presence in the Midwest, and then up through Massachusetts and up into the main area. We are supporting them with a number of strategic initiatives, where they are moving some of their locations, where they are also trying to move into more of a tech heavy organization. They are looking for a lot of tech talent, particularly in and around the Boston area. So we've been supporting them with really, how do we identify and attract and find that kind of talent for them? Chad: Man, that is ultra-competitive. I mean, obviously there are tech schools, some pretty big tech schools, in and around that area, MIT. Are you guys focusing on just trying to identify and target the right talent that's out there, or are you also working with universities and whatnot to be able to pipeline? Mark: Both. Because then it has to be a complete holistic process. It's a question of very short term, very tactical, here, now, this is what we need, but also longer term. Particularly if organizations are moving locations or they're moving into different areas. We have examples as well where some of our organizations, a large manufacturing and defense organization. They've got a ton of retirees. Their challenge is that their workforce is retiring. How do we support those organizations with finding or retaining that talent? Hence, the reason we're moving a little bit into looking at talent pools and keeping those people in those populations. Chad: Well, it has to do around the creation of talent as well, right? Because if you don't have enough coming out of the universities, because not enough are going in, I mean, that's with all of the boomers going away, this is going to be a problem. How's AMS going to deal with that, other than beg, borrow and steal? Mark: It's not just the boomers going away. You've also got restraints on immigration. You're cutting it off at both angles. You've got an aging population and you've got restraints on the workers coming in. I think that will have to change. I do think that will have to change at some point because there'll be a need. I think, this is really where it comes down to building relationships with organizations. And I think that's what we do really well. Our average contract length is nine years in duration, and that's important. Chad: Nine years? Mark: Yeah. And that's really important because- Chad: It's usually three year contracts, right? Mark: Yup. Chad: So therefore you've got a three ... I mean, that's a hell of a retention. Mark: But that's important if you are thinking about, not just today, but about tomorrow. In terms of where our talent's going to come. Is it a permanent hire or is it a gig worker? Is it a contract worker? Is it temp to perm? All of these different angles, these are what our people on the ground are talking to clients with all the time. The other thing that's really important, is that for AMS to succeed, our brand shouldn't be out there, because we represent our client's brands. Actually for me, success is, no one's heard of AMS. Actually, they've heard of the clients that we work with. We're seeing more and more on the contingent side, and on the permanent side, people want to work for good brands. They want to work for brands that stand for something that means something. Therefore, we can tap into that when it comes to, how do we attract talent, how do we retain them, and how do we work with these organization's to make their brands better or look at bringing them in based on their brand? Joel: Let's dig into that. You mentioned talent communities or talent pools as well as the comments on brand. Tell me some best practices to engage with the talent, how brand can be emboldened or highlighted to that community? Does that create a referral network? Let's dig in a little bit to the communities and how you can build brand with that vehicle? Chad: You have a bunch of data, how do you actually engage these people in a meaningful way? Joel: That might be another way to ask that question, yeah. Chad: I'm just asking. Mark: Some of it comes down to how much the organizations want this to work. For example- Chad: Some don't want it to work? Joel: What do you mean by that? Mark: Some organizations- Joel: We want failure. Mark: Well, no one wants to failure, but they're more protective of their brand and they won't let their brand be used in certain ways. Whether that be in social, whether that be in really neat initiative ways in terms of some of the tech, some of the apps that you can use. Even something as simple as text messaging sometimes, actually is a real challenge to get through some organizations' security processes and methodologies. To really leverage brand, you also have to make sure the organization want you to use that brand. Otherwise, just a staffing agency, that just for a number of CV's or resumes at the wall, and hoping one sticks. Mark: I think the brand's important, making sure you've got the right people and the right stakeholders within the organization that really want this to be a success, and then really understanding what the story is. What's happening within that organization? Where are they going, what are they doing? That enables us to do push messages or regular updates that keep organizations and keep the people informed about what's happening and what they're doing. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Joel: For clients that are married to email, what would you tell them in terms of the metrics versus text messaging? Andy Katz: It really depends on the audience you're trying to reach. I'm not going to even tell you text messaging is the right tool for every type of audience. You're not going to reach a VP or senior level person necessarily through text. You're going to reach more of those hourly workers, more of the gig economy, more of anybody that's on their feet all day long. Again, you got to break out email and texts in two different categories, and sometimes, depending on the audience, the best thing to do is hit them with both of them. It reinforces the message, the brand that's coming across. They'll know who the company is and it's like any other commercial or podcasts. You might have to listen to it a few times before it resonates and it sinks in. I believe it's the same thing with text versus email versus any other form of communication. Chad: For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember, that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X. Hiring.nexxt.com. Chad: Let's talk a little bit about this direct sourcing piece that you guys are actually focused on right now, or at least you are, I think. You're championing this. What is it all based around? Direct sourcing's been around for a while, but what are you guys doing? Mark: It's been around for a while, but it's not really adopted in North America. It certainly is in Europe. That's how we started the business back in 1997. If you think about what happens today, when an organization has a vacancy and a contingent labor vacancy, what do they do? In 90% of cases they farm it out to a large number of staffing suppliers. And what do they do? They then farm it out to job boards. And then you're in a numbers game of, who can get me the most resumes first, fast, and then you're dealing with, where's the quality in that? There's speed. Let's look about what happens today. Chad: Not to mention also, the candidate experience is shit for that. Mark: That's comes back to one of the benefits of what we're doing. That's what happens today. You get a poor candidate experience. Yeah, you get good time to hire. In 90% of the cases, you're getting the job filled, so everyone's happy. But that's going to change. If you read any of the reports, by 2030, 50% of the workforce in North America's going to be some form of flexibility, some form of [gear colony 00:21:51] worker. So organizations need to be able to have the ability to attract those workers. And then it comes back to brand as well. Mark: What direct sourcing does, is it enables us to create a talent pool which belongs to the organization. It's their IP. We are the custodians of that talent pool. We attract people in and we can use a bunch of tools to attract people in. We can use their brand, we can engage on social, we can engage and referral networks, and we then manage that population of workers in a talent pool. When there's a vacancy that comes forward, we then supply that vacancy. That vacancy gets sourced and we support the filling of that job. We do that at a much lower price than a staffing agency. That gets us through the procurement door. Joel: Let's dig into gig economy for a second. I guess, what's your overall perspective of the Upwork's, the Fiverr's, the Uber Works, et cetera? Above your opinion, just generally, how are companies best leveraging solutions like that, if at all? Mark: Well, I think they're not, I think some are, but the large corporate, blue chip, Fortune 500, I don't think are to the same degree. Because 99% of how the U.S. market has operated, is the same today as it was when I was a recruiter back in 1990s. Gig workers have been around for many, many decades. It's not a new thing, it's just that there are tools now to engage them. The Uber creates the tool and it makes it perhaps a more of a socially acceptable way of working, but it's not new. It's been around for many times. Joel: Your perspective is, the gig economy has a long way to go to make inroads with big enterprise level companies? Mark: Yes. Chad: On the AMS side of the house, are you guys looking at trying to build an app for that? Because I mean, it obviously works, and the transparency of all of those individuals matched up against all of those opportunities, is that something that you guys are looking into today or maybe in the future? Mark: We're not a technology company, that's not our area of expertise. What we do really well is talent management and talent acquisition. I think there is Skype, over the longer term to think about what technologies we use, but certainly in terms of the direct sourcing activities, no, we're not looking to build an app at this point. There are plenty out there that do a really good job, so I think our focus is on making sure that we manage the experience and we focus on the brand and focus on getting people to the organizations. Joel: I love that he brought up Skype, that brand new technology that no one's ever heard of. Talk about talent acquisition. I think there's a lot of clutter out there. You mentioned Skype, which I don't think most people would default to in terms of a recruiting tool. We talk about tech talk on the goddamn show almost every week. I mean, Snapchat, all social media. Chad: I'm on it right now. Joel: We talk about programmatic advertising, chatbots, you guys know quite a bit about. From a recruiting and a marketing perspective, what works best for you guys? What should companies out there be looking to use, from a platform or medium standpoint, to get traffic in the door for candidates and applicants? Mark: Do you know what? That's a great question. Part of the challenge is- Joel: I only ask great questions. Chad: He's full of shit. Mark: Cheers. Part of the challenge really, is there's too much out there. There's literally too much out there. Chad: It's noise. Mark: Before I came in here this morning, I had 15 emails of people trying to sell stuff or- Joel: Email, what's that? Mark: But this is how they're pushing the products. Joel: Say that again. You had 15 emails this morning of vendors trying to sell you shit. Mark: Yeah. Joel: Wow. Mark: Not just- Chad: Not surprising. Mark: ... talent acquisition vendors, but vendors across the board. I think part of the challenge is that ... Well, to answer the question, what's the best out there? You've got to try and use it. You've got to have the case studies. You've got to really try and understand who is pushing best practice and is that best practice got a return on investment? That's what we try and do with, I mentioned the Hive earlier, which is basically our internal ecosystem that enables us to try products. Chad: Kind of like a marketplace. Mark: It is. Joel: The Hive sounds much sexier though. Chad: It does. People don't know what the hell a hive is. Joel: The Hive. Mark: You can be a bee and you can come into the marketplace. Chad: Hive. Mark: It does sound good. It wasn't me that came up with it by the way. But I think the different organizations have different needs as well. We work with a lot of banks and a lot of financial services organizations that have extremely tight security requirements, as you would expect. So what works for them might not work for another organization in the healthcare industry or the farmer industry or whatever. I think that's the other challenge. You've almost got to look at it in terms of, what's working well, what are the products, what's the success, where have we seen the benefits, and what's going to fit with this organization? Which comes back to your original question, in terms of does one size fits all? No, it doesn't. You do have to try and customize to be able to get the right return for that organization. Chad: It seems like all these other RPO firms are doing business wrong, because they're trying to slam all of these square companies into a round hole. That's what I'm hearing from you. Mark: Well, it's not wrong. It's a way of working, and that's working for them. Chad: That's very British of you to not say that, "Yeah, no they're doing shit wrong." Mark: I just think there's a different way of doing it. That over time, will allow us to be able to understand what's happening to the market and adapt to the market. Just because we've been doing it for the last 20 years doesn't mean it's the right way to always do it. Joel: You sort of danced around what should people be looking to use by saying, everyone is customizable, but are there certain platforms like, it doesn't matter who it is, we're going to use this to attract candidates? Chad: Chatbots. A podcast. Mark: We should do a podcast. Joel: Yes we should. Chad: We do a podcast. Joel: We'll talk about that later. Chad: And that being said- Joel: He also didn't answer the question. Mark: No, I didn't. Chad: ... AMS just bought a chatbot. Joel: Get that man another beer. Chad: They just bought a chatbot, I mean, I would assume that that would be a technology that ... Let's talk about that. Instead of trying to get him to answer the question, let's talk about- Joel: Well, dammit. Chad: ... something that they actually have bought into, which is a chatbot. I would assume that, what do you see as the upside? Obviously, AMS sees it as an upside because they bought a chatbot company, Karen. What's the upside? Mark: I think what it gives us is it gives us the ability to try and over time, start to think about what tools are we going to use? What's working? We have chatbots outside of Karen that we have deployed across clients around the world, but those have been deployed in-house. Whereas, now we have the ability to leverage real engineers, real experts that we can use to enhance what we already have or in some cases, decide to merge what we already have into a new products. There's definitely upside in terms of access to technology, access to the thinking. That's really the main things we're looking at. Chad: When you're talking about chatbots and matching, and every product out there today has AI attached to it, is that just more noise? Because everybody's using it. Joel: What's your definition of AI? Mark: I think in the talent acquisition space, AI is being used to make recruiters jobs a lot easier. Certainly a lot easier than it was for me in terms of the technology does match, it passes resumes, it matches candidates, and it learns and it gets better. So I think that's where we're seeing a lot of AI come into it. Has it really hit mainstream yet? No, not yet. But it is in every single product and it is making things easier, and therefore, making things efficient. Which then leads to more price competitiveness. That's what we're seeing. Chad: Does it really matter to somebody in talent acquisition whether something has AI on it or not? Mark: No, I don't think it does. Joel: It's not a checkbox that every department has to check off? Mark: Well, I think a lot of people in talent acquisition feel they want it, so I- Chad: Even though they don't know what it is. Mark: Yeah. Joel: Give me some AI. I don't know what that is, but give it to me. Chad: Put some AI on that. Joel: Throw in a chatbot and some programmatic something or other. Chad: I'll have some fries with AI on top. Mark: That comes back to what's the business, what is the problem we're trying to solve? If we can have a really strong business case, then there is a real business case and a real financial, or enables us to be able to leverage people that we're doing a job into another job. That's really where the benefit of AI really comes in, whether it be a chatbot or an interview scheduling tool. Interview scheduling tool is a really good example. That is work that not everyone wants to do. It's actually a lot harder than it sounds because you've got to match calendars and all kinds of different things. That's an example whereby, it sounds simple, it's a bit harder to get in, but can make a real difference and allows us to focus on quality. It allows us to focus on what's really important to the organizations. Joel: I love that we touched on AI because some of the comments that we've gotten towards the end of the year and end of this year is that, diversity and inclusion is the new AI. I know that that's something you guys focus on. So talk about diversity and inclusion and what companies should be looking to do heading into 2020? Mark: It's a massive area. We see it all the time. Joel: And sorry if I weaved into your lane there, Chad. Chad: Oh, you're good. I love it. Mark: Well, there's a- Chad: He's learning. Mark: It's something that one of our organizations that we work with talk about. I'm not the expert in diversity. Three middle-aged men sat in a podcast today, probably aren't- Chad: White dudes. Joel: You mean a middle-aged British white guy isn't a- Mark: Yeah, probably isn't the best diversity. But it is something that we see more and more, and we have whole teams that focus on, how do we attract the right talent? This is what it comes back down to. Whether it's diversity, whether it's female, male, women in tech, whether it's retirees, it all comes down to the same thing in terms of, what do organizations want and how do you attract that talent? Chad: Well, and I would assume that your clients, most of your clients, big companies, they really focus heavily on D and EI, right? Diversity, equity and inclusion. So that they know that, from your standpoint, they haven't been able to do it. They haven't been able to diversify their talent pools. So they come to you to hopefully be able to do that. Are you seeing many companies come to you and that is almost like the tip of their spear? Mark: Yes. Chad: It's like, "This is something we just haven't been able to do it. We need help in this area." Mark: And it's not as if they can't do it, it's just, they haven't focused on it or they're letting their business get in the way. If you're a hiring manager, the hiring manager has a job, get it filled. It's costing me money if you're not being filled. So, having any outside party come in, is to spend some real quality time and thinking about what is it you're trying to achieve. It is a short spear. It can lead into assessment, it can lead into selection, it can lead into technology, it can lead into a whole range of different things. Chad: And overall, it comes down to outcomes. I mean, you can do all the warm and fuzzy bullshit, but if that doesn't come into outcomes, it doesn't work, then I think that's what we've seen, unfortunately. Mark: And outcomes, that means something to organizations. Does that mean, is that around retention? There's no point hiring somebody who buggers off after 12 months. That's not the point. That's one way of measuring the quality. And measuring quality's a difficult thing because quality means different things, different organizations as well. Joel: I want to apologize for Chad mentioning the tip of his spear, before I ask my question. What's the greatest opportunity for your business and what is the greatest threat? Mark: I think greatest opportunity is really continuing to focus on what we're doing in North America and continuing the great work that our team is doing with the organizations that we're working with. It really is a great opportunity and that's why we're here. I think the threat is going to be really interesting. I think instability could be a challenge. Joel: Meaning, global, political, environmental? Mark: Global, political. I think instability, a lot of people are looking over their shoulder right now. I think we're obviously in a period of challenging times. I think that does pose a potential threat, but equally, it also presents an opportunity, because many organizations when you are about tightening your belt, want to think about a talent acquisition process. Want to think about how they're attracting talent or how can they save money, how can they do things better, faster, cheaper, which also creates opportunities as well. Chad: Quincy has been teasing us about this new- Joel: She's such a tease. Chad: ... this new thing that AMS is doing in 2020. It's now 2020, she's still teasing us. Can you give us some insights on what's going on, without us getting in trouble by Quincy? Mark: Quincy will definitely give you a update and a demonstration very soon. Chad: Excellent. So I got to go back to Quincy. Mark: Yeah, you have to. Chad: Means I have to buy her more beer. Joel: And on that note, Mark, thank you so much for coming out here on the west side, sorry, from the east side of Cleveland to join us for some Q&A. For those of our listeners who don't know Alexander Mann, where should they go to find out more or to connect with you? Mark: You can find me on LinkedIn or go to alexandermannsolutions.com. Thank you both for having me today. Chad: Love it. Joel: Because there aren't many Mark Jones' on LinkedIn. Mr. Jones. Chad: Mrs. Jones. We out. Joel: We out. Thanks, Mark. Mark: Thanks. Announcer: This has been the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #RPO #AMS #Technology #SkillsGap #TechStack #chatbots

I'm so hungry right now... Why? Mike Miller and Joe Albano from Chipotle's Talent Acquisition team joins The Chad & Cheese to talk about food, brand, experience, marketing, free college, nurses, and does a brand really need an "employment brand"? All of that while you grow hungry for your favorite burrito bowl. Brought to you by our friends at Smashfly - a Symphony Talent company. Smashfly, technology built for the talent life cycle. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Joel: This Chad and Cheese CULT BRAND podcast is supported by Smashfly recruiting technology built for the talent life cycle, and big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let Smashfly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit Smashfly.com today. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash, and Joe Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, bottle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: I'm ready for a podcast with a little extra queso with it, how about you Chad? Chad: Well, I like the guac, I know it's going to cost $2 more. Can I just have it? Just give it to me. I don't even want to ask for it anymore. Just put the guac on. It's delicious. Joel: It's all delicious. And this is a great segue to today's guests. Let me introduce everyone to Joel Albano, and Michael Miller. Guys, welcome to the show from Chipotle. Joe: Well, thank you. Thanks for having us. Mike: Happy to be here. Joel: Yeah, yeah let me give you a little applause there because- Mike: Is that real applause? Chad: Yeah. I think it's actually pronounced Meeler. It's not Miller. It's Meeler, right? Joel: Meeler? Chad: Mike Meeler, he's got the easiest name so we've got a screw it up, right? Joel: And Joe was your nickname Albino in high school. It had to be, right? Joe: It was my nickname in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, in my twenties, and in my thirties. Joel: And for the record you are not actually an albino. Joe: I am not. I respect the albino community but I am not part of them. Joel: Obviously and they recruit vigorously. Joe: I tried to. Joel: We'll get to that in a little bit. Joe: Great. Joel: The albino recruiting strategy. Chad: Guys, we have not used that. We have not used that in the office. Just so you know guys. Joel: You're welcome guys. Joe: Thank you so much. Joel: Well for those who don't know you guys, let's get the elevator pitch on you individually. I'm sure most of our listeners know about Chipotle. But feel free to plug that as well. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: And if you have a special coupon code for our listeners, feel free to sling that out there. Joe: If we do, we'll keep you posted. But I will kick things off. Joel: Awesome. Joe: I'm Joseph Albano. I have been with Chipotle for about six years. My role with Chipotle is to really oversee our field recruitment team. So we have a team of 12 who basically support all 2,600 restaurants across the country from everything recruitment related from our entry level crew members all the way up through our senior executives working across the country. Joel: Wow. 12 people? Mike: That's a good elevator pitch Joe. Joe: I've practiced in the mirror many times. Mike: You show up on Monday, you come back. Chad: All right Mike. Now you have to live up to that one. Joe: Good luck. Mike: I can't do it. I just live to support Joe guys. Mike Miller or Meeler, my parents cursed me with a very common name. So I'm going to go with this Meeler thing, see how it rolls for the weekend. And I've been at Chipotle for coming up on two years. And so truly, truly have the pleasure of supporting the best team that I have ever been on. So I'm responsible for recruitment operations. Joel: Aww. Mike: It's true, it's true. Joe: He always knows what to say. Mike: Recruitment operations- Joel: So nice. Mike: Well, look, I've been at some pretty cool brands, right? But this is my favorite brand, my favorite team. And I've been let's see here, I'm also responsible for talent marketing and talent branding. So everything in the talent acquisition world and how we can effectively market that and build a cool narrative, that's what we try to do. Yep. Chad: Dig it. Joel: Very cool, very cool. Well, Chad wants to get to the hard hitting questions, but I want to know before we get started, what do you guys order when you go to Chipotle? Joe: Oh God. Okay, so it depends on if I'm trying to be on a diet and avoid carbs. Mike: Which is always at the most inopportune time, Chad. Joe: Right. Joel: Screw that. Joe: So I'm a burrito guy. Mike: Tell him about our summer deal. Joe: Well- Mike: We would eat lunch at different times. So I would come back and say, "Haven't had lunch yet Joe?" And Joe would say, "Well, I already have but I'm up for it again." So we'd have double Lunch. Joe: Yeah. I'll do a double lunch. One time I've done a triple lunch because I deserved it. Thank you. Chad: Are you practicing to go against Kobayashi sometime soon? Joe: One day. That is my ultimate dream in life is to be in a food eating competition. But until then- Mike: Every day is practice. Joe: Every day is practice. And everyday I get closer. So I am a burrito guy. I am obsessed with our new Carne Asada. However if it's not Carne Asada I'm getting Carnitas, I'm a brown rice, pinto beans, Carnitas, I will do the red tomatillo salsa with extra cheese. And then I will do chips and guac on the side. Thank you. Thank you. Mike: Good. Joe: And I should mention, I do double meat. Mike: You're getting applause for the overeating. I think these are our guys. Joe: My dream come true, people who understand me. Mike: People who understand you. You found your brothers. Joe: I found my niche. Mike: What do I get? So I'm six foot six, I weigh about 300 pounds. So I try to go with the kids quesadilla. Chad: That's a good call. Mike: Which is sad but true. One of our team members likes- Joel: Hold the chips. Mike: Yeah. They like to order that for me. And I don't have the heart to give her the feedback so I just take it, eat it of course. I like Carne Asada. So I actually had, I deviated a little bit yesterday, Carne Asada burrito, skipped the beans but went rice, sour cream, cheese, guac. It was a winner. Chad: I have to say that the burrito bowl to me is the best value, first and foremost. Sofritas with every freaking kind of bean you can throw on that thing. And double helping of guac, man. Mike: Nice. Chad: That's me right there, man. Yeah. And that's at least two meals. Joe: Or one for me. Chad: I'll say that's at least two meals for me. I'm not the overeater on the Chad and Cheese podcast. But yeah, dude, that is a staple for me. Joe: Love that. Joel: I'm a Barbacoa boy. I'm kind of surprised no one said that. Joe: I love Barbacoa. Joel: Barbacoa all day. Bowls, burritos. I don't care. It's all good. Chad: Just as long as somebody else is buying. Okay. So first question. This is... You're booing free food? Joel: I'm booing your comment that I'm cheap. Chad: Everybody knows you're cheap. Joel: I'm sending back your Christmas gifts. Chad: So first question Chipotle, do you guys feel like Chipotle is a cult brand, or they're kind of like on their journey to being a cult brand? Joel and I, there's no question, Joel and I feel like you guys have reached cult status. I see lines out the damn door here in little Columbus, Indiana. But what do you guys feel internally? Mike: What we want to be and where I think we're moving, I think what you're seeing with those lines and with those observations is that brand love that was maybe simmering for a little bit. And I think now it's boiling again. And so from a cult brand perspective, I think there's elements where, yeah, absolutely. But what I would say is that we're also really inclusive. So it's a lifestyle brand for many people. But as far as being culturally relevant, I think what we're saying is the renaissance of Chipotle as a culturally relevant brand. Mike: Because we may have lost our way obviously for a little bit. But we're excited, right? So that excitement that you're seeing as part of the reinvigoration, the transformation of the brand from a consumer perspective, we feel that too. So it's really cool because it's not like we're going to an agency and saying, "How do we show up? What do we say? What are the vision and values? And how are we experienced?" We're excited about that. We're fans, we love the brand. So there's this like, if cult, then I would add lifestyle brand extension. And there's an undeniable family vibe that I think is absolutely present in our restaurants, in our support centers, and ultimately experienced by our consumers. Joe: Absolutely. And one thing to add to that is when Chipotle started in 1993, we were just in one restaurant in Denver, Colorado. And we grew quickly and we grew via word of mouth. So I think if we were to look back at our history, we probably had more of that cult like presence or a cult brand presence back in the 90s. Mike: They grew very organically, it was grass roots. Joe: It grew organically. It grew through grass roots. And we never really had the need to invest in media and advertisement, whether it's TV, social, radio. We never had the need cause we just grew through word of mouth because people wanted a big ass burrito served quickly. Joel: Yeah. Mike: Yeah. Who doesn't? Joe: Right. Chad: How do you parlay that cult brand feeling into recruitment? And the biggest key for us, because we talk about it all the time, how do you ensure that your people feel it? And your people obviously being the employees, because if they feel it then obviously the customers feel it. Joe: Sure. Chad: Not to mention more than likely your employees are also customers. Joe: So yeah, perfect segue. So when we look at our data, about 92% of our candidates at all levels are our customers as well. So I feel like I have one of the easiest jobs in the world to be a recruiter for Chipotle because I don't really need to give my Chipotle spiel. People are coming to me who kind of what you were saying before, and your restaurant in Columbus, Indiana, you go, the lines are out the door, the food is good, they're getting me through quickly. The people are great, our candidates are coming to us and sharing that and they want to be a part of that. And they want to help grow that into something bigger as we continue to grow. Mike: I'm not the brightest person, you probably already know that in our time together. But one of the things that really struck me and Joe, and our team earlier in the years kind of hit us over the head that there really is no difference between... Oftentimes when you are in these functions you're working in corporate settings, even though we're a big company, but we really don't feel that corporate. But there's this distinction between defining the customer experience, the guest experience, and the candidate experience. For us it's one in the same. So it's really holistic. And that influences the way we communicate, right? There's just, we don't have to have a separate line, a separate narrative. We're talking to the same people who already love the brand. Chad: That point though, it just becomes experience. And one of the things that we're seeing and we're hearing a lot about is just the fracturing of brand. You have a brand and then you have the consumer brand. And then you have the candidates employer brand, and then you have a... it seems like this fracturing. When we're making things more complex, but from what I'm hearing from you guys is that there is this holistic brand that is one in the same, and that's one of the things that you try to stay cohesive with. Is that where you are? Or is that where you're trying to go? Mike: It is the foundation post transformation. I think Joe can probably speak to the legacy perspective. But I would say that we've probably just entered the room where that is the atmosphere. It's something that we're absolutely trying to continue to cultivate in a number of ways. We work really closely with Chris Brandt, our chief marketing officer, and his team in ensuring that it's the same voice. And we all know that doesn't always happen. In fact, I don't think we've ever had this much alignment with a marketing team. Joe: Correct. Mike: And what I mean specifically is if you take a look at what Joe was saying that early on it was this grassroots, authentic word of mouth experience. And so we're really careful when we look at an advertising platform and program now, it's our people. So it's still authentic. It's still real. It's our own people that we're highlighting. And so we try to carry that over, pull that through across the proverbial bridge to the recruitment narrative as well. So what I'm saying specifically is let's keep this focused on our own people telling our story. Joel: Hey guys, you mentioned at some point in there losing or the brand weakening, and obviously going from a one restaurant organization to what you guys are now with 2,600 restaurants. You've obviously had challenges in the news with whether it be health issues and the meat or lettuce, whatever. How do you guys, just like every brand has challenges, how do you guys sort of keep that north star and overcome some of those challenges, whether it be brand or recruiting related? Joe: Well, I think looking at it from 30,000 feet up. I think a big help for us is really realigning our executive officer team. And so Brian Nickel, our CEO joined Chipotle about two years ago as well. We had a lot of different focuses. And we were basically stretching people a little too thin. And it was really simplifying everything we were doing, making sure that our number one focus was food safety and quality of food. But then making sure that we had fantastic people within the organization to prep, to cook, to serve that food, and give these people awesome opportunities to develop into a career within the restaurant industry at Chipotle. Mike: There is an acute focus on food culture. Let's not lose sight in our growth, and as we scale with keeping the main thing the main thing, right? Taking excellent care of the customers and having really great crave-able food as he would say. Joel: And you mentioned working with the CMO, which I know both Chad and I, spidey senses tingled when you said that. Because we really champion HR recruitment, talent acquisition teams really engaging with marketing and brand and messaging and all that good stuff. So for the organizations out there that isn't doing that, why is it important and what exactly do you guys do in terms of working with your marketing department? Joe: Well, I'll go from the legacy standpoint. So I've been with Chipotle for six years. And marketing and recruiting never had a relationship within Chipotle. We were like the ex-husband and ex-wife who are still mad at each other for the fight in 1997. Joel: Ouch. Mike: I'm experiencing this. Joe: Mike's going through that personally. Joel: Ouch. Joe: No. But so we've never had a great relationship. So what we were talking about before, we had two very different brand messages going out. We had a recruiting brand message and we had a food brand message. So that was the legacy story. And then I'll let Mike go from present to now. Mike: I then had an arm and an opportunity. We have a really, really awesome chief people officer, Marissa Andrada who she's taken pity on me for 20 years, and has let me help out with some people building for some really great brands. This one truly, truly being my favorite because I have a burrito addiction. And so when we came in, the order of the day was really get some alignment, we really took, we took a 25 year old brand and kind of flipped it into startup mode. But sort of the best of startup mode because essentially you're well-funded and profitable and have no debt. So then how do you focus in on the vision? It has to do with building capability in the organization, right? We understand that. We've seen that done well at times and certainly have seen that fail with organizations. Mike: I'm sure there are many people who have more technical skills from a recruitment perspective than I do. But I'm a frustrated storyteller. And a frustrated writer. And really love aligning... So starting with Red Bull in my career, took a look at how I could be that bridge between the work that talent acquisition is doing and how can we partner that up with marketing because we're telling the same story yet we often, as you've mentioned this, we oftentimes see it's a very disjointed approach. And so I think once I realized, "Hey, look, these can be our friends. We can have a relationship that really is mutually beneficial." Because what happens is we can keep that message and that narrative really alive as we're talking to thousands and thousands of candidates. And so I had an opportunity early on to work with the executive leadership team and really saw their humility, their alignment, and how fired up they were to ensure that essentially we had become a blockbuster video of burritos. And so Chris really led that charge. Mike: And it wasn't one of those things where everybody was really respectful, but they're kind of looking at me like, "Okay. So you're really going to help us do this and you're going to help us build these all star teams." And so we were working 24 seven straight through weekends. And then finally I got, it was a Saturday night, and I was submitting some candidate. And Chris said, "Hey." He texted me, "Give me a call." He said, "Man, stop. We're good. This is going to wait until Monday." And then I thought, okay, we're on to something as far as the trust building. But then I think from just the interpersonal relationship that we built and then helping him hire his team, he was very inclusive with us. And so I thought, this is going to be part of the secret salsa of building a world class talent acquisition function, was to make sure that we're really in that wheelhouse of narrative creation and brand creation. So don't mean to overshare with you there. But that's really been just such a key part of our success I think over the last couple of years. Joe: Well, and it feels like at Chipotle, we've had a come to Jesus moment where recruiting and marketing realized that we were both needing to be codependent on one another. We can't offer new menu items, grow sales without having all the people in place. And we can't have all the people in place and double in size and restaurants without having our marketing team supporting us on the backend. Mike: And you know what? I think the leadership team models really, really well, which then of course just trickles down very naturally, is this notion that we really partners... There's this family vibe, we're partners to each other. So it's not exclusively from the marketing lens, or we call human resources people experience or from the people experience lens. It's really how can we get the right people, build the right capability in the organization, and make sure that we're really rowing in the same direction? And not sitting there boring each other by leading with our respective functional knowledge. That's not going to help anybody. We've all seen organizations that really sink in that. Chad: You had gold that you provided to PR and marketing. And let me read this real quick. Chipotle is covering 100% of tuition costs upfront for 75 different types of business and technology degrees through their partnership with Guild Education. So if you're in marketing and PR, and you get your hands around something, like this is gold. Not just from the standpoint of making the brand look great from one side, but making it look great from all sides. So how did this happen? Well, again, the genesis around this, it makes a hell of a lot of sense because obviously this is in many cases a high volume place where you're looking for retention, you're looking for great people. How did this come together? Joel: That's gold, Jerry. Joe: It is golden. I think when I kind of take a step back and look at what we're doing at Chipotle every day, it's cultivating a better world. That's really what we believe in doing every day. And we employ approximately 80,000 people across the country. And we know in 2019, soon to be 2020, cost of education is going up. We're in this sort of gig economy where our people might need to work two or three jobs just to go to school and have a basic living. So we had a big aha moment. We introduced our Guild partnership back in 2015. Joe: And it wasn't as robust as it is now. But about a year ago, the conversation at the table was, "What can we do better for our people? How can we treat our people better?" And we did a lot of surveying. We talked to a lot of our folks across the country and one of the top benefits that we could offer was, how can we improve our tuition reimbursement program? And from that was born the debt free degree program. Mike: It's interesting too because our goal from a people experience, really the mantra from a people experience perspective is to ensure that we're creating an environment where people can thrive and pursue their passion. What's interesting about it is that we understand that people may not stay with us forever, right? So it's not a situation where we're saying, "Hey, we'll do these awesome things for you and your family. But you have to be on a fast track to becoming a general manager." We understand this may be a side hustle for somebody, but want to ensure that in our effort, as Joe said, to cultivate a better world. Hey, that doesn't really just end within the walls of our restaurants. So if we can take great care of you while you're with us, and you wind up going somewhere else, it really does fulfill that mission. Joe: And on the flip side, there are a good amount of people who work in our restaurants who are pursuing these debt free degrees, who ended taking that with triple even further, whether it's going down in a multiunit capacity or even transferring to some of the roles in our restaurant support centers in both Columbus, Ohio, and Newport beach, California. Chad: Well, who had the holy shit moment though? Because this is really a holy shit moment like you think about it, it's like first off, the economy is doing well to an extent, right? We want to be able to retain people and our business is people. So we have to take care of those people. Who was the person that had the holy shit moment that everybody else went, "Ah, there it is." Mike: Fair enough. I think I can answer that. Now as much as I would like to say that it's me and Joe. Joe: I'll take credit. Mike: This was a conversation between our CEO Brian, who are our group reports into through Maurice, our chief people officer, in combination with... Now guys, I've spent most of my career trying to steer clear of comp and benefits. But I've got to say we have an innovator in that space. Scott Stanson, who's our director of comp and ben, and is just always looking at things from a different lens. So I would probably give that initial credit to those three. And then you look at it and it's one of those things that once it's in front of you, you say, "This is a no brainer." Even though really nobody else is doing or at the scale that we're doing it. So it was very easy for our team to get behind it obviously as well as marketing to evangelize it. Joe: Yeah. And I think it's as simple what can we do to make the lives of our people easier? So they don't have to work a four to eight hour shift at Chipotle, and then drive Uber for four to five hours to make ends meet. They can work at Chipotle, they get a free meal. We pay for them to go on break. And then we also pay for them for their education. So they can work at Chipotle and kind of that's it. Joel: Frankly, as a potential candidate, you had me at free burrito. But the other stuff is pretty nice too. Mike: Well, that means we have you forever. Joel: I know you guys are our loyal listeners of the show. Joe: Yes. We love your show. Joel: Yeah. You guys, if someone calls in sick, apparently you send them to a nurse that then has some sort of checklist to verify that they're actually sick and not just hung over. Can you explain what's going on with that? Mike: The nurse, by the way, is on her way to you guys right now. Joe: To make sure you're not hung over. Joel: I'll save her time and let her know we'll fail the hung over test for sure. Joe: No. So as we talked about before, Mike mentioned, we have been building a culture of food safety for the past three to four years. And a big portion of that is we want to make sure that our employees and the restaurants are not coming to work sick. So we've created things like making sure that one of the benefits our crew members get is sick time, paid time off. So they don't feel the pressure to come to work sick and in return get other people sick and infect our customers. So one of the other changes we've made is providing a nurse hotline for our people if they're not feeling well, we provide a nurse hotline for them to connect with. And they'll just run through common symptoms and again, they'll determine, "Okay, are you just hung over? Did you just have a really good Saturday night? You can work Sunday. But if you are actually sick, do not come into work. Use your sick time, rest up and be good to go." Joel: Got you. And it's sort of an early warning sign for you guys. If the employees are getting sick, you can nip it in the bud so customers don't start getting sick. Is that part of the strategy as well? Joe: Absolutely. Joel: So there's not a rampant drinking problem with Chipotle workers. It's actually about food safety. So I'm glad that you've laid to rest any concerns that I had about a potential drinking problem. Joe: Well thank you. Mike has a drinking problem. But that's [crosstalk 00:26:08]- Joel: Okay guys, we appreciate the time. We know you're busy with everything going on there. Joe: Oh, thank you. Joel: For any of our listeners who, for God's sakes, don't know about Chipotle are you guys, where would you send them to learn more? Joe: We have a couple of different avenues, so I would always highlight our people of Chipotle at Instagram. It's an in depth look into what's going on in the restaurants and our support centers. And you can also find us at jobs.Chipotle.com. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thanks guys. We out. Chad: We out. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad, and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit ChadCheese.com. #Technology #CultBrandSeries #Brand #Branding #Marketing #CultBrands #College #Experience

Thanks to last week's "predictions show," this episode encompasses a whopping two weeks of news from the world of recruitment. On tap, let's start with some shitty optics from Indeed's newest toy, ClickIQ. Then let's move into news that Walmart is going all-in on robots and Taco Bell paying mad salaries to recruit and retain top talent. The dessert: A tasty acquisition and a fat new investment. As usual, show powered by Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Jim Stroud: 15 minutes ago. The world changed. Companies are microchipping their workers. Robots are hiring humans and brain to brain communication is a thing. This is all happening now. If you want to know what happens next, listen to the Jim Straub 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 fun pack! Joel: Aw Yeah. What's up boys and girls? Chad: What up? Joel: The predictions' episode from last week has put us behind two weeks in the new cycle. So we're all backed up and ready to spew! Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad 'I love guacamole' Sowash. Joel: On this week’s show Phenom people get a phenomenally big check. ClickIQ has an optics problem and right after this I'm applying for a job at Taco Bell and if they don't hire me, I'm eating all the chalupas! Chad: I'm going to Chipotle. Joel: Put on your fat boy pants. It's another episode of HR's fattest and most dangerous podcast. And what's more dangerous than an advertisement? We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com that's S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: Yes, you will. And dinner talking about taco bell. We actually just dropped the 'Chipotle Cult Guac' episode. Chad: Got to talk to a couple of guys Joe and Mike. Joel: Holy guacamole. Chad: Holy guacamole. Over at Chipotle. That is a great interview. Joel: And we were not shy about adding queso, if you know what I'm saying. Chad: Yeah or guacamole. Joel: Shout out to a speaking of food Zume Pizza, many of you will not know Zume, but it's sort of a sad day in the world of robotics. Zume was a, they called it co-bots, so it was people and robots working together, creating pizzas. And these trucks would go around town making the pizza while it was coming to you. And then the person would come out and bring you the pizza. Well, they're in the Deadpool for the most part. This thing didn't work out. They're making pizza boxes now as a pivot which is interesting. But the dream of like the streets being filled with food making trucks that deliver hot, delicious food to your door is at least on hold for now. Chad: It's not going away. Okay, let's just make this, make this short and sweet. Joel I will predict by definitely in the next five years, you'll definitely have trucks with pizzas that are actually being baked on the way there. Joel: Look at us with more predictions. We just can't get away from this stuff. But yeah, I mean we already have the dominoes, you know, little R2D2 things delivering pizzas on college campuses. So yes, it's going to happen. Zume just didn't quite have the right recipe, if you know what I'm saying. Chad: Yes. Joel: Whomp, whomp. Chad: Well, I'm going to go into a long string of a bunch of overseas shout outs. First and foremost, maybe not overseas, just not in the U.S. Julie Ho over at JobAdX finally received her Chad And Cheese T-shirt, dude, she's in Canada. What the fuck is up with the Canada mail? I mean it just, does it take that long? Do you have to put it on a moose? Joel: So I do have some experience with this because I'm married to a Canadian who has Canadian relatives. It does take that fucking long to get shit to Canada. Chad: Good God. Joel: However, I will say it to props to the postal service when we send out our Christmas cards this year, all the international cards, which I was sure would get there maybe right before next Christmas. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Actually got there in a pretty timely manner. So I don't know if they just juiced everything up for Christmas and the holidays, but yeah, for the most part the items delivered on moose back or beaver tail or something. I don't know what the fuck was going on. Chad: A shout out to Cindy diesel listening from Johannesburg South Africa. She's with the PeopleSoft. Joel: Is that it? She's a fan. okay. Chad: She's a fan, she's listening. Joel: Shout out to South Africa, South Africa, South Africa. Chad: Big shout out to Pat Healey who is actually a staff writer and public publications officer and data scientists, believe that shit over at ESSA which is the Economics Students Society of Australia. He's a listener and he's just given a shout out for connecting on LinkedIn. The big thing for me is we have friends and listeners over in Australia, you know? Joel: Sure. Chad: Right now I can't but feel totally powerless with all of the fires that are happening over there. I can't imagine how they feel. Joel: Yeah, you can go, you can donate money. That's not powerless. But I feel like the news doesn't even talk about it anymore or the fires out? I don't, I don't even know. Did they get a good rain in? Chad: They did get some rain. I don't think it's over in that smokes also a problem and inhalation and those types of things, so everybody over there in Australia who are listening. Yeah, man, dude, we're as much behind you as we possibly can, but again, other than feeling powerless from being a world away, it's hard watching the news about it. Joel: A billion animals. How is that even possible? Chad: Oh man, it's fucking crazy. It's like one out of three koalas are like dead now because of this shit. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Anyway, on an upward note, we're going to come back to the U.S. Tom Nolan in Jacksonville, Florida over at TextUs big shout out to him for listening. Chad: Summer Crenshaw over in Cincinnati, pretty close to us [crosstalk 00:06:33] COO and CMO over at Tilr. And Nico's over at Next. Big shout out. Chad: Again, thanks for listening everybody out there. Again, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn, get a ton of those things. I will mention a few every now and again, but feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn. Go to Chadcheese.com. Go to wherever you listen to podcast and subscribe. Joel: I love it. You know Tilr's been saying they've been, they're going to come to Andy to visit us for about two years and they haven't made it up from Cincinnati. We may just have to go to The Natti, get in a reds game cause there are seats available. Chad: Yes, Of course. Joel: And maybe go see the kids at Tilr at some point. Chad: Yeah and see Matt Adam cause you know he's napping right now. Joel: I won't tell him you said that cause he's the hardest working man in that company because I think he's the only employee left in that company. Chad: He literally did a disrupt HR presentation on naps. Joel: That's true. That's true. But I don't know if he himself naps fairly regularly. Chad: Oh, he does. Joel: And as someone who does nap regularly, I don't see the telltale signs of napping in him. I'm gonna do my bunch of shout outs, I guess if you're done? Chad: Yep. Joel: Get Optimal is our latest Death match entry signed up this week. Chad: Woo! Death match! Joel: We're going to see them in London. They're headed up by a former Indeed guy. So, uh. Chad: Good that's awesome. Yeah. Joel: Could be an interesting addition to death match. You've you failed to mention our new voices series that's coming down the pike. Maybe that was on purpose, but Robert Ruff, CEO of Sovren founder as our first voices participant. Chad: El Presidente. Joel: We have a sexy new celebrity intro for voices that maybe I'll, I'll go search the voice, the MP3 files and see if I can maybe play that at the end of the show. Mark Jones from our friends in Cleveland at Alexander Mann solutions. His podcast interview went out this week, so if you haven't checked that out, we talk all things our PO candidate marketing, yada yada. Chad: Technology. So before we jump into topics, I have a quick rant that really for the whole HR and talent acquisition community. Joel: We haven't had a chad rant in a while. I'm excited. Let me give the boxer sound on this. Chad: On Twitter Wendy Berry seems like a very nice person. She had a great tweet, which was pretty much the epitome of what we've seen over the years and here's what it is. Quote, "just got a rejection email this morning for a job I applied for nine months ago and here I thought I had it in the bag. Smiley face. Try harder talent acquisition and recruitment folks." So I said, "Wendy, who the fuck are you talking about? What company is this? Let's let's name some names" and Wendy said, "everybody does it." Come on Wendy. Every other talent acquisition, HR and human out there. Everybody listen, unless we start naming names, what the fuck do we expect to change here? Unless we start pointing people out and holding them accountable and driving transparency, we will not see progress. So if you don't name names, you're bitching for nothing. So stop your bitching. Joel: Shame away people. Shame away. Chad: Stop it. Be accountable if they fucked up some kind of process or in this case, getting back with you nine months later, name the names and quit being wusses is out there HR talent acquisition. Joel: Would it be too bold of a prediction to guess that Wendy is a millennial? Chad: It would not. Joel: I'm just going to put that out there, that they're a little bit less likely to offend people than other generations. Chad: Yes, sensitive. Joel: Yes, yes. All right, Chad rant people, get excited. Chad: All right, let's get to the show shall we? Chad: Let's do this - TOPICS! Joel: So we did, we did predictions with Tim Sackett, which was an awesome show. It was fun to do and we invited listeners to submit their own predictions and I don't know any of these, so I'm going to be surprised by these and I'm going to let you just sort of read them off and maybe I'll comment. Chad: Okay. You're going in blind. Well first and foremost, Jason Roberts, he actually quoted and said, we actually got one of those predictions right, that we thought we got wrong. Google is almost always the number one referral source of candidate traffic over Indeed. It actually was before they released Google for jobs as well. We, and in this case it was RSR, we saw a 30% increase in traffic after Google for jobs launched while indeed was flat to 10% down depending on the client. So Indeed stayed flat or they actually dropped 10%. Now again, this is coming from Jason's experience when he was at Randstad. Sure. There we go. We thought we went O for last year, we actually got one and that was like a second half to one of your predictions this year. So we can go ahead and wipe that off cause we already got it. Joel: Well I'm still holding to the monetization thing. They're going to start pay per click. But yeah, it does matter depending on the organization, like some will not see Google number one, many will. Chad: And a company like Randstad or Randstad SourceRight represents hundreds of companies. So what they can do is, what we've talked about over the years is that staffing and RPO does recruitment better because it's their business. They have to be more efficient, they have to attract with less amount of money. So I think if you are in talent acquisition and you're not seeing Google as your number one, that's because you haven't optimized enough. That's because you haven't focused on efficiencies. You haven't done things that the staffing professionals do because it is their business and that's how they make money. Joel: Yep. So Indeed if you're listening, SFX: That's it man. Game over, man. Game Over. Chad: The second one comes from a good friend of ours and friend of the show, Michael O'Dell at talent.com or as we know Neuvoo, he predicts with all of the acquisitions that happened in 2019 there will be more programmatic entrants into the market because these new entrants can provide independent options that today are starting to dwindle because those programmatic companies are going under brands like indeed. Joel: Hmm. Interesting. I agree. There's a need for more, although I also think it's not easy to just set up shop with a programmatic solution that's worth a shit. So yeah, we'll see. And maybe, maybe that's a little glimpse into what the folks at Neuvoo we were working on as well. Chad: He didn't say they have to be worth a shit. He just said that there are new entrants. Oh, next prediction from Quincy Valencia, the queen of chat bots and stuff over at the Alexander Mann solution. Joel: The chat bot queen. Chad: She predicts robots will continue to encroach on recruiter and coordinated spaces, forcing companies to start to radically redesign how their talent acquisition teams are structured and how they operate. Chad: I think she's early on this, I think personally, RPO. Yes. I think RPO, you're going to see this and I think companies who start to look at RPO are going to believe that this is kind of like table stakes, but for companies to do this themselves, I think we're still a couple of years early because hell we're already five years back as it is. Joel: Yeah, and a very cerebral prediction from Quincy. I'm not even sure what I just heard, but I'm sure it was really smart. Chad: So next coming from our millennial, Kyle Hager. Joel: Yes! Chad: He is predicting that a ton of small ATS's will consolidate due to Indeed starting to cut off. There are organic traffic. One of the biggest advantages for having an ATS for small or medium sized businesses today was candidate attraction. Currently is candidate attraction through organic. I'm not that, not the paid stuff. Apparently indeed is shutting the spigot off for small applicant tracking system companies and those ATS is are feeling it and obviously so are their clients. Joel: So did I hear that right? They're going to join forces? Chad: They're going to consolidate some form or fashion. Consolidate or die is pretty much what it comes down to. Joel: Okay. This sounds very millennial from our buddy Kevin. They're going to, they're going to all get together, create one big death star and compete with the big boys. Yeah, we'll see how that works. Chad: I think it's more if they don't consolidate, through mergers and acquisitions, they're going to die. Joel: Well, it's usually a big fish that swallows the little fish. He's saying like all these little fish somehow evolve into one big fish. I'm just really confused at how this is going to work. Chad: Next prediction coming from Mark Feffer over at hcmtechreport.com. Joel: The Feff. Chad: Yeah. Much like I think a Quincy, very cerebral. Joel: Oh my God. Chad: He is predicting that automation becomes table stakes. Last year and into this year's vendors talk more and more about tools that somehow streamlined the talent acquisition process. Usually by automating chores like interview scheduling, so on, so forth. By the end of this year, those features won't be differentiators anymore. They will be expected.Joel: I'll agree with that. I think that's a pretty good prediction. I think if you're a vendor and don't have that stuff like you're not even going to get a second glance. I don't think. Chad: And you shouldn't. Joel: I think it's going to be expected. Yeah. Like it's like mobile, Oh your shit looks like shit on mobile. Like fuck you. I'm not even going to play ball. Like it's just something you have to do. Chad: Yep. Exactly. Joel: So. Chad: And last but not least, we have Josh Zywien a.k.a Jay Z is over at paradox. He predicts the growth of voice in video as dominant channels for transactions, automation and direct audience engagement. User generator videos and video telling the real authentic stories will grow exponentially, particularly as the cost to create and distribute it goes way down and people become more disenchanted with the traditional channels. Joel: Yeah. I think a JZ might have 99 predictions, but that was not a good one in my opinion. Chad: Dude. Joel: Yeah. Videos just it's too, I don't know it's too far. We've had video for how long and it hasn't taken off. Right. We had this with higher view selling, it shit off and it's investors getting out. I don't know. I don't know dude. Like I'm just the jury, so out on video, I just, I don't pay attention unless it's really something significant. Chad: Again, back to audio. I think that's where we're going to see some really cool shit, whether it's Alexa, Google, assistant w whatever it is. But also being able to do those things and podcast form. Something that's more portable. So yeah, I agree with partially with that. The video part's really hard to get on board with. Joel: Well, either way. To all of our, I don't know, second rate predictors, thanks for chiming in. We love you. Chad: Yeah, we love it. Love it. Joel: By the way, is Kyle employed yet? Chad: I don't know. Joel: What's his deal? Chad: I don't know. I think he's, he's like sucking off a trust fund or something. I don't know. Joel: Somebody, somebody hired this kid. He's got game. Chad: He's got more than game man. He's pretty legit. Joel: I want 15% Kyle. Chad: Next story is all about optics. Joel: Oh God, Yeah. Chad: Optics. Okay. People, let's talk through how to create a believable narrative and understand how optics apply. So our friend, friend of the show, CEO of ClickIQ, Richard Collins. Joel: Sir Richard. Chad: Has been adamant that opinions of ClickIQ turning into an Indeed buying house is absurd. Joel: Trojan horse. Chad: And that it literally makes no strategic business sense to piss off their network providers Adzuna, Neuvoo / Talent.com, all the different job boards by focusing on buying Indeed because they can get more money out of their network and then obviously leverage Indeed as well. Chad: It makes good strategic sense. I understand that narrative. Joel: Separation of church and state from a Brit, I mean what can be better than that. Chad: So I understand that narrative and I believe it to be very sound, but here's the big but, remember Indeed has a history of building their empire through Trojan Horse tactics. Joel: Yep. Chad: And in December of 2019 just last month, a gentleman by the name of Joe burrows was appointed as Media Director at ClickIQ. Then just last week I received multiple emails and messages pointing to me to Joe's LinkedIn profile, which has changed from ClickIQ to Indeed. So many people say, but Chad ClickIQ was bought by Indeed, that makes sense. Okay. Step back from the table for a second. And this is where optics kick in. If you say you're building a Chinese wall to protect against bias buying behavior, the wall will be blown to smithereens by a stupid ass move like this. Joel: Uh huh. Chad: And Joe wasn't the only media staffer changing from ClickIQ to Indeed on LinkedIn on the profile. I don't understand how people don't get how this is a problem. Joel: So I think it's Joel actually. Joe burrow is the LSU quarterback that just won the national title. So that's such an obvious mistake by a football crazed American as yourself. Yeah, I mean it. Yeah. I mean I see where it's harmless in that, Oh, "I'm an indeed ploy employee now." But to think that you're going to come off as unbiased, playing fair with everybody. If you're all, if all ClickIQ people are now properties of Indeed the optics are obviously bad. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Which goes back to, you know what we've been hearing from the likes of ZipRecruiter and I think a Neuvoo, slash talent, right? Like they're not going to play ball with ClickIQ because they don't want indeed to have their data. And if, if you, I mean, so to say you're Indeed now. Guess how many more companies are going to go, "wait a second, why am I playing with ball with these guys if it's indeed? Like that could be a bad move for me." Joel: So for me, this is a real, cut your nose off to spite your face, by hurting your business, by claiming and touting Indeed as your ownership. Chad: Overall though, when you have talent acquisition professionals actually sending us messages saying ClickIQ is unbiased. That's total bullshit. You know something's wrong. Joel: Sure, sure. I mean the, and the plus side of this is at least Indeed isn't like stabbing you in the back and twisting the knife as they smile at you. All while cutting off job boards and staffing companies. At least this time they're full frontal stabbing as opposed to doing it in the back. So at least they've, they've come full circle to a new position in fucking people. Chad: I'm not really sure they can sneak up on anybody anymore. Joel: That's probably true too. Let's hear an ad. Chad: There we go! Joel: JobAdX folks. And when we come back we'll talk Walmart, robots and chalupas. JobAdX: So how's the hiring going? Find those purple squirrels? With applicant after applicant it feels like I'm just getting further from hiring the right candidate. I've got tons of applications, but none of these candidates are even close to being the right fit. Volume is great now, but my small team doesn't have the time to sift through hundreds of mismatched applications. I want more relevant candidates, not just more candidates. JobAdX: Well get this. JobAdX has been helping small to medium businesses get their job ads in front of targeted active job seekers by matching your jobs to a candidate based on their search behavior across a vast of niche job sites and talent networks. And the best part, it's self-serve. No sales reps, no chatbots, no spend minimums. JobAdX: Just fill a form with your name, number of jobs, and a budget you're working with. And by luck, your ads are now shown over a growing network of 150 job sites. Better yet, those company videos that showcase the value of being part of a small team can have a new home now within your ads, helping you stand out and share your vision proactively. Wait, what was that? JobAdX: Oh, I just signed up for self-serve with JobAdX. What were you talking about that fast, huh? Jumpstart your targeted recruitment with JobAdX today. Visit jobadx.com and click that Get Started Risk-Free button. It's jobadx.com JobAdX. Engage. Attract. Employ. Joel: Attention, Kmart shoppers. There's a blue light special on aisle. Do you remember that shit? Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: That was so awesome. Why don't stores do that anymore? Like flat channels within, within the retail space. I think that should come back, which is our segue into Walmart robots. Chad: That's exactly right. And the flash sales could be really pulled off by these robots. Joel: They could, sure the robots could have a blue light, it goes off. And then like attack robot on aisle four for flash sale information. Chad: When we say attack robot, we don't mean with aluminum bats. Joel: Well apparently they're being attacked by kids who hug them and like scrape up the mirrors and fudge up the mirror. So yeah, and their attackers are not quite what we thought they would be, but they are getting attacked apparently. Chad: And so Walmart expands its robotic workforce to 650 additional stores. They have these self-scanning new robots that are joining the ranks of Walmart's increasingly automated workforce, which also include devices to scrub floors, unload trucks and gather online grocery orders. And in this online grocery order thing, we've talked about this before, Julie loves it. Right now humans are going through and they're picking things out of the out of the Isles and actually doing the shopping. They have robots that can do this 10 times faster. Joel: Yeah. And so the new, it's a new fleet of a thousand that are going to these 650 U.S. stores. They're six feet tall. Bloomberg calls them a robot army so they sound very intimidating and they're trying to thin them up, which I thought was funny to like take up less space. So when they kill you won't see them apparently, cause they're so skinny. Joel: They're not going to take away human jobs. Wink, wink. As the Walmart PR department claims. But yeah, whether we agree that or not, I don't know. But they claim that the robots will lead to a redeployment of employees doing less mundane roles, which is sort of the company line on everything robotic these days that people will be able to do more, I don't know, intelligent complex tasks. I for one thing, that's a lot of bullshit. People will lose jobs over their shit. And a thousand is a drop in the bucket for Walmart. This thing will be 5,000 probably by the end of 2022 or so. And these things will be everywhere. Chad: Yeah. Well what they're doing is they're, they're doing things in two days that he used to take two weeks to do and that's restocking shelves. So they're going down and they're just scanning the shelves. Joel: Yeah, 15 cameras on this thing. Chad: Yeah. When, when something, when they go through an area or an aisle that needs restocked, they just automatically hit a human being who has a handheld device and then boom, they go and they restock it. So one of the things I think is pretty amazing is we, we talk about this a lot, the jobs going away, but yet you take a look at the unemployment rate, right? Chad: This is what they call the lump of labor fallacy. Where over the years, either technology or just different types of process innovations have taken quote unquote jobs where they really haven't taken jobs, they've displaced workers to do something more technical. The problem that we have is not that jobs are going away. The problem we have is that every time those jobs go away, there are other jobs that open up that take different types of skills or evolving skills. The problem we have is we're not educating our workforce. We're not training our workforce for what we need next. Jobs aren't going away. They're evolving. We as human beings are shitty at adapting to this apparently because we always have this fucking skill gap that everybody always talks about. Joel: So stay in school kids is what Chad's saying. Chad: I think this is more on the corporate side than it is schools. Joel: Well, corporate training, government training, education needs to keep up with the demands of the workforce. There's a disconnect between what education is going on as to what private companies and companies need in the workforce. No one's talking to each other as much as they should. Chad: Companies should take more of a leading role in this. They should be, if they need fucking developers, they should pay for developers education. I want you just like the military does. Chad: Hey, you're going to come work for me for three years, guess what? I'm going to give you free college. Here you go. If you need them that bad and they are that integral, that vital to you, to your organization, that's what you should do to be able to get them in the door. Then after they're in the door, you as the company should help that individual adapt to these new positions. Joel: I love that you brought this up because today actually I got an email from Fiverr. Chad: Okay. Joel: Which I've been a user of Fiverr and Upwork like for a long time, but anyway they've just started Learn from Fiverr. So basically in this email I was learning sort of SEO fundamentals, the ultimate framework to be a successful optimizer of websites. Fiverr in this case is sort of taking the ball and running with it and saying we're going to have education with our workers, our giggers, whatever. So then they can learn new skills and take up gigs. Joel: And I assume this is probably driven by the demand of, of people who want to SEO professionals and there's a lack of them on Fiverr, I'm assuming. So they're saying let's, why don't we train people who are internet marketers or designers to like learn more SEO? So I think to your point, companies and private entities or public entities, corporate entities are sort of taking the ball and running with it by educating via online. We've obviously seen Lynda being acquired by LinkedIn. I think that's been a sort of a missed opportunity by them. I don't see a whole hell of a lot going on there, but education and providing classes is certainly something that private companies are doing. I just think when you get to the level of I'm a cashier or I'm a janitor, you know, what kind of educational leap can you make from that? I think that's, that's a challenge. Chad: I don't think it's a challenge if a company can understand where their gaps are and start to streamline into that and stop looking to government fucking handouts. I mean the government has been providing corporate charity for God's sakes for decades. So instead of looking to the government to fix this, companies should be fixing this shit. They should be able to identify the gaps that the issues that they're having in their organization and also predict where those gaps are going to be. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: They know better than anybody. They should be able to take care of this. Not to mention corporate profits are bigger than ever. They can use that money and invest back into their employees. Joel: Yeah. I just think it's a little Pollyannish to think, "okay, we have 10 janitors, let's just train them to be whatever, restocking with computer tools." And do we need 10 janitors to overtake, you know, maybe there's only five openings on the automated side? Like at some point workers are going to be dispersed. They're not going to have a journey or a track available in Walmart or target or wherever. And what do you do for those people, I guess is the question. Chad: I think. I think anybody who believes, and again, it's a difficult problem for a government to solve. A difficult problem for a company to solve because they know what they want, they know where they want to go and they should be able to get it. The problem is they're depending on government providing charity back to them for schools, universities, and hoping that there are public programs that they can actually pull off so that they can get their people for free. It's all fucking bullshit. Joel: Well companies are going to act in the favor of their shareholders. Chad: Yeah. And they're going to buy back fucking stocks and not put money into their employees. Joel: Which is maybe why there's a space for government on this stuff. Chad: Yeah. And that's to regulate these assholes, to be able to treat their people better. Joel: But you know who's not hurting for opportunities. Chad: People at taco bell. Joel: People at taco bell, like let's transition to that. Taco bell is now offering a hundred grand salaried positions in an attempt to de recruit people and also retain people and also recruit and retain good people and also make a splash from a PR perspective. Obviously the news and news outlets are going to pick up $100,000 jobs at taco bell. So obviously that was maybe part of the decision to do this, but they're sort of testing this in the Midwest. Midwest and I think South Southeast, something like that. Obviously where they have taco bells that need to be need to be serviced. Joel: So I think this is genius. If it works good on them because I know from, you know people I know in the restaurant industry it's like fucking war to keep people. They lose people, they got to replace people. And I'm sure somebody in the math department at Taco Bell said, actually it's Yum Brands! Said okay, we're losing this much on lost labor, lost customers being serviced. Like let's up these positions to this much. So in your point of the market working in capitalism, working, I think this is an example of yay capitalism. Like people are making a hundred grand working at taco bell now. Chad: Yeah. Until the market goes back down and then there'll be $30,000 salary again. Joel: Such a buzzkill. Chad: That's how it works unless you actually put guidelines. Joel: People like me keep taco bell in business, so I know what I'm talking about. Chad: Yeah, we'll go. We'll go by that. For select restaurants in select areas for select positions. I got to say I do like it because there are very hard to fill, hard to retain types of positions, and these are hard fucking jobs. I have friends who used to be GMs at restaurants and also regional managers at different restaurants and whatnot. These are hard fucking jobs. And it was interesting because when I posted this out, there were people that kind of laughed and said, "Oh, I can't believe you can make $100,000 at taco bell." And it's like, you've got to be a fucking idiot not to understand how hard these people work. Not to mention the workforce that you have to be able to direct and retain and manage. I mean it's, it's, it's ridiculous. So yeah, good for good them. Joel: And now, you know, think of the competitive angle on this, right? Like how many McDonald's, Wendy's, burger King, Chick-fil-A, whatever managers start looking at jobs at taco bell because they're making 20-25% more money? Chad: Yeah. Joel: And then does that spark all those restaurants to up their salaries to a hundred grand? And then you've got an interesting career track for people that would normally be on a traditional career track. So I think it's cool. Chad: Yeah, it's definitely cool. It's being able to set, and we're talking about more of the upper wage, you know, let's jump down. I was reading an article from Fast Company for the push to increase the minimum wage. So these are the lower wage earners, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: In certain cities and States. And the benefits of doing so go beyond merely enabling people to afford their rent, which is, which is a very damn good thing by the way. A higher minimum wage could keep people out of prison, has been linked to fewer instances of child maltreatment because people are pissed off when they get home because they can't pay their rent and they're stressed out and they treat their kids badly. Chad: It could literally keep people alive by leading to fewer suicides. A study actually showed a mere dollar increase in minimum wage is linked to a 3.5 to 6% drop in the suicide rate among Americans with high school education or less. So as we have the debate about minimum wage or a hundred thousand dollars for somebody working at taco bell, we have to better understand how this is linked to society through happiness. Are people going to be more happy because they have money that they can cover their rent? Joel: Sure. Chad: Cover food, cover school and those types of things. I just common sense says yes. Joel: Yeah. I mean, and we talk about sort of universal basic income, right? And I think that the people that are supportive of that would look at these numbers in terms of maltreatment of children, suicide rates, depression. I'm sure you could track some of the abuse of opioids and other drugs to some of this shit. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They would probably bring a similar arguments to a universal basic income. Chad: Agreed. Dennis Tupper actually recommended a documentary that if you're listening, it's fairly easy to remember. You can go to Amazon. It's called Happy. It's only an hour and 13 minutes. And I thought it was interesting because they actually focused on, one of the segments was focusing on, for our country, instead of focusing on GDP, they focused on creating a happiness index. That in itself the people are more happy. What happens? Well, they have higher production and that actually helped grow their GDP. So instead of focusing on product, right and GDP gross domestic product, they focused on what they felt would trigger higher GDP and that was the actual people who are responsible for growing, building all of that. Joel: Do you think they have that in VHS format? Chad: Maybe beta max. Joel: Oh then I'm good. I'm good. Who else is good but our buddies at Canvas? Let's hear from them and we'll talk about people getting some money and acquiring some other companies. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvas bot is at your side. Adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's go canvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: Money, money, money. Joel: I talked to Jobvite's new CMO. Looks like we're going to be getting some new ads soon. So if you're a little tired and spaced out on a that canvas ad, get ready cause they're about to blow your socks off with some new stuff. Chad: Not, I think Amber Ferrari in the canvas ad is awesome. Joel: I wouldn't say she wouldn't be in the new ads. Chad: Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. Joel: I don't, I don't know. But yeah, she might be, the coolest name ever. But she's getting married and it's going away. So baby and what's her new name? Like Amber Jones or something? Chad: Hopefully. Yeah, it's hyphenated Jones-Ferrari. So phenom. Joel: Phenom, yes. Chad: $30 million in series C funding, bringing them to a total of 61 million. Now listen to this long list of names and then we'll get into this after. The round is led by WestBridge Capital with participation from Alliance Bernstein private credit investors. Contributions from existing investors include AXA ventures, Sierra ventures, Amador, technology ventures, Sigma prime ventures and car Laney capital. Joel: Holy shit, who doesn't have money into this thing right now? I think my dog peepers gave some money to this organization as well. Joel: Peepers! Joel: I don't know what to tell you about that. Chad: Oh my God. So this is to support the global demand for AI driven talent experiences. Phenom people will use the investment for continued company growth and scale. Now obviously AI driven was in there, so go figure why they got $30 million. Joel: So this is 61 total? Chad: Yeah, 61 total. Joel: That they've gotten? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Convenient. Chad: That's, that's a lot of cash. Joel: It is. It's not, I mean, for what they do when you look at what chatbots are getting. It's sort of on par with that. And phenom does a lot of other stuff. You know, I think what, what I've, what I find so interesting about this is I remember, so the guys who started this company were doing like mobile sites for career builder. Like 10 years ago. They were sort of the white label mobile solution for CareerBuilder. Joel: CareerBuilder started doing their own thing and these guys were, were let go or the contract ended or whatever. And so they created a company called iMomentus. Chad: Yep. Joel: I don't know if you remember that or not, but so they did basically mobile development for companies and ATS's is, and then they super pivoted to Phenom people and doing so many more things than just sort of the mobile product. So to me it's like a cool story of just putting your nose down, learning what the market wants, continuing to iterate, pivoting to new opportunities. So for me, I say good on them. We know quite a few of the employees over there and we know they do good work. Chad: 18 months ago they received 20 million. I mean, what's the burn rate at this point and what are we really, I mean this is IPO or bust for me. Joel: Yeah, I mean when you said that I thought of uncommon going through 18 million in 18 months. So it can be done. Chad: What happened there? Joel: But yeah, I mean it could be part of like, "look, you know, a recession is coming eventually. Let's keep our powder dry. Let's have some money in the coffers." Obviously they're a private company. We don't know how much they're making. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But yeah, there could be a lot of different reasons to go get 30 million. But the general census says if someone will give you 30 million like go ahead and take it. Chad: Whew, that's a lot of money. Somebody who didn't mind taking the money was HereFish who was acquired by Bullhorn. Joel: Herefish, fish, fish, fish, fish. HereFish. We liked, we liked this acquisition. I think. Chad: I loved this acquisition. And there's one quote that really just kind of knocks it out of the park for me. "On average here, HereFish automates 7.2 million actions per month in saves over time, two and a half hours per recruiter, per day." That's two and a half hours of not doing stupid shit. Rather, being able to have two and a half hours to do human to human stuff or you know, maybe just spend more time on tech talk. I don't know. Chad: But overall that's what a company like Bullhorn really has to, has to focus on because of their clients. Their clients are staffing companies and RPOs. But mainly staffing companies and staffing companies. That's how they make their money. So you have to help them in different areas to be able to gain margin. And this is smart from Bullhorn's standpoint. To be able to say, "Hey look, we know that you have to be more efficient for all of your recruiters. We can give them back two and a half hours per day through this acquisition if it's implemented correctly, yada, yada yada." That's, that's a hell of a sales tool to be able to pull on more companies. Joel: Yeah. To me it's great market forces, customer demand, recruiters, staffing companies. They want more automation, more tech. It's not just about getting me more people or make this, you know, faster. It's automate shit and let me focus on this stuff that's more important. And the Herefish acquisition goes a big way into to helping their customers do that. So yeah, good on Bullhorn. We liked this acquisition. Chad: Like it. Joel: Terms not disclosed so we can't talk about that, but. SFX: That's it man, game over man, game over. C & C: We Out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast with Chad. The cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one Cheddar, Bleu, Nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any who, 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 grub cheese is so weird. We out. #Robots #predictions #Walmart #TacoBell #minwage #Wages #SkillsGap #PhenomPeople #Herefish #Bullhorn #ATS

If you think the battle between LinkedIn and hiQ is over, think again. While hiQ seems to have won over the judges, LinkedIn is currently appealing the latest decision to the Supreme Court of the United States. The boys bring in Sovren president Robert Ruff to discuss this David and Goliath story. The winners and losers, regardless of what happens in court, may surprise you. Enjoy this Voices Series from The Chad & Cheese Podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. VOICES Intro: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting, while on the other hand, the Chad & Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad & Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up, boys. 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 & Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. What's up everybody? It's the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And Chad Sowash. Joel: Very special guest, Robert Ruff of Sovren, I guess CEO and founder, is that right, Robert? Robert: Yeah, I actually go by president. Joel: El presidente. Robert: Yeah, el presidente, and one of the co founders. I actually started the company with a friend of mine 23 years ago. Joel: God, a legend. Chad: 23 years ago. What did you actually start out doing? Did you start out with parsing? You couldn't have started there. Where did you start? Joel: They were parsing newspaper ads. Robert: Yes, exactly. So like most good people in IT, I went to school and studied finance and was a commercial banker for 10 years. And then I got out of banking and did a leveraged buyout of the family business so my parents could retire and my sisters could work less hard, and sold that business off after a few years to a much bigger company. And was basically on a partial retirement, which the best advice I ever got, I think in life, was a guy that came to me and he said, "Hey, I heard you just did really well on the sale, and you're thinking about retiring." Robert: And I'm like, "Yeah, it seems a little odd though at age 33." And he's like, "Yeah, so you're really lucky. This is how that works. Retire right now for a year or two. And in another 10 years do that again." He goes, "You should retire multiple times in your life. So you don't put all your eggs in the end of life basket and maybe you don't make it there or you don't make it in good health." Chad: I like it. Robert: That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Chad: Yeah. I like it. Joel: Words of wisdom for the kids out there. Hope everyone's paying attention. Robert: Yeah. So go on and tell your boss that next year you'll be taking off. Joel: Sabbaticals are what those are called, I think. Robert: They're called searching for a new job a year from now, plus one day. Joel: The thing is, my boss is my wife. I'm not sure how she'd take to retiring multiple times. Chad: Your job currently is retirement, whatever. Robert: When you tell your wife at 33 that you're retired, she's like, "No, no, you're not. You have one year to live or get a job." Joel: By the way, Robert and Sovren, incredible supporters of the podcast, we couldn't do it without you. I got to get that in there. Thank you so much for your support before we get into the meat and potatoes. Robert: So the check did clear. Joel: It did clear. Yeah. Yeah. PayPal's cool like that. Chad: We wanted to be able to start an ask the expert type of podcast where we could get some people in the industry, who've obviously been in the industry for a while, to have conversations around subjects like AI in recruiting, the big data, the hiQ verdicts. There's so many things that- Joel: Chat bots. Chad: Chat bots, yeah, we love to talk about all this stuff, but we want to be able to get more angles. So as we start this one out, I want to start this with a red hot one, because I know that you have some interesting angles or thought around the hiQ LinkedIn ruling. Joel: Contrasting opinions. Chad: Yeah, and for the kids out there, LinkedIn was actually telling this small company called hiQ Labs that they couldn't come in and scrape their data. Then a federal court said, "No, that's not your data. That is public data." So therefore hiQ now has the opportunity as... This is really setting a precedent for all those other organizations who want to get to that data. Now they can get to the data. So what do you think? Is this a bad thing for LinkedIn moving forward down the road, and all those smaller organizations will be able to thrive off LinkedIn data? Robert: I think it's actually the opposite. This is probably the salvation of Microsoft's investment in LinkedIn. So no one's ever really criticized the purchase or said this is going to be a fiasco. But recall that LinkedIn basically laid low for forever and pretended to be a professional network, when in fact they were the world's largest job board. A job board for the most valuable candidates, which are the ones who weren't actively job seeking. So whether it's right or wrong, the reality is most people want to hire people that aren't looking for a job, not the people that are. And that's what LinkedIn was. But it couldn't monetize it on its own without exposing the wizard behind the curtain too much. So in selling it to Microsoft, Microsoft clearly had to find a way to monetize it. I personally made a prediction that has not come to pass. In the initial days I said, well, they will turn it into the next edition of Clippy. Robert: I don't know if you remember way back to that. So that as you're typing your email and as you're typing your Word document, the little Clippy thing will pop up and go, "Oh, I see you typed the word engineer. Did you know that we have 17 engineers in your area? Click here to see the engineers," Chad: The little assistant. For all those kids out there. There used to be this thing in Microsoft Word called Clippy, and you would start typing things, and this little paper clip would pop up. And it would start not talking, just chatting with you. Its name was Clippy, and it died a nasty death. Joel: It looks like you're typing a memo, would you like some help with that? Fuck off, Clippy. Robert: People hated Clippy. Joel: Are you still holding to that prediction, or have you buried that and said goodbye? Robert: I think some version of that is coming. So my prediction is that it's going to be part of Office 365 eventually. Robert: So in order to get to LinkedIn, you'll have to have an Office 365 subscription, and it will be part of that. And it will be integrated into more parts of that. So that's still prediction. I think the Clippy part itself unfortunately did not come to pass and won't. But here's what I think's going on on this. Microsoft needed an excuse for really cutting people off from this data, if they are going to truly be that repository that you have to come to and play by their rules. And LinkedIn, before they sold, had to try to keep people off the site from doing some kinds of things like what hiQ had done. Now the courts have basically said, "No no, it's not your data. It's supposed to be public. People can come in and get that data." So here's what's going to happen. Robert: It's already happening. LinkedIn is going to be legally required to let people try to get that data. But they are also, remember, part of Microsoft now, who is helping them make it so that even though you can see the data as a human being, when you try to scrape that data, or you try to get a PDF profile off and use that data from that profile in an automated fashion, it is a mixed up, jumbled night... So what a human sees is not what a machine sees. And what they've done behind the scenes is to make it as unparseable, unextractable by machines as possible. And they are doing it in the smartest way, which is 1% every few days. So if they did what they had done in Europe about six years ago, which is to suddenly make the PDF profile unusable, because you couldn't even extract any text out of it. Robert: So it looked fine to a human. But as soon as the machine tried to get the text out, it was like, there's no tex here. It caused riots because it was such a sudden, I used to get this data off LinkedIn and now it's not usable. So everybody got mad at LinkedIn, and LinkedIn quickly undid that. Nobody's getting mad at LinkedIn right now, because they don't think LinkedIn is doing this. So you know it's making companies like Sovren's life very difficult right now, because we're trying to figure out a dynamically changing landscape of, take a good resume, and scramble it up as much as you can, and give it to us, and see how good we can do with it. It's very difficult. And those formats and the way that they're putting that out is changing, in some cases daily. And there's some randomness to it too. Robert: So it's making it very difficult to get data out, and it's getting worse by the week. Chad: Here's the question, Robert. Can you prove that they're actually doing that? Because if you can, wouldn't that be going against the ruling? Because you are literally not making that information accessible to the public. Robert: I think it is accessible. So I don't want to imply that I think LinkedIn is doing something that's either illegal or unethical. I think that they have built their business on this data. And to the extent that they can protect it legally, they have a right to. So you can still get the data. You have to look at it with human eyes to do much with it. Okay. I'm not sure that's discriminatory in any sense. Chad: But that's against the actual hiQ model though. It's not predicated on hiQ's ability to go in manually with human eyes. Chad: It was their ability to actually go in with technology to be able to utilize their platform. So it sounds like there are going to be different iterations of this argument around really just impeding what the court- Joel: Bots versus humans. Chad: What the courts have actually ruled on already. Robert: It remains to be seen, because the ruling is not final. This was just a preliminary injunction, is that correct? Chad: I believe so, yeah. Joel: There's been a few. Robert: So we'll see how it comes down in the end, and what rules there are around that. But I doubt the court is truly going to say, "Not only can you not protect this data if people want to scrape it, but you have to make it easily scrapeable. And in fact, if people want it in a certain format, you have to give it to them on that." I don't think that's going to happen. Robert: I hope it happens, but I doubt it. And if it doesn't happen, I think Microsoft ends up winning. Because what's going to happen is, the recruiters who have built their business around LinkedIn, and 90% of what they do starts with LinkedIn, are going to end up giving 90% of their profits to LinkedIn. Because they're going to have to buy data in a useful way. So I think this turns out to be the way that Microsoft monetizes it, and the rest of us get shut off from useful data. Ironically, this turns out to their benefit, I predict. Joel: So is the benefit the fact that hiQ and the ruling basically forced LinkedIn to take a technological approach to building a walled garden as opposed to a legal walled garden? Is that sort of your consensus? Robert: That is 100% my point. Joel: Okay. And it's going to put, what, 99% of the hiQs out of business. Right? Robert: I think that it will make the data unusable, because you will find ways to get some of it. But in a huge data aggregation, it's impossible to vet the data as you get it. And so you won't really know what you don't know, which is like some of your data's great, and some of it's terrible. Joel: Yeah. It's basically like SEO. SEO used to be everyone knew the rules, everyone knew how it worked, and then Google said, "You know what? We're going to change this up. We're going to turn the knobs every so often." So ultimately every SEO is going to get out of the business except maybe 5% or less. That's essentially what they're doing. Robert: I think so, yeah. And again, I don't know the legality of it. I would suspect that what they're doing is fine. I don't think it's the right thing to do, but at the same time I don't think it's necessarily immoral. They did build a business on that data, and it is still publicly available. If you go out there, I can go to see your LinkedIn right now, and it's the data that I want to see. Good luck using it. Chad: Again, I think it still goes against the actual idea of the ruling in the first place of being able to allow, empower these smaller organizations to really create business models around that data, whether it's data that's compiled on one database or multiple databases. I think just from my standpoint, the spirit of the ruling at this point is definitely being fractured. Joel: They also know that very few companies have the resources to take them on. The fact that hiQ's been fighting this for so long is pretty amazing. I've got to think most companies, even though they might agree with Chad in saying, "Hey, we should be able to get this easily. And we can't," are they going to want to take on that fight? And my guess is again, 99% aren't going to want to climb that Mount Everest. Robert: This is where a consortium of the smaller organizations actually come together, because that's the only way that they can get something like that done. Joel: Class action. Chad: Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad & Cheese Podcast series is devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #LinkedIn #HiQ #Microsoft #SCOTUS #VOICES #RobertRuff

What happens when the New York Attorney General slaps a subpoena on the young upstart Airbnb in 2013 to access all host data for 15,000 hosts? Do they comply? Do they fight? Listen to this amazing story which embodies Airbnb's brand straight from best-selling author, cult branding expert and former Airbnb global head of community. Douglas Atkin, joins Chad & Cheese to start unpacking Making Plan B Decisions. Welcome to the new Cult Brand Series of podcasts supported by our friends at Smashfly.This podcast series is a compliment to Douglas Atkin's Living Your Purpose articles on Medium. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Joel: This Chad and Cheese Cult Brand podcast is supported by SmashFly, recruiting technology built for the talent life cycle and big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smashfly.com today, Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark buckle up boys and girls. It is time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh yeah, we're back, I can't get enough of this cult brand learning shit, man. This is been freaking amazing today. We're fortunate enough to have an amazing cult brand expert icon back on the show. Chad: He's back. Joel: He's back people. It's Douglas Atkin, former global head of community at Airbnb, partner chief community officer at Meetup.com and all around Smart Dude. Not to mention author of the highly acclaimed book, "The Culting Of Brands." Welcome back Douglas. Joel: Wow. Douglas. That's a hell of an intro. Douglas: And it was great, that's nice, yes. Please start every day off like that for me. Joel: Culture changing. Yeah, religious experience... Douglas: Yeah. Chad: Wow. Douglas: I will take it all. I'll take it all. Chad: This is our third installment of Douglas's, how to live your purpose series, which is really intended as a compliment to his writings over @medium.com but most importantly to focus on how to become and stay a cult brand. We should all at this point know why we want to become one, this is the house. So today we're going to talk about make plan B decisions. Why are we talking about plan B decisions and not plan A decisions? Douglas, Douglas: It's interesting you say that. Well because one thing I realized when I was started working at Airbnb with the founders is that they, that's what they refer to as the decisions they make when they don't want to follow convention, when they don't want to follow the path that most people normally take or is expecting. Chad: Got you. Douglas: And instead they will take and that's plan A, plan B decisions are the alternative that the big problem with plan B decisions is there is no plan B, nearly always. You have to kick Bolic scramble as they say in England to make it all happen and invent it from scratch. So, you know, normally you use you will face all of these decisions when you're facing a crisis and the thing you want most of all is a really easy sort of off the shelf plan or path to take when you're dealing with this crisis. Douglas: But no, we do plan B decisions at Airbnb, which basically means inventing something that no one's ever done before and it, you know, sort of under huge pressure because we, we find that plan A if the normal route is unacceptable. So a good example of that is I guess one of the first plan that would be decisions I was ever directly involved with. And that was, I'd been working at Airbnb for about six months and the New York attorney general, Schneiderman... Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Douglas: Had issued Airbnb with a subpoena to get all of the information of all of the hosts in New York at the time it was about 15,000 people. And we knew in our guts that we didn't want to comply with this subpoena because that is a huge, we felt it was a massive data overreach. It was a huge sort of fishing. Chad: They had to scare the shit out of you guys though, because I mean the AG... Douglas: Well yeah, the attorney general in New York is sort of famous or infamous in that no one ever says no to the attorney general in New York. Chad: Right. Douglas: And bear in mind, this is sort of middle of 2013 so Airbnb was not well known. In fact most people hadn't heard of us. We were this tiny little pipsqueak startup from the California and we actually after sweating it through and having long sort of evening meetings with all of us together, decided to take the attorney general of New York to court and squashes subpoena. When we told the attorney general that they said, "what! Do you even have lawyers?" We had one at a time, Darren, who is our one lawyer, he said you, and they said to us, do you know that no one ever says no to the attorney general in New York? In fact, last week we just got billions out of the international banks for causing the 2008 depression and you think you are going to take us to court. So we, it was a big, it felt like an existential threat actually doing this, but we felt that we had to do it to support our hosts. Douglas: One of our sort of called one of our core values, which we'll talk about in subsequent sessions is be a host, which means, you know, be a host to everyone. Look after people, make them feel like they belong, be by their side, support their side and support them. What we want felt we needed to do was be a host to our hosts. We couldn't abandon them and just hand over all of their information, their addresses, their phone numbers and everything else. And our hosts were really panicked. I mean, at the time, my title at the time and my role was global head of communities. So I was holding a weekly or biweekly town halls with 200 plus hosts in New York city for flying out there every week or every other every other week and hearing how they felt about it and they felt incredibly victimized and scared. Douglas: They called it a witch hunt because previously a few months previously with one another action, actually a separate legal action where one host was fined tens of thousands of dollars because it contravenes some hosting contributes some sort of arcane local law. So they were really, really scared. And, and one of the arguments, one of the reasons we decided to say no to the attorney general of New York, you know, beyond the fact that it was one of our values is that I was basically being the advocate for the hosts in these meetings and saying, we have to stand by our host. We have to stand by our hosts. If we don't, they'll abandon us. But anyway, it's just the right thing to do. And I had freshly arrived from Airbnb, from having worked in the field of movement making starting movements for social change. Douglas: And Brian turned to me and said, so do you think you could start to movement to of our hosts to take political action and change laws and, defeat and help, change opinion against this subpoena? I said, yes, I think I can. And of course inside I was going, Oh shit, what am I taking myself into? But, I did actually think we could because I had already met hundreds of thousands of hosts who are incredibly passionate and willing to do anything. And so that's what we did. We said no to the attorney general of New York and we actually won. And we turned around public opinion in New York in favor of Airbnb. And that was a plan B. So the plan B was, was really, really hard. I mean, we actually ended up doing things that no other company has ever done before, like starting a movement of hosts in New York and guests and everyone else to change the law. Douglas: So I recruited a lot of grassroots organizers from the Obama campaigns of 2008, 2012 because I knew that they had written the kind of the game plan on how you take ordinary people and turn them into political activists and lobby politicians and change laws. And so thanks combining that with my background in movement expertise, I worked incredibly hard, since that from the moment we said no to the AG and took him to court, I was basically spending every waking hour for the next five or six months until December, doing all kinds of things to recruit and mobilize our hosts to take political action. We had a petition that was started by a host who was hosting because she was a vet to come back from war and wanted to change her life and go to college and she was hosting to pay for college. Douglas: And so we started a petition saying, please change the law. It's ridiculous that hosting is illegal in New York. And we expected about 10,000 and we really, really wanted about 10,000 signatures and we ended up getting 236,000 signatures on that petition, which then in turn got the attention of the press. We had retrained hosts to give press interviews. Then we raised money for an ad in the Albany times, I think it's called to lobby politicians to change the law. We trained all of our hosts to go and turn up to legislators offices and make their case and tell us stories about why, how they've got through the recession. We're able to stay in the city because of Airbnb, all these kinds of things. It was a huge... It was basically running a political campaign. Joel: Yeah, the host almost sounded like a labor union. Douglas: Yeah, no they were. It was amazing. And they all do that, we never paid anyone. The really cool thing is that the passion and the commitment in these town hall meetings we were having, they were very, I mean, one of the policies, I wanted to make sure we did was, we had to inform our hosts of everything, certainly before they saw it in the press, because it was like one of the big top stories in New York over those months. Douglas: This whole fight with the AG plus, Airbnb in New York and the issue of hosting. And so I said, they're terrified. They need to feel like they're on the inside. So we have to inform them about everything all of the time. And certainly before we tell the press. So I had all our lobbyist and our one lawyer, one lobbyist, and one lawyer, David Humpman and Darren to give sort of radio interviews, basically online radio interviews telling him what the latest status and everything. We had these town hall meetings where I flew Brian Chesky and myself and the lawyer and the, and the lobbyist over to talk to posts every week or every other week. It was a lot of work. And as I say, no one had ever hired grassroots organizers before. No one had ever turned the users into a movement using these political techniques and it was a huge amount of work. Joel: Yeah, I don't think consumers ever think about users of an internet service being mobilized for political purposes. Douglas: No. Joel: This is really fascinating. Douglas: No, I know, but I kind of knew it would work because they weren't just ordinary customers. They were passionate. I'd heard their stories about how Airbnb changed our lives, whether it was turning them into an entrepreneur so that they could give up the legal secretary job and start the Opera company. They always wanted to do that was a woman called Maria in Jersey city or, whether it was simply being able to keep your apartment in New York when you'd been fired during the recession. Joel: Do you think the political piece to help serve the cultural goals of a company? In other words uniting to fight or fight for a common purpose. I assume that helps build the culture, but does it change it as well? Douglas: What did that event eventually did, are saying no to the AG fighting him and mobilizing our hosts to also fight him and take political action. What it did actually was become what I call a meaningful moment in a company's history. And a meaningful moment is, is a moment with where there's lots of meaning attached to where you normally stand on principle for something often at great risk to yourselves. So the risk to ourselves here was we had no idea what the attorney general could do to us if we lost, he could ban us completely from New York city, which was our largest market at the time. There was a significant part of the business. So this was a huge big deal for us at the time. But we decided to face that threat of extinction in New York city, potentially our biggest market because it was the right thing to do. Douglas: And we kept to saying that it's just the right thing to do to stand by our hosts and to help them change their local laws so that they could host legally, happily and securely and, invest all this time, this money and this expertise in doing all of that. And so that did actually become, it was very reflective back into the culture of Airbnb to your point in that it became like one of those moments with our backs against the walls. We said we're going to stand on principle and do this and we did it and then it worked out well. Joel: I'm reminded of Facebook's recent issues with the government and the contrast in terms of, they have a a billion and a half users, like pretty much everyone uses Facebook. But I don't remember any, lobbying, any groups, picketing congress... Douglas: What? No. Joel: Or boycotting, anything in defense of Facebook whereas your members did. Now they kind of screwed up. You were just fighting for something you guys believed in. But is there something in Airbnb's culture versus what Facebook is doing that makes that happen? That there's not the grassroots support for them when the government comes knocking? Douglas: Well I can't, I can't speak with Facebook in internal culture. I don't know that at all. So what I can say for our culture is that it's a sort of a default thing which is how are we going to stand by our hosts basically. I mean remember almost everyone in Airbnb is a host themselves, and certainly a guest. And the other thing by the way is a, and this came up a lot when we were in, I was getting the, the founders to focus on the core values and not the employees on redoing the core values. There is this real sort of human humanity humanness hosting this feeling at Airbnb, which is, we are all in it for humans compared to say for example, Uber with whom we're often bracketed where we, we we feel where even though we often talked about in the same articles, because we are both leaders of the sharing economy and so on. Douglas: We see ourselves as completely and utterly 100% different, especially culturally because they seem to be doing everything they possibly can to remove humans from driving from everything else. Whereas what we're trying to do is celebrate humanity and its diversity and creating, intimate personal interrelate, relationships and things bring guests and hosts and each other. So there is this automatic default position I think in everyone at Airbnb from the top to the bottom, which is grass roots ish alongside the hosts. We're all in it together. The other thing that's really important is probably to say is that because we're a platform, for hosts and guests to meet each other and do what they need to do, it means the goals of hosts in particular and guests. But the hosts in particular are very closely aligned with us. Douglas: Everything we're doing basically is to provide a platform for hosting guests to get together. So when hosts are threatened, we're threatened when we're threatened, hosts are threatened. And so that's sort of different in a way from many old style companies like the old packaged goods companies or car companies where they're producing things at a profit and the goals of a customer aren't necessarily the same goals of a corporation. Whereas in this case it is. Joel: Yeah, I think Facebook in particular has this sort of cult of personality around Mark Zuckerberg. Douglas: Yeah. Joel: And I think if you asked a thousand people on the street, you know who founded Airbnb, they'd have no idea. But do you know anyone that Airbnb or anyone who rents Airbnb they would know that. Douglas: Oh yeah. Joel: And I think maybe having a culture that's sort of invisible in terms of someone pulling the strings or we own your ass kind of mentality I think really helps in the end, it's stuff like what Airbnb faced with the, with the governor. Douglas: So when all of this, and then that's also speaking to this point about this sort of grass roots inclination if you like, so that there sort of a feels like a long dark tunnel of months I'm just recalling it, that period from about September, October to December in 2013 and there was only again about I know 200, 250 of us in HQ at the time. Whenever I saw Brian, he would like do a sort of fist symbol and say, resist. You know all the revolution. Joel: Fight the power. Douglas: Yes, he was, he loved, he loved that I was doing this. You know that in fact, when I had first joined Airbnb full time, this was in January, 2013 when I first joined, I went to Brian very early and said, I think we need to create a movement for the sharing economy because I keep getting emails from other companies in the sharing economy like Uber and Lyft and Sidecar and so to do the same, asking me to do the same things about signing petitions. Douglas: Why don't we all do this together? We're all in it together and it's a new economy. We're going to be bumping up against old laws. All of us, all the sharing economy companies are and also know all of the hosts or the drivers and things. We're all going to be facing the same things. We should start a people's movement. And I said, I've just come from this area of working in this area. I kind of know how to do that. And he said yes. And then, so for this first six months from January to June, he and I did what he called a startup within a startup. So he and I launched him a grassroots movement called Peers. And we raised about one and a half million dollars donations from a lot of the sort of heavy breathers on the Silicon Valley that from a rave Hoffman, from the Omidyar group, the founders of eBay, and you know, from all these people because they also saw the same need and he loved it. Douglas: We, so basically Brian and I did this startup together within a startup, which was Airbnb. And we launched Peers or hired someone from the democratic party to run it called Natalie Foster, who's well known at the time. And it was actually through that, through Peers that we did this campaign in New York against the attorney general. But they also did campaigns for Lyft and and others and the reason I'm mentioning that is yes, Brian loves, he's all three founders. Douglas: There's a sort of inbuilt DNA part of them, which is that you're bucking the man, you know what I mean? Sort of like fighting the man. In fact they have a different term for it. And again a lot of all these sort of big important values and defining characteristics came up when I was doing a revisit of the core values a few years later. It's part of a value. In fact there is a value, there's a couple of values at Airbnb which is embrace the adventure and be a serial entrepreneur, which is all about daring to do plan B. It's the people we hire, the people, how we train them, how they're the culture of Airbnb is all about plan B-ism if you like. It is not being content with how it's normally done and doing it better or doing it differently because of that. Joel: Yeah. I'm curious plan B to me sounds a lot like a pivot. Is it just a pivot by different name or is there a significant difference between a company pivoting and having a plan B? Douglas: It's probably a a bad description for what we do, but basically what it is is, by so plan A, in that example with the attorney general would have been complying with his subpoena and handing over 15,000 hosts information. That's what every other company had done in the past. Some probably would do in the future. And we said, no, we're not going to do that. But then we had to say, but what are we going to do? Because if we take him to court, we can't just do that. We have to bring our hosts, mobilize them, feel like they're part of something alongside us fighting this unfair subpoena. But more than that, fighting this and these old laws that are getting in the way of this new economy. And so we need to immobilize them and make them feel part of a bigger movement together with us. Douglas: So we're standing side by side and that's why we did all those town halls flying 3000 miles across the country every week or every other week with the founders and, and everyone else to talk to and listen to our hosts face to face in a we work actually in Soho. Douglas: Everything you did was new because basically everything we were doing had never been done before. There was no marketing book or playbook you could buy at the store about how you do what we did because we were inventing, you know, not just a new company or even a new market or even a new economy. We inventing a new behavior as well, which is getting strangers to trust each other enough that they will be, feel happy and content to have a complete stranger they've never met before, sleeping in their bed at night. So it was like changing everything. And so I placed in that context it is both liberating because you cause after that and then when you doing something so radical, you know you don't want to do the status quo for anything but but we generally had to make everything up as we were going along because it hadn't been done before. Joel: Yeah, and I love how this has become commonplace. The things that were so radical back then are becoming normal place today. Douglas, appreciate it. For our listeners, where can they find out more about you? This is part three and a mini part series. On our next edition we will be talking about longterm culture goals but Douglas for you any Twitter accounts you want to point people to or websites? Douglas: You can find me on LinkedIn and I'm writing the series on Medium about how Airbnb founders purpose might. It's a good one and then how Airbnb lives its purpose of which doing plan B's is one. Joel: Outstanding. Thank you Douglas. Douglas: You are welcome. Chad: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show, and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Marketing #Smashfly

Just when you think Facebook is about the bow out of the employment game, something new happens and the boys talk about something new this week. What else, LinkedIn and Indeed were in the news, along with Delta Airlines and Amtrak. What's more, a new site has entered the global Top 5 in job search traffic. Who is it? Gotta listen. Enjoy this podcast, powered by Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. James Ellis: Employer brand isn't something you sprinkle on your recruiting like magic fairy pixie dust to kind of make it better. It is both a craft, and a calling if that's the kind of work you want to do with your employer brand, come join me. James Ellis at the talent cast. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRSs most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash, and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hearse 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: Aw yeah, boy. Howdy kids, and welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. HR is most prison ready duo. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week show, Delta Airlines workers get paid. LinkedIn TalentHub gets cozy, and Facebook goes all Google for jobs on us. Chad: What? Joel: Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume, and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com that's S-O-V-R-E-N com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software, so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: I'm well fired up today, Chad. I got SWAT teams out in my yard. I got a drug sniffing dog. Yeah. You know the neighborhood I live in is pretty rough. So, we got shit all the time. No, it's been a crazy morning here for sure. I'm a little bit a little bit jacked up, and I've only had two cups of coffee before the show. So, let's get to the shout outs. Chad: I can see you peeking through your vertical blinds, "What's going on?" Joel: Remember The Burbs with Tom Hanks back in the 80s? It was a total like window moment. I'm going to multiple windows to see what's going on. So, to put a little context this, my neighbor who's, from what I could tell a nice guy, I walked the dog this morning, and there's like seven cop cars. Well, a combination of cop cars, and like detectives who are in regular cars, clearly searching my neighbor's house. For what, I don't know, but it's been an exciting morning to say the least. They had the dogs come in. Don't be surprised if my door goes off here while we're recording, and I get some questions from a detective. Unfortunate, I don't have anything to tell him. It's not a Burbs situation. But anyway it's been a fun morning here out in suburbia for sure. Chad: That sounds like a blast. Oh shit, fuck, or not getting into shout-outs. The new Chad and Cheese t-shirt Promotions going to be happening soon, kids. So, remember last year, we thought, "Hey a Chad and Cheese t-shirt would be kind of cool." And Joel was like... Joel: I didn't think it was. Chad: Joel was like, "Nah, I don't think so." And guess what? Everybody thought it was fun and cool. So it's coming back, and we're going to have the same type of promotion we did last year. We're going to have our listeners vote on which tee shirt they believe should be the 2020 Chad and Cheese T-shirt. Joel: Yep. I don't know if it will be better, but it's got to be bigger, because I've gained about 12 pounds since the last t-shirt. So, slightly kidding there. A shout out from me to Build a Bear. I don't know if you've seen this in a mall near you, but these stores that build little stuffed Teddy bears. They're bringing baby Yoda to Build a Bear. With a three year old I couldn't be happier. I'm going to Build a Bear very soon to get me a baby Yoda. Chad: Can you imagine the Disney cut on that? Because you know Disney's taking like the largest cut. That baby Yoda is probably the cutest thing I've seen in a very long time. Other than Jeremy, of course. Joel: Good God. Jeremy's my kid for those that don't know. Chad: Axe. Joel: Shout out to David Bernstein, Job Sync. We don't talk about new hires very often, but David is sort of an icon, a stalwart in the industry if you will. Job Sync was recently a firing squad participant. Alex Murphy swung and hit a home run on that one. So good for David. I think he left Allyo, which is where he was prior to this I think, but a big win for Job Sync, good things continue to happen for them. Chad: David Bernstein also known as the Steven Seagal of the recruiting industry. Joel: Yes. The man that can still pull off a ponytail. I don't know how he does it. Chad: Oh, big shout out to Deidre Pitts, she's apparently a big Chad and Cheese fan. I heard that she's probably going to want one of those new Chad and Cheese T-shirts. Joel: Love it. Love it. Well, I'll see your super fan there, and I'll add Cameron Laker, Vancouver based Minefield. That's the company name. Not like there's a minefield in Vancouver, although there might be. He's the CEO and co-founder of this RPO big fan, reached out to me and said, "Guys love the podcast. Keep it up." So, out there on the West coast in the north, Cameron Laker the shout outs for you, buddy. Chad: Boom. Lynn Stewart over at TMP connected with me on LinkedIn, and wanted to say that she definitely loves the show. Joel: Awesome. Rick Carsley of Ikea, he sat down with us this week, showed us a good time, showed us the inner workings of Ikea, had a great time out there. Apparently, you got to actually top golf with him. I had to leave to get my kid early, so maybe you can add some context to how that went. Chad: Well, first off, we had a full Ikea spread. I didn't know that Ikea actually have chefs on staff. So, Chef Joshua brought us in this amazing spread is what it was. We didn't go to a buffet. Joel: He brought us balls. Chad: It was brought to us. Joel: Big balls, spicy balls. Chad: We had all the different types of Swedish meatballs that Ikea loves, and cares for, but we had wonderful outlay of food, and great conversation with Richard, which is going to be coming very, very soon. He did show up late to top golf. I was actually just walking off. We had a beer, and I can guarantee you we are going to meet again. Joel: Fantastic. The level of transparency that he showed in the interview was fantastic. So, make sure that you listen to that one. If you're a fan of the show, you'll, you'll love it. Chad: Yep. Big shout out to Phyllis Badgett from AMS. She is a new listener, and she's enjoyed what she's heard thus far. And probably that was because it was Mark Jones, the SVP for AMS. Joel: Mister Jones and me. Give it some time. It'll rot your brain to the point that you don't like it anymore. Chad: It's good stuff. Joel: All right. Nancy from Philly, who we have not mentioned in a long time, heart goes out to her. Apparently, she was in some sort of a car wreck. Chad: No way. Joel: So, she's been a little bit out of the loop. She says, "I'm back, and I'm bad, and I'm going to reengage with you guys, and listen to the show again, and catch up on episodes." So, Nancy, we love you out there in Philly. Hope you're okay, and stay safe. Chad: Love you, Nancy. And we didn't say that. Also, Rick from Ikea is from the Philly area. So if you guys want to- Joel: Philly loves us. Chad: We've got a bunch of Philly listeners. Joel: So by the way, Philly, Philly Recruits coming up. We're not invited. We outstayed our welcome apparently after one show. But yeah, if you're in the Philly area, checkout Philly Recruit, it was a grand old time. Chad: I think it's recruit Philly. Joel: Whatever. Chad: Adam Gordon over at Candidate ID, I swear listens to every podcast that pops. I don't know if he's listened to as many pods as Steven Rothberg has, but he continues to tell us on Twitter how wrong we are, and we appreciate that Adam. Joel: And we usually are wrong. So it's not that big of a stretch to point out how wrong we are. I'm really out of shout outs, but I'm waiting for you to bring up Wilkins Burnett. Does that name ring a bell? Chad: Okay, so LinkedIn is whack. Okay. So, Wilkins Burnnett connects with me on LinkedIn, and then I automatically get a message, and she says, "Hey, I'm looking to upgrade my page, and I'm looking for" pretty much a relationship "a partner" is what she said. And I responded, "Okay, a page partner? I don't get it." She's like, "No, two different things." I kind of think I know where this is going. So I was like, "Okay, so a business partner." And she was like, "No, a boyfriend or somebody to marry." And I'm like, "You got to be fucking kidding me." Within less than five minutes, this is what I get. Okay. So once again, not the first time, cat fishing on LinkedIn alive, and well. Chad: Second, we talk about sales people on LinkedIn all the fucking time. Please, if you're a recruiter or your sales person. So, I get a connection request from a kid. His name is Frederick Noble Ropkey, the eighth, not the second, not the third, the eighth. Joel: This fucker royalty or something? The eighth. Chad: Anyway, as soon as I connect, I get a sales request for a call, and I wrote back, "Dude, you're killing me. I don't even know you, and you're pitching me a call." His response was "Why not have a discovery call? You accepted my friend request. If we're not actually going to talk then what is the point of connecting on LinkedIn?' My response was "good point" and I severed the connection. It's fairly simple people, if you just go in again, it's kind of like when you're a teenager, and you're just hitting the hormonal phase, and you just want to go straight after it because you haven't had sex yet. It's got to be slow, and you've got to create a relationship, and you can't just go after it. Just can't hit it and quit it. You got to you got to do this the right way. Joel: Buy me a couple of drinks, and get to know me first. Chad: Fucking crazy, dude. Joel: Don't try to dive down my pants at the first connection on LinkedIn. I will go back to the wind. All right, where did they get the name Wilkins Burnnett. Chad: It is totally fake. I have no clue. Joel: Burnnett has like three Ns in it or something. Chad: Two Ns. Joel: It feels like some AI software like just is pumping out these profiles with crazy name. Chad: Dude. Joel: So, if you get a Wilkins Burnnett, people just don't accept. Chad: It's not just that. If you get somebody who is trying to hook up with you on LinkedIn, I mean seriously, if you're not doing this on Tinder, right? You're looking for a hookup on Tinder. If you're not, you're on Facebook. If you're on TikTok, just push away from the table and say no fucking way. Okay, but that being said... Joel: Pretty sure there's a whole lot of hooking up that's going on via LinkedIn. Don't you think? Chad: Fuck no. Joel: Pretty much, every social network I bet. Chad: No, that's so sad. Joel: No? If you found your husband or wife on LinkedIn, hashtag us at #chadcheese and tell us the story. Chad: That being said, if you want to connect with us on LinkedIn, not catfish us, connect with us on LinkedIn, because you listen and you want to engage. I mean real engagement, not try to get me on a fucking sales call within five minutes. Then feel free to find us individually on LinkedIn, on Twitter. If you like the Facebook, we have a Chad and Cheese page on Facebook. You can look that up. Feel free to engage with us anyhow. Anyway, on Twitter #chadcheese. Joel: If you want to have that call with Chad, at least start out with something like "Love the podcast. You're so much smarter than that cheese guy" you know, stroke his ego, and he'll maybe take the call with you, but don't just jump into it. Chad: There's a possibility. Joel: You're saying there's a possibility? Chad: Let's do this really quick, events. We're firming up our 2020 events schedule, our calendar. Again, partnering with our travel sponsor, Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Shaker Recruit Marketing everybody. So I'm really looking forward because we sent them a shopping list for new stuff this year. So I can't wait to see... Joel: Waiting for my Speedo. Chad: Getting the Cheeseman Speedo. We are locked in to the Gathering of Cult Brands, February 19th through the 21st in Banff. Joel: Canada. Chad: Dude, fucking winter. It's a winter Wonderland at the base of the Canadian Rockies with some of the biggest brands in the world. It's Forbes, top rated, must attend business summit Under Armor, Hot Wheels, Doritos, Spotify, Coca-Cola, ESPN, Skittles. I mean fucking brands that you're not going to see anywhere in our conferences, and our events, and the types of people, the actual brand types, the CMO types. This is the best opportunity for you to actually get in front of those type of people, listen to them, and engage in conversations, whether it's around employer, brand, holistic brand. It doesn't matter. Joel: If you're an agency, you would do yourself a favor by at least sending someone to explore the opportunities at this conference. Whole lot of money being sloshed around. Chad: We're talking marketing money people, branding money people. Joel: Marketing money pitches. Chad: Not to mention. Once again, I can't imagine in our industry this wouldn't be just a pipeline. So if you are in an advertising agency, recruitment marketing agency, what have you, and you're not going to Banff for the gathering. What the fuck are you waiting for? Go to cultgathering.com, literally. Not to mention on Friday we're going to be the first ones on stage and it looks like we're going to have mimosas, the Caesar, which is the bloody Mary of Canada, and some other hair of the dog drinks. Joel: Can't wait, and looking a little bit ahead in March, we'll be heading to London for the TA Tech Unleashed Super Conference. Chad: Pretty awesome. Joel: Firming up the Deathmatch contestants as we speak. Chad: Love it. Joel: But be on the lookout for that. It's going to be good time. Chad: Excellent, You ready to get to the news? Joel: Topics. You got some insight on Facebook. What's up? Chad: Yeah. The Facebook jobs product is starting to spike, so big props to Nathan Patrick, and the gang over at AIA worldwide, AKA TMP. Patrick and Nathan contacted me, and said they had some really intriguing information around Facebook. So, apparently Facebook is starting to test what happens when they actually start getting job content into their jobs platform. Joel: Say what. Chad: They've apparently started scraping jobs from corporate career sites, and AIA/TMP noticed activity through their TalentBrew platform. Joel: Interesting. Chad: Huge apply click spikes. So, they investigated, and found their clients jobs on their respective Facebook pages, and the clients had no clue how the fuck they got there. Joel: Of course. Chad: AIA reached out to Facebook, and the regular Facebook job, customer service people had no clue either. So, this is obviously happening in beta. It is so new that they haven't even briefed the jobs people about this. And I think it's interesting because you brought up the applicant tracking system integrations that are happening. Joel: Yep. So they're developer pages have integration via ATS as part of their solution. There's some big names in there that we know, SAP SuccessFactors. ISM-SmartRecruiters, but you're saying that's clearly not an integration with an ATS. This is actually apparently scraping jobs, and getting them into Facebook and the new apply button I think is interesting. That says basically what apply through the company website, or something and then that person goes off Facebook and applies through the website. So that's certainly new. Chad: Yeah, instead of the chat bot, or uploading information to Facebook. Right. Joel: Yep. Yep. Chad: The thing that's interesting is that obviously TalentBrew is not an applicant tracking system. They are the cosmetic piece for experience. They do gather information, but really if you think about it there's an ATS behind it. So, if there was an integration, they would already be pulling the jobs from the ATS directly. Right? Joel: Right. Chad: That's not happening. So, they must be going to the actual sites themselves, clicking on careers, clicking on jobs that they might have built a bot to be able to do this, to identify where they're at, and start scraping. But it's interesting that this is obviously something that's new, something that's happened over the last quarter, or so, but they're seeing very big spikes. I guess you could say runs parallel to what we saw with Google for jobs. Joel: So, Indeed's got to be happy about this, that they were dealing with Google for jobs with Google. Now they get to deal with Google for jobs on the largest social network in the world. So they've got to be giddy about this new development. Chad: Even more so companies like Career Arc, who have created actual products around feeding jobs to Facebook. I mean, we don't need that anymore. We're actually paying you to do it, and Facebook is coming to us to do this, now. It's kind of, it seems intermittent to a point, because Nathan and Patrick actually said not all of the jobs are actually showing up on Facebook. In some cases they were, so maybe they're not hitting the scrape every 24 hours, who knows? But it does sound very amateur, and beta at this point. Joel: Sounds suspicious. God dammit. Every time I want to write Facebook off, and say they don't really give a shit, and they're eventually going to peter out and give up. They do something like this that tells me, they're kind of serious about this job search stuff and they're going to continue to do it. Which makes sense. I mean, I know that their marketplace is getting crazy traffic. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I mean, Zuckerberg has been on record talking about how much traffic goes to the marketplace and the classified. So, it makes sense, and you know, a billion and a half, you know, headed towards 2 billion people on the planet. That's, you can't just fuck with that shit. Like it's going to be potentially huge. Indeed, and others should be quite aware of this. Chad: Yeah, and think of it from this standpoint, Google for jobs, user experience isn't great, because you go to the job, there are all these buttons that ask you to click through, and apply with one of these job boards, and or the career site. They're doing this from the from the reason of obviously, "Hey, we're not a monopoly. We don't want to have an antitrust issue", but it really sucks for the user if they click on our job board, and then they have to go through really an intermediary to be able to do what they want to do. Chad: That being said, the Facebook scenario, Facebook's just taking them currently directly to the job on the corporate career site. Whether that's housed by your TalentBrew, or your applicant tracking system. It doesn't matter. So this is pretty telling I think, and I really believe, just like you'd said, the Indeeds of the world are going to lose in this case. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. Joel: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Facebook man, keep plugging. More news out of the 800 pound gorilla category. So LinkedIn, this past week launched some new affiliates. They added video, and candidate background screening tools to their TalentHub, which is their applicant tracking system. The new tools are provided by First Advantage and Talview. First Advantage of course is background checks, drug screening, all that good stuff. Then Talview, you're looking at basically video interviewing, AI enabled stuff. I don't know a ton about them, but you know a little bit about Talview. Can you speak to what their capabilities are? Chad: I can't really speak to their capabilities. I just know that if you're looking at LinkedIn actually displacing Dynamics 365, the talent version, that's big. When we first started talking about TalentHub, we're like, "Well, what are they going to do?" They have two applicant tracking systems now. Well, I think they're making it very apparent, and they're going to start stacking things on top of TalentHub. First Advantage just purchased by Silver Lake not too long ago, and Talview, I mean these are two big partnerships to be able to focus on different aspects of the game that LinkedIn probably really doesn't want to touch, or maybe they want to acquire those organizations down the road. Joel: Yep. So a little bit more about Talview. So, the Greenwood Talview founded in 2017, offers users access to Talview's proprietary. It's called the Instahiring experience platform. The company says its platform "enables hiring managers to work remotely, automate routine tasks, and reuse data throughout the hiring process. The firm offers an AI enabled video interviewing service with natural language processing, and video analytics." Chad: Again, we're talking about going through, trying to build a full scale hiring stack, right. Or at least on the way to try to get there through partnerships. Joel: Sounds a little bit like our friends at VERVO, or some hiring view competition, I guess. Chad: Yeah, but that competition is plugged directly into LinkedIn. Joel: Cool. Very good. Well, let's get a word from Canvas. We'll talk about one of your favorite companies, Delta Airlines. Chad: Oh yeah. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent, text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen, and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center. While Canvas bot is at your side. Adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology, and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Canvas: Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy, and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: You know, I got to say, I'm still a little bit angry at Delta Airlines wife for making me sprint in the Atlanta airport last year, trying to keep up with you, but this next story makes me feel a little better about Delta Airlines. Chad: I love me some Sky Lounge. Joel: You do love Delta, man. Chad: The story from AJC, Delta to pay out 1.6 billion in profit sharing to workers. Joel: Oh shit. Chad: Dude. Okay, this is the kind of story that we want to hear and I'm always pounding out about, with regard to companies, and record profits, right? So quote, "employees will get the bonus payout on Valentine's Day." Very nice, Delta. When the company typically holds profit sharing celebrations for workers across the country. It will be its sixth year in a row that the airline has paid out more than 1 billion in profit during payment. Chad: According to Bastian, the CEO, "for years I would get beaten up by Wall Street. They thought the profits were theirs. And why are you giving the profits away to employees?." Bastian said during the remarks that he had during a press conference Monday, that's "Wall Street has actually come full circle, and they realize that Delta is the most awarded airline in the world because of its employees." Chad: This is one of the things that you and I kind of go roundabout, is that when companies use that those profits, or they're not paying taxes, and they're buying back stock themselves, and they're not putting it in their employees. This is where you fuck up. Unless you're Delta Airlines, and you put that money back into your employees, you make them feel wanted. Not to mention, this is like two months of a salary, was it not? Like two months, I had two months of salary. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Big applause dude. Joel: Yeah, big applause on that, and yeah, so some context, two months’ salary. That's not nothing. I mean in terms of a recruiting, and retention tool? Chad: Yes. Joel: This is serious, serious business, and I think it works out to roughly a third of gross profit that's going into the bonuses that go to the employees. It's also interesting to note that these sort of profit sharing agreements also happen in a few other airlines, and they also are pretty common in the auto industry. Joel: One thing that both those industries have in common are labor unions. So, whether you're pro or anti-labor union, there is probably some connection to rewarding employees, because you're dealing with labor unions that are expecting rewards, and not expecting you to reward Wall Street or shareholders, which let's be honest, most of the tax cuts that have happened go back into Wall Street. They're not going back into workers pockets. So big applause for Delta for not looking at Wall Street, but looking at their employees to reward with the profits that they made as a great airline as Chad keeps reminding me, although the jury's still out as far as I'm concerned. Chad: Well, the company expects to hire six to 7,000 people this year, and a total of 25,000 over the next three or four years. In a very competitive landscape, this is the way you do it. I mean this is the type of things that you have to do. Yes, we have to focus more on the people. When you do that, as it was said, the most awarded airline in the world, because of why? Not because of the CEO, not because of the fucking stock holders, because of the people who do the work every single day. When we lose sight of that, that's when we lose our brand. That's when we lose our people. And that's when we start to fuck up. Much like a company. We're getting ready to talk about. Joel: Choo, choo. Amtrak. Chad: So, Amtrak asked two people who use wheelchairs, individuals with disabilities to pay 25,000 for a ride that would normally cost them $16 a piece. This is an NPR story. Imagine an organization treating their people as great as Delta did, right? Or, and hopefully they will continue to, now imagine an organization treating their customers badly. Now, we're talking about Amtrak who pretty much said "Hey look, our trains are not fitted for people with wheelchairs. So what we have to do is we have to take a one of those out of service for a day, and then we can bring it back. And that's going to cost about $25,000. Joel: So, basically for the cost of an actual car, they had to pay that to buy a seat on an Amtrak. This is like a Saturday Night Live parody of a parody. It's so bizarre. Chad: It is. Joel: That this that this happened. I don't even have much to say about it except what the fuck? Chad: Again, this is total bullshit reply from Amtrak. They said, "Oh, you know it's going to take us, we're going to have to take a car out of service for a day, blah blah blah." It's total bullshit, because they should already meet accommodations. It's called universal design, and it's something that is good for everybody. So, to be able to say, no, we've got to take a car out to make it ready for somebody with a wheelchair is total complete bullshit. Chad: They should have accommodations available and there are different types of accommodations. Think about it from airplanes, and the flight accommodations. Right? Joel: Sure. Chad: They have actual, they have people there. Now you can't bring your wheelchair in, and set your wheelchair in that slot, right. A little bit different, but still, here's the thing, they have people that are dedicated that you see with the wheelchairs. They're walking them down who actually help those individuals get to where they need to go. They get in first, or they come off last what have you, but there are accommodations that are made. If Amtrak said, we will make accommodations, we will actually have a human being help, and service while you're on ride, right. That would be an accommodation that they could have made that just makes sense. But in this case, they're pretty much saying fuck you. Joel: I mean the Americans with Disabilities Act is a 30 year old plus act, right. As far as I understand and Amtrak is no stranger to sort of these issues of disability seating challenges, and whatnot. So this is just really bizarre. I mean, I love how the story says for 25 grand they could have bought more than 1500 tickets. Chad: Yeah. Joel: As opposed to the one that they were priced. So, this is just fucked up, man. Get your shit together, Amtrak. Chad: Ridiculous. Joel: But what's not ridiculous is the deal you can get from JobAdX. Let's hear from them, and when we come back from that, we're going to hear about a new company that has cracked, the global top five for job search traffic. Ooh, how's that for a tease? We'll be right back. JobAdX: Nope, not for me. All these jobs look the same, next. JobAdX: This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just halfheartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it. We live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs, and bullets in templated job descriptions. JobAdX: Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop-off. JobAdX: You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compelled top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing, joinus@jobadx.com that's, joinus@jobadx.com Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: Oh, shit. My neighbor's running down the street. Oh shit, just kidding. Just kidding. Chad: So bad. Joel: So, Indeed rolled out some news this week. They launched the Indeed job market. That sounds sexy, doesn't it? So, the service works as a subsection of indeed.com, it contains educational material, discussion board, resume tutorials, and a database of employer reviews similar to those that you'll find on Glassdoor. It also includes a local events calendar, that's exciting, which now consists of eight Indeed events in the US meant to introduce the Indeed job market to job seekers. Joel: Obviously, with Google for jobs, Indeed is looking to launch new things like this, so just local events to get local markets excited. This story was in AIM Group this week. They believe the strategy is working, by early last year quote "almost 44% of indeed.com traffic was direct." Although, I would say a lot of that was the advertising that they're spending. "Half of search traffic was from searches contending the word Indeed, which is interesting." Chad: Which again is from advertising. I mean what they're about is they're spending a shit ton of cash to be able to get people to the site. Which is fairly understandable, but it's one of those things where before Google for jobs, they had all of this organically coming to them, right? It wasn't something that they paid for, but they did do search engine marketing, don't get me wrong, but they had a leg up over everybody else because of their organic search, and now that organic search is somewhat displaced. Chad: I think this is interesting. No question. Because they are going to have to do something, add services, all these different things, and while they do this, are they going to take their eye off the ball? That's the big question. Joel: The ball in your mind is jobs. When they first came out, ‎Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, when they first came out it was really specific. It's cost per click, right? Pay per click advertising. It's very focused. It is laser focused, and that's what we're going to do and that's what they did incredibly well, right. Joel: When you start to see organizations like this broaden up, and they don't just broaden up into two or three different areas, they do it in a multitude of areas. You wonder if they're going to lose focus in the areas that matter most to their stakeholders. Their stakeholders being the candidates, and then the employers, and they obviously don't really care about the quote unquote "employers" that much, because of you know, search quality or what have you. They believe that everything starts with the job seeker, and okay, that's great. But if they take their eye off of the job seeker ball, the employer is going to go away entirely. Joel: Sure. I think when you see these sort of brand searches, it is an indication that they are building a strong brand via television advertising, in this case. That's obviously a model that's very costly. So, someone there said, "gee, can we do like local events or resources or how to write a resume shit on the site to be more of a resource tool." Now Monster, CareerBuilder, everyone else has done that stuff, and it didn't really work out too well for them. Joel: The brand stuff starts to wear out as you stop advertising, right? I mean it took one generation for monster to an energy drink as opposed to a job board for kids today. So, Indeed, if they stop spending the money, to me they're in trouble. To me when the rubber hits the road is when Google starts adding a pay per click component to Google for jobs. Joel: And maybe talking about Facebook, Facebook starts integrating some sort of a pay per click, or promotional thing, because companies only have so much budget to spend in these places. I'm going to guess that Google's going to undercut in price, and get everyone over to Google, which is going to fuck Indeed. Cause they're either going to have to lower prices or lose advertisers completely. To me that's when things really get chaotic at Indeed. I'm not sure these things that they're launching now is going to put Google at bay when they start launching pay-per-click stuff, and companies have to decide where am I going to spend my money? Chad: Well, I think what we have to remember is that Google, and Facebook are more lifestyle platforms. They're used every day. Whether you're looking for a job, you're looking for a recipe, you're looking just to interact, and engage in the community. That's what you use. My phone uses Android, right? I mean it's actually baked into my every single day behavior. Indeed is not, right. Joel: Nope. Chad: These things that they're launching are nice for that individual if they're looking for a job, right. If I'm looking for a recipe, I don't give a fuck. If I'm looking for directions. I don't give a fuck, right. So, I agree, but going to a gun fight with a rubber band, they're going to be shooting a rubber band. Joel: You wanna get Capone? One of his brings a knife. You bring a gun, he puts one of yours in the hospital. You put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way. Chad: Well, FBI way. Joel: All right, a new entrant into the top five global job search numbers here. This was provided by a similarweb.com and AIM Group analytics. So, your top five reads like this, now. Indeed at number one with 590 million worldwide visitors, users, that's fucking nuts. Number two is Joobal, J-O-O-B-L-E, not well known here in the US with 123 million users. Glassdoor at 69.2 million, HeadHunter at 51.1 million, neuvoo- Chad: neuvoo. Joel: ...also known as talent.com if you've been listening to the show, comes in at number five cracking the top five with 47.3 million. So with the talent.com name, the new entry into top five, they're on their way, and they're right on the heels of HeadHunter just four million left and they could go to the number four spot. Chad: This is momentum, and this is momentum before they actually start the big push of talent.com, right? So this is the before. So, this says something to me, they're doing something to actually get ready for a big splash. This in moving forward with new brands, we just talked about obviously Indeed spending a shit ton of cash. Is that sustainable? Right? What can talent.com do with this new name to be able to provide sustainability when it comes to growth? That'll be exciting to watch. Joel: Yeah, and it's kind of a nice little a prize fight that we get to watch here in the next few years, which we didn't have just a couple of years ago. I didn't even know who fuck neuvoo was two years ago. I don't know about you. Chad: Exactly, and in two years we won't know who they are either because they will be talent.com. They will be talent.com that'll be who we know them as, and it'll be a word we can all spell, and say. Joel: The traffic number for Indeed also underscores how long it's going to take for them to die. Chad: It took Monster a while to get thrown off the top of the mountain. I think in this case it's going to take longer, but once again, unless Indeed understands that they're playing, they're trying to play a lifestyle game, and they're not a lifestyle platform. That that again is another focus point where a neuvoo or a talent.com, or what have you. I don't think that they're going to play that lifestyle game. I think they know where their bread is buttered, and they're going to have laser focus. This is how Goliath gets knocked down by David. SFX: That's it, man. Game over man, game over. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast with Chad, the cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible, and not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, swiss, the so many cheeses, and not one word, some 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. It's so weird. We out. #Facebook #GoogleforJobs #Google #Indeed #DeltaAirlines #Amtrak #LinkedIn

Referrals rock! Ask most companies and they'll tell you referrals are the best resource for candidates they currently employ. Unfortunately, vendors hoping to solve the referral riddle have largely fallen on their collective faces. Remember Jobster? H3? Exactly. But one startup is hoping to change all that and they're willing to put their better mousetrap in front of the Firing Squad. Tell your friends about this Talroo exclusive and enjoy. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. Chad: Talroo was focused on predicting, optimizing, and delivering talent directly to your email or ATS. Joel: So it's totally data-driven talent attraction, which means the Talroo platform enables recruiters to reach the right talent at the right time and at the right price. Chad: Guess what the best part is? Joel: Let me take a shot here. You only pay for the candidates Talroo delivers. Chad: Holy shit. Okay, so you've heard this before. So if you're out there listening in podcastland and you are attracting the wrong candidates and we know you are, or you feel like you're in a recruiting hamster wheel and there's just nowhere to go, right? You can go to talroo.com/attract. Again, that's talroo.com/attract and learn how Talroo can get you better candidates for less cash. Joel: Or just go to chadcheese.com and click on the Talroo logo. I'm all about the simple. Chad: You are a simple man. Pirate: Ye be poo without Talroo. Announcer: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover kids. The Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Oh yeah. I've got an itchy trigger finger today, Chad. We haven't done Firing Squad in a while so I'm pretty pumped today and I've had about eight glasses, sorry, eight cups of coffee. Glasses would be too bougie for me. Chad: You are pretty bougie. Joel: It's true. All right, today we are honored to welcome Sammy Davis Jr, also known as Sam Davis, the CEO of Real Links. Sam, straight out of the UK. Man, welcome to firing squad. Sam: Hey, what's up guys! It's great to be here. Joel: Pleased to have you here. It's Friday in London, it's almost a happy hour. Are you in a pub right now? Sam: The rest of our team I'm here with you guys instead. Chad: You take them and you're like, "Get the fuck out of the office. I've got to do this thing." Joel: Nice moral support. "Hey boss, we're going down to the pub. Good luck." Sam: Exactly. Joel: Jesus Christ. Well, Sam, give us a little bit about you and then Chad will read you the rules, we'll get to the company, but we want to learn a little bit about you because no one knows who the hell you are. Sam: Yeah, no, that's fair. So yeah, a bit of background on me, I went into recruitment immediately after university, lasted about six months being a recruitment consultant, randomly doing early years in the North of England. Don't ask where that is. Then decided to kill my soul a little bit more and go into corporate law. Chad: Oh shit. Sam: Yeah, it was hell boys. It was. But actually I got referred from one law firm to another law firm and it was that which prompted me to think actually the reason I decided to work here, the reason I decided to join this law firm is because it came from somebody I knew, somebody I trusted. Why is this not happening more? And that was basically the Genesis of this. And thankfully I decided, no offense to my old colleagues, to get the hell out of there and set this up and my life has been significantly better since. Joel: All right, so who's your football team? Sam: I am a Chelsea fan. Joel: Beatles or Rolling Stones? Sam: I'd go rolling stones. Joel: All right, very good. Chad, read him the rules. Chad: All right, Sam, you are going to have two minutes to pitch Real Links. At the end of two minutes you're going to hear the bell. Then Joel and I are going to hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling, Joel's going to hit you with the crickets. That just means tighten up your game and move along. Joel: Move along kid. Chad: That's right. At the end of Q and A, you are going to receive one of three grades. Number one, this is what you want to hear, the big applause. Chad: That's right. Get your bank account ready. The money's going to be rolling in. Joel: Make it rain Sammy. Chad: That's right. Number two, the golf clap. Yeah, you can do better than that. You might be on the boat, but you can do better than that. And last but not least, the Firing Squad. That's right, hit the bricks, close up shop, get the hell out of here because more than likely, this is not the thing for you or anyone else. Joel: Take your ass to the pub. Chad: That's Firing Squad. Are you ready Sam? Sam: Ready. Joel: Two minutes starting... Sam: Employee referrals are a great hiring solution. They lead to a 39% better retention rate and candidates are three to four times more likely to be hired to name just a few referral stats. The problem is that generally companies struggle to get more than 10% of annual hires through referrals. That's what our employee referral platform Real Links comes in. Sam: As you guys know, there are a few other players in the market, so I'm going to focus on what makes us different here. Our platform syncs in employees connections on LinkedIn, email, and Facebook, matches into live vacancies and notifies HR teams and employees when a match has been made. Sam: Employers have huge networks but it's too unmanageable and time consuming to search through them each time a new vacancy comes up. Our platform makes it manageable and supports diversity in the processes. As candidate data such as name, ethnicity, nationality, and gender is anonymized in the HR view, removing any unconscious bias. Sam: Our referral methodology is another key differentiator. We use gamification of rewards. We don't take a "one size fits all" approach. Each company is different, so we run focus groups to understand employee motivations and customize the gamification to meet their needs. It might be a raffle, it might be a point space leaderboard, but you don't know until you speak to the employees. This way we're able to increase referral participation and longevity. Sam: We also boost participation by letting employees select whether a referral is a recommendation or an introduction. People generally only feel comfortable recommending four to five people as referrals, but we have big networks of contacts with relevant skills and experience. Introductions to those contacts are also valuable. Allowing employees to identify what sort of referral it is takes the stigma away from them needing to be recommendations and opens up the referral network. Sam: Addressing one of the other key reasons for low engagement, we keep employees updated during the referral journey. Employees no longer feel that their referrals end up in a black hole and there's no transparency. We're already working with a number of large organizations including McKesson and Adecco. We white label the platform and do a two way integration with ATSs for our clients. Sam: Find out more about us and our pilot offering at reallinks.io. Joel: Hello. Look at that, he actually had the website address at the end of it. Sam: I was listening for the other ones so I heard Joel make that point. Chad: So it also, it sounds like you've had about three pots of coffee as well. Sam: Yeah. Joel: Yeah, he got in a whole lot there in a short period of time. Chad: Kudos to that. Joel why don't you turn it up. Joel: Yeah, for our American speaking listeners, that could be a little tough for them. Chad: Just slow down the podcast, you can do that. Joel: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Half speed folks. It'll sound great. All right. I'm always interested at first in terms of sort of the name and coming up with it. And the one thing that I looked into was, so you guys are really ".io" and so reallinks.com is for sale. I'm curious, did you sort of explore getting the ".com?" Were you married to the "io" from the outset? What's up with that? Sam: Yeah, being completely honest, we had a Real Link store "co.uk" initially. That was the site that we went with. And as we sort of scaled up, we got the investment. We wanted to obviously be seen as more than just the UK. And yeah, looked into it and the "io" just felt like sort of more along the lines of sort of a tech startup and where it was going. And that was just a decision that we made at that point. Joel: Sure. All the kids are doing it now. Are you open to exploring buying the ".com" at some point? Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: Okay. Chad: Easy, easy answer. Joel: And did you mention the investment in the opening? Sam: I didn't mention the investment in the opening line. I can talk you through that if you want. Joel: So mention it now. Sam: Yeah, sure. So we got some pre-seed and there's some seed investment through a VC called Fuel Ventures totaling sort of a roughly 1.4 million and it's been crucial. It's really helped us in terms of sort of scaling out the team, as is often the way with a startup. Sam: It was Dan and me in his basement, for quite a few months with our MVP and we went out there and with our MVP we were able to sort of win a couple of big clients, including actually McKesson who we've kept and Norton Rose Fulbright. But it was very apparent to us that to get to where we needed to be, the platform needed to be better. We needed to have the right infrastructure in place. Sam: So yeah, it's allowed us to hire on the tech side, hire on the sales side, and hire on the marketing side. And the platform that we have today is a lot, lot better than the platform that we had when we were working out of the basement, which is great. Chad: So you talk about all this hiring, how many employees do you currently have? Sam: Yeah, we've got nine at the moment. Chad: Okay, so nine. You had me thinking it was like 50 or something with all this hiring you were talking about it. Sam: Yeah. I mean, yes on the face of it, it seems like that. But when you're a startup and it's two people actually going from two to nine makes such a huge, huge difference. So yeah, I get that. Chad: Okay, so employee referrals, at least what we've seen here in the US and I would assume that transcends across the pond, they already work. It's usually the number one or number two source of hire for many hiring companies today. Right? So why do they need to change? It's already working. Why do I need to spend money on something that I'm not spending money on, but it's my either one or two source of hire? Why do I need to change? Sam: Well, I mean I would contest it in a sense that I would say that generally you see the percentage of annual hires in particular across Europe and the UK are being sort of under that 10% of annual high mark. So actually, if when you factor that in, there is an enormous amount of growth opportunity there in terms of pushing that percentage up. Sam: We believe a bit of good referral scheme, even without our product should be up around the 15-20% mark. We believe with our product we can get up to sort of 30-40% and that's where I really think that it's beneficial, because I slightly disagree in the sense that I do think that a lot of companies have it as quite a low percentage of their only hires and it could be a lot higher. Joel: Sam, we met you at Unleash in Paris. Bill Boorman introduced us, which I won't hold against you in the Firing Squad. Chad: Oh, I will. Joel: But I'm curious, how did you fare at the Unleash competition? Sam: We went in it. So basically, we signed up for a Unleash later on, so it wasn't possible for us to enter into the competition, but we are going back and we are going back to it this year and we will be entering. Joel: And you'll be in the competition this year. Okay, so this is a nice little primer for you guys headed to Paris next year. Sam: Yeah. Joel: All right. So as I understand it, so I'm at a company, you connect to my social network and you basically read my social networks skillset. So let's take LinkedIn for example. So you know, my LinkedIn connections, if there's a job in sales, you know everyone in my LinkedIn network that has sales in their profile and you alert me and say, "Hey, here 10 people that we think might be a good fit for this job." Do I understand that correctly? Sam: Yeah, that's essentially it. Yeah. So it's for all of the jobs that say a particular company. So we'll say it's McKesson for example. Particular job title goes into our taxonomy of related job titles. Same thing happens with all of our employees contacts, they'll go into same taxonomy where we are able to drop a match off the back of that. They will be shown as matches to you as the employee. It also allows the HR teams to sort of go into the platform and they're able to see where any of their contacts, any of their employees contacts have been matched to jobs and actually prompt the employees to make a referral. So if they're getting prompts from the platform but actually if the HR person's like, "I really want to see this candidate," they can send a referral request to the employee as well. Joel: Okay. So are you tapping into APIs to get that connection? Are you doing any scraping? What's sort of the backbone of that? Sam: Yeah. So it's really important, particularly from a sort of a GDPR perspective, that the employees obviously consent to sharing their connections with the platform. Joel: Yeah. Sam: So when it comes to sort of email with Gmail, Hotmail, et cetera, it's an easy sort of upload for an API there. When it comes to LinkedIn, essentially we allow them to sort of download their connections and upload their connections into our platform via way of a CSV. And we've sort of set up a nice sort of funnel for that to happen quite well in terms of the onboarding and the training piece that we do with clients. Chad: Wait a minute, all the employees have to do that from LinkedIn profile from LinkedIn profile? So if I have 300 employees, are you saying all 300 of them, to do this the right way, have to actually go through this process? Sam: Yeah, and it's part of the onboarding. So it's not that time consuming and it comes down to our customer success piece to nail this. Actually, the guy that you referred to earlier, Bill Boorman has been a big part of us developing that customer success piece to essentially make it as easy as possible for the employees to do that quickly and easily and make sure that we have the right onboarding plan in place. The customer success piece when it comes to that, it's crucial. Chad: So Chad touched a little bit about in terms of threats to the business and I think relying on that is obviously a threat, right? So if LinkedIn changes how you're able to download contacts or able to access contacts, I assume that's obviously a threat to your business. Do you agree, disagree? And if agree, how are you sort of managing that minefield? Sam: That's a fair question. So basically when it comes to the contacts that you've got on LinkedIn, so say you know your 300 contacts that you refer to. You have a right because they're your contacts that download details of them, which is why LinkedIn has that thing where you can essentially download a CSV of your contacts. So they can restrict certain amounts of information but they essentially still have to give you that right. LinkedIn made it I guess as hard as possible for people to essentially go through that process. Chad: Sure. Sam: Which is why they did do the APIs. But we're pretty safe in the sense that they've done that piece and we've still made it work. I think a little while ago, they were more open and certain companies were reliant on that API piece and they thought it would be a bigger issue than it is in terms of getting users to download and then upload. And it's actually interesting to see with the right onboarding plan you can make that work. Chad: So then how often do they have to download their contacts? Because obviously people are adding them all the time. Maybe deleting contacts or profiles are updated. How often do they have to do this? Sam: Yeah, so it could depend on company preference. So basically we have it set up so every three months the employee will be sent a reminder to refresh their contacts and they can refresh their contacts at any point on the dashboard of the platform as well. Chad: So when it comes down to the whole process, it really depends on how LinkedIn plays the Whac-A-Mole game. We just had a conversation with Sovren, the president of Sovren and they do parsing and they are talking about how LinkedIn, just incrementally, they're making it so much harder for companies to be able to do what they do. And I could see them perspectively, maybe not shutting you off totally, but just keep you chasing the rabbit as far as you possibly can and making it harder for you to do business. Have you seen them? How many changes have they made since your inception of the organization? What's that span been? Sam: Our MVP didn't have this piece of functionality, but since we've essentially built this piece of functionality, they haven't moved the needle in terms of the way in which people can download their connections. Prior to that, so obviously I've spent quite a lot of time sort of researching this, doing the evaluation of it. They had made that decision to make it harder. But my understanding and the advice we've had from a legal perspective is that they can't really go any further than this. Sam: So they have to as a base level provide this to users off their platform because although they're the intermediary, you know when you connect with somebody it's your connection and they've chosen to share their data with you. Sam: And subsequently you have the right to essentially pull that information, which means that we're relatively safe because they can't make it much harder. And we've actually found a workaround that is working and an onboarding plan and that's getting employees to do it even though it is a little bit more cumbersome than it once was. Chad: Yeah. Keyword "workaround." My next question, what is a bias-free application? It says it on the website. What does that even mean? Sam: I mentioned the HR view of the platform. Essentially for the HR view of the platform, when they go in and they're seeing employees connections, they're not seeing any personal identifiers. So they're not seeing their ethnicity, they're literally just seeing their experience. So where they work and their skills, et cetera. And the whole point of that is essentially, we're trying to make it so that they're not influenced by things such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, name. Sam: So look, there is always an element of being complete transparent, a bit of bias and these things. I mean the very fact that you went to a certain university and that's being seen, it affects, right? It impacts. Chad: Right. Sam: It would be outrageous to say that we've removed that completely, but we have done a bit there to help and ensure that it's perhaps a bit better than that you see elsewhere. Chad: Gotcha. Okay. So in employee referral programs, we're talking about actually trying to add a more diverse talent pipeline into the organization. Well employee referral programs have unintended bias already engineered into them. When you're hiring friends of Bob, you tend to get a bunch of people who look and think like Bob, so why would I focus on this aspect of hiring instead of diversifying? Joel: Yeah, Bob sucks. Sam: Great question. So you know when I was talking in my pitch about sort of recommendations and introductions? I was talking about how referrals historically tend to fall into sort of this recommendation bucket and that tends to be your friends of Bob, as you put it, that four to five people who are like Bob, who go to the same pub as Bob, probably go on holiday with Bob and you don't necessarily want more of those people. Sam: However, we tend to have quite vast and often diverse larger networks on LinkedIn through people that we may have studied with or people that we've potentially worked with, et cetera. They tend to be a lot more diverse than just my friends. Historically, people haven't referred those people beyond the recommendation piece, which means the referrals as a system aren't as sort of diverse as they could be. Sam: By actually opening it up and getting people to sink their connections and doing the matching for them, IE. looking at their bigger network, and saying, "Hey you're contact, Jill, who you never go on holiday with, you never go to the pub with actually seems to have the right skills and experience." Don't worry if it's not a recommendation, which you make an introduction is actually opening up the referral network and I think it's moving it away from being just your friends of Bob that referrals have been seen as historically. Joel: Sam, it looks like most of the interactions with opportunities and employees is via email. I'm curious, if that's correct, are you looking at adding SMS in the future? Maybe a Slack integration, WhatsApp, et cetera? Tell me about that. Sam: Yeah, 100%. Again, I'll refer back to the referral methodology piece. I couldn't squeeze any more into my pitch, so that's why I couldn't talk about that. But one of the things that we're looking at alongside that is what communication channels they use. Sam: We were dealing with a gaming company at the moment and it's like, okay, when you guys are communicating and you guys receive notifications, do you want that by email or do you want that by Slack? Or would you want that with dealing with, I won't say the name of the company, another company, and actually for them it made sense they wanted their notifications by WhatsApp. Sam: So in answer your questions, yes, it will always be sort of via email, but as soon as we learn that in the focus group, we will look to build an integration around whatever communication channel they want to be notified on. So we're actually just about start a pilot, which is all going to be done via WhatsApp notifications. Joel: And curious because you guys are relying so much on LinkedIn, for example, does it sort of restrict you from using your product with, let's say, service industries like restaurants, dry cleaning, things like that, people who don't necessarily have a LinkedIn profile? Sam: Yeah, really good question. Basically it reverts us back more to sort of version one of our platform actually and that piece of functionality. So the example I just gave you about the WhatsApp sort of communication notification piece is really relevant here. You might go in and run this focus group and be like, yeah, we're not connected on LinkedIn, but we all have Facebook and WhatsApp groups. So in that situation what you do is you're like, okay, well you're not being notified about any jobs here, but we know you're connected to them. Sam: So what we do in those instances is we encourage them to share on the networks that they're connected in. We don't do the matching piece for them as such, but we use our gamification functionality around sort of rewarding them for the different things, the different actions should we say, and encouraging them to share and send to people on the networks that we know that they use and that we learn about in those focus groups. Sam: So it does work. We've seen it work. It just requires a different approach, which again comes back to what I was saying right at the beginning, like when we set this company up we were a little bit naive. We were like, okay, well if we build it like this it'll work for each company. But we learned pretty quickly it doesn't, so we need to be able to customize and adapt. It took four companies like you're describing there, like McKesson for example, our longer standing client. There's a big group of their employee base which is in that boat. Chad: Well let's get into the adopting piece because most of these platforms or these processes or these programs have not been adopted because they are a pain in the ass from an engagement standpoint. How do you get past that? How do you get past not really having that kind of gray area of can I, or do I, or how hard is it to participate? Sam: You mean in the initial sort of onboarding piece or just sort of the life cycle? Chad: All the way through. Its onboarding as well as the adoption on the day to day. Sam: Absolutely. Yeah. No, it's so crucial. Again credit to Bill here, but actually going back to these focus groups again has a lot to do with how we get people on board it. So the rewards piece, so most organizations that you go into will have a referral bonus. And that referral bonus would be sort of paid six to nine months, sort of down the line when somebody passes probation or when they're hired, but it's really far in the future. And often most employees haven't been asked what they care about, what rewards would motivate them. Sam: So we go in and we sort of speak to them about, okay look, we want to launch this, obviously there's a bit of hassle in it in terms of getting you guys doing it. It's sort of outside of your job, what would make you do this? Why would you do it? And then they start speaking us about the sorts of rewards that they want about the sorts of gamification they want. So it might be like a weekend trip in Paris. Chad: So it's catered to them is what I'm hearing. Sam: Yeah. Chad: It's actually something that they want as opposed to something that the company thinks they want. Sam: Precisely. But not only that, it's more immediate. So it's like rather than waiting six months, there'll be a monthly raffle perhaps and you could win sort of a weekend trip. So making those rewards more immediate and acknowledging them for the different actions, including the onboarding piece. And when you're rewarding them with stuff they care about and you're making it more immediate really helps with that onboarding. But you have to learn what they want first. Chad: Yeah, it's like the mouse hitting the button for the sugar cube. So what about from a business aspect, what are you doing from a partnership development/channel development standpoint? Sam: Yeah, so we've got a few partnerships with ATSs already. We have one with Alio. Joel: Yeah, Taleo? Sam: Alio. Oh yeah, the other one. We're in the process with Cornerstone and we're in the process of building out more as well because it's crucial for us to be partnered with all the main ATSs. Chad: Kenexa, iCIMS. PeopleFluent. Sam: Yeah, absolutely. We are in discussion with that. Chad: I see it on their website. Sam: So it's crucial that we're, partnered and doing that. That's not the only partnerships or the channel that we're looking at, we're in discussions with Korn Ferry at the moment and a few of the big HR consultancies because we see that as being a key way of us scaling and being used as well. Joel: Nice. Chad: What about pricing? Sam: Yep. So it all depends on the company size. It's done on the basis that the number of employees that an organization has. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Sam: So for smaller organizations it starts at sort of four pounds per employee per month. But that scales way down when you're talking about the likes of Accentures of this world. If you were talking a global rollout, obviously that would be astronomical. So we sort of tailored the pricing depending on how big the organization is. Joel: Okay. Chad: So it's seeded almost too to an extent? If you have a hundred versus 300 the pricing is going to vary, do you have that siloed out on the website for people? How's that work? Sam: Yeah, it's not on the website. The reason for that is... Anyway, we are up front with it as soon as possible. In the pipeline piece. Joel: I'm really intrigued by sort of the badge and the data around the employees who are doing the most referring and sort of creating a competition internally. So that's not a question, but just curiosity of how engaged are employees, like do they really give a shit about this stuff? Do you see anything that would indicate like, wow, they're really fucking geeked on this stuff or not? Sam: Yeah. Again, it all comes down to the [inaudible 00:26:47]. If we get a focus group and we get some killer ideas off the back of it, it is really cool to see how excited they can get, particularly around the raffle stuff. When you're talking about a monthly raffle and you make it viable for everybody to actually have a chance of winning, you need to do points basically that's leadable for six months, for example. Sam: Within a month you've got your, say, five people at the front. It's hard for everyone else to catch, right? At least do a drop off. You don't think you're going to do it. It's like playing fantasy football. Whereas if you actually sort of do it on a more regular basis with a raffle, it does get people excited. It is cool to see. But it was all about being the right reward and something that they care about. Chad: There we go. Joel: All right Sam, that's the bell and you know what that means. It's time to face the firing squad. Are you ready? Sam: I'm ready. Joel: All right, Chad wants to go first. Chad: All right. So Sam, we've talked about this and I think that you being able to feed off of more than just LinkedIn obviously is incredibly important, but you've got to remember once you start feeding off of that morphine drip, you become addicted. And LinkedIn could shut you off at any time or play the moving the actual goal for you or where you get the data or where you get the contacts. The key word "workaround" is one of the things that you're going to have to really be diligent about with platforms like LinkedIn. Not to mention the whole friends of Bob things still within employee referrals is a problem, right? Chad: But I do agree 100% we need better employee referral programs. We can do better from an engagement standpoint. We can do better from a maximizing of the people that we know. I love the small immediate points of engagement and the gamification, which I think is awesome. And overall to stop the friends of Bob problem, we need data to audit and auditing will be the key to getting to an unbiased process. That's the only way we can do it. Chad: So for those reasons, and I think you're working through some hurdles and some obstacles you'll be able to, but for those reasons I'm going to give you a big applause. Joel: All right, way to go, Sam. Nice synopsis there, Chad. Always intriguing as usual. All right, it's my turn. I got to admit, when I heard about another referral solution, I couldn't help but sort of wax nostalgic and think about all the referral sites and solutions that have failed in the past. H3, Jobster, I could continue to name many. People have argued that, hey, well social media will change the game, mobile might change the game how we communicate, et cetera. Joel: I tend to think that we're probably closer to the right time for a referral system than we are away from it. So I do think that the time is probably right for a company like Real Links. I think the team is great. The initial funding I think is going to get you through that first hump in terms of your development. Joel: I don't love the sort of manual process that employees have to go through to get data. I know also you had mentioned that you look into email addresses of workers and try to create profiles through it that way. So I think you'll eventually work through some of that as well. I'd love to see you get the ".com" at some point. I'd love to see you become more global, get some more big companies in the basket, which it sounds like you're working on. Joel: Unfortunately, I don't give big applauses for stuff that will happen or what will probably happen or could happen, but I definitely think that you're on the right track. I think you just need to continue to work hard and make some of these things happen. So by no means the guns, but for me, you got some work to do, but you've come a good long way. We'll see you at Unleash. I hope you kick ass and win that competition, just like Job Sink who we also recently had on the firing squad. But other than that, Sam man, keep up the good fight and good job. Sam: Awesome. Yeah, that was great. Thanks for having me on, really enjoyed it. Joel: And Chad, as we always do, man, we out. Chad: We out. Announcer: This has been the firing squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the firing squad, contact the boys at chadchees.com today. That's www.C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E.com. #FiringSquad #Talroo #referrals #emp #Startup #bias #ATS #LinkedIn #social

Roberto Angulo, CEO of After College and Recruitology join the HR's Most Dangerous pod to talk about the survival of newspaper, Facebook's possible strategy for jobs, and how the hell does SMB embrace programmatic? Only the biggest questions tackled on this Sovren 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. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now based on that technology come Sovren's artificial intelligence matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second, receive much results, that provide candidates scored by fit to job. And just as importantly, the job's fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today, by visiting sovren.com that's, S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren. Software so human. You'll want to take it to dinner. Intro: Hide your kids, Lock the doors, you are 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: There it is. Aw yeah, dude I love that we have so many smart people come on the show and talk to us. Chad: We need to dude. We really do. It bounces out the stupid . Joel: For sure. Welcome everybody. I am Joel Cheesman of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. HR is most dangerous. Joined here with- Chad: Chad Sowash. Here we go. Joel: Chad Sowash, and lucky enough to snag Roberto Angulo. Chad: Roberto. Joel: Roberto Angulo, CEO and founder of Recruitology and Aftercollege. Is that how we should introduce you? Roberto: That works and- Joel: You like that? Roberto: I like it. Joel: What are we missing? What should we add to then? Roberto: Co-founder of after college and CEO and co-founder of Recruitology it is. I'm also an author, author of Getting Your First Job For Dummies, one of the Wiley books that I wrote about a year and a half ago. Joel: Really, When did that come out? Roberto: That came out last... Actually late 2018. Joel: Nice. Chad: Well for dummies. So you came on the right show. Wow, It's awesome. Roberto: Now the Wiley, because of after comes, "Hey, do you want to write a book?" And I'm like, "Not really. I don't have time to read books, let alone write one." And they said, "Oh, we'll help you." So I actually had a lot of fun writing it, and in the process figured out- Joel: I originally, I met you, I want to say I met you in '06 when you were at After College. When did you start that company? Roberto: I started After College and in 2000 a few years after I graduated from college. Joel: Wow. Roberto: Started it out of a personal need of not knowing what I wanted to do with my education. Joel: And it's still going strong. Right? Roberto: It's still going strong. It's one of the top sites with college students behind the indeed the mother of all job sites. So, everyone says indeed as their go to, and then followed by LinkedIn and then it's the Career Center and then it's After College based on some research we did. So, it's pretty cool. Joel: So after college, I mean it's been out... It's been around for how long again? How many years? When did it start? Roberto: Started in 2000. So it's been 20 years now. Joel: There are people using the site. They weren't even born when you started it. Chad: Holy crap. So I mean it's been around 20 years for goodness sakes- Joel: Yeah. That's the scary thing. I mean I was like... It gives a really good with math, by the way. Chad: There you are. Roberto: Yeah. I mean, I started it out of personal need and you know, I studied economics, didn't know what I wanted to do with my Econ degree. I knew I didn't want to do consulting, I didn't want to be a programmer, and all my friends were going through the same thing. So we created the site and over the years that evolved in the basic value prop, "Hey, if you don't know what to do, go to After College, type in your school and major and the site will make recommendations." If you know what you're looking for, you go to Indeed because that's where you're going to find all the jobs. Joel: Nice. Chad: So, why spend off into to Recruitology, you have this obviously this brand that is chugging along 20 years for goodness sakes. What was the Genesis? Why Recruitology? Roberto: But yeah, great question. So, I mean after college actually it did help us get to the point where we launched Recruitology. So , we got to a point where we had all these employers posting on After College, but we also had this, a network of reseller partners, media companies, newspapers, Houston Chronicle, New York times. And they, they'll say, "Hey, we love that we can get access to these college students who after college, but we want the access to nurses, we want access to veterans, we want access to people with some experience." Roberto: And then we just said, "Okay, what do we do here? They like working with us. We're a good company to work with. Very true to customer and user focused. So, we ended up partnering with a company at the time called Cross-post. And I don't know if you guys ever met Carl Bron, he started crossbows with John Fuji I think back in 2006. And there were an essence working with sites like indeed sip recruiter and a bunch of other niche sites. And so we partnered with them, so all this demand that we're getting from our channels, partners, a hundred media companies, we started sending them the jobs for all these other niches. Joel: That's not the same as Mr Fuji, the wrestling icon, is it? Roberto: Yeah, I don't, maybe, I don't think so, unless think so unless John hasn't told us about his side job. But, so, we ended up partnering with Cross-post for good. I want to say six years and then we ended up buying Cross-post in 2012, and then we spun out the partnership side of After College with Cross-post. And then we created the brand Recruitology, and we just followed the business. Roberto: After College is really good business, but it's niche. It's a niche, right? The biggest it's going to get is constrained by how big the market is. I think the college recruiting market is maybe a hundred for a hundred million in dollars a year, in terms of how much companies spend to advertise their college level jobs. But by just the recruiting market in terms of advertising, just sourcing and getting people on board. That's 8 billion a year. Roberto: So, we looked at that start and we said, "Okay, college is great, let's keep running after college, but let's go after the bigger opportunity and let's leverage the fact that we have these media partners that are willing to work with us to do it." So we bought Cross-post, and we took the bet, we rebranded and for years we've gone from about a hundred media partners to close to 400 now and growing. And the cool thing is through these 400 media partners, we're serving 50,000 small, medium businesses every year, new ones, and then growing. So, there's something there, right? and it's just a bigger niche. Joel: So. Roberto: Not a niche I mean. Joel: You mentioned newspapers and not a week goes by before, without hearing how the newspapers are dead, and that media platform is on life support. Listeners and long-timers will know that CareerBuilder got out of that, those partnerships long time ago, Monster as well, had a ton of newspaper partnerships and have gotten out of it. So from your perspective and dealing with the media companies, what is your state of the union of newspapers and the business? Roberto: Newspapers are definitely struggling, right? So, revenues keep going down and it's mainly their print advertising. I mean those print ads, display ads are a big chunk of money and companies are fast moving away from doing print advertising to online. And in online is all Google and Facebook. I mean they own what 85% of the market for online advertising. So it's a lot. But here's the thing, I don't think the papers are going to go away. And we're calling them media companies cause they're not, I mean most of them are, are you doing print paper? But they're all doing digital in New York Times is the best example, right? They're New York Times.com and Y times.com and they basically are killing it in terms of digital subscribers. So a lot of these media companies are moving, they realize that advertising is there, but they're growing their digital subscriber base because they have good content there. Roberto: Most of them are still the trusted source of local news and information. And I say most because again, you've got big players like New York Times. That's, you don't have to be in New York to read the New York Times. People worldwide read the New York times. Joel: Right? Roberto: If the you're in Seattle you're going to read the Seattle Times, you're in San Francisco, you go to SF gate.com so I think these brands and these media businesses will remain, it's just their business is shifting. So revenue from advertising is shrinking, but they're, I think they're doing a good job at growing the subscriber base, and converting them from print subscribers to digital subscribers. As long as they keep their content fresh and they provide content you don't find anywhere else, I think they're going to be okay. Chad: Well, it's interesting some of them, not all of them are actually switching over to almost like a podcast model where they have the writing, and then they'll have somebody voice. The actual article itself. So it's more portable and you don't have to sit. And actually read, you can listen to. So you see it where it's starting to go into these different mediums, which is really cool. Chad: But I actually just learned today, and I don't know if Joel knows this yet, but Facebook is starting to scrape jobs from corporate career sites. So what we've seen or what we used to see from the Indeeds of the world, and obviously Monsters, or whoever it was, were scraping jobs to be able to have more content. We're starting to see that from Facebook. I just got the 411 from a recruitment advertising agency today. That they're seeing a huge uptick with their clients jobs and it's coming from Facebook and they didn't give them a feed. So as we're having this discussion and newspapers are trying to fight back, how do they fight against this? Roberto: Actually, no, they go with the flow, I think. So here's the thing, Facebook is a couple of blocks away from us here in San Francisco. And we were one of the early partners of their Facebook for jobs program, but they're really making an effort to be a player in the job space. Facebook is. And from what I understand, they've done a good job at getting sort of the big companies jobs on their platform. So I know of jobs from companies that are going on their company page on Facebook and they're also going into the marketplace. The one thing that I know Facebook really wants to get more of, there are these SMB jobs. Jobs from these small companies, Mom and pops, City Governments. These employers that are what I call the last mile, these last mile employers that are really hard to reach. Joel: Yeah. Roberto: Somehow websites and Facebook will find them eventually, but they're not getting all those jobs. They're getting the jobs from like the Enterprise Rent A Car, and they're getting jobs from like the Geico's of the world, right? But the majority of these jobs are small companies and papers are actually well positioned, because they're the ones that are the local source of trusted news. So the small Mom and pops actually still go to them to advertise. So I think papers and media companies have this leg up, where they have access to these small employers that companies like Facebook and Google want to reach. Joel: But you could also argue that most small businesses have a Facebook page. I mean, I know a lot of small businesses that have a Facebook presence but don't have their own website. So how do you think that jive with the SMBs? I mean my guess is Facebook will probably be free. We can boost your jobs or whatever. Whereas you know, the model that you're in has a cost. Like do you think that's a major threat to what the newspapers are doing? If Facebook does kind of carry on that model and really promote it, which I guess they'd been, they'd been giving that option to small businesses for a long time. I think you could just argue that the small businesses haven't quite embraced it yet. Roberto: So we're in the middle of it. I think at Facebook... Like you're right, most small businesses have a Facebook page, like the quarter pizza shop is going to have a Facebook page. The thing though is typically it's an owner that's maintained them the Facebook page, they're ordering the supplies, they're dealing with payroll and all this stuff. So, what we found is that these small business owners are not initially posting the jobs on Facebook, right? They build the page. Maybe they have somebody outside maintaining it, but they're not necessarily using Facebook to post their jobs. Now eventually they may, and I think Facebook is in a good spot because there was no friction there anymore. But there's two things, right? Getting the employer to actually post a job and then also Facebook is not the only place where we're getting to find people. Roberto: I mean there's still sites like Craigslist that are being used by people to buy things, and there's people that are going to find jobs on Craigslist though, now people are looking at Indeed, they're looking at Google. So I think the media company isn't a good spot, at least from our perspective. And that's what we partner with them because they're, they have access to all these employers that are already going to them and what we're helping them, do say, "Hey, we're a one stop shop for you guys, we'll help you get on Facebook, Craigslist and all these other sites like CareerBuilder, even Indeed, ZipRecruiter. Joel: Who? Roberto: Indeed. Joel: Career who? Roberto: CareerBuilder. yeah. Joel: Exactly. Roberto: Well, they're still there, right? They're still a great brand. It's just that they're just one of many brands now, but there is still a job secret brand that's on pace and plumper Joel: I guess. Chad: And I think it's funny Indeed had the whole job spotter thing where they had an app, and people could go take pictures of help wanted signs. Joel: They still have it as far as I know. Chad: Yeah. And it goes, obviously I think you get a reward or some shit like that. But I mean they've been trying for years to get those types of jobs where... As Joel just said, I mean there are a lot of Mom and pops shops, that are close to me. They have Facebook pages and they don't have websites. That is their website. That's where they engage in. That is where they will post their jobs, right? It's just, it's inevitable I think. Roberto: Yeah, they'll post it there. I think ZipRecruiter is also doing a good job by sending these postcards out, right? Saying, "Hey, get free jobs". Thing is the employers getting bombarded by all these different companies, right? Facebook is one of them. ZipRecruiter is another and even if it's free, I mean it's not free, right? You still got to spend time posting and then you've got to figure out where you're going to get the best response. So, I think the problems for the employer is still the same. Where do I post? Where do I spend my time posting? Joel: And it's probably fair to say Roberta, that if I'm in Seattle, right, you guys are a partner with Seattle Times. If you call a small business and say, "Hey, we're the Seattle Times." That's going to be a much easier conversation, than I'm with some job board you've never heard of before. Roberto: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Seattle Times has that local street trend with the local market. So if you get something from the Seattle Times, you'll pay attention. Joel: Yeah. Roberto: Facebook is that way. Right. And Facebook's huge. But again, I think there's a way for them to coexist and to work with each other. Facebook to serve the audience, the job seeker audience. And somebody likes Seattle Times to be able to say, "Hey, I have these employers here at Facebook, help us get enough candidates for these employers." Joel: And I don't see Facebook leveraging local on the street sales people to go into these businesses ever. Roberto: They don't need to. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Well that would be dumb. That's not sustainable at all. It doesn't make any sense. Why would they? Joel: No, but you can argue whether it's going to work or not, longterm. I mean, Facebook jobs had been around a while. Roberto: I think it's fairly simple. If you have a local page for your business, Facebook is going to use their own platform to advertise to you to get you to use it, to do their advertising. They don't need humans on the street to do it. They have the platform you're already using to try to get customers and you're their customer and they're going to try to get you into it. Joel: Right? Roberto: So therefore- Joel: And they've been doing that for years now and we're still talking about Facebook is going to be a thing. Roberto: Well that, but they haven't executed and that's what we're starting to see them slowly do. They've, done a shitty job of it thus far. But to be able to put feet on the street makes no sense. Joel: Oh I agree with that. But the argument is can they really compete locally just by having an add on when you log into your Facebook page saying, "Hey, post jobs." Roberto: I still think that's where the media companies have a very strong leg to stand on. And at least that's where we're betting, right then we can help these media companies serve that market. But I think, they own the rest of the market. Facebook owns the half, what is it 45 or so percent of the digital advertising market, and then Google and the other half roughly can huge. Chad: Fucking huge. Roberto: It is huge. Chad: There's money there. Roberto: So they put people on the street. Chad: Yeah. So let's, let's pivot a little bit. We're talking about programmatic in 2019 there were a shit ton of programmatic acquisitions. One of my 2020 predictions was that we're finally going to see a core platform being an applicant tracking system or a big CRM. They actually go through acquisitions at that point, and we start seeing ATSs grabbing in those, those programmatic platforms to embed in their core system. What do you think about that? What do you hearing out there? Are we going to see Recruitology in somebody soon? Who knows? Roberto: So, I mean definitely, I mean there's a lot of chatter in the space in terms of us going somewhere else. I mean I think we're here to stay for at least 2020. We send jobs ATSs, we integrate with some ATSs. But, and we actually build their own, in terms of an ATS buying a programmatic plate, it's hard to say. I mean it depends looking at who owns these ATSs, some of them are owned by private equity, and I think they're more looking for the private equity guys are looking for, what's a good business with a good enough gross margin. If it's making let's say more than 80% gross margin, what's the recurring revenue. Roberto: So I think there are more looking at the numbers, as opposed to thinking about the market strategically. So I think those ATSs they're owned by PE. Are probably not going to make those moves. I think ATSs that want to be strategic and say, "Hey, we were offering all these different services and programmatic is some service that needs to be core." It could be, there's a lot of good applicant tracking systems out there. I mean we see them through the jobs that we're getting in. You know, there's ICMs, there's like a greenhouse, there's a lever and a few others. Chad: Hundreds. Joel: A lot of others. Roberto: A lot of others. There's just a lot of them. Right. There's 88P. I guess the question is do they want to grow revenue? Do they want to just be more strategic and grit, get market share? It depends. I don't know yet. I mean I think ATSs, are serving this one gateway to all these other technology providers or service providers. I don't know if they're going to buy or partner. In our case, we've, started as a job distributor, put AI behind it and now we built an ATS, a were our messages, "Hey, we're more of an ATS and we'll give you access to all these best of breed tools that are provided by other companies." Chad: But why get into the messy world of applicant tracking system? I mean, it's different for SMB, right? It really is. Joel: Necessity. Chad: But, it's so messy. Roberto: I mean, we got into it against my own wishes. So you know what, when we launched their IDN, I mean I was talking to repeat them, I'm like, Hey, the last thing that we'll need this another ATS. I mean, there's so many good ones out there, but again, it's more of a market segment issue. We were seeing a lot of jobs coming in to Recruitology, and most of them had no ATS. They had an email address in the URL. Some of them even had faxes or address . Chad: Faxes. What the hell is that? Roberto: Exactly I mean less now, but email we get a lot of Emails. And I think a lot of these SMBs, they don't want to pay for an ATS. They don't want to spend even a hundred bucks a month because they might not have more than a couple of hires a year. Right? So we launched the ATS and we did it for free. In our case, if you buy a job through Recruitology, then you get the whole candidate sorting and ranking and organizing through us. So we launched it more just to provide an ancillary service. That's what we got into it. Joel: Let me switch a little bit. So we've talked about SMBs, programmatic and all that good stuff. But so when we talk about programmatic and the app casts of the world, we're usually talking about pretty big enterprise entities. You guys have sort of tapped the SMB and programmatic. And I'm curious, you do have a lot of competition. How does SMB embrace programmatic when they probably don't even know what the hell it is, let alone maybe even know how to spell it? Roberto: Yeah, that's a good question. So there is a lot of competition in the programmatic, there's lesser competition in the SMB space we're finding and that's what we're there, and we rolled out programmatic. And so you mentioned Seattle Times, right? That's a great partner of ours and a good example. So if you're an employer and you're posting a job on job dot Seattle Times.com, job's going to go on Seattle Times.com, but then behind the scenes it's going to go on sites like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Nouveau, or Talent.com now, Glassdoor, next and so on. About 36 different sites that accept jobs on a CPC basis. So what we're doing Recruitology behind the scenes. So just bidding automatically on these jobs and making sure that the employers budget is going to work to maximizing the number of candidates they're getting. So the employer doesn't even know this and they don't need to know. Roberto: So, we've made it an invisible process for them where they're just posting on Seattle Times.com and they're getting some distribution to these top brand sites and they're going to get some applicants back and they'll say, "wow, wow. Actually I'm getting good candidates here." And it's programmatic behind the scenes, and we've just done it in a way that's invisible. I think when you start getting to the larger employers, it gets more competitive. So you take something like a click cast, right? I think they did a beautiful job at sort of quartering the ad agency market, and going after the big employers and getting these big budgets. Where it's competitive is with all the features you have to build, right? There you're selling HR and they're saying, "Well, I want something that'll turn the posting, or into this or into that to maximize the candidate flow. Roberto: So then you're competing on features. So we're starting to see more bigger companies use our programmatic and saying, "I want to put a $10,000 budget a month here," But our technology is more bare bones focused on getting results and we haven't really gotten into the whole feature building where I think you're seeing, I think that's where you see more competition, bigger employers saying, I have so many options on me and I ask this company to build the world for me because I know they want my business. Joel: Excellent. Roberto: I think that's a different beast. Joel: Yeah. Overall I would agree and I would also agree that we really appreciate you having on the show. Really appreciate you supporting this show. Chad: Thanks Roberto. Joel: And, for all of those who are out there, who want to know more about you, and also Recruitology maybe even after college, where should they go? Roberto: So. I mean to know more about me, just go to LinkedIn and look me up. Roberto Angulo, I think I'm R Angulo on LinkedIn. And just go to recruitology.com learn more about what we do. And if you're an employer of recruitology.com/employers. If you're a college student, go to Aftercollege.com. If you just graduated, don't know what to do with your degree. Check out Aftercollege.com and type in your school and major in will automatically match you with relevant jobs. Chad: Thanks man. Joel: Thanks Roberto. Roberto: Joel. Thank you guys. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Kristin, thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad and his goofy Friend Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I need new track spikes. You know that's a shiny gold pair that are extra because, well, I'm extra. For more visit chadcheese.com. #Programmatic #media #Newspaper #Facebook #FacebookJobs

Tim Sackett steps in for a napping Joel during this week's podcast. Chad & Tim talk about ... - Glassdoor's new car smell - Delta creating a legion of Iron Man employees (didn't they see Ultron?) - Chipotle paying big Mass fines - Bullhorn says "Show me the money!" ...and Canada beating the U.S. in more than just hockey. Pay your gratitude to JobAdX, Sovren, and Canvas for making all of this podcast goodness possible. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides comprehensive website accessibility testing with personalized recommendations to enhance usability for people with a variety of disabilities or situational limitations. James Ellis: Employer brand isn't something you sprinkle on your recruiting like magic fairy pixie dust to kind of make it better. It is both a craft and a calling. If that's the kind of work you want to do with your employer brand, come join me, James Ellis, at The Talent Cast. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Chad: You know it, kids. Welcome to the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Today we'll be talking about new Glassdoor Who Dis? Bullhorn says, "Show me the motherfucking money." Canada is kicking the US's ass, and we're not talking about hockey here, kids. And Chipotle has kids rolling burritos for entirely too long, all after a word from Canvas. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvasbot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off the Bitmoji. Canvas: We make compliance easy and are laser-focused on recruiters' success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io. And in 20 minutes, we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: All right, kids, we have a surprise for you today back by a demand. I think like three people said they wanted to have Tim Sackett back on the show. So guess what, people? Tim Sackett. Tim: Yes. Everybody wants a little bit more of Tim. That's the name of my autobiography coming out in late 2020: A Little Bit More of Tim. Chad: A little bit more of Sackadomus. Joel just, let me through this out here real quick, he'll be back soon. Don't worry. But if you haven't listened to the 2020 prediction show, listen to it. Myself, Joel, and Tim, we predict the future, and we're really fucking- Tim: Good times. Chad: ... bad at it. Tim: I don't know. I think one of mine almost came true. I don't know. We'll make them true. Chad: Jason Roberts, who used to be the tech dude over at Randstad Sourceright, which, I mean, that's pretty much where all their technology, their big stack stuff comes out of the RPO anyway, he said that we actually got right Google without Pace Indeed. That was a roll-up. I mean, there was a roll-up of Google organic and Google for jobs. So we'll take that one as what I would like to call a win. Thank you very much. That's my thought early on. Chad: Let's go ahead. We're going to jump into some shout-outs. While I'm going through these, I'm going to try to rip through them real quick, you think of some people that you would like to give some shout-outs to. First shout-out, and, again, all these people are either doing one or two things. They're engaging with us on social media, behind the scenes and LinkedIn Messenger, connecting with us, whatever it is. But Stacey Dunn-Emke loves the show. She owns a couple of job boards: nutrition jobs and exercise jobs. Have you ever been to a job board that is like that niche? Tim: Have I? Chad: Yeah. Tim: Just searching midget porn. No, I haven't. Chad: Makes- Tim: Yeah, no. Chad: I would assume that would make, especially when it comes to SEO and trying to get maybe personal trainers and shit and managers of these facilities, that would be great. I don't know. Stacey, you're going to have to let us know- Tim: Yes, all in the SEO. Chad: ... what the scoop is. Julianne Knapp, Recruitment Tech Manager and loyal listener over at Nielsen, so I don't want to know what our ratings is, so just kind of keep that to yourself, Julianne. Gregory Raymond from Jobrapido over in Milan. Do you remember when Jobrapido first came out? Tim: I don't. Chad: It's like the Indeed for everything else because Indeed was very US-centric. So this was a long time ago. And I was the VP over at DirectEmployers, and every company would come to us for corporate content because we pretty much indexed the entire web when it came to just core corporate content, worked with applicant tracking systems. Chad: And Jobrapido came and it was one of the bigger names outside of the US for so long and we had so much traffic from those guys. He's actually listening in from Milan, Italy. He's a new listener catching up on the pod. Binge, baby, binge. That's all I've got to say. Chad: Paul Drake, Head of Business Development over at Talent Funnel in Oxford in the UK, he's a big fan of the show, definitely our drunken Recfest bit. And I think I look back on it, and it's one of those things where I constantly nitpick all the shit that we do, but I don't know if there's a better way to close... You were at Recfest. Tim: Yeah. Chad: I don't know if there's a better way to close Recfest. What do you think? Tim: No. I try to tell people, if you're going to hit one conference in the entire year, you have to go to London. In recruiting and talent acquisition, you have to go over to London. You have to check out Recfest. Holy crap, it is a party. It's fun. At the same time, it's still great content. There's great content throughout the entire day, but just it's unlike anything I've ever been to. Chad: Yeah. Well, and it was funny because Jamie came, and he's like, "Okay, we have this slot at the end of the day." I'm like, "Jamie, you open the bars at noon, everybody's going to be drunk." "Oh, okay. Well, that's right on brand for us," which means we want whiskey on the stage. And we talked about T-shirts. They actually printed 50 Recfest Chad and Cheese T-shirts. Tim: People were losing their minds for those shirts. Chad: It was fucking ridiculous and fun at the same time. But Paul Drake over at Talent Funnel, obviously he had a great drunken time himself. Mitchell Davis over in Germany, he does recruitment for autonomous, intelligent driving. Dude is in recruiting, number one, but for autonomous intelligent driving. Tim: Connect with me, buddy, because I got some needs right now with some US auto makers trying to find some of those autonomous engineers. Chad: No shit. Shout-out. This actually goes with the Recfest shout-out to Tim Sackett for giving my wife the shirt off his back. So Tim comes on the stage. And I think he's really just pandering to the crowd. I mean, it's fairly simple. Everybody fucking hates Trump. He has a Fuck Trump shirt on. My wife goes crazy. Tim: Literally, were almost ripping it off me. Chad: My wife goes crazy. Tim: And not in a way that they're upset, but people wanted it. They kept asking me, "Can I have your shirt? Can I have your shirt?" I've never had so many people at once ask me for my shirt. Chad: Shout-out to Jim Stroud. You know this cat, right? Tim: Yeah, really well. Chad: So he launched a new series, a podcast series called The Retro Lounge, and it is fucking awesome. And let me tell you, it's retro because the newest episode is a throwback from when he was doing a podcast in 2008. This one's called Sex at the Office: Is it a Wonderful Thing? So if you're not subscribed, The Jim Stroud Podcast, do yourself a favor and do it. Chad: He's got great new stuff. It's almost like a black mirror kind of recruiting episode of technology. But then he does this retro lounge shit that is so fucking spot on. It's awesome. Tim: Jim is a quirky, wonderful person. He's so smart. He gives so much to the community, especially in recruiting. The dude is awesome. Chad: It's just, it's amazing. And giving back to community, I want to talk about this symphony talent thing, this exhibit that they did on the West Coast. Now, you heard about it. You didn't see it. I didn't actually see it. Tim: I haven't seen it, yeah. Chad: But I saw... Okay, so the exhibit is where you can go through the hiring process in the shoes of a candidate. It's an exhibit. And the candidate experience starts with a step. But it's what follows that matters. Gina Alioto, I think is what you say, the VP of Marketing at Symphony Talent was the go-to person on this one. Chad: When I first saw the exhibit, well, I saw it on paper, and I immediately thought, "Oh shit, this is could be fucking awesome, but more than likely it is going to fall flat on its fucking face because trying to get like a real-world experience into like an exhibit, like a walk-through exhibit- Tim: I tell you, the one piece of it, though, that I think is really going to hit home with people is when they fall into that 50-foot hole, the black hole, and hit the bottom. I think they'll realize at that point it becomes real. Chad: Dude, I saw a quick video and also some responses back and forth from actual attendees. And they were blown away. And I actually got a quote from Gena. She said, "Everyone really appreciates how we took something that was a buzzword, overwhelming, and intimidating, and transformed it into something that was approachable and a fun experience." Chad: And I agree. I think this is a big win or a big lose type of scenario. And I think from Symphony Talent's standpoint, them doing something that nobody else is doing right now in an interactive kind of this is why the process is fucked up or why it's great, this is exactly what we need in this industry. So when it comes to Symphony Talent and spending a shit ton of cash creating that exhibit for an event, I'm hoping they had some other events. Tim: Chad, you got to spend money to make money. Chad: That's what I hear. That's what I here. That's all we do here at the Chad and Cheese Podcast: spend money and take naps. So that's it for shout-outs. Do you have anybody you want to shout-out to? Tim: Actually, Jim McCoy. He's a chief revenue officer over a Scout Exchange, goscoutgo. In Boston, I'm actually meeting with them next week. And we were talking on a phone call. And he was like, "I heard the show. I heard the Sackadomus show. That was awesome." So, I mean, it just shows the reach of what you guys are doing. Chad: Goscoutgo, big listeners of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Event: So first and foremost, we're go be in Banff at the gathering. This is happening again. Tim: I hate you guys. I wanted to go. I said that. Yeah, last year I said you guys went and I wanted to go. No one even reached out. Chad: Dude, this is in a castle at the base of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in February, which means they're going to be snow-covered, there's no question. Rated by Forbes two years in a row as a must-attend business summit. I am blown away first and foremost by the event when we went last year. And I'm really excited to be able to go back and to be on stage. So we're really excited to start kind of like that series of conversations. We'll be doing it in Banff. We'll be doing it at Transform in Boston and in a couple of other events this year, so pretty excited about that. Tim: Yeah, Allyn Bailey's one of... Intel's one of my favorite people in the world. She is just genuine as can be and just awesome, and just digs the space. And- Chad: If you haven't gotten your tickets and you're in employer brand, or recruitment marketing, or you're with one of these recruitment ad agencies and you're not going, okay, go to your browser right now, cultgathering.com. Buy a fucking ticket. If you miss this, that's on you. Chad: Next, UNLEASH and TAtech are putting together their brands to have what they're calling a mega conference in London in March. Do you go out to the TAtech at all? Are you a part of those at all? Tim: I have attended in the past. I haven't recently. Chad: Back in the day, it used to be pretty much the job boards. Tim: Job board guys. Chad: Yeah, the job board conference. That's what it was, the IA, the International Association of Employment Websites—worst acronym ever, switched over to TAtech because they saw that obviously this was transforming into much more than a job board industry. So I think there are probably more chat bot companies at TAtech than there are job board companies today. Chad: So you're seeing the tech change more matching companies, those types of things. So it's a pretty awesome event, not to mention you couple it with UNLEASH, which I love. We'll be out there in March. If you want to check it out, go to TAtech.org and unleashgroup.io. Tim: Nice. Chad: Where you going? Tim: I'm going to SHRM Talent. I'll be speaking there. People always ask me, "What's your favorite conferences?" Of course I love the HR Tech Conference because it's just a conglomerate of everybody in the industry there at one time in Vegas. So that's a awesome. I like SHRM Talent because it's actually corporate talent acquisition people. Tim: I think my room last year was like 850 people, and 99% of the people, it was a packed room, had a corporate talent acquisition title. And it's people from enterprise down to SMB, people that are in the weeds, like literally you can feel the pain in the room as they're trying to figure out stuff. So those are my people. I love talking shop with all of them. And then I'm also hitting Hiring Success, the SmartRecruiters Conference, which is, again, a who's- Chad: Oh yeah. San Francisco, right? Tim: Yeah. Who's who of TA thought leaders and people that'll be out there. So I really like that. And then they just have... I mean, their tech is really good. So I enjoy... And their CEO Jerome is one of the sharper dudes to be around and talk job with. So he's awesome. Chad: Yeah, he's pretty awesome. Joel is going to be out there in San Francisco. I might pop my head in. I don't know. Tim: Stay in the hotel and getting your nails done, stuff like that? Chad: Yeah, that's a possibility. Now, I mean, I might come. I'm just not going to come as a podcaster. I'm taking a break until Banff. Tim: Nice. Chad: Okay, dude, so it's time for topics. Are you ready? Tim: Let's do it. Chad: Okay. Give me a second. I got to go... There we go. Okay, so the first topic, you weren't really that interested in because you feel like it's happening all over the fucking place. People are just now getting caught for it. But Chipotle is fined $1.4 million in vast child labor case cited by, this is in the article of New York Times, "Massachusetts said Chipotle lets teenagers work too many hours per week and too late on school nights. The chain settled without admitting to the estimated 13,000 violations." I reached out to Chipotle because we just had these guys on the fucking show like less- Chad: ... two weeks ago or something. Tim: You guys are like the SI curse, you know? Chad: No. So I reached out and generally we don't get responses from companies. When this kind of shit happens, you don't get a response unless they kick you to PR, and then PR gives you a response. But Joe- Tim: They have to give you guys a response or Joel just makes shit up. Chad: Well, yeah. But Joe Albano, who was on the show, Manager of National Field Recruiting at Chipotle sent this statement: "We took our people, culture seriously. And we're committed to insuring that our restaurants are in full compliance with all the laws and regulations we have diligently worked over the past year with the Massachusetts leaders to ensure our systems are updated to support our growth and that we are in compliance with minor employment and wage and hour laws as part of the settlement for violations dating back to 2015. Chad: "We have agreed to donate half a million dollars for the education and enforcement oversight related to child labor laws for training and skills development of young workers and to assist Massachusetts youth. We are committed"- Chad: Give me a second. "We are committed to the welfare of all of our employees and are proud of our industry-leading benefits," which they do have. "Chipotle's industry-leading benefits for all team members, including debt-free degrees, tuition reimbursement up to $5,250 per year, access to mental health care, financial planning tools, and the opportunity for quarterly bonuses, including crew members up to months' worth in pay per year, and paid sick leave, et cetera." Chad: So that's a long... First off, it's like, "Yeah, we're sorry. This shit's fixed. It was back to 2015. We have a new CEO. We're fixing shit. But you got to remember we do all this really good stuff." Tim: This entire concept is bullshit, and not Chipotle. Chipotle is trying to do the right thing, and they're fixing their stuff. Good for them. But this is happening everywhere at every level. And it's a victimless crime for the most part. Here's what was really being set was you're forcing these kids to work. No, the vast majority actually want the hours, want to work because they want the cash. They got to pay for their cellphone. They want the new gear. They want the new easies. Chad: But they got to pay for college, dude. Tim: Got to pay for college. I have a niece who's 17 working at Starbucks. Guaranteed she's working more hours than she should because I talked to her parents, and they constantly are freaking out about her getting her studies done and her working too late on a weeknight, blah, blah, blah. And then I see her hours, and I know the basic kind of labor laws and go, "For sure they're breaking it." Tim: But I've also ran HR for Applebee's, and we constantly were breaking them because you know about it, but you don't know. It's like don't tell, don't see, don't whatever. Chad: You don't have the workforce to be able to fill. Tim: Yeah, and then $1.5 million that Chipotle paid was way less than the overtime they would've had to pay to actually not break the law. And so it's like they're like, "Okay, whatever." Chad: And over $2 million, okay, and we'll talk about the semantics here in a minute, but in Q3 of last year, they made $1.4 billion. So that's how you put it into... and in a quarter, $1.4 billion, and over since 2015, $1.4 million. Tim: .0... yeah. Chad: So here's the thing: This feels like a really interesting kind of a way for Massachusetts because they also hit Qdoba for like a half million dollars before this. But Massachusetts has found its way to start raking in cash because they can see that there's no way that these organizations can do the job, can actually stay open because they don't have the workforce to be able to get it done, right? Tim: Yep. Chad: And let's talk about the kids here. I have a 16-, 18-, and 20-year-old kid. 18, she just turned 18, so but she still feels 17 to me. Shit, she still feels 13 to me. Anyway, two out of the three are preparing their bank accounts for college. One wants to join the Air Force, so she's out. Tim: She's a smart one, yeah. Chad: Yeah. Anyway, do you know what college costs today? These kids aren't making Nikes and Apple phones for $2 an hour in a sweatshop in fucking China, they're rolling fucking burritos, right? Tim: Yeah. Chad: Plus, let's talk about the economy. I mean, how many of these kids are also helping out with the bills at home? Mom's already paying... She's already doing two to three jobs with the fucking side hustle, so overall this is not... And, again, Chipotle was on the show. I'm not defending Chipotle, I'm defending all of the organizations that are out there and saying, "Look, this is a symptom of a much larger fucking problem." This is a math problem. Tim: Yeah. This is a government generation issue. This is just a way for... The government went after Chipotle because they knew Chipotle would pay. Guess who they're not going after? The mom and pop diner down the street that's actually breaking the exact same law because they know they'll sue them, they'll go out of business, and they won't pay. Tim: And so it's just it's all contrived. I just think it's the worst thing in the world. We should be focusing on other things than going after fake child labor issues. Chad: If I'm a parent and my kid is working too many hours and they're not getting their schoolwork done, guess what? They stop working the fucking hours. And if I have to cause a store manager, guess what? I'll walk in the fucking store. So overall let's just go ahead, and I'm not saying this was all on the parents. This is a shared responsibility that's happening here. But overall, do the fucking math. Chad: If there are all these low-paying jobs that are opening, and that's what's bolstering this... I shouldn't say bolstering the economy. But when we see all the jobs that are being created, there are these types of jobs. They're not the middle-wage-earner or high-wage-earner type of jobs, they're these types of fucking jobs. If our economy is doing nothing but building these types of jobs, who the fuck is going to fill them, not to mention we'll talk immigration later. Tim: Maybe we should lower the age of working. Maybe instead of 16, you should be able to work at a McDonald's at 14. Again, I get really pissed off if I have to wait 15 minutes at Tropical Smoothie for my Mango Morning Sunshine. I would rather a 14-year-old learn how to use a blender and make my goddamn smoothie. Chad: Hell, I went to Austin a couple of times this year. And every time I stop, there's a coffee machine right there. It's a robotic coffee machine, makes wonderful coffee. Boom. Got it. I don't have to wait in a Starbucks line. Tim: There's a little man bun on top of the vending machine. It's awesome. You love it. It's awesome. Chad: Okay. Let's move on. We've got the new bullhorn survey. It's the 2020 Global Recruitment Insights and Data. It sounds really formal. Did you get a chance to look this over? Did you see anything that really kind of jumped out at you? Tim: Yeah. No, I did. I mean, one is they have a huge obviously data set with everyone that's using Bullhorn there, obviously have a really big footprint. Again, it's the recessionary stuff of, guess what? Recruiters are coming to their clients and going, "You got to pay more money if you want to get people." Turns out- Chad: Wages. Tim: Chad, I can tell you at least two to three times a week we'll have so many contacts and say, "Tim, gosh, we want to work with you. Oh my gosh, you guys are a great company! Recruiting: Uh." And then they'll go, "Here, we want you to find a Java developer for 13 cents an hour," whatever. They're so far under market that I have to go to them and say, "You know what? I thank you, but we're not going to do the search." And they're literally taken aback. They're, "How could you not want this? We're trying to give you money." I'm like, "No, you're trying to give me work that I'll never be able to find." I'm like, "How long have you been looking?" "A year." "So you couldn't find it for a year, but somehow magically I'm going to find it because you're paying so far under market." Tim: And then here's the real issue: They're trying to find somebody on the outside market. And they're like, "We can't pay $150,000 a year because the five people in that job internally are only making $110,000, and if we pay somebody else $150,000, then we have to raise them up. Yeah, it turns out that's how compensation works. Chad: Yeah, and what Tim's referring to here is 77% of global recruitment firms say that employers—their clients—must accelerate worker pay increases in order to compete for qualified candidates in 2020. Not only are they going to have to do that, but also exactly what you were saying. That person that's getting paid $110,000 more than likely is going to get pulled out of that company by somebody else who's going to pay him $125,000, $140,000. Chad: So the thing is, as we as corporations, let's say, overall, we are making record-high profits. Where the fuck are you putting that money? You need to put it back in your fucking people, not just to keep them. Yes, that helps, right? Tim: Yep. Chad: Not just to attract them. Yes, that helps. But it also ensures that you don't have all this nonfairness that's happening within the organization. where people feel like, "Well, fuck, so-and-so I know is getting paid this, that, and the other thing." We need to be more transparent and give those people money so that they can spend it in the fucking economy. Tim: Yeah, pay equality, pay equity, we know. I mean, it's been an issue forever, and it continues to be an issue. And mainly I think it's because of that, right? It's because are desperate for talent, so they're going out there. They're making some awful decisions in terms of saying, "Oh, I'm going to pay somebody coming in to what I have to pay to get them." And if they're not making the adjustments on the back end, which just causes more inequality and equity issues in the organization. Chad: Short-term decision for a long-term problem. Tim: Yeah. Chad: And that's what we're so good at humans doing. And in talent acquisition and HR, when a company says, "Well, we don't have the money to be able to provide for a $150,000 developer," okay, so how much does it cost for that seat to be open? If you're in talent acquisition and you don't know what that number is, you have to know what it's actually costing the organization because you can go back because these are business numbers, people. This impacts the bottom line. This engineer, I have five engineering positions open. It costs x per day. Extrapolate that out over whatever the general hiring time is, and then demonstrate that. Show it. Be able to try to focus on bringing that time down, not to mention also retaining individuals in your organization so you don't have to do this fucking loopty-loop shit. Tim: I got to tell you, I'm just so energized right now by two middle-aged white guys talking about pay equity. It just is amazing. I mean, it's like, wow, this is 2020, motherfuckers. Chad: I have two girls, and then they are white females. So they're getting paid I think on the pay scale closer to white men than the rest, right? But overall, this is bullshit. The reason why we don't have equity is because of lack of transparency. Tim: Yeah. I do think it's difficult. I will say this. Chad: It's difficult, yeah, but we can fucking do it. Tim: Well, no because I think the difficulty is understanding that most people have... I mean, you and I think intelligent people understand there's going to be a difference between what a CEO makes and what an accountant makes within organizations. But when they see the actual difference, most people can't wrap our heads around that, right? Like, you get like, "Wait a minute. So they're making 1,500 times more? I don't..." Tim: And there's where the transparency piece starts to fall down because I don't know if it actually lends itself to a better culture because what you tend is then you get this infighting constant measuring yourself against the next person from that standpoint. So there's kinds of transparencies that might help. I don't know if full transparency helps in terms of compensation, but- Chad: This goes into a much grander conversation around wealth, wealth imparity. We're already fucked up when it comes to that, and we need to change it that. But overall, I thought some of the other pieces in this survey that it's cited that 49% cited that skills gap is an issue while 74% of the recruiters also said reskilling is effective against skill shortages. Yeah, no shit. I mean, you're saying that these people don't have the skills. Then you give them the skills. And it's effective. No shit. Although 47%, nearly half say that, well, their reskilling efforts will actually increase in 2020. I should say less than half. Tim: 53% are saying, "Yeah, we don't really need to reskill. It's kind of a waste." If you had to think of, though, the data set of a Bullhorn, it's going to be mostly staffing firms. Staffing firms really don't have an impact on reskilling. Most of what they have an impact on is I'm going to show you a candidate that has the skills you want because that's what you asked for. So it could be something on the data. Chad: That's total bullshit. You could manufacture talent. Tim: Staffing firms don't really manufacture talent. Chad: You got to spend money to make money. Tim: I'm not saying we should. Chad: Think of it from this standpoint. And you're thinking the old model. Old model is we go find people. Right? Fuck that. Manufacture them. You give them the skills and you sell them at a larger margin. You know that's exactly what should be happening. If those big brands can't build talent pipelines themselves because they can't get out of there goddamn way, they're going to come to you. Tim: It's cheaper and easier to steal talent, from the recruiting standpoint. Chad: There's always going to be a need. Do you have to scale down production sometimes? Yeah. Right? So anyway, on the other side of this break, we're going to talk about a Glassdoor redesigned, new Glassdoor Who Dis? Right after JobAdX. JobAdX: Nope. Naw. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs just half-heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it: We live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? JobAdX: Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop-off. JobAdX: You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel, begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@JobAdX.com. That's join us at JobAdX.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad: So new Glassdoor revamps, so new Glassdoor Who Dis? They've redesigned, a quote from HCM Technology Report: "Glassdoor introduced a range of enhancements for both employers and candidates. Among them is a candidate messaging feature that allows companies to connect with job seekers through its applicant management system." What do you think? Tim: I love that feature because I think it's something that ZipRecruiter kind of created. I mean, in a way, LinkedIn did a little bit but not as much. I love... And LinkedIn does this where you can see somebody. If you're looking at somebody, they're at the green dot or whatever, if they're there, ZipRecruiter does the same thing. If somebody's actually on the platform while you're on the platform, it allows you to connect with them right away. Tim: So it's a future that works really well. And I think both sides, both the recruiter's and the candidates love it. So it makes complete sense. I mean, the one way to think of this, though, too, is there's a piece of me that goes, if there's an unemployed candidate, certainly I'm sitting on the platform all day, and I'm a recruiter, and I'm talking to him like, "Shouldn't you be at work?" I don't know. Chad: "What are you doing here?" So they also revamped their Employer Center, which serves as their hub for talent acquisition, teams, yada, yada, yada, simplify navigation for job posting, responding to reviews, and tracking brand reputation. I mean, what this says to me is they're giving employers more tools to spend more time and money on Glassdoor. Is that what you're hearing? Tim: Yeah. I think it is difficult too because how many... Okay, yeah, so LinkedIn has like LinkedIn Recruiter, and now Glassdoor has their employers. And Indeed has theirs. And Zip has theirs. Everyone has these things. How often are we really using that full capacity of that system of what they're developing when we have these big giant recruitment platforms, ATSs that we're using already? It's like, just stop it. Stop building this crap so much. I'm not spending all day on the Glassdoor Employee Center. Chad: I don't understand that, though. I mean, this seems more SMB than it does enterprise. Tim: Probably. Chad: Yeah. So the big question is can we stop talking about Glassdoor being absorbed into the Indeed brand? Can we stop that? Tim: Yeah. Chad: Does this prove- Tim: That makes no sense. Chad: I don't think it makes any sense either. I don't think a single brand, Indeed, Glassdoor brand makes any sense at this point because I only see them losing money if they do that. What do you think? Tim: I agree. I think for one is it's really almost two different buyers in a way. At least Indeed is an aggregator and everyone kind of knows what you get out of that. Glassdoor has some unique content that it's hard to find other places around the Internet. We know the traffic is high because job seekers are going there to check out what the heck is going on in companies. So it's like why would you want to give that away? And I think both of them, you can use to e-leverage each other from a revenue standpoint. So... Chad: Yeah. And also it's almost like a defensive position, right? So if you're number one Indeed and then you suck in let's say number two, three, whatever, Glassdoor, then you become a perspectively bigger number one but not by two times. That's for damn sure. But that's like a defensive position to an extent because Indeed has more reviews than Glassdoor does now, right? Tim: I don't know. Do they? Chad: They're getting reviews at a much faster rate and clip than what Glassdoor is. I see running two, like one and two makes a hell of a lot more sense. Tim: I mean, I just think it makes sense separately, and I think individuals who are going to use them, but most companies are going to use both regardless, but and I'm sure they'll find a way to package it. I'm waiting like for that third company, that they could just easily create. Why isn't Glassdoor... Why don't they have a complete consulting arm to come in and say, "Hey, you know what? You're kind of fucked up as an employer. We're going to fix you." Right? Chad: Dude, do doors really need another consultant? Tim: Well, no, but every organization needs more consultants. We love giving money to consultants. We can't wait to give money to consultants. Chad: Well, that being said, now, which North America city saw the biggest growth in technology jobs in the last five years? Tim: Detroit. No, I don't know. I'm going to say on it's something in Canada. Chad: Wait. What? Yeah. No, it's the Canadian tech industry is booming. One huge reason is the US immigration policy. The Trump Administration has made it harder for highly skilled workers to get visas. So what they've uncovered, and I'm sure there's multi-pronged, but the Trump immigration policy is driving high-tech labor to Canada. "Under the Trump administration, highly skilled workers are getting rejected in a higher rate. In 2015 92% of H1B visas applications were approved." Chad: But in the last two years, the approval rate is dipped to only 75%. We can't get the people here. We've gotten them from overseas before. How do we get them? Tim: Well, let me speak for Canada because I live close to Canada, so I feel like I'm part Canadian. I was actually there last week speaking at the HRPA, which is Canada's largest HR conference. I will tell you, Toronto as a city and then the HR community that I was with might be the most diverse city I've been in in the world. Tim: There is Asians and Indians and Africans. It's insane the diversity that they have in Toronto, and part, like you said, because, hey, if you're Indian and you can't get in the US, what's the next best place? The UK or probably Canada. And Canada and especially the Toronto market has been really open in Ontario to bring people in. Tim: Ottawa has tagged itself the Silicon Valley of the North. I actually spent some time in Ottawa last week as well. And I will tell you literally five- six-story building after another with every major tech brand that you could imagine, and, again, a city filled with a lot of kind of Indian and Asian transports who can come in, get a visa, and make decent money. They're not going to make the same kind of money you would make in Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, blah, blah, blah. Tim: But it's still probably better than what they could make in their home country. So there's part of that, right? So it's for all these kind of US companies and even international king of companies that are looking for a really great kind of lower cost workforce, man, Toronto and Ontario's a great place to open a job. Chad: But they have the skills. Tim: Yeah, for sure. Chad: So one of the individuals that was interviewed, she was born in Turkey, studied in Europe, worked as a postdoctoral researcher in computational biology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. She says, "Getting a visa in the US is not easy. And it's really costly, not just for the companies but also for the person itself." Chad: So we have an individual who was actually in this country highly, highly skilled, doing postdoctoral shit. Right? And guess what? She's like, "Fuck this. I'm going to Canada. There's too much red tape, too many hoops, and this is not worth it." Tim: Yeah, you know what's something that will really screw you up is if you're in Canada and you're in a bar. And I was sitting in a bar in Canada in Toronto, and I had this Indian come up to me as a waitress. And you could tell she was Indian. And my American me is waiting to hear the Indian accent. And I also had a bartender female that was African, and I'm waiting to hear this accent. And they all have the Canadian accent. And your mind cannot comprehend this, A, and all this stuff. And I'm just like, "Oh, my gosh, this is so weird." Chad: I can love it. So here's a quote from a CEO of one of the technical hubs in Toronto: "Every time Trump tweets, we get another sort of injection," which is all good from their perspective, right? "Companies are locating here because they can get access to foreign talent faster. And that means we're not just missing the talent. We're missing taxes from those companies overall." Chad: Again, it's a much larger problem than just that one person that we missed because she did postdoctoral stuff in Maryland. It's bigger than that. Right? If people will from here- Tim: Yeah, for sure. Chad: ... more entrepreneurs to start up business, that's a tax base with why come to the US when there's all this red tape and bullshit to worry about? Tim: I think the other side of this is Canada is very small. It's calmed down. I mean, their entire population of the entire country is less than California. So the overall impact, I mean, that's why it's still small. But you can see how the growth could be enormous. And I think the Canadian government and obviously the Canadian people are hoping that it happens, but it's still not necessarily the best place in the world to want to go unless you love snow and cold weather for nine months out of the year. Chad: And for all of those who do, and they have high tech skills, that might be where they're looking to go. So we're going to go ahead and take another quick break. And then we're going to talk about Delta and Iron Man. We'll be right back. Tim: Yes. Sovren: Google, Lever, Entello, Monster, Jibe: What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren Technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligent software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com, S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo. Chad: Free demo. Kelly Robinson loves hearing about free demos. You know Kelly, don't you? Tim: I prefer the paid demos. The free demos, I think suck. I mean, you get what you pay for. If it's free, it's going to be a shitty demo. If you paid for that demo, it'll 1,000 times better. Chad: So if you pay for an Iron Man suit today, what do you think that'll cost? Tim: Oh God, I mean, of the real one or I just want to dress up like Iron Man and go to Disney and be some idiot? Chad: That's a good question. Tim: I would, gosh, I love to be in that real Iron Man suit with a computer guy in my head making me super smart and super strong. Come on. Chad: Next story goes out to Delta and big props to Holland Dombeck. Delta is the first airline to explore first of its kind wearable robotic exoskeleton to bolster employee strength and safety. So they're lifting heavy shit. And obviously they get injured, not to mention it's a very tiresome job. If you can get kind of like this exoskeleton, this Iron Man kind of skeleton, how could you safeguard your employees and also possibly get work done faster? Tim: Oh, I love it. I just I'm such a fan of technology anyways, and I'm like, "Wait a minute. You can put me in a robotic suit and make me better? Yes. Now. Do I just wire it right into my spine, to my head? How does this work?" It's funny because when you see the video, it looks a little like... In the Iron Man movie, you have obviously the clear great red-suited Iron Man that looks like the coolest thing ever. And then the villain always tries to recreate their own Iron Man suit. And it starts out as this big clunky piece of shit. Tim: And then quite frankly, that's kind of where this technology is right now in terms of real realness. But I can also see someone throwing bags off a plane out of something and taking the head off of the coworker. Like... "Oops. Sorry, Jimmy." Chad: Should've had- Tim: I should've watched out- Chad: Should've- Tim: ... had the Iron Man. Chad: Should've had your- Tim: I got the Iron Man suit on. Chad: You should've had your exoskeleton. Tim: Some little kid in the window looking out there and seeing Iron Man unload their bags. The marketing and Holland Dombeck, the kid, I bet she can't wait till they start painting Iron Mans on the side of those planes. Chad: Oh, yeah. This is perfect for a Marvel kind of sponsorship or partnership with Delta. Tim: Oh, right? Chad: Yes. This is perfect. Now, next, I think the next thing that we should be talking about is robot-human exoskeleton fights. Tim: Oh, could you imagine? Who's going to win, Conor McGregor robot or the Mike Tyson robot? Yeah, that would be crazy. Can you imagine as a supervisor having a little dashboard with all your little robot real people and going, "Goddamn, Tim, I'm speeding his ass up." And all of a sudden you're walking faster like, "Come on!" Zz, zz. Chad: You have like a double-time button, like double-time. And Tim's always at halftime as it is. So we got to put him to double-time. Tim: Get home from work. You just feel exhausted. I don't even know why I feel so tired. Goddamn robot made me work twice as hard today. Chad: You're probably worn out after all of this today. So that being said, once again, Holland, thanks. We appreciate it. We love Iron Man. Give us more shit like that. And we out. Tim: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called, the podcast with Chad, with 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. With so many cheeses, and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today or 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. #Glassdoor #Indeed #DeltaAirlines #Chipotle #Canada #Techjobs #SkillsGap #Wages #exoskeleton

Whose fault is it Marketing or HR? Chris Kneeland Cult Brand creator and co-founder of The Gathering of Cult Brands joins the show to debate. Marketing has all of the budget and HR touches millions of people every year. Who owns THE BRAND, moreover THE EXPERIENCE? And why don't big brand leaders recognize the existence of EMPLOYER BRAND? This podcast made possible through the support of Smashfly. Let Smashfly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Joel: This Chad and Cheese Cult Brand Podcast is supported by SmashFly. Recruiting technology built for the talent life cycle and big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smashfly.com today. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Boom. we're Joel Cheesman free today kids. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese, less Cheese podcast. Joel has taken a short sabbatical and we have today on the show Chris Kneeland and I'm not sure, are you coming on as a guest or you're going to start the co-hosting? What are we doing today Chris? Chris: This is my audition tape and I'd like all the listeners to write in, to sort of out see the Cheeseman. Chad: Okay. So, a quick overview, if you haven't listened to the Cult Brand Podcasts, I don't know why. What the hell? We have a whole series of them. Go to chadcheese.com, click on cult brand, a lot of good shit there. But we are talking to Chris Kneeland, CEO co-founder. What's your actual title? You have so many... They have Cult Brand, The Gathering, Communo. What don't you do? Chris: Yeah, that would be a shorter list. Now, it feels like we got our fingers in a lot of pies here. I like to use the word Czar, but not many people know how to spell it correctly. In this deck we're, CEO or co-founder most of the time, but I run a marketing services firm that provides advisory services for brands that are seeking to have hyper levels of audience engagement and those audiences are most often customers and staff. We host this event called the Gathering, which is really just a showcase of the world's most adored brands. And then my business partner fortunately, is here to help and carries a lot of the load and we have another company called Communo, which is a talent management platform really for the gig economy allowing people to have what we call radically agile workforces by having real time access to the talent they need in the creative digital marketing space. Chad: Yeah. We call that a marketplace Chris, in the employment side. Yeah. Chris: Thank you. Noted. Chad: So last year, we met at the base of the Canadian Rockies. This sounds like a love story. In Banff during the gathering of cult brands and became fast friends, but I guess... What are you doing here on the Chad and Cheese Podcast? That's the big question. Chris: Well, I think that we have a common enemy, which is the inappropriate or lackluster approach with which most brands are treating talent management, what we affectionately call talent mismanagement. And I think we just discovered that the journey that you had been on, I think by trying to whatever you say, hit the HR industry in the mouth or kick them in the balls or something. Chad: Wherever it hurts. Chris: So, you've been going at it from the HR angle and we've always been going at it from the marketing side and the redeployment of media dollars and creative dollars and using a lot of that talent and those resources inward and we call it cult brands inspired from within. And so I think we just realized, wow, we're cut from the same cloth, but we have different influence over different audiences. If we could put our powers together, that would be chocolate and peanut butter and that's pretty delicious. Chad: Always. So, what exactly is a cult brand? Because we know there are big brands that are out there and you know and you hate that I do this, but I hate Amazon. Amazon is a huge organization and they're making money off of the people's backs and those people are having shitty experiences, which we actually hear in the press all the time. So, even though it's a big company, it's got a big brand, it's making a shit ton of cash. That to me is not a cult brand. So, what really signifies a cult brand? Chris: Yeah. Cult brands are special because they're not measured by some of the other common KPIs that would indicate fastest growing, most successful, most profitable, even in some cases best places to work, although that is the category that we find the highest correlation. Cult brands are defined by two primary attributes, what we call brand attachment and advocacy. Brand attachment deals with the emotional connection that customers and staff have towards the brand. So, it's less about popularity or even like net promoter score or willingness to refer. It's that I'm bought into that brand beyond just the transactional value, beyond the delivery of their goods and services. I'm rooting for them, I'm hoping for their success, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. I don't just like them, I love them. They actually are a badge. They make me feel better about myself. So, you think of a Lululemon or Harley-Davidson or Rolex or GoPro. These types of brands that people just are kind of freakish about. Chris: That's one of the reasons why we affectionately call them cults, because it seems like these people are more than just customers or like customers on steroids. And then the other thing is that they are brands that benefit above normal from their peers from an advocacy perspective. People talk about them. So on the customer side, that obviously manifests in what we a call non-commission sales force, but on the employment side, it manifests itself in likelihood to... They spend less on headhunters, they receive an irresponsible number of unsolicited job applications. I remember at one point Zappos was getting 20,000 applicants for 200 call center positions and they were more like audition tapes for American Idol. Many people were doing magic tricks, making up songs and doing field trips. They were auditioning for the opportunity to get a job at Zappos much like I'm auditioning to take out Joel on this show. Chad: Well, I think you just made a point for me because we've been having this discussion around how marketing is really dropping the ball when it comes the employment side, because there are so many companies. I would say the bulk of companies out there, 95% plus of the companies don't realize that candidates who also could perspectively be buying their shit and be employees are having a really bad experience applying or going through the application process. Number one, going into a black hole possibly or something of that case and really beating down the overall brand, which is why HR and talent acquisition, they've had a fracture of their own brand create their employment brand around their experience to try to tell a story that the overall marketing brand isn't telling. So number one, there are a shit ton of leads in people that they should be making happy in marketing that are coming through this gateway, the career's gateway. Number two, they're dropping the ball by not partnering with HR and actually realizing the huge opportunity that's there. What the fuck's going on? Chris: Well, I disagree with you. It's not 95% are dropping the ball, we've done the research. It's actually 93% are dropping the ball. If we're going to talk facts, let's use facts. Chad: I appreciate you doing that for me. Chris: It's three buckets actually. I know that we've talked in the past and that you're passionate about the pre-employment group and I agree with you that probably is the lowest hanging fruit, particularly in categories like retail or restaurants. We have a restaurant client that has 100% turnover with tens of thousands of frontline staff and their servers and then their waitstaff and then their back kitchen. Chad: We could have a whole podcast discussion around that piece. Chris: So when you think, if they're receiving and hiring tens of thousands of applicants a year, you almost have your store traffic numbers made up just by marketing to the people. Either they got the job or didn't get the job. Then there's obviously employees. I think marketers should be spending more time with employees because the data is very clear of the correlation, that a hyper engaged employee creates a hyper engaged customer. And that doesn't have to be necessarily even a frontline employee. It can be somebody that's in the product development team or the R&D team in the back office, but they're just so committed about what they're doing. They're bringing their best self to work every day and they're looking for excuses to have customer interactions in their personal lives. They're proud of where they work and what they're working on, but then also don't forget the alumni. There's a tremendous opportunity for marketers to go back to employees that are no longer with the company. Chris: It's kind of like... I don't know. It's like I haven't been divorced knock on wood, but how do you maintain an effective relationship with your ex-wife so that it doesn't have to become toxic or bitter. In the same way when employees choose to leave or ask to leave a company, there's a tremendous opportunity for marketers to make sure that that relationship stays positive enough that they continue to, at a minimum don't start tarnishing the brand, but at a maximum they should remain advocates because they gave a good part of their life and their talent to that brand. Chad: Yeah. You've been talking about the marketing aspect of this. So, why... And let's just turn toward The Gathering. It's coming up here in about three weeks in gorgeous, Banff Alberta, Canada. Why should talent acquisition and employment brand types of individuals? Why should they visit? Why should they make the pilgrimage? Why should they come? Chris: Well, it's one of the things that we... It's been a pleasant surprise for us. The Gathering was created to both celebrate and learn from the most cult brands on the planet. And we didn't script it. We didn't tell what to say when they showed up. We just help them to share their experiences and brands like Red Bull or the Dallas Cowboys or Porsche or Marvel or Nintendo come and start talking and at least a third, probably more like 40% of the speeches from these either brand... We call them brand leaders. Sometimes just the CMO, sometimes just the CEO, talked a lot about their culture, talked a lot about their internal engagement, talked a lot about their hiring practices. Chris: So much so that we're a little dense but we're not idiots. And at some point we start just connecting the dots to realize that one of the key differentiators between a great brand and a good brand is how much time the C-suite is spending on people issues, and beyond what would be traditional HR issues. I'm not talking about wages and benefits and pension plans and all that kind of stuff. We're talking about engagement strategies. They get people excited. And so it was an aha moment for us and so then we started opening up the invite list to more than just marketers or what would be... But I don't think many HR professionals would consider themselves a brand leader, would you? Chad: I do. That's the problem that we're seeing now. I don't think it's a problem, but I think they should be embracing those things. They should be brand leaders, they should be embracing the brand. And one of the things that I heard from Tom Herbst last year onstage from North Face was be more fucking human. That is the basis in the central conversation that we're having around brand, being around first it has to center on employees because that has to come from the inside out. And if they are not taking that stance and they don't feel like they are brand leaders, I think we have a problem, don't you? Chris: Well, I do think we have a problem, but I don't... If I was going to cold-call into a business and say, "Can I speak with your brand leader?" I don't think anybody's putting me into the HR department. So, I think that our brand leaders, I think they should step up and become more brand leaders, but I don't think that they use that language. Some of this is just semantics. I don't think the marketing team and the HR teams even use the same language about what they do and why they do it. And so I think there's certainly resources from the marketing side of the fence that should be deployed into the HR group. I think it's the HR group that needs to grab it and say, "We can do much more than risk mitigation." But the HR departments I know, operate more like the legal department. They're about compliance and enforcement as opposed to engagement and really rallying the troops. Chad: Yeah. Well, most of the ones that we deal with are about technology, they are about experience and they are about messaging brand. This is why we're having that discussion. This is why we've come together because we're looking for that bridge. Right? And I feel like last year when we came to The Gathering in February, that Joel and I were able to walk across the bridge and have discussions with brand leaders, with CMOs, with the Douglas Adkins of the world. Right? The guys who have built holistic brands and understand them from the inside out community, from the inside out. That's one of the reasons why we really have been putting a huge push on our listeners and all of those individuals in marketing and brand on the HR side of the house to come to The Gathering or at least engage somehow. So, if they can't come to The Gathering, how else can they engage? Chris: Oh, lots of ways. We continue... We meaning, wearing my cult hat published content daily about what we sometimes call the anatomy of a cult brand. How we've sort of looked at the cult brand genome, we've got all sorts of scientific on it, trying to help people understand these built-in characteristics of cult brands. We've written a book, we're actually going to be launching the newest edition, we wrote it initially five years ago. So, some of the case studies have gotten stale and some of the research needs to be updated. And the reality is, it has only gotten more compelling. Chris: As the world gets increasingly commoditized, they must be honest. There's really very few things that any brands are providing that you can't get somewhere else. I'd still put maybe Tesla on a pedestal of selling something that's somewhat unique for their category. Apple's advantage has been surpassed, Nike's advantage, certainly GoPro, Starbucks. There's lots of places now that are selling the same things of some of our most beloved brands, but what's keeping them in that front and center in the hearts minds and on the lips of their cult followers, is their culture, is their ethos, is the lore and legend around the things that they do to remain special. Chad: Well, and again going back to Tom Herbst at North Face, be more fucking human. That's the key behind it. Not focusing on the board room. Chris: Tom is no longer the CMO of North Face. You know why? Because they moved to Boulder, Colorado. So North Face was a VF brand which was in San Francisco for a decade. And one of the things that they've decided to do to more fully live their brand is to go to where their brand enthusiasts are, which is in the footsteps of the Rocky Mountains. And so they moved the entire headquarters at tremendous expense. I think they lost, I don't know the number. I believe it may be up to half of the personnel didn't make the move. Tom being one of them, given his ties to San Fran, but think about the boldness of that decision. Part of it is an employee based decision that orders has a lower cost of living. So if you want to attract great talent, asking them to live in the Bay Area can be a hard sell, but part of it also, is if we want our people in the mountains on the weekend, because if you really want to work for North Face, you better love mountain climbing. Chad: And those types of stories also like Airbnb, where they fly everybody into California for a week, for Airbnb one I think they call it. That's a lot of money that they're spending so that everybody's having the same experience. Those types of stories are pretty amazing. Another one, I almost asked you if this starts to qualify this brand, but Delta Airlines the sixth year in a row that they've pushed money back to their employees instead of their stock holders, $1.6 billion they pushed back to their employees. That to me is a strong signal that they understand what actually runs this organization. And that 1.6 billion was about two months pay. So, does that send a strong signal saying, hey, we should be having conversations with these guys? What do you guys look for? Chris: Yeah. It's a really great question because it's fairly recent for us. We actually work with IBM Watson now to help us call through, you're responsible now to data to try to find the symptoms of cult brands that we can engage them in our evaluation to see who should be on the stage every year. And we've just historically not looked at that element of a business as a way of inciting buy-in. That's literal buy-in, that's equity ownership. And a couple of years ago, Chobani Yogurt got to the top of our list, because of all the media attention and some of the social listening things around them gifting a bunch of options to their factory workers. Chris: And so it did make us start to look at it more... There's a Canadian airline called WestJet, which is sort of a Southwest airlines, but with a much more emotional attachment in a different more humane feeling to their cult brand status. And that was always one of their founding principles, is that owners care more. So all of our employees are owners as well. And then more recently we interviewed Bruce Linton. Have you had Bruce Linton on your show from Canopy? Chad: No, not yet. Although, hopefully we will when we come to Banff or you guys will get him scheduled for us. Chris: He became the CEO of the largest cannabis company in Canada, which makes it the largest cannabis company in the world, given Canada's progressive thinking and legislation around cannabis. But Bruce had a pretty strong opinion about equity and allowing all employees into either a profit share or a stock option pool and it created a lot of tension in the C-suite, particularly as they got bigger and bigger and went public and all those types of things. But he certainly was a big believer that if you want your employees to buy-in, then they should be buying-in the way that you expect your executives to buy-in, which is, have some skin in the game from an equity standpoint. So, we're kind of looking at it Chad, I don't think that we have a definitive answer, but it's certainly anecdotally seems to make a lot of sense that that's just the next level of enlightenment and a way of getting people to care more than most. Chad: And you don't have to be a big name like Porsche or Marvel or Airbnb. We met with James Boettcher from Fiasco Gelato who probably blew us out of our socks more than anybody else we talked to. So, you don't have to be a huge brand, right? Chris: Unfortunately, James remains an exception versus the rule. I wish he was the mold upon which all CEOs were cut, because I really think at the end of the day, I heard the same thing from Tony Shay at Zappos. It wasn't like Tony Shay was a freak about shoes and so he created a shoe company. I think Tony Shay was a freak about opportunity and building a company that he wanted to work at and it happened to be opportunistic to get into the shoe business. Same thing with James, I don't think James is a gelato master, he's become one. Goes to Italy and learns all the tricks of the trade. Chris: I think what James really wanted to do, was to build the company of his dreams. And so his policies from day one and the way that he organized his staff, onboarded talent, treated his employees and they became a B Corp. So it had some social good and environmental goodness into it as well. I think people listen to James like, "Oh, I wish I cared about my job that much, or I wish I loved going to work that much." So, he just did it the right way for the right reasons. Chad: He's a pretty cool cult. And again, if you haven't listened to these cult brand podcasts, go to chadcheese.com, right below our ugly cartoon faces, it says cult brand, you can click on it and there is a bunch of knowledge that is dropped in those podcasts. So, on the way out, I just got to say, is this the second year in a row that The Gathering has been listed on Forbes top rated must attend business summits? Chris: Yeah, we are quite honored about that. In fact, it just got the year two announced earlier this week and that's a real feather in our cult because when we built The Gathering, really the creative brief was most conferences suck and we did... Particularly, the more senior we get, the kind of, "I want to get to 35 or 40," and you no longer think it's fun to be out partying all night and using conferences as boondoggles. Most leaders opt out of conferences and so we said we have to create something that is different, which is why we didn't even call it a conference. We just called it a gathering. And you're somewhat sequestered in this 200 year old castle in the Canadian Rockies. Chris: So, you're not going there because you want to hit a Vegas show afterwards, you want to go to Broadway or you want to go to a great restaurant. You're going there because you're desperate to find new ways of shifting your paradigms and new ways of shifting your practices so that you can reap some of the benefits. Not everybody's going to be a cult brand. The Gathering is not for aspiring cult brands, The Gathering is for people that want to improve their business performance to having more engaged customers and staff. And we simply use cult brands as our model or our muse of what good looks like to see what we can learn from that. Chad: And if you didn't hear that, he did say a castle, this happens in a castle at the base of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Hopefully, snowy like it was last year. It is one of the most beautiful scenic events. Not to mention the actual experience that you have. And one of the reasons why I think you guys did this, the brilliance of taking it to Banff, is that pretty much everybody stays. So, usually we go to these events and then we have these very big speakers, they come in on stage, they do their thing, they do a book signing or whatever it is and boom, they're gone. Right? When we were there, we didn't see people leaving. They stayed. As a matter of fact, they made a weekend out of it because you're in Banff. So, I think what you did here was genius. One of the reasons why again, Forbes said it was a top rated must attend business summit. Chad: It's happening February 19th through the 21st, you can go to cultgathering.com, that's cultgathering.com. I already know that we a small contingent that might be larger than what I think that are already going to be there. Joel, myself, we're going to be on stage with some heavy hitters, but there are some others who are also attending. If you're not attending, you're in employer brand marketing, recruitment marketing. It's a must be show. So, get there. Anything... This is your audition Chris. So, what would you like to say on the way out? Chris: Well, first of all, thank you for the strong endorsement. One of the highlights of my career is having the chance to curate the 52 pieces of content. I think this year is our best lineup ever. We got 51 of the most amazing speakers you can think of. And then somehow Chad and Joel made the 52nd spot there at the end. So, nobody's perfect, but we're about 99% and it will be an opportunity, I think regardless of industry and we're doing more and more in the B2B space, every year we're trying to get into businesses of all different sizes, startups, hyper growth companies, fortune 500 brands, because we think that there's inspiration to be gleaned from people that are facing a variety of different problems. And then just for your listeners, what I'm really grateful for is we need to get smarter. We meaning, the Cult team and The Gathering to understanding, are the barriers to some of this that we're not aware of? Are there challenges that the HR professionals are facing that are unique that we wouldn't be exposed to coming at this problem from the marketing side? Chris: So, I'm really hoping this becomes a continuous two-way dialogue, where our intention is to give HR professionals more prestige, more power, more team members, more money, more creative power, more agencies support, all the things that I would imagine they would want. That's what we're advocating and we're using the best brands in the world as proof points that that's how they're doing. Chad: And the only way you're going to get there, being in talent acquisition and HR, is to be able to engage at this level. Chris I really appreciate you taking your time today man. Great audition, we're going to have to see what the listeners say, but at the end of this we always say we out we. Chris: We out. Outro: This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh, yeah. You're welcome. #Marketing #CultBrandSeries #Brand #CultBrands #TheGathering #DeltaAirlines #Airbnb

Do hiring companies really care about the candidate experience? Robert Ruff, President of Sovren Technology tackles the hard questions as he and the boys about the black hole experience hiring process which really hasn't changed much in the last 20-years. Enjoy this Voices Series from The Chad & Cheese Podcast.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. VOICES INTRO: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and confident. Why? While law on the other hand, the Chad and cheese podcast is like listening to a nickel bag album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway. Y'all now listening to voices, a podcast series from Chad and cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. Show Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad. Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hurts complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls it's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation back up with Robert Ruff, president of Sovren industry veteran and all around smart dude. So the standpoint of companies like HiringSolved, I mean we, we actually spoke with Jeremy over at HiringSolved. Joel: And Sean. Chad: And Sean, yeah. Over at HiringSolved and they're going away from this whole public data stance with their platform and they're only going to be working with organizations like a major fortune 500 company who has an applicant tracking system who's getting the data one way or the other. So a candidates are coming into their system, they're applying into their system or those companies have access to the LinkedIns or what have you of the world. And they're getting those individuals to come in again through the applicant tracking system. So it's almost like they're going to get the data, but it's going to be more relevant data because it's individuals who have actually applied into a company's platform. Do you think that's a way to skirt it is like, look, we have to work directly with these companies because they're the ones with the data in the first place. Robert: Yeah, so I think that this brings up a bigger point, which is that over time, although Microsoft, I think we'll and LinkedIn will win in the short term over the long term, it makes them less valuable to the ecosystem as a whole. So we can think of other job boards who dominate it and a niche very quickly and over a number of years by giving people something for nothing. And as soon as they started to monetize it and take things away from people, they became much less valuable and kind of lost their position and the ecosystem. And I think that's what will happen over time is I think this will actually devalue LinkedIn in the long-term. So it's a short term bump, a long-term negative. Chad: So that being said, so that being said, what about indeed because indeed did give everything away for free, pretty much right out of the Gates. And they're cutting things off and, they're starting to force individuals or companies or what have you to pay for what they used to get for free. So do you see them going down the same line that you saw Monster, CareerBuilder go down? Robert: I think it's very possible. So FREE when you get good things out of it is very valuable people and people don't want to pay for what used to be free. So one of the things in business that really upsets people the most is to take something away. And that's what all of those moves feel alike. It's like, well, we, we kind of suckered you in and we got you here and now we're going to take it away. Right? Yeah. And so they, they have the right to do it, but maybe over the long term it really doesn't end up being the best way to make money out of... Chad: That whole Trojan horse process. Robert: Yup. Joel: What do you think happens after the next recession, what happens to some of the established players? So we're in a candidate scarcity situation right now, right. Robert: And so that'll turn into a job scarcity situation. And actually for our business where we parse a lot more resumes than we do jobs, that will end up being a net positive for us because people will be flooded with resumes. But the one thing that people continue to not do that would make them more valuable, whether they're a job board or an ATS or direct employer site, is they are not making the candidate experience so that candidates feel valued. You know, why does it feel like when you upload your resume, you basically just sent it into the wastebasket somewhere? You know, why can't we give people more feedback on actually, you know, you match these jobs. Are you interested in them? Oh, if you are, then we have some others that are like that, that you might be interested in. I mean, why can't we give them some understanding of where they are in the pipeline? Like you're in this bucket over here that no one will ever care about or see. Okay. Thanks for at least telling me so I can move on to something more productive. Chad: Yeah. My question is, you know, the whole candidate experience really came from a group of individuals who had no fucking clue what experience was in the first place. Recruiters, HR, talent acquisition, I mean, nothing, there's compliance may be process, may be shitty. Process may be, but they really didn't understand what experience meant. So now we have two decades where we have shitty experience and that exactly what you talked about, that going into the garbage can is the experience that candidates are used to. The problem is, and one of the things that we talk a lot about here on the podcast is that those individuals also buy things. They also interact. They're interacting with your brand, whether they're coming in as a candidate or they're coming in as a buying customer. So from your standpoint, how do, how do we change this whole thought process of more of the customer side of the house as opposed to the candidate side of house? Just get rid of the whole thought process that they're even a candidate and that they're waiting for us. We should be waiting on them. Right. Robert: Well, you notice that when you go to the site, you don't really get to rate it. So if I go eat at your restaurant and you give me a terrible food or terrible service that's going to show up really quickly and you're going to change, you're going to reach out to me and say, Hey, how can we make this right? And you're also going to actually try to make that not happen again. I think that the problem is there's not enough feedback where the candidates haven't put into the process to let people know like, yeah, I actually am not going to buy your products anymore. I don't know how you change that. Maybe there is some company that comes along and that's their add on and then it catches fire and everybody feels like they got to have. Chad: It sounds like a great addition for a Glassdoor to come in and actually, you know, provide a reviewing system on your actual platform itself and that will be sellable, right. Robert: I would think you know, the first test would be can they sell it to their sister company Indeed? Joel: I think for most people, it's much easier to say, I'm going to go to another restaurant than to say I'm just going to get a job somewhere else. Now, I know in our current state, maybe that is the case for a lot of people, but most people don't feel like, I'm just going to go next door and get a job there. And if I do, it's a whole process that I have to go through that is a pain in the ass. And does the recession really make them really make any of that stuff better because you're taking away resources from companies to hire they're going to get more resumes and not really give a shit, whereas now they probably care more than they ever have and they still don't care that much. Robert: Yeah. I don't know. I've been through several cycles in this industry and actually y'all asked how Sovren got started. It actually started as a recruiting company. That's what we did for our first year. I built the software and my partner built the sales and I just have never seen anything really changed much in this industry around that cycle. You know? And, and what's sad is that for years, I mean decades, we have had the ability to automatically reach out to people and say, Hey, thank you for this. Hey, I want to let you know that you actually have a couple of jobs that seem to fit you. Hey, if you're interested to this and that, and people just don't do it, I'm at a loss to explain why that is other than nobody else is doing it that well. So they don't feel the pressure to do it themselves. Joel: So when you say people, you mean employers? Robert: Employers, yes. Joel: It shouldn't be like, you know, buying something on Amazon, right? Like, Oh, we've got your order. It's being shipped. Here's how you learn more. It should get here in three days. Like none of that happens when you apply to a job. Robert: No. Why should you apply to 50 different places and literally have no feedback from him? You know, it would be helpful to know that on 10 of them, they looked at it and said, you simply, we have no idea why you sent your resume. You're not qualified for anything. Voices Outro: Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad and cheese podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #RobertRuff #VOICES #Brand #Experience #EmployerBrand #Marketing

Do you like magic? Then you'll love this week's episode, featuring another good ol' fashioned Indeed.com switcharoo! Want more? The boys talk about how LinkedIn made their CEO disappear and CareerBuilder did the same with one of their most profitable businesses. Oh, and we've also got a recruiting robot under our sleeve. Hocus pocus, suckers! TOPICS! - Indeed got tricks - Is CareerBuilder bleeding the business dry? - Linkedin lost it's Weiner, but not revenues. - Women on top! - Tengai has an evil twin robot Sigmund Enjoy this week's episode, powered as usual by Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides comprehensive website accessibility testing with personalized recommendations to enhance usability for people with a variety of disabilities or situational limitations. 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 to. Jim Stroud: All right. That's it. What? Wait, you said $20. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Yo. What's up you smelly pirate hookers? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm your co host Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, Indeed pulls the old switcheroo, LinkedIn loses its Wiener, and Tengai, the Swedish recruiting robot, gets an evil twin. Be afraid. Be very afraid. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: Well, obviously, Sovren was not used in Iowa because Iowa had some shitty fucking technology. I mean, how do you fuck that up? Joel: You had one job, Iowa. But your boy Buttigieg had a good day. Chad: Yeah, he did. I mean, so if you're in Iowa, you have to feel like fucking idiots right now. The Iowa Democratic Party Caucuses, from your standpoint. I think caucuses, they're really cool from the standpoint of you get a chance to actually talk to your neighbors. The social interaction is really cool. I think from a voting standpoint, it is the dumbest fucking thing ever. Joel: So it's fun in a way that it's sort of a trip back into time like when it was 1814. That's sort of cool. But for a democratic process, stupid. It's horrible. For the mere fact that people with young children are basically, can't just go out for four hours and do this. Chad: Elderly- Joel: If they go out for four hours... Yeah, elderly people, disabilities. I mean, the weather is always an issue it seems like in Iowa. So basically you get college kids and 50-60s, empty nesters or older kids that can go do this, and it's just not the best thumbprint on what's going on in America, beside the fact that Iowa's like 99.9% white also kind of throws a monkey wrench in the whole legitimacy thing as well. Chad: Yes. We've made voting way too complex, and I understand that's exactly what some politicians want. But man, we have to focus on making this a more vetted process that's easier to participate in. And this whole electoral college bullshit, all of it just drives me crazy. It's like a vote equals a vote. Oh, wait a minute, not in the United States it doesn't. At least the general election. In this case, it's the same kind of thing because Bernie had more votes than Pete did. It's really weird. It's really fucked up. Iowa, do a fucking vote next time, not with your caucus bullshit. Do your vote. And don't do it with an app. How about we don't do that. Joel: The fact that we don't know who the winner was... I don't know how much money Buttigieg will probably lose because he couldn't go fundraise that night. He probably could've raised millions just on that night alone because he had won the Iowa caucuses. Chad: You're right. To be able to pay that much money, which I think we should get money out of politics all together. But to be able to pay that much money to have a clusterfuck this this is ridiculous. Joel: Did you see the Superbowl though? Chad: Dude, the Superbowl was, it was a great game. I don't know that Patrick Mahomes knows how to lead, especially those big games, and maybe he just doesn't feel motivated unless he's in a hole. But either way, man, the last three fucking games comes out from behind, wins the game, amazing. Joel: Yeah, he has quite the penchant for the comeback for sure. If you've seen any of the parade of the Chiefs winning, what a bunch of meat heads. Holy shit. Beer drinking, wrestling watching knuckleheads. Chad: And that might have something to do with them being in Kansas City, and just for all of our listeners, just so you know, Kansas City, Missouri. Chad: What about the ads though? What were your favorite ads? Joel: We talked briefly about this, and we both love the Tide ad with the stain. It was Tide, right? Tell me it was Tide. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So the Tide stain and then how they interject multiple brands into their ads, that shit's genius. I'm a sucker for old school rap, so to seem Hammer make an appearance in the Cheetos ad was certainly great. Although I'm not sure Cheetos popcorn is going to take off, but at least Hammer's still paying the rent, which is nice. I still think it's interesting that I think I counted three electric vehicle ads. One for the Hummer, which I think is really ironic, and yeah, probably awesome. But it's great that the leader in electric vehicles, Tesla, has never done an ad ever but still is on top of that world just because of the market share that they've grabbed and the brand that they have. So yeah, EV Hummer, electric great. Cybertruck is cool. We're going to see a lot of that shit driving around, which is fun. But yeah, that was my thought. And of course you can go through your favorites, but we got to talk about the Jeep ad featuring a groundhog, which from my standpoint effectively lays off the Indeed groundhog because the fact that Bill Murray is in it and the fact that it's a legitimate movie that people recognize. So what are your thoughts on the Superbowl ads? Chad: I think the groundhog moved on is what happened. The groundhog saw a better opportunity and said, "Fuck Indeed," and went back to his old pal Bill Murray. Groundhog Day is a staple. I mean, we've seen it many times. Having Gary the Groundhog around, it was on Groundhog's Day, by the way. He with Bill Murray in a Jeep ad was amazing. Joel: Whoever came up with the Indeed ad had to just be kicking themselves thinking about how they fucked up and didn't tie a groundhog in some way, shape, or form to Bill Murray and pop culture because effectively I don't think Indeed can use the groundhog anymore because people are going to think about Bill Murray, Groundhog Day, and Jeep and not Indeed in finding jobs. Chad: Yeah. So we've actually reached out to the groundhog's agent, and I think we might actually have something going on with the groundhog hopefully sometime soon. Joel: We've got something cooking with the groundhog. So listeners, stay tuned. We'll have some fun stuff coming down the pike. If you remember the Chad and Cheese run for Monster President, you'll enjoy this one. Chad: Definitely. Shout out. Joel: Shout outs. I'm going to shout out to two folks in pop culture that had big days or big weeks. Axl Rose celebrated his birthday, born in '62, which would make him, what? 58. Chad: Yup. Joel: And Kirk Douglas unfortunately passed away. Similarly to you, when I heard the news, I thought it was Michael Douglas who is still alive. No, his dad who was 103 and actually looked better than Axl Rose does now passed away unfortunately. So if you haven't seen Spartacus or another Kirk Douglas classic, do yourself a favor and tune in on Netflix or wherever you stream your movies. Chad: Wherever you stream your movies. Yeah, that was an oh, shit moment for me. I was like, "Michael Douglas? Oh no, shit. His dad is still alive." Yeah, Kirk fucking Douglas, dude. He was a machine. Chad: Some rapid fire. So Jaqueline Martinez aka Jay-Quellen, long time listener. She actually started her own podcast called Coffee to Wine. We were obviously an inspiration there. Maybe not on the wine side, but it was more of just the alcohol. But congrats to Jay-Quellen. Chad: We saw another news outlet announcement this week, which I thought was very interesting. I don't know if you saw this or not. Was it Martin Burns started the Recruitment News Network, and this seems like just another form of Brainfood, the Recruiting Brainfood, our Hung Lee buddy. Doesn't it? Joel: Yeah, we need another news blog in the space for sure. Gee, thanks. Thanks for that. It looks like he did incorporate George Larocque and some other personalities to contribute to it. But yeah, we have enough of those things as far as I'm concerned. Chad: Pete Suchy. I'm going to say Suchy, I don't know. Joel: Sushi. Chad: Suchy. Joel: Suchy. Chad: Suchy. Recruitment ad advisor at CVS and I quote, he says, "It's refreshing to get brand insights from people who don't drink the Kool Aid." We try not to. Joel: Yeah, Pete, we may not drink the Kool Aid, but god damn it, we're drinking cough syrup from CVS right now. Chad: Right now. Joel: Pretty fucked up on that shit. Shout out to James Mailley of Monster, big fan out there in Ireland. He gave me a "slainte "through LinkedIn. So James, welcome to the show, and Saint Patrick's Day is right around the corner, my friend. Chad: Very nice. Tony Serna. Joel: Tony. Chad: From SmartRecruiter sent over a little love letter. He loves the podcast, and all I got to say is binge, baby, binge. Steven Rothberg loved your Captain Stubing hat on the podcast teaser trailer. He's a big fan. Joel: That was mine. Thanks. Chad: A ton of employees over at Alexander Mann Solutions are giving our interview with the SVP Mark Jones a ton of love on Twitter. Joel: Mr. Jones and me. Chad: Den, Kerry, Erica. I mean, just a ton. Now this, kids, is how you push a message. I got to probably thank Adam Giffey for that over there, but when somebody in leadership or anybody from your organization is on a podcast or quoted in an article or something like that, share the shit out of that. I mean, that's again you want to be able to lift them up. And again you get an opportunity, reciprocity, baby. Joel: For reals. For reals. Will Inus of TK Solutions is a big fan of the show. He reached out to us. So Will, welcome aboard to the insane train, and thanks for listening. Chad: Insane train. Adam Gordon over at Canada ID. He really enjoyed Sam Davies on the Firing Squad, the pitch for the startup Real Links. Pretty cool and very usable tech. Go figure, Joel gave him the golf clap. Joel: And I love the fact that Adam Gordon is still pissed off about his golf clap when he was on Firing Squad. Chad: It drives him, man. It drives him. Joel: Like a little story. It was parish, right? We met them out for dinner, he was one of them. So I walk into the restaurant. And he's there like... While we're in the restaurant giving me a golf clap. So Adam, we love you, man. Chad: I think the funny part was is like I don't get it. I'm like that's because you gave him a golf clap, Cheesman. Jesus. Joel: I think I got it actually. Chad: Yeah, I don't think you did. Joel: Pretty much French- Chad: Last on the shout outs, don't miss our new voices series where we have very frank discussions with industry leaders. The latest series is with Robert Ruff, President of Sovren Technology. We just released the second episode of our conversation with Robert. And this one is entitled Does HR Care About Candidate Experience? So check it out. We're going to be pushing a lot of these voices series out there, and they're just, again, frank conversations about things that you guys give a shit about. Joel: Yes, and if you haven't heard the new celebrity intro to voices, that alone is worth tuning in. Chad: No shit. Joel: Voices. Voices. Chad: Got events real quick. Joel: Oh shit. Chad: The Gathering February 19-20 in a Castle at the base of the Canadian Rockies in beautiful Banff. We're going to be on stage. We're going to be interviewing brand leaders. I don't know if I told you this or not, Joel, but we actually have the director of brand marketing for the Harlem Globetrotters. Joel: What? Chad: Yup. He listened to the pod, and he's like, "I want to do some of that." But if you're not listening to the Cult Brand Series, go to chadcheese.com, click on the logo, it's right in the middle of the page. Cult Brand. And if you're not going to Banff and you're in employee branding, recruitment marketing, CultGathering.com, be there. Joel: Yup. And I hear a rumor that cannabis is legal in Canada. I'm not sure if that should be an inspiration to go, but if it is, hey, what do you know. Chad: And then in March, we have Unleash and TA Tech. They're having a, what they're calling a Mega Conference. Two shows together in London in March. We will be doing Death Match at TA Tech. For information, go to TATech.org and also UnleashGroup.io. Check them out. Joel: Really good. Chad: Topics! Joel: Indeed switcheroo. Chad: Dude, this is like Lucy in Charlie Brown where Indeed is like Lucy, and she has the football. And she keeps ripping it away from Charlie Brown, and Charlie Brown always, always falls on his ass. That's talent acquisition or staffing or anybody who has actually paid or partnered with Indeed because it seems like they're always trying to fuck you. But in this new move, which seems like it's been happening much like Indeed does. They don't roll something out all at once. They slowly start to roll their partners or clients into it. But what they've done is the rewards program Indeed has now will sunset March 31st. So if you have been in their rewards program and you're still in it, you won't be March 31st. Clients will have until then to make purchases with their rewards. They're switching to more of a seats based scenario, and I've talked to several TA leaders about this and it goes from kind of like this is something that you should be used to with Indeed. They're always moving the ball, and then some of the other ones saying, "Yeah, it's not that big of a change." It's $960 a year per seat to get 30 contacts a month, that's about ***$32 per contact. *** Cost is $960/yr w/ 30 contacts/mo. = ~$2.70/contact Chad: Remember, this is about sending a message. So you're paying ***$32 to send a message to a candidate. Now if you get the credit back for a positive acceptance of the message or response of the message. But can you imagine sending an email out through any type of marketing mechanism and saying, "That's going to cost you ***$32 every time you hit send." *** Cost is $960/yr w/ 30 contacts/mo. = ~$2.70/contact Joel: Sounds a little bit like LinkedIn's playbook. Chad: That's exactly right. Yes. Yes. Joel: You think anyone misses the old days of like $1 per resume on Indeed? I think that's what it originally was. Like, "Access the contact information for $1." Those days are long gone. Chad: Well, yeah. Joel: To me this is like another instance of pushing the Google for jobs panic button and sucking as much profit out of this melon as they possibly can. So it'll probably work for them for a while. But yeah, another ball moving so to speak by our favorite Lucy to Charley Brown. Chad: So a couple of quick quotes from a couple of different TA leaders who had different viewpoints. The first one, I don't think this is going to be a big change because of obviously again LinkedIn rewards. So it's almost like mimicking and competing with LinkedIn. Indeed protects their data from spam more than most whether that's the one click at a time to mass sending or tossing the analytics and response rates in your face. So Indeed's going to say, "Look, your shit sucks. Tighten up your game." And this TA leader thinks it's just making them do their job better. Chad: Another TA leader said, and I quote, "You still get additional contacts per every positive response with reaching out to people. That's the last thing they will probably take away next year or two to fall in line with their business practices." Then the follow-up response was, "Indeed is always looking for another way to fuck us." Joel: They could end up shooting themselves in the foot if they raise the price too much to the point that people just figure out how to source the web and cross section it with the data and the resume somehow. That seems like an opportunity that someone could capitalize on. But at some point, ***$32 per contact, that adds up after a while. *** Cost is $960/yr w/ 30 contacts/mo. = ~$2.70/contact Chad: Not cheap. Joel: Yeah, not cheap. So at what point does it drive people to other competitors or other sources? I think they should be really careful about that. I mean, their benefit is that Google doesn't have a database. LinkedIn does. As long as they keep comparable to LinkedIn- Chad: But still, again, I don't think from a talent acquisition standpoint they should see this as sustainable because they're buying the same contacts over and over and over. They're pulling the same fucking people into their applicant tracking system they have for the last 20 fucking years. If they actually put that money into a pipe lining, a nurturing type of technology, a CRM, that would actually go in and continue to nurture the candidates that they have already paid for, then they would really not need or need a lot less these types of platforms. Joel: Yeah. The market will eventually figure out a way to do it better and cheaper. Chad: We haven't yet. Joel: Well, keep raising the prices, and we'll get there. Give us a nice recession, and we'll get there. Trust me. Chad: Talking about ways to do things better, CareerBuilder found a better way to do background checks. Joel: Sell, sell, sell. Chad: Sell that shit. Joel: So we did a shred on this yesterday. So they have been acquired. So CareerBuilder bought a company called Aurico in 2016. Aurico was a background check company. They got rid of the Aurico brand and called them CareerBuilder Employee Screening or employee screening. CBES. So this company comes along, Accurate Background, well known company. They're not one of the big companies like a Sterling or Hire Right. But they come along and basically acquire the assets of this screening product at CareerBuilder. The press release made it sound a little bit like they might still partner CareerBuilder. So they'll still have background checks sort of run by Accurate. It wasn't real specific. Of course the terms were not disclosed. But one of the comments I got from a former CareerBuilder guy was that, "Look, the background check was like printing money." The fact that they've gotten rid of that really shows that Apollo is playing with house money at this point and just the fire sell continues, continues to squeeze money out of this pig until he can't anymore. And the screening product was obviously a major part of that. Joel: I suspect, as you probably do, this fire sell will continue at CareerBuilder, and that this is just the first of 2020. Chad: So there was this very long email from Arena out to all the customers. I mean, it was one of those too long, didn't read bullshit emails. But in the last paragraph, they talk about new talent acquisition social referral product along with our next generation career sites and expanded CRM capabilities. Do we believe, does the industry actually believe that CareerBuilder is spending money on anything to develop anything? I mean, to me, it's very much like a shell game, and you're trying to sell off your assets. I had two individuals reach out to me, just quick texts, and I asked them, "Okay, so what do you thinks going to happen from here?" One said, "I think it's going to unravel very quickly from here." The second one said, "Nah. They'll hang on and slowly bleed this bitch dry. And everyone with equity gets shit." Joel: Yeah, look, the press release that went out basically reading the same thing. We're selling this to focus on our core competencies of talent attraction, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is a nice way of saying, "Continue to give us money because the crappy product is going to get better at some point." Chad: Please. Joel: But the height of innovation that we've seen out of CareerBuilder was Pokemon Go for jobs two years ago. From all accounts, they've laid off most of their tech team. So I'm not really sure who's going to make all this innovative stuff. They've shown no signs since Arena's taken over that they're an innovative company. I kind of agree with the slow drip commentary. It's going to be status quo. They're going to keep selling pieces, and before you know it, somebody's going to come in and buy the brand CareerBuilder and its remaining assets for pennies on the dollar. And Apollo will wash its hands free with a lot of money in its pocket. Chad: Do you think Textkernel or Broadbean goes next? Joel: I think they'll both be gone by 2021, which should've been in our prediction show, by the way. Let's here from Canvas, and we'll talk about LinkedIn's new Wiener. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text based interviewing platform empowering recruiters to engage, screen, and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvas Bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing a bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io. And in 20 minutes, we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: I'm sure they love being the lead in to the LinkedIn gets a new Wiener story. Chad: Who wouldn't? I mean- Joel: Sorry, Aman. Had to do it. Chad: Who wouldn't want to listen through an ad to be able to hear about LinkedIn's Wiener/ I mean, that's a perfect intro. That's good. Joel: It's a great teaser. Great teaser. So after 11 years, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Wiener will be stepping down from the company. He's not leaving the organization. As all of our listeners know is owned by Microsoft. He will be the executive chairman effective in June. Current SVP of product, Ryan Roslansky, hopefully we get him on the show. Probably not. Will step into the CEO role and VP of product, Tomer Cohen will take on Roslanksy's responsibilities. In a statement to Wired, Wiener said, "It just felt like the right time. I had always thought of myself that I'd be in the role for as long as I was happy, and then I realized I loved this place so much and our sense of purpose, our vision has become so extricably linked with my own sense of purpose." Aw, isn't that sweet? So did you read anything to this or it's just life moved on? Chad: Yeah, get the fuck out while you're on top, man. I mean, LinkedIn's dollars up 24%. Their revenue up last quarter, 24%. Now on the other side, Dynamics is up 12%. And we just heard that Dynamics is shutting down talents, and they're going to pull The Hub in. My question is what's the future for LinkedIn, and does LinkedIn stay out of Dynamics? I know they're making money, but is there a great transition there to be able to do something more? Joel: That's interesting. Do you think throwaway LinkedIn is a brand and just move it all over into Microsoft? Chad: I think a transition only makes sense if you do it that way. You can't just throw it away. But if you think of it from this standpoint, LinkedIn, there's so much ridiculous opportunity when it comes to sales industry. The sales industry itself. And sales has or marketing, sales and marketing have a shit ton more money than HR does. Not to mention I saw avocados advertised on LinkedIn. Avocados, dude. I mean, I don't know if that was pointed to me because I probably eat like two a day. But to me, the opportunity is so large and it goes way beyond, easily well beyond anything that we can think of here in HR talent acquisition, employer brand, anything like that. Joel: Did you know avocados are responsible for more accidental knife cuts than any other activity? Which makes sense, I guess. Chad: Amateurs. Joel: But anyway, I heard that on a podcast the other day. So I thought I'd share that. I think LinkedIn is weird. They're hitting on all cylinders. They're doing very well. They're making tons of money. But I have to wonder if they're looking at the privacy issues that are coming down the pike, if they're worried about that. I mean, they're in China. Is their fear that they'll get kicked out of China? I'm really curious to see where the hiQ case goes from here. I wonder if they see a decrease in value in the future of profiles and accessibility to those. I really wonder what corner Jeff is looking around to know why he would make this move. Chad: Robert Ruff said on our last show with him, we actually just dropped earlier this week, that he thinks this is a very big play short term for LinkedIn and Microsoft but bad from a long term play. Joel: In terms of the hiQ case? Chad: Yeah, the hiQ case and just data overall. This is working now, make your money on it because it's not going to be there long term. Joel: The guy taking his place has been at LinkedIn for a really long time. I mean, it feels like this isn't turning over the table and starting new. This is just like, "Hey, here's the baton. Keep running." So I don't see any immediate change in LinkedIn. But yeah, I am curious as to what Wiener saw, what kind of hurdles they're going to have and challenges because they will. Chad: Yeah. Again, I think it's interesting to watch what happens between the relationship technically between LinkedIn and Dynamics because now they're sucking in Hub as their ATS. But will that grow further? They've already done some things on the sale side. I could see it in the marketing side. It could be a great opportunity to have kind of like a front facing store possibly of LinkedIn, and then everything integrated on the backend with Dynamics. Joel: Sure. I also think with younger folks, they're having a hard time... If you look at this generationally with Xers coming in and younger as they come in, I mean, LinkedIn seems like much less of a necessity to be on when you have other social networks, other platforms. You have the gig economy, which for most part LinkedIn has no dog in that fight whatsoever. So yeah, long term play is probably pretty challenging for LinkedIn, and maybe that's why the Wiener moved on. Chad: "Wiener is gone," said Lorena Bobbitt. Joel: He did a Jersey curve out of there. Chad: We're talking about women taking something. Joel: Oh my god. Did we just transition from LinkedIn's new Wiener to women on top. Chad: Women are on top. Women are a majority of the workforce. Take your power any way that you need to. The big question is so women are the majority of the workforce now, finally. Is this time to celebrate? And I quote, this comes from AEI.org, "As of December 2019, women held 76.2 million jobs, constituting over 50% of the total non-farm payrolls. This is the first time in the decade we have seen more women than men on the payrolls." And this parody is indeed a noteworthy labor force gain. Are we going to perspectively see parody in pay equity? Are we going to see pay equity come to place because of this trend? Joel: I think we have to ultimately. I also think that more females are graduating from colleges now than men, and I actually think that's been going on for a while. And I think through a combination of either the political leanings in this country, the pendulum's going to go the other way at some point. It might happen this year. It might happen four years from this year. I don't know. But ultimately there's probably going to be a combination of either legal smack down or a governmental smack down coordinated with I think market forces are going to be such that some of this stuff is going to be equaled out because more and more sites from Glassdoor to Indeed to whatever, salary information easily accessible. There's more transparency than there ever has been before. I think that that's going to empower whether your male, female, Indian, African American, whoever you are, that data's going to be powerful. And ultimately companies unless they adhere to either a combination of governmental regulations and marketing forces are going to lose some of the best people, which more and more and more is on the female side of the equation. So I think those two things are going to create a parody in equality of salaries because that's just how sort of business and commerce and life works. Chad: Yeah. Don't you think we have to get to pay transparency pretty fucking quick for that to happen though? Because you go into an interview, you don't know what the position pays. You have some maybe round about hope. But you don't know what it pays. But yet they ask you what you made in your last three positions or what have you. And they're looking to negotiate. At that point, we know different people negotiate differently. Some better, some worse. But overall, that doesn't tend to be very equal. And that's where if a female takes $2000 a year less, that first year, eh, doesn't seem like that much. It's still not equitable, but still... In five years, with the same pay raise, it's entirely different. In 10 years, it's much... So that's where the wage gap actually grows because we don't have transparency. Joel: The simple fact that jobs on Google for jobs are somewhat indexed and ranked partly according to is their pay information on this job, that's a little thing that going to help drive employers to say, "Here's how much this job is worth and what you're going to paid," as opposed to the blindness and the black box that salaries have been up until now. Chad: Yes, which rolls into minimum wage to increase in 26 states this year. This is from WTHR here in Indianapolis. This was interesting because we're talking about not the minimum wage but being able to actually create wage that people can live on and being able to live off of like some of the lowest minimum wages in Georgia and Wyoming, $5.15 an hour, probably isn't realistic in 2020. Joel: I think this sort of goes back to my comment on sort of combination of government intervention and the market working as it should. Cities more and more are competing with each other for labor, brain power, resources, et cetera. So I think it's interesting that you see cities being the ones that are driving so much of this initiative. So you have Seattle, you have New York, you have these big cities that need more and more people, particularly service oriented, the jobs that are minimum wage to get people there, to move there, to increase their tax base, to increase... So basically all the votes rise when you do this. So you have New York competing with Chicago competing with Seattle. So you have this sort of market, the hand in the market driving up minimum wage as opposed to the federal government saying, "Hey, it's no $10," or whatever it is. But I do think there's probably got to be a floor. I mean, the minimum wage hasn't raised... This is your lane- Chad: 10 years. Joel: Correct me if I'm wrong, 10 years, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: So corporate profits have gone through the roof the last 10 years. I mean, the unemployment is as low as its ever been. But minimum wage has stayed pat. So at some point, we as a country have to make a decision. Where's the money going to be in the hands the most, right? And at some point, we have to raise the minimum wage. We have to raise the floor to bring everybody up. Now I'm not saying it has to be $16 like Seattle because Seymour, Indiana can't sustain $16 an hour. It's not Seattle. But the floor has to be more than it was. Was it $7.25 now? Chad: Yes. Yeah, $7.25. I think, I listen to a podcast called Pitchfork Economics. The guy who runs it is a billionaire in Seattle, and he talks about this in Seattle a lot. And what they're actually saying, the first impact of it versus what long term impact is actually happened. And the people that worked in some of these restaurants couldn't afford to actually go and eat in these restaurants. So therefore this new economy and this new money actually put more money in bank accounts and they were able to actually go out and spend more and enjoy themselves and heighten their level of living. Joel: Sure, and it's not just cities that are competing, it's restaurants. I mean, we had a story couple weeks ago about Taco Bell paying $100,000 a year more for executives or managers at the restaurant. So restaurants are competing, cities are competing and all that competition is obviously good. But I do think that the government needs to sort of wake up and raise the floor at least for inflation purposes. It hasn't changed in 10 years. I mean, when I started, you and I started about the same time in the workforce I assume. I think it was $3.35 an hour when I started working in the mid-80s. I mean it's only doubled, and that was 30 years ago. So yeah, shit's got to... The floor's got to come up quicker, at least in pace with inflation so that people have a floor that raises every year in terms of their working opportunities or just become a manager at Taco Bell and eat all the chalupas like my life goal is. Chad: Yeah. I think we should take a break and talk about Tengai's evil twin. Joel: Yeah, let's hear from JobAdX. Nah. JobAdx: Nope. Nah. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just halfheartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it, we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets and templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative, employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel, begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employee with JobAdX. Joel: It gets more crazy than just a robot doing interviewing. Chad: And we didn't even mention robots with minimum wage. That's a whole other variable. But yes, our Swedish friends are back in the news. What's up this week? Joel: Yeah. Actually it's not them, it's another company with a I would say evil twin version of Tengai named Sigmund. He's being developed by an assessment provider LTP Business Psychologists, and so far it is still a research project. "The robot combines the applicants statements with the way he or she says it including facial expression." So I want to make a quick differentiation here. So first off, we've been talking about Tengai . I mean, we went to Sweden. We know a lot about Tengai and obviously what they're trying to do there. Tengai is not doing facial recognition assessment rather it uses the actual robot to follow your face while you're speaking just so you have a better candidate experience. I think we have to be smart about drawing a line in the sand when it comes to robots. Should they ask questions? Record and transcribe an answer to the questions? Yes. Can they answer questions like FAQ kind of stuff back? Yeah. I mean, that's chatbots do that shit. But should they assess a candidate through facial recognition and/or voice? I say that's out of bounds, and that's exactly what Sigmund's doing. Joel: So Tengai just really being able to ask the questions, take your answers, transcribe and answer basic questions. Sigmund is going the evil route of maybe the HireVue route of facial recognition and really assessing people. Chad: Yeah, so I have two points on this. One is Facebook recently settled a case with Illinois who had some law about facial recognition and getting sort of a sign off or approval opting into that sort of technology. Now with Facebook's money, it was like, "Okay. Let's look under the couch cushions to pay this fine." And I think that to a large degree, large companies like Facebook will probably just do the math and say it's easier, it's cheaper to pay the fine than it is not advance this technology and make more money or be more intrusive than we already are in people's lives. But I think if you're a HireVue... So I think people draw the line somewhere with facial recognition and trying to read my mind based on how I look. We seem to be okay with all kinds of other privacy sort of breaking, but for some reason facial stuff people have a problem with. So Facebook settles HireVue will probably have to stop doing what they're doing or pay some money. I don't know how that's going to work. Illinois has pretty strict laws around this. So I do think from that standpoint recruiting and interviewing with facial recognition and are they lying, are they telling... What exactly is going on there? I think that's going to be a major hurdle for a recruiting companies. Chad: I think on the second point that I want to make is Tengai built basically a software to fit into a robot created by a company called Furhat, as I understand it. So think of Furhat as sort of the iPhone, and Tengai is an app built on that phone. So now you have another technology that's basically building a different software on essentially the same robot. Looks the same just about. I as a consumer don't know the difference because there's no brand. There's nothing I have to say this is the Tengai robot. And that's a whole other level of problems because you have to educate people on what Tengai is. Joel: It's market confusion. You don't know what this product is doing versus that product. And I agree. I mean, it's going to be harder for companies like a Tengai who's out of Sweden or a Sigmund who's out of the Netherlands to come into the US, especially with this market confusion. That's the hard part. I mean, you take a look at Illinois, I think again that state is sending a signal to any company that that's not going to happen here in the US. And I would expect other states to follow, if not federal legislation. Chad: Yeah, when I go to the bank and get money out of an ATM, I think it's Chase Banks ATM or its Wells Fargo's ATM when it's actually I assume a third party ATM that's running the whole thing. But you associate that technology with that company. So if you're going to use a robot to recruit, well guess what, now you have some issues with brand awareness and education and all that good stuff. Have fun with that, folks. Joel: Okay. I need a beer. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about Cheese. Not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any who, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, 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. #LinkedIn #Indeed #Careerbuilder #Acquisition #Tengai #Robots #minwage #Wages #PayEquity #Equity

Roopesh Nair is president and CEO at Symphony Talent, the recent acquirer of SmashFly, which listeners will remember from the podcast. Well, we thought it was a good time to bring Nair on the show and chat about a few things, like the history of Symphony, the 'why' behind the SmashFly deal, thoughts on the hottest recruitment tech and what the future holds. Enjoy this exclusive brought to you by Sovren Technologies. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now, based on that technology comes Sovren, artificial intelligence, matching and scoring software in fractions of a second receive match results that provide candidates scored by fit to job. And just as importantly, the job's fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human Sovren software. So human, you'll want to take it to dinner, Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hurts complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark buckle up boys and girls its time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Yeah. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast on your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: And today we have the pleasure of being joined. By cosmetic royalty, RuPaul Nair aire to the fortune of hair removal. Rupaul, welcome to the show. Chad: No, no, no, no. His name's Roopesh number one. And the last name I believe is Nair. Is that how you say it? Roopesh? Roopesh: Almost there. Roopesh Nair is how you say it. Joel: Well I fucked that up. Roopesh the head man in charge over at Symphony Talent. Let me do this again. Roopesh welcome to the show. Good to have you join us today. Chad and I are milking a hangover from the Superbowl, so don't talk too loud if you, uh, if you can help. Roopesh: Thank you Joe and Chad, really happy to be on the show. It's one of my favorites. So thank you for having me. Joel: Way to suck up early on and I love it. That's always a plus. That's pretty smart. Chad: That's what a smart CEO does, right? Joel: That's right. Chad: So right out of the gate I mean, what brought you to this? What brought you to this industry? Roopesh: Oh, that's a great question. So four and a half years ago, I didn't know anything about talent acquisition or for that matter recruitment, marketing or anything we do here at Symphony and Smash. Like today I had an experience, I had all my experience before that I had about 15 years in consumer marketing and technology. And then I got a call from the board was now the board of Symphony Talent. And basically they talked to me about an opportunity to really transform an, which kind of is going through a similar price formation as consumer marketing and technology went through you know, about a decade ago. And I just got excited about it. I, I, the way I told my friends, I said, Hey, you know, today I help companies sell detergent and shoes and tomorrow I'm going to help companies sell jobs and life. So that's basically what got me excited and, and it's just been an awesome journey. As you guys can see. Joel: You choose wisely. You choose wisely going to Symphony Talent. I know we want to talk about the acquisition of SmashFly, but for those listeners out there that don't know what you guys do, give them, give them the pitch. Roopesh: Yeah, so simple words. Pretty much what I said before, we kind of find the, in the, in the business of redefining how employers connect with talent and they are bringing in all the, all the new innovative thinking on how, how the connection happens between, between people and then bringing in, bringing it into the world of a career marketing and talent acquisition. So that's what we have been doing for the last five years and, and before and, but it's SmashFly coming in. That's become even more interesting for us overall as a combined company. Chad: Before we get into the, the SmashFly Joel just wants to go straight for the stuff, right. I want to hear a little history about, you know, what pieces parts came together to create symphony because I mean there were all these different pieces and it was an amalgamation of, for a while it seemed to just like craziness. It was, yeah. Agency's technology background check. Tell us, tell us a little bit about that. Roopesh: Yup, yup, yup. And that's basically, you know, fortunately what got me my job, you know, because there was a history which led to me coming in. As you guys might know, Symphony Technology Group acquired a few companies specifically starting with First Advantage. And then Findly, which was which was early, early CRM in the, in early 2010. So I would, I would, I would say . Chad: Jason Kerr days. Roopesh: Yup. Yup. And then basically from there they recognized quickly that, you know, frustrated vantage was a transactional background check business. So they basically, they peel that out of the business and took all the other pieces, skill assessments, the ATS bought at that time and CRM and kind of merge it together and brought Hodes in at that point. And this was all before my time but obviously you guys, some of you guys know the history, the acquisition didn't really go as well as planned. And then, and especially, you know, kind of coming in thinking about cultural combination of agency and bringing in technology. And agency together was not as simple as it was initially perceived. Roopesh: And, and that's what led, frankly to me getting my job about five years ago because that's exactly what we did in previous organization. At Sapient, we brought technology and creative agency into one single play in the consumer world. And basically over the last I think five years, what you've done is exactly that. Chad and Joel, we basically kind of a broad Hodes as you guys you know, know that really well. It's, it's been around for, I would say about 40 years now as that employer brand agency kind of transforming itself over the years, but at the same time kind of having strong relationship with some plans and bringing some awesome creative and strategic capabilities into the table. But then, then we rewrote all the platforms involved between skill assessments, do basically the CRM to carry your website to programmatic media and bringing all those things together into one single platform. Roopesh: We call this experience cloud. And the idea was that, you know, we wanted to focus on kind of really transforming the experience for, for both the candidates, employees and, and the employers. And that's what we did. We kind of rewrote everything in, in modern technology. We brought in a lot of the ideas around how do we use creative and content in the context of the technology to drive personalization, drive that seamless candidate engagement. And, and that led to where we, we were early this year I'm gonna say like early last year when he had a strong set of set technology suite. And we also had a, had an awesome, awesome creative capability and a bunch of clients who were super excited about what we were doing with them together. So that's the story to tell the SmashFly time Chad: When it comes to all of those technologies. Because I mean, First Advantage had an applicant tracking system, background check. I mean there was a ton of stuff there. Findly obviously was an entirely different segment of technologies, and then Hodes who did have some tech but they really weren't tech. I mean being able to merge them all together into one and then also all the technical debt that had to be paid. Did you just start over from ground zero and use the data because you're talking about being able to build new technologies. That's really hard to do off the back of some of the old tech that you guys were inheriting. Roopesh: Again, a very good question. So the first thing we did is basically invest in what we call this on data, which was kind of that one single data platform which connected all these solutions together. And that gave us the early wins so that we can kind of, you know, sell these pieces. Obviously background check, as I mentioned, was completely taken out of the equation. We didn't, we didn't bring that into this technology, right? So that was, that was First Advantage. And you guys, you guys had a podcast about how First Advantage had a great exit. So that was, that was a completely separate business. But everything else, we, we first connected the data into it started that work in 2015 and to your point, we looked at it and said the tech debt was too much to pay. So we kind of read out everything starting 2015, we basically took all the, all the knowledge all the lesson learned from all of these platforms, but rebuilt the, the front end and the backend in, in the modern mean stack as a, as we call it. Roopesh: And then, and then upgraded pretty much as of 20, late 2018, we had upgraded all the clients into that one single platform, which we call it as experience cloud. So I mean, that's why, you know, some of you are saying, Hey, you know, you know, we have not been that active in the market talking about symphony specifically because we basically were focused a lot more on ensuring that we have an awesome set of stable, awesome clients who are really happy with what we have done with the integrated platform. And that was the journey til 2019 sorry, 2018. And then we were ready to kind of look at the future with everything else we had. Joel: So that probably brings you into the SmashFly acquisition. As part of your 2019 initiatives, what was the catalyst of that? What was some of the pieces they brought to the table that you didn't have? And were there some complimentary technologies? Roopesh: Yeah, exactly. So that, that story of kind of thinking about SmashFly or frankly, initially it was, we were looking at growth from an organic perspective or an organic perspective. And we debated that a lot and we decided to look at both and to invest in invest in both. But as we looked at the market and we ended up finding Spanish Flay, the felt like smashed way, had so many complimentary capabilities, which we didn't have. And also from a client based perspective, as you bring the claim base, both the companies together created a, you know, organization which, which is very difficult to be matched in the, in the modern recruitment marketing platforms industry. Right. So specifically talking about areas which smashed lay was really strong in. If you think about the deck to the smash SmashFly had in, in the recruitment marketing space, just purely as we think about the CRM, the depths the SmashFly has and had is unmatchable you know, frankly by anyone in the industry right now. Roopesh: And on the other hand, Symphony Talent had focused a lot more on the experience of the candidate, the personalization, which comes with that engagement. A lot of the lot of the automation part of recruitment marketing when it came to kind of building these drip campaigns which can, which can automatically personalize itself and run through the different ecosystems and finding the personas and that angles, what Symphony Talent focus a lot mater like moron and obviously also on the, on the programmatic media and that engagement, right? So when you looked at the CRM depth, which smashed lay hat and the experiential capabilities with talent had and the programmatic capability, we had a, if you think about the overall recruitment marketing or the talent acquisition life cycle, you know, we, we basically had the best of breed in all areas and it just made sense. And we had the experience bringing technologies together before. Roopesh: So we looked at it and said, what does it take for us to bring smash flight and, and experience cloud together into one single solution. And we were very, very convinced that that the pieces, the way they were built and the Bay that we could bring them together, there was a, there was an easy path to that, that keeping all of our clients happy. So we decided to go down that path. And it's been, what, three months now? And, and it's been, it's been, it's been amazing because we couldn't have been, we couldn't have been more right on our assumptions on bringing SmashFly into Symphony Talent. Chad: So you were looking at 2015 rewriting everything so that you have a Unicode and you, you got it out to all clients in 2018 that takes a little while. I totally understand. It was all upgraded. Yeah. So now you have another piece and I mean this does, it sounds like it fits well within, again, the constructs of your ecosystem. But again, this is, this isn't an integration, how long is it going to take for customers to be integrated into the SmashFly piece that's already integrated into all the other technologies that you have? Roopesh: No, a good question. Again on the clarification on that 2015 to 18, right, there was a path around basically 2015 we started with a blank slate without anything in May, 2015 and basically the platform was first announced, if you guys remember in, in like mid 2016 was when we announced experience cloud and media cloud. And then there was basically a journey to get, get the clients on it because we don't want to kind of disrupt their journey, right? We want to ensure we upgrade as it makes sense. So that's basically, you know, a pretty 18 was a time when we had paid all, all our tech debt with all clients upgraded into that integrated platform. Now, now the, the journey is going to be a little different from here because the way we won, the way we built these platforms, right? Roopesh: So, especially the experience cloud the, it's basically going to be an incremental add on to SmashFly. So we are basically taking the SmashFly platform. And the reason I was mentioning that we couldn't have been more right about the acquisition was we've already kind of upgraded the candidate experience or the career website platform in SmashFly with what we had with experience cloud and behalf of our, we have three clients already kind of running on it as we speak who were SmashFly clients and then basically pretty much what that means is going forward. The SmashFly platform now has all the personalization engine and all the, you know, content marketing and content capabilities, which Symphony Talent's, experience cloud had pretty much right now because again, it was built in. That is because we had paid all the tech debt in a, in a, in a good way of previously. The next thing we are going to see is basically the programmatic media platform getting plugged into SmashFly platform. And that's in line for basically a late Q1 launch which basically then we'll upgrade the SmashFly platform to have all things programmatic from a job boards to banners to social to basically Google AdWords and all those pieces built into SmashFly as of end of Q1. Joel: We should create a drinking game for every time that you say experience cloud that Chad and I do a shot. I that that'd be a good idea as we can there. So you, you mentioned programmatic and you guys offer a ton of shit, but let's focus on that real quick. As you know, and listeners know programmatic was a hot button through 2019 you had acquisitions the 800 pound gorilla by most estimates with app cast being acquired, like talk about sort of your view of programmatic, where it's going, where it's been and how you guys fit into that. Roopesh: Yeah, that's again, a good question. So programmatic, a lot of our view of programmatic was generated directly from, from consumer marketing. And basically programmatic as this industry knows is very, very, very focused on job board advertising and kind of optimizing your spend across job boards. We obviously are, are very, you know, we do believe that's important. We basically optimize across all the job hoods and, and, and the spend across those. But we also add on basically all the other forms of paid media, whether it is basically banner ads or social or Google ad words. Our, our, our video pre-rolls and all those pieces and be optimized basically spends across all those pieces, which kind of helps us in one way to look at passive and active candidates and, and beautiful word on that most both from what we call as drivers of candidates, but also from an influences of candidates and ensuring that we create a good mix of that as the programmatic drives in. Roopesh: Right? Because one of the risks of programmatic is that you might just always be optimizing towards the minimum costs to apply our minimum costs to click, which may not always be the right thing for the organization, especially if they're looking at quality as a big driver. So that's one of the differentiators in programmatic for us especially brings out our experience from the consumer side that how do we really focus on not just the click or the apply, which is what most of the programmatic in the in the industry optimizes to, to basically ensuring that we focused on the quality of applies and the actual actual basically, you know, detail which goes into the application as we go through the process. And the fact that we have a CRM and, and that integrates up automatically into the programmatic piece helps kind of do that because we are also applying the quality lens as we get the applications and then optimizing across all the active and passive sources of media. Joel: Yeah. Now, so we talked about programmatic and you're dropping things like banner ads and job boards and things like that. So it may be Chad and I are too far ahead of the game or maybe we're, we have our head in the clouds, like from, from your perspective, and you guys offer a ton of options in terms of marketing your company. Like what are the most impactful ways that companies can do that? I mean, is it still banner ads? Is it job boards? And is it not, you know, AI and automation and things that we talk about on the show? Like where is the real customer finding success? Roopesh: Yeah, again, a great question because the answer is depending on the job you're talking about and the location and basically the industry, it's a mixture of that. And that's exactly what our programmatic platform does. It kind of takes that guests out of the equation, right? Let's make the decision of exactly the question you asked on the fly based on where the real results are coming from for that particular job, for that particular category, for that particular industry. Right? So as the job comes in, you're kind of finding whether the automation and talent community and those pieces are giving us the best results, then spend more on that. Versus maybe for an engineering job, the job board may not be the best option because there are not enough engineers looking on job boards to basically apply. You might have to basically spin off those banners and social and Google keyboard optimization to be able to do that. And that's exactly what the platform does. Just take the guests out of the equation and you just need to put your spend in there and you just need to figure it out. That just need to tell the system that the related priorities and then, and then the guesswork is taken out because you're making decisions based on the real business. Chad: So you're, you're actually talking about quality with regard to where the jobs land, but not who's applying. Is that correct? Or are you actually doing some type of matching on the way in to assure that you are getting qualified jobseekers? Because, I mean obviously you can go to an engineering job site which everybody has access to and you can still get individuals who are not qualified. How is it, is it just more of a ratio of, well that's where the engineers are going to go so we want to target where the job lands. Are you doing more than that and trying to actually match. Roopesh: More than that because basically the same AI we use for matching on our CRM and our career website. So if you go to the career website for example, you know, a person can see what jobs are best fit for them based on their profile they have provided to the company. The same AI is used to match real time as the applicants come in, we use the applicant data to then basically hash to say, Hey, based on historical performance of who has been matched to this company and who has got hired, we are able to make a quick decision based on AI to say, all right, this seems like that particular applicant to keep it very, very simple into machine learning. We can get into depth of that, but very, very simple sense based on historical performance. We are making a decision on as the applies come in, are they quality applies or not, and then using that to determine where to spend the money on media along with how the applications are pacing, how the organic clicks are pacing and so on and so forth. Chad: Okay. So let's back out of this real quick and say in 2019 with the acquisition of made a big splash. I mean that was, that was a huge splash close to the end of the year. But Symphony Talent really wasn't a big brand that anybody really heard about. There's a lot of tech going on, a lot of things going on behind the curtain is this, is 2020 going to be the year? The coming out year where the curtains are drawn, everybody can see inside and we can start hearing more about these big tech advancements and programmatic and what you're doing with SmashFly. And is SmashFly going to just mold into Symphony or is the name going to stick around Roopesh: Both good questions. So basically, and the answer is yes. On the 2020 being the year of both SmashFly and Symphony Talent kind of been coming in the limelight and what Symphony Talent is and what SmashFly is far Symphony Talent. Kind of all that getting clarified so that you know, everyone's clear in the market as to you know, what, how to buy from us, right. To your point and ensuring that these, you know, VR unveiling all these pieces, especially in the context of how technology which was already at Symphony Talent and then technology which, which existed in SmashFly is going to seamlessly integrate to drive that whole division of you know, system. You know, humans should not be kind of going into the systems to kind of make guesses, but humans should actually be leveraging system to really have real human conversations. So that's basically what we are, we are hoping to do in 2020 kind of bringing, bringing all the pieces together, focusing on automation of all the way from, or if you're calling us awareness to offer, integrating with the ATS is developed, which we already do really well. Roopesh: So that you know, the human beings in this, in this equation the recruiters and the candidates spend most time talking to each other rather than searching for things which already the systems can provide, right? So that's basically what we are doing and you'll see us a lot more in the market. If you were at TAtech last week week the, we made a big splash of what Symphony Talent and SmashFly and do it together and be able to continue to do that. We will obviously use our Transform Conference to bring that for the life. And we'll basically be leveraging all the opportunities in 2020 and even forward to do that. Now to your second question, Symphony Talent and SmashFly are both going to exist as brands. Symphony Talent has kind of, you know, excelled in being known as that brand, although it's not known as in the technology as a technology brand. Roopesh: The, the, all the pieces were brought together. Symphony Talent is being perceived as a brand which can kind of been brought in to kind of really help you transform your overall brand engagement. But the talent right from the right from awareness to advocacy as we call it. So we are going to continue leveraging Symphony Talent for ensuring that we, we get into those conversations where it makes sense. And then SmashFly is going to be our one single product suite, which basically will slowly bring in all the pieces, including the programmatic pieces, including the personalization pieces, the skill assessment pieces and everything else. You heard from me about what Symphony Talent had and you'll see the SmashFly product evolving really, really quickly the next two quarters where we're basically, you know, the competition won't be able to get to because of all the pieces with Symphony Talent also had. Joel: Let's take it to employer branding for a second. And historically, branding started at a company's career site, right? That's where the videos were. That's where the sort of the, the identity was created. And I think more and more in some of the startups that we've talked to and companies you know, a lot of the apply stuff happens from the job search, right? It doesn't, they don't have to go to the company site anymore to apply because of one click solution. So I'm curious do you still agree that the, the career site is a major component to employer branding or is employment branding moving on to social media, Glassdoor, YouTube, external sources as opposed to the home site? What are your opinions on that? Roopesh: Yeah. Again, the employer branding is going through the same evolution which, consumer branding did, right. In many ways that's how people basically, if you, I know some of my early, early conversations about employer branding in talent acquisition space I talked a lot about omni-channel and prior branding. This was early 2015 as they came in because I was kind of ready buyers done what I saw on the consumer side. It was all about kind of, you know, yeah. Career site is a hub instill in many ways because you still come to the career website to kind of get to know a little bit more about certain things you click on as ZipRecruiter or whatever. You come into the job page and that's still in the career website. But the idea is that gone are the days where you create those basically ton of pages on the website and you hope that people would come to that page because we have data that between homepage job search and job description page and career website, most of the traffic of the web after career website is between those pages and all of the pages that are almost never visited. Roopesh: Right. And so if you focus on those and if you focus to your point on social, on, on Glassdoor, on indeed on, on banners and every single touch point on the emails you send out on that text, you send out on that, on that WhatsApp you send out, right. Everything is part of your brand equation now and, and basically a relationship management solution. This can help you kind of really manage that brand across all these touch points is what you need as a, as a recruiter, marketing professional and not a something which can manage the career website separately versus social separately versus advocacy separately. It all needs to be one single solution. That's exactly why we are excited about what we have here. Joel: Sure. It makes you that much more valuable with all these different channels to brand companies. Roopesh: Yup. Yup. And how all those works closely together with real data. I'm making decision on where do you need to focus, right. Because some, depending on the roles, depending on on the type of job you're talking about, different channels might be important as compared to others. Chad: Right, but the black hole is, the biggest issue I would say that most companies have from an experience standpoint, hiring companies have flashy websites and videos and blog post writers and all this, all this wonderful, fun stuff, great content, but the experience still sucks for candidates and what is, what is, what is symphony doing to really get rid of that black hole experience? Because that doesn't just impact the quote unquote employer brand. If I'm buying something from that company, I might stop. That. Could perspectively impact the consumer brand as well? What is Symphony Talent doing to get rid of the black hole? How is that going to happen? Roopesh: Yup. No, again, wonderful question because ATS, as you get to the ATS point and when we are making decisions as an employer as to do we spend time with the candidate or not, that's where you know, the processes, the human intervention comes in and basically you know, candidates never hear back and yeah, you can have a flashy website as you said, and you'd get into the application process. Sometimes it becomes complex. So our solution to that is a combination of things. One is to ensure that we are having very, very deep integration with ATS where we can still provide that seamless like one check, one click type checkout experience as we call it, the application experience. So, so that it can be seamless if you're going for as a candidate you want to apply and we are working with a lot of it is also working with companies to really figure it out. Roopesh: And that's where our transformation capabilities working with companies to figure out is that what you really need in your apply process or can you, can you cut these things off and move this later? And things like that. And I think we making real progress with companies and kind of thinking about what really needs to go into the application and how can we seamlessly integrate that in. So that's one part of it. The second part is as these decisions are getting made in the company and you know, the, the people are not being talked to because now they are in the black holes. We are kind of bringing in our engagement engine as part of the CRM to like ensure that, you know, we, we bubble up people who are, so we kind of quickly use our matching, regarded them to figure out who are the people that we should be talking to right away and push the recruiters, push the recruiters who talk to them quickly and, and give that visibility. Roopesh: The execs also, that's the aspect I was talking about around automation and kind of ensuring that people are not, you know, just searching, searching in systems and trying to figure out the right people. But, but people who are really best fits getting bubbled up pretty quickly so that those conversations are enabled quickly. And then people who are not that great fit based on the matching, kind of ensuring that we are talking to them also, right? Depending on, Hey, are they, are they repeat applicants? In that case there's a different conversation happening. If there is less data available about them, let's, let's have conversations about skills and assessments and stuff like that and talk about what else they can grow in and stuff like that. So that it's not, it's not that it's, it's a Hey in a crude or picks up the phone and calls this person conversation, but it's about all those conversations which can happen with a candidate all through the life cycle of the application and eventually as they get hired. Right. So again, I think there's a lot of work which needs to be done as a process and also technology in that area. But what I think they're making a lot of progress there. Joel: Alright Roopesh. I'm gonna let you out on this. You mentioned Tiktok on the symphony website and Chad couldn't be happier about that. You talk about Snap and others, so I'm curious, sort of on social media. What do you, what are your thoughts on the real progressive stuff like the tech talks and Snapchats are companies of yours actually using those mediums to effectiveness? And if not, what will they be doing? What social media platforms do you see fading for your customers and which ones are sort of at the top of the bell curve right now? Roopesh: Yeah, so I think the social media platforms are going through an evolution, right? Facebook used to be the coolest thing five to six years ago, and now it's my dad and my granddad basically spend their time on Facebook right now to be honest. So I'm actually on frantic people on Facebook because basically all my family's out there and it's more of a, there's more of a different conversation there, right. As compared to the Instagrams. And so I think it'll continue to happen and you'll see that every year basically. You know, new platforms will come in, you know, pick doc is basically the medium for, for you know, the, the youngest of the generations, I guess these days. But that's it to your specific question on jobs. I would say how it be used in job and advertising and getting people connected to companies. Roopesh: It again depends on the persona you're targeting. And we have used Snapchat effectively in, in some personas specifically around you know, university targeting and stuff like that. We have used Snapchat very effectively in the past. If you stick talk effectively in, in case of very specific like what do you call a millennial type campaigns where we had to kind of create there was a diversity campaign we ran, which we use tic talk very effectively with kind of bringing in advocates who basically could basically share, share their videos and kind of bring that in. So again, my point is each platform has its own, its own, you know, area and Facebook. I think it's still an effective media. Basically advertising, especially as now its reach has increased beyond the early adopters. I would say in the early two thousands, mid 2000 period to now basically pretty much everyone is on Facebook. Roopesh: So I think it's still an effective social media platform. So my simple answer to that is each of those platform has its own areas and you will see that evolving more because more and more platforms coming in that'll be these niches where it's a single platform might make sense. And that's where a platform likes like what we have at symphony will be effective because you're not trying to guess what is working. You're trying to kind of leave it to the platforms to make a decision. And then you are focused on the content and the personalization you want to produce really. Chad: Well. Excellent or pass. We appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to speak to a couple of knuckleheads. If people want to find out more about you, uh, or Symphony Talent SmashFly, where would you send them? Symphony Talent? Roopesh: Specifically dub dub dub dot SymphonyTalent.com. I think that's the best place and be at integrating SmashFly into that content. So that's probably the one single place of truth as we, as we progress and more about me just Google Roopesh Nair as you called it and I think you'll get to the right place. Chad: Excellent. Appreciate it. We out. Joel: We out and we wear short shorts. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit ChadCheese.com. #Technology #Brand #Branding #ATS #CRM #Programmatic #Marketing #Recruitment #Smashfly #SymphonyTalent

Sourcing extraordinaire Mike "Batman" Cohen is not the kind of cat who pulls punches, which makes him the perfect guest for the podcast. In this can't-miss episode, the boys discuss the state of recruiting, sourcing ... and the imminent takeover (not so fast!) of the robots. Enjoy this exclusive brought to you by NEXXT. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hearse complained with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Bottle up poison. Joel: Yeah. Screw spidey senses. He got something better today. What's up boys and girls? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: And today we are blessed to have Mike Batman Cohen, head superhero. I don't know what the title is of Wayne technologies. Mike or should I call you Batman? Like what's, what's sort of podcast etiquette? Chad: What's appropriate? Yeah, I don't get it? Batman: Publicly prefer Batman or like most of the time I can't get full adoption cause my wife and family refused. So I go by both. Joel: Batman. It is. Have you seen the Seinfeld with the Maestro who wants to be called Maestro? Batman: No, I don't. Why? I have a strong aversion to Seinfeld. Joel: A strong, okay, well this is a separate con... Why do you have a strong aversion to Seinfeld? Batman: My dad was a dentist and he had TV's over all of his chairs and he only played Seinfeld. So I only hear like the drill in the background while that show is on. Joel: So he loves the anti Dentite episode. I assume. Batman: He loves all things Seinfeld. Chad: Oh, that's good. Shit. Good shit. So let's, let's learn a little bit more about Batman. Tell us, tell us a little bit about yourself. Batman: Yeah, Um on the professional side been an agency side recruiter for 12 and a half, almost 13 years. I owned my own company now because I'm a fairly disgusted with the majority of the recruiting industry and how they're, how it's approached. It's a super low bar of entry with high potential. And so it floods with people just looking to make a buck. So I I actually created a new style of sourcing contract sourcing that isn't based on hours. It's based on a clear deliverables of delivering X number of candidates per role with, you know, personal contact data and then actually doing the outreach and making introductions that way. So I'm hoping to positively impact the industry so people stop spending money to companies who are giving them quote unquote, 40 hours a week with no like true SLAs and instead just say, Hey, you want this thing? Cool. Well, I'm going to give you this thing. The better I am at delivering that thing, the last time it takes me, the more money I can earn. So like we're in mutual alignment with each other. Chad: Makes sense. Deliverable, always nice. Joel: We got to touch on why Batman before we get to the Q and a, because a lot of people do not know you. They're hearing this podcast saying, who the fuck is this Batman guy? So why the Batman thing? Batman: Yeah. as a story, I'll try to condense it. So it's about four years ago, three and a half years ago, I was in New York city as four years and I was working for a boutique staffing agency doing tech recruiting. I had a bunch of like super cool clients, man at the time. And I wanted to work on my personal branding so that way people would want to work with me. Right? And I'm like, all right, Michael Cohen, what can I get? That's my actual name and what can I do with that right? I'm like, Aw, my initials are MC, blah, blah, blah. This was right around the time our current president started running for office, which it probably doesn't seem relevant to most people listening to this, but if you do any level of research or you can remember he had a lawyer and that lawyer was objectively, kind of an idiot and a jerk. Chad: You mean the one in jail right now? Batman: The one in jail. And he had some epic interviews where he just said some stuff that was just awful. And his name is Michael Cohen. So yeah. So I was like, great, I'm never coming up on the first page of Google ever. And so dude, I, you know, I love Batman. I didn't read comics as a kid at all despite what people think. I, I read my first and I was 19. It was a Batman comic. I fell in love. I figured he's the world's greatest detective, which, you know, as a sourcer and recruiter, that's kind of what we do. And I said, you know what? Let's give it a try and see what happens. And people seem to like it. So, Chad: Okay. So with this low bar that you're talking about, cause there's no question we agree with that anybody can get into the into the industry. And don't you find that because of the low bar that recruiters get tagged with being and sourcers get tagged with being a lazy just because of the influx of anybody, quote unquote, anybody can do the fucking job. Batman: Yes, but you used a phrase they get tagged as being lazy. I think they're just lazy. By and large. If you look at a group of people, anything, sourcers, recruiters, doctors, lawyers admins, and more than 50% of them are lazy. I don't think you're tagging them as lazy. I think just as a group of humans, they're lazy, Chad: But that's not fair though they didn't go to school to be recruiters. They didn't get trained to be recruiters. They weren't they, they came in because there was a job, they thought they could do it. They're really not recruiters. So if you take a look actually probably, but if you look at the core of recruiters who are actually recruiters, would you say that they're lazy? Batman: No. Chad: Okay. Batman: The number unfortunately the percentage is much smaller than it should be. Chad: Well we wouldn't have a third party vendor system without lazy recruiters. Batman: I'm super grateful. That recruiters suck. I like, I increase like the quality of their recruiting industry, but like not to 100% cause I'd be out of a job. Chad: That's the name of this podcast by the way Grateful Recruiters Suck. That's awesome. Batman: Yeah, that's perfect. But maybe suck a little bit less. I'm sorry you asked what percentage? It's really tough. I, I think legitimately like how many really good recruiters are out there. I think 20% would be pretty generous. . Joel: So we jeez, we talked a lot about the death of sourcing last year and had some, I think pretty smart people who know a thing or two about sourcing. Johnny Campbell for instance, said what 98% of sourcing should be dead at some point. Like what's sort of your view on the present state of sourcing and the future of said profession? Batman: Yeah. So I'm going to come out right here and this is going to annoy some people. So bring it, you have my email address everyone. It's online. You can send me hate mail that way. So I'm going to make a blanket statement and say Hey, if you're not actively sourcing all the time, don't give me your fucking comments on sourcing. I don't give a shit what you think about sourcing. I can say the same thing about online training videos are going to be dead in X amount of time cause there'll be ways to automate that shit and people will do it for free on YouTube just recording themselves working. But like I don't know that cause you know I don't do it every day. So like that's annoying as shit. Do I think sourcing will be dead? No, I absolutely do not do. I think shitty sourcers that people who are recruiters who say things like, yeah, I do outbound. Batman: And you're like, cool, what are your favorite platforms? And they're like indeed and dice and monster. You're like, Oh cool. You're not, you're not going to have a job. In a couple of years. Once they get like the AI sourcing platforms down, like they're not going to be able to sustain, but like a true sourcer right now, look at people like Amy Miller or Steve Levy who are not approaching this as like, Oh, let me go to LinkedIn and type in the keywords I want and type in the X and Y and Z. Right. The way that we work at Wayne Tech, you're creative about the sourcing. It's not go to platform type in shit. See what comes back send message. It's like a great example. We're working on a CFO for a biopharma company. They need help raising money and IPOing. And so one of my recruiters was like, cool, I'm going to do research then on every biopharma company in a similar space, which is like the immunization space, who IPOed in the last seven years. And then I'm going to find their executive team and I'm going to look at the two or three people who were responsible for raising the money and bringing them through their IPO. And then that's the people that I'm going to reach out to for the role and like there's no tool that's gonna do that. Joel: That sounds like thoughtful recruiting. I'm gonna applaud that. Do you feel like sourcing will exist in every industry? So we had someone on recently and we all sort of agreed like high frequency recruiting and hiring will all be at some point. Like do you think that sourcing will only exist in sort of the higher profile jobs or do you think it will continue to exist in all sort of phases of it? Batman: I am not a futurist so I don't, I don't, I want to caution and say this is an opinion of mine. Not, not based on empirical evidence. Joel: That's all we do on this show. Batman: Oh great. Okay, perfect. Then I'll fit right in here. So I think that it will still exist and I think the reason it will exist is the online presence for those folks, right? The blue collar workers in general is not as prevalent and therefore finding them is inherently going to be more difficult. Right? Like so when I was doing a searches for CDL drivers and I was doing searches for like service techs for folks who would literally go out and like clean tanks for the oil and gas industry, the only way that I could find those guys was either, I believe you're not Craig's list or Facebook searching people and finding people on Facebook who work at companies that did that job or had titles like driver and stuff like that. But it's going to be hard to automate that because you know, who else has titles of drivers, people who like deliver pizza for pizza hut driver as their title or people who drive for Uber. And so it becomes a lot harder at that point to kind of automate a process of searching through different platforms and also LinkedIn and Facebook do a super great job of changing their UI just often enough to fuck everybody. Chad: Oh yeah. Joelr: We actually have a, we have a live a camera at the Craig's list R&D department. Let's, let's check in on that. Okay. All right. (CRICKETS). Chad: You know what, that's not though. That's not their revenue department. That's for fucking sure. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of NEXXT. Joel: What kinds of companies should be leveraging programmatic? Andy Katz: Every Fortune 1000 company out to anybody with extreme volume of jobs. You're recruiting for 20 positions a year. You don't need programmatic. You can go to a recruitment marketing agency or a job board and do a direct email with your company only you're not in with another 20 companies in a job alert or you're not just on a career site or a job board. You can do banner advertising ,buy premium placements. So where programmatic again, is one piece of the puzzle. It's not going to ever be the end all be all. And I do believe all the programmatic platforms out there have ancillary services to support that knowing that you can't just survive on a one trick pony. Chad: For more information, go to hiring.NEXXT.com remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X, hiring.Nexxt.com Chad: So when we're talking about talent from a recruiter who is really focused on, you know, detective work, what is the best source for a company today? Cost,] really all for the ROI piece to be able to go out and actually find qualified candidates Batman: Ahh man. Do you want like candid response to that question? Chad: Yes. Batman: Cool. That's a stupid fucking question. And here's the reason. Sure. I equate, hi, thanks. Whoever hit that I assume was cheese. That is the equivalent question to me of asking a contractor or building your house, Hey, what's the best tool to build a house? Right? And if they're like, Oh, a hammer, I'm like, you're fucking fired. You're not building. Right? So the answer to your question is I don't know, what positions are you recruiting for? Where in the world do you recruiting for them? How senior is your team, what does your budget look like, how automated you need X and Y and Z processes. Are you a spray and pray recruiting company? Like all of these things play into effect as to whether you want to do something that like a Hiretual whose AI is great for turning back like tons of folks very quickly to weed through or whether you want to use something like Seekout where you have much more control with boolean. So if you're like a boolean and lover and master like, so for me seek out my go-to. Typically if you're like solely hiring for tech, right? It depends where in the world. But like particularly in the U S I'd go with human predictions globally, I'd probably go something like amazing hiring. If you are really a fan of paying a bunch of money for really shitty service, you can go with LinkedIn recruiter. You know, it just depends on kind of what you, what your unique use cases. Chad: So thinking about it from, from this standpoint, companies have spent millions, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to spray and pray and do all that shit over the last couple of decades. Right? And they've built massive applicant tracking system databases and they don't use that shit at all. So from my standpoint, and again, again, I'm not the expert here, that seems to me like the number one source that you would want to try to dive into or at least try to create a talent pipeline around so that you don't have this black hole experience that recruiters get blamed for a lot of times, Oh, the recruiters aren't getting back with them. Well fuck when you have that many goddamn applicants, how the fuck can you, so in looking at sources, why aren't we using the applicants tracking system resume database? Because we're buying these motherfuckers five, six, 10 times over. Batman: I mean, the short answer is because inherently recruiters are lazy on the front end. You have an overwhelming amount of candidates responding to jobs and putting in the data into the ATS is literally the last thing most recruiters want to do. So like they're not updating things like, Oh, what's their category, what are their skills or tags, what's their rating, what's their visa status, etc. They're just throwing shit into the system. And the problem with doing that is a year from now if you want to search for people, no one's actually categorized in any way in these huge systems. And so people have ATS is that for all intents and purposes are useless outside of process tracking, in which case just get like a Kanban board like a Trello and you'll be fine. The same shit at that point. Chad: Well we have all this data though. Batman: No you don't. Chad: The data's there. But it's not contextualized. Right. So just like you're saying, no, no. If that fucking visas don't know what's going on, all this shit is really just garbage data. How can you turn some of this tech that we have, like some, some that you were talking about on that data to make it worth a shit. Do you think we can or do you just think it's garbage? Get rid of it. Start from ground zero. Batman: There are tools that you can use to try to reinvigorate the data, right? So like this is where the idea of using a chat bot is super appealing. So a, I use XOR.AI. I'm big, big on Aida is doing some awesome stuff. She is great and, and Maldovia their tool I use to reinvigorate candidates, right? Cause if you have that many candidates, you don't want to have to reach out and then deal with, you know, a million responses. Batman: I instead would want a chat bot reaching out saying, Hey, just want to touch base. It's been a little while. You know, if you're open to looking for a new job or you know, updating our data so we can reach out in the future for relevant jobs, let me know. Right. And say like, yeah, sure. And the chat bot gathers the information of where you working, what's your title, what's the best email, blah, blah, blah, and then that will auto update the database. Now all of a sudden you're starting to make use of some of that data. If you're not willing to take steps to correct the bad data put in the system, it's useless. Just, I mean hang onto it solely for the reason of like, Oh it looks like we spoke to this person. You know, like last week. We should probably not talk to them again. Joel: Batman. I'm intrigued by the fact that on your website you actually list the tools that you use to source. That Batman: That's not totally up to date. Joel: Not totally up to date. So assuming, assuming you're not getting paid to list these companies, you're actually using them on Batman: I and to clarify that I do not accept any money from any of those companies for anything. Joel: I'm going to assume that you get a lot of pitches from a lot of vendors and so I'm just curious about how are they doing it incorrectly or correctly. What tips would you give to salespeople in the vendor space? And maybe what are, you know, if someone's looking at this and saying, you know, I have a budget for like, you know, three tools, what would maybe be your three must have tools that are in your tool chest right now? Batman: I'm not going to name specific tools, I'm going to name functions instead. Cause again, I think the use case will be different based on the tool within the function. So your first question was regarding salespeople in these in these products, in these vendors spaces, what can they do? I find that too, these companies sell the product based on their knowledge of what the product can do as opposed to how the product is being used. So if you're able to talk to some thought leaders, quote unquote, whatever the hell that means in the space who are using the product, I would personally suggest, Hey, reach out to those folks and ask to do a screen share and just watch them use the product for 10 15 minutes. See how they're using it, and then ask questions about, Oh, why do you do that? What do you do there? Batman: What do you do there? So, so when you're demoing the product and like, Oh, look at what we can do. Oh, look what we can do., who gives a shit what you can do? What, how are they going to use the product? So I'll step off my soapbox there and I'm going to get right back on my soapbox. And in, in terms of tooling, there's a few areas I think people really need to think about. One is sourcing obvious, yay. But like, get off of LinkedIn. Recruiters, stop using it. Yeah. It's so expensive now. Chad: But that's what lazy recruiters do though, right? They just go to... Batman: It's not their fault, it's what they were given. It's the only product they're given. Often times it's the only thing they know how to. Chad: Yeah, but they're crying for it though too. You know it. You hear it. Need my LinkedIn Recruiter. Batman: Of course they're addicted. They're addicted. You guys were at TalentNet to give a whole talk on addiction and the recruiting space, they're addicted to the way they've always done it, right? So one is, Hey, for the same price you pay for LinkedIn recruiter, you could literally get a better AI sourcing tool and an email automation tool and a contact information finding tool all for the exact same price. Right? And you can say, Oh well then we lose the ability to search LinkedIn for a, you know everybody, no you don't. There's a thing called Google and you can use that and you have access to all of LinkedIn still. So stop it. Stop using LinkedIn recruiter guys, I feel like I just, it kills me. So one is sourcing, the other is email automation. People don't necessarily realize PWC put out a study I think like 2017 so it's a little older. Batman: The average number of candidate touches it takes to generate a response. Right? And the number is, is shockingly higher than people think. I get the majority of my responses on my third and fourth emails to candidates. So like most people aren't doing that and if they are, it's taking an extraordinary amount of time to track who's responded, who hasn't responded, who would rather move from this list? I have to send these out to these people. How is that going to work? So like just use an email automation tool. There's a whole bunch out there. I'm not again going to mention names. I think it depends on your use case. That would be one after that, there's a few different things I think are important. One, I think our contact information finding tool is super important so that you can email people instead of InMail. The average cost of an InMail is somewhere between like a dollar 20 and $3. Batman: The average cost of looking up a personal email is between like 80 cents and a dollar. So it's, it's actually cheaper and you can hang on to the data forever and ever. Joel: And there's our money shot. Thanks Mike. Batman: Yeah, I think an ability to web scrape is important, right? I will call this out. I use ZapInfo. I don't know of a another tool in the space that can do anything close to it. So for me, I want to be able to search on any site and any platform and pull that data and I use spreadsheets for everything. So like I want to pull all that data out into a spreadsheet. I don't want to be confined to an individual tool because it doesn't play well with anything else or let you export into a spreadsheet or let it function with any other tools like fucking LinkedIn Recruiter. Batman: So hypothetically if that's what I was talking about. So that's one. I would also suggest that this is going to be a big shout out for our company because of the only thing I've ever seen like this. Check out, Honeit. H. O. N. E. I. T. Nick dude. Nick Livingston is doing some, some shit, man. It is. It's case for qualification calls and it is been like life changing for my clients. They've been able to cut out an interview round by me using it and hiring managers go bananas, so I think that's, that's probably one of the other, the other big ones, Chad: It's genius and if you haven't listened to it, we actually have done a Firing Squad with Nick and Honeit. He got big applause from both of us because it is a kick ass fucking platform. All you have to do Google Honeit and firing squad or Chad and Cheese. That shit will come up. Mike. Dude, we appreciate you coming in. Hope to have you back, but before, before we have you back, we want to, we want to be able to have all the listeners know where to actually find you, contact you. Where can they do that? Batman: Anywhere really. I LinkedIn, if you look up Mike Batman, I'm going to be at the top. I think if you look at Batman, I'm probably going to be the first one also or, or just email me at batman@wayne-technologies.com if you don't get the reference, we probably don't have a ton in common. If you do email me, just reach out. I'm always happy to help. You want to talk tooling? You want like a quick chat like street shop. I do want to help as best I can. Chad: Excellent, man. Thanks so much for joining us. Batman: Absolutely, guys, thanks for having me. Outro: This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible for more visit ChadCheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #recruiting #Technology #sourcing #AI #Automation #ATS

Remember liking that tweet 3 years ago expressing disdain for the president? Imagine if it gets you fired 10 years from now? Well, welcome to the future, and the boys cover a company who’s monitoring your online behavior to facilitate such corporate behavior. Additionally, this week’s episode covers - Slack’s comeback, - Indeed’s moon landing ad? - Amazon ruins everything - HEB gives employees 10 millions reasons to cheer! and much more. Enjoy this week’s stimulating episode, sponsored by Canvas, JobAdx, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Jim Stroud: 15 minutes ago, the world changed. Companies are micro-chipping their workers. Robots are hiring humans, and brain-to-brain communication is a thing. This is all happening now. If you want to know what happens next, listen to The Jim Stroud 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 & Cheese Podcast. Chad: Woo. Joel: All right, all right, all right. The week's big winners? Buttigieg and Parasite. As long as it's not a parasite on my booty. Welcome to The Chad & Cheese Podcast, kids. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's episode, those Twitter likes can get your ass fired, get ready for robot resources to join human research, and Slack bites back, along with your employee of the month. Time to go look in the mirror and judge my booty. We'll be right back after a word from Sovren. Chad: Not happening. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: What's the line from Full Metal Jacket, when he says, "Pal, your ass looks like two pounds of chewed bubblegum," or something like that? That's pretty much my situation right about now. What's up, Chad? Chad: Too much information. Joel: Too much information. That's what we do on the show. Chad: Yeah. Don't just spread TMI like it's... Yeah. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: You need protection to listen to this show. Good, man. It's been a good week. It's been an interesting week. We got a lot of good shit to talk about, so let's do this, though. Before we get into the really good stuff, we have a death in the family that we have to report. Joel: Okay. Chad: Employee Guide has finally... Joel: Oh, shit. Chad: ... like a goldfish, needed the flush. Joel: That's nice. Employee Guide, for many that don't know, was a regional free paper, which I guess they still do in some parts of the world, where you go to the corner of the whatever, Main and 6th, and there's free papers you can take. This one used to be a free paper for jobs, obviously wasn't going to scale into the 20th century very well. They had a website that supported that. I actually was a keynote for them back in the mid-2000s. They had an annual event. I also did some SEO stuff for them back in the day. I sort of knew about them. They were like 100 employees strong. They were a big organization, but the jungle is the jungle, man, and they are apparently Audi 5000, G. Chad: They were grasping at straws. "Hey, let's get that Cheesman cat in here. Maybe he can throw some search engine tips." Joel: Yeah, if you're going to attempt to blame me for their demise, you got another think coming, pal. Chad: No, they're already on their way down. They could only afford you, is what I'm saying. That's how far down the rabbit hole they were. Joel: That's true. They were at the bottom of the keynote speaker list, for sure. Chad: There's somebody else at the bottom of our list. You noticed a stupid fucking article that led back to TheLadders, and they have this new logo or something. Joel: Oh, God, TheLadders, yes. We've talked about their, I guess, content marketing strategy a while back, and how they're kind of like TMZ and that shit, and trying to get paid views, and then once people go to the site. Every now and then I like to go check and see what kind of dumbass articles they've published, so this past week, I came across this gem title, "Doing This Many Pushups Reduces Heart Risk by 96%." Classic bait-and-switch, get that SEO traffic, and then get that resume mill, that profile mill going. Now, I also noticed that they have a new logo. It's ladders, and then... Hold on, give me a sec. Chad: 100K Club. Joel: Yeah, 100K Club, which they really haven't pushed since their founding, their original business model, but if you do a search for jobs, many of the jobs are not 100,000K or more a year, so it's a nice marketing tool, but it doesn't quite hold mustard with the reality of the site. Chad: No, and it's interesting, because I don't know if they still do, they probably do, they used to charge job seekers to be able to gain access to this coveted list of 100K plus jobs, and as the VP of Business Development over at DirectEmployers, I dealt with all the partnerships, they were taking jobs from us. There was nothing there that was coveted by any form or fashion. You could find them on just about any job site, because I think we were feeding the exact same fucking jobs to 3,000 plus different job sites. "Here's the bait-and-switch. Pay me $19.95 a month," or whatever the hell it was. Joel: I really wish these guys would just fucking go away. They're really annoying. They need to go the way of the employment guide. Chad: It's a slow death. That being sad, you also brought up Indeed's new Oscars commercial, because we've been talking about Gary the Groundhog, and how they can't use him ever again. As a matter of fact, we're going to pull him over to Chad & Cheese side of the house, but the new Oscar commercial was kind of confusing, wasn't it? Joel: I thought it was funny. For those who watched the Oscars, I'm sure they've been running it since that, but basically, the gist is they show the moon landing, they show Houston with all the screens and the scientists and the mathematicians, and they even show the janitor, but it was basically saying, "Hey, everyone pitches in. Everyone's important," sort of saying, "Hey, we have a job very everyone." Of course, as I'm watching this, I'm thinking to myself, "None of these people, back in 1969, got their job through Indeed, so the relevance of it is really stupid. Everyone probably got recruited, or found a job in a newspaper, and the internet wasn't even around." Why they chose the moon landing to pimp their internet job search site was just sort of stupid. Why don't you just have the signing of the Constitution, or maybe the Magna Carta, or some shit like that before Indeed was around. Chad: They couldn't find a big brand that everybody knew and do the same kind of thing where they actually helped them hire different levels of people in their organization, because everybody fucking hates them, so they had to make some shit up about a moon landing. I do like the signing of the Constitution, though. I think they should probably pick that one up. Joel: Keep swinging, Indeed. Eventually you'll get that TV commercial right. Chad: Okay, shout outs. I'm going to start the shout outs today with my Maya swag, the cool hat. I'm sure you finally got yours. Cool hat, T-shirt, beer glass. The company is sending better swag again. The trend continues to move on. I enjoy it. Joel: Yeah, I was hoping that because you got yours so much earlier than mine, that there might be some liquid refreshment in my box. However, there was not. Whatever, Maya, I appreciate the T-shirt. That's fun. Shout out to Tim Hawk, one of our favorite listeners. He loves the transcriptions, which a lot of people do, but last week, my line, "Old school rap," got turned into, "Old school rape," by our transcription service- Chad: Not good. Joel: ... which, as you can imagine, caught the eye of a few people, including Tim, so Tim, thank you for pointing that out. That could have been really bad for my SEO in the future, for whatever reason, but no, it was old school rap. Chad: And it is old school rap now, because I was actually taking lunch and he messaged us, and I'm like, "Well, fuck." I made my way back home and changed it, but yeah, transcription service is good, but obviously not 100%. Joel: It's not perfect. Fortunately, Tim Hawk is perfect. Chad: Tim Hawk is pretty perfect, and staying on the error side of the house, I really shouldn't do math on the fly. We had to do a readjustment to the Indeed math that we shared last week from the Indeed switcheroo segment. It's $960 per year, not per month, for 30 contacts per month, so it's kind of a switcheroo right there. You're per year, then per month, so you've got close to $1,000 a year for 30 contacts per month, which equals about $2.70 per contact, so whenever you actually press that button, that's what's going to happen. Joel: Sorry math. Math just zones me out. I apologize for that. Chad: We have to make sure we do our corrections though, right? Joel: Yeah, talking about Indeed, ZipRecruiter, or at least one of their employees, loves when we talk shit about Indeed. He was very congratulatory and appreciative on, I think, LinkedIn after that post. Zip, this is to you, buddy. Shout out. Chad: We love it. Also, Rachel Rillings over there, who listens, she definitely, I'm sure, loved a little bit of that. Joel: No doubt. Chad: Also got some messaging from the people over at Tengai. Last year, we talked Tengai and the evil twin Sigmund, and here is the official statement, officially, "Our evil twin is not allowed to be used commercially, only allowed to be used in a research project at the university." Joel: Oh no, Sigmund. Chad: That squashes the market confusion, which is awesome. Joel: I love the viking cage match. That's always fun. Viking-robot cage match. Shout out to Walter Isaacson, much too smart to be on our show, but Walter wrote the biography on Steve Jobs. You may remember him from that. Anyway, he has a podcast called Trailblazers that's for Dell Technologies, which to me is kind of an interesting strategy for a company, to hire a podcaster and then create a series around that. I think it's a good marketing strategy, but the shout out goes to him because he had a podcast episode a couple weeks back about the early days of job search sites, and he specifically talks to Jeff Taylor and Richard Johnson, who was HotJobs and Monster, and that first year of Super Bowl ads, and how things evolved. If you're interested in the history of our industry, go check out Trailblazers, Walter Isaacson, and then search, it's like job search or something. Chad: I have to jump in too and probably add some color, because I guarantee you he didn't get all the angles right. My last shout out is to Tim Sackett, who will be emceeing SmashFly's Transform event again this year. He had a 10% discount code for registration, and go figure, I guarantee you he created this. The discount code is Tim Rocks, so here's what I say. I think we're going to work with SmashFly to get our own discount code, and our discount, for the same, probably, percentage off, is going to be Tim Sucks. SFX: Hell yeah. Joel: Ours needs to be an 11% discount just to be preferential for people. My last shout out... Well, I got a couple, I guess. Roopesh Nair from Symphony, we interviewed, which we published this week, it's a great interview. We also interviewed Batman, who most people know. Michael Cohen. Chad: Michael Batman Cohen. Joel: Not that Michael Cohen. The heavy speaker on the circuit, a lot of people know him. We had a really frank conversation about recruiting, sourcing, automation, all that good stuff, so check out those podcasts. My last shout out, a headline came across my screen this past week. It was, "GoJob Raises 11 million Euros." Jonathan Duarte, his old site was GoJobs, which I think he still runs, so when I saw the headline, I thought, "Holy shit. Duarte just raised 11 million euros," but no, it's some French company. Take out the S. It's GoJob. It's worth a shout out, but Jonathan, sorry. I got real excited for you, but that faded really, really fast, unfortunately. Chad: So close. So close. Event. Okay, next week, kids, February 19th through the 21st, we, again, are going to be lucky enough to go to the gathering of cult brands. We're going to be in a castle at the base of the Canadian Rockies. Dude, it is sick. Go to CultGathering.com if you want to check out what's going on, tickets, whatever, but we are going to be onstage with Bill Neff, who is the VP of Consumer Brand and Marketing from Yeti. That's right, from Yeti, and then we're also going to have Tyler Weeks- Joel: Our bad, Tyler. Chad: ... and Allyn Bailey from Intel, so we're going to have a really frank discussion around marketing and employer brand and big brand, so we're going to have that discussion onstage. It's awesome to be able to get in front of heads of consumer marketing for huge brands, and to be able to have these discussions. Joel: It's going to be an awesome, awesome panel. Chad: It's going to be pretty amazing. Then UNLEASH and TAtech and their mega conference. Mega conference in London. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: In London, in March. Currently we're going to be at TAtech for Death Match. We have JobSync, Optimal, and S-B-O-J or SBOJ- Joel: Spooge. Chad: Yeah, spooge. Jobs spelled backwards. That's what everybody should start off with. We have one spot left to compete for the European Grand Champion, and that Grand Champion will get the Chad & Cheese Chain of Champions. Joel: Already ordered, my friend. Already ordered. Chad: That's what I'm talking about. Joel: By the way, I make great Valentine's Day gifts as well. If you really want to make your significant other feel special, get them a big old championship gold chain. It's awesome. Chad: That's right, just have HMFIC on it or something. If you're in and around London and you're not going to TAtech or UNLEASH, what the fuck's your problem? TAtech.org, UnleashGroup.io. Get your tickets. We'd love to see you there. We're going to be there at UNLEASH, and more than likely, doing some interviews and whatnot, but really excited to go to both of those shows together. Joel: Nice. Nice. Looking forward to it. Let's get to some news, shall we? Chad: Topics. Joel: Oh, so this is a good one. You and I are fans of the Joe Rogan podcast. I don't listen regularly, but I listen enough to say I'm a fan. Chad: It's hard, dude. It's like three fucking hours long. Joel: Whenever I think our podcast is long, I think, "Well, damn, fucking Rogan's is three times as long as ours." Anyway, they actually talked about some employment issues in a recent episode. Somebody tipped us off. Basically, someone got fired from a job because the company was using a service that was looking at every employee's social media footprint, if you will, sent the company 300 pages, sort of activities on mainly Twitter, I think, was what was on the show. They were pointing out stuff that he liked, tweets that he's made. They were tagged as racist, sexist, violent, which was really out of context for a whole lot of the tweets. The fact that I guess there are two issues here is one is these services exist, companies are using them, how do we feel about that, and number two, how do we feel about, I guess, the gray areas of social media activity and being pinched for, I don't know, liking a tweet from someone 10 years ago that is somewhat subjective to being naughty. Chad: Over 300 pages. 351 pages, and there were more than one tweet on each page, social media post, what have you, of anything that they thought could have been disparaging, if it said, "Fuck," on it, or something like that. Here is an example. It actually has a side-by-side. On the left hand side, it says, "Why it flagged," so it was good or bad, "Flag reason," and this one was, "Language, bigotry, and sexism," and then the reason was that the post type was liked. Didn't create the post, didn't share the post, didn't retweet the fucking post, liked the fucking post. Chad: Here's what it said, "To this day, this is still the most big dick energy I've ever seen in a video." That was it, right? You can look at big dick energy, and that's what Joe Rogan was talking about, what that actually means, and it doesn't mean, really, I think what the algorithm thinks it means. Is that bad language? Possibly. Is it bigotry? I don't fucking think so. Is it sexism? I doubt it, right, but yet, this is the kind of shit that's going to an organization, prospectively about you, because you, out there, might have accidentally liked something. You might have fat-fingered something. Joel: Yeah, if you really want to screw over your ex before you break up with them, go get their phone, get on their Twitter account, and go search really bad shit on Twitter from five years ago, and go like stuff, and get them fired. That shit will happen once people find out that this is a thing. Chad: The thing was, that person went home and there was a package on their doorstep containing the printout of all 351 pages, which I thought was fucking crazy, but the company's name and the service is called Fama, F-A-M-A. I've reached out to their CEO. I've already contacted him. He might actually be on the show, so we might get an opportunity to talk to him through this, but this is from their website, "The smartest way to screen toxic work behavior. Fama. Fama is a talent screenings software that helps identify problematic behavior among potential hires and current employees by examining publicly available online information." Hence, your tweets, your Facebook, whatever you have that's exposed that you're allowing just the public to see. From my standpoint, as somebody who believes that individuals are individuals and we're not trying to fit them into our brand box, because our brand is who they are, right, this is really troublesome to me, because it really seems like big corporate America saying, "You're not wearing the right suit, so you can't work for IBM." Joel: Yeah, it goes well beyond, "You've emailed something to someone internally, or you've done something on the corporate account." This goes beyond, "We didn't hire someone because of this," and I'm sure Fama, Fama? Chad: Yeah. Joel: It can also be used to pre-screen people, although I don't know if they have to sign permission or verify what their accounts are. That's a whole other can of worms that you can open up on people, but yeah, it takes social media monitoring to a whole other level, and it's probably a level a lot of people don't like too much, for the very reasons that we've outlined. Chad: Yeah, and on the website it says, "Compliant, comma, AI-based online screening for the enterprise. Our technology helps businesses identify thousands of job-relevant behaviors, such as racism or harassment, without exposing hiring managers to unnecessary risk or manual work." I think we've already pointed out at least one example of, "Was that really sexist?" I don't think it was anything to do with bigotry, but I think if you are a company and you allow a company to do something like this, you have to think of those 351 pages, and every single tweet and/or LinkedIn post, Facebook post, whatever it is, and now you are going to have to defend all of those and why they were either bigoted or sexist, or whatever it is. You're going to have to defend that shit. Joel: Yeah, have fun with that. 300 pages. Can you imagine that meeting? "All right. Let's start with page one. Okay, let's look at this one." Chad: Hopefully, Ben will actually listen to this podcast. We're going to try to get something scheduled with him fairly quick, the CEO of Fama, and really just take him to task on this and ask him about it, because obviously, he feels there's a need, and people are buying this, so there obviously is a need. The biggest question is is this the way it should be executed, right? Is this really the way it should be done? Joel: Yeah, and by the way, if you're listening and you use Fama, it's Fama.io, I think, is the URL, please hit us up directly, or hashtag us at ChadCheese. Chad: Let us know. Robots. Joel: Robot resources. I thought this was an Onion story when I first read it. Chad: There are two stories that are coming in here. We've got robots are coming, and job openings are sliding. The first one's from ZDNet, and the other one's from Barron's. ZDNet said, "Retailers are increasingly adopting AI and robotics, both in brick and mortar shops and in warehouses, and with a new robot workforce means the need for new management methods, so this goes beyond HR," which is what Joel is talking about. Joel: Yeah, I mean, in some ways it makes sense, right? I love the story, how it says, "There won't be AI holiday parties or robot retirements." Someone in robot resources is going to have to be, "Procuring, maintaining, training, taxing, decommissioning, fixing, disposing of obsolete machinery, et cetera." Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: I don't think we think of that as a robot/human resources job. It's probably just some engineer in the back room that fixes robots and shit. Chad: "With AI powered robots being particularly suited to the retail industry, Gartner's research predicts that 77% of retailers plan to deploy AI as early as 2021." That can be around floor cleaning, data collection, security. There's just so much, not to mention we see Walmart, for example, with Alphabot, a robot for their fulfillment systems, and they have... What is it? The systems, "Implemented in retailer's 20,000 square foot warehouse in New Hampshire." Joel: This reminds me of the Jawas on Star Wars, the big truck that would just go and take robots from the desert and shit. Someone needs to start a company called Jawa, and then just be like the outsourced robot resources for companies. Chad: Yeah, and I think what they were trying to do with this whole human resources and robot resources thing is that all these different examples, like Kroger's signed a deal with UK company Ocado to build huge automated robot warehouses, but there are going to be humans that are there, that are actually packing the bags. Amazon's Kiva robots transport pallets. They work together with humans, so this is really a human hybrid with these robots. Joel: Companies will need liaisons to work between people and robots, probably. We just added a million jobs to the economy with this robot resources position. Chad: No, I don't think so. Joel: Which is good, because we've got slowing jobs, which is bad. This was also in the news this week. Chad: That's the thing. We are going to see, there's no question, some of these jobs that we have now, which are undesirable, to be quite frank, taken over by robots. That's not such a bad thing, until job openings dropped in December to the lowest level in almost two years, a sign that demand for labor may be cooling. It's the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report. The DOL said openings fell 8% in December to 6.4 million. That's the lowest it's been since January 2018, and it's down from a record high, 7.58, that was hit in January 2019. Joel: This is great, Chris Rupkey, Chief Financial Economist at MUFG, said, "Something is happening out there to the economy, and while we can't be quite sure what it is, this collapse in the need of labor on the part of companies is not a positive development." Thanks, Captain Obvious. By the way, do you remember Jolt Cola from the '80s? Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: That was like eight times the sugar of Coke, and 10 times the caffeine. Chad: I had one and my heart almost exploded, so I didn't have another one. Joel: You could feel your teeth deteriorating as you drank it. Oh, the '80s. Great decade. Chad: Last but not least on this, okay, so let's think about the last story. We're talking about Amazon and Kiva. Well, Amazon said that if installed in each of its 55 US fulfillment centers, the robots could eventually replace 1,300 humans, and you can't tell me that's not exactly what Jeff Bezos wants. Joel: You don't think so? SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: I know he does. Joel: All right. Well, let's take a break and hear from Canvas, and we'll continue this Amazon conversation, because they're in the news with another story this week. Be right back. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent, text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen, and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human... That's you... at the center, while Canvasbot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology, and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy, and are laser focused on recruiters' success. Request a demo at GoCanvas.io, and in 20 minutes, we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's GoCanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: Amazon Flex drivers. I have a little bit of insight on this. My sister's boyfriend, which sounds weird because my sister's in her 50s, and when you say boyfriend, you think they're like 17 or something. Her boyfriend... Get married already. He's in the trucking industry, and it's pretty fascinating. Basically every morning, they wake up, and there's a bunch of opportunities to take shit places, right? Warehouse A is saying, "Hey, take this to warehouse B. We'll pay you this much," and then you try to gauge which job, which pays the highest, which one is the easiest drive. You try to manually make sense of this. When I heard him say that, I was like, "Somebody's got to be automating that," and sure enough, this story comes up that yes, third party apps have been created to help these drivers basically automate the shit out of the best opportunities, and leverage the best revenue opportunities to take shit for Amazon to other places to be delivered. Chad: It's more the latter than it is the former. First off, let's talk about what a Flex driver is. Flex drivers are contract workers, not full-time workers, who use their own vehicle to deliver packages to customers' doorsteps. Think like UberEats. You're picking up a package, and you're delivering it, but in this case, you're given a window of time to complete that task. Say, three and a half hours to deliver 45 packages. Flex drivers can make 18 to $25 an hour, depending on the actual blocks. This is an interesting conversation, especially around the app, because I agree, being able to take logistics and move it is incredibly helpful. The problem is these guys, they can see that there are jobs open, they can see the time frames, and they can see the dollar amount, but what they can't see is where it's at, and they can't see how many packages. They can't see, really, the necessary information to say whether I want to take this job or not. It's pretty much just covering your eyes and saying, "Okay, let's see if we can do this one." Joel: Right, and I think a lot of the Flex drivers are in what's called the final mile. I'm no expert on this, but apparently the final mile is the most expensive, because it's drivers and insurance, and it's people, and it's labor, and yada yada yada, so this is a little bit different than the truckers that go 500 miles to deliver cars and produce and shit like that. Chad: Yeah, I think the big story for me in this was that this really is much like their warehouse jobs, but unfortunately, it's not full-time. You don't get benefits, and you have to use your car, and own gas money, and maintenance and stuff. They have tight windows, no bathroom breaks, in some cases, to be able to try to make. Remember the conversation around warehouse workers who had goals, quotas to meet, and they couldn't go to the bathroom, so they were pissing in the garbage cans? Joel: Yeah, not good. Chad: These guys are talking about making sure they take their bathroom break beforehand, because if they don't in that three and a half hours, they might not be able to take it. It is so Amazon. I see Amazon going full automation like I had said, with the warehouses, and then the delivery drones being able to take care of this last mile piece. Joel: Yeah, in Jeff Bezos' perfect world. If you're a shareholder, you can't hate on this. It's like self-driving trucks, self-driving delivery vans, drones to deliver packages, little bitty vans that we've seen on college campuses delivering beer. Basically, the whole thing's automated and profits are optimized to the fucking roof, for sure. Chad: And we are the laziest motherfuckers in the world. Joel: Yeah, we are. Speaking of profits, Slack, the popular messaging service, bit back this week after being on the Wall Street blacklist. They revealed that IBM was going all-in on Slack to handle the messages internally with its employees. Wall Street loved that, and this week, Slack is up 15% on that news, originally trading around 22.50. Right now, they're around the 26, $27 per share mark, so good for them. They've had a rough year with Teams, so this was a good bit of news for them, and yeah, we'll see if it keeps on keeping on. Chad: Somebody's got to buy Slack. I mean, there's got to be a merger. There has to be a buy. Something has to happen, because I don't see Microsoft Dynamics and Teams slowing down. The reason why, again, Slack fell was because Microsoft announced that they had 20 million daily active users. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: I think Slack had like eight million, so it was like, "Meh, look at what we can do overnight." Joel: Yeah, and if Amazon would just listen to my predictions every year, they'd go buy Slack and clean up, but no one has done that yet. If you think Pepsi's a bad place to be compared to Coke, I mean, you're probably right, but Pepsi's not the worst place to be. I think Slack will have its little corner of the market. I think, to me, the interesting thing with Slack is how do they move beyond messaging, and how do they get into bigger things, software. I think their app store solutions, which we saw at UNLEASH last year, has a lot of potential. They're not monetizing it currently, and they certainly could, but yeah, it's an interesting story to watch. IBM was also on our radar this week. We got some inside scoop on some of their love for Workday, and they're not so much love for somebody else. What went on there? Chad: Yeah, so this one, for me, is hard to believe, unless you've ever worked at or closely with an applicant tracking system, because it's a bitch. We've heard rumor... Say that out loud, rumor, that IBM will be sunsetting BrassRing Kenexa, and another part of it that's really hard to believe, not that it's not a shitty applicant tracking system, because it really is, but OnGig's ATS report of Fortune 500 companies showed that the ATSs that they were using, Kenexa BrassRing had 10% of the market, number four in the top five, and twice as much as ISIMS did. I mean, can you get behind this rumor? That's a lot of money to dump. Yes, there is consulting on the Workday side. Can you play both sides of the ball and still make money? I think so. Joel: Yeah, we're watching you, IBM. Big Blue's in our cross-hairs, baby. Let's hear from JobAdX and talk about Benjamins being handed out at HEB, a popular grocery store down South. JobAdX: Nope. Nah. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs, just half-heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it. We live in a world that is all about content, content, content, so why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits, with JobAdX. JobAdX: Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel, begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employee with JobAdX. Chad: Okay, so this next story just seemed too good to be true. I do know that HEB, which is a very well loved grocery store chain in the United States, they're really good to their employees. They call them partners, right? Again, words matter, and we heard that they won the National Grocer of the Year Award- Joel: Nice. Chad: ... and that they gave all their employees a $100 bill. I was like, "Wow. That's pretty fucking cool." Joel: $100 cash money bill. Chad: Yeah, and I thought, "That's really cool." I mean, because all the different types of individuals who work at a grocery store, $100, that's not bad for anybody. I was like, "Wow, let's see how big HEB is." I did a search, and it's 100,000 employees, and then, check my math if you would, because I'm not great at it. Joel: I'm not checking math. Chad: I did the math on that, and I'm like, "Oh, dude. That's $10 million." Okay, I haven't heard much about this, right, and if a company gives out $10 million, why the fuck wouldn't we? I reached out to HEB, and they confirmed, "For clarity, we call our employees partners, and we shared this with all partners," so all of their employees/partners received $100 bill, which equates to $10 million. Joel: My father, who lives in Texas, when he retired, he took a part-time job at HEB, so I can confirm that he enjoyed his experience there. He was treated really well. He was the morning produce guy, so he would get there at like 4:00 in the morning and the produce truck would show up, and he'd dole out the bananas, pun intended, and whatnot, so he can confirm that. Now, the second part, I think, which is genius, is number one, every employee that got $100 is guaranteed to tell five to 10 people that HEB, their company, gave them $100 bill. Chad: For winning an award. Joel: The free advertising they got on that alone and probably the recruitment benefit that they got for people that wanted to come work for HEB, yeah. Then the second one is imagine all the stories that were written, the PR that they received from the $100 gift, if you will, or reward. I'm promising you the PR they got, the recruitment advertising they got, the good will they got, was worth well more than $10 million, although that is a mighty sum to give out to partners/employees. I think they got their money's worth. I think that spending $10 million on TV advertising would have been much less impactful than giving $100 to every employee, so from a marketing perspective, it was pretty genius. Chad: Yeah, not to mention giving to your employees, like, I don't know, raising their wages or what have you, gives them an opportunity to spend more money with you. Joel: That's right. Chad: They feel good. Joel: This is unconfirmed, but I think Torchy's Tacos received at least 20% of that $10 million. That's unconfirmed. Chad: Yeah, good stuff. Joel: The consummate dog person, you love this next story. Chad: Yeah, so a man who works from home keeps naming his dog Employee of the Month. This is out of UNILAD. Michael Reeg from Georgia, he's a distribution sales manager, says his dog Meeka is a real asset when he is busy working in his home office, and has helped to ease the transition to telecommuting. I think it's hilarious, because we have dogs. We have three dogs, and every now and again they're a pain in the ass. They need to get up, they need to go to the bathroom, that kind of stuff, but that gets me away from my desk, because I would be chained to this thing if I wasn't, not to mention they want to play and that kind of thing. They actually uplift my mood during the day, and it's really funny, because this dude has a picture of Meeka on his wall, and they're all different pictures. They're not the same picture. He takes a different picture every single time, and awards her the Employee of the Quarter, and that, to me, that made me smile and happy, and I know exactly how he feels. Joel: Yeah, I agree with everything you said. To me, the funny thing is he has one dog. It's the same dog every quarter. At least you could mix it up every so often, right? Chad: Well, he has two dogs, and here it is. "Sadly, Meeka's glass ceiling breaking attitude has failed to rub off on the other dog of the house, Kya, who is reportedly much more of a lady of leisure." So Meeka comes to work, man. She comes to work. Joel: That's nice. That's nice. Well, if you don't have fun doing this shit, you go crazy, so major applause for Meeka and Company. I love it. Chad: That's right. That being said, I'm going to roughhouse with my dogs, so we out. Joel: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to... What's it called? The podcast with Chad and 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. There's so many cheese, 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. It's so weird. We out.

Today freelancing is hot, either as a side hustle or a full-time affair and the Gig Economy seems to be getting bigger and bigger every day. The big question: Are HR giggers ready for a platform of their own? Chris Russell, a job board industry veteran brings HR Lancers, an "HR Marketplace" to Firing Squad. Does first to market mean glory, fame, and acquisition or simply a rush to market with a souped-up job board? You'll have to listen to find out! Thanks again to our friends at Talroo for supporting FIRING SQUAD! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad: Talroo is focused on predicting, optimizing, and delivering talent directly to your email or ATS. Joel: So it's totally data-driven talent attraction, which means the Talroo platform enables recruiters to reach the right talent at the right time and at the right price. Chad: Guess what the best part is? Joel: Let me take a shot here. You only pay for the candidates Talroo delivers. Chad: Holy shit. Okay, so you've heard this before. So if you're out there listening in podcast land and you are attracting the wrong candidates and we know you are, or you feel like you're in a recruiting hamster wheel and there's just nowhere to go, you can go to talroo.com/attract. Again, that's talroo.com/attract, and learn how Talroo can get you better candidates for less cash. Joel: Or just go to chadcheese.com, and click on the Talroo logo. I'm all about the simple. Chad: You are a simple man. Pirate: Yee be poo without Talroo. Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Oh yeah, time for a little Firing Squad. What's up gang? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Firing Squad episode edition. My name is Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: And on today's chopping block... Chad: So excited. Joel: We have, full disclosure, longtime friend, not only of the show, but just in general, Chris Russell. Please welcome Chris to the show. Chris: Yeah, let's get it on, fellas. Chad: There he is. Joel: Spoken like a Yankee fan with a lot of confidence going into spring training, obviously. Chris: That's right. Let's go Yankees. Joel: All right, Chris, well, before we get into your new thing, tell us a little bit about you. Obviously, Chad and I know you from way back, but many of our listeners do not. So give us the elevator pitch on you and your crazy mad scientist life, and then Chad will read the rules of the show, and then we'll get your pitch and have at it. Chris: Yeah, cool. Started out in the job board world, back in the good old days of 1999, when D was just a small little player on the scene. Joel: '99? I weren't even around. Chris: Exactly. Well, a few years later. I've been in this space for about 20 years, mostly in digital recruiting as I call it, as running job boards, different startups, spent a couple of years in corporate recruiting as well. And for the past five years, I've been working for myself essentially as a freelancer, a writer/podcaster in the space overall. So a lot of people know me, but that's a quick background on who I am and what I do. Joel: Outstanding. Well, Chad, tell him what he's won. Chad: You have won a two minute pitch for HR Lancers. At the end of the two minutes, you're going to hear the bell. Then Joel and I will hit you with some rapid fire Q & A. If your answers start rambling, then Joel's going to hit you with the crickets. That just means you need to tighten your shit up. At the end of Q & A, you will receive a one of these three grades. Number one, big applause. Joel: What you want. Chad: Yep, means you knocked it out of the park, man. Number two, golf clap. Okay, we might've been a little bit impressed, but you are not there yet. Last but not least, the firing squad. Ouch. You should pack your shit up and go home. You should start something different. This is not- Joel: Restart jobs and pods or something. Chad: This is not your thing. Chris: It's a good thing I bought that flack jacket on Amazon yesterday. Chad: Yeah, so that's the firing squad. All right, are you ready, Chris. Are you ready? Chris: I'm ready. Joel: All right, in three, two... Chris: My name is Chris and I'm an HR freelancer. I've been working for myself since I left my last corporate job five years ago, and over the past year or so, I began to notice more and more HR pros and recruiters leaving the corporate life in favor of working as an independent consultant. The growth of the freelance or gig economy, as some refer to it, is a real trend these days. A report by the freelance union says that 56 million people are now freelancing and increase to 3.7 million over the last five years. According to ADP, one in six enterprise workers are actually gig workers paid is either 10.99 consultants or short term W employees working one to six months. Chris: If you've ever spent time in some of the popular recruiter and HR groups on Facebook, you also notice this story. I frequently see HR pros and recruiters posting in search of messages looking for remote work as a consultant for example. They crave the ability to set their own hours and work from the comfort of their own home. There are thousands of us out there and it was time I thought to create a resource that brings them together and provides a way for these HR Lancers, as I call them, to you find work and be found. That's why, in January, I launched hrlancers.com local marketplace to find and post remote and onsite roles specifically for contractors and consultants in the HR space. Chris: The site contains gigs and projects for everything from benefits to sourcing to writing, and it's already working. Alisa Penny, a small business HR consultant from Abilene, Texas has been hired. She created an employee handbook for a small tech startup in Charlotte, for example. And I've even hired some of the recruiters myself to write for me and one of my clients around HR recruiting topics. In the past 30 days, the site's received over 5,000 visitors and we signed up over 400 freelancers to the platform. I want people to think of HR Lancers as the Upwork for HR, so feel free to post a gig or a profile today at hrlancers.com. Joel: Boom. Nice pitch. Nicely done. Marry me. Chad: You mentioned Upwork. What is your definition of a marketplace? Chris: It's a place where both the employers and seekers can come together. Essentially, that's it. It's pretty simple. Chad: A traditional job board, you can actually see as a marketplace? Chris: Yes. Chad: Okay, so does HR Lancers fit into the same kind of mold or do you look at them fit, you fitting into the same kind of mold as other freelance sites that have, again as you'd said, that have become incredibly popular. Chris: If you look at Upwork, it's essentially a job board that's with all the data essentially hidden overall. You can even find Upwork jobs coming into Google for jobs itself as a side note. So they are, in a sense, of job board but it's just essentially a private one. You don't know who the contractors are by name until they actually apply. And you can't see the names of the employers who are posting gigs up there overall. So from that perspective, HR Lancers is an open marketplace where you could see everything. All the profiles are public for those who choose to activate them, and all the gigs are publicly available much like a job board is. Joel: Chris, a lot of folks who don't know you, I'll clue them in that you are famous in our industry for launching, let's call it small, hobby-like initiatives. Is that fair to say? Chris: Yeah, my biggest success was a company call AllCountyjobs, which I ran for about 13 years. I ran it out of my house. I had a couple of employees over time, but it was essentially a lifestyle business. Joel: Right. You launched a lot of things, let's call it, spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. You mentioned the growth and freelance and things like that, but what was it about this idea that really put a fire under your butt and said, I got to do this and do it right? Chris: From my own experience, it comes from, I think overall, and I really thought that something like this could be big. If I had to pick to predict the future here, I think this could be my last legacy for what I do overall as someone in the HR industry overall. This could be a big site in other words. People know me for a lot of small projects out there, but this I think has the potential to be the biggest thing I've ever done. Joel: So if I were to say, hey, one of my skepticisms about this business is that in six months, you'll launch something else and you'll lose interest or sell it off to somebody. You're here to tell me right now on this show you're going to commit to this thing? In two years, you might have employees, you might have a staff and an office and all that good stuff. Are you telling me that right now? Chris: Yes I am. Joel: Okay. Chris: Definitely. One of my key traits, guys, is persistence. So for anybody who knows me knows that I'm constantly plugging away and grinding out there no matter what I do. I've shut down stuff in the past that hasn't worked, have admitted that stuff. But this is something that is going to be around for two years from now, three years from now, five years from now, guaranteed. Chad: Cool. Can I access all of the giggers for free? Chris: Yes. Chad: Okay, so why pay to post? If I have access to those individuals, not to mention are you afraid of other technology coming in and actually scraping a lot of that data for their own purpose of re-monetizing? Why open to the public and why do I need to pay if I'm an employer? And the third prong of this is what about all those other technologies that are out there that want that data? Chris: Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because there's actually a one site called Active Hire, which appears to be scraping resumes off of there right now. I've seen that referral traffic come in. Another job board I ran as well, I saw that same site come in as well. So I don't care. Right now, I want to build a community and a foundation, and that takes time overall. So this first year is really just making it a frictionless experience overall. And so, the reason I want to open it up is essentially to do that, to make it simple and easy. You can go on there today and hand a contact that freelancer, their phone number, email is up there overall. Chris: Over time, that may change. I'm not saying it's not going to, but I want to create a simple transparent site that everyone would find easy to use overall. So that's the simplicity of, I think, it makes it a frictionless experience and just helps to grow the overall user base more quickly overall. Chad: Gotcha. So there are 56 million freelancers out there today. Do we know how many of them are actually HR freelancers? Chris: No, we don't. If I had to guess, I'd say there's probably... If you count freelance recruiters in there, probably a few hundred thousand. Chad: Okay, okay. Currently, you have 168 giggers in the platform. Chris: Yeah. Chad: How do you get there? How do you get to that hundreds of thousands? How do you actually do this? How are you going to attract more giggers? Because, obviously, if you have more giggers, what are you going to have? You have more employers wanting to try to come in and utilize the site, right? Chris: I don't think we need a hundred thousand giggers to actually make the site successful overall. I think that number is probably closer to five to 10,000 after the first year or so. And that's what I'm shooting for overall. I'm spending money advertising, I'm doing shows like this to get the word out and it takes time to do that, guys. I'm not so dreamy-eyed that I think it's going to happen overnight, in this game for a while. So it's going to take one to two years to get to that point. Joel: I'd like to dig into that marketing and you're spending money. What are you finding to be the most effective ways to market this thing to HR folks? Chris: The best way is social media right now. As I mentioned, it was groups in part of my pitch there so Jobs for Recruiters is a Facebook group out there, it's pretty popular. I'm on there every day just looking at the post and commenting to people. That's by far the number one way to get traction. I've already hired one of the lancers on the platform to actually do outreach for me as well. As part of her job, she's actually has a quota to go out there each week and invite X number of people to the platform itself. So I'm leveraging other freelancers to do this as well overall. And then from a paid standpoint, I've been using LinkedIn ads right now, which probably getting about a three bucks a click on average as far as that goes just targeting HR out there. Joel: When you first mentioned this to me, I think you more than most, understand the niche site. You made your first success with All County Jobs when Monster and CareerBuilder and those guys ruled the earth. But you were able to find a niche there locally, as many others did, to find success. That was largely driven on SEO and optimizing for terms that when people search Toledo jobs or Boston jobs that you could be successful. When I look at maybe your thought process on this, how do we niche Upwork? How do we niche Fiverr and other companies like that? Joel: But when I look at those being tech platforms, big, large public companies with a lot of resources, they've been around for a long time, it reminds me of when companies were doing video, jobbing video. And certain job sites had their own video platform where everyone knew it's never going to be as good as YouTube. YouTube has the resources, they're going to have 4K, they're going to have all this cool stuff, and they're going to have the audience. Do you really think that nichifying Upwork and Fiverr is a strategy that's going to work for you? Chris: Yes, and I think it's already happening, guys. If you look at some of the stuff out there that's getting funding for example. I'll mention a few of these. Marketer hire, which is a marketing freelance platform, picked up a million and a half bucks recently for funding, I would say Communo. One of the guys you know as well. It's a marketing freelance platform as well, got some funding as well. So we're seeing the nichification of gigs right now in the industry. Chris: I talked to a guy last week who runs a group called Biteline, which is an app for a dental hygienist to go find temporary gigs overall. And so, there's one for nursing out there, there's stuff for hospitality. So we are seeing a nichification of the gig industry overall. I think every industry is going to have some form of gig marketplace that serves it in the future here. Chad: I agree. How long does it take to create a profile in HR Lancers? Chris: Just a couple minutes. You just signed with your LinkedIn profile or you can create your own, upload your resume. Chad: So if you sign in with your LinkedIn profile, all my data from LinkedIn will actually pull over into the site? Chris: Yeah, it pulls down your entire chronological history of all your stuff there. Chad: Okay, you might want to get that checked out. I tried to do that three times this morning and it never worked. Chris: Oh, yeah? Chad: Yeah. Transparency also equals ratings. If you take a look at Fiverr and Upwork and whatnot, you see the "better" rated giggers floating to the top. You've gone away from that, correct me if I'm wrong, you've gone away from that and you're actually charging giggers to be featured, which is not really transparent overall, that's just if a gigger has more money than they're going to get more exposure. So why did you choose to go that route instead of a ratings transparency route? Chris: I'm not saying it ratings will never be on the platform. I think they will eventually. But I wanted to give freelancers a way to join for free, which they can do of course. There's no charge there. If they want to upgrade their listing and feature themselves in certain categories, things like that, they can do that for a small fee overall. Chris: If you look at sites like Upwork, and this is another reason I started HR Lancers, because I think Upwork specifically is trying to take advantage of freelancers out there. They charge 20% of project fees, which to me is ridiculous overall. Plus they charge you a monthly fee of $15 a month just to actually join the platform overall. And they're a public company now, so they're all about the dollar and they're going to be trying to suck that out of freelancers wherever they can I think overall. I want to create a free resource for these guys, and by charging them 80 bucks a year to feature their profile for a year, I think it's well worth the money. Chad: Okay. Is posting by the hiring companies manual? Chris: Yes, it is. Although, we can scrape as well if they give us a feed. Chad: And that's for the same $19 a month? Chris: Yep. Chad: Okay, excellent. How are you marketing and selling into HR departments? Because obviously going after HR Lancers to get them in to create profiles is one thing, but how are you going after the HR departments to be able to get them to know about the platform and start using the platform? Chris: Yeah, a couple of ways. I've got my own email list as well I built up over the years through many different newsletters and sites like RecruitingHeadlines for example. So I'm using and leveraging that as well. I'm doing a lot of outreach on my own on social media platforms as well. I see these roles or comments that say, hey, why don't you repost this on HR Lancers? Actually, I'll go and repost it myself for them as well. And the other part of this is that... the demand side of these roles out there, the demand side is there. There's definitely more freelancers today who want these types of roles than there are these roles exist. Chris: So that's probably my biggest challenge right now, is finding the companies overall. But there's enough out there to keep the site going and keep... These remote roles themselves essentially... I put them on the site, they're getting 10, 20, 30 applicants within a week. That's how in demand these things are overall. So it's not that hard to find the seekers out there. They're there, it's just a matter of getting enough demand side positions onto the site. Joel: You touched on money briefly. Are you currently looking for funding? Are you just going to bootstrap this thing for the foreseeable future? What's your plan around that? Chris: Yeah, I can bootstrap it for as long as I wish, I think, overall. At some point, I think I would like to look at raising money overall. I think it's such a big opportunity here in this space and there's definitely validation from other players, other sites like Communo in the market or hire out there that validate this type of model overall. So I do think that's a possibility in the future. Joel: Yeah, and in terms of growth, Fiverr and Upwork launched... Fiverr used to be $5 gigs, and that used to be all that they had. But it was largely an international group of giggers. And then probably, I don't know, Western companies and people hiring them is your model. Are you global in nature? Do you want to grow North America and then dribble out into Europe and Asia? What's the current plan of targeting and what's the future? Chris: Yeah, I'd say North America first. That's where my is my audience is overall. That's what people know me from here. I think it'll eventually build into more of a global site. We are already getting people from overseas creating profiles on the site. Joel: So you're not blocking countries currently? Chris: No. You can't do that technically, but that's really a pain in the ass. Chad: Any why, right? Chris: Exactly right. But I do think eventually it can be more of a global site. The next stop will probably be the Europe area and things like the UK and stuff like that. But yes, North America for now and we'll see what happens in the future. Chad: Okay, can giggers apply using their HR Lancer profile? Chris: Yes. Chad: Excellent. So how does that actually work? Can they apply and then... Chris: Yeah, they can fill in a little cover letter or submission profile there, summary. And then they can attach the resume if they like or attach another document that has details of the project or whatever. But yeah, they can apply to that directly and the employer just gets an email and logs in and goes to check the status of that application. Chad: Okay. So it's not going into their core system, it's going into their email and really just letting them know, signaling them at that happening. Chris: We can redirect to the employer site if they have the ATS whatever, but generally better to keep them on the site overall. Chad: Yeah, that's just a quick link but they still have to go through all the hoops. My overall thought process is today that companies don't want to use another platform. They want that platform to integrate with their core system, so that if somebody does apply, I don't have to go out to another system and try to jump in and pull those resumes over into my applicant tracking system. Sales partnerships, who have you aligned with to be able to get the word out there and to be able to create sales channels because I'm sure one guy selling isn't your plan. Chris: Yeah, no, definitely. I haven't got there yet. I did speak with Jessica over at Workology the other day and she brought up the idea of creating a course for freelancers to help them get off the ground. So I'm talking to her about that overall. It's a partnership with them. But that's it right now. But yeah, you're right up. I can't do this alone, guys. And I definitely realized that. It's the reason I hired Alisa down in Texas there to help them with outreach and I'm sure I'll be hiring more over the course of the year to help with this and any continuing partnerships and things like that. Joel: Hey dude, I know you're a closet techie and you like shiny metal objects and things like that. I'm curious, I know you're a fan of mobile and believe that that's the future. First part of my question is should we be expecting native apps to come out for HR Lancers or will you remain desktop for the foreseeable future? And secondly, what sort of tech would you like beyond mobile to start integrating with the system, if any? Chris: Yes, I definitely think a mobile app eventually it will be a good thing to add to the site overall. If I got funding tomorrow, probably the first thing I would do is create an app overall. I don't think it needs it right now. I think that the vast majority of recruiters in HR out there, particularly on the employer side, it's a desktop universe for the most part with those guys. If you look at the actual stats of a typical site that recruiters frequent today, it skews towards the desktop side overall. But, I will create an app at some point in the future for the audience there. Other tech, I want to build a community here too. We're going to have Zoom Hangouts for the lancers on there. We may do some courses as well. So I do want to build more of a community feel, particularly this first year, to get everyone involved overall around some of this stuff. So I think the next year will be really focused on content and community versus tech right now. Joel: So you're saying virtual reality isn't in the near future? Chris: No, I will not. What's that CareerBuilder app called? Chad: Pokemon for HR Lancers. Joel: That's it from me, Chad. Do you have anything else? Chad: No, sir. Joel: All right. Chris, are you ready to face the squad? Chris: All right, let me button up this flack jacket here. Joel: Yeah, put on the helmet, buddy. Tighten up the chin strap. Chris: All right. Joel: I'll go ahead and go first. I think there's a lot of good here and I think total transparency with the audience. Chad and I spoke before the call and we were worried what's this going to be about? And Chris is loosey goosey with stuff. But Chris was super, super firm on this is what I'm doing, this is my focus, this is what I'm committed to. And I really believe that. So to me, that hurdle was cleared pretty quickly. In just looking at the business, I think it's a question of do you believe in a future of niche gigs and contract workers versus a monolithic site to do that or maybe as a variety of big sites with a lot of resources. The answer is obviously only time will tell. Joel: But if look at history as a gauge, if we look at Job Search for example, it's more or less a few sites that are job search sites and we have niche sites for everything. But those are pretty much secondary. Will Uber Eats compete with Upwork or Uberwork? And so, we have all these players with money and resources. My contention over this whole thing is that I don't think that you'll have the resources to compete with some of the bigger companies that can do this. Imagine if LinkedIn tomorrow said we're going to have contract workers and we're going to compete with Upwork, which is not totally out of the realm of possibility. I think that definitely could happen. Joel: If that happens, all the HR people are on LinkedIn already. So I think that deep sixes your whole business if they decide to do that. Although I think you're committed, I think this is a market, this is an opportunity. I don't think you're looking to cash out a $1 billion valuation at some point. I think this is, hopefully for you, your next 10, 15, 20 years of working. So in that case, it's possible, but I think there is a lot of risk here, a lot of threats. So for me, it's a golf clap. I think there's a lot of uncertainty, but I think you're going to make a success of it. I just don't know how big. Chris: Fair enough. Appreciate that. Chad: Fair enough. Didn't even need that flack jacket. Chris: No. Chad: All right, Chris, my turn. Chris: Alright Chad. Chad: First and foremost, Niches Smart, Niches Necessary and specialty sites like this can make awesome money. And you can get some really good traction if you execute and you start to set expectations. You'd said earlier there is validation in the market of people saying that this is something that we need. I agree 100% but I feel like a marketplace is an entirely different concept. This is more of an open job board where there's no transparency to the ratings, there are people that are obviously transparent, which is, again, another great way to get people in to start using and perspectively scraping until you shut that down, not to mention, as I had said, I used the LinkedIn sign in with email verification, which I thought was awesome. Chad: Problem was it didn't work. It didn't carry my information over into profile and there were three different times that I received a 429, too many requests message error from the actual site itself. So leaning on LinkedIn and other organizations, you can do at your own peril obviously. But overall, it seems there is no question this, there is a validation, I believe, in marketplaces and marketplaces to be more niche, more focused only because you are a veteran in this market. And I know that you have industry network contacts and you have the wherewithal to be able to get this done, anyone else, they would be facing the guns right now, but because of your history, I think you can definitely knock this out if you focus and execute, which is why I'm giving you a golf clap. Chris: All right, I'll take it. Joel: That wasn't too bad. You can take the bulletproof vest off now and take the helmet off. It's all good. All right, Chris, for those out there that want to learn more about you and the company, where do you send them? Hrlancers.com, my friend. Joel: Too easy. Chad, another one in the boats. We out. Chris: Peace out. Outro: This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese Podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup, who wants to face the firing squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com. #FiringSquad #Talroo #GigEconomy #Freelance #Marketplace #Startup #HRLancers

What is Whitebox AI and is it the answer to better transparency and technology for the future? Robert Ruff, President of Sovren, continues the conversation with Chad & Cheese in this episode about GDPR, Free AI, Blackbox and Whitebox AI, and more. Enjoy this Voices Series podcast from The Chad & Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities. Voices Intro: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices, like mine, are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. HR's Most Dangerous: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls. It's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation back up with Robert Ruff, president of Sovren, industry veteran, and all around smart dude. Chad: So over the years we've had these sharing consortiums to an extent where the Job Foxes of the world and there have been some other AllianceQ, where companies that actually... They had pooled the resumes of individuals who didn't make it into their organization and they would be able to feed off of those. Chad: Why has that never worked? I know that there's competition that money on those individuals, but still, wouldn't you rather see one of those individuals get a job whether it's with you or somebody else as opposed to having a shitty experience and just going into a black hole? Robert: I think to a certain extent the laws have changed those. So if you look at privacy laws, especially outside of the United States, I think things where you take someone's data that was submitted to a particular place for a particular purpose, and gets Senate just for that and you repurpose it into a larger thing that's probably not legal anymore. Joel: Yeah. Robert: And I think it's getting less legal here. So I think maybe the day of that idea ever being able to get traction, it never did in the past, I think it's, I think it's probably gone forever. Chad: What are some of your, I guess bigger thoughts in addition to that in regards to GDPR privacy and where you see the world going and how it impacts our industry? Robert: So I have a couple of different thoughts about it. I don't think the GDPR is nearly as honorous as people think. I think it makes a lot of sense. And I wish we had protections to like that over here. Joel: Yes. Robert: That said, what actually dismays me is that the only job function that is called out in the GDPR, and it's called out twice as being explicitly subject to it, is applying for jobs. Robert: And what I can't get my head around about that is that a resume is actually a person's advertisement, publicly, for a job. So yes, you may send it just to one person at a time, but by no means are you trying to let people have this idea about your data that like, "Don't ever share this with somebody who might use it in a way that would benefit me by offering me a fabulous job and benefits." Joel: It's not bank account info. Robert: It's not bank account info. It's not your health. It's not, do you have a contagious disease? Robert: Yeah. But I think if we had a more transparent just like you're going back to the kind of like the pooling of resumes and whatnot, if we had a more transparent idea and allowed candidates to opt into something like that. So yeah, I would definitely love to be able to... AT&Ts, Sprints or maybe all these other big companies. I would love to have my resume provided to those companies as well. Robert: I think a lot of it has to do with transparency. We've been shit for transparency in this industry and if we just focused on being able to treat that actual resume like a human, and maybe not like shit like a human, but treat like a customer because they might spend money with us, then it might actually make sense. But I think the transparency piece makes the most sense because that's really what GDPR is. It's about what you own and being transparent about what's going on. Chad: Yeah, I think it's about being honest about what we're going to do with your data. Robert: Yeah. Chad: Now you don't have to go read some privacy policy and get an attorney. So Apple's newest privacy policy I think was 70 pages that comes out on your iPhone. Joel: Like sure. Robert: Okay. But I agree with you that... So one of the things about GDPR that's not well known is that if you are subject to an automated algorithm, well all algorithms are actually automated. But if you're subject to an algorithm for a selection, maybe it's for credit extension, maybe it's for hiring. They have to let you know how that algorithm worked. Well, most AI is Black-Box AI. Chad: Yes. Robert: And no one knows what it's doing and you're like, well it's just 20 to a thousand layers of statistics of statistics and we don't really know how it got to the answer or why and we can't really control it. Robert: Well that on its face doesn't really fly for the GDPR unless you have an opt out where a human gets involved. With our software, a little advertisement, we don't have that problem because we built White-Box AI. So it does what humans do the way humans do it. Humans can be told what it's doing in human terms and can change it and control it. Robert: But I think that the idea that algorithms are something that need to be disclosed is a good idea. Because if they're not disclosed and they're not verifiable there's a tremendous amount of hidden and unknown bias that is lurking in those, right? Because we're doing is we're looking at data that's always been there about who we hired in the past and we're saying, "Oh look like the people we've always hired so we will want to hire you." Robert: It's basically locking people in into a vision of the future that is exactly like their past, which is the opposite of competing in the global society we're in today where things change so much. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Well exactly. And those data sets, right? That big data. Remember we always used to talk about big data? Robert: Right. Chad: Now we can crunch that big data with the algorithms, but all that data is how all the bias methodologies we used before. So it's like how do we become unbiased? Well we don't use all that bias shit. Robert: So we've got an engine that we scrub out all the data about the person before we use it in the engine. So you know, I can't look at your name and guess it's about who you are, either as a sex or a nationality or anything because I don't see your name. We scrubbed your name out, your address, your email addresses, your date of birth, how old you are, your gender, everything that we know about you we scrub out before we use it on our engine. Robert: In addition, we get out of it or allow you to take out of it, what I think is the hidden bias that needs to just stop and it is rampant in the U.S. And before we have the next recession, this type of bias needs to be made illegal. And it is the bias on educational attainment. Joel: Which really sucks because my email address, bigstud@aol used to get me a lot of places and now it's totally scraped out from everything. So whatever. Chad: Well there, there's an app for that, but... Joel: There many actually. What a Great segue to AI and I'm curious, you were at HR Tech this year- Robert: Yeah. Joel: ... and AI is pretty much on every trade show booth in the hall. As someone who's really dedicated to AI, how do you feel or what do you think when you look at all these companies, touting AI and what that really means? If anything? Robert: Well I think that finally people are starting to wake up and realize that if the home builder is telling you, you should buy his house because he uses 18 volt cordless tools to build it, maybe that's not the compelling argument you're looking for. SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: Okay, so real quick. So I mean what you're saying is AI's the standard, everybody's using it. So putting it on your booth really doesn't mean anything. The big question that we keep asking in this industry is AI real in recruiting? Joel: And how do you define it? Robert: So AI is... It's not an application, it's not a solution, it's not even a tool. It's actually a toolkit. So you download the free AI software. I don't know if this is widely known, but the greatest AI in the world is free. Google will give you the exact stuff they use in their business for free. Joel: Open source. Robert: Yes, it's open source. So what do we know about that? We know that the AI toolkit itself has no value. If it had value, they'd sell it for something. What is the value in it? The value in it is what it can do. And what it can do is going to be limited by how much data you have, how well you have curated it and how well you have finessed the toolkit around that data in multiple, multiple iterations. Robert: So that gets you to a working algorithm which then has to be validated in the real world and more feedback mechanisms. But that only gets you Black-Box AI. To do White-Box AI, you have to take it many steps further and you have to get the good data and the bad data and put them into separate buckets and start using those explicitly and algorithms on top of algorithms rather than having one magic thing that is uncontrollable. Robert: You have to bring it up to a level of, we started with this level of competency and we built on top of that and that's what people don't understand about AI. They think that it's some type of magic that you just point it to data and it figures out everything about the data. It's like, no, that's not how it works. Chad: So that's one of the biggest issues I think we have though with AI is that if you take a look at profiles, a lot of times it's garbage, unstructured garbage, which is a very hard job for you, which you guys obviously do well. But then you'd take a look at the job description and that's just as much garbage as the person's profile or their resume. So how do you actually take two sources that are incomplete sets of data, let's say, okay, in bad data and actually make that match happen? Robert: So I don't want to answer that question, but I want to answer a question that's related to it. So I'm acting like a politician now. You asked me a question I'm going to give you- Chad: You don't want to give her away the secret sauce. That's what I'm hearing. Robert: So there's another question about what's the proper use of AI in chatbots and the industry and stuff like that. And I get tired of listening to people saying that this is going to change everything. Well, let's admit that most of the hiring in any society is of the type of hiring that actually doesn't even need a resume. It's application-based. Joel: Right. Robert: And a lot of places and a lot of jobs that you might find a thousand feet from where you're sitting right now. The only thing really required is, can you show up on time? Do you have reliable transportation? Can you pass a drug test? So those kinds of things. You don't need matching software, you don't need AI for that. You know what you need? You need an app. An app that reaches people in that vicinity and says, "Hey, you got a job for you. You want to show up tomorrow? Can you do these things? Great." Joel: Is that the Gig Economy you're talking about? Robert: So not necessarily the Gig Economy, but if I was going to hire somebody for a slot where if somebody quit today, McDonald's, I know that I can't hire somebody 40 miles away, they're not going to reliably get there all the time, right? I've got a small radius and I should be able to reach people in that radius and say, "Look, this is a 11.50 an hour, this is what you do, it starts tomorrow. You need to be able to do this, this, and this. So pass a drug test, don't show up if you're going to fail the drug test, whatever those two or three little drivers are. Robert: That completely can be done with an app because as you're describing, there is no data that needs to be matched there. What we need to do is know are you available and do you have these attributes and these attributes are never going to be on a resume. Joel: All right. So almost a Tinder for jobs. Robert: Yeah. Exactly audience: Ooh. Robert: Oh, I felt- Chad: I love it. Robert: ... from the comments earlier. We were going to go that direction. Chad: Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. For more visit chadcheese.com. #whitebox #AI #blackbox #GDPR #VOICES #RobertRuff

You like apples? How ‘bout these apples: On this week’s show the boys discuss a $22 billion merger, iCIMS finds their new leader, and Walmart says, “Taco Bell, hold our beer.” And lots more, hosers. Enjoy and don’t throw snowballs at Sovren, JobAdx, and Canvas. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Bottle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Ah, yeah. Chad: Yeah, yeah. I don't even know what that was. Joel: Welcome to the Canadian Rockies edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Straight out of Canada. Joel: I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad, looking at the Rocky Mountain Sowash. This is fucking awesome. Joel: On this week's show, a $22 billion merger; iCIMS finds their new leader, and Walmart says, "Taco Bell, hold our beer." We'll be right back after this word from a beloved sponsor. JobAdX: Nope, nah, not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs, just halfheartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it; we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop-off. JobAdX: You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compelled top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@ J-O-B-A-D-X dot com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad: Then we're back. Joel: Shout outs. Chad: First shout out goes to Sarah Stamp from Intel. From my understanding, I'm getting the intel. Joel: Super fan. Chad: She's a super fan. It's like she takes notes. Joel: Mega, super, cultish loving fan. Chad: Yes, and these are the types of people that we hold close, and we love. Joel: We love you Sarah. Thanks for listening. Chad: If you're taking notes, and you're actually correcting people, because, "No, wait a minute. I'm going to pull out last week's notes of Chad and Cheese," you ma'am are, yes, super fan. Joel: And I've got another super fan: Michael G. Cox, not to be confused with Michael J. Fox. Chad: That is close. I like it, and it's good. I like how you did that. Joel: Yeah, I think he throws the G in there just to confuse people. Michael's a fan. Michael, we appreciate the kind words you gave both of us this past week, and thanks for listening. Chad: Yes, we are the number one thing that you can actually use to pair with your favorite whiskey. Joel: Absolutely. Chad: Yes. Joel: Yummy whiskey. Chad: Amy Schroeder with AgHires over in Ohio. She said, I was surprised that you guys were from Indiana. Joel: OH. Chad: IO baby. Joel: Shout out to Alaine Kalder who reached out to us this past week and shared her love. Appreciate you Alaine. Keep listening, and share it with the 100 of your closest friends. Chad: Yes, and more please. D Pit, another super fan by the way. So this is what she actually sent over. She was like, "Just caught last week's pod. This is my world. Batman fucking gets it." So if you haven't heard the Batman podcast, it's pretty simple. It has a bat signal. Go get it. Joel: Can't miss it. Chad: Listen to it. I think he's going to be a regular. Joel: And shout out to Michael Cohen, while we're at it, while we're at it. I'm going to go low hanging fruit. If you haven't noticed, we are currently at the cult Gathering Conference in Banff, Canada. Frankly, we're pretty podcasted out at this point, so we're just- Chad: It's crazy. Joel: ... on fumes. But I would be remiss if I didn't start some shout outs with Ty Weeks and Allyn Bailey from Intel, as well as our new friend, Bill Neff from Yeti; Chad: Yeti. Joel: Everyone knows Yeti- Chad: I've got this big ass Yeti cooler man. Joel: ... who were all brave enough to come on stage with us and talk talent acquisition and marketing. And look for that coming to a podcast near you. But major shout out to them. We love you. Chad: And shout out to Ryan, Chris, Mike Germano, Erinn who is our handler and was amazing, because I'm telling you- Joel: Two Ns. Chad: Yeah, Erinn, two Ns. She just killed it, beforehand making sure we knew what was going on, why we were here, constant contact. It was fucking awesome. Also want to make sure that we get a big shout out from Elise from SmashFly, Gina from Symphony Talent. Those guys, sight unseen, just heard things about The Gathering, and said, "We're all in." So they were a sponsor this year. And this is the fucking crazy thing, dude. We have the CMO of Coca-Cola came up to us after- Joel: SVP actually. Chad: SVP- Joel: I looked him up. But still someone smarter than us- Chad: From Coca-Cola- Joel: ... at a big organization. Chad: ... in marketing came up and said, "Your guys' session rocked. I couldn't believe everything that I came away with." And Symphony Talent and SmashFly are the only talent acquisition technology company that is here represented. Such an awesome opportunity for them. And I think next year we'll see more of those companies, because this is a space where we need to invade. Joel: Pretty confident SmashFly and Symphony are going to put a stake in the ground here in Banff for our regular sponsorship. And also wanted to give a shout out to Elena of the Elena and Abby Cheesman combo there at- Chad: Skill Scout. Joel: Skill Scout. Chad: Love them. Joel: Dude, does anyone dress hipper- Chad: Mo. Joel: ... than Elena Valentine? Chad: No, never. Joel: No, we're talking about gold fanny pack, multi-cloud colored camouflage, the hip sweatshirts. I'm just in awe. So aside from being an awesome videographer, frankly an awesome person, she's an awesome dresser, and this shout out is for you Elena. Chad: We love you. We love you. A big shout out to Talkpush. They put together this- Joel: Push. Chad: ... nomad program. And what it is is all their employees are raffling to live in another area of the world. They can pick between Manila, Mexico, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, New Delhi, or Kuala Lumpur, and Talkpush, the actual company, will pay their two months to live in that country. I thought that was a awesome fucking perk. Joel: Now, which one of those would you be picking? Chad: I think Costa Rica. I think either Costa Rica or Kuala Lumpur. Joel: I was going to say Costa Rica. That sounds fairly nice right about now as we're freezing our arses off in Canada. so I'm good with outs. What else you got unless- Chad: Event. Joel: ... we get to traveling. Chad: Events baby. We have UNLEASH and the TAtech mega conference. Joel: Jolly good, going to London again. Chad: In London in March, currently we have Death Match. And we've been here all week, and I know there've been some startups who've been trying to get that last spot, so hopefully we'll get those guys locked up. But we do have Job Sync, Optimal- Joel: Get Optimal. Chad: ... Get Optimal, and S-B-O-J, SBOJ- Joel: SBOJ baby. Chad: ... jobs- Joel: It's going to be all over the stage. Chad: Jobs spelled backwards. Joel: Spoj. Chad: So there's only one spot left. If you want to get into it, you should get into it. But if you want to win the Chad and Cheese chain of champions, that's what you want. Joel: And who doesn't? Chad: Everyone- Joel: You know what I'm saying? I just ordered them this past week, so we're good to go. Chad: Get your tickets tatech.org, and unleashgroup.io, chadcheese.com. Just click on the event. You'll see you can go there and just click through there as well. Make it easy. Joel: And a little bit premature, but I'm going to be in Vancouver as we're in Canada- Chad: Vancouver. Joel: ... I'm reminded. I'm going to do some sort of recruiting event on April 6th or 7th. Chad: Recruiting. Joel: Our buddies at Rectxt. Chad: Love them. Joel: Yeah, the gorilla aficionados of marketing- Chad: I love them. Joel: ... out there, R-E-C-T-X-T, they're going to have me come out a will with one of their recruiting organizations, and I'm going to talk about who knows what. But if you're in Vancouver on April 6th and 7th, I'll be there. Come out and have a beer, eh? You hosers. Chad: And if you are a listener and you want to meet us, we want to meet you, definitely face to face. Hopefully we have our new tee shirts out in the next couple of months or so. Go to chadcheese.com; click on events; see where we're going to be at. We definitely want to meet you. Joel: We promise no bad touch. Chad: Well, okay. I'm not going to promise that. Topics! Joel: Oh man. So this one actually came at the end- Chad: Body moving. Body moving. Joel: This is what came at the end of last week, and we were like, "Do we talk about it or did we save it?" We saved it. Chad: Saved it. Joel: But this story is crazy. The Body Shop- Chad: I love it. Joel: ... is hiring basically the first applicant to any retail job, no background check, no blood sample, no urine. If you can pass three tests- Chad: The three questions. Joel: ... Yes. legal in the US, I think- Chad: Yes. Joel: .. can lift 50 pounds, and stand on your feet for eight hours- Chad: That's exactly right. Joel: ... you've got a job. Chad: Yep. If those three questions are answered, then we will give you a chance to come to work in our distribution center. So I think the cool part about this is that retailers are really hurting for people. They are. With really the crackdown on immigration, we talked about that a little bit this week; people are really afraid to get out there in some cases. Not to mention, they're also looking to work with individuals who were formally incarcerated, which makes damn good sense. Most of what we do today is, we're almost like in a cashless business in most cases. So it's like, "Oh, I'm worried the people are going to steal." It's like, "Come on guys. They've served their debt. Start to allow these people to get back to do what they want to do, and that's just live life. And the only way you can do that is to actually pay for a roof over your head, pay for your family." So I love this man. This is fucking awesome. Joel: Yeah. So both of those pieces in terms of needing to fill jobs, I think there's a nice little PR spin on this as well. They're getting some nice free marketing. So apparently this started with a bakery out of New York or the New York area. And the folks that The Body Shop caught wind of it, and in addition to everything that you just said in terms of benefits is, apparently it's an amazing retention tool. Not only the bakery, but also The Body Shop had seen retention rates increase significantly. So turnover rates in the 60, 65%, those went down into the 12, 14% ranges for these companies. Chad: You know why? These people aren't getting chances man. Joel: They're grateful. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah, totally. Chad: So we are at the gathering of cult brands, and we're talking about how companies actually create, devotees, devotees. How do you create these cult followings? One of the things is to be able to give those people a chance. Especially in these types of jobs, if you can answer those three questions, why the hell can't you get the goddamn job? Joel: Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see if more companies follow suit on this, until someone comes in with a chainsaw, and it's a really now a bad idea, and nobody does it anymore. Chad: I don't know that that's going to happen. Next story is a big story for us, because we're fairly close to the people over at iCIMS. When Collin was elevated, I guess you could say, not stepping down, but elevated to chairman of the board, you and I, we automatically started hearing signals, warning signals. Joel: The private equity warning signals. Chad: Private equity comes in, the strangulation starts to happen, and that's never good. And we don't want to see that for a brand that we've known and the people that we love for so long. But Steve Lucas, this is a big fucking pool dude. Joel: Yep. So we're at a marketing conference, and we could probably survey 1,000 attendees and ask them if they know Marketo- Chad: Easily. Joel: ... and more than 90% would know Marketo even though- Chad: They'd probably know Steve. Joel: They probably do know Steve. And although our industry doesn't know Marketo like this segment does, to me this is a huge story, because iCIMS, an applicant tracking system, could have really picked any one probably to come lead the company: a geek, a pencil pusher, any sort of what we've seen from the likes of CareerBuilder or Dice bringing in, and those types of people. But they brought in a marketing software CEO who sold the company to a little company called Adobe Solutions. So to me, this is sort of the ultimate verification that if you don't think recruiting and marketing is starting to blur, this should be validation that it definitely is. Joel: And I'm really excited to see what iCIMS is going to come with in terms of marketing solutions mixing with recruiting and how that turns out, because I think it's going to be really fascinating. And I think we're seeing this as well with Aman Brar at Jobvite, pulling this guy who knows marketing and technology, and the mobile pieces, and things like that. To get the head of Marketo to now take over ICMs, and the fact that he even was interested in that position to go into human capital management, is really exciting. So I think this is a huge story. Even though we have a $22 billion merger in our stories, to me this is a bigger story longterm. Chad: I agree. I think there's a bigger upside to be quite frank. And again, it's fresh in our brain because we're still here: we've been hearing for at least a few years that if you're in recruiting and you're not focusing on marketing, you're probably not going to have a job pretty soon. That's the thing is that we need to continue to learn how to provide a better experience for these individuals who are coming through. Because they want to come work for your brand, and if they have a bad experience with your brand, that's not good for the overall organization and bottom line. So I think we in talent acquisition need to understand that the employer brand is one thing, but we need to start to mesh and work better with marketing, or some of the shit's going to be taken away. Joel: Let's take a break and get a word from one of our beloved sponsors again, and we'll talk about this $22 billion acquisition or merger. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren: software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: And we're back. Joel: We're back. Chad: Kronos plus Ultimate- Joel: UltiPro Chad: ... equals big fucking platform. So this is a story from our buddy Feffer over at HCM Tech Report. He knows a lot about these types of platforms. So we see that Ultimate, Kronos are both controlled by PE firm Hellman and Friedman. They're going to merge them. So again, there's a PE firm coming in, and so there's warning signals there. Let's just start there. Kronos CEO will become the CEO and chairman of this new combined company. The Ultimate CEO, Adam Rogers, will end up transitioning out. They're going to rebrand this company. So the first warning signal to me is PE, and the merger of two brands really to pinch pennies. I guarantee you, "We can do this under one marketing department. We can do this under one brand." And I guess the question is, and it is; it's a math question. Can you make more money with two brands, which I think you can, but is the overhead that you can save by merging going to just cancel that out, and just make it easy and make it one brand? Joel: Yep. So some of the specifics of the deal. So upon closing the combined company will have revenues of approximately $3 billion, not too shabby, 12,000 employees worldwide, and an enterprise value of 22 billion. They plan to grow the company an additional 3000 employees over the next three years. The Kronos chief executive officer will be the chief executive officer and chairman of the combined company. They will be jointly headquartered in beautiful Lowell, Massachusetts and Western Florida. You can imagine more people wanting to flock to Florida maybe. With dozens of offices around the world. To me this speaks to the larger issue of consolidation, and it's a competitive world out there, and the one platform argument, and taking duplicitous services and bringing them into one organization. Desperation? Chad: This just feels like IBM BrassRing Kenexa and turning it into a shit show. It just does. When you have platforms of this size, and breadth, and scope, being able to integrate these things, it's not going to be easy. The technical debt that they're paying, I guarantee you the infrastructure they're on is not 100% new code. So- Joel: There's a little bit of two dinosaurs snuggling together to survive the asteroid. Chad: This is hard. And I just see, again, as a PE firm, they got off their pencils, sharpened them up, and said, "You know what? Let's go ahead, and let's just see if we can do this more cost effectively under one brand." The thing I don't understand is why they are rebranding. Joel: Yeah. If they drop some stupid ass, "Human capital energy," or something, that's going to be really stupid. Chad: Yeah. I, again, just don't understand. If you have these brands, you have these customers, loyal customers, maybe that's the problem. Maybe the loyalty factor is not there, and they want to try to create something new. I don't know. But from my standpoint, I don't like this. I don't like it at all. But again, when PE gets involved, doesn't fucking matter. Joel: Do you have any winners in this scenario? Workday comes to mind, I guess, some of the other big platforms. Chad: Oh yeah, any of their competitors. It seems like you've got this now huge monolithic platform, but you don't. What you've now created is a crazy amount of chaos. You've got this restructuring that needs to happen. You've got an old CEO that is going to be transitioning out, the a new CEO. You've got to rebrand. There's so many moving parts. If I am a competitor, and I am focused, and I am disciplined, and I'm on my road, man. Joel: Yeah, and you're calling the clients of those two- Chad: Oh, fuck yeah, yeah. Joel: ... companies to bring them on board of the competitive service. Chad: Now I'm just going to remind people, you remember when IBM bought BrassRing and they bought Kenexa? There are many other stories, but those are big names, and they just turned those logos, those brands into shit overall. Joel: Yeah. I'm sitting here thinking, "I can't think of a positive story in our space that started with private equity acquires." Chad: Anybody out there, if there is a positive, please tweet us #ChadCheese. We would love to hear it. Joel: Yep. Hit us up at chadcheese.com, because I can't think of any, but it's been a long week, and I'm pretty tired. Chad: That's right. Joel: Speaking of, let's take a quick break, and we'll talk about Walmart paying the peeps. Chad: Paying them. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform empowering recruiters to engage, screen, and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's go canvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: We should record our podcast beside a fireplace and the Canadian Rockies every week, damn it. Chad: Literally, I'm looking out my window, huge Rocky Mountains. Joel turned on the fireplace. We have on ambiance going on here. This is good stuff and so much on ambiance. This next story, I think that there's a positive in there. Joel: It's as warm and fuzzy as we are right now. Chad: It might be. It just might be. So we talked about Taco Bell $100,000 jobs. That was a pretty big deal, and I said, "You know what? Being a GM, I don't think that's enough, but awesome. Great for them." And now Walmart's coming out and saying $175,000 jobs. Joel: Hold my beer Taco Bell. Chad: That's right. "Walmart store manager might not be one of the gigs that comes to mind when thinking of high paying jobs," says CNBC, "but according to Walmart's first environmental social and governance report," wow, that's horrible, "released-" Joel: Way horrible. Chad: ... "Wednesday it's UD store managers earn an average of $175,000 per year and received benefits including parental leave, health benefits, and 401K contributions. That's more average salary than a dentist or lawyer." Joel: Yeah. And keep in mind, this isn't just out of the good of Walmart's heart. This is good business. And we've talked to at least one fast food restaurant here in Canada, and it's a jungle out there. Chad: It is. Joel: It is a literal war for talent. And just giving away Chotchkie's from the company party to employee of the month isn't really going to keep people there anymore. And you're competing with Starbucks baristas with healthcare and college education, Walmart paying for college, and career tracks of $175,000 a year, Taco Bell GMs making 100,000. If you're in the service industry, this is upping the ante to the Nth degree. And I think it's a great thing, and we're to see salaries rise. We're going to see companies have to step up to keep the best employees and service their clients. Chad: And I love this, a quote again from CNBC, "An open position for a store manager in Dearborn, Michigan, for example, requires qualifications including bachelor's degree and two years of general management experience, or without a degree, four years of general management experience." So you can tell it's tight now, because you really don't need a degree to be a manager per se, especially if you have the experience. I love that. That is awesome. That helps. I think not just Walmart, but the rest of the competitors start to look at this and say, "Yeah, we should probably back off some of the quote unquote requirements that we have that we really don't fucking need in the first place." Joel: Now if we could just combine The Body Shop with Walmart and say, "If you're the first to apply, we'll pay you 175 a year," I think we got something. Chad: Boom! There's a little bit of negativity here. Now let me jump in to the ring. Joel: Bring it down. Chad: So earlier this month seat CNBC reported that Walmart is testing a new employee structure, which means there are going to be less of these store managers, which is why they are going to be paying them more. So this might not last for long. They have so many managers now. Can fewer managers still do the same job? This could be kind of like the Microsoft four day work week in Japan. It's a Guinea pig type of a thing. I don't know. Joel: Or hopefully Target comes along and says, "Okay, we'll match you Walmart," and other retailers and other service industries follow suit. So my hope is that this starts a chain reaction, and people are paid better, and the world becomes a much nicer place. Chad: Yeah. I don't think that the biggest problem is this level. I think it's Walmart's average is like $11 per hour starting wage. So again, depending on where you live, that might be good. But in most cases 15 is probably better. It's interesting that Amazon challenged the rest of their competitors, "Raise your wages to $15 an hour." And it's like, "Yeah, Jeff. Do they get their own trashcan to piss in as well?" Joel: Yeah. And let's see him have that sentiment if Amazon starts getting taxed in the same way that Walmart and other retailers do. Chad: Yes, because those motherfuckers need to be paying taxes. Joel: And on that note, I'm ready for a Molson. Chad: Amen. Joel: I'm out. Chad: We out. Walken: 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. There's 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. It's so weird. We out. #Walmart #iCIMS #UltimateSoftware #Kronos #Merger #software #Technology #Wages

Think that naughty Dave Chappelle tweet from 6 years ago that you Liked can't come back to bite you in the ass? Well, think again. Fama is a company working hard to reveal social media behavior to employers making hiring decisions. Yup, background checks look a lot different today than they did 10 years ago, and the boys have some hard questions for CEO and Founder Ben Mones. NEXXT keeps fueling the Chad & Cheese hits. Check out how NEXXT can help you more effectively target the right candidates today! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. Jamis Ellis: Employer brand isn't something you sprinkle on your recruiting like magic fairy pixie dust to kind of make it better. It is both a craft and a calling. If that's the kind of work you want to do with your employer brand, come join me, James Ellis, at the talent cast. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Bottle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: It's that time again. What's up folks? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad “Just-Got-Flagged” Sowash. Joel: Oh shit. Red flags everywhere on the episode. We are happy to introduce Ben "He Made Her" Mones from Fama.io. Ben is CEO and founder of the company. Ben, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. Sound Effect : Hell yeah. Ben: Thank you Chad and Joel. Pleasure to be here. Appreciate you guys bringing me on. Joel: Right on. You are a brave man. Good for you. Chad, get him! Chad: You heard the podcast where we talked about Fama. Joe Rogan, which is pretty awesome because a few people listen to his podcast, he called out... Ben: Just a couple, all right. Chad: Yeah, he called out Fama, he called out an actual situation that happened and a person was sharing some of the Fama reports that their company sent to them on Twitter. I mean, that was a triggering event. Joel: 300 pages. 300 pages. Chad: Yeah. Multiple tweets per page, all that other fun stuff. But anyway, I mean, from our standpoint to be able to hear about this, I mean this obviously crosses over into what we talk about all the time. We thought, man, we definitely want to talk about this. There's no question. We had to have it as a topic, which is why we did. And then you agreed to come on the show. So we really appreciate you doing that because in most cases, CEOs are like, yeah, no, I don't want any of that. Ben: Well, I appreciate it. You guys got a big audience of our users and our customers and I think I don't have to come in here and change minds. But I think tell them what you do, why we do it all that is a great opportunity for Fama and anything we can do to get the word about what we're doing is a great chance for us. So yeah. Thanks for having me. Chad: Tell us about you and then tell us a little bit about Fama and why did you start? Why does it exist? Tell us about that. Joel: Were you not hugged enough as a child, Ben? Ben: No, I had a very welcoming home. It was nice growing up, but had family issues certainly. No, it wasn't my family issues that started the company. I've been in software ever since really getting out of school, different companies. Always enjoyed working in technology, helping big companies solve tough problems using tech. Ben: And one of my companies early on, we hired a guy looked great on paper, his resume checked out. He was like a VP of sales. There were like 40 reps that we ran through for this guy. Board referred guy, a VP of sales. He had like 110% quota attainment eight quarters in a row. He came onboard six weeks in, he did something really bad. He sexually assaulted one of our employees actually. So it was a terrible thing to happen. It caused significant fallout for the business. Ben: And what we found after the fact, the postmortem that we do, is all of this misogynistic and pejorative content online this guy had posted, that had we seen that we never would have brought the gun on board. Ben: So people are always like, how did you start this company? You're a sales guy from startups and you did a couple executive roles at enterprise SAS companies. You had no HR experience coming into it, but it was really experiencing the sort of exact pain that we're solving for. Ben: So in 2015, I talked to a couple of folks I knew in HR, asked them if they were looking at social media, if they were looking at news and web content, kind of Googling someone, Facebooking someone before bringing them on board. And it turned out a lot of companies were, but with the FCRA and all the litigation around protected classes and the EEO, a lot of them, it was sort of this unspoken thing that was happening in HR and talent acquisition where recruiters were kind of absentmindedly Googling people or Facebooking people and seeing stuff they really shouldn't see when trying to find that kind of needle in the haystack. Ben: So we saw the problem as being big enough that we wanted to build some technology to automate the most manual tasks of that process. So that's why we built Fama. People always think we're like scoring people are giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down or we're making a recommendation on a candidate because I think with the history of data abuse, that's where our mind kind of naturally drifts to. Ben: But what the software does is it identifies certain types of content online. So a business will really define and say here are the behaviors online that we'd want to know about. It could be harassment, threats, bigotry, violence, et cetera. Language and alcohol too, as you saw on the Joe Rogan podcast. And just like a background check, if we find you know, something on a person's complete digital identity, it's not just social media. We look at like a non-courthouse litigation, so stuff like LexisNexis, business journals, social media, news, web content. Ben: If something falls into one of those categories that a company defined as relevant to their preemployment process, we add it to a report and we have a web-based dashboard where we do that and also a PDF copy of it. So really it's about customers defining "these are the behaviors that we care about, we want to know if these exist in a person's digital background." Ben: Operates just like a background check, the candidate signs a consent form, they get a chance to go through the pre adverse process. The employer wants to take action on that report, contest the results. And yeah, the employer makes the determination, so we're automating something that's been done manually for a long period of time. Joel: I assume they'll do this as they're an employee as well, right? They can sort of sporadically throughout their tenure do these kinds of checks that they're signing? They're signing off on that right? Ben: Mostly no. There's a lot of talk around continuous monitoring. The background screening industry, it's something that I think was one of SHRM's Hot Trends for 2019. Just from what I've seen, there's a lot of interest but not a lot of adoption. Just like with the background screen and the pre-employment phase, I think the business has a clearly defined business need to do it. Like I've seen some government contractors who will do it for reasons for national security. But by and large, most companies are doing this from a pre employment standpoint. When I say most companies, I mean like 98% are doing this for pre employment. Joel: Okay, so they're basically signing off on, yes, a background check, but are they specifically signing off on sort of a social media review or online presence? And if not, how are you verifying that this Twitter account is this person or this news item is actually that person if they're not actually giving you their Twitter handle as part of the approval process? Ben: Yeah, basically with the disclosure and authorization process, just like a background check where it says we're going to look at credit data, criminal data, companies will amend that disclosure and authorization and include social media, news, and web content. Ben: Most employers, what they'll do is some will ask for the social media handles. Many will not. You're not allowed to ask for the password of course. But some companies will ask for the social handles. But we actually on our end, employ kind of a mix of both automated and human intelligence. And human intelligence, I mean literally dedicated analysts that sit in our office in LA that confirm that the social media profiles or news and web articles or litigation belong to the subject in question. So it's a mix of both automation and having a real person confirm that these subjects or these articles or profiles belong to the subject. Joel: So, if I just, five years ago, hated Chad Sowash and started up at Twitter handle "chadsowashisamazing" or something and put out some tweets about everything offensive possible, how would you guys be able to tell that that's not really Chad Sowash? Ben: You mean if you created a fake Chad Sowash account and started posting under his acronym or his name? Joel: Correct. Ben: That is a disclaimer that we offer, because we get that question. What we have seen is people who will leave their social logged in at the library or at an Apple store or something like that, that's the more typical question that comes up. Ben: And you know we do offer the end-to-end kind of a disclaimer of saying, hey, this person could be the victim of computer hacking, which is why it's so important, I think that the candidate and every chance that one of these reports is run, if there is going to be action taken, gets a chance to review the results and contest and explain. But we do from an automated and human standpoint under the FCRA you have to pursue maximum possible accuracy. That's one of the core tenants of it. Ben: So we have kind of a multi-step process on our end to try and determine if that was the case, if there was a victim of computer hacking, if it was like a new social media profile that was created or the friend network only has two friends or something like that. Joel: Right. Ben: There's certain backend technology things that you can do to look at that, but it's also just highly trained experts that know what to look for and do this day in and day out. Joel: Gotcha. And what sources are you looking at and are you getting that information via like APIs or scraping? Ben: Yeah, so it's social media, news, web content. You can kind of think of the publicly available web and obviously there've been a lot of changes to APIs over the past couple of years, So we've had to kind of change our approach as those API restrictions have evolved. Joel: Okay. So I'm going to name some sites and you tell me if you monitor them or not. Ben: Okay. Yeah, so social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Joel: Yes or no is fine. Facebook? Ben: Yes. Joel: LinkedIn. Ben: No, we have LinkedIn profiles but we don't screen through LinkedIn content. Joel: Snapchat? Ben: Nope. Joel: TikTok? Ben: Nope. Joel: Instagram. Ben: Yes. Joel: Reddit? Ben: Yes. Joel: Okay. Thank you. Chad: Ben, on the website it says "the smartest way to screen toxic work behavior" and also talks about problematic behavior among potential hires and current employees. So who defines what toxic or problematic behavior is? Ben: Our clients will define... Like they essentially have a pick list of certain types of behaviors that they want to look at and zero in on and every pre-employment screen that they do, we use the word toxic and problematic as kind of a single kind of uniting category or term for things like violence, threats against others, bigotry, harassment, et cetera. Ben: So that actual umbrella definition is something that we've found just general agreement on with our clients as we've developed the solution as that's the rough overall description of the category. But clients will ultimately define in every pre-employment screen that they do, whether or not a certain type of behavior is toxic for their organization. Ben: You might be a tech company, for example, that you really only care about the worst of the worst. You might be a much more conservative organization that wants to take a wider approach. But ultimately it's about defining the business reason for screening. This sort of behavior online. The company has to be able to draw a straight line between saying, this is why we're looking at this information and this is how we justify in the same way, looking at certain types of databases. Ben: We use that example for like a DUI, right? If you have a DUI and a role that you're never driving, you're never behind the wheel, can an employer really use that in a background screen and take action on it? Many would argue no. Chad: Yeah, but Ben, I mean, this is something that is contextual and we all know that AI is not where we wish it would be, where it could actually understand the context of many of the conversations that are actually happening, especially when you're talking about broken conversations, right? Ben: Right. Chad: And if somebody is liking a tweet that your algorithm really doesn't understand yet because it hasn't actually worked through the understanding and the auditing to ensure that it knows what the hell is going on out there. There are flags that can be pushed out around bigotry and sexism and obviously alcohol and things like that that really don't make sense. Right? Ben: Yeah, sure. Chad: So I guess from our standpoint, because we work with AI companies all of the fucking time, so we know that the context piece is very, very hard, especially when you're talking about in a social environment and unstructured data to be able to actually flag people. Chad: So I mean, from my standpoint it's really hard to say, yeah, we can just go after toxic behavior, problematic behavior. Well you don't know what that really is in the context of the conversation. Do you? Ben: Yeah, it's a great point. Look, and I think when we were building the technology, that's why we didn't want to put the label on the person or the label on the individual, and instead winnow down what is huge amounts of online information that employers were, in many cases, looking at anyway to the sort of categories that they had defined as specifically relevant. Ben: And in the cases where we are absolutely always trying to improve our AI and to take that step of making those content models as accurate as possible, meaning to say, what is this piece of content about? What is this text about? Even people I think disagree on what something like bigotry is or what a violent threat is or something like that that's made online. So the context is difficult to ascertain. Ben: But I think our approach has been, let's put this sort of category of content and labeling the content itself and then providing that to both the employer and the candidate to have a conversation about what's there. Ben: And in many cases, you're right. If it is inaccurate information, the employer then will look at it and say, you know what? I see why the AI thought that this was bigotry or something like that. But at the end of the day, we're at a point where this isn't the type of bigotry that we're concerned about. Ben: So it is that very, I think, healthy conversation between the candidate and the employer that we see that allows us to get around it. But I absolutely acknowledge what you're saying and agree that we and many others have a long way to go of being accurate and you're a hundred percent accurate when we're organizing this content online. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Joel: Andy, for clients that are sort of married to email and a little hesitant to text messaging, what would you tell them? Andy: That text messaging is part of any integrated strategy. There's not one-size fits all for anybody. Job seekers opt into different forms of communication, whether it's with Nexxt or anybody else. They might want to receive email, they might want to receive SMS, they might want to receive retargeting on their desktops. So it's one piece of an overall puzzle. Chad: For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X. Hiring.nexxt.com Chad: Now, if I was a candidate and the company sent me 350 pages and I was in the interview process, I would call the hiring manager back and say, "you can go fuck yourself." Because there's no way that I want any company to big brother my ass and think that I don't even have my individual right to be able to have conversations. Chad: Now, the entire package, to be quite frank, could all be good. But overall, don't you think this is something that would repel great talent to get away from an organization like that? Ben: I think ultimately what the employer cares about and what the employer is screening for is the determinant of the culture that I want to work for. I agree, even at our company, right? We use our own technology and we don't screen for things like profanity and alcohol because it's not something that we think is relevant to building a healthy and productive culture here or even protecting our corporate brand in the marketplace. Ben: So, I think if the employer and the candidate have a clear understanding around the channel of communication, what we're trying to create, what we're attempting to do when we do this sort of screening and why, I think that's when certainly the candidate can rally around that concept and rally around that idea. Ben: But certainly if an employer is screening for things that are misaligned with what you as a candidate care about, if you say, well, you care about using profanity, well, shit, right? What am I going to do about it? Right. Ben: That's your call as candidate. And I agree with you. It's something where we have this weird kind of middle ground of being the provider of data in some ways, but also rendering implicitly I think judgment in how we flag certain types of behaviors. So especially from a user experience standpoint and how we organize certain types of content. Ben: It's funny on the Joe Rogan podcast, he talked about the bad and good labels within that report. And that was something that we had heard from other clients too. They were like, look, this is rendering a judgment in some ways. I know you're just organizing content, but to say that profanity is implicitly bad, like that's not bad for our company. Right? And that's not what we want to communicate from a candidate experience standpoint. Ben: So those were some changes actually. Always learning lessons when we're trying to do something new and create tech that's never really been around before because this is not something where we had a precedent. There wasn't a incumbent that we were replacing that was using AI to inform the background screening process by looking at publicly available online information. Joel: How does a company typically use the information? I think, from the Joe Rogan segment, it sounded like this candidate got a FedEx in the mail, it was 300 pages of social media activity that they thought was negative. Ben: Right. Joel: I mean, I assume that the company sent that to the candidate. I am sure that you did not. And I'm sure that most companies would do it much more diplomatic than that. And they would sit down with the person and say, we have some concerns. But I also think do companies look at these reports and say, no, we're not going to hire that guy or gal. And then they just say, due to the background check information, we're not going to move forward with the hiring. Like do they have to provide the information that they received from your site? How do companies typically engage in this way? Ben: It is atypical, we had never heard of a company printing out a report like that and sending it to a candidate and that obviously being in California and ecologically minded, that was not something that was representative of what we do. Ben: But yeah, no, it's totally cool. So companies are legally required just like with the background screening to send a copy of report if you want to take action on it. California, Jan. 1, 2020, it shifted where regardless of if the company is taking action on a report, they're required to send a full copy of the background screen. It's kind of this CCPA, FCRA new legislation that's come out where some companies are just sending the background check regardless, even if they're not taking action on it. And I was surprised to see that someone would print that out because that is not what we do. Ben: But look, I mean, there's going to be different that people want to communicate with their candidates. But most employers, yes, how they're using it, it's not always like a binary, are we going to fire this person? Are we not going to move forward with them? A lot of times, it can be a conversation with saying, "hey, we saw this online, just want to let you know this is not reflective of our culture, our brand, what we're trying to do here." Ben: So it's not always this question of, is this person going to work with us or not? And if we see the Fama report, we're just not going to hire that person. There is a careful consideration, adjudication matrices that companies develop. Chad: I don't know. I don't know if that's the case, Ben. I've been working with Fortune 500 companies for way too long to think that they have a great process in place. And that being said, one of the things it says on the website, which I think is great to an extent, "our technology helps businesses identify thousands of job relevant behaviors, such as racism or harassment without exposing hiring managers to unnecessary risk and or manual work." Chad: Manual work I think is awesome because we should use technology to be able to knock that down. But from the standpoint of risk, if these companies start to, much like you'd said before, they have this checklist. If they check everything down when it comes to language and alcohol and all these things, they really start to open themselves up to more risk if they use that against hiring. Ben: Right. Chad: But they're opening themselves up to more risk because they have to defend the information that they have in front of them. Right? Ben: Right. I mean, that's the challenge. I think the hardest part of adoption for us and the biggest learning curve was less about the technology and more about the adjudicative process that a company sets up that supports active deployment. Ben: When you have this question of where do we draw the line as a business? Because look, I hear you on many HR leaders not using a ton of process. But with Fama because it's so net new and because of that implication of saying, hey, we don't want to end up on the Joe Rogan podcast or something like that and have that brand blow back. Ben: Companies do take a very careful approach to how we want to draw that line, where we draw the line, and also who's involved in the construction of that conversation. It's employee relations, it's legal, it's HR, it's talent acquisition. Where the opposing force of saying, okay, we don't want this harassing bigoted behavior in the workforce. These are things that we've either been burned by internally that's been a public news story about our employees or executives acting in a very public way that's detrimental to our brand value. Or maybe it never got out, but we just know empirically what the blow back is internally for missing out on this information. Ben: And it's that discussion of the opposing forces and I think frankly it's driven by consumers and employees who have higher expectations of companies that they buy from the companies that they work for. So it is a really careful conversation though, but you have to, as you just said, justify the business reason why you're going to do this. And if you can't justify it, then... Sorry, go ahead. Chad: Yeah, because if you can't justify it and you can't defend it, there is a huge opportunity for discrimination. Ben: Sure. Chad: So I have 20 years in the military, right? So whether it's active duty or the army reserves and I interact and I speak with in different contexts with individuals outside of the board room, different than I do inside of the boardroom. Especially if we have this brotherhood, this military connection. Ben: Right. Chad: And from that standpoint, companies who are trying to hire veterans that could be seen, possibly from this algorithm, as negative. Not to mention also individuals who are from different socioeconomic backgrounds, right? These are the things that I think we have to really clamp down on, especially after we saw Amazon shut down an algorithm because it was proven that it started to teach itself more bias. Ben: Yup. Chad: So this is the thing that is incredibly important to me is that yes, I believe technology can help us through many of these tasks. Although, how are you guys ensuring that the audit trail, it's looked at very closely. It's incredibly important because discrimination can pop up. Ben: Absolutely. First off, totally agree with what you're saying. And this is something that we talk about a lot internally. I mean, it's this question of adverse impact on certain groups to extending your metaphor even further, are there certain people that tend to post more online that then might have a greater chance of being flagged by something like Fama just because of the fact that they're posting more on the internet? Ben: And there are demographics obviously that post more online than others, right? So does that mean that they have less of a fair shot at getting a job or an employer taking action, right? So there are algorithmic techniques and technology techniques that you can take to try and identify adverse impact and run essentially blind studies on your own data across a wide cohort of people. Ben: Now, the right way to do that is to try and obtain, there's something called a construct validation study, which essentially allows you to look at, we've done that internally, but whether or not your algorithm is creating an adverse impact on a certain group. Ben: And while we've taken those steps, the real way to do that would be to have companies actually supply like full gender, age, race information on the candidates, which they would never do, right? Companies would never, nor would we want to handle that date on behalf of our clients. Ben: So this question of adverse impact, it's one that is difficult, but to your point, there's also the technology question of how do we find the middle ground. And I think if we were talking about a technology like Waze, if there was a fully automated, here's how you get there, here's where you take the left, here's how you avoid the traffic, to find the candidate you're looking for and here is your answer, I think we expose ourselves to a lot more potential for that algorithmic bias to creep in. And I don't know the full detail on Amazon's story, but I think there was a resume parser, right? That was recommending people for certain jobs. Is that the Amazon reference you're speaking to? Chad: Yeah, a little bit more than that, but yeah. Yeah. It was using past behavior. So the algorithm was learning off of past behaviors and it learned how to become biased. Ben: Right. Right. So I think with us, the thing that we really tried to zero in on is how can we help HR and talent acquisition do their jobs more efficiently and do their jobs better while letting their intuition around the sorts of things that you're talking about here and their experience around making sure that they're not taking a adverse impact approach the way that they hire, letting the people really shine and thrive as opposed to having the algorithm do all the work. Ben: We call it kind of human augmented intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, which is basically to try and bring a user to the precipice of action. Not to tell them what to do, but try and reduce all the noise that allows their intuition and their ability to take hold and drive that final decision as opposed to a computer doing it for you. Ben: So it's not like consumer tech. I think enterprise AI is a totally different ballgame and something that requires people much more than what we use our phones for on a day-in/day-out basis. Joel: All right, Ben. Thanks for your time. And for those of our listeners who want to learn more about you and your company, where should they go? Ben: Thanks a lot guys. Yeah, fama.io. F-A-M-A .io is our website. And yeah, we'd love to hear from anyone that's interested in what we're doing, has further questions and yeah, thanks a lot guys for having me on. It means a lot, Chad and Joel, and I appreciate it. So thanks again. Chad: Thank you, man. Joel: Word up. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Walken: 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. There's 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. It's so weird. We out. #Screening #social #Privacy #Famaio #socialmedia #Nexxt

Like it or not your brand is probably dealing disappointment to loyal followers and consumers who want to join your team. LIVE from the base of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in Banff, Chad & Cheese bring you The Gathering onstage including: Yeti -- Bill Neff, VP Consumer Marketing Intel -- Allyn Bailey, Talent Acquisition Transformation Leader Intel -- Tyler Weeks, Head of HR Data Science A mind-broadening experience you will NOT want to miss all thanks to SmashFly, Let SmashFly help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smashfly.com today. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Joel: This Chad & Cheese Cult Brand podcast is supported by SmashFly, recruiting technology built for the talent life cycle and big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit SmashFly.com today. The Gathering: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage bad-ass podcast hosts of Chad & Cheese Podcast, Joel Cheesman and Chad Sowash. Chad: I know it's early Canada, but come on, give it up. Come on. Good morning. Who was out till 1:00 AM last night? Joel: Nice. Chad: Nice. Joel: Nice. Chad: That's dedication right there. Joel: Actually it was someone on our panel who was up till 1:00 AM last night. That's how talent acquisition parties, baby. Chad: Yeah, hard. I'm Chad. Joel: I'm Cheese, and we are the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Most of you probably don't know who we are. We cover the talent acquisition, HR, marketing more and more, topics on our show. If you listen to podcasts, we invite you to go search whatever podcast platform you enjoy the most, type in Chad, Cheese or any combination of the two, subscribe. If you're not into podcasts in that way, go to chadcheese.com to find out more. Chad: Yeah. Can we get our slide? We have one slide. Joel: We've got to be on brand here, people. Chad: Yes. One slide. Joel: We're at a marketing conference. Chad: Real quick, gathering story. Everybody has their gathering story, right? Last year, I get this cryptic email, and it's like I have no clue what the hell these guys. Joel: Was it from Russia? Chad: I have no clue who this guy, no, close. No clue what this guy wants. So I'm like, "Can we talk?" So we get on the phone and he's like, "I want you to come to the gathering. I want you to become a part of the cult." I'm like, "My mom always said not to be a part of a cult." And he's like, "No, seriously. I think your mom is probably a really great woman, but come and join the cult." Joel: I'll vouch for your mom. Chad: Thanks. We came and we had an amazing experience and we really felt like fish out of water because we are HR, TA. I have 20 years of experience. I was with Monster before it was Monster. Right? So, on the tech side, on the HR side, talent acquisition, I've been an individual contributor. I've also been a leader of teams, actually marketing were reporting up into me. Built veteran hiring programs for some of the biggest brands in the world. Pipelining veterans, military veterans into their organization. And now I'm a duet. Joel: And aren't you a lucky man because you're now folically less challenged than you were before. Yeah, both of us have 20 plus years in the industry. So we like to think we know what we're talking about from that perspective. I've worked at Job Boards a little less well known than Monster. I'm an entrepreneur, so I've started and sold companies in the space over the course of my career. Well Known blog at one point called Cheese Said, and now I do the podcast. Surprisingly 85% of my time is through that. So it's been a real surprise success for me as well as I have a startup that helps monitor online employment reviews. Chad: So we want to thank the gathering. We want to thank Ryan for that crazy ass cryptic email, first off. Chris, for actually having a conversation saying, "Why the hell are we bringing these guys in?" And then really starting to form this idea between a blind spot that marketing actually has. M marketing, even cult brands. We'll talk about it today. Even cult brands who have been awarded have a blind spot. And for us it's not a blind spot, it's our every damn day. Chad: So we're excited to actually bring some guests on stage who can help us talk a little bit further, not just about the HR side of the house, but also bringing the marketing, the consumer base, all of that backend and that blind spot from now on, hopefully, especially here at the gathering. And if you listen to the Cult Brand series from Chad and Cheese, it won't be a blind spot anymore. Joel: And I think to add to that, one of the things that we saw in coming to this was that everyone that goes on stage that's a keynote speaker, anyone that goes on to present talks about people. People are our greatest asset. Our brand starts with people. They're our front lines. They're the ones that are out waving the flag to the world. But yet there's a disconnect we think in terms of the recruiting process and how you guys reach out to candidates and appeal to candidates in the process. That's a real disconnect to what your brand is. Joel: So part of our relationship with the gathering, and Chris, I think you'll agree with this, is to say, how do we bring recruiting and marketing together? Because they have a lot more in common than you think. So we're real excited to have this presentation this morning to bring a great consumer brand and their marketing as well as some talent acquisition folks, some great brands. So without any further ado, I'd say we bring them to the stage and get this show started. Chad: Yep. Joel: Let's start with Allyn Bailey from Intel. Let's cheer it for Allyn. She's a little company, she's going salsa dancing after this presentation. So was that what you were wearing last night by the way? Allyn: No. Joel: Okay, so she's freshened up and ready to go. Joel: Nice. Joel: Next up is Tyler Weeks from Intel as well. Let's give it up everybody. Chad: So we had a challenge, I think about a month ago. So Bill, Joel and I already had facial hair and we said, "Hey, we're all going to grow a beard." And Tyler tried. Joel: Let's agree not to shave for a month. Chad: He really tried. Joel: And this is what we got from Tyler. Chad: Put your hands together for Tyler. Joel: He's going to be late for school today, unfortunately. And last but not least, you all know I'm Bill Neff, Yeti. Chad: Okay. So those are our guests. And I have to say that they're brave because we have many CEOs who won't even come onto this show, because we ask the questions that need to be asked, that aren't asked. We don't generally do the softball question and that's why people listen. They want the reality. They want to know what is going on and that's why we do it. I really appreciate it. Put your hands together for everybody, first off, before we- Joel: And Chad, we almost forgot the most important part. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: We need to give some thanks. Big thanks to the gathering. Chris is here. Everyone that's great. SmashFly in particular for having the faith not ever being here. They kind of [crosstalk 00:06:47] put out a word at least this here for SmashFly, Stephanie Talent. So we want to give a special thanks to them- Chad: And Gina. Joel: ... and Gina. Yes. Sorry, Gina. For supporting this effort and believing in us and getting a this thing together. Without any further ado. Chad: First question, hard question one that I want everybody to listen to very intently. Allyn Bailey, I always pick out on the land and that's why she sat way down there because I always pick on- Allyn: I know, I was like far away as I can. Joel: And we know that she can take it. Chad: So how many human beings actually apply for jobs at Intel in a year's time frame? Allyn: A little over 1.5 million. Chad: 1.5 million. Okay, so Bill, how many people... Okay, so Bill on the consumer side, right? Joel: Marketing side. Chad: Marketing side. And then we've got the talent acquisition side over here. So they should know their shit. Keyword should. We don't expect Bill to, But bill, do you know how many? Bill: No. Joel: So there's your first takeaway Marketing folks. Go to HR and ask how many people are applying because why? That could be customers that are coming through the door every day and you're not even conscious of them. Chad: So back to Allyn and Tyler. Tyler is the analytics guy. So he generally has all the numbers. So Tyler, do you know how many people actually hit your career site a year? Tyler: It's over 2 million that hit our career site and fill out a talent form. And beyond that it's probably double that. About 4 million that just see it. Chad: Again, ask yourself, did I have any fucking clue that this was going on? Joel: Bill, do you know how much traffic yeti.com gets? Bill: Generally, yes. I get data. Joel: Would you share that or no? Bill: Well, I would share it, but like I would have to look at my Tableau report from this morning. Joel: I can tell you there's a good chance that between 10 and 18% probably go to the job section. Would you guys agree with that? Allyn: I actually think that number's a lot bigger. On our end, we find that- Joel: That you can buy coolers at their website. Allyn: You're not going to buy a chip at my website. But we find that the career page is the number one driver for the consumer site for all Intel external- Chad: And we've actually seen that through data and analytics from all big time brands. They look at their web traffic and the number one it used to be, now this has changed, the number one is the home site and the second was the career site. They were going to the homepage to get to the career site. But with search engine optimization and these huge footprints that companies are putting together, how many jobs do you have open now? Tyler: About 5,000. Chad: 5,000? Tyler: Yeah. Chad: Holy shit. Tyler: Give or take. Chad: That is actually a footprint, right? That's a footprint that Google can see and you're using a platform. You actually use SmashFly to be able to build out that footprint. So that footprint is seen by Google. So you're having people do job searches on Google and they're going directly to the actual jobs on your webpages. Tell me about that experience itself and do you work with marketing at all four basic job descriptions? Allyn: No, and we should. And I think we would love to do that. Chad: Has marketing asked you? Allyn: No. Chad: Why the hell aren't we involved? Allyn: Oh no. Nobody pays attention to the job descriptions unless there's something written in it that offends somebody and then they all call me. In 99% of the time people see job descriptions and by the way, they usually are as completely transactional purchase orders. Joel: Cold and corporate. Allyn: Exactly. Cold and corporate. This is my list of skills and requirements is all very legal and there's all this compliance around it and et cetera. We really see a clear distinction between the job description and the job ad. And for us as we start thinking about our partnerships in the marketing space, we really want to figure out how to get better at translating what is essentially a purchase order into something that's a compelling job advertisement that is real and authentic and helps people really understand what it's like to work in our environment. You don't get that from a job description. Chad: So to clarify real quick here, job description is more of a technical document, right? Allyn: Exactly. Chad: It's a technical document. The problem is, most companies use job descriptions as their job postings. Because lazy, they're not marketing. Because you guys aren't giving them the time they deserve. Anyway, the posting itself is the job description. The job description should be the marketing angle on selling the brand. Right? Allyn: Right. Chad: So Bill, is this news to you? Bill: Yeah, a little bit. Because we definitely do get involved in our job descriptions. We're a much different, much smaller than you guys. You guys have a real thing going and an engine really rolling. And we hire I think it was close to 300 people last year. So we're hiring about a person a day. And for us the talent acquisition group is like, "Okay, this is the job that I know is coming." The job descriptions requirement is on our side. Bill: The only thing about it is, and why this isn't a surprise is as we're growing, we're starting to cut and paste a little bit with job descriptions because it's a little bit easier and quicker and we're not probably taking the time to really... And then we let talent scrub it up a little bit and then post it and away they go. But we do make sure and work with our talent group. We have a much smaller group of people we're going after than you guys. Joel: And I think it's an important distinction, what Chad said was something that sort of happened in our industry in the past few years where Google has gotten into our industry. There are about a 100 million to 150 million people or searches done every month, in the States for job searches. So one of the things I wanted to point out is that marketing and typically gets involved with like the careers page and life at Intel and they do all these pages. Joel: But what's happening is job seekers go are going directly from Google or indeed directly to the job description. They're not even going to your careers page. So marketers should pay more attention to the actual job description because that's where more and more traffic is going directly. And in light of that, I'm curious, what was the last time any of you applied to a job at your company? Just to see the process. Tyler: I'm not even sure I work at my company. Things happen, I don't know. Allyn: He's like, I just see the numbers stuff. I don't know. I usually go into, my job is focused on trying to understand the experience and that's the lens that I take. It's part of my job to go and apply and I do it regularly, at least once a month. I'll tell you this, it doesn't change. It still sucks. It sucked a month ago and it'll suck next month. It'll suck the month after that. Joel: So we'll get to that in a second. Bill was last time you went through the process? Open and honest that's what we like. Bill: When I was forced to apply for the job that I have now. Tyler: Forced. That's a great- Bill: They're like, "Hey, we really want you to come in and interview. We want you to do this job." That's four and a half years ago. I was like, "Great." "All right. Go to the website and apply." And then you apply and it's like, I don't have any idea who the six people I need to list in all these things. And I'm like, "You called me." Chad: Real quick, we're starting to get into the meat of this. So you're all in. Now, I want you to do your little Twitter intro. Pretty much everybody knows who you are, but real quick, who are you, what do you do? And then all the way down the line real quick. Bill: I'm at Yeti Coolers and I'm Vice President of Consumer Marketing. Tyler: I'm at Intel. I'm the head of HR Data Science. Chad: Holy shit. What? Tyler: I'm a physicist and an artist and I love telling stories. That's what it is. Chad: Just keep that mic close to yourself. That's all I got. Allyn: Could you hold it the right way? Tyler: Sorry, I'm totally screwing this up. Allyn: We give each other a hard time. We travel way too much together. Tyler is, we're like two sides of the same coin. I work in the talent acquisition space, but my focus is around experienced design and driving a larger base of our candidates to understand what it's like to work at our company, but also to build our culture through our candidate base. And so I'm Allyn and that's what I do. Joel: So the other takeaway for everyone in the audience is I want you to, before you leave Canada or band, is apply to a job at your company and just see how it is. See if your brand translates well into the apply process. And I'm going to take a bet that most of them don't and you'll be shocked at how cold and corporate and little that your brand comes through when you apply to a job. So I went through and applied to both of your companies before the podcast. Chad: It's like Jerry Springer moment. Allyn: I know, I'm like... Joel: And now, who's the father?. Allyn: I apologize now. Bill: Pop out of the cooler. Hi Dad! Joel: That would be good. For next time. Bill: Yes. Joel: Not turning out to be mean, but some constructive criticism because Yeti, your brand is very, it's warm, it's exciting, it's challenging the boundaries of what everything is. So I went into apply and the good news is it was a one page, pretty simple attach your resume. I liked that you had the ability to add a file, like a video file. So someone could actually, I don't know, go surfing and then go on the beach and say, "I want to work at Yeti because of whatever." So they could really build their personality in terms of their resume. Joel: I think where you dropped off a little bit was once you applied, the thank you message was like a lawyer wrote it. So I went through this whole process and I'm on Yeti and I love their stuff and I want to work there. And then it's like, I get the lawyers. And there wasn't anything like thank you, now follow us on whatever social media. Or we'd love to stay in touch or here's a coupon for 20% off your next Yeti purchase. Joel: So I think from a marketing perspective and brand, that was an opportunity to say, thanks for your time, we appreciate it. Now here's a real thank you. And then the second, probably worst part of the process was the follow-up email. So thumbs up that there was actually a follow-up email. A lot of companies don't do that and you should make sure that you do. But it was super legalese and it was like, "If you don't hear from us in six weeks, just assume that you didn't get the job." Joel: So you have an entire opportunity in an email to brand and build that message and keep that going and build some warm and fuzzies. And I ended the process feeling really cold and like I'm just part of the process now. So, overall you were better than Intel and I'll get to them in a sec. Bill: Thank you very much. Allyn: I'm ready. What happened. Chad: But still from a consumer brand standpoint, from your standpoint, you are touching customers. These individuals actually want to be a part of your cult, not just buy your shit. They want to be a part of your cult. So, how does that make you feel? Bill: I think it's really interesting. I hadn't applied for a job on the site. You assume that stuff is just sort of being done. I promise you it sounded like a lawyer wrote it because they did. But that's incredible feedback. We'll get upwards of 30,000 people applying for a single job. And while that's, may not be a lot for you guys, but it is a lot for us. How do you scale and then sustain as we continue to grow? But it's probably really smart of us to get in front of that now. Bill: Because the truth is if I was applying for a job at Yeti, I would want that there's a different emotional thing happening and not anything against Intel, but you guys are powerhouses. And so I'm not sure if I'm going there, it's because I'm probably really smart. And I don't know if I would expect the same type of butterflies in like and candy canes. Tyler: You said something that's actually interesting. You said we've got about 30,000 applicants. That's probably not a lot for us. That's a huge amount. And in fact- Bill: Because you have 5,000 jobs open right now. Tyler: Right. So we get about, on average if you average across the globe we get about 75 per position. So in some ways that organic interest in your jobs is a good indicator of your cult status. The fact that people are banging down your door to join the cult is probably a KPI that you should be looking at from a marketing standpoint in general. Because they're not just looking to buy a cooler, there's almost no commitment to that. Like saying I want to give you my nights and weekends and 40 plus hours a week and give up time with my kids to like work with you. Bill: Yeah. Even when you guys invited me on the podcast, it's taken me like hours to understand what the topic is. Joel: Are you understanding? Bill: Yeah, I am understanding it now. It clicked like 36 hours ago. Tyler: It's marketing, Bill. Bill: And because it's like not stuff we think about at all. I mean we just don't. Chad: It's a blind spot. Tyler: Yeah, it really is. And it is a blind spot too, for us, for sure. Joel: So getting to Intel, I can tell you, you might be getting that many if your process was better in applying to your job. Chad: The thing is- Joel: So I applied. Chad: ... we probably don't want then. Joel: Yeah. We'll get to that. This was where the dual goals come into play. In applying to Intel, Intel has a situation where they have what's called a talent community. And talent communities were created because applying to jobs through what's called an applicant tracking system became an incredible burden on job seekers to perform. So talent communities are a layer between, I want the job and I want to apply to say, "Hey, join our talent community." And that's almost like a business card of bit of information, right? You get the email address, the name, maybe they attach a resume. And then you send them to the crappy applicant tracking system apply process. Chad: And quick question, that's more important to you really than the applies. Is it not? Allyn: Yeah, no, absolutely. Because my goal is to build my relationship there. I completely, I get in trouble with this at work all the time, but I do not believe it is in our benefit to have people applying to jobs that they're not the right fit for. So I want to keep them from doing that. Tyler: And to steal a little bit of a lens language from some other presentations we've done. If you think about take those 30,000 people, you disappointed 29,999 of them. If you think about the average purchase opportunity for each customer, like let's say it's $100 a piece, and you multiply that by the 300 jobs that you have every year. Now you're talking about revenue that you're impacting. What we saw and the thing that we wanted to get out of the business of was dealing in disappointment. We just felt like we were these brokers of where we just like, what we're really selling you is disappointment every day. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, which is why you need friends like Roopesh Nair. CEO of SmashFly on your side. Joel: To become cult brands, companies need to build from the inside out. How can messaging and technology facilitate that type of growth? Roopesh Nair: It's easy to build a so-called employer brand in paper and say, "Hey, this is my EVP and these are my pillars of EVP." But it is much more difficult to activate it internally and ensuring that as you build your EVP, that activation is top of your mind. I've seen a lot of organizations build these awesome EVPs which stands for who they are, but then not necessarily using that effectively internally. Some of the times it's because the EVP is not created in a very genuine way. Roopesh Nair: Then obviously it will not stand the test stuff, that internal activation and hence you need to ensure that your EVP is credible and aspirational as you think about the future. But at the same time spending that time to ensure that every persona in your company understands what your differentiation is, what do you stand for as a company and why is it relevant to that particular individual in that particular role is very important as you basically ensure that you're building that culture or value proposition inside out. Then it's easy to activate it because then you can use your own employees to really activate your EVP and you brand as you think about external activation. Joel: Let SmashFly help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit SmashFly.com Allyn: Right. And we really wanted to flip the switch and say, "Well, if that's not what I want to do, if I really want to understand that these 1.5 million people who come in and are saying, I'm interested, I like you enough to try and at least figure out how to navigate my way through this." If nothing else, some basic investment. I want to be respectful of that and to say, how can I now give you an experience that says we not only see you, which is mostly what people want, I see you, I appreciate you and it's not your job anymore to figure out how you connect to me. You've told me you want to be here. Now it's my job to figure out how I connect to you. How will we build relationships. Joel: In a relevant way. Allyn: In a relevant way, right? I'm driving you to the right opportunities because I'm taking the time to know who you are. That's to us what a talent community does. Joel: Did the marketing have any touch points with regard to the CRM or the actual implement branding piece? Allyn: They do. I will say this, we do have partners that we work with on the marketing side of the house, but it's interesting, different companies have different ways of approaching this. But we have our employer brand or our employer communication team. They actually have jumped between whether they sit in HR or whether they sit in marketing, but they always have this cross collaboration going on in that space. Allyn: But frequently, our collaboration, even with that team who understands employer brands and is thinking about employer brands, their focus is much more up in the very, very top of the funnel. They're looking at trying to build these big employer brand messages and not necessarily connecting it to when we actually pull people in. So we're left there by ourselves to figure that piece out. Chad: Tyler, you had a great example of how we look at and how we've seen employer brand is this thing by itself versus the overall brand. So the whole Apple kind of idea. Tyler: Yeah. We were having this conversation at lunch yesterday. If you go to a recruitment marketing conference, you'll hear a lot about employer brand. And there's a whole school of thought around employer brand versus the corporate brand and those often get talked about as two different entities. Like two different strategies, how can we make the employer brand more important? Tyler: Really, it's like you're sitting on two different sides of the table and you're staring at the same Apple and you're describing the side that you see and I'm describing the side that I see. If someone's listening to their conversation, they might think that there's two apples there. Just because we're seeing different things, but we're really talking about the same entity. They're inseparable. That's why if you have a cult brand like Yeti, you'll get 30,000 applicants. That is tied to your brand. Tyler: And vice versa. Where Intel for example, has enormous market share in servers and PCs we get a ton of applicants from college students, will be in the 1,000s per position. Where we're in new markets where we're trying to grow our growth engines as a company, like autonomous driving. Nobody thinks of us as automaker. Did you know that we're an automaker? No you didn't. We struggle there to get applicants because they just don't have that association. And it all comes down to our brand. Our employer brand is our brand. Chad: Right. Bill, let me hear your feedback on that. Bill: I want to know if it's rude if I take notes up here. My wheels are turning and- Tyler: If I'm sitting on stage with Bill Neff and he's taking notes. Chad: You've just made it. Allyn: His head's gone like, we do not need that happening. Tyler: Please take notes. Elyse take a picture. Chad: I have thoughts. So have you ever heard of employer brand? This is like a new concept. Because I remember talking to Douglas Atkins saying employer brand and he looked at me like I had three heads. Bill: No, I've never heard the terminology of that. Now I'm not saying our talent team doesn't. And we do have a good relationship with our talent team because they're a small group and we're still relatively a small group, we work really close together and we're friends. But no, I don't even know really what it (Employer Brand) is ]. I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. But the idea around, you said something that I thought was really interesting and it's like it isn't about a customer acquisition that wants to buy a $300 cooler. They want to give you their time and they want to give you their sweat and they want to give you their brain and they want to give you there their self. Chad: They want to join the cult. Bill: That is like a super powerful statement that you said because I never have thought about it like that. And how do you cultivate that. And at least acknowledge that. That's humbling that you want to come join us. Chad: But we see them as candidates, we don't see them as customers or somebody who want to, we don't have that view. Because it's become so transactional. Bill: Yeah. As much as we want to be humbled to the process and we are a humble brand, but there's probably some arrogance to it. You want to come join us, why do you want to come join us? And I think that's really a wrong way to look at it. Joel: And that's very common. Bill: You see the candidates walking through and they're getting interviewed and all that. There's probably an element of pride that I'm here and you're not yet, that is probably a little unhealthy. But understanding that this person is, is wanting to join the team and how exciting that thought process is and potential is. Allyn: So the emotional investment somebody makes when they do that, also means that their reaction when that doesn't work for them, has an even bigger downstream implication for you because they're much more passionate about it. There's research out there now that shows that over 60% of people who are told no by your company during the application process change their consumer relationship with you. They say, "And." Right? "But I'm going to make it worse for you." And over 70% of people who have a negative experience with your company during the application and hire process, tell all their friends and family with huge amount of emotional resonance. Chad: We saw Chris's graphs yesterday. What was the most influential bar chart? It was friends and family. It wasn't the influencers. It was the friends and family. So that and is pretty damn important. Tyler: Can I ask the crowd, can I ask the crowd something? Joel: No. Let's ask the crowd if you can ask the crowd something. Tyler: No, I'm asking you if I can ask the crowd. Can I ask them if I can ask you something? No. How many of you have an awful experience either interviewing or applying to a job or you just got horrible like you just, you're just emotionally scarred? Yeah, I thought so. Chad: Pretty much everybody. Joel: I'm going to call you out on that a little bit because getting into your talent pipeline was easy. Applying to your job was, I didn't even make it through. Allyn: Oh, it sucks. Nobody does that. Joel: We were talking earlier and you're like, "I don't want them to apply, I want them to get in my funnel." But then you're saying, "well if they have a bad experience then we're really screwed." We talk a lot about in e-commerce, you want people to buy something as easily as possible. And if they leave your shopping cart, you send them emails that say, "Hey, it looks like you left something in your shopping cart." If they go to click off your site, you put up a popup that says wait before you leave, get 10% off that purchase you were just about to make. So on an eCommerce perspective, they want it as easy as possible to buy products. But on the job seeker side, it's almost like you want hurdles. You don't want people to apply. You don't care if they do or not. Allyn: Right. Because think about it. Here's the one fundamental way in which consumer product marketing differs from employer or job marketing. You want all of those consumers to be consumers. You have and you will figure out enough product to sell to all of them. So the 30,000 people, if they were going on to click onto a job, we're actually going to get 30,000 different jobs, you'd want as many of them in there as you could possibly get. Because it's all about, I can give you something when you do it. Allyn: In a job application process, I only have one job for that 30,000 people. So the other 29,000 people, I have to figure out how to let down in a way that feels relevant and personal and connected. And on scale, big companies just can't do that well. In fact, if I think about most of you who put your hand up and said you had a crappy experience, it was probably related to a lot of the key issues we have. Allyn: People who go in and apply. Of those 30,000 people, 29,000 of them or a thousand of them. Sometimes in our case, not only have a bad experience, but it's based on the fact that nobody ever talked to them, they go into a black hole, they go and invested their time and energy. We know it's a crap process to apply for a job. There's all sorts of reasons I can go into about why that application process just sucks, but it does. And there's things we can do and try and make it better, but it never gets good enough. Allyn: It always feels like a very personal thing when you go and tell somebody you want them to like you, which is what you're doing when you fill out an application. It's all this emotional investment. And 90% of the time we don't have the ability to go and personally tell you why, "Thank you very much, but it's not the right fit for you." And it ends up being this paper computerized note that feels like it came off a dot matrix printer in 1982, that says, "Thank you for applying. Please consider us for your next-" Tyler: That would actually be more personal. That would actually be more personal than an email because they had to put it in the mail. Allyn: That's true. I guess in my mind that's why it's a fundamental difference. I don't want people applying to jobs unless they're the right fit for those jobs. Because I don't want to disappoint them and I don't want to put burden on me to figure out how to manage that piece. I want to keep that relationship where we can build and connect and figure out if you're not the right fit for this opportunity, how do you stay connected to me and my brand? Bill: Okay, so let's go back to Bill real quick because again, you're dealing with a 1,000 or 75 that apply per. How do you wade through when you might not have this, because you haven't done it. But you're team is wading through 30,000 and that is literally impossible. So it's almost like a first come first serve. How does that work? And do they become a part of a pipeline much like I would think in marketing that you continue to get more brand that's coming out, maybe more angler info or things like that. Really relevant info, which is one of the things that Intel's trying to do with their CRM. Bill: There's pretty stringent job requirements on our jobs now. So there's years of experience and all those things. I actually don't like it that much because I think you pass on people based on a couple of years less or... But there's 30,000 but over half of them are just out of college applying- Chad: Spray and pray. Bill: ... for the director of marketing job. Yeah. It just isn't right. And they don't have the years of experience in that. That weeds out a lot. But then they get down to it and then we surface the ones most the time that the marketing team will identify other brands that we admire or if we want someone with an agency mind. And then those will start to surface a little bit and then a lot of it is through network. This world is so small and you can figure out who these people are pretty quick specifically and in our world. And there'll be 10 or 15 really surface and that's the ones that we see. Bill: But we don't see really any of the other ones and have to trust the process in some capacity. And of the 15 that make it five will probably be some names that have been given to us through referrals. And then the other 10 are ones that we think match it. So I'm saying this only really truthfully guessing. I don't know how they weed through them and I don't know how they get to- Joel: I think the constant connection with these folks as well is really important. I think that's a place where marketing misses probably the market in many cases is that do you continually talk to them on a regular basis and let them know what the company is doing? I'm guessing with the talent community, you guys are conscious about keeping in touch with them on a regular basis. And what are you doing currently and are you guys looking at how can we take a job seeker and keep them energized for years and years, either selling them stuff or letting them know about our company? Are you guys doing anything around that currently? Allyn: Yeah. I mean, that's the whole point. Having people in the pipeline, it does us no good unless we have data and information about them to be able to figure out how we build relationship with them and how we help them connect with us in a way that makes the most sense. And so we have an entire team of people located in different regions whose main job is just to manage that pipeline and the relationships in those pipelines and to network to those pipeline to build connection. Allyn: We talk about relationship, but for us this is where I start sounding really manipulative but it's true. We build relationship because we understand that if you trust us you're going to tell us more about yourself. The more you tell me about yourself, the more data I have- Chad: These are marketers. That's exactly what they do all the time. Allyn: Exactly. Chad: Manipulative? I mean, come on. Allyn: The more data I have about it, then I'm able to throw it over to Tyler and his team who were able to put great analytics and artificial intelligence and algorithms behind it to help me figure out who you are, connect you on what to do with you. Tyler: Because I mean for on the, on the talent acquisition side, volume is not the game. And we've said that a few different times. So our challenge to break down who our audience is at a more granular level is big. Because we need to know more than just what your interests are. We need to know what you're good at and what your aspirations are. Those are three different things. You may be very interested in our company, you may be a wonderful accountant and you may be interested in doing machine learning. That doesn't mean you're qualified to do machine learning. Tyler: So the quality of our pipeline is also overlayed with ability. We have this framework that we use of ability, interest and opportunity. That sound simple but understanding those three at any given point, actually has a lot of nuance to it. But that's how we build and strategize and think about this audience that we've got. Chad: So we talked yesterday about resentment and being able to get away from resentment. And I think that's a big word for a room full of people who are focused on brand and touching those, those individuals in a great way. As opposed to having a bad experience, you're having a great experience. You're more on the HR side, Bill can answer this too. Why do you think marketing, they don't interact with TA as much? Why do you think this isn't like more of a symbiotic relationship? Is it HR and HR is just scary? Tyler: I don't mean to scare you people. Bill: You are scary. Chad: Bill's called the HR, HR, Bill please... Allyn: I don't know what it's like in every company, but I know what I see and I think in a lot of the big large enterprise companies, HR organizations have been over the years really reconstructed as transactional organizations focused on driving transactions around paychecks and applicants. And so it doesn't feel like it, unless you tell the story and start having this conversation, it's not a natural moment. I'm imagining where you sit down in the marketing department and go, I wonder what's happening in our candidate relationships. Right? Allyn: Because when you think about HR and you think about what they're doing in talent acquisition, you're thinking, I wonder how many applicants they're processing so that I can fill my seats as quickly as possible. Our measures are that way. We use in the HR space, sales measures, not marketing measures. And so we're not building that conversation. Tyler: I'd go a little deeper. Nice answer, Allyn. Allyn: Whatever dude. Joel: Shallow but nice. Allyn: Fine. Tyler: I think here's a historical component to this where, I'm venturing a guess. I'm just making shit up right now. I'll bet that retailers where historically you'd walk into the store with your resume and that's the same place that you're going to buy their products have actually found a tie between these two for a very long time. That'd be my intuition. I'll bet that companies like ours who are more an OEM or you're more B2B, the place where you go buy things and the place where you would walk in with your resume into the headquarters, we're two different locations and two totally different experiences. And it's only been in the last couple of decades that those have converged into one portal on a corporate website. And so I think we're just learning as an industry how to combine those two. Chad: Very nice. Very deep. So HR is here- Joel: You guys talk. You guys are in frequent communication with HR? Bill: Yeah. Just because we're friends. Joel: And do you get to go strategically and talk about- Bill: No. Joel: No. Chad: We have beers, we do all this stuff, but we do not talk about strategy. Bill: I think probably the biggest deterrent from it is just time. It's not our job. Chad: It's not a priority. Bill: It's not a priority for us. Chad: The question is, do you think it's priority? Bill: Yeah, like this stuff I wrote down. I think there could be a real priority. I do. And I think it could be things that we actually change to just make that your experience the warm and like excitement to the cold and like. I think it's a real takeaway for us. Joel: It's like an air ball at the end of it. We're running out of time. Let's hear a warm round of applause for our guests. Chad: Allyn, Tyler and Bill, thanks so much. And again, I'm sure you're going to want to re-experience this in a podcast way while you're on a treadmill. You can just go to wherever you listen to podcasts. I don't know, maybe even Spotify and look for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. We'd love to have you. Joel: And everyone go and apply to your jobs and set a lunch date with your HR department. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Allyn: Thanks guys. Tyler: Thank you. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast. Yeah. The Chad, the Cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing, just a lot of shout outs to people you don't even know, and yet you listen. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Not cheddar, blue, nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and yet not one word. It's 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. #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #Yeti #Intel #Brand #EmployerBrand #Branding #Marketing #Recruitment #Experience

Best of times, worst of times ... while the coronavirus ravages the world and employers take notice, money continues to flow into startups and acquisitions in our space. Something's gotta give, right? The boys discuss these two opposing forces in this week's episode while also finding time to discuss creeping propositioning by CEO's to women, compliments of LinkedIn. Enjoy this Tamiflu-inspired episode, as always, sponsored by Canvas, JobAdx and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls its time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Welcome to the black plague edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, boys and girls. I'm your barely surviving co-host Joel Cheesman Chad: And this is Chad. I am so glad I'm not in the same room as you Sowash. Joel: And on this week show, all big dick energy on the acquisition and investment front while the economy burns, of course. Workday is canceling and homie don't play that. Grab some Kleenex and pour yourself a hot cup of soup, we'll be right back after a massive intake of fluids. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com. That's Sovren.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: I am your father. Chad: Yeah. So you got checked, you don't have the coronavirus, right? Joel: No coronavirus but Type A flu. I wasn't aware there were different types of flu but I have A. And I'm the final recipient of this lovely flu in our household, so I get to have a nice weekend apparently. Chad: Yeah, you just stay quarantined and away from the rest of the population that we would really appreciate. Joel: Roger that. Chad: And rest. So a couple of weeks ago you gave a shout out and I thought, you know what? I'm actually going to listen to this podcast. It's called Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson. The subject was job search, not entirely human resources. Dude, it was such garbage. I can't believe you actually told people to listen to this thing. We're going to have to do an interview that actually straightens out all this fluffy bullshit revisionist history stuff. Jeff Taylor, Dick Johnson. Dick Johnson was actually good. Arena was on it for God's sakes. I mean, dude it was a total fucking puff piece. Joel: After you just said, Dick Johnson was good on it. I appreciate that you want to come at me while I have the flu and my ability to fight back is minimized but, okay, so let's be specific. Did you feel they were lying? I mean Arena, whatever. I just thought that historical perspective of the two Superbowl ads, hot jobs rolling the dice, some history on Monster. I mean specifically, what did you hate about it? Was it lies? Was it- Chad: I mean mainly except again for the hot jobs commercial, which I thought was awesome. The rest of it is like they were setting up Monster, and Jeff Taylor was talking about Monster and the only reason monster.com actually existed is because The Monster Board was a piece of shit. TMP, actually took OCC, which was a better technology and The Monster Board and Monster. I mean Jeff did have a better flare to himself and better to marketing flair. So all they did was they took the OCC tech, redirected the tech to put it on, monster.com. With not The Monster Board but monster.com and put new colors on it. I didn't mind the pieces of the commercial on the Superbowl but it was so puffy. Maybe it wasn't that bad from somebody who was looking for a puff piece and you're a puff piece guy. But for a guy like me, I want to dive into the actual details and really figure out the real stories and it just wasn't there. Joel: This is a Generalist Podcast featuring Walter Isaacson, which I think you'll even agree is a reputable personality and professional. Chad: He did no research. Joel: I didn't spin the show as deep insight into the industry. It sounds you're just mad that your former employer, OCC wasn't mentioned at all. Chad: That dude did no research whatsoever. He was a puff piece. That's a thing. Joel: He's telling a story. He's not doing critical interviewing and reporting. Chad: It was fucking horrible. Joel: And you are a tough critic. God damn. Chad: Sometimes our shit's bad too. Joel: I mean, take it for what it's for, it was not a Geraldo 2020, 60 minutes deep dive into the industry. It was a little story about a time in place. Chad: It was a puff piece. Joel: I'm going to give a shout out to Tamiflu, which is actually making me even able to talk to you today. Tamiflu, miracle drug if you're on the flu, Tamiflu. Chad: Tamiflu. Joel: Available at Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid near you. Chad: And hopefully the following people do not have to take the Tamiflu. Tyler Weeks from Intel, who's the head of HR Data Science, Allyn Bailey TA Transformation Leader at Intel and Bill Neff, the VP of Consumer Marketing at Yeti, to be able to get those guys on the stage and have a holistic discussion of brand and how talent does either positively or negatively affect consumer brand. It was really interesting that it... I mean onstage, you could see it actually hit Bill in the face and he's like, "Fuck. This is incredibly relevant." So thanks to those guys. Joel: So to me, if there's any teaser it was CMO of Yeti saying he had never heard of employer branding until our conversation. So to me this is a timely, very important podcast for industry as well as marketing. So if you're in TA share this episode with your marketing department, I think it's a must listen for them and hopefully can get some dialogue started if there isn't any in your organization between TA and marketing. Chad: The title of the podcast is called Brand Revelation Joel: And let's not forget SmashFly and Symphony Talent for sponsoring the event. Big ups to Elise and Gina for being there and always been awesome. Shout out to... I'm going to screw this up. [Levan Van Hiza 00:07:03]. Levan is out of Belgium and he runs House of HR, I spoke at their event last year. Anyway, he is going to unleash a UK, which will be at the... I don't know, the sister event TA tech. And he's attending because he heard our show. So he's buying a ticket so you're welcome. unleash Levan will see you in London and have some Belgian beers hopefully. Chad: Yeah, no shit. Quick shout out to Fama.io CEO Ben Mones. He took some hard questions around social media monitoring. I mean, from the privacy standpoint, from the idea of big brother watching you, no matter where you're at on Twitter or on Facebook, what or wherever it might be. It's an eerie feeling. Then this is under the podcast entitled Somebody's Watching me, so check it out Joel: And I want to apologize to you for all the sniffles and coughs that you're going to have to edit out on this show, much apologies. Shout out to Layton Davison, a student out in Calgary, Canada. Who has attended two gatherings in a row and recognized us last week because he was so impressed with our first podcast from the show that he wanted to give us some love at the show. So Layton Davidson man keep studying. Get that degree and maybe you'll be on the show one day. Chad: He's a good dude. Big shout out Michael O'Dell at talent.com. Thanks for the socks, man. The only problem, the first pair that came in a package with my name on it was taken by my wife, so I made a mention on LinkedIn. "Wait a minute, she took my socks." So he sent another pair but it was addressed to her. So now she has both pair of socks. talent.com socks I have not. Joel: That's just good stuff Michael O'Dell, I like that. Yeah, I got a pair of socks too. Thanks, I appreciate that. A shout out to Shelly Norske. You may or may not remember Shelly from dinner the first night at Banff and the large crowd of people that we had eating workers. But Shelly's now a fan of the show, a marketing person. We need all those folks we can get. Shelly, if you're listening welcome to the show, we had a great time and we'll see you next year in Banff, I'm sure. Chad: Excellent new listener, Ollie Kilvert. He's turned on to the podcast after Rob Prince over at Talent Nexus posted the late arriving holiday card. I said, "Okay. So it was a little bit late for Valentine's day, even though it was intended for much earlier." Joel: Feel the love. I want to know what the post date was on that when it left the States. Because it had to be in December and it didn't show up until now. But anyway, shout out to Carlos Gill. We'll be producing that interview and putting it out soon. But Carlos is on marketing new age, a social media guy that has a history in job boards that we dig into. But I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Carlos for being a longtime fan and listener of the show. And if you haven't read his book, the end of marketing, I encourage you to go out and check that out on amazon.com or wherever you enjoy your books. Chad: Very nice. Ready for events. Joel: I have one more, shout out to Fred Goff, our buddy at Jobcase in Boston. Fred made a really nice LinkedIn post, I think it was last week where he said, "Look, if we're going to be in the industry, we should support companies that are doing great things with employees." And printed out the Delta who've we've talked about in terms of giving money for revenue. Revenue generated by the company. So Fred is saying basically, "Hey, if we believe in this industry, let's support those companies. I'm flying Delta from now on." So good for Fred, I like that move. Chad: Luckily I am already doing that Fred. Joel: Of course Delta's probably either a client or he wants them to be a client at some point in the near future. But that's the cynic in me. Sorry. Chad: Always looking for the angle. All right, events. So Travel is sponsored by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. We just receiving upgraded gear. We just received upgraded gear. So soccer jerseys. You got a soccer Jersey, right? Joel: Yeah. That's football for our European listeners. Chad: Got a North face vest and also a Nike golf quarter zip. Joel: They have upped the game significantly from last year. Chad: Yeah. Well, I mean last year we got luggage and stuff. So I mean I can't bitch about that. But man. Joel: No hate at all. Chad: No. Good stuff. Good stuff. And that's going to help us propel to our next place in London. Hopefully fingers crossed and this coronavirus fucking thing goes away. On Lynch and TA tech have a mega conference in London in March. Joel: Death match baby, are you ready? Chad: Yeah. Fuck yeah. JobSync, Get-Optimal, SBOJ. How can you not? We have one slot still available. It's interesting how over in Europe and the UK, they don't like to really get up on stage and really just pitch their stuff. They're more subdued in the background. We're here in the U.S. we can't keep the fucking startups from wanting to get on stage. Joel: I'm sorry but, touting my company might be against my protocol for a decency of a civilization and society. Yeah, it is an interesting cultural shift where in the U.S. people who have companies are more than happy to talk shit about their stuff. And in the UK it's like pulling teeth or be it crooked teeth because- Chad: And if you don't have tickets, go to TAtech.org or unleashgroup.io and then after that we are heading to Austin. Giddy up Staffing tech May 5th through the seventh. Joel: Yep. And don't forget my friends at Rec Techs had a good laugh about me calling their conference, "Some sort of recruiting event in Vancouver." Which I actually don't know yet what that event is called or what it is, but I will be in Vancouver April 6th and 7th. So if you're out there riding orchids or snow skiing, come out and say hi and we'll have a beer. Chad: Writing Orcas, yeah. You have fun up there I don't need any more of the cold fucking shit, I want to go to Austin. I want to go to Austin if I take Julie, she's going to want to buy more boots. But anyway, amazing staffing leaders at Staffing Tech, a ton of startups and vendors. Just overall, it's a great event. Joel: Agreed. Chad: Topics! Joel: All right. Big acquisition to the tune of one. It's a weird number, 1.3 whatever billion, 5, 3 billion. Cornerstone and Saba get married. Okay, cool. My take is the education play frankly. I think the online learning stuff that Saba brings or does currently is in high demand and going to be in the future and any of these companies are realizing that and made the play. Wall Street didn't like it very much, Cornerstone in addition to shitty earnings and a shitty just environment for stocks right now is down 20 plus percent. What are your thoughts on the news? Chad: Yeah, I think that there's no question that had something to do with it, but the stock market started tanking the day before with the whole coronavirus piece, which we'll talk about later. Yeah, I think- Joel: Not 20%, it didn't. Chad: If you take a look at what Cornerstone and Saba both do recruiting on the new talent attraction side of the house. Learning of the LMS and then performance and coaching. So you can see where this is nice to be able to... In some respects definitely start acquiring competition. Overall, they have 75 million combined users, 818 million and combined ARR. And if you think about it, more users equals more data equals feed the AI machine learning beast, right? So with all this AI and machine learning that's out there, we've been talking about and I think we actually talked to Robert Ruff from Sovren. That the AI machine learning obviously is one piece but you have to have the data to feed, to learn before the AI is even worth a shit. So I get from this standpoint where it makes sense. You're taking a competitor out of the game, right? You're absorbing that competitor. Saba's CEO Phil Saunders, he's going to take the COO position until the merger is complete. And then more than likely he's going to say, "bye, bye." But yeah, I think it's a pretty easy math equation. Don't you think? Joel: There are a lot of facets to this deal. The release CEO and founder of Cornerstone, Adam Miller summed that up for me in quote, "Saba and Cornerstone have always shared a passion for people development and together we can accomplish great things. The additional depth of expertise and capability from Saba is an ideal compliment to Cornerstone. With the combination of our product development team is expected to significantly expand, giving us the ability to develop faster, further increase competitive differentiation. Help millions of people around the world to overcome the skills divide." So there you go, that summed it up for me. Chad: Well, and don't forget that in January Cornerstone bought Cluster Tree. An AI based skills engine, which has a pretty massive skills ontology. So the engine uses machine learning to help companies match their employees skills with specific job roles. So we're talking about external and the prospect of internal, right? So it's not just about getting the right people coming in the door to the right jobs. It's also about having your people that currently work for you. Mapping to career progression and succession. Joel: I want to see Cornerstone and StepStone merge to create. Stepping on the cornerstone. That's what I want to see. Chad: Not the angle I thought you were going with that one. Joel: That's the flu right there my friend. Chad: The online learning angle though, Udemy. Just got, was it 50 million. Joel: Udemy with 50 million to focus... Again, back to the learning piece, the growth piece. Obviously companies need folks to stay in step with current trends, new technologies, everything that's coming out. So yeah, Udemy which I know a lot of companies swear by raising 50 million this week. It's good to see the money's still coming in to this space and we'll talk about the economy here in a little bit. But this was a great move by Udemy, 2 billion valuation, which is still peanuts for what they could be. Chad: Yeah. To over 220 million overall they've taken this far, so another round, $50 million online learning marketplace. It's definitely a thing and as we talk about talent, whether we currently have them or we need them to be able to have these new skills, we've got to do it some way and this is a great way to be able to make that connection. Joel: Yeah, and this'll be interesting as recession threats loom, I guess. How do companies treat current talent bases and current employees in terms of retraining and repositioning as opposed to laying off? I guess time will tell on that. But companies like Udemy help reposition employees for other jobs in the company. Timing's probably right on these guys getting some new money. Chad: Yeah. Well and talking about new money and Telecare lands 45 million in series B. And Telecare is a Massachusetts based startup with an app that lets post acute facilities, hire on demand nursing professionals. It's like the Uber. Joel: Uber for nursing home staff. Which I can tell you, our interview with Saundra from Ageless, which I know is coming out as well. We were really surprised to see someone with Amazon and coach in their resume go to a nursing home or assisted living home. But the trend in terms of boomers getting old and this is going to be a huge growth opportunity for a lot of businesses as well as companies that service them and the nurses that service their customers. So in terms of timing again in Telecare nursing home, Uber getting nurses the right place to me, this is also very interesting. Was it Nomad Health that we talked about was an Uber. Uber for Healthcare jobs as well. This is where the gig economy is going. I think we both agree in terms of niche defying themselves and really specializing in certain areas. Healthcare is an obvious gig economy fit, so I anticipate more companies this getting money and this continuing to be a growth area for our industry. Chad: Yeah. And it says for nursing professionals, join our team and start picking up shifts in less than 72 hours. So again, if you are already working a gig but you want to or a full time position and you want to be able to pick up hours somewhere else, you could do that. That's pretty fucking awesome. I think one of the problems I see here is, in most cases the actual talent pool itself is already overworked so it's going to be hard to get people to join into that. Because it's like, "I'm already working enough over time as it is. I don't want to pick up any more fucking shifts." But I guess this can actually shift back to you become a part of this platform and then you just work where you want to work when you want to work. It's an entirely different type of lifestyle though, man. Joel: Yeah, and I think the number is one in four people who actually have a nursing degree are actually practicing nursing. So if a more flexible platform or space can help bring some of those 75% that have a degree but aren't working in the industry back into it, that's going to be a huge win for healthcare and maybe the gig economy can help do that. Chad: This is what I define as a marketplace. It's not a job board, it's actually more of an app where you can really flow back and forth with talent, you know what I mean? There's a need, there's a demand, and then there obviously is the feeding that demand with the talent in the actual app itself. So this is something that I would definitely place in the marketplace segment, versus some of the other I think platforms that are out there that really are just more job boards in there or anything else. Joel: Yeah, yeah. I see what you did there. Think of Uber when you think of platforms. Right. Like, "Hey, I'm ready to work." "Okay, here are jobs." They're ready to go there's no posting, it's automatic. There's a need and the platform just facilitates the two getting together and making miracles happen. Chad: Yeah. Well, and I think it's important to start to differentiate between what tech is, right? Is it a job board? Is it a marketplace? Is it programmatic? Is it just pure job distribution? Because there's so much noise out there. We have to cut through that clutter. Joel: And speaking of non posers, let's get a quick word from canvas and we'll talk about the economy going in the toilet. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human that's you at the center while Canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent that's gocanvas.io, get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: Now you don't hear this often, but I think Workday made a damn good decision on this next story. What do you think? Joel: Prudent for sure. They had an event that was going to draw out 3000 participants to Florida. Chad: Sales kickoff. Joel: Globally. Events are canceling all over the world and one of the biggest ones is the Mobile Congress that happens every year in Spain. That was the big one that's stopped early. Which brings people from all over the world for sure. So Workday is no surprise. And by the way it's a shitty time to be in the conference business but we're not in the commerce business. But yeah. So the news out I guess today, wasn't it? Or Wednesday actually. So yesterday Workday canceled its annual internal sales meeting over fears of the coronavirus outbreak and will be moving the program online. We'll see if that stays online and years to come. But it was bringing people from around the country I think. Chad: Yeah. Well and over the weekend South Korea, Italy and Iran reported a sharp increase in cases. So I mean there has to be prudent measures that are taken by organizations. Facebook canceled a San Francisco based global marketing summit. Facebook and Sony also pulled out of marches game developers conference in San Francisco. So there's a couple of different things. First off, this is incredibly smart and it makes a lot of sense but it's also going to affect the economy in those cities because those cities are looking for that dump of cash when they have these conferences in. Joel: I mean imagine what it would do to work forces, profits if their entire sales team got the coronavirus or got sick. They would probably shut things down at the company for a while and it would impact revenues quite significantly- Chad: Well, what if it was their sales force because that's exactly- Joel: Exactly. So good idea to not get your whole sales force sick. I think it will be interesting to see... There's no remedy cure for this virus and no one knows exactly what it's going to look like six weeks. Let alone six months from now but obviously affecting the HR conference circuit. I mean, I think... Nestle today shut down all travel from everyone in the company and that's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. Shit's going to get crazy and that goes into our economic outlook as a whole. But Workday, I think is a sign of things to come. Because this thing isn't going away. Chad: It's getting a little hot in here. That's for God damn sure. We saw a dip in the Dow Jones that was associated to the coronavirus. And again, a lot of that comes to commerce not happening because of travel not happening. And so we've been feeling and hearing about the possibility of the economy slowing and obviously the corona viruse isn't helping. Adecco reports Q4 decline in revenues at 4%, a softness in Europe and slowing in North America. And generally we start to see first with staffing. That's our early indicators for town- Joel: Canary in the coal mine. Chad: Yeah. So Expedia is cutting 3000 jobs. Business Insider reports as a living costs outpace wage increases. The typical U.S. worker can no longer afford a family on a year's salary. Showing the dire state of America's middle class. So I mean, this is becoming bigger than just the economy slowing. This is actually a trend that we've seen over the last 30 years that is starting to catch up with us. Joel: Well, let me give the kids out there a quick little history lesson. You and I have seen two such a dips. The 2000, 2001 recession with the.com bust and obviously 2008 which was the world ending and only rats and cockroaches walking the earth for a couple of years. These are the early signs of stuff could get bad, when you look at these early signs and it's not just the coronavirus is spreading but a lot of this stuff with, start ups laying off people. You've got IPOs going badly for investors. I'm going to be really curious to see if these investments in our space continue, right? If those start drying up and I do think they are a little less than they used to be. I'm going to be watching really closely and I know you are as well. Chad: Yeah. Well, in the last two weeks we've had two huge acquisitions slash mergers. So I don't know that anything's slowed down this far. For years we've been touting the economy as it's the best that it's ever been. But we're not rewarding the people who actually do the fucking work. This is the problem, that the raising. Not raising the wages, not helping cancel student debt or at least pay off student debt not paying for the necessary further education to keep their skills up to par. And Mike Germano, CEO of a Communo. Actually said that 40% of the freelancers that they work with, their time is spent learning and getting better and FTE doesn't have time to do that, right? So I think what we're doing is we're not looking at the actual economics of work the way that we should and why do we believe a CEO is worth 1500 times that of an individual who's actually driving the creation of the product or delivery of service? Chad: A dude's idea is fucking worthless if the execution isn't applied. We need people to be able to do the work to make that happen. To be able to create product, to be able to deliver services and those individuals, their wages have been stagnant and we've talked about just the minimum wage itself being at the same level it has been for over 10 years and not being able to... There's another story that actually said as CNBC, full time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S. It's just like you are going to say, "Well what about Seymour Indiana?" Anywhere in the fucking us. This is a fucking problem. We're making more profits than we've ever made in our lifetimes or at least that's what we've heard but yet that's going to buy back stock and it's not going to the people who are actually doing the fucking work. This is a big problem. Joel: I heard a great quote the other day is, essentially in America we have socialism for the rich and we have rugged individualism for everybody else. And that sums it up. So 2020 is starting out to be a really interesting volatile semi-scary year. So here we go, buckle up boys and girls. Chad: Quick rants. Okay, first off, we've got to stop this fucking communism. Socialism versus capitalism bullshit. Capitalism drives prosperity money, right? And it's the best at driving prosperity, which is why we've always done so well. The problem is capitalism sucks and being able to actually deliver prosperity back to the people, which I was just talking about. CEOs getting paid 1500 times that of the people actually creating the product or delivering the service. That's where we've always lived in a hybrid society of capitalism versus almost social programs. We have to think more of hybrid evolution as opposed to this or that. That's my rant. Joel: Yeah. Well, look if you're a student of history and I know who you are. The times in history where the money has gone to very few and the very many feel left out and disenfranchised, the pitchfork and the gear teams come out. I'm not saying we're there in America, but there certainly is some opposing views in terms of what our country is currently like and it's probably going to come to a head sooner rather than later. So, rant appreciated and I'm sure it's just one of many more rants that's yet to come as the presidential race heats up and the economy continues to melt down. Chad: I need a break. Joel: JobAdX could be the break that you need. We'll be right back kids. JobAdX: Nope, not for me. All these jobs look the same, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just halfheartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them, face it. We live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions. Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team health candidates, see themselves in your role by emailing. Joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: Homie, don't play dat. Chad: Homie don't play dat. Joel: I thought this was an onion story when I first read it. It's so ridiculous. Chad: It is. So Jordi Greenham, the CEO of Mexican longterm rental startup Homie, has resigned after a sexual harassment investigation was carried out by his company's ethics board. Okay, so long story short, this is the tech crunch story. So Greenham had actually met this lady. This unnamed lady through a mutual friend five years ago. And he was obviously feeling a little frisky so he reached out to her on LinkedIn. They started chatting back and forth and she thought that possibly there might be a position open at Homie because it was a growing startup company. And Greenham propositioned her in a WhatsApp message around 1:30 AM on Valentine's day to spend the night with him. Joel: Can we recreate the conversation? Do you want to be Homie. The Homie CEO or do you want to be the recipient? Chad: Okay. I want to be Homie. Are you ready? Joel: Okay, go ahead. Chad: Okay, so here's the conversation on WhatsApp. I'll be the Homie CEO Jordi. Hi, I would like to see you. Joel: Can you explain to me the random texts at strange hours? Chad: No, there is no rational explanation, it was irrational but I understand that it doesn't interest to you. How much could I pay you for one night, 3000? Joel: And 3,000 Pesos by the way is $150. So this guy CEO is a big spender when it comes to propositioning young ladies to spend the night with him. Chad: But this is connection happened over LinkedIn. We're always talking about LinkedIn and people like the spamming and shit but also the cat fishing. Joel: I feel like LinkedIn should change its mantra from a Facebook for professionals to Tinder for professionals because that's more and more what it's becoming. Chad: So this is obviously a thing, not just in Mexico because on several occasions I think we've talked about it on the podcast. Pseudo women. I doubt that they're women are always trying to reach out and ask about relationships on LinkedIn. It's like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Anyway, if you're out there and you're on LinkedIn, beware. Joel: And you've got to think that this is maybe worked for this dude before. What are the odds that this is the first time that he's propositioned somebody via LinkedIn? Probably not the first, right? Chad: No, I'm thinking it was 1:30 in the morning, he was drunk, he was horny and he was obviously fucking stupid. Joel: By the way Homie's now champ startup. They raised $8.2 million. They've gotten money from Sam Zell, who's a really well known billionaire here in America with a long history of stuff. When you have this responsibility in this title don't do this shit. This is just fucking ridiculous. Chad: And we out. Joel: I got a packet of soup waiting for me, I'm out. Walken: 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 of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening, it's incredible. And not one word about cheese but one cheddar. Hello Nacho, pepper jack, swiss, there're so many cheeses and not one word so weird. Anyhow, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode and while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese, it's so weird. We out. #Linkedn #Workday #Cornerstone #Saba #Economy #Travel #Intelycare #Marketplace #Events #Expedia #Homie

Robert Ruff joins The Chad & Cheese for another VOICES episode where they spin through topics like: - Gaming the system with the Gig Economy - Culture, the new Discrimination - The 10x Rule for Work Enjoy this Voices Series podcast from The Chad & Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Voice Intro: Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices, like mine, are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls its time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation back up with Robert Ruff, president of Sovren, industry veteran and all around smart dude. Joel: How does that shake out, Robert? Is there one major player for all jobs because it's very fragmented now, right? And you know Uber lost a billion plus dollars last quarter. How are they going to be profitable? Is anybody going to make money in this business from the gig economy perspective? What does this look like in five years? Robert: So I'm not a big proponent of the gig economy. I think the gig economy is just another exploitation of a kind of a desperate and dispossess class in general. Now, having said that, that doesn't mean that if you're driving for Uber there's something wrong with you or blah, blah, blah. I mean, there's a lot of people that do it and are big advocates of it. Robert: But in general, the driver behind it is we don't know your benefits, we don't know your retirement, we can play games in some cases with the rules and how we pay you. Joel: They do in California. They're trying, yeah. Robert: Yeah, they're trying to crack down on that, but you'll notice that the day after they pass that law, Uber announced that they were not a transportation company. They were an operating system for life to try to redefine themselves out of the tentacles of the law that was passed. Joel: Yep. Chad: Have you seen Uber Works? Because what they're doing is trying to be just the apparatus for hiring through staffing. Robert: Correct. Chad: I mean, that's it. They want to get their way out of the actual human part where they actually have to treat people like people. Robert: So I think at the gig economy level, at the "can you show up tomorrow for a physical labor type of job" level that there is a lot of use for systems that will replace application systems. Robert: So a video interviewing system, which is essentially just asking you the information that would be on an application. Which I am a big proponent of that and here's why. There's a lot of people that aren't fluent enough or literate enough, let's just say literate enough, to fill out a written application in any language. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't have a job and couldn't do a great job. It just means they can't get over the application process. Robert: So to have a oral, chat bot interview process or whatever that is that's AI... Joel: A robot. Robert: Yeah, a robot doing that is fine for those shops. But please do not try to convince us that that is also going to replace hiring for CEOs, mid-level managers. That's just nonsense. Joel: Yeah. Robert: So when we talk about HR is being revolutionized or disrupted, which my least favorite word on earth, we forget that there's no such thing as HR. HR where? Right? So that's like the whole thing that we talk about about corporate culture. I don't believe that there is a corporate culture. I believe that your accounting department has an accounting department culture. Robert: I believe that your engineers over in the engineering department have their own culture and I don't believe those cultures are the same. I don't believe an accountant going and sitting with the engineers for a day, would feel like, "well this feels just like my job over there." They was be like, "wow, everything about this feels different." Right? Robert: So this whole idea of corporate culture as being a monolithic thing that people need to fit into. I think it's just another way to discriminate against people. Let's just say I test you and I feel like you're very extroverted and you have these following traits. Robert: Surely, in most companies there is a job where that is needed. Why are we trying to apply those traits as a filter for like, "oh, you don't actually fit the overall profile of the corporate culture." That's just some silly average, which obscures the fact that there's a tremendous amount of difference underneath it. Chad: But wouldn't you agree that, I don't want to use the word culture, some companies, their purpose is much different? And to be passionate about that specific purpose, not everybody is. Chad: So if you're just looking for a job and you're not passionate about building widgets or what have you, then you probably shouldn't apply, but people are going to anyway. Don't you think that is a fair assessment, somebody who really wants to dedicate their life to doing widget building? Robert: No, because I think you're confusing the job that you identify with that company, with the jobs the company has. So let's just say you work for Tesla. Yeah, there's a lot of people there that have this passion about changing the world and getting rid of carbon-based transportation systems and stuff like that. But there's also a lot of people there that are doing facilities maintenance that all they really care about is facility maintenance. They don't have to buy into the overall vision of the company. They're not actually changing. They don't need to fit into that quote, "vision and culture" in order to be a valuable part of that company. There is a slot for everybody if we'll just quit pretending that everybody needs to fit into one monolithic culture. Joel: And do companies that have that goal, are they making a mistake? We talked to quite a few chief-whatever officers that talk about "what is your why," like what is your company purpose. And if a person doesn't fit into that, they don't get hired. Joel: So is your sort of theory that companies are overthinking culture and overthinking their "why" when they shouldn't be, they should just be hiring people that can do the job? Robert: So yeah, I would agree with that. I think that they are really just in a news form of hire people like me that I'm comfortable with. And let's admit that your culture may be great, but it might be able to be much greater. Your culture may be great today and completely inappropriate tomorrow. Robert: So I think what we're doing is we're building in the future to look like the past by too much of this, analyze who we are today and cement that into what we're going to be tomorrow. Joel: Interesting. And how does the hiring of robots impact so much of that? Like Chad and I talked about a story. How many workers at Amazon, Chad? 100,000 they're going to hire in the next three months or something. Chad: They hired 100,000 in the last three months and they have over 750,000 now. Joel: And these are the warehouse, probably automated folks in the near future. That's just one company. What's robotics' impact on this whole hiring workforce thing? Robert: Well I think it's crowding out jobs for people that don't have a lot of other job opportunities, unfortunately. A lot of times people that are working in a warehouse don't have the mobility to say, "well, you know what, that's over here. I used to do that. I got replaced by a robot. I think I'll pick up and move 800 miles to this other town." Chad: Yeah, not happening. Robert: It's just not happening. So at the risk of being the least liked man in America, I would say that I think that this is why we need a more socialist society as we move into more automation. So either all the benefits are going to flow to the 1% of the 1%. Joel: Are you going to say universal basic income? Chad: Dude, that was my next question, shut up. Joel: Oh, damn it. Robert: I don't have an answer to it. But there's a lot of approaches to it. We criticize France all the time as Americans. We kind of forget the fact that if it weren't for the French coming over and helping us win the revolution we still would be a colony of Britain. Joel: It's true. Robert: We want to act like they're cowards, but even though they saved our bacon. But if you look at what they do in France, it's basically illegal to work too hard. You can work smart and you can work hard, but you can't work too long. And that actually makes a lot of sense. So do we want to be competing against people that are willing to distort their personal lives and hurt their families by working 80 and 100 hour weeks? Not really. Joel: And it's great for the beverage and tobacco businesses too from my time in France. Robert: Yes. Joel: A lot of times sitting around smoking and drinking. Chad: What about Japan? So we see Microsoft brings in three-day weekends, a four-day work week and they're seeing a 40% productivity increase. So I mean, just what you're saying, and what we've seen not to mention also in Australia where I believe they have the longest sabbaticals that anywhere on earth does, but yet they're still getting great performance and productivity out of their people. Why is it here in the US, this kind of stuff gets laughed at when it actually makes us happier? I don't get it. Robert: Yeah. It makes us happier and it actually makes us more productive. So in Sovren, we don't have any offices and we don't have any paper that we file. So it's a completely virtual company. Everybody works out of their house where they are and everything happens electronically. Chad: Nice. Nice. Robert: Well we had an employee that we hired from one of our competitors and he was just working himself to death. I mean, we could not get him to work more productively and less hours. And finally we had to impose some pretty draconian things. We literally took a lot of his tools that he was using to overwork away from him. Chad: All right, I see you're using this over here to help you do your job too much. Okay, and this is going away. Robert: Yes, correct, correct. So we had built this really large prospecting tool for him at his request and when we saw how he was using it, we were like, no, no, no, no. So we took the tool away from him and we just had some really intensive training that we want the 40 most productive hours out of your week. I don't care when they are, but I want the most productive 40 hours. And by the way, if you'll give us the most productive 40 you'll actually perform better than when you give us your burned out 80. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Robert: That's a fact. People need to get disconnected from work. They need to take time off. They need to have real vacations. And when we don't do that, we're operating at a very low level of productivity and innovation compared to what we would be if we allowed ourselves to recharge. It's just like a battery that never gets back above 40%. It goes down to 2, we plug it in, we don't have time, got to go somewhere else, it's now at 38. We just never run on 100 in this country because we run too hard, too much. Joel: I recently read about a company that at 5:30, the lights go off, like you have to go home. Which I think is great because people think, oh, if I stay longer then it looks like I'm working harder, blah, blah, blah. Chad: Right. Well, we actually heard... We were doing an interview and before that we're talking about going to France and the interview, he actually said, oh, yeah, I was there about a year ago and we were meeting in their office and that's when they said they turn the lights off at 5:30 because everybody had to go home. They pushed everybody out of the office because it was time to go enjoy your life. Joel: Yeah, which is probably government ordered. Robert: The first time I worked in Paris, I worked at one of our customers headquarters in Paris and I'm there at about, I don't know, maybe 4:30 in the afternoon and I am literally sitting across a table talking to a guy, we're having conversation and while I am talking, he puts his stuff in the backpack, puts it on his back and walks out the door. Never says a word. [crosstalk 00:12:30] and I looked over and I asked the only other person there, I'm like, "I'm not really sure what happened is he coming back?" And he's like, "no, we're done for the day." I'm like, "okay." Chad: We'll pick this up tomorrow. Joel: Why wouldn't he mentioned that as he's walking out. That seems really odd to me. Chad: You should have known you dumb American. Joel: You may have said something to tick him off. Robert: I might've said something to tick them off or maybe I should have shut up for some time in the hour before. I did tell you that I was talking when he walked out. But I don't know. It's a different mindset. Robert: To my father's credit, he used to tell me all the time when he saw me working too hard in the family business, he's like, "go home. There's no end of work, just make it end. Go home." Chad: So that is part of Sovren's culture though, right? So to say that it's not a part, it is. You actually made somebody stop working. So it's a part of your culture and if people don't fit in, you just take stuff away from them or they just don't work out, right? Because they don't work out. Robert: Well, part of our culture is we're not going to micromanage you. And you can't impress us by how much work you do. You can only impress us by how you add value to the company. Joel: Yeah. Robert: Which is different than how much work you can do. We want the smartest work, not the most work. So we're knowledge workers. At least we like to tell ourselves, we do genius-level work. We do some of the hardest AI there is, you know this White Box stuff and I cannot have burned out people or people that are hungover or whatever. So if you're hungover today, please don't feel like you have to work. We don't want that eight hours out of you. Maybe two at the end of the day would be fine. I don't know. Joel: I think you just blew my mind. Robert: It's not going to be a productive eight hours. We want the best 40 hours, most productive, 40 hours out of your week. And the cool thing is about being in the software business is if you only hire the top 2%, Steve Jobs is the one that first popularized this concept, he'd call it the 10X. Robert: He said you could put Steve Wozniak in an office and put 10 other engineers down the street in another office and at the end of the year, Steve had done 10 times what the other one's had done by himself. There's this idea that yes, a guy that paints a house cannot be 10 times more productive than another painter, but a person doing software at the highest level can be 10 times more productive. Robert: In fact, Jeff Bezos said about a year and a half ago, he thought the very, very top coders were a thousand times more valuable than the average coder. Joel: Wow. Robert: And why more people don't seize on that's how you really add value in IT is not by having average. You can have great people that you pay multiples of the average and get multiples of that out of them. They're the cheapest people you have, even though you're paying them way above market. Chad: Because the 10 times rule. Robert: Correct. So you pay him twice market and you get 10 times. You're five times ahead. I learned this the hard way. So in 2006, I hired a whole bunch of new employees all at one time and they were average people and capabilities and skills and background and we paid them average salaries. Robert: And at the end of the year, on average, we didn't get anything done. It was the least productive year in the company's history. I don't really want to tell the rest of that story. Chad: Look for more episodes of Voices, this Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #VOICES #RobertRuff #Culture #Discrimination #Work #GigEconomy #Economy

Rick Carsley, Director of Talent Acquisition at IKEA, knows how to plan for a podcast. 1) Feed Chad & Cheese Swedish meatballs and dessert 2) discuss topics like: - ZipRecruiter commercial blitzkrieg - Vendor Experience - Why Ryan Reynolds needs TaskRabbit - Automation - IKEA Tech Hub? and more.... Come for the discussion, stay for the fika. All supported by our friends at Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovern.com, that's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. 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 and Cheese Podcast. Rick: So Peter is doing the fake podcast and he starts reading the litany of commercials that something includes and when he gets to zip recruiter, and the folks at zip recruiter where we've greatly overestimated the amount of people that listen to podcasts and make hiring decisions. And if you've listened to any sports podcasts in the last two years zip recruiters just shoving it down your throat nonstop and it reminds me of Glassdoor like three years ago when they were the most aggressive salespeople in the world. If you do not answer them they're going to talk to your CHRO your CEO and the last thing you want to get in my gig- Chad: The Indeed method is what that's called. Rick: See I think I've always brought Indeed. When half of the success of my career was tearing apart CareerBuilder and monster contracts and being like, "Hey do you want cost per candidate of $1.50 because here we go." Right and then when Glassdoor tried to sell that way it's like, I would talk to-I was at an Indeed conference where I was sitting with a guy from Marathon a guy from Pepsi and we're talking about our vendor experiences and everyone had these terrible sales calls with Glassdoor where they were insulted because you did not want their product. And they're like, "Oh we're a job board." And you're like, "No you're not, you're the Yelp of our industry." Chad: Yeah. Rick: I've had bad Chinese food once or twice too. I don't go online to talk about it right away. Chad: Yeah. Rick: But Zip is the same kind of thing where-remember when I posted on LI, I think it was your status, where I was like, "Hey why do you guys get free AirPods? I don't get free AirPods." Joel: Yeah. Get a podcast and you'll get free AirPods. Rick: The ZipRecruiter rep hit me up maybe two minutes later. Chad: No shit. Rick: Trying to bribe me with AirPods so I would take a meeting with him. Joel: That's not bad. It's because of your post that he knew so at least give him credit for paying attention. Chad: Somebody could get fired for that. Rick: I definitely could. Chad: That's the thing about sales people. It's like they don't think of the ramifications of not for themselves but who they're setting up. Joel: So you were you're talking very poetically about how vendors get it wrong in that they're trying to facilitate the job seekers perspective and not who they are actually selling to. So I'm wondering if you could pick that back up or explain. Rick: We need to get an intro in here or something. Chad: All right. Straight from IKEA, from IKEA baby that's right. Joel: Straight from Fishers. Joel: We got the meatballs, we got the fries, we got the food. Chad: Some lovely dessert thing I gotta figure out what the- Blueberry, jello, some crunchy. Chad: This is delicious. Is his name Josh? Rick: Josh, yeah. Chad: Joshua. That dude can do it. Joel: Because when you're the chef, you're Joshua. Rick: It's a good chef name it's a strong chef name. Joel: It is, yeah. Chad: If you're in Indianapolis and you hit the IKEA, you definitely have to have some of the meatballs and whatever the blueberry thing is. We've got to make sure that we get the name of that, that was pretty awesome. Joel: Joshua's the one with the beard netting around his face. Sort of Hannibal Lecter style Chad: I kind of feel like you need one of those. Rick: I could get some extra we probably have in the kitchen? I could totally supply those. Joel: When I rock the smoker at home I'm wearing the beard hat. Anyway, yes we're here live from the IKEA in Indiana the only one here in the state, talking to Richard Carsley. Chad: Now Richard, Rick? Can we be more informal here or is it Sir Richard Carsley? Joel: Is it Dick? Rick: I go by Rick though. Joel: Rick. And you are head of TA in North America? Rick: Director of talent acquisition. Joel: Yeah so thanks for having us out, this is awesome. You're in town from Philly, specifically you're firing people or what? Rick: That's why I wear the power tie. Of course my whole reason was come out and talk to you guys. We have an open interview day tomorrow in Fishers on Wednesday. For as we slow down a little bit after the holiday season, but as we peek back up to something called K drop where all of our catalogs go out. Then we start picking up hiring. Joel: Okay. Rick: So we had an event planned for tomorrow, I have one of my recruiters out here kind of trying to work that. Joel: So for the rare person that doesn't know IKEA, let's get through the elevator pitch on what you guys do and where you are and all that good stuff. Rick: I hope everyone knows IKEA. Chad: Watch Deadpool. Deadpool has a great IKEA segment. Have you not seen that? Rick: No I have. Joel: So do you put yourself on par with the Walmarts and the Targets in this country? Rick: We blow past the Walmarts. Joel: So you think you think your awareness is better or on par with Walmart? There's no way you think that. Rick: I mean Walmart is a very large brand. Joel: If I go to Seymour, Indiana, the chance of them knowing you versus Walmart are pretty low. Rick: I think IKEA will always be thought of as a destination. Joel: True. Rick: You don't come here for groceries. We do have people that come here for the meatballs you guys devoured in front of me. Chad: The experience, yeah. Rick: You come here for a half a day, a couple hours and shop. I don't think anyone wants to sit in a Walmart that long. I don't think anyone can afford to sit in a Target for that long either. Joel: Yeah, good point. Rick: But IKEA has been doing what we do with that flat-pack furniture and home design for forever. It's across the United States. You see the sign, you'd have to take the access road and the exit in every single place and that's kind of our mark. Joel: And you're in how many cities in North America now? Rick: We have 50 stores in the United States. Chad: So is it kind of by rule or do you have a deal with Topgolf to have a Topgolf right across- cause you're talking about an experience, right? Joel: They must have the same lobbyists. Chad: So you come to the IKEA, you have the meatballs, and then you go work it off at the Topgolf or either the wife or the husband who wants to spend time in the IKEA. Rick: Good gender neutral terms. Chad: Then the other can go hit the Topgolf. Joel: By the way there's a Portillo's between IKEA and Topgolf. Rick: You guys have Portillo's in Indiana now? Joel: Are you kidding me? There's a Portillo's, we can walk to it from here. Rick: I had no idea. Joel: South side Chicago guy. So if you're not working off meatballs and salmon, you're working off the Italian before the Chicago dog. Rick: So while Portillo's is the brand, AL's beef is really where it's at when you want to get your Italian beef on in the city of Chicago. But Portillo's is the one that's pushed. I didn't know it came out here though. Chad: This far south. Rick: It would make sense. And Topgolf is just become a huge thing in Norfolk in Virginia back where I used to live. Very similar it is like a mile away. Joel: Printing money. Rick: If you want to talk about the constant vendor spot- Chad: Yeah. Rick: The amount of offers I get to go to Topgolf... Chad: Which is why we have an appointment at 2:00. Yeah so the whole experience is pretty awesome but in Cincinnati it's the same way. IKEA right across the street to Topgolf, it seems like it just fits. Rick: That's just a killer concept, I wish I would've been a part of that. Joel: In Stockholm, there's a Topgolf right across from the headquarters. Rick: I don't know if that's the truth. Joel: So I know we're going to talk about recruiting but I am interested because we talked about Walmart and Target. You've interviewed with Amazon or know a little bit about them. So the retail environment is challenged largely because of Amazon. Rick: Definitely so. Joel: And you guys are a private company so you're not talking publicly, numbers. But the fact that you are a destination, it is someplace you come for the day, it is someplace you travel hours in some cases to visit, would you say that you guys are faring better in the current retail environment because of that sort of destination brand or do you think you're as challenged as the Targets, the Walmarts, the other retailers, Best Buy, etc. Rick: It's no secret that retail patterns have changed and that's going to affect visitation whether that's at our store or any stores, right? We have taken turns to kind of meet the consumer where they are going to be now. No different than what we're doing in TA, right? So a lot of what we've done work with on our digital app, a lot of before when you buy IKEA furniture, if you weren't willing to come into the store, haul your item through, throw it in the back of a U-Haul, put it together yourself, you weren't going to get the product. Now we have the click and collect where you can make your order online and just come pick it up. We also with TaskRabbit, not only will we put it together, we'll deliver it to you. So we've kind of made those changes to kind adhere to where the consumer is. Joel: Which Chad and I thought the TaskRabbit move was brilliant by the way. We talked about that extensively. Chad: But we haven't heard a lot about it. So what's the actual usage for that? Because I could see a ton of people saying, "Okay, I don't want to put that shit together." "I love it but I don't want to put it together." What's the usage? Rick: So being a private company, it's one of the things I can talk about my own experience with utilizing TaskRabbit. When we moved to Philly initially we were going to buy a desk, I was telling Joel this story previously. And we came into IKEA. One of Recruiters used to work in active selling and worked my wife over for thousands of dollars in purchases. The last time I put together an IKEA product I lived in Secaucus, New Jersey, and it was a desk where I think I put the drawer on wrong so I had to flip it around so I'm like "I'm not going through that again." So for me the TaskRabbit experience, you get the quote inside of the store and then you can also manage who you want to put together your particular product through the app. So just like any experience, you're looking through the profile of the people that are going to put together your product, you're figuring out the times that they quote, you're looking through reviews of the work they did previously. Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rick: It's been a very successful venture for us because it changed what we were doing, and when we have our competitors, the Wayfairs, doing the same exact thing, utilizing a Thumbtack or other very similar products, it's something that only made sense. People were putting together our furniture with or without us being a part of it and charging for it. It only made sense for us to kind of close the circle. Joel: So I know you guys are pushing people using TaskRabbit to put together furniture. Are you doing anything on the other end to push TaskRabbit as a gig option or sending people to join TaskRabbit to then make money that way. Are you pushing both ends of that? Rick: I honestly, at this time, I don't believe so but that really wouldn't be my realm. Joel: So TaskRabbit is still a separate business altogether right? Rick: Uh-huh. Joel: Okay. Rick: It was separate recruiting structure. The gig economy is one that is massive. I've kind of had my finger to the pulse about what's going on with Uber as they've gone through big cities. I mean what could be wrong with a company that's getting sued that's cash poor now offering people a bunch of jobs. Joel: Buy that stock today, baby. Rick: Right? How will that workout poorly? Joel: Double down. Chad: So how do you get Ryan Reynolds to talk about your product because that's perfect for TaskRabbit right? The video, I'm sure you've seen the video. Joel: Right. Chad: It's like a minute and a half long. He gets this crib from IKEA, he can't put it together, he gets on customer service, and it should be like TaskRabbit. It's like perfect. Rick: Obviously you want to buy the stuff because it's great stuff. Can't put it together: TaskRabbit that shit. Joel: You're asking did you pay for him to do that or not, right? Chad: No I know they didn't but they should tag onto that. Rick: Right? I think it brings on all interesting marketing possibilities when we have the brand that will put that stuff together for you. Sure, people much better compensated than I are going through that think tank. You kind of come to me for the people that can potentially put it together more than the ideology behind the process to be honest. Chad: You just love it because of the amount of brand awareness you get out of that one guy in Deadpool movies in there too, it's freaking hilarious. Joel: It's probably a double edge sword, the brand. You get grief for being the hard to put together. Rick: There's two constant comments that you get. I was at the dentist in Virginia a couple months back and they see your- Joel: This is going to hurt but not nearly as much as putting together a... Rick: Right, that's exactly it. They look at my insurance card and they're like, "Oh you work for IKEA." So immediately there's one thing that people always iterate. "Oh, I love the meatballs," or, "I was putting together this book case and..." They go into your story and you wanna help because I represent the brand but you're like... Joel: This root canal is going to be painful but not nearly as painful as putting together a... Rick: So when I actually interviewed, the amount of people that I'm like, "Hey I'm going to go to IKEA and I'm going to interview." I think three or four people made the joke to me where it's like, "Oh is the last step putting together some of their product?" Chad: That's what I asked on the way in. I'm like, "We don't have to put shit together do we?" Rick: Right. Chad: Talking about the experience, you're talking about going to have an interview day. How often do you have those and what is generally the experience? Kind of cattle call scenario or how does it work? Rick: We don't do like the cattle call hiring event thing. The attrition that comes from those type of events is massive. Anytime you think of a group of people are going to walk into a door to get a job it's very likely that at some point they'll walk out the door together to leave a job. So what we do is we identify a particular need. So in this particular store, we had enough openings to justify the event. From there, we break it down where we go through our process of CVs that we already currently own. On market CVs right now, the cost in a 2 to 3% unemployment is up about 200% from where it was a year ago. Chad: And you guys go into your database before you start[crosstalk 00:15:59]. Rick: Right. And then so much of what you need to do to get in touch with candidates now is texting. We talked about the rise of cell phones, we talked talk about the Genesis of this pod. Chad: Oh yeah. Rick: It's very same with recruiting. I feel like Boost Mobile and Pay Tel, and those off brand cell phones really helped accelerate my career because, "Hey, we'll text." So we go through that process. We don't have people for an event like this and it can also be based on population that we bring in without them going through some sort of screening process. IKEA as far as our retail attrition numbers are much lower than the majority of our competitors and there's multiple reasons for that. I'd like to say one of the first ones is we treat people well. So we do hire for our culture we do hire for our values, but it doesn't hurt that if you work 24 hours at an IKEA you get full time benefits. That's not the norm for most retailers. Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rick: So a store like this we kind of had a crux. Our food is always an area where it's hard. People don't think of us as a restaurant. To kind of pull people from a culinary school isn't really... Chad: Yeah, you have a chef. Rick: Right. A chef from culinary school that had worked with us for a couple other stores. Joel: It's all about the Fika, dude. That's why that's why they come and stay. Rick: It is. Joel: The Fika. Rick: Hey 15 minutes of a break. Chad: I didn't see that on the job description though because that would have been the key: Fika. Getting the Fika. Joel: For sure. They need a YouTube video for that. Rick: I strongly assume if you Google IKEA and Fika, you're going to find a couple of them. I strongly, strongly... Chad: That's kind of the traditional walk through the door come interview. Do you guys do anything online, like interviews online? How does that process usually work? Does it differ from level of the type of individual that you're bringing to the store? How does that work for you guys? Rick: Definitely so. The thing is we are a people centric recruiting model because even when we think about our jobs and workforce, like who's going to be at the store, who we're going to schedule, that is a manual, people based process. One of the biggest kick outs to work in an IKEA store is weekends. You need to work weekends, we need to know from compensation standpoint where you're at. So we have multiple mediums in which we screen that out. But when it comes to answering a behavioral based interview question, well I can push that a lot of towards one sided video which I have done in other walks of life it's hard to want to replace that actual genuine conversation that we have with the candidate. Whether that's a 10 minute conversation or an hour long conversation it's the fact that it occurred and then we're able to not have 60, 70 people walk in the door that didn't apply through our system that don't know why they're there, they just want a job. That's not kind of our candidate base. Chad: So you just tell those people if they come through the door, go to the website? Well how does that all work? Rick: I'd like to say it's a uniform process for every location across the United States, I'd be telling tales out of school if that's what I went with. We do route them back to the system but there's also something to be said if someone has the hunger for a job and were willing to show up, and are professional and dressed for whatever part they're there to interview for, we're going to figure out a way to get them through our process. It's just the much preferred way is scheduling your time to be here just because as much as I say you know unemployment numbers and all that effect, we do not suffer for resumes in the majority of our locations. It's somewhat unique. When I was working in financial services, I was dying for people to come fill out contact centers. It's just a different mode. Joel: You mentioned some tools that you use to streamline the process. Looking at your current database, you mentioned text messaging. I'm curious if automation in the scheduling of interviews is something that you're using? Rick: Right. Joel: How does tech really streamline things for you aside from your own database in the text messaging piece? Rick: So we have a time trade link that we push out. Well my first experience with recruiting was actually my mom was a recruiter for UPS. And that was the very first time that I saw the candidate sets up their interview. And almost since every single stop that I've gone to working high volume that was the very first part of it. Chad: That was how long ago? Rick: That was in the late 90's. Chad: There's still companies who are not doing that. Rick: I don't understand why you wouldn't. If you want to talk about the vendor piece for a second; it does give me a little bit of pause when a vendor reaches out to me and tells me to go to their calendar to set up my own time to talk to them because I want to be like, "Please. I don't even want to talk to you. You think I'm going to click this link to see how few people want to talk to you?" Joel: I've seen literally where it has the calendar and you can set up a time for a demo on the website like publicly facing... Chad: It's a free demo though. Rick: Exactly. Joel: For sure, yeah. It is a free. So how are we going to say no? Rick: We are not going to charge you. Chad: How can you say no to the free demo? Rick: Our products that we utilize for recruitment I can't openly push matters... Joel: Let's go into this, okay. You've talked a lot about how vendors are selling incorrectly and not doing it right so to speak. So assuming you are using third party vendors for text messaging. I assume you are? Rick: Yeah. Joel: What did they do right in the selling phase? Or was it you did your research, you did your homework, and you reached out to them and said, "I want to learn more about you guys, you sound good." Chad: And they didn't send you a calendar link. Rick: Right I was trying to find the right term. Joel: We'll talk a lot about how they're doing it wrong, but the ones that did it right that got you to buy, what did they do? Rick: A lot of that is just based on vendors that I've worked with in different stocks. Joel: Okay. Rick: I've gone through a million and a half RFPs and I have a good idea of what products work with the other products that... I was stuck in a couple of Workday houses. So when you're with Workday- Chad: Stuck. Rick: It's just the reality. And when you build an all encompassing solution, like your ATS is the one with the least amount of money behind it and therefore I used Workday when it was on version 5 before it had resume parsing and could identify source. And we had gone from Taleo, which Taleo has its bugs too, but I remember looking at my CHRO like, "What am I supposed to do with this?" "You asked me for reporting that I can't give you anymore, this is bad." And then Workday started giving out money to the phenoms and to places that would help bridge the gap. But I have a good idea of what automation tools that I like to use. Not to pander, but there's a lot of times where you guys will talk about a particular tool and when I see that there's an actual solution for something I need. Everyone's trying to sell a CRM, right? But an ATS, and we use Avature, which I believe also has sponsored the pod at some point in time? Joel: No. Put him on the list. Tell my son, put him right next to ZipRecruiter. Rick: We'll get into that later. But when I look at that, everybody has the exact same product in the CRM. Well I hear one person that's actually doing something different with it. Showing me scores, showing me a campaign that I don't have to manage every day. Well that's someone I want to talk to kilt or not. Chad: Right. Rick: But the tough part is, I had mentioned this earlier, but all the good innovation comes from tech. But it is not often at the large companies that I've gotten a chance to recruit for that tech has a seat at a decision-making table when it comes to budget. So when you look at the products that are always easily championed, I look at my friends LI where they have a product that tells the people that run large companies happy birthday, and great anniversary, and... Chad: Or who just got promoted. Rick: Right, who got promoted and we all click like and congratulations. Chad: A lazy-ass congratulations. Rick: Right but that doesn't do anything to change the truth behind a passive board that has time based job ads. So what solution does that really give in that regard? Joel: But you're getting it from the top to use it and signing off on it because of the ego of the product. Rick: The familiarity of the product and, if you look at website hits I assume LinkedIn probably clocked in in the top 20 of websites visited in the United States. Chad: So does Facebook. Rick: But no one uses Facebook jobs, right? Chad: And I would say from a high volume standpoint, you would probably be more pushed toward using a Facebook for jobs. Joel: And have you? Rick: I have not used Facebook jobs. My opinion on social has been tough because when it became a big to do let's say '06, '07 when everybody said, "Oh you need to hire social media expert." And so I go through that process, and you try to take a brand that people aren't familiar with like financial services, and we're going to make it cool. Joel: Uh-huh. Rick: And I'm buying followers at like 12 a month to make people believe that TSYS is a destination. And it just doesn't work. What changed my opinion somewhat is I actually had an admin at a site in Charlotte that was leaving and she's like, "Hey I'm here to help you find my replacement. Do you mind if I share it on Insta?" And I'm like, "Yeah, sure, go ahead." In 48 hours, she turned 80 resumes of candidates that pushed out because outside of being an admin at this office in Charlotte, she also had a big makeup page. And so I had all these people so then when I took that, my stance on social is people that have networks outside of our brand have a much greater reach than people that I can purchase. Now with IKEA, we have a branch, so our efforts make a little bit more sense. But financial services, it's like on Facebook. The "on this day." You're sitting there in the morning and you're like, "Hey what did I do on this day?" Well nine years ago, I felt the need to tell everyone that I was watching the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on ABC Family. Joel: Was that with Vanilla Ice rocking the soundtrack? Rick: That was the second one. Joel: Okay. Rick: The ludicrous part of it that 32 people liked that status. Joel: Yeah. Rick: If I was wanting to go out on a Friday night I think I have 4 friends. But seven years ago, 32 people cared enough to be like...and were they calling people, were they like, "Hey hun, Rick's watching the turtles." Chad: "We should roll over to his place." Rick: "What does he think about the Shredder reveal about 12 minutes in?" Joel: So you are a fan in the prospect of social media being a referral engine for jobs? Are you using any tools currently to manage that or maintain? Rick: We have a department inside of IKEA that manages the day-to-day. In a past life, I used Hearsay, which you would just plug in your five or six social tools that you wanted to post to and just create a schedule. Joel: And IKEA obviously has a social presence. Is there an employment presence separate from the corporate? Rick: Yes there is. Joel: So talk about the decision to do that as opposed to just using the main brand to reach candidates. Rick: That's a tough thing because we want to, it doesn't make sense to break apart our brand towards customer facing to job facing because it speaks to the same actual human beings. But on the flip side, it is a different message and whether it's the same audience or not, if I'm attempting to get you into a store to purchase a couch, there's a different messaging that I want to send than if I'm wanting you to look at IKEA as an actual career. So my boss Ellie kind of brought in a role where we would just take a certain amount of head count and devote it to pushing our social presence. Now some of those campaigns have to be the, "Hey I just posted something, you have 50 people, let's go all like that." Because you know how easily LI can be tricked into pumping that social. But on the other side, if you produce good enough content that doesn't pander, you are going to get recognized on those boards. One of the things that we all do, because we're all terribly vain at heart, is we post something and then we click how many thousands of people have looked at that. And you see, "Okay 54 people from Farmers Insurance looked at this. Well I ran Farmers Insurance. Who from Farmers is looking at my stuff? Do they have an IT background?" All those kind of things. Joel: Which platforms work best for recruiting for IKEA? Rick: Our bread and butter as far as job boards? Joel: No, for social. Do you get more engagement on Instagram for the kinds of positions and people that you're looking for or are you on Snapchat or you on some of the more... Because I would assume it skews younger but I could be wrong. Rick: Right. We haven't started to get deep with Snap or TikTok or anything like that. IKEA is conservative with a lot of our social plays, so the majority of the stuff that you're going to see is a Facebook, is an Insta, and is an LI. We're looking for people that... The problem with monitoring those social feeds is monitoring the comments and the flow. If you go on Twitter, check any chain restaurant for, "Hey, it's all you can eat day at Applebee's," and grab yourself a diet Cola and laugh for about the next hour for the people that just unload an Applebee's because it gave them an upset stomach once and it's hilarious. Chad: 12 years ago, yeah. Rick: Yeah. Chad: Well back to how that actually impacts brand. So does IKEA the brand people have final say in branded marketing over what you guys do on the employer marketing messaging side of the house? How does that work? Rick: So there is an approval process for anything that we're going to post that is outside of protected norms. So if I'm say just going to post an opening in a department, and I'm using previously approved language, that just kind of goes through the channel. Chad: Okay. Rick: But if it's something that is calling a product out, if it's something that is our involvement with any other organization, all of that has to be approved before we're going to push anything. Chad: So who writes the job postings? Do you guys actually write the job postings here or does marketing kind of put their flair into it? Because I've read some, just so you know. Rick: Why we love you. Joel: And how many pieces of flair must be on every job description? Rick: There's a whole lot of pieces of flair. Our job descriptions were a partnership to get them written. It's just like anything else when you're talking about job scripts because you've all heard the stats where someone reads it for nine to twelve seconds before clicking apply. So to take time away from arduous tasks to go ahead and re-write those is something that I always felt was a little bit of a fool's errand. When people actually go back before they interview, they're supposed to look at your job description for slightly over a minute. Do if I'm going to devote time to anything, is it to rewrite something which most of my public looks for eight seconds and then maybe 5% actually get it for one minute you know what's your stance on job descriptions? Just out of curiosity. Chad: Overall, I think it's the experience, right? So if you're looking to apply for something, it says director of sales, and this is the male inside me, I'm just going to hit apply. For me it wouldn't, but for somebody else, maybe a female who does, and they take more time, and they check those bullets out to see if they're actually meeting 90% or 100%. Rick: Have you heard about the breakdown in how female candidates are more likely to not apply if they don't meet.. Chad: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Joel: Textio has produced a lot of interesting studies on that because that's what they do. Chad: Right. Joel: And how women will read every bullet and if one of them doesn't fit, they won't apply to a job whereas guys are like, "Fuck it, the title is right so let's apply." Rick: It brings up a really good question though just because one of the entertaining parts as I heard that initial study I've gotten emailed that study, and I was talking to someone internally that I thought would be a good fit for a different role. And one of the first things that she said to me, she said, "Well I kind of read through the job description and I'm just the type, if I don't hit every one of those, it just might be over my head." And you're like, "Seriously? One of those emails that got sent to me eight times was real?" Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah, right. Rick: So it's just one of those things that when, not a stereotype, but when something gets played out right in front of your eyes, obviously it has some credence. Joel: I'm curious about, so we talked about the brand piece a little bit as well as social media and collaborating with marketing. How do you guys approach online reviews such as Glassdoor and Indeed reviews? I would assume that that's something you care about, so how do you manage that and monitor it? Rick: So that falls again under our social media group. Joel: Is that a social arm. Rick: Yeah, it's a marketing arm. We have a project right now that I'm a part of to make sure that things are getting addressed properly. The biggest call out you get out of whether it's Glassdoor reviews, or now Indeed reviews which have just spiked over the last 18 months or so, is something called out that is egregious that's occurring in one of our stores that actually is more of an HR matter? Or is it harmless venting? Our Glassdoor scores are phenomenal. By far a full point over any place that I've ever gotten to represent. Our Indeed reviews, Glassdoor has the character that you have to hit, I forget exactly how many characters, or you can't leave the review. Joel: Yeah, it's like Yelp. Rick: Yeah and Glassdoor actually gives you a whole lot of authority to dispute reviews. Like if you're not a public company and you utilize someone's title that isn't in a public role, that gets taken down. If you put yourself in the wrong category, that gets taken down. I worked at companies that were so intense about trying to police misinformation, which tend to be accurate, that we would get things allowed to taken out on a technicality. Indeed has yet to really police their review content. Chad: They want the content. Rick: Right. Yeah. And I understand. Joel: The want the thirst traffic. Chad: They want the content and they really could give a shit less what anybody thinks. Rick: You said it. Chad: It is what it is. Joel: And they've never really thought of that as their business. They'll joke with you off the record, like, "We have more reviews than Glassdoor." Even though they're owned by the same company. Rick: Right. Joel: But internally, they sort of laugh at Glassdoor because, "This isn't even our business and we have more reviews than they do." Rick: It's really spiked. It's amazing what's occurred. My last rep meeting, the exact numbers elude me, but when we looked at it 12 months ago, we've climbed 1200 reviews on Indeed, versus the static couple hundred that come through Glassdoor. And it's just the difference of Indeed's interface, love them or hate them, is very simple to navigate through. Joel: It's very Google-y. Rick: Yeah, exactly. And if you're already signed in to apply to jobs it is one more click of a button to leave a review. In our applicant heavy world that we're living in right now, it took five minutes to apply to 40 jobs, yes I'll spend two minutes to slam the past employer that I used to be with. With Glassdoor, I have to set up my email, then I get the confirmation email, then I have to accept that, then I post a review, then I need to wait 48 to 72 hours to actually get it online solely so I can slam something? Are you that vengeful? You're in the wrong business. Joel: Is it that worth it? Rick: Right. Joel: So you mentioned earlier, I asked about the retail environment, and it sounds like you're becoming more of a technology company. I know that's maybe a stretch and maybe a bad word but we talked a little bit about before we turned on the mics that you guys are actually launching an initiative I think in Philly or near Philly where the US headquarters is to build sort of a tech hub. What can you tell us about that? Rick: We are, which is actually really exciting. We're building a digital hub outside of Philly. We're looking for a launch in August/September. It's going to be about a head count around 250 to 300 new IT jobs. What's exciting for us is the majority of our needs are customer facing rather than security, or .net, or all the kinds of things that I've worked with as a past. Chad: So what kind of jobs are those? They're IT but they're customer facing? Joel: So like building apps or enhancing mobile apps and things like that. Rick: The facility itself will research 3D design, mobile terminal solutions, app development, social media, big data, and overall just concentrate on in store customer experiences. Chad: Gotcha. So experience overall and really focusing heavy, go figure, on the technical side of the house. Rick: Right. It's going to be an exciting thing because nobody really thinks of a furniture company as an IT company. And where we're located is a phenomenal market whether you're going to play the sea-to-sea game, the largest winner of the Visa lottery every year is 40 miles away from us in New Jersey. There's a whole lot that we can do just being in the tri-state. Joel: Almost everybody is becoming a tech company so it's no surprise that you guys have sort of taken this initiative and stepped forward. Chad: Your biggest competitor Amazon is a tech company that's all it is. Joel: And delivery, and drones, and robots... Chad: It's a tech company. Rick: Airplanes... Joel: Yeah, airplanes and rockets. Rick: I heard healthcare not too long ago. Joel: Yeah, healthcare is coming. That's right. That is at least in collaboration with a few other smart people. Rick: Right. We don't make our people wear diapers. I don't know if you read that. Chad: No pissing in trash cans? Joel: Everyone seems really happy here, worker wise and I shop here, I live close by and I've put together way too many pieces of furniture. Chad: I think that's a Swedish thing. Joel: Do you think that's a Swedish thing? Rick: I think it's hiring good people. Joel: There you go. Chad: You don't think that has something to do with culture though? Rick: I think it definitely could, a lot of our stuff is branded as such. Chad: Now in Philly I mean you know it might not be... Rick: Brotherly love, man. Chad: You might say, "What the hell are you doing here?" And that means "good morning." But do you not think it's a culture thing that to be able to span... You know more than anybody because, shit, you're going across the entire United States, IKEA to IKEA, what do you see difference wise from culture? Rick: I really do think that we do a good job of selecting people that follow that same culture and values that you guys see when you walk through the store. I have gone to IKEA stores in a countless amount of states and I am still greeted in the same professional fashion that you get almost everywhere. While the the slang might be a little bit different, the calls I get when I come through, but I feel like we do a really good job and the people that stick around with us and move on to management positions that grew up in an environment that's inclusive that you know screens out for potential red flags, is one that really has created a very, very good culture. I was interviewing someone for a store manager position a couple days ago who is thinking about relocating to a market in the Midwest that she's not familiar with at all. And so I'm like, "Hey can I ask why you picked this market?" She's like, "Well my family lives there." So I type in my notes, "family?" And I'm like, "You have family in this market?" She's like, "Well my IKEA family, I just haven't met them all yet." And as sappy as that sounds, the amount of times that I've heard people talk about this place being their friend network, this place being the people that help them out, that help them shovel snow is countless. Chad: Sounds like a Saturn commercial. Remember Saturn, everybody would wave to each other. Joel: Sure, the trip to Tennessee. Right, everyone. And Jeep owners still do that. Chad: If you could have any tech right now, what would it be and why would you want it for current high volume? Rick: Tough question to answer because this is something that- Chad: There's a lot of it? Rick: Yeah there really is. I think every vendor call that I get is really set towards the candidates before they hit my system. My landing page takes forever or my application process isn't mobile friendly and all those things, while there is truths behind them, I don't believe that is really an issue with large companies as much as we say it is. The much a larger issue is once candidates get inside of our system and how they are treated throughout the application process. Something that concentrates on engagement after they're in my system much more than if they can save two clicks before, that makes a happier job seeker. Chad: Well and possibly a customer because they might be buying shit here too. Rick: Right. Chad: Do you see people outside of HR actually seeing that... How many how many candidates do you guys actually touch, or I should say perspective customers, do you touch a year? Rick: Can't really say that. Chad: Okay, a bunch. Hundreds of thousands, easily. So those are potential customers. Do you have discussions outside of HR around this type of impact? Because these are customers. Rick: I think the IKEA family plan that you join when you walk through the door, you do it for a discount, but I believe that that is our loyalty group. So when I think about the people inside of our ATS, that is our loyalty group all the same, but one group will bend over backwards to try to keep you coming back and increase visitation. The other one, we respond to you when we need something. So it's a little bit disingenuous in that way. Continuing to work a talent pipeline is not just sending a static list of jobs that says, "Hey you applied to blank, what about blank?" And you know the audience did not receive a job and most likely applied to that job that you are emailing them about telling them to reapply with no note towards the history of what occurred that made them didn't get the job. So that part of our business, and not IKEA, but that part of every TA program with everyone I talk to is broken. Especially now where we're spending almost double the amount of money to acquire resumes over the last year than we have in 10 years, but then once we get them, it's like working hard to get a pretty girl and then once she's over at your house not talking to her. So that's kind of, when I think about a program that is a talent pipeline that gives you a free CRM that can work your network and actually look at the scores in what kind of media people want to see, that's something that I feel has a lot of salt to it. Chad: Well and again, selling that to why do you need something like that because these are customers and we want to treat them right yes they could perspectively come work for us, but guess what? They spend money too. And I think that's something in talent acquisition we haven't leveraged enough. Rick: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel: So we're seeing a lot in terms of automation and I think the high frequency stuff that you guys do, but a lot of people in our seats would say chatbots seem like a perfect fit for what you do or some sort of automated questionnaire. Are you guys currently using, that looking at using that, do you feel differently that it would be a good tool for you? Where is your stance on chat bots? Rick: I'm not a huge fan of the chatbots. I think I mentioned this before, but I think it already exacerbates candidate base that doesn't feel like they get engagement. And granted, do they know that they're talking to a robot and not a human being? It's anybody's guess, but people are pretty intuitive, especially one that wants work. I like when a candidate applies into our ecosystem that they are greeted with the ability to actually have an interview. And we're retail so our hours are different than everybody else's. So if you want to interview with me at 3:00 AM, if you want to interview with me in your car, giving you the venue to do that, meeting the candidate where they want to be, just like we're trying to do as a company. So on-demand video interviewing is really where I've pushed programs in the last five years because that gives us the most possible insight into that candidate. It saves them the trip, it saves my recruiters screen, and before we have to get involved, if I can have you do a video, have you do some sort of assessment that shows that you have, whether that's a command of the King's English or the ability to run a till, only sets you up better as a candidate to get into the right role. And if I could qualify the compensation that you would need legally speaking, of course. Joel: Right. Rick: I could make sure that I don't waste your time. Because what candidates I find, if you ever have a friend or these holidays that just passed, someone that's looking for work, we immediately look at that as it is the worst thing in the world, like, "I'm sorry man, that sucks." Chad: Because the process. Rick: Yeah, but looking for a job should not be that bad. It should be the start of awakening. A period of crossing that you're going through with a pot of gold at the end. Now I say that somewhat in jest, but I still believe that we can give that experience. Joel: Yeah. Rick: And sending someone to a chatbot, I don't feel helps them out as a candidate. It just kind of gives them just a little bit more information. Joel: Great answer. Rick Carsley, everybody. Chad: From IKEA. Don't forget to get the meatballs while you're here. Joel: Meatballs and that lovely dessert tray that they have is nice. Chad: The blueberry thing, yeah. I loved it. No dude seriously, we really appreciate you getting in contact with us, letting us know that you were in town. I know it's because you want to go play Topgolf, that's cool. But really appreciate it, it's been a blast. Joel: And thanks for listening to the show. Chad: Yeah. Rick: No, I thank you very much for the invite. For the IT hub, if I could do a shameless plug? Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Sure. Rick: The site for interested candidates is going to be joiningka.com. That's join J-O-I-N period I-N-G-K-A dot com. Chad: Ingka. Rick: Ingka. Chad: Excellent we out. Rick: We out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my step dad, the Chad, and his goofy friend, Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. The most important part is to check out our sponsors because I need new track spikes. You know, the expensive shiny gold pair that are extra because, well, I'm extra. For more visit chadcheese.com. #IKEA #Automation #recruiting #vendor #ZipRecruiter #Glassdoor #Indeed #Events #TaskRabbit

It's Corona time! On this week's show, Indeed flunks an IQ test, Tengai, the recruiting robot, passes its validation test, the world's immune system is getting tested, and Chad is feeling testy. Temper, temper! Grab the Purell and tune-in. You'll be glad you did, and sponsors JobAdx, Sovren, and Canvas will stay happy and healthy. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. SFX: It's Corona time. Hey, it's Corona time right now! It's Corona time. 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 and Cheese Podcast. Chad: You can keep that Corona shit to yourself. Joel: Oh, yeah, it's Corona time. Welcome to the Purell edition of the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel Flu-Shot-Baller Cheeseman. Chad: And this is Chad Quarantine Sowash. Joel: On this week's episode, Indeed gets an IQ test, Tengai takes a validity test, and everyone's immune systems are being tested. Grab a bar of soap and wash for at 20 seconds people. We'll be right back after a word from JobAdX. JobAdX: Nope. Nah. Not for me. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Oh, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just half-heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it, we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets and templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad: I literally just went to the bathroom and I washed my hands for 20 seconds. I had plenty of time to come back. Thank you, JobAdX. I appreciate it. Joel: That's why I picked that ad, dude, so everyone could go get those germs off those hands baby. Chad: Good public service announcement, I appreciate that. Joel: It's Corona time, baby. Shout outs! Chad: Yes. Okay, so right out of the gate, I'm going to give a huge shout out to one of our sponsors, our transcription sponsor, Disability Solutions. So PepsiCo, who is a client of Disability Solutions, they've hired thousands, that's thousands with an 'S,' of individuals with disabilities, have retained them at higher rates and continue to drive hiring through the most diverse single-demographic in the world. That's individuals with disabilities. Chad: The US Government's Office of Federal Contract Compliance and Programs under the Department of Labor has awarded PepsiCo with the DOL Gold Excellence in Disability award. This is the first year that they're doing this, but what this does is it's almost like bringing back one of the old awards that they had is they're kind of placing Pepsi in this security dome and saying, "look, you don't have to worry about audits for five years," which is fucking amazing. Joel: When you said "security dome," I automatically thought like coronavirus protection. It's the kind of world we live in. Chad: Protection from audits, which is probably in some cases worse than the coronavirus depending on where you're at in the world. Joel: Those awards sound impressive, so way to go. Chad: Yeah. Good job Disability Solutions. Joel: Good job. Have you seem their SHRM commercial? Chad: No. Joel: So it's all about diversity and inclusion. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Joel: Your wife should love it and most people will. They scan through four or five different offices and they have different diverse people in each office and talks about diversity. All the numbers you just started to rattle off, like retention rates and all that good stuff. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So yeah, SHRM is hitting the DNI stuff really hard, so the time is right apparently for all that good stuff. Chad: The time is right, yeah. She's not the very big SHRM lover because of them taking Koch brother money. So yeah, we'll go ahead and we'll go with that. Great ad, great ad, but we think you're full of shit, SHRM. Joel: Ouch, man. Chad: Hello. Joel: Shout out to LinkedIn. I'm thirsty for some Kool-Aid. Someone posted on LinkedIn, imagine that, about LinkedIn sending a congratulatory box with a little water thing and notes and some other stuff saying congratulations on the new job. So somewhere in LinkedIn's algorithm, they're seeing when people change jobs and they're sending little gift packets, which is really great marketing. Chad: Yeah. That's pretty cool. Joel: So shout out to them for working that algorithm in the right way. Chad: Yeah, no question. I don't think they have... Maybe they do have my snail mail address. I never thought about that. I don't think that I've ever put my actual physical address into LinkedIn. I'm going to have to check that out. Joel: Well, they probably have work addresses if it's a big company. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. Big shout out to Brandon Ford, the chief accelerator director at Lubrizol. We met Brandon at The Gathering and became fast friends. Wanted to give him a big shout out, he's a new listener. Great people and amazing times at The Gathering, great meeting you Brandon. Joel: And shout out to his beard, it's a glorious thing. I love it. Chad: It is, yeah. Joel: Shout out to Levi's, they not only make a fantastic denim wear, they announced paid family leave for their workers. Chad: Woo-hoo! Yeah, that's good shit. Joel: So a step in the right direction there in the retail space. Chad: Good shit. Joel: Good job, Levi's. Chad: Shout out to Steven Rothberg who loves the Voices podcasts. They're about 10-20 minute pieces of conversations we have with awesome fucking people. You can check out the latest, it's called Culture Is The New Discrimination with Robert Ruff. It's about 16 minutes long and it's a great segment of conversation. Having guys like that come on with their opinion and then we just talked to Rick Carsley from IKEA, a pod that actually dropped today, he had an entirely different opinion on it. So it's awesome to not just talk to a set of people that think one specific way, but we have varying opinions. And again, you just continue the conversation. Joel: And now I just got really hungry for some Swedish meatballs from the IKEA cafeteria. Chad: Oh, God. Damn it. Joel: Shout out to Dan Price. No one will know who this cat is, but we talked, I don't know, a few months ago, about a company that gave everyone a minimum of $70,000 a year salaries. So, that's big news. Chad: Even himself. Joel: Yeah, even himself. He's a millionaire, but that's beside the point. The company is Gravity Payments. As a result of this, in terms of the benefits, they're seeing three times growth, I believe, in the last one or two years from that, retention rate's through the roof. No surprise there, their Glassdoor score is 4.5 out of 5 stars, they're doing all the right things. So I just wanted to give him a little shout out. Dan Price, keep it up there in Seattle, good vibes to you. Love it. Chad: Yeah and $70,000 is not a lot of cash for that market, so to be able to have, first and foremost, that kind of pay transparency and that equity throughput the organization is awesome, but for people to be retained only making $70,000 a year... And I say only, but you've got to remember Seattle's a little bit more expensive than most of the markets like we're in, in Indianapolis, so that's pretty amazing. Joel: Yep. He had a great quote and story and to get it right, five years after they've initiated this, the business has tripled for the company. But Dan Price had a quote, he said, "people are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York in gold chairs." It's bullshit basically. So we like Dan. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let's get him on the show and talk about this sit. Chad: That's a good idea, we should do that. Joel: Because we don't have enough content, goddammit. Chad: Yeah, no shit. We'll talk about that later. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So somebody else we also like is the JobBoard Doctor, we haven't heard from him in a little while. He tweeted, I quote, "#chadcheese smartly pointing out that candidate retention is often up when formally incarcerated are hired." Chad: That's right, there's no reason why we shouldn't be looking at individuals who have been in prison and have served their debt to society. Ban the box. If it makes sense, Get them into your organization. Stupidest thing in the world that we still have individuals who have been in prison, they come out and they can't feed their family. What do we expect them to do at that point, right? Joel: Go back to jail. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. And again, putting money in the Koch brother's tiller. Go ahead. Joel: By the way, that's also part of the SHRM ad that you haven't seen and the organization that you hate. I'm going to say adios to Facebook chatbots. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: We talk quite a bit about chatbots, but Facebook making some major changes this week. Many of you may remember Poncho, which was the chatbot automation weather app from back in the day. It was a big epic fail. People really don't like automated messages from companies or apps. So chatbots take a bit hit I guess this week in terms of chatbot sort of shutting that whole thing down and moving in a different direction for their discovery on Messenger. Chad: Yeah, I think what we'll see is a movement from that to voice-activated. We talked to Gordon Collier this week about voice interaction on job search. I think that's going to be ubiquitous when it comes to just needing information. I don't need you to just push information to me, we've been used to pushing information forever. All I want to do is when I want it, I want to ask for it. And from a voice standpoint whether you have your phone or your Google Assistants or Alexa, I think that's what we're going to be transitioning to. Joel: And speaking of push, I want to give a quick shout out to Talkpush. Chad: Push it! Joel: Our buddies put out a really great blog post this week about surviving the impending recession. Chad: Nice. Joel: Spoiler alert, automation is the future folks, in case you haven't been listening to the show. Chad: Go figure. Heather DeLand, or DeLand, DeLand? I don't know, she's over in the UK. You could say it a bunch of different ways. She's a new listener from AIA Worldwide. Thanks for listening, now go and make sure that all of your office is listening right now. together right now. Make sure they're all listening. Joel: All right, and then we're going to talk about robots in this show, but I had to give a special shout out to our robot friend Sophie. Chad: Oh, yeah. She's four! Joel: She turns four years old. This is the robot with the transparent head. She did a really funny video with Will Smith a year or two ago, which you should check out if you haven't seen that yet. She has legs and arms now, so it's getting creepier and creepier by the year. Happy birthday, Sophie. Can't wait for your fifth birthday and your tenth birthday when you get automated weapons and kill all the humans. I'm excited. Chad: More of that to come. And an anonymous shout out to all of those people out there who keep us informed. I know that yours does, my phone blows up when anything is happening. I mean, anything. So keep up the good work Chad Cheese Heads and keep the intel flying our way. Joel: That's a deep throat shout out if you will. Chad: Yes. Joel: For you Nixon fans out there. Chad: And for all of those who want to be on the show and we've been getting shit tons of requests, thank you so much, thank you, I have four words for you: be patient and thank you. Joel: Well, I'm out of shout outs. I'm going to mention my first travel trip. Chad: Yes. Joel: I've already talked a couple times about a trip to Vancouver. The name of the event has a name, it's Recruitment Jam, which makes me want to breakout the MC Hammer pants and the Michael Jackson zipper jacket for my trip there and my presentation. So Vancouver April 6-7, I'll be out there for Recruitment Jam. Chad: I think they should go with the Space Jam motif really. I mean, that to me makes more sense. We got to also remember that all of our travel brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right, gear again upgraded this season, kids. Soccer Jersey, North Face vest, Nike, [inaudible 00:13:34]. I mean, we've got Shaker stuff out the wazoo. Not to mention last year's backpacks and this stuff. Joel: Soccer Jersey. Chad: Yeah, no it's good stuff, so thanks for keeping us outfitted Shaker. Joel: I'm rocking the vest right now and frankly, for men of a certain age, I think the vest is a really good look. Chad: The problem is, he's only rocking the vest. Yes, so let's put our hands together and do a little prayer, wish, or whatever it is, Unleash and TA Tech has a mega conference happening in London this month currently for Death Match by Pontoon Solutions at TA technology. We have JobSync, Get Optimal, SBOJ, that's "jobs" backwards. Joel: SBOJ. Chad: And SonicJobs, who just joined into the fray. Joel: Oh, Sonic. Chad: They're all competing for the European Grand Champion and to get the Chad and Cheese Chain of Champions, which has arrived at the Cheeseman residence this week, right? Joel: Chains or Champions in the house. Chad: Woo hoo! Joel: I've been wearing that along with my Shaker vest, it's a really nice look. Chad: We need that picture. We need that picture. So you can get your tickets at tatech.org and unleashgroup.io. Once again, big thanks to our friends at TA Tech and Pontoon Solutions for making Death Match actually happen. Topics! Joel: Topics! Neuvoo tells ClickIQ to take a hike this week. Chad: Yes, would you like to read the actual statement or would you like me to? Joel: I can read it. Chad: Go ahead. Joel: It was in their LinkedIn feed. Chad: Yes, yep. Joel: Okay, here we go. Neuvoo says, "After much thought and consideration, we regret to announce that Neuvoo/Talent.com will be discontinuing our partnership with ClickIQ. This will take effect as of 9th March 2020. This decision was not taken lightly as we strongly believe in the power of collaboration within the TA Tech industry where it makes sense. On this occasion with ClickIQ, it has not proven to be successful or mutually beneficial." Ouch. Joel: "As Neuvoo/Talent.com and ClickIQ do share many mutual clients, please take this post as confirmation that your company jobs, be they organic or sponsored, will no longer be visible via ClickIQ on Neuvoo Worldwide. Being that we believe in the idea of transparent marketplaces within the performance-based advertising space, we will continue to work with the other programmatic platforms across the globe." Chad: "Other." Joel: "A notification email to all our valued clients will be going out on this subject detailing how you can still maintain your candidate traffic flow," blah, blah, blah. And this was the kicker, "Again, as of 9th 2020 March, Neuvoo/Talent.com job seeker traffic will no longer be available through ClickIQ nor its channel partner Indeed.com." Chad: That's the big kick in the nuts right there, kids. This really has nothing to do with ClickIQ until Indeed bought the store. That's what it comes down to. Not to mention, I know for a fact that Neuvoo has been trying and ClickIQ has been trying to be able to make this work, but it's one of those relationships that just wasn't going to work. I mean, if you can think of it, you know how aggressive Indeed's sales people are. One of those things that we've seen over the years who are selling against their partners, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: And it's like, don't spend money with them, just give it to us and we'll make sure you get your talent.com clicks, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: So it's like, funnel through us, we will be the agency and then hopefully talent.com will receive the clicks overall. And that's not something that obviously talent.com is very happy about. Joel: Yeah and don't forget, people don't want all that data being funneled and seen by Indeed.com. We talked a little bit a few months or weeks ago about ZipRecruiter allegedly saying we're the hell off this thing, because if Indeed thinks we're going to show our data, they can go ahead and piss up a flagpole. So yeah, these big companies don't want to share the data with Indeed.com and who can blame them? Chad: Yeah, it makes no sense. Especially since there are so many different programmatic networks and platforms that are out there as it is. Joel: Exactly. Chad: I mean, we've heard the rumors around Zip, but every time we reach out to Zip, they don't have the guts to actually tell us what they're doing. Fucking weak sauce, Zip, very weak sauce. This isn't surprising to me and to see these types of brands leave, I would think that the Adzunas of the world and some of the other organizations that are out there who probably feel the same way, they're going to make moves. They're going to have to make moves or maybe they actually get more clicks out of this because the other ones are going away. Joel: So the question is, do more programmatic companies look to sell because the value of them is going up, do they remain independent because that's where the value is because if people can trust them, they'll continue to use them? Chad: We know, over the years, that Indeed, they have a history of playing the Trojan horse game. And there's no way I would ever be comfortable with allowing them to have any of my data whatsoever to be able to prospectively scheme off of me when I'm trying to actually compete against them. It just doesn't make any sense. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Basically, if you're a job site, that's a pretty broad term, don't go buy a programmatic solution because the value of it will go down because no one will trust you. If you're an agency or some other conduit that plays nice with everyone, I guess buying that programmatic solution is okay. Chad: Yes. I would tend to agree. And the thing that I'm not agreeing with, not only are they showing the industry just where ClickIQ is headed, but they're doing even more by starting the rebranding process, so ClickIQ, from what we've seen and different sources of what we've heard, is going to become IndeedIQ. Joel: We've seen screenshots, right? Chad: Yeah, we've seen screenshots. Do these idiots want this to fail or is it just me? I mean, optics at the very least, right? It doesn't make any sense to me. Joel: Yeah, that doesn't really scream Switzerland, does it? Chad: Yeah. No, we're going to be totally unbiased. Indeed's going to be there on the other side, they're not going to touch your data. And ClickIQ, I mean, I'm sorry, IndeedIQ, will make sure that everything is done right. Again, optics guys, if that is really the case in what's happening, that's probably the stupidest fucking move you could make. Joel: Yep, yep. I was talking to someone that's been around for a long time, pretty high up and we were talking about the impending recession, because that seems to be a thing that with the stock market and coronavirus and all that good stuff people are talking about. Anyways, his prediction was when recession comes, Indeed is going to take a big shit. Not that recession is coming for sure, but recessions have a way of calling the herd and it'll be really interesting to see all these businesses and all these pieces of spaghetti that Indeed has thrown at the wall to see when the economy goes to hell what exactly happens to Indeed, ZipRecruiter and the others. Chad: Yeah, Indeed will tighten up and start to refocus. That's all there is to it. They've got a shit ton of cash, they will start cutting the frayed edges and get back to business. Joel: And layoffs. Chad: Yeah. But talking about rebranding, this is something that actually the Job Board Doctor threw our way, has Snag reverted back to the Snagajob brand after spending all of that money on snag.co and trying to push toward more of an app environment? Joel: Yeah, so listeners might remember we actually had the CEO on I think when they basically launched a marketplace. They still had post jobs for retail, part-time work, et cetera. They were big vision talking about platform, where it's like an Uber Works or any of the other platforms that are out there. And they had a URL snag.co, which was their new thing and they launched an app in certain areas. Snag.co now goes to snagajob.com, so from that perspective it looks like they're going to keep the job posting business, the old traditional way is not going away. Joel: However, I also came across late-February Snag Shift or Snagajob Shift. So the solution is still there and if you go to the app store and search Snagajob Shift, you'll see their platform site. It doesn't look like it's restricted by region, it doesn't look like it's super out there. Joel: There's one press release that I've seen out in the world, but there isn't any sort of major PR push or news push. It looks like they may have just said, "hey, we have the technology, let's just launch this secondary app and see what happens." Maybe they have some customers using it. It looks like Five Guys is using it in terms of the screenshots. So I guess they've definitely refocused on the posting business, which was their bread and butter and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. But they do continue to have their toe dipped in the marketplace for retail hourly seasonal jobs. Chad: Yeah. If anybody knows what the fuck Snag is doing out there, or I'm sorry, Snagajob, please, feel free to fire some stuff our way. It seems like they are a headless chicken at this point. Joel: If their relatively new CEO wants to come on the show and tell us what the fuck is going on, you're more than welcome to join us. Chad: It's time for a break. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com, that's S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: Acquisitions. Chad: So this is from Yahoo Finance, "M3 USA has acquired NAS Recruitment to expand its portfolio into recruitment marketing." Into recruitment marketing, not that it was doing that shit before. "Stone-Goff Partners announced that it has sold NAS Recruitment Innovation ("NAS") to M3 USA, a leader in healthcare digital solutions for hospitals, health systems, and physicians." And this doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Joel: It's a bit of a head-scratcher for sure. The only synergy really is they have a physician recruitment business. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So do they take the recruitment marketing and just sell it into hospitals? I know NAS has a fairly strong footprint with some hospital clients. Chad: Right. Joel: But the NAS thing is really close to home for me, because when I started out in the business, ESPAN/JobOptions, our sister company was NAS. Chad: Right. Joel: And we were both owned by the gun group out of Cleveland. So I've seen NAS as a huge company when display advertising, newspaper advertising was really at its zenith in the mid-late-90s. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: I can remember having a good laugh at trade shows where their booth was literally a velvet background and then they would literally have newspaper ads velcroed to the fabric background of like a 20 by 10 booth, which was really funny if you think about it. So tons of employees, tons of offices. They're down to about 200 employees, which frankly, I was kind of surprised they had that many listed on LinkedIn. A good guy named Matt Adam out of Cincinnati has been there for 25 years. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I've seen the height of this thing, they've gone through at least three or four owners since I've known them. This looks like a total private equity dump. So I wish them the best, but I mean, this feels like the last breath of NAS in that recruitment market business. Chad: This has shades of the Relentless Bandit acquisition, where Relentless Bandit, I'm sure on the clearance rack, was sold to a healthcare, more on the recruiting side, the healthcare recruiting side. More from the article, "NAS has shifted from a traditional media services model to an end-to-end digital offering with the development of the ACTIVATE platform." I love Matt Adam, but I really need to better understand what the fuck they mean by end-to-end, because there's no way in hell the active platform is an end-to-end attract-to-hire platform. Joel: Yeah and how brutal to be a marketing agency and have to just deal with healthcare. People like Shaker doing shit with McDonald's and cool companies. Like I got to get up and market hospitals all day. Chad: It's money. Joel: Fucking kill me, dude. Chad: That being said, I think shades of what happened with Shaker and The Arland Group actually happened with Mamu merging with Haley Marketing. Joel: Yeah. Make sure it Mamu and not Mamu or Mamu. Chad: Like Shamu, Mamu. Joel: Shamu. Chad: Mamu. Mamu Marketing, now that would not be allowed. There are no orcas allowed, okay? Joel: Yeah, no mascot orcas on the site. Chad: No, no. I really believe this is a smart way for smaller orgs to compete through combining talent, resources, hunkering down and just doing business. So I really think we'll see more of this. It just makes sense. There's great talent out there, do we do it separated and try to fight small tribes against the bigger fucking monolith tribe? You know, the TMPs or the Symphonys, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Or do we start to combine, specialize and then you know, start to kick ass and take names. I love what KRT did when they really focused heavily on programmatic and obviously that spun into a merger/acquisition with recruiting, so I see more of this happening. Joel: Yeah, Mamu, I guess I'm saying it right, is a pretty interesting company. I mean, it's entirely content and they just do content that looks like for staffing companies. So they're doing magazines, webinars, obviously video shit, blogging and newsletters, email stuff, but that's all they do for staffings, so this is like a super niche business and it seems like a fairly interesting company. I'm surprised that they can make fucking magazines for staffing companies. But hey, they apparently are, so this looks like a little bit of a aquihire, a bit of a nice little business that they're going to wrap it into this marketing company. But yeah, good for them, interesting marriage. It's more interesting than NAS and M3, that's for sure. Chad: Marketing needs content and if you have a content engine, you put those two together, I mean, again, you can really focus heavily in that area. So I guess we'll see. Joel: By the way, there's a great quote, this is sort of out of left field, but at our time at The Gathering last month, there was a great quote, it said "You've heard content is king. It's not king, community is king, content is queen." That was kind of an interesting quote. So yeah, take that for what it's worth. Chad: Yeah, I would say content is king, community is queen. You've got to remember the chess board, what is the strongest piece on the chess board? It's the queen. Joel: Look at you. Chad: So therefore, yeah, content is king, community is queen. It's the bad bitch on the board baby. And that being said, the bad bitch on the board right now, and we don't want to get too crazy and get people scared, but coronavirus. SFX: It's corona time. Hey, it's corona time right now. It's corona time. Joel: And I won't tell your wife you said bad bitch. Chad: Yeah, she's hearing me say it right now. So on Twitter this week, Tarquin Clark, who we all know as one of the studs over at Google, posted a picture on Twitter of a parking garage at SFO, so San Francisco Airport, it was desolate. Usually packed on a Monday. Dude, there were parking spots open all over the place and we talked about it last week, Salesforce canceling their big sales meeting, Facebook canceling the San Francisco F8 marketing summit that they have. Facebook and Sony both pulling out of the March Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Joel: Yeah, Mobile Congress. Chad: Google canceling Google I/O, I mean, all of this is happening and I think personally, not to scare anybody, this is incredibly smart. I mean, what would you do from a risk standpoint? Joel: Well, from a business standpoint, you don't want your whole workforce to get sick and/or scared shitless. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, I can't blame any corporations. I know Nestle, who I think has 30,000 employees around the world has basically banned travel. My wife, who's a college professor, you can imagine how concerned they are with, you know, they have students as well as employees. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: I know they banned all travel to Italy, South Korea, and Iran, and China. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, that's going to be a no-brainer I think for a lot of people. Most people know Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter as well as Square, Square has stopped all in-person job interviews, so this is good for the HireVues and all these sort of web/video interviewing folks. Chad: Perfect for Tengai. Joel: I'm sure meetings... Yeah, right. Tengai doesn't get sick. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But yeah, I mean, ZoomInfo and conference software in terms of those stocks are going through the roof, it's good for Slack and any kind of communication device, stay-at-home stuff is hot. I mean, the only way this is going to stop is people don't interact with each other, the weather gets warmer and viruses go dormant until we get a vaccine for this thing. But yeah, it's a scary time, I can't blame companies for doing what they're doing. Airlines, bad energy companies, it's a rough time for sure. Corona time is no-fun for a lot of people man, even though the song rocks. Chad: Microsoft is actually recommending that all its Seattle-area employees to do their jobs from home. So for the next three weeks, so "through March 25th, in the latest effort to thwart the spread of the coronavirus. The company employs nearly 54,000 people in the Seattle region, most of them is at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The guidance, issued Wednesday by Microsoft executive vice president Kurt DelBene, excludes workers in data centers, retail stores, and other jobs that require them being on site." So if you're in the retail area, just a shit ton of hand sanitizer, maybe one of those totally encapsulates suits or something like that, you'll be fine. Joel: Think about it, I mean, March Madness is right around the corner, we got the Olympics coming up this summer, like this is going to be really interesting to see how this affects turnout in some of these big, popular sporting events. Chad: It's smart to be educated, to understand, yes, the flu does kill people, but it is at a much smaller percentage than what this virus does. What you need to do is just go to who.int, the website, so The World Health Organization. They have information, a special area there to be able to educate yourself. And that's the biggest key is don't sit around, watch the news, and get scared shitless because it's very easy to do. Go to who.int, focus on yourself if you're in one of those populated areas that perspectively has some of those outbreaks. Personally, if it was me, and again, this is just me, I would keep my fucking kids home. Joel: And for god sake, don't go to the Johns Hopkins Interactive Map of how this thing is blowing up all around the world. Alright, let's take a break on that note and we'll close this thing out and shut down, batter down the hatches and go into hiding I guess. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvasbot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off the Bitmoji. Canvas: We make compliance easy and are laser-focused on recruiters' success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io. And in 20 minutes, we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: So do you remember when the movie Top Gun came out? Joel: I do. Chad: Kelly McGillis. Joel: Paging myself. '85? Summer of '85 I believe? Chad: She was hot, Tom Cruise, Goose dies. Joel: Val Kilmer. I think he's in the new one. Chad: The F-15 motherfucking Tomcat. The best, baddest fighting machine that was out there. Joel: Goose. Chad: Yeah, so the biggest problem with pushing the boundaries with those fighter jets are human beings. Human beings cannot withstand the G's and we're the ones that actually handicap the equipment. I mean, that's one of the reasons why some of the actual fighter jets, they're not allowed to do what they can actually do because there's a human inside, right? And Elon Musk has said "the era of the fighter jet has passed" and he said that the US Military's vaunted F-35 stealth jet "would have no chance" against a drone remotely piloted by a human being. Chad: That's one step away, first we get the human out of the vehicle because that's handicapping performance in the first place. Next, we put them in the seat to do it from far away. Then we just take him out of the seat entirely.So think of it from this standpoint, now, we have robots that have passed validation studies with flying colors. Joel: Yes. Chad: And those validation studies are focused all on AI interview robot Tengai. So the social AI interview robot Tengai can, without human interference, conduct and measure standard and objective blind interviews. The conversational technology can assess personality traits correlated to work performance, all according to a new research validity study conducted by two doctors of psychometrics in Sweden. There are 420 Tengai robot interviews. 84.6% feel interview was serious, so this wasn't just kind of like a bullshit throw-a-robot-in-front-of-me, but it was a serious interview. Joel: Yep. Chad: And 74.3% felt they could give more honest answers because it was a robot and it wasn't somebody sitting there fucking judging me. Joel: You know, I don't think there's a conference that I attend where somebody doesn't come up to me and ask, "what's up with Tengai, dude? You don't really believe that thing's going to be a thing, right," or give me some sort of criticism like that. And ultimately, yeah, time will tell whether it's a thing and I think you put people's bias into this thing and do I really want to interview with a robot. I don't really know, but no one can deny that this thing is slowly but surely becoming a thing that works and is relevant. Joel: One of the doctors, and I'll attempt to say his name, Dr. Anders Sjöberg, Psychometrics Sweden AB, said "the validity study confirmed that Tengai can ask questions that correlate to work performance and interpret the answers independently without any help from human. This means that Tengai is validated and should be used to achieve a more unbiased interview process. It is a first step toward replacing the traditional job interview with an unbiased robot interview." I'll throw in the fact that an English version of this robot will be released in a few days or weeks. Chad: Yeah and for all those people who are looking at the robot saying, "well, that's going to be biased," I think it's time for us as humans to look in the mirror and realize we are the most flawed and biased things on this earth. If we can actually use technology and tools to be able to do our jobs better, faster, then great. I mean, why do interviews in the first place, especially if we know we're going to add bias into it and some people say "well, bias is good." Okay, well, if bias is so good, then go completely transparent and show everybody your workforce. Is it really an unbiased workforce? Is it really a diverse workforce? If it is, then it should be transparent already. In most cases, that's not going to be the case. Joel: Dude, your views in the mirror are very complicated if that's what you're thinking when you do that. I think about how my ears and nose don't stop growing as I get older. Chad: Well, after all the naps, I hear that naps actually make your nose grow. Joel: All right, dude. SFX: It's corona time. Hey, it's corona time right now. It's corona time. Chad: It's corona... No. Joel: Let's take it out with a little corona time. We out. Chad: Be safe, we out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called, the podcast with Chad, with 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. With so many cheeses, and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today or 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. #Robots #AI #Indeed #ClickIQ #Talentcom #Neuvoo #Coronavirus #Tengai #NAS #HaleyMarketing

On this week's show, what else: CORONAVIRUS! OK, there's more than that, but of course the boys are talkin' about it and what employers are doing about it. - Google is takin' care of business and by business we mean people. - Upwork has a nasty surprise for companies who rely on its platform, - Wiley swipes right on Madgex - StepStone rakes in the cash and the US women's soccer team needs more "responsibility"? WTAF? Enjoy and show our sponsors - who always wash their hands for at least 20 seconds - some love: Canvas, JobAdx, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. James Ellis (00:00): Hey, this is James Ellis from the Talent Cast Podcast, and you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, which, I guess is your choice. SFX (00:08): Oh my God. Okay. It's happening. Everybody stay calm. Everybody stay calm. SFX (00:12): What's the procedure? SFX (00:12): Stay (Beeps) calm. SFX (00:12): wait, wait, wait. Announcer 1 (00:15): Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel Cheesman (00:35): keep calm and carry on people. What's up? You know you're not heading to a conference, so you might as well be listening to our stupid ass show. Welcome everybody to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, I am your cohost as usual, Joel, virus-free, Cheesman. Chad Sowash (00:52): And this is Chad, I'm in a bunker, Sowash. Joel Cheesman (00:57): On this week's show, Corona virus, imagine that as a topic. Upwork has a surprise for employers. And the U S women's soccer team needs more responsibility. Stay inside because that's what you're going to do anyway. We'll be right back after a word from one of our loving sponsors. Sovren (01:19): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad Sowash (01:46): So Joel Cheesman (01:46): Dude. SFX (01:46): This Corona thing. Chad Sowash (01:49): Trump goes on TV last night and to be able to calm nerves and stuff like that, he does the polar opposite, because nobody fucking believes his dumb ass and the markets fucking tank. The very first thing that happens this morning. Joel Cheesman (02:03): It's the oil fight with Russia and Saudi Arabia. Chad Sowash (02:05): Oh, bullshit. Joel Cheesman (02:05): Don't believe the virus thing, man. Come on. Chad Sowash (02:08): Yeah, right, right. Yeah. We'll go with both. Okay? Joel Cheesman (02:15): How much longer can I play this before it becomes insensitive? Chad Sowash (02:19): I think we're past that. SFX (02:20): This Corona thang Joel Cheesman (02:21): Dammit. It's so catchy though. It's so catchy. Chad Sowash (02:24): Yeah, it is. It is. Joel Cheesman (02:27): Shout outs for the still living among us. Amy English, super fan. Shout out to you. She hit us both up on social media saying how great we were. And Amy, we love that so much. Chad Sowash (02:38): Amy, over at Zip and also Allah Bughara over at Joveo. Thanks both of you for listening. Joel Cheesman (02:46): Much love. Much love. Robert Ruff, guys, talk about love. We can't stop the social media affection coming in for his latest Voices series on the podcast. If you haven't listened to some that good stuff. Go check it out at chadcheese.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Chad Sowash (03:04): It's good shit, man. Big shout out to Adam Chambers, our Irish kid genius, who is living in Mexico, has learned how to Salsa dance. And you're a smart man, Adam. I've always said, if you learn how to Salsa dance, then everything else dating-wise, is so much easier. I remember I was 19 in Panama, lucky enough to actually learn and that was like the end. Just period. It didn't matter. Joel Cheesman (03:38): You mean it wasn't your charming good looks or you're charming demeanor and your dashing good looks? Chad Sowash (03:42): It all helps, dude. Salsa dancing is the way. Joel Cheesman (03:47): I just want to be this cat when I grow up. I wish I was that cool at 22. Shout out to St Patrick's Day for talking about Irish cats living in Mexico. How about Irish cats living in Ireland where St Patrick's Day, God help us, has been canceled, as well as pretty much every parade here in the States. Chad Sowash (04:07): Yeah. Chicago is big day, right? Joel Cheesman (04:09): I've got a lot of Guinness I'm not going to know what to do with now. Chad Sowash (04:13): Yeah, I doubt that. Joel Cheesman (04:15): Party at your place. Chad Sowash (04:16): So, not really a shout out, but a smackdown to The Ladders, for sending out all state franchise emails to the masses. This is what they are classifying obviously as 100 K jobs. Fucking idiots. Joel Cheesman (04:37): Shout out to Steve Fogarty. Nothing in particular. Just the dude called me up and said he wanted to catch up. Many of u know him as the guy from Adidas, who did a lot of speaking gigs 10, 15 years ago. He's now at Twitter, doing TA there. But, just a cool cat, wanted to say hi. I think I turned him onto the show, after talking to him, rapping with him. Chad Sowash (04:57): John's little brother. Yeah. We've got a question from the job board doctor, he asks, the real question for Chad & Cheese, will Corona virus sideline the dynamic duos aggressive travel schedule? And the answer is you'd better fucking believe it will. Yeah. We're not fucking with that shit guys. Joel Cheesman (05:18): So, we're not going to talk about travel? Because there is none. Chad Sowash (05:22): I actually spoke with Joe shaker yesterday, and it was funny because he brought it up. And Shaker Recruitment Advertising, remember people, is the official sponsor of the Chad and Cheese travel. He said, I quote, "I'm telling you guys, it's more than okay to stay home. No, you need to stay home." When your travel sponsor's actually telling you stay home, you know it's time to stay home. And shout out to David Manaster, who tweeted, instead of our event in Seattle to protect the health of our community members, SourceCon is going digital. We're seeing this pretty much everywhere, either postponements with the NBA, cancellations with the SEC tournament, the big 10 tournament. This is just prudent and responsible. I know that we are not known as prudent and responsible, but guess what, it's time to be an adult. This just makes sense. Joel Cheesman (06:26): You failed to mention, unless I was daydreaming there for a second, that our new travel promotions will be like heading to the grocery store to get toilet paper or heading to the Walgreens for an acids or whatever. So, we will still be traveling powered by Shaker Recruitment Advertising, but it just won't be to exotic places like London and Vancouver. It'll be to the local Walgreens on the corner of Oleo and 96th street. Chad Sowash (06:57): Exactly. Yes. Events be damned. Joel Cheesman (07:00): This is where my virtual reality prediction maybe comes true. If we can all just put headsets on and go to the mixer, that might work. Chad Sowash (07:09): This is something that we just noticed that we've been talking about the Groundhog, the Indeed Groundhog, and how we haven't seen them and any additional commercials. There's that one commercial and then he's kicked to the curb. Well Joel Cheesman (07:22): Yeah. There's a new ad, dude. Chad Sowash (07:23): We've been foreshadowing this Indeed replacing The Groundhog, and it's finally happened. That's right kids. Indeed kicked Gary, The Groundhog to the curb and replaced him with automation, AKA The Claw, that we know from Toy Story. Joel Cheesman (07:38): We're pretty worried about The Groundhog. Times are tough, people are staying home. Thank God we had Groundhog Day before the whole Corona virus thing happened. But we're a little worried about The Groundhog, so we're going to check up on him and see what's going on. And while we do that, Indeed will keep creating hot garbage for their advertising campaigns, and getting their ass kicked by LinkedIn, by the way. Chad Sowash (08:01): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (08:01): That's a topic that we'll save for another day, maybe. My last shout out goes to Tom Hanks. America's icon Chad Sowash (08:11): Best ever. Joel Cheesman (08:13): Father, grandfather. Just Chad Sowash (08:14): Amazing. Joel Cheesman (08:16): A national treasure. Tom Hanks has Corona virus. Chad Sowash (08:19): So does Rita. Joel Cheesman (08:20): Yeah. He “Social Mediaed” it out, if that's a word or verb. Chad Sowash (08:26): Sure. Joel Cheesman (08:26): And just, heart out to him. Everybody loves Tom Hanks, man. If this dude dies because of Corona virus, holy crap, the whole thing is just flushed down the toilet and it's over. Chad Sowash (08:37): Okay. Joel Cheesman (08:38): Hey, what's your favorite Tom Hanks movie while we're fucking talking about it? Chad Sowash (08:42): Oh, maybe Saving Private Ryan. Forrest Gump was amazing. I read Forrest Gump as a book, and I was a total laughter reading the book. And they said that they were going to make it into a movie, I'm like, "There's no way in hell they can make something like this into a movie." They did, with Tom Hanks. It was outstanding. There's just so much that he's done and I don't know that you can put a finger on something that he's really done that's been shit. He's amazing. Joel Cheesman (09:09): I watched Philadelphia a few months ago, and it's amazing how that movie has aged, and it's amazing to remember what it was like back then, to think that it wasn't that long ago. So that movie is really powerful to me. And frankly, keeping it light, who could forget The Money Pit Chad Sowash (09:30): Yup. Big. Joel Cheesman (09:31): Splash, Big, The Bachelor, The Original Bachelor, Bachelor Party, sorry. Chad Sowash (09:38): Bosom Buddies, for goodness sake. Come on. Joel Cheesman (09:41): Bosom Buddies, yeah. He had a starring role on one episode of The Love Boat. The dude's just precious. Say a prayer for Tom. Get better man. We love you Chad Sowash (09:51): Tom and Rita, because she's amazing by the way. Topics. Joel Cheesman (09:56): Google love. Google love (inaudible) man. It's about time. The government is not going to be a leader in this whole death to human race stuff, Google will be. This last week, Google expands their work from home, recommendation to all North American employees. We're talking about like 100,000 employees globally. So this is no little, small business that says, "Hey 25 people, stay home this month," this is a big deal. I certainly applaud them and I'm sure that you do as well. Chad Sowash (10:26): Yeah. This just makes sense and it's in their own interest. Why the fuck would you want anybody to come into the office and perspectively just spread this, right? And if that happens, you can't get work done because everybody's sick. So, yes, it is smart for Google, but this is in their own interest. They are thinking of their people, but they're also thinking about themselves. So, if you can get work done, do it from home, so that you're not spreading the virus, you're not getting sick and you're not getting somebody else sick. Because you have to remember, this virus itself, one person is being spread to three others. That's how this is growing so quickly. This is also happening in Europe. But I call out, because we're talking about remote work. If you, like most Google workers are working remote, here's a great resource to check out. This week in the Recruiting Brainfood, Hung Lee has devoted this entire addition to remote resources. Resources for recruiters, HR folks to implement emergency work from home policies, those types of things. It's a searchable archive, crowdsourced, yada, yada, yada. Hung always does really good stuff and he's focusing on this specific topic this week. So if you're currently a part of the Brainfood community, check it out. Joel Cheesman (11:49): Why wouldn't you be? Chad Sowash (11:49): If you're not, go to recruitingbrainfood.com. Transitioning away from the whole remote full time thing, Google has actually set up a fund to offer paid sick leave to contractors and temp workers. And Google has more contractors working for them, around 120,000, than they have full time staff. Joel Cheesman (12:14): Yeah. Chad Sowash (12:14): This is interesting overall, just from the standpoint of being able to ensure that if you are sick, they want to be able to take care of you. What do you think about this one? Joel Cheesman (12:25): I think it's great. I think so. The fund will enable all temporary staff and vendors all around the world to take paid sick leave if they have potential symptoms of the disease or can't come to work because they're quarantined, what a horrible thing that would be. Chad Sowash (12:39): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (12:39): Taking care of your workforce is job number one for a lot of these companies.If Google doesn't have people to write code, they're out of business. So this is obviously a great move by them. And I think it's great to show that as temporary workers and contract workers, vendors, you feel a little left out sometimes because you're not in the full time employment umbrella, I think this is a great way to say we care about you and we're going to take care of you. Chad Sowash (13:08): Yeah. I think Google though, they've made some strides in ensuring that any of the contractors that they're working with, or at least the companies that are facilitating this contract workforce, that they do have benefits. We've done stories on this before. Because usually, if a company like this is going after contractors, it's because they want more on and off cheap labor without the benefits. Right? But that's not this case, I believe, with Google. So yeah, it's very interesting that they are more on the contract side than they are full time employees, but again, this is self-interest. They want to make sure that their people are taken care of and that they're not spreading shit. Joel Cheesman (13:53): Well done, Google. I can forgive you for watching everything I do online, for a little bit, just for that. Chad Sowash (13:59): For five minutes. This also kind of leads into our next story, how Corona virus is hitting low wage earners especially hard. And this is out of Fast Company. Joel Cheesman (14:11): Thinking about the hourly workforce, seasonal, whatever it is, that works at as a small mom-and-pop, or a restaurant. Obviously, traffic flow from that decreases. What if you do get sick? What if your whole family's on quarantine? You can't go to work. Guess what? You don't get paid, in many cases from small businesses. Unfortunately, it's the lower paid hourly worker that's going to be really suffering from the disease as it grows around the country. Chad Sowash (14:43): Yeah. The headlines ... And this is from Fast Company article, the headlines have focused on governmental response times and political spin, go figure. But economic inequality issues are front and center of the crisis. On a macro level, the Corona virus story involves governmental response times, all this other fun stuff, lack of testing, go figure, but it is a tail more than a hundred years old, the poorest, and the uninsured, and the under-insured will be disproportionately affected. They will get sick in large numbers. They will unwittingly expand the scope of the problem and they will have little latitude to do much about it. The big reason why, they have a great example, a single mother of two, working for LSG Sky Chefs at LA International Airport makes $15 and 25 cents an hour or 610 bucks a week. About half of that goes to her shitty healthcare plan. Her apartment, nearby Culver City, is $1,700 per month. She is already the working poor. She cannot, she cannot afford to miss work because she doesn't have enough paid sick days. Joel Cheesman (16:00): Yeah. And we had it as one of the topics to potentially discuss. In terms of the gig economy and driving an Uber, I know there's a lot of stories out there that people don't want to step into an Uber, for obvious reasons, right? Who else has been in here? Is it clean? I've heard stories about every Uber that you do get into now smells like a bucket of Clorox has been thrown around the car, because they want to make sure that it smells clean and virus free. A lot of gig opportunities are going to be lost on people that want to make a little extra money. I think that even plays into it a little bit, in terms of hurting employees and people. Joel Cheesman (16:41): I'm curious though, we talked about the corporate side, where does government come in? And there's a lot of talk about tax holidays for businesses and no payroll taxes. Do you see the government coming in with, sort of a Marshall plan to say, "We're going to take care of everybody for the next 60, 90 or 30, 60, 45, 60 days or whatever it takes to make sure that everyone can still pay bills and can still put food on the table and a roof over their head. Do you see the government taking that kind of initiative to help the lower level worker like this? Chad Sowash (17:16): Unfortunately, because of the current administration, I don't. I think it's going to happen on the corporate side and they're going to hope that it bleeds down. But this still doesn't answer the biggest problem overall. Even when there isn't a Corona virus, these people are the working poor. Period. They're barely making ends meet as it is. When we're talking about companies, and the profits are bigger than ever, and isn't everybody happy that the economy is, was, is, was so great, right? Joel Cheesman (17:53): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad Sowash (17:53): That's when we should be putting money in the pockets of the people who are actually creating the shit that we're selling and, or the services that are being provided by our organization. Yet, we're pushing that money to the top, and to stockholders on buybacks, and a bunch of shit that makes this unlivable. Joel Cheesman (18:14): Yeah. The problem of the working poor or Chad Sowash (18:18): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (18:19): All right. Okay. Chad Sowash (18:19): The working poor. The Corona virus is just helping to identify and float to the top that our economy's fucked up already. Joel Cheesman (18:28): Yeah. And this virus isn't helping whatsoever. Chad Sowash (18:31): No. Joel Cheesman (18:31): I personally expect the government to step up. I hope the government steps up in a big way to take care of not just businesses, but people just like this that can't, whether health insurance, whether pay the rent, whether it's I'm not working, getting the regular paycheck that I would, or I'm not getting the hours that I used to get because of the virus, that the government steps up and helps everybody and gets us through this. They did it in world war II God dammit, they can do it again. Chad Sowash (18:57): Or, companies can take some of those profits and actually do that themselves. We always look for government to save our asses when the fucking corporations are making all these goddamn dollars, it's ... Joel Cheesman (19:11): Let's take a break and listen to a word from JobAdX, and talk about lighter topics. Not really. JobAdX (19:19): No. No. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Oh, next. JobAdX (19:23): This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just halfheartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it, we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions. Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits, with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, Job AdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with Job AdX. Chad Sowash (20:43): Transitioning away from COVID-19 for a second. Joel Cheesman (20:47): Yeah? Oh, that's it? Chad Sowash (20:49): Upwork is trying to slip through a change in their terms of service effective in three or four weeks that will subject any client who hires a freelancer they found on their site, to a fine of up to $50,000 per freelancer. What the fuck is up with that? Joel Cheesman (21:12): What is up with Upwork? Yeah. From their point of view, yeah, I'm sure they get really pissed when they do all the leg work and get someone to join their platform, and that person gets work, and then they do a job for someone and Upwork gets paid, but then that person says, "Hey, why don't you come work for us full time?" And Upwork gets jack. So they're sort of secretly, slyly putting in this language, that says if you use their services and you hire one of their contractors, you could be on the hook for up to $50,000. And I think this change is coming in the next four weeks or so. I think they're going to be changing their terms of service. Yeah, I get it. But it's bullshit because it creates ... An opportunity that might be there for someone, is now gone because the company doesn't want to risk paying the fee or going to court or paying lawyers to fight Upwork or the for the process. It definitely screws the contractor who could have a full time job, but it also screws the company who could have a full time worker that does a good job. Chad Sowash (22:21): Yeah. We talked to Justin Gignac from Working Not Working and also Ryan Gill from Communo about this. And their whole thought process was, look, this is a community, people flow in and out of gig work. Right? And people who do full time stuff want to do side hustles. We want them to stay with us, no matter whether they're full time or they're gigging. Right? Joel Cheesman (22:51): Yeah. Chad Sowash (22:51): Overall, I think this is one of the stupidest moves Upwork could make because as a client of Upwork, I would go away. There are other marketplaces that are out there that are more targeted, and I might actually have to use two or three of them. But to be quite frank, screw you. These terms of service are just total shit. Joel Cheesman (23:10): Yeah. The unfortunate truth is, very few people will notice that this happens. No one's going to read the terms of service. If there's a story on TechCrunch or something, the chances that a lot of people will see that are still pretty minimal. This will be like the occasional lawsuit that may be some people hear about, but for the vast number of Upwork contractors, they'll never understand or know this. Eventually, maybe they will, but it's a ... Upwork, as a public company isn't performing very well, they need to raise money somehow, so let's sue companies for 50 grand to help do that. Joel Cheesman (23:46): This came out, in terms of where I caught it, was Seth Godin, he's a pretty famous marketing guy. He's written a ton of books. He has a really popular blog called seths.blog. If you don't subscribe or read it, you should check it out. But anyway, he has a great post on the problem with freelancing and how it's becoming a commodity. We've done a podcast with the guys at Communo, and others, to talk about how they hate Upwork and how it becomes a commodity and it's a race to the bottom and dah, dah, dah. And Seth has a great, post building context around his point of view on how the gig economy is a race to the bottom and really bad for both freelancers and companies. Chad Sowash (24:35): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (24:35): There's a quote here from the blog post, "The gig economy is based on the magic of finding the right person for the right job. It falls apart when it becomes a commodity marketplace in which each freelancer struggles to be valued for the work they are able to create." Chad Sowash (24:52): Yeah. And again, back to Working Not Working and Communo, they are trying to be like the anti-Upwork, where they are focused on the race to the top, and being able to provide better, the best contractors, the best work, those types of things as opposed to playing this race to the bottom, that we're really starting to see from Upwork and Fiverr. Joel Cheesman (25:17): Yeah, for sure. I think the, the value of these niche platforms, that we've talked about quite a bit lately, with healthcare and other other niches, is that there's a level of quality in those niche communities and platforms that I think a lot of freelancers are going to flock to because they are feeling like the big Fivver and Upwork are a race to the bottom and are going to try to find solace and more money and better opportunities in these community, platforms. Well, they actually do vet the experience. I know Communo does, I think, as well as Working Not Working. Chad Sowash (25:51): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (25:51): They actually vet the quality of work and the contractors that are there. There is a level of work that they have to do as a niche platform, but it sounds like it's paying off in dollars and cents for the contractors that are on their platform. Chad Sowash (26:05): Yeah. And this type of a move from Upwork's going to do nothing but fuel better opportunities in those other niche platforms. Joel Cheesman (26:14): Yeah, totally. Totally. I agree. Well, speaking of bad opportunities, the U S women's soccer team, the national treasure, that is the U S women's soccer team, took a blow this week. This is sort of your lane with soccer, what's going on? Chad Sowash (26:31): Remember the Audi commercial with the little girl racing in the soapbox derby? Joel Cheesman (26:36): Totally. Chad Sowash (26:36): We both love that commercial, right? She's racing and as she's racing, her dad is narrating and this is what he says, "What do I tell my daughter? Her grandfather is worth more than her grandmother? Her dad is worth more than her mother? Do I tell her despite her education, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued less than every man she ever meets?" And at that point she wins the soapbox derby. You see it and then you hear him say, "Or maybe I'll be able to tell her something different." And that actually on the screen it actually shows Audi, and talking about equal pay. And then we see this come out from an iconic team. This is probably one of the best known teams, not just through America, but probably the world, the U S women's soccer team. And the message to them from their employer was, men are worth more. Joel Cheesman (27:40): Yeah. It gets nastier than that. It's also arguing that women athletes are less skilled and work less demanding jobs than their male counterparts. Chad Sowash (27:51): Crazy. Joel Cheesman (27:51): And that there's more responsibility on the U S men's soccer team than there is the women's. I literally thought this was an onion story because it's so ridiculous in 2020 that we're even talking about this. Chad Sowash (28:04): Yes. Joel Cheesman (28:04): Because the women's team is so much better in their sport than the men's team. And this argument just seems ridiculous. Chad Sowash (28:13): Won it's fourth world cup title in France. My God, dude, it fills stadiums. It sells tickets, they sell tickets. Again, they're an icon. March, they sell. They are more popular than the men's team, by far, by eons. But the U S soccer, pointed out to biological differences and indisputable science, to argue that women should be paid less than the men's team who requires a higher level of skill than the women's team. I think what this all revolves around, I know what it all revolves around, it all revolves around money. Joel Cheesman (28:55): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad Sowash (28:55): FIFA pays more to the men's tournament in U S soccer, than it does the women's. Overall, it's fairly simple, funnel some of that cash from the men's program to the women's team. If you want to focus on equity, that's what you do. If you know what's coming your way, make it equitable for both teams. Shit, the women should be getting paid more. This narrative around biological differences and/or responsibility is total utter bullshit, when the women perform at a much higher level than the men do, on their stage. Joel Cheesman (29:35): Yeah. What surprised me, and you hit the nail on the head, is that ... What surprised me was, the arguments against were level of skill, the matter of responsibility, the physical prowess of men versus women. Where if they had come out and said, look, the men's world cup and this is irrefutable, the money that that tournament makes dwarfs the women's. Chad Sowash (29:58): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (29:59): By a lot. But they don't even argue that. I was really perplexed as to why the argument was a biological argument as opposed to a financial argument. Because the financial argument to me is harder to win unless women's soccer as a whole is so worried that if it becomes a financial argument, like you said, there's more money get forced into the women's because of equality, as opposed to having this biological argument, which is just silly. Chad Sowash (30:31): Yeah. It's all a diversion because they don't want to talk about the money. Joel Cheesman (30:35): Yeah. Chad Sowash (30:35): That's what it comes down to. Because if it comes down to the money, that's like, oh, well that's what the real problem is? Well, we can fix that. Well, they don't want to fix that. From my standpoint, again, going back to the Audi commercial, having two daughters, this is incredibly important, not just for me and my daughters, but for the ones that are behind them. This is ridiculous to make this kind of statements, not to mention, think of all the talent now who just won't go to U S soccer. Fuck them. Why? That hurts. Joel Cheesman (31:08): That hurts, man. Chad Sowash (31:09): That hurts. Joel Cheesman (31:10): That's going to get a big boo from me. Chad Sowash (31:14): What doesn't hurt is Joel Cheesman (31:15): Text recruiting will never [00:31:19.07] Inaudible] folks. Joel Cheesman (31:19): With Canvas. Canvas (31:20): Canvas is the world's first intelligent, text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvasbot is at your side, adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel Cheesman (32:20): StepStone is ringing the register here lately. Chad Sowash (32:25): Germany's doing well, apparently. Joel Cheesman (32:28): Axel Springer. StepStone, many of our audience will know recently as the Appcast acquirer, but they are part of a much bigger company. Anyway, a story came out this week, their revenue climbed 7%. Obviously, one of Europe's biggest online job sites. They saw a revenue climb to 647.1 million euros, that's 734.5 million U S dollars, for those at home. In 2019, this was up from 602.6 euros million in the prior year. The job portal, headquartered in Dusseldorf, is part of the German media group, Axel Springer, they published an annual report on Wednesday revealing StepStones financial performance. Most interestingly from the story is, the company is still very interested in acquisitions, the CEO, Mathias Dopfner, mentioned that they were going to be on the acquisition hunt in the next year, uh, particularly with U S-based companies to add to their portfolio. So, look for interesting stuff. And as the economy is teetering on destruction, they're going to be some companies on the cheap that they can probably pick up. Chad Sowash (33:43): Yeah. On a push away from the table of destruction, hopefully, we'll have a bounce after all of this stupid shit that's happening with the administration and the virus. This is awesome from a StepStone standpoint, we've been talking about how the acquisition of Appcast was genius. How they could pull Appcast away from the likes of Indeed. Joel Cheesman (34:09): [00:34:10.17] Inaudible] Chad Sowash (34:09): Yeah. Overall, they really had no economic impact into the U S, the biggest market in the world. Now, they have programmatic impact and also the opportunity to use those programmatic technologies in Europe and beyond. And now that's going to happen slower obviously. But this is just genius. I think from a strategy standpoint, man, I can't hate on them at all. Joel Cheesman (34:44): Let's hope that they don't rename Appcast Appstone or something, to really fuck shit up. Chad Sowash (34:50): Yes. Joel Cheesman (34:50): Madgex, in the news. Chad Sowash (34:51): Indeed, IQ. Yeah. It's funny, Madgex, which probably not so well known here in the U S, if you're really into technology and job or technology throughout the years, you've definitely heard the name. They've been at conferences all over the place, events, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then out of nowhere, poof, they were gone. You just didn't see them anymore. Joel Cheesman (35:18): Yeah. Chad Sowash (35:18): And that whole pivot was toward associations, which most of us didn't even recognize or even know. But Wiley, who acquired them, turned them on to a U S base of customers that really, they don't ask for much. Right? They're not looking for innovation. They're not looking for the new cool tech, chatbots, AI or any of that shit, they just want something that works. So something that's like 2008 technology is going to be great for an association. That's how Wiley provides publishing to and/or now, technology. It gives Madgex, I would say, who was probably suffering from a shit ton of technical debt right now, an opportunity to not play the innovation war games anymore, step back, take some money for acquisition and say, "Goodbye." Joel Cheesman (36:18): You and I remember a day where job boards were going to be everywhere. Do you remember this? Chad Sowash (36:23): Oh, yeah. Joel Cheesman (36:23): Like, Simply Hired, had this plug and play product. WordPress had all kinds of job boards that you could just plug into your site, and everyone was going to have a job site. I, for one, believe that, right? Blogs need to make money, Publishers need to make money, associations need to make money. And having job postings was an easy way to have someone drop 99 bucks for a job posting, on their website. Chad Sowash (36:50): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (36:51): I think over time, social media has destroyed that. Chad Sowash (36:57): Easily. Joel Cheesman (36:57): In that, if I'm a member of association, or like my college, right? I get more information from my college through social media, than I ever do going to their website and trying to look around and find stuff. So, social media has killed this job board everywhere thing. We applauded jobboard.io getting acquired by ZipRecruiter Chad Sowash (37:19): Yeah. Smart. Joel Cheesman (37:19): A year or two ago or maybe even longer than that. And they've sort of disappeared. I think the fire is running out for the job board plugin, plug and play solution. Chad Sowash (37:30): The association play is definitely there and there's money there, there's no question. But the thing is, overall, I believe Madgex being the biggest job board platform player in the UK, I believe those days are very numbered. So, being a pure play job board, that's not going to be the case, because they're not going to focus on innovation and helping these companies try to have a market differentiator. Right? If you own a job board company right now and you have a platform, you want your provider to always be looking toward the future. That's just not going to happen anymore Madgex, I feel. They're going to be looking toward associations, again where there are money and there are monies available, and they're just going to stock 2008 job board stuff and associations will be happy with that because they didn't have shit before. Joel Cheesman (38:27): Yeah. I just don't think there's a whole lot of money and getting cash from associations. Chad Sowash (38:32): I think there is. Joel Cheesman (38:34): Well, then why don't we see more job board platforms and softwares pop up? Chad Sowash (38:38): You do. Joel Cheesman (38:39): When was the last startup you saw? Chad Sowash (38:41): It's not about the startups, it's about the companies who are pivoting their current tech to that market because they see dollars, like Madgex. When they see that they don't have to compete on the innovation front, but they can go get dollars in the association realm, that's why they did it. And that's the way they, poof, went away. Right? And there are other job sites, the web scribbles of the world, community brands, the one platform that job target used to own and sold off to community brands, that's pretty much all they do. Right? So they are out there, but they're just not innovative, which is one of the reasons why we hardly ever talk about them, or even know that they're out there. Because they're boring as shit. Joel Cheesman (39:23): If the dog was free (Inaudible), pal. I'll go wash my hands. Joel Cheesman (39:23): Yeah. Joel Cheesman (39:23): This Corona thing. SFX (39:23): Oh, my God. Okay. It's happening. SFX (39:32): What's the procedure? SFX (39:32): Stay (Beeps) calm. Walken (39:34): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese, and 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, Lu, Nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you listen 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 Grub cheese. It's so weird. We out. #Freelance #remote #virtual #Google #Upwork #Madgex #StepStone #PayEquity #Equity #Coronavirus #Events

Robert Ruff is back and joins The Chad & Cheese for another VOICES episode with candid conversations about: - Silver Bullets all around - Artificial Intelligence Trainwreck - CEO's at cocktail parties, that's the problem! Enjoy this Voices Series podcast from The Chad & Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Intro: (00:00) Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and confident. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese, that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. Intro: (00:34) Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad Sowash: (01:04) Welcome back. We're picking the conversation back up with Robert Ruff, president of Sovren, industry veteran and all around smart dude. Let's kind of pivot here back to the industry overall. And we've had a lot of movement in the last year, year and a half, acquisitions, mergers, I mean, and investment and what have you. Where do you see the most exciting piece? Because you see there's money flowing pretty much everywhere and anywhere in this industry now. What's the most exciting piece for you, knowing what you guys do at Sovren obviously, but maybe outside of that a little bit. What excites you the most about what you see happening? Robert Ruff: (01:47) What I see happening is that, even as there's a lot of consolidation, that does not rule out the ability of new companies and smaller companies to thrive. So it is still all about a niche. You can't compete on scale if you're a little company or a start-up, but you can compete on finding a niche and servicing that niche better than the other person. I talked to a customer of ours the other day who wanted to talk to me about quote, how they were going to disrupt the industry. And my view of what's actually disruptive is literally just doing things right. So if you look at some of these really big companies, they have a momentum that propels them forward despite the fact that at the core level, some of their stuff is really bad. But it's like in the old days when they said nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. A huge company is not going to buy some tiny little company software to run the business on. So to a certain extent it's big companies buying from big companies and that's the way it is. But that doesn't mean that software is actually that good. And I think there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity just for companies to sit down and say, "From this starting point to this end point, what is required to do it really well?" Instead of looking for the magic bullet, like, oh, we just disrupted using those one little piece of AI, that's not disrupting anything. Chad Sowash: (03:21) But isn't that what the buyer's always looking for though? They're always looking for the silver bullet. There's no real strategy behind it, building talent pipelines that will actually pay off, let's say five years in the future or what have you. It's all about the here and now, kind of like the birthday party. You want to have a party, but you don't want to clean up after it. There's a lot of work to be able to create something that is that sustainable and that can scale. But it seems like we don't want to do that. We're just looking for the easy button all the damn time. Joel Cheesman: (03:54) Get off my lawn. Robert Ruff: (04:00) Okay. The answer is neither one of us. That was the get off my lawn rant. Joel Cheesman: (04:06) Yes. Robert Ruff: (04:06) Oh gosh. Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of that. I call it, to me it's what happens at cocktail parties, right? It's the Instagram view of you. No one posts on Instagram like this is me crying today in the corner. This is me yesterday, I was so depressed. It's the idealized view of you. Well, it's at the cocktail party. I've never been to a cocktail party and had somebody tell me about how they just lost a ton of money on an investment. Chad Sowash: (04:36) Yeah. Robert Ruff: (04:38) It's always, "Oh, my stocks are doing great." I'm like, "All of them, really?" I think that there's a lot of ... Oh, backup. I'll tell a tiny little story. We got called in by one of the biggest companies in the world. It's an extremely tech-oriented company and their whole mission was they had to put in AI into their hiring process. So, we wanted to talk to him about it. There was just a lot of stop talking, stop talking. No, we need the most AI. Tell me you have AI this AI that. And finally, I was like, "Did this come down from the CEO directly?" And they're like, "Yes. Yes it did." And I'm like, "Literally he went to a cocktail party and someone wound him up on this and then he called up the head of HR and told you this?" And that person was in the room and they said, "That is literally what happened." And I was like, "Okay, okay. Well, here's the thing. We're not here to actually help that happen because that's a train wreck." Again, that's like looking for the buzzword tool that's going to make you the cool person in the party. It's not going to get the job done. Joel Cheesman: (05:38) Robert, can you talk about, I think longevity is sort of a part of that as well. You're one of those sort of rare organizations that at least from my viewpoint has grown organically, has grown fairly slowly, has been really committed to the vision that you started out with. And we have companies obviously, Uncommon comes to mind as a recent one that, we counted at least three pivots in 18 months going through $18 million and they're no longer around. So, talk a little bit about longevity and how that's been important to your business. Robert Ruff: (06:11) I think it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to stay embedded in your niche and do one thing and do it well. It's not the shiny object, it's not sexy. It doesn't make people want to throw money at you. But if you're in business to actually make money and not just sell something to someone else, by more money I mean sell something. I mean, sell your company to someone else. If you're actually in business to, the old-fashioned way, just make some money. I don't think that there's any way that you can do that without having a laser focus. You can't be all things to all people. And what happens is companies want to chase every single dollar of revenue. So, somebody comes running in and they're like, "If we'll just add this feature, we can get that sale." Robert Ruff: (06:59) But you wake up one day, five years down the road, and you have 400 features in your software of which 300 you don't even remember what they do, no one uses them. But you'll get a call today from someone who did actually use that feature and it's broken. And you're like, "Oh, gosh, how are we going to fix that?" And so, you end up with a company that either has too many products that don't do anything well enough, or one product that is so fragmented that you don't even remember what it's supposed to do well. And with Sovren, what we have done is say, "We don't want to be that store that has 15 different things on the window. Like you can fax, you can wear notaries, you can copy. I don't want to be 15 things. I want to have one thing that is super hard so that the barrier to entry isn't money, it's time and intelligence. And when we found that niche, the barrier to entry was time and intelligence, we said, "Let's just occupy this niche and let's dominate it. And while everybody is forgetting that they have to get better every day, they just want to do more every day. Let's just get better every day instead of doing more." And that is the entire secret sauce. Chad Sowash: (08:11) I think the whole like 15 things was really the counter to Walmart. And that's kind of the idea, the whole thought process we've gotten into from a business standpoint is like we have to go against the big guys who are doing it all. So therefore, we have to try to do it all, which is sharpen lawnmower blades or whatever it might be, the little things, but I agree 100%. And when we're talking to start-ups, it's always, where's your focus and are you disciplined on that? Much like the Uncommon story, they just had no discipline. They had great, smart, incredible people, but there was literally no discipline behind it. Where does that come from? That has to be from the top. That has to be the CEO or from the C-suite. Where does that actually come from in a start-up? Robert Ruff: (09:02) I don't know where it comes from in a start-up. It comes from the C-suite, for sure. Honestly, one of the surprising attributes that pervades the culture of Sovren is a stitch of collection of really lazy people. Chad Sowash: (09:19) I can't believe Joel doesn't work there. Robert Ruff: (09:25) When we hire people, we let them know that like, I want to know what you're lazy about. Because here's the thing, in our business, if you're up against ... if you're going to be great in IT, I guarantee what you learned five years ago isn't really important today. What I want to know is how do you learn? How do you solve problems? How do you get around this barrier? And when you're lazy, you're like, "Ah, I'm not going to go do this until I figure out the easy way to get this done." Chad Sowash: (09:58) That's thinking smarter, not harder. I don't know about lazy but Joel Cheesman: (10:02) I'm picking up what Robert's putting [crosstalk 00:10:05.11]. Chad Sowash: (10:02) You just do the lazy way, as in I'm going to wait until Chad does it. Joel Cheesman: (10:10) I love these interviews where they're like, pro nap, pro smarter, not harder. We have some great guests. Robert Ruff: (10:19) But you do realize that taking a nap is actually what you want your knowledge workers to do Joel Cheesman: (10:24) Oh yeah. Robert Ruff: (10:25) You want them going off. Joel Cheesman: (10:28) Yeah. Robert Ruff: (10:28) But when I say lazy, I don't really mean lazy. But what I mean is like, we had a situation the other day where our guy that runs our IT and I were having a discussion and I said, "I think employee X is way off track. There is no possible way what he's been doing for two weeks should have taken two weeks. I literally think it was a two-hour deal. What's going on?" And so what had happened was, is this employee misunderstood what our coding practices were and thought he was not allowed to do something the easy way, he was right, but he was wrong. In our core product, we would not have let him do what he was wanting to do the way he wanted to do it. But he was just writing a report that was not core. And yes, there's a simple easy way to do it. Robert Ruff: (11:11) And instead of getting clarification, he decided that he was going to spend two weeks doing it the hard way. I don't want people to do it the hard way, I want people to do it the easy way. So what he should have done was pick up the phone and say, "This is going to take two weeks to do it this way. Are you sure that's what I'm supposed to be doing?" So we had a training issue there. I mean, you should have valued employee, but that's the kind of employee that needs more training on a mindset of you're not a hero for solving this problem yourself. You would have been a hero for solving it in two hours. Even if that really meant asking your co-worker like, "Hey, can you solve this for me? Because I don't know what to do." Chad Sowash: (11:50) Did you find ... That sounds like a communication, yeah, you can classify it as training, but it also seems like a communication problem too. Generally working in sales and marketing, who are people who overcommunicate, you have to ask for clarity around things because there so much. In working with IT professionals, is it that there's not enough communication that's happening and they're just taking the information, not asking for clarification? How do you manage that? It's got to be much different. Robert Ruff: (12:22) Again, we try to hire for what you could know rather than what you do know. When we're hiring you, we're not really looking for people that know the kind of software we do because they don't exist very often. What we want to know is what do you not know? We're going to find an important thing. We're going to give you that task and we're literally going to watch you for one hour live solve that problem. I want to know how you're going to research the problem. I want to know what sources of information you go to. I want to know if you even ask us questions. We didn't tell you, you couldn't ask us how to do it. Robert Ruff: (12:57) I mean, that's an interesting thing, right? I want you to solve something, I'm going to watch you solve it. I didn't tell you what to do. You could've said, "Well, okay, how do I solve it? Tell me." We probably would have told you like, "You're brilliant. You're hired." Because that's what we want. I want to know that you are the most productive learner because that's what's going to get us down the road. I guarantee you the software that we do today the way we do it will not be competitive three years from now. But I don't know where we need to be three years from now, but I want people that are always figuring out this is the pivot we need to take. Chad Sowash: (13:36) Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com #AI #Technology #software #RobertRuff #VOICES #virtual #remote #Talent

Joel is on the record calling Bullhorn's Marketplace "bullshit". Enter Nina Eigerman, SVP Alliances & Biz Dev from Bullhorn who joins this episode to enlighten Joel and feed him his own words. Enjoy this podcast RUMBLE made possible by Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Sovren: 00:01 Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now based on that technology, come Sovren's artificial intelligence matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second, receive match results that provide candidate scored by fit to job. And just as importantly, the job's fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. SFX: 00:43 Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad Sowash: 00:59 Time for a 99 [00:01:07.24] Inaudible] baby. Joel Cheesman: 01:17 Oh yeah. You want to get nuts? Let's get nuts. Chad Sowash: 01:17 I'm going to dance. Joel Cheeseman: 01:18 I'm going to dance. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad Sowash: 01:26 And I am Chad Sowash. Joel Cheesman: 01:28 And we are pleasantly joined today by Nina, 99 loof balloons, Eigerman. Chad Sowash: 01:34 That's right. Joel Cheesman: 01:35 VP of alliances and business development at- Chad Sowash: 01:41 Bullhorn. Joel Cheeseman: 01:44 Listeners may remember a while back I referred to Bullhorn and their paid to play marketplace as bullshit. Chad Sowash: 01:49 What? Joel Cheesman: 01:49 So Bullhorn's credit, they said, "Hold the phone, we're going to get Nina, the pit bull, Eigerman, on a podcast with you to tell you how you got it wrong." Chad Sowash: 01:58 Yeah. Joel Cheesman: 01:58 So Nina, welcome to the podcast. And more than that, thanks for having the balls to come on the podcast to tell us where we got it wrong. Chad Sowash: 02:09 Big applaud. Nina: 02:10 Really happy to be here, and thanks for having me. Joel Cheesman: 02:12 She's so nice. I can't do this. Chad Sowash: 02:16 After all of the bullshit calling. Yes. But before we jump into that, first off, I would like to say, thanks for coming on, because as we do here at the Chad Cheese Podcast, we love to have companies on to be able to add more color and more information around our opinion/in some cases, bad research, Joel Cheesman. Joel Cheesman: 02:40 And we love to rumble. Nina- Chad Sowash: 02:44 Tell us about you. Nina: 02:44 Sure. Happy. I am the VP of alliances and business development at Bullhorn, which means that I'm responsible for our marketplace and all of our partnership programs. I've been in the staffing industry for almost 20 years, done everything from working a desk to being out on assignment. I joined Bullhorn after a brief stint as an investment banker and a longer stint as a consultant. So I have a pretty broad view of the ecosystem and I have a fondness for the staffing industry in general. Joel Cheesman: 03:21 And as we learned, you like to steal your kids' headphones- Nina: 03:26 I do. Joel Cheesman: 03:26 When you're doing podcast interviews because they have way better equipment than you do. Nina: 03:29 They do it. It's definitely one of the advantages of having children, there's always some electronics around the house that you can pick up. Joel Cheesman: 03:37 Chad and I both appreciate. We'll get into the marketplace for a second, but I'm curious, the podcast goes live, I think even the title was like, Bullhorn is Bullshit. When you heard the podcast and our comments, what was your initial thought? Did you guys want a pipe bomb our houses? What exactly was the response there internally? Chad Sowash: 03:59 How would you go to pipe bombing? Nina: 04:01 No, no pipe bombing. I'm familiar with you guys, I know the style. It wasn't totally shocking to me that you would use the very obvious Bullhorn line, which we've heard before. But, I really wanted to come on because I felt that you really missed the point of the Bullhorn marketplace, which is that we love entrepreneurs and we love the ecosystem and we really want to foster innovation for recruiters and for staffing firms in general. And for you to say that the Bullhorn marketplace wasn't good for entrepreneurs, I was just like, wait, they haven't heard what we do. They don't know about how we spend time with companies and really help them to learn about staffing and recruiting and the ways in which staffing and recruiting are fundamentally different from Corp HR. Because we see a ton of entrepreneurs who come in, they have something that they either developed in Corp HR or that they've started to to sell into Corp HR and then they think, "Oh well we can just bring this over to the staffing and recruiting industry," and they don't have any of the right examples. They don't have the right value proposition. They don't understand the difference of the economics, the fundamental ways in which the staffing firm operates. And we spend time with them, help them get good examples, help them change the language of their marketing material so that it's more applicable for staffing and recruiting and really do a ton to help them. Chad Sowash: 05:28 Nina, I get all that, and that's all warm and fuzzy and I love that stuff, but this was all really based around Joel's thought process of joining a marketplace shouldn't cost them anything. To be able to ensure that there's a low barrier of entry so that they can get their tech in front of these staffing companies, I think that was really the base of where Joel was coming from. Joel Cheesman: 05:55 Yeah. And to add color, it wasn't you're anti-entrepreneurial, I think it was an anti-startup sentiment, that these companies don't have the money and you guys still aren't on record as to how much it costs to get in the marketplace. So I'd like to dig into that a little bit. But I don't think there's a sentiment that you guys are anti-entrepreneurial, I just have a problem with the toll that some of the ATS's and platforms are charging startups to get on the field. Nina: 06:23 Well, I think you're cutting it fine to say that we're not anti-entrepreneurial, but we're anti-startup. I think that we're really trying to make sure that there is a low barrier. Joel Cheesman: 06:34 They're the same to you? Nina: 06:34 They're kind of the same to me. Joel Cheesman: 06:35 Okay. Nina: 06:35 We really help those startups, and I think the numbers speak for themselves that we've grown. We started the developer program, which is our entry level program for partners to start to develop on the Bullhorn platform, and we started that program maybe two and a half years ago and we now have over 70 companies that are in the developer program. And it is a very low barrier to entry. I'm not going to lay out all of the economics of the entire marketplace program for you, but I will let you know that ... I will tell you that the entry point for the developer program is a $5,000 annual fee. And to be honest, if you're not willing to invest $5,000 into developing for the staffing and recruiting industry and working on the Bullhorn platform, you probably aren't really committed to being in staffing and recruiting. Chad Sowash: 07:29 Ouch. Nina: 07:29 For that 5,000 you're getting time with the alliances team, you're getting a sandbox, you're getting access to developer documentation. You're getting your own API key. You're getting your ability to really develop against the Bullhorn platform. And as I said, I think the numbers speak for themselves. It's pretty popular. Chad Sowash: 07:45 Yeah. I think that was pretty much my stance when we were talking about this. From a cost standpoint, there are resources that are allocated for a marketplace, and to be able to charge for that, there has to be some kind of barrier to entry to an extent, to be able to demonstrate commitment. Because if it's free, and you'll see with some of the apps that are out there today, if it's free, then anybody can just throw an app in there. Right? So getting to to the actual marketplace strategy itself, okay, there is a barrier to entry, it is $5,000. What is the actual marketplace major strategy right now with startups? Is it to be able to provide a different types of tech and resources to your current clients or is there something else behind it? Because we know, and talking to the other applicant tracking systems, they're using marketplaces for different reasons. Nina: 08:39 The real thing is, that we don't ever want to be a barrier for innovation. What we see is that every staffing firm is different and they really need to be able to tailor their solution, their technology stack to fit what they're trying to do. And Bullhorn as a platform enables them to have all that technology plugged into a single system and have access to that in a single pane of glass, as we like to say. Having all of your technology integrated is really great for the staffing firm and we don't ever want to stand in the way of the staffing firm being able to do that. So we have a very open policy and we talk to every company that applies to be part of the marketplace. We'll spend half an hour walking through a demo with them, understanding what they're trying to do. And as long as they're really a viable company as opposed to just a guy with an idea, they can join the developer program and be on track to be part of the marketplace. And then the criteria for moving from that entry level developer program into being a full marketplace partner has to do with the market acceptance. It's all about how many Bullhorn customers are using your technology. It's not about whether I think that it's a great technology and it's a brilliant idea, I've certainly been wrong before, it's really about whether our customers are buying it and adopting it. And if we have 10, 15 customers using the technology, then that technology can move on to be part of the marketplace. Joel Cheesman: 10:10 And then at that point, you start talking about M&A. Right? Nina: 10:14 Well, I think, I was talking to someone, one of my colleagues in the office, Vinda Souzaand she's like, it's not the only way that we do M&A, we have acquired a lot of companies that are more at part of the marketplace, but she was like, "Well, it's the same reason that you date people at work," right? It's proximity. We know these companies really well. You look at a company like Herefish, we've been working with these guys for a long time and [00:10:40.09] Crosstalk] seen the popularity among our customer base and seen the benefit that our customers have from working with that technology. And so, it was a natural acquisition Chad Sowash: 10:50 Does the likelihood go up if you're in the market place for M&A, for those startups or does it even matter? Nina: 10:57 I don't think it really matters that much. It's not really a criteria for entering the marketplace and it wouldn't be a reason that I would cite to someone that they should join the marketplace. I think the value of the marketplace stands on its own. And when you think about the access that these startups have to 11,000 customers who are in the staffing and recruiting industry, and being able to leverage our sales team to go out and talk to folks, I think it's really beneficial for them to be part of the ecosystem. And that should be enough of a reason. Joel Cheesman: 11:36 We're not going to agree on this, and that's totally fine. I think for you to say five grand is no big deal is a little bit of hubris. I think there are plenty of startups that five grand is a big deal, even though they'd like to develop on the platform. I also think it's a challenge to say, "Okay, how many ATS's hiring platforms, whatever are there?" And if each one is five grand, then that quickly adds up to a lot of money for a lot of startups. So we're obviously not going to agree on whether five is a lot or not, or if they're not willing to spend five, then they're not serious about their business. I don't think we're going to agree on that, personally. I can look at, Apple is $99 a year to develop on their platform. Google is free. Slack is free. iCIMS is now free. I could go on and on. I think it's just a business decision that you guys have made to say, "We're going to make money on our platform and this is the fee to play on our platform." Yes? Nina: 12:34 Yeah. I often will use the analogy about planned economy versus a market economy. I personally believe in a market economy and I think we need to deliver enough value to these companies to have it be worthy to them to spend the $5,000. And I want to feel like we're on the hook to do that. Free is not a good price point to create an economic exchange. Chad Sowash: 13:02 The sustainability behind that, obviously isn't very easy, unless again, you're using this as a litmus test for M&A. Nina: 13:13 It's not a litmus test for M&A, but it is a litmus test for the staffing industry, that sometimes people will say, "Well, I want to be on every ATS out there. I want to be part of every ecosystem." And they haven't really thought about the difference between Bullhorn and a Corp HR system, and the fact that we really are an end to end staffing platform and that it's really designed for the staffing and recruiting industry. And that piece of it, I want them to pause and think for a moment about whether this is something that's worth it, and then I want to be able to help them to have the resources to be able to help them really tailor their solution. Joel Cheesman: 13:55 And there's also thinking creatively around, Apple takes 30% of everything you make on their platform, that's bought through their platform. There are creative ways to be accessible and yet make money on your end without having the hurdles that maybe you currently have. Nina: 14:11 30% seems like a lot to me. Joel Cheesman: 14:13 But if it's free to get on, and you only give you money if you make money, that's just a barrier that you could take down for startups and companies. Yes? Chad Sowash: 14:21 The heroin drip. Nina: 14:23 I think that that would not be in the economic best interest of the startups to do it that way, personally. But I'd rather match the value that we're delivering to the cost that's incurred, rather than having it be like, it's going to be free up front, but we're looking to stick it to you at the back end. I'd rather have it be like, we're going to charge you upfront because all of our costs are at that rate. We're spending time with you, we're validating the integration, we're making sure that this all works. We'll provide the sandbox, and at the back end, it's not going to be a 30%. Chad Sowash: 14:58 And we're basically just talking about the semantics of different business models. There's one way to get paid up front or during the course. The business model is the business model. That being said, another business model we want to be able to talk about is Herefish. Nina: 15:12 Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad Sowash: 15:12 And why? You just recently acquired Herefish. I didn't see a number. How much did you guys pay for that? Joel Cheesman: 15:18 How much was that again? Nina: 15:20 We're not disclosing the price of the transaction, like most of those transactions. Yeah. Chad Sowash: 15:25 Uh, okay. Got you. Okay. We're talking about staffing, and obviously staffing is much different than talent acquisition because obviously staffing, it is the business of recruiting, right? When you're talking to your clients, which are staffing companies, you're always talking about the most efficient, I'm assuming, trying to help them in margins, those types of things, how did Herefish help you?And how do you think, how do you believe Herefish will help you with that conversation moving forward with staffing companies? Nina: 15:57 Sure. So we have three core components to Run as One strategy, which is about being a end to end platform for staffing firms. One is to have technology that starts at the beginning of the recruiting process and runs all the way through invoicing and payment. The second is AI and automation. And the third is our open ecosystem. Herefish, coming from the open ecosystem, flows right into that second pillar of automation and AI. So the core reason that we acquired them is their ability to automate workflows and enable our customers to spend more time on the relationship aspects of their business and less time doing routine tasks like time sheet reminders or sending people out on assignment. Chad Sowash: 16:50 Got you. So, when we're talking about the Herefish acquisition, how many of your clients were actually using the product, before you guys went through acquisition talks? Nina: 17:01 They're relatively small company on the marketplace. They've been working with our customer base, but without having a mass level of adoption. And one of the things that we're really looking forward to is being able to bring their value proposition, which is around data cleanliness and workflow automation and communications to both candidates and customers and colleagues, to bring that to a broader set of our customer base and enable more people to take advantage of this technology. Joel Cheesman: 17:40 So we agree that was a nice acquisition and we talked about it on the weekly show. So I'm curious, what are some future acquisitions you guys might be looking at? Or if you're not willing to name names, what sort of technologies or directions of companies are you looking to maybe gobble up? Nina: 17:58 Well, I can tell you what we're seeing in terms of the types of technologies that our customer base are really interested in and the things that we're seeing as good compliments to Bullhorn. I don't have a crystal ball in terms of what the acquisition landscape looks like, but I can tell you that advanced search and match is something that we're seeing a lot of adoption and traction. People being able to ... Sort of this, the promise of hands-free recruiting, right? It can come in, AI can analyze the job description, can then bring back a set of candidates that would be applicable for that job. The second key area that we're seeing, is in chatbots and text communication and candidate engagement. Ton of activity in that space. Nina: 18:47 We have a number of marketplace partners there. We have SenseHQ. We have Maya. We have TextUs, CloudCall entering into that from the VoIP space. So that's the second area. The third area is that integrated VoIP space, with CloudCall and now TextUs doing that as well, where people are going beyond just click to dial, to actually leveraging the call recording functionality and features to be able to train employees to make things easier and to have more focus on the relationship building and less on dialing for dollars. We're also seeing other communication technologies like portals. I don't know if you guys covered some of the recent tribulations of JXT, which is one of our marketplace partners. But Volcanic is also in that space and Haley Marketing, and the ability for people to communicate with both candidates and customers in an automated way at the time and place that they want them is a big one. Nina: 19:46 Also, we see some stuff in like video interviewing and there's a bunch of ... The ecosystem's really vibrant. Chad Sowash: 19:52 Yeah. There's a lot of noise out there. Joel Cheesman: 19:55 Yeah. Chad Sowash: 19:55 From your standpoint, what is the mos vapor ware-ish type of thing that's out there today? Joel Cheesman: 20:03 Biggest poser. Nina: 20:04 Certainly video interviewing is something. I've been around for long enough to remember when it first came out and it was this huge, we were going to completely transform our recruiting process around the idea of being able to do video interviews and- Joel Cheesman: 20:17 We all remember that. Chad Sowash: 20:18 That, and Second Life. I think Second Life came out around that time. Nina: 20:23 Yeah, Second Life. Oh my God, yes. I remember that. That was big. Joel Cheesman: 20:27 That was one of my topics in MySpace for a while. Nina: 20:30 IBM was going to like do all their recruiting in Second Life. Chad Sowash: 20:32 Yes. Nina: 20:36 That was big. Joel Cheesman: 20:36 I do remember that. Nina: 20:36 Well, I hate to say this, but we're old. Chad Sowash: 20:39 No, I'm not. Joel Cheesman: 20:41 Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you. So video ... Yeah. Sorry. Nina: 20:44 Anyway. I remember when video first came out, huge amount of noise and all of this stuff, then it died down, but it came back and then different functionality. And there was this promise of sort of self service, first round interviewing that people could edit their own ... It just won't go away. It's like it dies down for a little bit, and then it comes back. We're actually seeing a big swing of startups in the video interviewing space, new companies, and then also more noise from some of our largest customers. [Romstad[00:21:20.27]] made a big investment in Montage and we see Hinterview and there's like a bunch of new companies coming out in this space. And I'm like, if that works, great. I'm just not seeing the uptake that I would expect given how long that's been around. Joel Cheesman: 21:38 Do any of them have like TikTok editing tools as part of their interview process? Nina: 21:42 As I mentioned before, old, therefore, TikTok kind of outside of my space of understanding. Chad Sowash: 21:53 [00:21:54.13] Crosstalk] Yeah. You need to download that app. You need to download that app. Let's pivot really quickly to- Nina: 21:59 No, no, no, no. I have children, they do that for me. Chad Sowash: 22:02 Yeah. Let's pivot real quick to high volume. So staffing, obviously staffing industry, high volume's big, what are you guys doing, what are you seeing in high volume that is exciting? We're hearing stories of organizations, staffing-like organizations, that are turning engagements around in less than 10 minutes and having interviews scheduled and so on and so forth. What are you seeing that's exciting around the high volume side? Nina: 22:33 I'm seeing a couple of exciting things in the high volume space. One thing that I'm really psyched about is we have SenseHQ as one of our partners and they've come out of a real deep understanding of staffing and recruiting and they've done some really cool things around automating, all that stuff of making sure that a candidate actually goes from placement, to showing up, right? In that high volume space, you could have a 30% drop off between the people who are placed and the people who actually start day one. If you can intervene during that time, and then between day one and the end of the first week of the assignment, the amount of communication that you have during that time can really avoid that drop off during the assignment. So they've done a lot of work around that, and I really, I'm a big fan there. Nina: 23:24 The second one is we have a developer partner, not yet marketplace partner, called Workin, based in Atlanta. That's done some really neat placement stuff. We also partner with a couple of other, I think there's like six or seven, of these automated scheduling tools. And we acquired a company called TempBuddy as part of the Erecruit acquisition that's also in this mobile app placement space. So I think there's a lot of activity there. Chad Sowash: 23:51 Yeah. Joel Cheesman: 23:51 Cool. Nina: 23:55 I have not seen anyone really own the space, but there's a big opportunity. So I'm excited about that. Joel Cheesman: 24:00 Well, Nina, please come on when you do find that company that is hitting the mark. Nina Eigerman, everybody. Nina: 24:08 Yeah. Joel Cheesman: 24:08 Thanks for joining us. Major kudos for coming on the show. We appreciate it. For those listeners out there who don't know Bullhorn or want to know more about you, where do you send them? Nina: 24:20 They should come to partners@bullhorn.com and/or follow me on all the major social channels, not Tik-Tok, but you can find me on LinkedIn @Nina Eigerman. Joel Cheesman: 24:30 And with that, we out. Chad Sowash: 24:31 We out. Announcer: 24:29 This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #Technology #partnership #Merger #ATS #Bullhorn

It's a party and nobody is invited - STAY HOME & LISTEN! TOPICS! How are ZipRecruiter and Indeed adapting to the ever-evolving employment landscape during coronavirus? Plus: - Mya gets more cash!?! - Amazon & Kroger become our crisis backbone - LinkedIn releases something to piss users off and WTF is HiringSolved doing with Paths.in? Seriously? We're confused, which will sound familiar to our listeners anyway. Wash your hands and enjoy this break from the dire, powered by Canvas, Sovren, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps corporations tap new channels to find qualified talent in the disability community, manage culture change, leverage federal and state hiring incentives, respond to a changing regulatory environment, and strengthen their workforce through diversity. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad and Joel are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel : Oh, yeah. Practicing social distancing since 2017. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most disinfected weekly round-up of the industry. I'm your co-host Joel germaphobe . Chad : I'm Chad give me some of that sanitizer . Joel : I love it. On this week show, yep, it's still corona time. Zip and Indeed are coping in their own special ways. Mya gets paid and eQUEST makes, God help us, a marky mark reference. I'm feeling the vibration. So that must mean it's time for a word from one of our sponsors. We'll be back. Yo, where's the Purell? Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvasbot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel : You're still alive, Chad? Chad : Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. Joel : Good. Are you fevering? Chad : No, I am not. Although, I now want to go out and get one of those thermometers that actually have an app that are associated to it because they're starting to use that to look for hot spots throughout the US. I thought that was fucking cool. Joel : Nice, nice. I'm curious, what's your home office work set up with the family and other members? What's the layout? Chad : It's a little easier for me because first off, I have kids that can go do their own thing. We have a downstairs. We have about a 4,000 square foot house. So I have my own office. Julie has her own office and we can go pretty much wherever we want. I mean we're pretty lucky in that respect. We don't have little kids running around all over the place. Joel : Right. So you got Tristan at home. Is he at school or at home full time? Chad : Yeah. Joel : Does he have swim practice? What's that look like? Chad : Yeah, no. All of that's called off, school won't happen, I would say probably, they're saying through the end of March, but I'm going to say probably through mid April at best. Joel : Yeah, we just got the alert that May 2nd I think was the extension date from April 2nd. So is Kennedy, your college student, is she at home or what's she doing? Chad : She's not and she will be home on Sunday, so they're actually kicking them out. They were doing online courses there and she lives in the sorority. But they're like, "Everybody go home." So she's going to be on her way home on Sunday. Joel : Get the hell out. Chad : Yeah. Joel : Yeah. I've got a ... So, my wife is a college professor, which means I have about three monitors at a makeshift desk upstairs in our loft area, and a nice addition, a 3D printer that she's brought home from the research lab. So, all kinds of fun I could have with a 3D printer. I'll keep you updated. And then of course we have a three year old who's pretty much just everywhere and it's hard to get shit done. And I know it's been a real hassle on our scheduling of podcasts, but unfortunately that's just the state of the world when it's corona time baby. Chad : Let that little guy just be another co-host, bring him right on. Joel : Well, the good news is he's three so he can at least talk and not stick his fingers in light sockets and pull the dog's tail and stuff like that. So, he's in much less danger than he would've been a year ago. Chad : He's doing much better than you because you still have problems with those things. Joel : Yeah, I still have problems going upstairs and pull the dog's tail. I know, I've got issues too. Chad : All right. Let's get out the shout-outs. Joel : Shout-outs. Chad : Right out of the gate. Again, this is kind of coronavirus time. I want to give big shout-out to the parent company of Louis Vuitton. That company has converted three of its perfume and makeup factories into hand sanitizer manufacturers. It says it could produce twelve tons as soon as this week. All of it will be given free of charge to French health authorities who will in turn distribute it to 39 public hospitals in Paris. That is amazing. Chad : And anybody who loved Louis Vuitton before are going to obviously be more indebted to that brand. Much like a not so well known brand called Bendt Distilleries, Lewisville, Texas. They shut down their distillery tours and tasting because of all the coronavirus concerns. But now instead of using the mixture, like their potent mixture to wash things around the distillery, which makes sense, they're turning that into hand sanitizers, which also keeps their people doing something and purpose-driven. So again, Louis Vuitton, Bendt Distilleries, right out of the gate, this is the kind of thing that community needs and just big shout-out, big applause to those guys. Joel : Yeah. Love how corporate America and corporations all around the world are stepping up. Little known fact about Chad, he owns a pair of leather Louis Vuitton pants, which he rarely wears, but it's worth noting. Also, don't forget Elon Musk and Tesla who have offered their warehouses to make ventilators if necessary for hospitals around the country. And Google, who was caught off guard by our president, Donald Trump, that they were building a website for coronavirus when there had never been a conversation that took place. But Google, the good spot, they're making a website per Donald Trump's orders, good for them, we appreciate that. Chad : It's making shit up out of thin air. It would be nice though if with all these offers if we just said, "Go do it." Yeah, we do need ventilators, that's going to happen. Do we care if we have a surplus? No. Go fucking make them. Joel : Also it's great to see Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba over in China. He tweeted this week that a million some tests were coming over to the US from China and said, "Good luck. Good luck to our American friends." So it was a nice bit of diplomacy by Jack Ma, I think that was really worth noting, shoutout. Chad : Yeah. And also hospital face masks, which we need. Protective gear, which we need as well. Moving onto the next shout-out, we were tagged in a tweet by, or actually a retweet by Bear Recruitment. So here's what the tweets said, and this is very specific to I believe what we're going to see more of, "For my next job interview, I'm going to ask my future employer, what are the things you've done for your employees during the COVID-19 community quarantine?" SFX: Hell yeah. Joel : Love to hear some of those answers. Chad : Yeah, I know, right? So if you're a company like Louis Vuitton or Bendt Distilling, then I mean, you have a great story, not just from a consumer standpoint. Joel : Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. Another corporate shout-out, Starbucks introduced mental health support benefit for their workers. I thought that was a nice step forward in the right direction. Chad : Yeah. Also, Facebook is offering its workplace services for free for coronavirus pandemic responder. So, another way, instead of using Slack let's say, to use Facebook, which everybody is probably pretty accustomed to, to communicate during this pandemic. Joel : Yeah, not a shabby sales tactic either to get people on the heroin drip during a disaster. A group of shout-outs here for Paradox who we don't mention too much. A lot of people may know them as Olivia, the chatbot. But they made a pretty nice hire this week, Adam Godson, who we've interviewed for the show. Aaron Matos who is the CEO and founder of the company welcomed a baby boy to the mix Chad : Well, hello. Joel : ... this past month. I believe his name is Beckett, so good for him. And also they were in Forbes listed as a best start-up employer along with Joveo. So, Paradox is having some good news here in 2020, which is nice. Chad : Nice. Well, that's two big guns Aaron Matos has acquired thus far. Josh Zywien, if you remember Joel : JZ. Chad : ... earlier this year from SmashFly, and now Adam from CieloAnd now that Aaron has a baby, hopefully the baby will take most of Aaron's time so that he can get the fuck out of these guys way. Because I'm telling you, you let JZ and Adam Godson do their thing and remove their obstacles, they will kick ass and take names. So great hires. Go play with the baby Aaron. Joel : I did get a photo with the baby in a bassinet next to the home office desk. He is still working but maybe out of the way a little bit more than usual. Shout-out to Bill Ackman. If you're not scared enough already, I encourage you to go to CNBC and look at a 18 minute interview with Bill Ackman, a famous venture capitalist on the coronavirus. It was just very enlightening, I wanted to give a shout-out to him, because he was keeping it real to say the least. Chad : Yeah. He was known as the golden boy in venture for a while until a little known, a big known pharmaceutical company slapped him around. Everybody's talking about remote working, remote working resources. We said last week and we'll definitely say again, go to recruitingbrainfood.com and subscribe because they have a great resource area for individuals who are now working remote. Personally, I cannot believe how unprepared we are as a workforce, especially office workers who have never worked from home and the companies, the managers who are not prepared on how to manage people that are not right in fucking front of them. This is 2020, how do we not have a handle on this, with a technology standpoint, and from a management standpoint? Joel : Well, in most cases, with mankind we tend to be very near sighted, and have blinders on and don't really have a lot of foresight with things like this. So when we are caught off guard, we play catch up and I think that's a lot of human nature. We're not prepared, we get hit, then we react to it and then we ease up and think everything is fine until the next disaster. Chad : And we're surprised even though we've been warned this shit is coming. Here's a great example from The Wall Street Journal. So The Wall Street Journal actually moved to a remote scenario for working from home. And here's an email that was shared and I quote, "While you're working at home, you should respond within just a few minutes to a Slack or group hangout message from your colleagues. Let your manager know where you are taking a break, conducting an interview, in a meeting or otherwise be unavailable for a while." Next one, "Make sure your cell phone number is readily accessible in your email signature, in your Slack status, in Workday, keep your phone ringer turned on and answer it when it rings. Now is not the time to screen calls." And last but not least, "Turn on your camera during Google Hangouts unless it weakens the connection to an unacceptable level." This is an email. Joel : This sounds like a message I sent to my teenage son not too long ago to keep his ringer on and actually answer emails and text messages, so yeah. We're all just children in the workplace I guess sometimes. Final shout-out from me, I wanted to send some love to my mother. People who know me really well know that my mother passed in January of this year. Today would have been her 79th birthday. So mom, shout-out to you, I'm definitely thinking of you and miss you. Chad : Ooh, just a quick breath on that one. Yeah, big shout-out to mama . Joel : She loved you Chad, by the way. Chad : She just loved the hugs, which we're social distancing. So right now, Joel, you're not going to be getting a hug anytime soon. Events, we're not traveling, so this is the not traveling with Chad and Cheese segment sponsored by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad : You went to Ace Hardware. I did a video from Kroger. I also did a video walking from one room to the next, just because that was pretty much demonstrating my commute. Times change, so you got to adapt, right? Joel : By the way, I'm really disappointed you didn't take the opportunity for me going to Ace Hardware and my do it yourself icon on my picture to make fun of me like, "Yeah, really what are you doing yourself?" And then, but you didn't. The answer would have been, I'm changing some light bulbs so it's a pretty easy do it yourself project. Chad : It is. Joel : But nonetheless, Ace is still the place if you want to get some light bulbs. Chad : Ace is the place for the helpful hardware man. And chadcheese.com is where you need to go for the t-shirt design contest. Now we got to remember, one day people, we will get back out to events and when that day comes, you're going to want the elegant feel of a Chad and Cheese custom tribe line tshirt as you glide through the expo hall. So go to chadcheese.com, vote on your favorite design and Joel : It's free. Chad : Yeah, I mean brought to our friends over at emissary.ai, because texting works every time. But seriously, last year we did our first t-shirt. We're really excited to do this years and get some more out to the people. Joel : Ready for news. Chad : Welcome to the corona block. Joel : Topics. SFX: It's corona time. It's corona time right now. Joel : Oh my God. There's only one thing that's flooding the news and our daily lives and that's the coronavirus. Let's start out light, get a little heavy and then we'll take it into the industry. Chad : Yeah. Let's start out with not killing Mel Brooks. How about that? Joel : Good idea. Chad : Max Brooks, if you don't know who Mel Brooks is, good God, watch Blazing Saddles at least. Max Brooks, who is Mel son put out a video on Twitter explaining why social distancing was good. Mel was behind a sliding glass door, which was kind of funny, while Max explained that he's in his late 40s, he's in good health, but still could easily spread the virus to his dad, Mel, who is 93. Mel could then give it to Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke. And before you know, it, Max could have effectively wiped out a whole generation of comic legends. Joel : Iconic treasures. Chad : That's exactly right. The point when it comes to coronavirus is that you have to think about who you can infect, not about just how you are feeling, and that's important. So practice social distancing, avoid crowds, wash your hands, keep six feet away and stay home. And his big message was, don't be a spreader. Nobody wants a spreader. Joel : I hate spreaders. And I'll throw in space balls just for good measure. And I see your Schwartz is as big as mine. My celebrity shout-out, well, first of all, Tom Hanks is out of the hospital and we talked about him. Chad : Woohoo. Joel : So big ups that Forrest Gump is out of the hospital. Kevin Bacon has partnered with an agency, you probably seen on social media. But everyone knows the six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. They've used that sort of pop culture reference to say, "Hey, don't be within any degrees of anybody unless they're family, close friends, et cetera." Kevin Bacon coming through with some nice comedic relief in addition to the Mel, the Max/Mel Brooks video. Chad : Yeah. You got to love it. In USA today, layoffs accelerate, but not everywhere, which is wonderful. Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Nordstrom, closing stores because of the coronavirus. Moms, small mom and pop shops shutting down because of operations. And in the restaurant sector alone, there could be a deluge of job cuts. Joel : Airlines, cruises, casinos. Chad : Yeah, especially in the states that have shutdown dining areas and restaurants and bars, including California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and the list goes on. This is a big switch for us because I mean, even though we work from home, I like getting out of the house and we ate out probably more than we should and we have it. So this has been a big change for us, but it's also impacted the economy and not in a very good way, right? Joel : Not in a very good way, unless you're healthcare or I guess food delivery services. Unemployment numbers came out today, they weren't crazy. However, the next round will probably be much worse. I mean, ultimately, and regardless of where you are politically, like in the Ackman video that I referenced earlier is really good at sort of clarifying like, we need White House leadership to say, everyone, unless you're really important, healthcare, food delivery, whatever, stay home, don't interact with people, stay six feet away. That's really the only way that we're going to take a 30 day hit and then come out of this. Joel : If we string it along, it's going to last 12, 18 months. Businesses are going to go out of business. People are going to ... It's going to be a depression, which is really scary particularly for us who make our living with the employment industry being healthy. It's great to see corporate America take the lead on some of this stuff. It's great to see countries like Germany, South Korea, even China has leveled off and come back from the depths. There is hope, and so I'm optimistic. I know you are as well. But these stories continue to be interesting to watch and these are really interesting times to be alive for sure. Chad : Yeah. We definitely need leadership on the federal level. We have governors who are taking head leadership when they should be focusing on just their state. New York is really starting to try to set benchmarks so that at least the states around them start to follow. We really need to have leadership in that area, not to mention we can't fight what we can't see. We've tested maybe 30,000 people while South Korea has tested over 300,000 people. As we are the super power, we need to fucking act like one, step up and take care of this shit, identify it and eradicate it. Joel : I hate to go back to the Ackman thing again, but almost any business can survive 30 days of no business, right? Chad : Yeah. Joel : From airlines to restaurants to everything. What he was proposing was, look, shut everything down, send everyone home. Tell everyone that you don't have to make a mortgage payment for a month. You don't have to make a rental payment. You're not foreclosing on anybody, like car payments, like federal judgement down, make sure checks are sent out to people so they can feed themselves, so they can have basic necessities taken care of. And at the end of 30 days, hopefully we can look at this and come out of it. But I'm hopeful that we don't have to have bailouts like 2008, because then you get into some real bad situations. Joel : I know you love the Mark Cuban interview from this week where he was talking about, if you take a bailout, there is no stock buy-back. There is no lining your pockets in the future through buybacks of stock, et cetera. So yeah, I mean, I'm hopeful that 30 days we can take care of a lot of this. I think we're going there. We're not quite there yet. And I hope that we don't have to do an extensive bailout of industries like cruises and airlines. I mean, Boeing for God's sakes, what's happened there is a tragedy. They're probably going to need help regardless of what happens in the next 30 days. But I'm hopeful that we don't have to take those extremes. I'm hopeful that they can send people, employees home. They get government checks, they ground flights, and then in 30, 45 days we come back and we're in a much better place. But if not, it's going to get really, really depressionarily bad. Chad : Yes. And isn't it interesting? Okay. So first and foremost, I definitely want to throw out to Delta Air Lines that I see them in a different light than all the other airlines because they had a $1.6 billion check that they sent out to their employees. So I put them in an entirely different light than I put in all these other airline organizations who did stock buy-backs. But it's funny that a capitalist like you is actually talking about socialism in a time of crisis. I think that this is the time to have the conversation around not saying that we need socialism, we don't need capitalism, it is a blend. And I think this is a perfect opportunity. We need a good blend of this to ensure that we are prepared for times like this. We don't need socialism. We don't need capitalism. What we need is a better hybrid of those two working together. So hopefully we can have that discussion as opposed to the black and white bullshit we've been dealing with. Joel : Yeah. Partisanship, it's a bad time for partisanship. Chad : It is. Joel : And you've brought this up before and I think where I'm coming from is there are certain problems that I think are just too big for enterprise to solve. The government has to get involved in. And we can debate whether or not they need to get involved with retraining of workers, right? They're going to be displaced by automation. This is essentially a war that we're fighting. And just like Roosevelt went to Whirlpool in World War II and said, "Can you guys make B17s and Ford made tanks. This is a very similar situation where it's only in partnership with enterprise and government and public works on the local and state level that we can actually get our hands around this and defeat it. And so I am a capitalist as I think you are as well, but some things are just too big for capitalism to solve on its own. Chad : Exactly. Which is why we need to really focus on a hybrid approach. One thing that's also interesting, I want to get into the next pieces is that Amazon is looking to hire 100,000 workers and Kroger is looking to hire people right now as well. So what we're seeing is we're seeing a big difference. I guess you could say in really our supply chain logistics around our normal food necessities, day to day necessities with these big organizations who can actually pull it off. Where before in World War II, you didn't have supply chains like this. We do now and now these organizations need help. Joel : Yeah. And there are unique industries that didn't exist in the 40s, that exist now such as food delivery. And I know that you and I are both appreciative of some companies that are doing zero fee delivery, like one of my favorite is Chipotle. Chipotle, which I've had twice already this week. KFC are two of eight restaurants. A lot of the others just sort of locally, like El Pollo Loco, which isn't everywhere. Moe's Southwest Grill, Blaze Pizza, Del Taco. There's a myriad of them, but shout-out to them. And thank you for getting my burrito bowl for free. I appreciate that very much. Chad : Looking at our industry, let's take a look at the overall economy thing and now how is this hitting our industry? We're hearing that ZipRecruiter is moving fast. It sees the changes in the market and it looks like it's going to stop the bleeding by axing all of their contract recruiters. Joel : Yeah. Like I said, I've said for a long time and you have as well is that, our industry is dependent upon employment happening and hiring happening. And the vendor side of our equation is very sensitive to the economy going to shit. And some of our leaders have been here before. They see around corners, they were around in 2008. They remember what it did to our industry. So they're acting quickly to hopefully save on expenses and they sort of see what's potentially coming. And ZipRecruiter this week allegedly, I haven't gotten confirmation, I've reached out to their PR person. But they've apparently laid off all of their contract recruiters, which makes sense because there's not going to be a whole lot of hiring going on at job boards or job sites if there's no hiring going on at companies. Chad : Yeah. I mean, it's fairly simple. ZipRecruiter's more on the small to medium business side, or at least from this side of the house. And that's where they're seeing a good amount of their revenue coming in, hence all the podcast advertising that they're doing XM. They're really looking to try to get all of those small mom and pops. But when they're having issues like they are now, the economy is, they have to do something. Joel : Yeah, a lot of it is, it's better to be safe than sorry. In your contract people, it's much easier to let them go for a lot of different reasons, so it's no surprise. Now if we start seeing and hearing stories about the full time employees getting laid off or the marketing folks, the customer service folks, that'll be sign of bad times ahead because once those people start going, then you know things are going to slow down significantly. Chad : Yeah. If there's no hiring, everything else just backs up and starts to wither away. Joel : On the other side of that equation, we have Indeed, and we got wind of a ... I guess an email marketing strategy, that they've enlisted to try to get some consulting work. So we have a letter going out, and I'll try to paraphrase it real quickly. But basically they're hoping to get some contingency plan consultant work, for say the next three months or so, to help companies deal with the coronavirus and what's going on. So a couple of things that they want to discuss with their clients are recruitment plan, how to keep churn low, how to keep employees motivated and mentally stimulated, how to move to an online interview and onboarding process smoothly. How to ensure a healthy pipeline of candidates to fall back on. At least Indeed's reaction to what's going on is, okay, if people aren't buying job postings and hiring, how do we get our salespeople into the mix in terms of getting money for consulting fees. What do you think about that strategy? Chad : Yeah, reading the email itself, it's just one of those, it feels canned and it feels like Joel : Oh yeah. Chad : You really don't give a fuck. There's no empathy behind what you're actually saying other than just wanting to sell something. There was no real connection that was made there. And I understand, this was sent out I'm sure via marketing, probably through their CRM. And the problem with that is you show just how inhuman the process is. If your salespeople have relationships on the other end with these people, that's when you should have real discussions. Is this a way to drive leads? Yes. In a time of need? Yes. Do I think this is very Indeed? Yeah. It's cold and it's calculated. I'm not sure that that's what ... that's not what we need right now, but it's what you should expect from Indeed. Joel : Yeah. And this isn't their lane, right? Their lane is technology, as little connection as possible with human beings. Pay, put a credit card in, buy some ads and keywords, that's their lane. This is out of their wheelhouse, so that's no surprise there. And I do think it's worth noting, historically when things go bad economically, the biggest of our industry players are usually the hardest hit. And with me just looking at the landscape, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, the Glassdoors, fill in whatever big job site you want, they tend to be hurt the most. And a lot of it is culturally because if you have thousands of employees and you lay off a quarter of them to half of them, that's a huge culture shock that some companies never recover from. Joel : People who were around in 2008 remember that, that disaster created Indeed, because Monster, CareerBuilder and others were not prepared for the tsunami that came in 2008. Indeed was and has become Indeed of today, which is a lot bigger and more bloated than it was 10 plus years ago. If this downturn continues, I suspect the Zips, the Indeeds and others are going to be hardest hit from it. And in contrast is that automation may see it's time in the sun if the economy continues to do what it's doing. Chad : Yes. This is the time of AI. Joel : Let's hear a quick word from Sovren and we'll get to some more industry news. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com, that's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad : Mya, this is from Business Wire and HRWins. They just stocked up on 18.75 million in series c funding and that's over 50 million overall. Joel : Yeah. So good for them. I did hear that this round was a few months ago. Whether or not that's true, they've just decided now to sort of release that. Maybe the check didn't clear until now or something. But, so this was great. Our pal, CEO and founder, Eyal Grayevsky said in an interview that the funding allows Mya to accelerate its mission to create a far more efficient and equitable job market powered by AI. And also added that while hiring is slowing down in some industries given the current crisis, we are seeing large spikes in demand from customers and healthcare, e-commerce, light industrial, call center, logistics, supply chain and other industries that have urgent high volume hiring needs. So automation baby. Chad : Well, and then Mya has helped customers automate the sourcing process with 10 times greater engagement, deeply screen and qualify 90% plus of applicants and has scheduled over 400,000 interviews with qualified and interested candidates. That's the money maker right there baby. It's process automation. Yeah, it's done through conversational AI. But I think when we talk about chatbots, we don't give them enough credit because they are so much beyond that. Conversational AI, but process automation is huge and we've seen an increase in demand from staffing businesses and corporations, while hiring is slow as you had said, there are different industries that are definitely going to need to. Chad : Let's say for instance, from ZipRecruiter standpoint, they have all these contractors that they are currently cutting, but yet they're going to have a need. How do they automate that? And how do they plan for the future? This is a type of tech that you need to be able to do that. These are the types of companies I see withstanding a big blow to our economy. Joel : Yeah. And I think outside of our industry, automation and chatbots in particular are really seeing their time in the spotlight, because with calls going to airlines to reschedule and cancel flights, you have folks calling on businesses or going to websites and trying to get information. And you hear about on the news how chatbots are really enabling companies to manage the expectations of consumers to answer questions and to be there 24 hours a day and to get instant access. So you see chatbots not just in our industry, but in other industries see their time in the spotlight and that's only going to continue. It's just going to be expedited because of the tragedy that we're currently going through. Chad : Yeah. I mean, these are the times, right? You focus and double down and that's exactly what Indeed did during the last downturn. Let's see if they can do it this time. I really think that there are other companies that are really poised to explode this time around just because they are so focused. Joel : Yeah. The question is how big is this asteroid and how long will the winter last and who will survive. Chad : And who can you snuggle up with? Joel : Yeah. And fortunately, I got my dog here with. Anyway, who is man's best friend by the way. This automation thing is also coming to advertising near you. And LinkedIn this week announced a new ad platform. Chad : Conversational ads. Joel : Conversational ads are coming to LinkedIn, LinkedIn's current message. So basically those who have used LinkedIn before, they have traditional sort of newsfeed ads, a little banner ads on the side. They've had in message ads or InMail ads for quite a while. Apparently they're discontinuing sort of the email, direct email in your feed from your LinkedIn message. Chad : Thank God. Joel : And replacing those with a more conversational advertisement. Chad : Fuck. Joel : So imagine getting a message but then deciding answering or having a conversation with it and saying, "Hey, would you like to attend a webinar or would you just like the white paper on this topic?" And you can select what you want to do. So it's more interactive, it's more conversational. I think it's probably one of the better products that they've come up with in quite a while from an advertising perspective. And I suspect that a lot of people in our space will gravitate toward it and try it out. Chad : Yeah. The email piece right now, the InMail sucks. I hate it. This really just sounds like a dumbed down version of Mya and just another way to get bombarded with shit I don't want. LinkedIn's conversational messaging, it's going to get smarter, but I don't see this as a huge win overall to say it's five times better than what they used before. Well, what they used before was total shit. So anything that you would throw at the wall I think at this point would be better than what they had, so good for them. But this to me just reeks of now I'm going to be in your messenger and really kicking things out to you that way, I don't want that. Joel : Yeah. I think a lot of it have to do with how targeted it is, how relevant it is. And that's obviously a challenge that everyone's facing. A company called Hired that's in our place, a lot of people will know was one of their success stories from the news release. Their representative said, "Hired saw a big uptake in quality candidates entering the system." This was Chase Gladden, Hired's growth marketing manager. He added the click through rate was almost five times higher, like you said, than what we'd seen previously, which goes to show the level of engagement is pretty wild. I love that he said wild. When you're able to provide multiple opportunities to click, let's get wild with LinkedIn advertising folks. Anyway, if you try it out, let us know if you find success or hate it. Hit us up at chadcheese.com. Chad : Because we're going to bitch about it because we're going to get bombarded with shit, I guarantee it. Joel : Do you get a lot of InMail ads? Chad : Probably two or three a week. Joel : Yeah, I might get two or three a month. So for whatever reason you're getting targeted a lot more than I am. Chad : It's their facial recognition gorgeous filter. Joel : Also on industry news, we both know Hiring Solved pretty well. I attended their event in New York, I know their folks, Shon CEO and Jeremy, their marketing guy. Anyway, they are launching something called paths.in, I-N, which is essentially like a job site. It's very sort of mysterious right now. You can sign up for early access by going to the site. Word from Shon is that this is sort of their moonshot to try to fix work. Chad : I'm going to have to reach out to Shon and Jeremy because I have no fucking clue what this thing is. Joel : Let's get them on firing squad for this new business that's [crosstalk 00:39:25.17]. From Shon, this is a quote, I got an email from him was, "Paths is our moonshot. All of our tech aimed at working out how to modernize finding work." Chad : Means nothing to me. Joel : What the hell does that mean? Chad : Means nothing to me, Shon. Joel : So I will add that as sourcing and profile data becomes more commoditized and available and accessible, a lot of these sourcing companies are going to have to figure out how to pivot or make money elsewhere. We certainly know from our conversations with Hiring Solved is that they're going more into the ATS search solution. Chad : I got nothing. Joel : Just make sure Chad knows what the hell it is when you do. JobAdX: No. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Oh, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just half-heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it, we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions. Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits, with JobAdX. JobAdX: Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad : Okay. So we've been given Facebook shit about all the fake news that they allow to happen. But here, this last week, Facebook was marking legitimate news articles about the coronavirus as spam due to a software bug. And it just wasn't coronavirus stuff because I had friends that were saying, "I'm getting all of these different, I mean, just different types of posts that were being marked as spam." And I did too, but mine was of a dog video because I thought everybody was sick and tired of just all this coronavirus stuff and all the political stuff. So I posted a dog video because everybody loves dogs and it got marked by Facebook as spam. So I knew something was fucked up. Joel : Yeah. And a story you shared or we shared with each other, it was great. It had all these examples of things that have been marked as spam and one was celebrating Tom Hanks and his wife being released from the hospital. Facebook needs to get these brainiacs on this algorithm and figure that shit out because it's broken. Chad : Yeah, I appreciate that they're trying to cut down on spam, I really am. So I've got to kind of sat back for a second and my one dog video that didn't get out to the world, I'm okay with that. Just make sure that we get less fake shit, that'd be great. Joel : So you're okay with a little screw up when Facebook messes up their algorithm. But if McDonald's launches, chat apply and it's a little bit off, that should be total scrap. Chad : Dude, it was not a little bit off. Are you fucking kidding me? All you did was say, "I get a text on my phone to apply into their shitty applicant tracking system." That whole system is fucked up. Joel : You are so easy to get riled up. eQUEST had us all hot and bothered this week too. Chad : For a brand that doesn't matter anymore, I thought it was incredibly interesting, they just put out a video. It was an ad that might've been made 15 years ago, I don't know. But it was like this cringeworthy sales dude who was hitting on some chick at the office. It was like that whole kind of spiel. And I'm like, "Dude, I don't know if Harvey Weinstein had actually helped production of this." eQUEST just doesn't matter anymore. We're talking about programmatic distribution and then these guys come out and then they're like, I don't know if they're resurfacing an old video or if this is new. I mean that's even a much higher level of dumb shit. Joel : Yeah. It was a little bit like if you remember the old Will Ferrell skit, Night at the Roxbury, where they're sort of dancing and then they pointed the woman like you and me, we're going to dance. And then like, no, okay. So it was sort of like that vibe where you saw the guy and he comes on to this Chad : Cringey. Joel : ... woman and he's like, "Hey, you want some mags on the deck and whatever. And then it's like, "Oh, well she said I got to post 300 jobs." And then what? You got to get eQUEST, you do it once and you post 300, whatever it is. So the irony of this antiquated eQUEST technology talking about antiquated posting manually, like the irony was just way too thick for it to be real. It felt really just comedic and fake and sad at the same time. Chad : It was ridiculous. It's kind of like a young lady walking home and you're like, "No dude, you get on my horse and buggy. Yeah, get in the horse and buggy, we're good." It's like, dude, this is old, pathetic technology. Why are you even talking right now? Joel : Horse and buggy, dude, you got to get out more. We out. Chad : We out. SFX: That's it man. Game over man, game over. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant.. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts 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. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's 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. #Indeed #ZipRecruiter #DeltaAirlines #Kroger #Amazon #HiringSolved #Coronavirus

What "Brand Job" is cool enough to leave Microsoft's XBOX Team? And what does it mean when a company focuses on transcending mere brand? Enter Jason "J" Anderson, the SVP of Brand Marketing for Cadillac Fairview who joins The Chad & Cheese to talk about these topics and much more... Thanks to our friends at Smashfly for supporting amazing Cult Brand podcasts like... PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Jason: ... this reality where a marketing budget is bigger than an HR budget. So we're not going to let 10, 20, $50,000 get in the way of a great idea. 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: Oh yeah. Chad: Here we go. Joel: What's up kids? You are listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad strange brew Sowash. Joel: No way [Inaudible [00:00:47.24] And we are happy to welcome our Cult Brand series marches on Jay Anderson, SVP, let me get this right, SVP of marketing and communications at Cadillac Fairview. Jay, welcome to the show. Jason: Thanks so much for having me. How you doing guys? Chad: Great. Well, we already know what you drive, right? Jason: Yeah. 99% of people will say, "Oh, this is a local Cadillac dealership that they're talking to." Chad: Yeah. Joel: Let's straighten that out right off. What is Cadillac Fairview? Jason: Cadillac Fairview, your right, lots of people used to think that we were, not only the car maker but a car dealership, but we are a commercial real estate company, head office in Canada. Most of our real estate holdings in retail and office are in Canada and then we've also got some international holdings in the U S and South and Latin America. Joel: Very good. Very good. Now let's talk about you. Give us the elevator pitch on your background and what you do at your capacity of SVP, of marketing and communications. Jason: Sure. Yeah. I joined the company about six years ago. I was previously, I spent 10 years at Microsoft Canada, leading the Xbox video game business in the Canadian market. Then saw an opportunity to move to a Canadian company and be a little closer to the decision making and strategy. I saw a company that I didn't really know, but as I learned more about them, it was a company that really wanted to leverage brand as a competitive advantage in a category that doesn't really think much about brand. And an opportunity to be in an industry that's facing some headwinds, but taking them on directly with boldness, and I got excited by that. Chad: You got excited to leave Xbox to go to building buildings and residential? That's pretty amazing. What did they pitch you on this? I'm sure it was pretty much blue sky, right? You can do whatever you want. Joel: Yeah. And this was before Fortnite came out, right? Jason: That's right, it's pre-Fortnite, but post Halo. So there you go. Yeah. It was an opportunity to come to a place that is bold in their thinking and is a leader in the space and wants to keep winning. And that got exciting. Yeah, certainly once I had made the decision to leave Microsoft, there was no shortage of people that I knew personally and professionally that were saying to me, "My God, what happened? Why did you get pushed out of Microsoft? Because that must be the only reason you would leave." But I got to say, this has been six of the best years of my career. It's been absolutely amazing. It's been a rocket ship. It's so fun. Joel: And the company is really old, right? Like 1950's? Jason: Yeah. Actually, originally started as two separate companies, Cadillac and Fairview. They were like the Hatfields and McCoys, they hated each other. Then in the mid seventies, they said, "Wow, we could actually be more powerful if we joined forces." So they did that in the mid seventies, and haven't looked back since. Chad: So what does winning look like for Cadillac Fairview? Because I think we can understand, like Xbox, we know what winning means for Halo, you're selling a hell of a lot of copies of those. What does that actually mean for Cadillac Fairview? Jason: Yeah. We think of it in two ways. One is, I'll just talk about it from a more traditional market perspective, which is to say that we're focused on owning premium real estate in every market in which we operate. We want to hold properties that are the standard of excellence. Whether it's Toronto or Winnipeg or Calgary or Vancouver or Montreal or wherever that might be, we want to hold the best standard of excellence premium properties that exist in those markets. We believe that yes, there's some headwinds happening right now in both the shopping center and office business, but we believe great properties, great real estate with great experiences will thrive in the long term. That's just a traditional more market view. The financial view of it would be, we're owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, which is a huge pension plan that funds the pensions of over 300,000 teachers. Our job is to drive the valuation of the land. In the same way that we understand the value of the home that we live in, we understand the value of every property that we own, and that adds to about $30 billion in real estate value. So then the pension fund uses that as a hedge against inflation. So winning in that regard, is about growing the land value of the properties that we own. Joel: For a lot of the companies that we talk to in our Cult Brand series, it's all about, sort of, grand mission. Whether it's Airbnb, anyone can fit in anywhere, or name any sort of cult brand out there that has a mission. It seems to me like real estate would be hard to build a mission around for all of your employees to get behind. Do you find that ... What is the mission that drives everyone? What gets everyone out of bed in the morning? Or is it easier than maybe I'm thinking? Jason: No. That is where I've spent the majority of my time in my time here at CF, is really ... Once we knocked off some roadblock and tackle low hanging fruit in the brand space, we really then became, well, what if we transcended this brand journey to be more of a purpose journey? And what would it take to become a purpose driven organization and unlock the potential in every one of our employees? When it started with that, we then started down this path of trying to figure out, well, what is our purpose? We had a mission statement at the time, it was very financially motivated, it was about driving returns for our owner, not the kind of thing that excites people to get out of bed every morning. Jason: So then we said, well, let's get rid of the mission statement altogether, and let's develop a purpose, and let's replace the mission. We really wanted to find something that we felt did a great job of being true to who we are and our heritage as a company, but still aspirationally plant a flag on where we need to go. And so our purpose is transforming communities for a vibrant tomorrow. We think that there are multiple things that set us apart from other real estate companies, including our focus on premium, really great real estate. The fact that we operate the real estate that we build, so we're not just in it to make a quick buck and get out. The fact that every dollar of profit that we drive goes and funds teachers' pensions after a very noble career of developing the next generation of young people. So we landed on this purpose of transforming communities for a vibrant tomorrow, and it feels like it's got that balance of being true to the heritage of the company, but aspirationally planting a flag on somewhere we need to go. Chad: You talk about balance, which I think is pretty much paramount for every cult brand that is out there. Because obviously you have the teachers that are shareholders, and the pension plan, and obviously after they've done their great work with the kids over the years, they deserve to get the hell out and go have a great rest of their life. Jason: That's for sure. Chad: You have them to be able to report to. But also, from a purpose standpoint, you have to balance that. Instead of constantly focusing on just driving real estate value or what have you, that all is more balanced with doing the job and how important the job is. How do you, literally, how do you balance that out? I think that's one of the hardest things any brand can do. Jason: Yeah. Part of my job as a brand leader in the organization is figuring out how to tell the stories of the great work that the company does. Yes, there's a bit of a stewardship of our purpose and leading that on behalf of the organization, but how do we tell the stories of the great work that we do? I look at that purpose, we have rooted in this notion of transforming communities. An example I would give would be, we're this real estate company based in Canada that not a lot of people have heard of outside of Canada, but the example I would use, earlier last year, I guess, the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship. All of a sudden, the world's guests ... There we go. That's a proud moment, especially if you are a Canadian, when our hockey team hasn't won here. But ... That's right. Yeah. So there's this reality where the world's eyes got opened to this thing called Jurassic Park, where thousands of people gather outside of the arena. The people that aren't going to the Raptors game that still want to partake in the community. And that's an area called Maple Leaf Square that we built. And lots of people don't realize that, but that was literally contaminated land 20 years ago. We created this whole new vibrant district in the city of Toronto and created this gathering place for thousands of sports fans. Chad: On contaminated land? Jason: Yes. Exactly. It takes a lot of work to make it uncontaminated. Joel: Was it a Molson beer dumping ground? Or something I don't ... Jason: Oh, Canadian stereotype. I love it. That's awesome. Joel: Yeah. Staying on purpose, purpose many times starts at the top. When we do interviews like this, I like to go to Glassdoor, see the review, see what kind of love or hate a company is getting. Overall reviews, you guys are crushing it, 4.2 out of five. But I was really impressed with your CEO's approval rating, which is 99%. So talk about the CEO's role on purpose and how he's engaged with employees to keep that ball rolling. Jason: Yeah. There's so many factors that get talked about on what it takes to become a purpose driven organization. If I had to pick one, that would be it. From the very first time I started interviewing with CF about the possibility of what this could be, I got an absolute sense of not only the commitment, but the boldness of our CEO. It was him that ultimately said this is going to be the next great competitive advantage for our company. There have been multiple times through the journey where, because this has been such a change for CF, there's been multiple times where either things aren't going well or people are resisting and you've got to be careful when you pull that card. But to know that when I need him either in the foreground actively going and doing things or in the background influencing things for our company to see, especially in a more traditional industry like ours, that's very traditional hierarchy driven, it is so critical that our CEO be on board. And I often say to people, "If our CEO wasn't here, I'm not sure I would be." Because either they might've gotten rid of me or I might've said, "This isn't for me." Just that commitment from him as a leader has been amazing. Chad: It sounds as if you are building toward legacy and do you believe most brands aren't building toward legacy and rather that's one of the biggest issues that they're really building to see the next quarter's report, but they're not really focused on legacy, message and being able to engage their people? Jason: Yeah. I'm definitely inspired by companies that are clearly doing legacy work. I think about companies like ... There kinds of companies we often look at as reference points. Because we're in a category that doesn't really focus on brand and purpose, in commercial real estate, we often look to companies outside of our category. We regularly go to school on companies like Nike, and Disney, and Nordstrom, and Four Seasons. Those are four reference brands that I often use in the journey that we've been on. I look at examples there, what they are just doing, it's clearly legacy work, they are not just doing this to make a buck. But I think the reality is with purpose, is helping people to realize that purpose is just simply the reason you exist beyond driving a profit. Those two things are inextricably linked. You need a clear purpose to inspire your people and make them feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. And that will help you drive more profit. And the companies that can connect those two things are the ones that really, really have that figured out as opposed to feeling like it's a trade off. Chad: Right. Most leaders out there, and I think they get overcome with shareholder value. In a leader's eyes, if you were talking to a leader today, what is their benefit to building a legacy? Jason: Yeah. When I think what that comes down to is, how can you make it about a legacy for everyone, not just for yourself? I think quite often people can get caught up in building a legacy for themselves. Whereas if you take an organizational view of legacy, when Nike takes a stand on Colin Kaepernick or when Nike takes a stand on designing a Pro Hijab at a time when the anti-Muslim sentiment around the world has never been higher, that's clearly not just one person trying to make a name for themselves. That's an organization thinking about legacy. And so I think that if leaders can find that way to transcend, not making it about themselves, but making it about the legacy of the organization, then people really get on board and want to be a part of it. Joel: Interested in how technology is advancing some of your mission and purpose. You guys have quite a few YouTube videos on your website that talk about the history and the purpose and being an employee. You have social media presence on pretty much every major social network. And I think a lot of people would think a construction/real estate company, what the hell are they doing on social media? Jason: Yeah. Joel: Talk about that strategy and how that helps advance the purpose of the company. Jason: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think ultimately what we're trying to do is humanize the company. If I had to simplify it down to one thing, that's what I would say. We're a company, and in an industry that can at times be criticized for being unknown. Quite often, if you build a shopping center, that's largely about just building four walls for the world's greatest brands to come in and have a relationship with shoppers. You're a company that can be largely unknown, and at times real estate developers get all painted with a brush of being greedy, being short term focused, doing shoddy work to make a quick buck. So the extent to which we can get out there and get to know people and connect with people and humanize our company and tell cool stories. Whether that is the Jurasic Park example I talked about earlier or there's a construction project we did to connect two with this really cool bridge. We said, hey, why spend a couple million dollars on a very functional bridge when instead you could spend 20 times that on a really cool bridge that's going to create a tourist destination in the city of Toronto? Well, the story of how we built that is actually really interesting. If you put that out on social media and tell the story of how you built this bridge with construction materials from Germany and you did this really cool maneuver to put the bridge into place without disturbing the city street below, there's a cool story there. So how do we humanize the company and how do we use storytelling to help people connect with us in meaningful ways? Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, especially when you're sending candidates into a black hole, which is why you need friends like Roopesh Nair, CEO of SmashFly on your side. Joel: Having someone submit a resume that just goes into the black hole is devastating for candidate experience. Doing to close the black hole and ensure everyone has a great experience when applying. Roopesh: We're doing a group of things out there. One is to ensure that the application experience itself is seamless by integrating with ATS's meaningfully and providing that statuses back and forth and ensuring that the levers of communication are activated every time there is a status coming back and forth from the ATS. Just providing transparency in the application process by leveraging our candidate relationship management solution. The second aspect is then actually ensuring that we're using our matching algorithm to bubble up people pretty quickly where they are a great fit for that particular role in the company and ensuring that the conversational engagement starts right away and the recruiter is notified while the engagement is going on. It's critical then that ways we are prioritizing those engagements which are needed to the most important applicants right away and then eventually ensuring that anyone who's not necessarily a good fit at that point, we are continuing to engage them, whether it is the job they applied for, or for any other job, or for that matter, just general brand awareness and general engagement on what might be a good fit for those guys ensures that that black hole is minimized. Chad: Let SmashFly help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smashfly.com. Joel: And it seems to me like one advantage a construction company would have, would be in the realm of charity. Building houses, or rehabilitating, things like that. Are you guys pretty active in charities? And are you using that to progress the mission of the company and maybe attract a better, talented employee that way through caring about the community through charity? Jason: Yeah, we are. I mean it comes from a couple of places. First and foremost, we don't just want to build stuff. We're in the business of bringing people together. Whether that's you and your girlfriends going for some retail therapy for the weekend and having fun together or whether that's your business taking the next step to go into an amazing office building in the financial district of Vancouver, we're in the business of bringing people together. What we recognize is charity is important, but we look at it from a community impact perspective. We want to be a meaningful part of the communities in which we operate. We're actually already the largest tax payer in every city in which we operate, just by virtue of the property tax that we pay, but there's so much more to it than just paying tax. It's about engaging with the community, creating these vibrant places and recognizing that helping those that are less fortunate is a big part of it. But we ladder it up to this idea of community impact and how we can play a meaningful role in the communities in which we operate. Joel: And I understand taxes in Canada is no small thing, right? Jason: It realy is not. Now the healthcare is awesome, but we probably aren't going to get into that debate in this podcast. Chad: we could. We could. I'd just like to say that I appreciate an employer who understands that taxes are what drives the community, instead of what sucks money out of their shareholder value. So that's a big applause for me on that one. Jason: Well, thank you. Yeah. Well, it's interesting about that to us, you look at something like the city of Toronto, there's 150,000 people a year coming into this city. So yeah, developers need to go build great communities, but then the municipal government also needs to stay caught up with infrastructure, and you need a tax base in order to do that. Chad: Right. Right. So you said, and I love this, "We don't just want to build stuff," and my question to you is, being a cult brand, does it mean more to you to actually turn projects down because they just want you to build stuff? And it's like, "No, that's not what we do." Jason: We really tried to stay focused on creating things that are special. I look at, I have a counterpart that I work quite closely with, I oversee brand and marketing, he oversees architecture and design. And what's interesting about both our jobs, is our jobs are our part art and part science and we share that within the company. So we work really closely together and he's just a great dude. We get along really well. And what's amazing to me is the level of detail he'll go into. He will want a look ... He's obsessive about light in ways that I could never pretend to understand. But then he's gone into buildings where he's seen horrible light and he's gone into buildings where lighting can actually add to the experience. So he'll be obsessive about the type of light that's going to go into a building and the mood that that sets and the way it contributes to the experience. And just the things that ... Building stuff is not part of my gig, part of my gig is telling the story and building the brand. His gig is building stuff. The focus that we put into this notion of, what does it mean to be the standard of excellence when you're creating spaces and you're creating these vibrant places? That's where he spends all his time and it's quite amazing to watch as a partner. Joel: I'm curious about internal marketing and mission. It sounds like you guys take measuring employee engagement internally pretty seriously. Talk about that. Jason: Yeah. From an employment perspective, we call it employee engagement. We take that really seriously. We really believe in this idea that a more engaged and excited team is going to create better business results. That's widely believed throughout our organization, which is amazing to have that buy in across the company. That's absolutely a focus for us, so we measure it, we have surveys that we do three times a year. And then we're really serious about following up with the leadership of the company to make sure that they're understanding across our 1500 employees, which might sound small by U S standards, but how do we make sure that every leader that touches our 1500 CFers is really going to that extra mile to create a great environment that's rooted in the values of the organization. We really think a lot about that idea. We have an HR team that's leading our values and a brand team that's leading our purpose. So how do we knit our purpose and our values together to make things A, simple but also B, inspiring for our people? Chad: Well that being said, there's the HR team and then there's the talent acquisition and all of the, I would say the employer face of Cadillac Fairview, is that an entirely different face? How do you attack that? Because you do have a brand that you have to get out there for the commercial side, right? For the residential side, for the government side, but you also have all these individuals who are coming in through this, "I am looking for a job," side of the house. How do you balance that out? And do you work very closely with the talent acquisition and HR group to do that? Jason: Yeah. That's going to really interesting change, while we've been on this journey to become a purpose driven organization. It used to be, like when I first started with the company, which wasn't that long ago, six years ago, the marketing and HR teams, we did operate more in silos. And then a couple of years ... For example, we'd have a marketing team going and building a brand to resonate with our shoppers and we have an HR team going out and building an employment brand. And yes, that sounds a little siloed, but I can be convinced on the value of that because a reason to walk into one of our shopping centers might be different than a reason to go work for the company. So you need to make sure you're building things that resonate with those people. Jason: But what we've found is, over the last couple of years, our teams have worked closer than ever and it's been awesome. And sometimes it gets a little bumpy, sometimes we get into each other's space, but at the end of the day, if you have a great relationship, and you see the value of knitting together purpose and values, and the way that you can unlock that, not only for your current employees but also for future employees in the spirit of creating a great place to work, it's just ... We're in our early stages of that, but it's been so much better being really joined at the hip with our partners in HR, recognizing that you have a marketing team. Marketers are ultimately trained in how to engage an audience and marketers usually train their attention on external audiences. What if we trained a little bit of our attention on the internal audience and unlocking potential in our people? We're seeing a great return on that. Chad: In what areas do you actually help HR? Because from our standpoint, job postings, their employment site, the actual process methodology that you have to go through to apply for a job in most cases sucks. That experience sucks. And not to mention HR's budget is in most cases much lower than than marketing. So how do you guys really partner and collaborate to make sure that the overall experience for that candidate, for that perspective individual who might be working for you, how they have a great experience? How does that work? Do you guys pretty much really become symbiotic? Jason: Yeah. It happens in a couple ways. One way, it's already happening, is part of what we call our brand team. Brand marketing and corporate communications, that's kind of all the team that I lead. We've already made a decision as a company that internal communications to our employees sits with the brand team, not with the HR team. So our team is charged with, how do we communicate and engage internally with employee? We've already, for years now, worked closely together in that regard, and we've actually, even just in the last few months, find other ways that we can work even more closely together. And that's been great. Jason: But then I even think about, my counterpart in HR, she's a great partner and she and I just recently had a conversation about, we have a skill set within marketing around social media. She's thinking about things like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, and she's saying it makes no sense for her to build that skill set within our team, so how could our teams partner? We're just on the cusp of starting to think about what that might look like in the coming weeks. The last example would be there's, a couple times a year, there are a few times a year, she'll reach out to us and she'll say, "Hey, I have this really great idea. Here's how I think it can drive our purpose and our values with our people, but I don't have budget," to your point earlier. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Jason: There's just this reality where a marketing budget is bigger than an HR budget. So we're not going to let 10, 20, $50,000 get in the way of a great idea. The reality is that, that's not a material amount of money within our marketing budget. So she and I just have a conversation about, well, what's the outcome going to be? And why is it great for our people? And who cares? Who funds it? I'll happily throw some money in to go do something great for our people. Joel: I'd like to dig in a little more than on the tactical stuff of this because I think a lot of listeners right now, their HR and marketing departments are not talking at all. You said roughly three years ago, the two got together, who drove that? What did it look like? Do you guys meet regularly or is it just, "Hey," when there's an idea or something that comes up? Are there real specific things that you do tactically in addition to the overall strategy that you have to work together that some of our listeners might really benefit from? Jason: Yeah, it's a great question. The catalyst moment for us was the decision to become a purpose driven organization. And once we said that, and once we said one of the key elements of that is going to be to build from within, we knew that our teams had to be knit together. So what we did that three or four years ago, was we formed this group of people that we called brand stewards. Love the name or don't love the name, doesn't really matter. But what we did is we brought together a couple of handful of people from our senior leadership team. So me as our head of brand and marketing, our head of HR and people, our head of operations. 70% of the employees of the company report up through our operations organization, so we saw him as important and he's accountable the 99% of the EBIT and profit that our company drives. Lastly, someone who's the right hand of our CEO and is a strategy expert whose role has been really to help develop and then bring strategy to life. So the four of us came together three or four years ago and said, if we're going to do this, it needs to connect to our strategic plan. It needs to unlock potential in our people. It needs to build our brand and needs to resonate across our operations organization, which is where our business comes to life through our properties. And so we knit the four of us together from the start in this group called brand stewards. And that's where it all began. And so we've been finding all those natural points of integration along the way. Joel: And is there structure to regularly meet? Is there an agenda? Does someone drive that? Jason: Yeah. Amongst our group of four of us, or now five, because we also added our head of innovation to that group more recently. It's changed over time. It used to be, in the early days, we would meet monthly and we would be spending quite a surprising amount of time on pretty small decisions. We reached a point where I went to them and I just said like, "Look guys, I'm not sure getting you together once a month so that we can all debate a $5,000 decision, is really a good use of our time. So let's pull us up a level. We're at a good point on our journey. Let's get more strategy focused and less execution focus." Now we get together on a roughly quarterly basis. Basically, my job is to raise my hand when I have stuff I need their advice on and pull the group together. So it's on an as needed basis as opposed to this regular cadence. Joel: Got you. You touched on Glassdoor for one of your comments, and I think for a lot of marketing folks, they're aware of Glassdoor but they don't think of it as a marketing tool or anything that they should really be concerned with in marketing, right? Most of the consumer companies we talk to, they're worried about Yelp reviews, Google reviews, Facebook stuff, but you touching on Glassdoor was interesting. So talk about how you engage with Glassdoor or how it's important to you from a marketing standpoint. Jason: Yeah. The way I think about that, and we don't have great examples of, "Hey, here's some best practices on that," because that is literally something we're about to get started with. Where we come from is a place of, we know we're on a journey to become a purpose driven organization. We know we want to start from within and build out because we can have so much more impact if every CFer feels like they're a part of something bigger than themselves as opposed to just a marketing team going and doing it. We also know that with changing demographics, purpose is more important to millennials than any other living generation. So we know that that's important to drive the top line of our business, but it's also important to fill our pipeline of talent. Once you knit all those things together, you're just like, well, why should I think about Instagram as being any different from Glassdoor? We'll start in the next few weeks in just figuring out, okay, how does our team partner with our people team to really think about that as an important vehicle to engage with people? And be agnostic as to whether that's about, we want someone to go to our shopping center and have a great time on a Saturday, versus we want someone to apply for a job and have a great time in their career. Chad: Yeah. I think that last part is one of the keys that I want to talk about. You guys focus on the experience, through architecture, design, message, and the big question is, and this is not a got you, because most haven't, but have you actually applied for a job through your applicant tracking system? Jason: I have not. Chad: Okay. So generally that is what we call the black hole of the experience for most candidates. Right? They go in, they spend 15, 20 minutes, some even longer, and they don't get that architecture design that I believe most talent acquisition and HR people should be aspiring toward. And I really believe that's where they need brand and marketing's help. Jason: Yeah. Chad: They obviously have a ton of things that they need to ... Box checking and things of that nature, but as you guys get together, what is your major focus when it comes to pushing this initiative forward? Especially when it comes to HR? What's the real big piece that is priority for you guys right now? Jason: Yeah. Internally it is this idea of knitting together purpose and values. And it's helping people to realize that purpose is the why, like, why are we in business? And values are the how in terms of how we behave. Helping to knit those things together to help people see how they can activate purpose in their day to day job, because purpose is not just something for, my partner I spoke about in architecture and design, who's building cool stuff, It's also for someone in the finance organization or a security guard walking the mall, you can activate purpose in your job. If we can knit those things together, help people see how to activate purpose and how to live in a manner consistent with our values, that's where I spend the vast majority of my time with our partners on the people team. Joel: I want to talk about your quick wins for a second. You've got puppy parks, dress for your day. Talk about those parks and why they're important to your organization. Jason: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Joel: Of course the parks sounds amazing. I'm ready to go. Jason: They are. Chad: How could you not love puppy parks? Jason: Dude, next January, it's worth the trip to Toronto. I know a lot of people don't think about Toronto in January, but that's when you can see a puppy park. So, really what this came from was once we developed our purpose in transforming communities for a vibrant tomorrow, we had to pick an approach or a philosophy on how you activate that purpose and how you bring it to life. What we did was we said, "We need bold moves and we need quick wins." You need bold moves so that people see you're serious and are like, Oh my God, wow, these guys are serious about this. We also need quick wins so that people see progress. What we did was, we got our team focused on the bold moves. What are those two or three big things that we're going to do to show people that we're serious about transforming communities for a vibrant tomorrow? But then what we said with quick wins is, what if we put it out to CFers as a way to engage people across the company who have great ideas. There's this thing that you want to do that you think would be a lot of fun and amazing, and as long as you can show a connection to our purpose, we'll fund your great idea and help you bring it to life. We've had a couple of examples, one are these puppy parks, which have gone surprisingly well. The spirit of puppy parks is, there's this concept called Blue Monday. There's a Monday in January that's generally regarded as the saddest day of the year because people are out of the holiday season, their Visa bill is coming in. It's just like World War phenomenon, and this idea called Blue Monday. So, we said, well, what if we could go into the lobbies of our office buildings and create something to cheer people up? And we're like, what cheers people up more than puppies? So we bring in a bunch of puppies, actually dog Instagram influencers. We reached out to the owners of Instagram dogs and had them come in and just created a bunch of buzz in these cool little areas where you can go interact with puppies. Whether it's like a puppy ... Thank you. Thank you. And it's got amazing traction with our office clients. They love it. There's people lined up to hug a puppy and get their photo with it and all that stuff. So whether it's that or whether it's ... We're a very traditional industry, so it's actually only in the last couple of years we implemented a policy called, dress for your day, which means you don't as a guy have to wear a suit and tie every day or be in formal dress. What's your day require and how do you address for that? How do we take a different approach to important cultural moments like Pride or Women's Day? Or even a little example like, sadly last year, Blake Nordstrom away, a key member of the Nordstrom family. It turns out he was actually friends with our CEO. So why not take that moment to tell our story to our employees, of our CEO's connection with Blake and what that relationship meant and have this incredibly human moment. Just thinking about these little quick wins so that our people and our customers see progress. Joel: There are certain brands that benefit from where they're from. Thinking of Canada, Tim Horton's, hockey and beer, does being a Canadian company come like ... Is that in play as your brand or do you think about that at all as a Canadian company? Jason: We think being Canadian helps as we look to build on a global scale. As we go build out our presence outside of Canada, we think being Canadian and being owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan helps the conversations that our investments team is having around the world. As I look at our domestic business though, which is where we focus a lot of our time and is a significant portion of our business, I actually think in inside of Canada, it's less about being Canadian, it's more about those emotional moments that happen in local communities. Because I think it's not so much that the shopping center is owned by a Canadian company, I think it's about the fact that the shopping center is in your local community. That's the place where your kids saw Santa and the Flash for the first time. That's the place where as a teenager, your parents let you roam free. That's where a lot of people had their first kiss and their first date. That's where you bought your prom dress. That's where you had that really great weekend with your friends. The emotional connection to the community role of a shopping center at that low, local level I think is more powerful than that national pride of being Canadian. Chad: And much better than going on Amazon, that's for damn sure. Joel: I'm thirsty for a Labatt right now. I can not tell you. Jason: I'm so glad you guys said both those things, not me. Chad: Jay, We really appreciate you taking the time. And if anybody wants to find out more about CF, where will they go? Where should they go? Jason: Yeah. Go to cadillacfairview.com or just flip me an email at jason.anderson@cadillacfairview.com Chad: Excellent, man. We really appreciate it. Thanks. Joel: Thanks, Jay. Jason: Thanks guys. Appreciate the time. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #CultBrandSeries #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Branding #CultBrands #Marketing #UX #Experience

It's time to take a step back and breathe for a few minutes. Today's podcast is straight out of Rome and was that surprise breath of fresh air everybody really needs. So, turn off the world, enjoy these Good Vibes From Rome and breathe. Italy passed China in coronavirus fatalities this month, and has become a focal point for the severity of the disease as well as a warning for the rest of the world. Emily Alvarez, Global HR Leader with Symphony Talent joins The Chad & Cheese Podcast from Rome to discuss the pandemic and its affect on her company. Her outlook is something we should all digest and take to heart. Continued social distancing thanks to partners and sponsors Canvas, JobAdX, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvasbot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: This crisis could perspectively bring you and your team closer together. Emily: If you're able to build stronger relationships, then you're just going to work better together and it can only be better. 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: All right. All right. All right everybody. A little bit of a somber opening compared to what we're going to be talking about today. But you are listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: And today we are happy to welcome Emily Alvarez, global HR leader with Symphony Talent. Emily, welcome to the show. Emily is reporting live from Rome and we thought it would be a good opportunity to have someone from Italy talk about the coronavirus, the impact not only on the community, but also the workplace, predictions for the future and maybe some warnings. Emily, welcome to the show, I wish it were under different circumstances. Emily: Thank you guys. Yes, I'd love to be able to share what we're going through very specifically here in Italy, as it relates to the coronavirus. And really share this as a learning for global community, specifically within Symphony Talent. We have employees throughout the US, UK, and India. This is actually a very unique situation since it's impacting us all globally. Specifically, in Italy, I could offer some insight as to what's happened here. So very quickly, the North of Italy, so the Milan area, which is your financial business epicenter if you will for Italy. The biggest vein from a finance standpoint. An area of so many employees and global companies just was impacted by big soar of the coronavirus. And they imposed some lockdowns if you will, within the communities there just to try to minimize the spread of the virus. They've taken some very strong responses there. Emily: What's unique to Italy is that most employees, most gatherings is very socially based, all in offices. But they've actually gone into extremely new territory and started to encourage everyone to work from home. They actually call it smart working, which is extremely creative, and I think more positive message than working from home or virtual. I think smart working has a nicer tone to it. I celebrate the Italians for coming up with that terminology. But they've had to take some really extreme measures. Hospitals are extremely overwhelmed. And it's impacting so many people, so many citizens that they've decided to do a full lockdown, which started two weekends past in the Milan area. Very quickly the government chose on just last week to impose this lockdown countrywide. Chad: From the US, I mean, we've been told that we're a couple of weeks behind Italy and I mean, we're pretty much sitting on our hands much like we saw Italy do. I mean, you guys were hit much faster than we were. But what were the learnings? Should we be testing and getting into lockdown right now? Because if we don't, we're going to be in a much dire situation in a couple of weeks. What would you say, and again, not that you're a medical professional or anything like that, but just from the learnings of you being in Italy, should we be locking down now so that it's not as dire in two weeks? Emily: Yes. In reality, we're all taking a very strong commitment or sacrifice, if you will, by making those choices. By staying home, you are giving a gift to others by not spreading this virus any further, and really supporting our medical professionals that are just in it day and night trying to manage this influx of patients just requiring so much assistance. If you're thinking about going to a movie theater or a mall or a restaurant, which is unfortunate for these industries, it's just not the best idea, so in any public spaces. I know the US started slowly, and okay, don't have any gatherings of X number of people and now they're trimming it down. In reality, you shouldn't be attending any gatherings. You really should just be hanging tight. But staying healthy doesn't mean you should be sitting on the couch watching the news because that's not healthy. Chad: No. Emily: That's actually going to be, that's going to create a negative, definitely be informed. It's just learning we've done here, so we're minimizing TV watching. We're getting, we've identified what resources we need to pull from online so that we can get the information we need, but really just avoiding any areas with any crowds at this point. Joel: You mentioned watching TV or in this case, maybe not watching TV. But the timing of this conversation is pretty unique in that, across the news ticker yesterday was the fact that Italy actually surpassed China in terms of cases and I believe deaths as well. Is that something you're conscientious of and everyone else is? How did morale react to that? And you mentioned the overrun hospitals. I want you to sort of paint a picture for what that looks like because I don't think we have a perception of that in the US. Emily: Right. The hospital systems are different in Italy than they are in the US for example. It is socialized medicine, mostly public facilities that are actually struggling with supplies. So basic supplies like masks and gloves and respirators. I mean, this morning I just read, which is a beautiful story. Ferrari stopped manufacturing their vehicles so they could begin manufacturing respirators. It's a very serious situation. I am tracking the numbers on the World Health Organization site. They do have a dashboard with the number of cases in Europe. And as of this morning, my morning in Rome, it was over 41,000 cases that have been confirmed in Italy. Joel: Can you paint a picture for what that means? Is it lines outside the hospital? Is it people that just give up and stay home and deal with it? Exactly what does not enough resources or medical professionals look like? Emily: It's unfortunate, so I don't have direct access to that, which is a good thing. My family is safe and we are following the government's instruction to stay home. But what I have been seeing through social media and other news channels is that medical professionals are making decisions on who is most likely to actually have a chance to survive and therefore are rationing ventilators for those cases. It's a very severe decision that the medical community is being put. Joel: And what's morale like in Italy right now? Is there sort of a bonding together or is there a helplessness? Emily: Yes, it's mixed. Italy, I am definitely an adopted Italian, so I grew up in the New York city, New Jersey area. I've been here for a few years now, so definitely adopted. But what's beautiful is that, yes, it is somber, but Italians by nature are extremely social individuals. Even business transactions are done over an espresso or a handshake. This is very disheartening for our communities, the sense of a Sunday family dinner. We're unable to celebrate weddings, baptisms now, so just really strong effects on our community. But on the flip side, I've just seen such beautiful displays of comradery. Emily: In Italy, children across the country have created signs of rainbows that they're hanging from their terraces with the hashtag, which is called [foreign language 00:09:28.18], which means everything will be okay. There is a mix of coming together and true community spirit. I'm not sure if you've seen, on the media there's families gathering on their terraces and singing. Joel: And singing. Emily: Yes, and singing. Joel: That's beautiful. Emily: Yes. Or DJs, or exercise, and really just a sense of trying to bring everyone's spirit together, which is so beautiful. My son's in a judo class and they actually created a WhatsApp group, the teachers. And they included all the students and parents and they're exchanging videos with the children to, in a spirit of connecting everyone together during this time, while we're not in schools, all activities have been closed. So really just celebrating creative ways to connect with everyone. Joel: It's commercial time. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now, based on that technology, come Sovren's artificial intelligence matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second, receive match results that provide candidate score by fit to job. And just as importantly, the job's fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: It's showtime. I think the key word there is spirit and not breaking the human spirit. As you see, a very social community, a very social country like Italy. And again, it makes you happy, but it also makes you sad at the same time as you see this wonderful chorus of neighbors out on their balconies singing together because they're enjoying each other, they're just not doing it in the manner in which they're used to. That being said, there in Italy, you work for Symphony Talent, which is a very global organization. How are you guys actually working this and managing this? I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you work smart from home already, right? Emily: Yes. Chad: How is this changing how you work and then also the team abroad? Emily: We have a mix of subcultures within Symphony Talent. In the US, over 50% of our employees already work remotely. They're pretty much okay with these changes. Having said that, lots of schools are starting to close now in the US so their normal is changing. They were used to working from home, but now they're managing their children. We're also starting to work, doing their school work from home as well, so that's an impact. Other offices like our New York city hub, our headquarters was primarily used to being in the office, so that's a big change. UK, our London office, our London team was completely on site. But they've rallied together and have started to do virtual walks, connecting with the team. Zoom, who we use for our video chats has been a trusted friend throughout all this. Joel: Can you describe virtual walk for me? What is that? Emily: Sure. Yes, absolutely. Chad: Walk with your phone. Joel: I guess. Emily: Yes. Zoom fortunately does have a mobile app. So you could actually take a walk, turn on your video or an audio of course if your bandwidth allows, and everyone's able to chime in. If you envision The Brady Bunch, the tiles of everyone coming on, that's what we're seeing a lot of. And Brady Bunch is only specific to the US so I actually had to share an image of the 70s show with our team in the UK and Bangalore because that's actually very US specific. Chad: And they should have time to binge Brady Bunch by the way now too. Emily: Yeah. Why not? Yeah. We all can learn from our cultures and we do that a lot at Symphony Talent. And that's what living in Rome has taught me, to be so sensitive to a US perspective or UK or even India. By visiting our teams there, understanding them. Our team in Bangalore are extremely hospitable, always in the office, so it's a big impact for them. But they've started to do tea service. Our Belfast team is doing tea at 3:00. Some of our teams in the US are starting to do virtual cocktail or happy hours. New York is hosting a karaoke and a happy hour next Thursday and I'm planning to join from Rome. And that's the beauty of Zoom and video chats. We're definitely coming together. Chad: Yeah. It sounds like this is actually an opportunity for companies that are out there, that maybe they worked virtual or remotely smart before, maybe they didn't, but it sounds like this is an opportunity to actually come together, start to use technology, start to get into each other's lives a little bit more, and make this more of a relationship instead of just a employer to employee type of relationship, it's more than that. And this crisis could perspectively bring you and your team closer together. Do you think that most companies are using this time to do that? Emily: I hope so. I mean, it's really the best thing to do. If our employees are able to rally together, if we focus on the humanity and the empathy that is the silver lining of this virus, I think it's only can make our team stronger and perhaps changing the perspective, primarily I would say in the US. It's okay to schedule a coffee chat with a peer. Not everything has to be a project or checking off the boxes. And if you're able to build stronger relationships, then you're just going to work better together and it can only be better. Chad: I was talking to a friend yesterday who's in the UK and he's working from home, and many of his team just didn't do that and it was starting to give them that moment to gel. Not to mention he has kids running around in the back. It's like our whole thought process of what quote unquote formal business is, is really thrown out the window and we can become more human while we're doing business as opposed to having to get the suit jacket on, or get the kids out of the room or have the dogs outside or something like that. Emily: Right. Accept the new normal. Chad: Yeah. Is that the new normal? Emily: It is. It's our reality. And I think the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can make our teams comfortable and be ready to share. Why would we want to identify someone situation in a negative way. We already are having so much stress that we're dealing with, changes in the way we're working, the way we're living, access to supplies. There's obviously been changes in the US, UK as well, just getting to the supermarket and seeing shelves empty. These are basic components that is very difficult for us to accept. And if we're able to at least empathize with that new normal, then we'll be able to get through this. Joel: It's commercial time. JobAdX: Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits, with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ, with JobAdX. Chad: It's showtime. Joel: Has this at home for you at all, anyone at work been affected by this or maybe in your own family at this point? Emily: No. We're extremely, extremely fortunate that no one in my family has been affected. Our team is healthy and sound. We all are dealing with our personal challenges I think with balancing a new routine, a new normal, but fortunately everyone is healthy. Joel: I want to shift it a little bit to work. Obviously layoffs are going to happen, companies are going to be hurt by this. And we certainly, we all make our living to some degree on companies hiring and the vibrancy of the economy. Have there been conversations at Symphony about how are we going to react to this new reality and our business, is it just like, let's survive this thing and then we'll figure that out. How is Symphony sort of dealing with a new reality? Emily: Right. The key is actually knowing, and I'll repurpose our CEO's quote, Roopesh Nair. He mentioned, "The work we do is nothing without our health and each other." That is the number one priority and that is what we're focusing on right now. Having said that, that is the priority and we're really focusing on that first. Because how are we going to put ourselves in our client's shoes if we're not feeling good, if we're not healthy. We're doing it in layers if you will, or steps. It's a new journey that we're uncovering. That is our building block. Emily: Two is actually then anticipating the new needs of our clients. So yes, the leadership team has been talking extensively about that. Obviously some of our clients are impacted directly by the virus. Anyone in healthcare, healthcare is going to see a surge. Others, or some of our food product industries are seeing a surge. They need to hire a whole bunch of truck drivers for example, to get the supply in. Amazon just recently advertised the amount of additional seasonal workers that they'll need to hire to maintain the demand. Emily: On the flip side, if you're in tourism or you're in the airlines industry, you're seeing a new normal as well. I think we have to rechannel what our clients are looking to achieve given their personal circumstances. But the key focuses will be on their brands. While hiring may fluctuate, whether it's one stream or the other, their brand and how they respond to this is an impactful opportunity for them and they shouldn't lose that momentum. Joel: I know that DoorDash alone will have to hire some more drivers just for the fact that Chipotle comes to my house two or three times a day. Last one for me. I just want you to just sort of look into the future a year from now, being almost ground zero in Italy. What does the world look like a year from now? Emily: From my standpoint, and if you look at it from the EU perspective, I think this is actually going to make our economies stronger. Right now there's probably going to be steps taken back. But with all this smart learning and this flexibility that I'm seeing within employers in Italy, I think it's going to be extremely liberating and we'll create a new era of smart working. And I think that that's going to allow so many more industries and businesses in Italy to grow. Chad: That's what I'm talking about. Joel: What a great way to start my weekend. Chad: That's what I'm talking about Emily. Wrapping up on a positive note, I love it. Everybody, this is Emily Alvarez, she's over at Symphony Talent. Emily, if people want to connect with you, where should they go? Emily: I'm on LinkedIn. That's probably the fastest way to reach me. Definitely on throughout various time zones during my day to be able to support all our global teams and happy to connect with others. Chad: Excellent. Thank you so much. Joel: Thanks Emily. Emily: Thank you guys. Take care. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Announcer: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts 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. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's 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 #Coronavirus #Leadership #Management #crisis

Robert Ruff doesn't take the bait but does shoot straight during this VOICES episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Where we talk about: - Advertising is a distraction - Humans want the party, not the clean-up - Changing the economy - Paperless Offices - Is taking advantage of workers a bad thing? and much more. Enjoy this Voices Series podcast from The Chad & Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast with special guest Robert Ruff, President of Sovren.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Morgan: Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese, that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation back up with Robert Ruff, president of Sovren, industry veteran and all around smart dude. Okay, Robert, so have you seen this new Amazon commercial, the one where they're really trying their damnedest to shift optics away from workers pissing in garbage cans wearing haptic bracelets. Joel: I applied for a job after seeing that ad, damn. Chad: Have you seen this? What do you think about this? I mean, what do you think about this ad? What do you think about the optics versus reality? Robert: Here's what I think about it. I think the clue to what's going to happen in that ad starts at the very beginning of it. At the very beginning of it, if you're really paying attention, the first five seconds, there's a guy saying, "Basically this is the world's worst place to work. They will grind you down." I'm paraphrasing there. But if you really listen to what he says, you're like, "Whoa." They kind of putting it out there and then they go into what's the advertising. I think advertising is really misunderstood and this gets into recruiting in a big way. Robert: People advertise their weakness. There's no reason to advertise your strength, right? If you've got the lowest price, people come there because you have the lowest price, but they hate your service. They hate the clutter, they hate whatever. You have to advertise the things you're weak in and try to convince people like, "No, that's not a weakness, we're really good at that." And that's why the early days of Home Depot, when all they had was this giant warehouse full of clutter, but it was cheap. They advertised that they had great service. Well, they didn't have any service, you couldn't even check out there. But it was like, "Oh, Home Depot has great service." You knew they had great prices. If you think about Walmart, they used to advertise this made in the USA thing. Why? Because they were outsourcing everything to China. They were trying to distract you from the reality and put a different idea in your head. So that's what's going on with that Amazon commercial. Joel: We're killing the mom and pops of America, but we have a smiley face on our sign. That's great. Robert: Right. I mean, if you really believe that commercial, I was looking at it, I was like, "You know what? I'd love to get a master's degree. I think I'm going to go work in an Amazon warehouse for a while." Get that thing paid for. Joel: Don't you think they're just waiting for the moment that they can just automate everything. Don't you think Bezos is just waiting for the day that he doesn't need F people do anything for Amazon? Robert: Yeah. And I think that Amazon is one of those businesses that could almost be completely automated vertically from the top all the way down. Because the software integrates the, quote, white collar part and the blue collar part is automated by robots and you're done. Chad: Have a nice day. Joel: How do you see the election shaking out? Robert: I'm just not going to take that bait. Chad: Yeah. That's a pretty nasty bait, right? Joel: Not touching it. Chad: Let's not go into that just yet. Let's talk about bubbles. The last great economy we had before the bubble burst was, it was really a Mirage. I mean the reason why the bubble was so big is because we were lending money to a shit ton of people we shouldn't have been. It looked like the economy was doing incredibly well, especially in that sector. And then boom, the burst happened. How do we stop those types? Do you feel like that's where we're getting to right now? We don't have enough watchdogs to ensure that bubbles like that aren't created so that when we do have a fall, it's not this huge 2008 fall? Robert: Well, if now I can stereotype the entire American population, I think as a population we are really immature. And what I mean by that is we only want the birthday party, no one wants to clean up afterwards. No one wants to look at the cost of the party and how hard it is to bring together. We just want to celebrate and have fun. And in our economy, we only want it to always go up. But the fact is, is that the longer it goes up, the worse the distortions are in the economy. And when it finally stops, it is going to be a much more brutal recession than it should have. Nothing goes up for forever. Yeah, it's a little scary. I wish we could just schedule it like, "Okay. Well, four days after the election, we're going to have a recession." Like, "Great, let's get it done." Chad: We know what to do, now go ahead and start stuffing your mattress full of cash. Robert: Right. The ironic thing is, is in the past, during a recession, cash is king. You've got cash, you can go buy things cheap. We're in an economy right now where cash is the worst asset you can have. You can't make money on your money, and that's intentional. The fed has been trying to flush money out into the economy to keep asset prices high so that people feel rich and are willing to spend more money. But that doesn't give you any cushion for when things go bad. When things go bad, it's going to be real bad. Joel: Yeah. It sounds, a lot of things that you're sort of painting are generational, I guess challenges. You have the older folks partying and guess who gets to pay for it? The younger generation, which we talk about the okay boomer movement here on the show. Younger people not being real happy with older folks. Hearing things like, older folks as they start dying, the real estate glut that's going to happen as a result of that. Do you have any sense of whether it's workplace related or just, I don't know, life related in terms of the generational breakdowns and I guess the tensions that we're seeing these days? Robert: Oh, I don't think that they are manufactured tensions. I think that truly the boomer generation has benefited from what they have done to the economy to benefit that generation and it's still going on. The irony is, is that it probably won't end well even for the boomers, because people are just now waking up to the fact that if you are the richest and largest cohort in America, you probably don't have anybody to sell your house to. And if that's your major asset, aren't you kind of stuck? Robert: What's interesting is that again, there's no such thing as American real estate market. There is a collection of markets, every market is different. But I believe what you will find, that you have found for the last 10 years will be true for the next 30 or 40, is that the great places to live will become increasingly in demand. Somebody earlier maybe before we started recording mentioned Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is a unique place because 97% of the land is not available for development. It is in public hands or it's in conservation easements. And yet it's an incredibly beautiful place, but it's also in the middle of nowhere. It is eight hours from any major city. But yet, what you're finding is some incredibly rich people have been moving there and every time you visit Jackson Hole you're like, "Wow, that county there is either the first or second most unequal county in the United States." Robert: Because you have billionaires moving there and then you have just blue collar people trying to hang on and they are literally having to commute an hour or from an hour away just to be able to afford a place to be able to come in and do the jobs that are needed to be done in Jackson Hole. But that distortion is going to only get worse. Because you have so many people now that can make great amounts of wealth without ever stepping into an office or getting on an airplane. And what that means is, is that these places that are highly desirable are going to become even more desirable. Chad: That's the big key, right? So accelerating inequality. And if you have three houses and two boats, who the hell do you sell them to? And then on the other side of this equation, we have individuals who are working two to three jobs, maybe a side hustle or what have you, to make enough money where they live to be able to keep food in the kids' mouths. So that inequality does matter. How do we ... I mean, other than going, and maybe it is, maybe we go to the extreme of, hey, we've got to do this radical Elizabeth Warren type of thing where we just tax the shit out of the top one of the 1%. I mean, how do you fix something like this, where you do have this much inequality? Joel: When did the pitchforks come out? Robert: Well, I think that the inequality is, if you look at the one single thing that has distorted this country's politics and economics for 40 years, it is taxes. I am a business owner and you would think that I would have the opposite view that I have on taxes. I believe that the tax rates that we had back in the 60s and the 50s were the reason we had a strong economy. We had punitive tax rates. Once you made good money and you started making great money, you didn't have a way to keep that money. Some of the marginal tax rates were actually as high as 90% and the typical top tax rate was over 70%. And what that meant for a business owner like me is once I've made a good pile of money, if I make another pile on top of that, I get to keep about 10% or 20% of that. Why would I want to make that money and just give most of it, the vast amount of it to the government? Robert: What business owners would do is they'd look around and say, "How can I invest in my employees? How can I invest in more training? How can I build another plant? So that I don't have to give them money in taxes." But now if I make X dollars or a hundred times X dollars, my tax rate might actually go down effectively, the more money I make. That's the crazy part about it. And there's no incentive for me to not just say, "Well, it's all mine now. I'm just going to keep it." Because it doesn't really cost me anything at that point to be self-centered. Robert: Back in the 50s and 60s, there was a real cost to being self-centered with huge amounts of money. The government was going to basically take it out of your hands. And that made the economy fairer because people had to take care of their employees because it wouldn't just, it did not benefit them to just pay huge taxes, take a little slice of it and put it in the bank. You could make a bigger return by investing in your people and your plant and equipment, than you could paying taxes. Chad: But we look at those days, and from that standpoint, having a strong economy, we look at today as having a strong economy and we try to equate those two economies to being, I mean the same. But they're entirely different from the standpoint of inequality. I mean from our ... like I had said, what needs to happen is we have to really take a radical look and everybody's saying that there are all these radical people out there that just want to take money. It's like, "No, this is not about taking money. This is about ensuring that everybody can actually live, have healthcare, be healthy, all these other things that we thought America actually meant. But it doesn't really mean that today." Robert: Look, the health of any real nation is in its middle class. You have a thriving middle class, you have a real country. You have no middle class or a dying middle class and we call those third world nations. The absence of a healthy middle class in this country necessarily means that for the vast majority of people the game is over. Because by damage of the 1% is the 1%. Joel: Any views on universal basic income? Chad: Yeah, UBI. Robert: Well, you guys keep baiting me into, I'm becoming America's most hated business owner. But I am truly believing that there is nothing moral about capitalism or immoral about socialism. These are just different ways to organize the world and we should be looking at what makes this sustainable. And truly, if all of the resources are owned by the 1% who then don't need the 99% to make even more money because they've automated it, softwarized it, and whatever else they do to take people out of the equation. Chad: Bezos plan. Robert: Yeah. What's left? There's nothing left for the 99%. And so I think to a certain extent the seeds of its own destruction are in there. And you want to talk about, with Elizabeth Warren, the wealth tax. I think the wealth tax makes perfect sense. Here's why. I bet both of y'all own your own houses. Joel: Yes. Chad: Yes. Robert: You pay a wealth tax every year. The taxing authorities look at, I think your house is worth $700,000, you have to pay me this tax to keep that house next year. That's a wealth tax, just happens to be that we decided that wealth taxes should be on the things that you have to have for living like a house. But why isn't there a wealth tax on your cash and your bonds and your stock investments and stuff like that? Why is it that the thing that you have to have to live is the only thing that we tax from a wealth tax standpoint? Robert: And what Elizabeth Warren is saying is like, "Yeah, these rich people can actually ... If all the people in the world who can afford to pay more, wouldn't it be the people that have the 90% of the resources?" Sure. I just don't have a problem with it. Joel: You have an interesting sort of corporate structure. You mentioned people living in different areas and sort of in places that are in demand. Just for those who don't know, you have sort of a fairly interesting, I guess would you call it virtual corporate structure? Robert: We do. Every employee in Sovren works out of their house, no matter where they are in the country. Joel: No offices. Robert: No offices. Joel: Okay. Robert: Okay. People always talked about for a while the paperless office, right? When we were back in the 90s, that was kind of a big deal. Sovren is truly a paperless office. We don't have a physical office. We don't have a corporate network. We don't have any real estate or fixed assets. Literally the company only exist in the virtual world. Joel: Are there cons to that or is it all gravy? Robert: Well, there's a reason why it's organized that way. We're in knowledge worker business, right? IT. IT is the greatest business in the world for, do not snip this out and use this as a standalone quote. It's the greatest business in the world for exploiting your workers the best possible way. Here's what I mean by that. When I hire people, I explain to them that they can expect to make great money working here, but I will never pay them what they're worth. And you get this weird look like, "Wait, what?" Robert: And what I'm explaining to them in that conversation is, if I have a dollar and I give it to you and you make me a dollar and give it back, what was the point of that transaction? Literally, I'm going to give you a dollar and I want you to find a way to give me back $2. The whole reason I'm hiring you is to have you do something that will make more money than what I'm paying you. If you look at like, "Hey, I made this company X hundreds of thousands of dollars last year." You're like, "Yeah, but that's why we hired you." You're not going to get that as your pay. Robert: But here's the cool thing, in IT you can hire people that are literally 10 times or a hundred times in some cases more productive than the average person that they are in their cohort. And you can pay them two or three times what the average person makes. They will never leave and you have still made fantastic money with those people assets. It is not possible in other industries. So let's just say that I'm an, I had a father-in-law who was in the painting business, commercial painting contractor. His best painter was 10% faster than his worst painter. You can't hire guys like, "Hey, that guy painted three houses a day all by himself." It's not going to happen. But you can literally hire programmers who are Joel: That’s much better. Robert: 10 times. Easily, 10 times better. Is that the average programmer? No, you want to avoid average people in this business. That's why Sovren is organized virtually. Because if I were to say, everybody has to come into an office, now there is a geographic radius that you can draw around that office that you have to select your people from. I don't want the best people in that radius. I want the best people in the continent of United States, or maybe even outside of the United States. And by doing that, then I am sure that I am really getting those people that can give 10 times or a hundred times. Now, the challenge of it is it's very easy when you're not being spied on and nitpicked to become 1% lazier every day and never even realize that like, you know you're not supposed to be playing golf on Tuesday all day. Joel: That flies in the face of a lot of companies now that are just really preaching engagement and creating really long surveys and making extra time for both employees and the execs in the business. It sounds like you found an easier way that's not a burden on everybody. Robert: Well, I don't think that great people are going to subject themselves to bad employment practices. We hire professionals and here's what we tell them, "We want your 40 most productive hours of the week." I didn't say that I wanted you to work five, eight hours days from 8:00 to 5:00 or something like that. I literally want your 40 most productive hours, and I actually do not want 65 hours from you. We had an employee that was working probably 65 or 70 hours a week and we didn't feel like the guy was really performing. And so we spent a lot of time trying to understand what are you spending your time on and why are you doing that? And it came down to, we felt like he was doing a tremendous amount of busy work to comfort himself that he wasn't leaving anything undone. But he wasn't doing work productively. Robert: We found the major thing that he was using as a tool to waste time, in our opinion waste time, not in his opinion. We literally took that tool away from him. We deleted it off of our system and said, "It's gone." We had to sit down and hold his hand and say, "You are going to burn out." And he had already gone through the stress of being a workaholic, which ruined a previous relationship that he had. And so he kind of knew in the back of his head, this isn't healthy, but he didn't know how to get out of it. We took the tool away from him and then we told him, "You're only allowed to use this one tool and this is what we want to see out of it every day." We have found that this person is now working 40 hours a week and we have measured their productivity because this person is responsible for actually producing something. They are about, they're a little less than 10% more productive than when they were working 65 hours. Chad: Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Economy #remote #Advertising #VOICES #RobertRuff

Looking for some warm-and-fuzzies as the world or employment burns? This probably isn’t to episode for you, as we detail misery at ZipRecruiter and Indeed ... and a world shortage of condoms. It’s not all doom-and-gloom, however. The end is truly nigh. We throw a little sunshine too. Shine on, brothers and sisters, and throw some sun to our sponsors Canvas, Sovren, and JobAdX. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Chad: What this comes down to is Indeed is, it feels like to me, it really seems like they're putting the boot on the neck of many of their partners in a time of crisis. SFX: That's it, man. Game over man. Game over. 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: All righty then, from the lockdown headquarters of Indianapolis and Columbus, Indiana, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. How's your 2020 going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody, HR's most resilient weekly wrap up of news and opinion on all things employment or unemployment in this case maybe. I'm your co-host Joel pink slip Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad stay home Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Zip gets serious. Walmart is checking your temperature and we're running out of condoms everybody. Only the hard hitting shit on our show. Stay tuned. We'll be right back after this brief message. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: Before we get into the deep, dark shit, let me ask you a quick question. Joel: Yeah, ask me. Chad: What Netflix or Amazon show are you going to watch next? Joel: Okay. I warned you before this show that I was probably going to go to a dark corner at some point. But I will say that a big winner in this whole period for me has been Tiger King of Netflix. And if you haven't watched it, just do it. Chad: Oh God. Joel: You'll feel so much better about your life and the world at large and you'll be entertained. Your mind will be off of all of this doom and gloom for the six hours or so that the show is on. I'll also ashamedly recommend Love is Blind, also on Netflix, which is a dating show, which are usually awful and this is awful as well. And in any given regular time and place it would probably be awful. But for this time and place it's pretty entertaining. I will say that I recently, there was a sale on CuriosityStream. Chad: Okay. Joel: Have you seen the channel? Okay. Chad: I have seen it. I haven't tapped into it yet. Joel: They had a coronavirus sale for $11 for the year, so I was like, "Fuck it." And it's all like BBC documentaries and some PBS shit. Chad: So you are learning shit. Joel: I'm learning shit which is also nice too. I would make that recommendation. If you have 11 bucks eating through your pocketbook, go download CuriosityStream on Roku or wherever and learn some shit. How about you? Chad: You see what he did there, right. He was talking about nothing but trash TV and he's like, "Oh, I better bring this to a good educational point." Joel: Well, it's the only thing that pull me out of the abyss is like a good documentary on Stalin. That's the only thing that gets me feeling good about things again. Chad: We just finished season three of Goliath on Amazon and tonight we will probably start Ozark and that's the third season, been waiting for this. And I can't put it off any longer because I'm starting to see things pop up in my Twitter feed and my Facebook and I just I can't handle the possibility of spoiler. We're going to start that tonight. Joel: Yeah. Ozark, we're about three or four episodes in, definitely recommend that. Goliath, is that the Billy Bob Thornton show? Chad: Yeah, it is. Joel: Okay. What season is that on now? Chad: It's on three. And this was like the most LSD trip written series I've seen for a while. It was kind of hard for a minute to try to get into, but at least this season was, the past couple of seasons were pretty good. But it finished off pretty strong. And from my understanding, I thought this would be the last season but it seems, as Julie tells me, that there's a fourth season coming. Joel: By the way, a moment of silence for Schitt's Creek, which I know we both love immensely Chad: Love that show. Joel: ... being done. Just do the human race a service and do more shows just to help us all feel better. Chad: Oh yeah. And Julie and the kids I swear watch, they've watched Schitt's Creek through about four times. Joel: Yeah. I will say too that the governor Cuomo updates are interesting. Equally bad would be the Trump campaign speech slash updates on the end of the world. Chad: Yeah. What they should do is do more of the Cuomo stuff and just cut the Trump stuff altogether. Now when Fauci comes on, they should like zoom in in Birx, is it Birx or Brix? When she comes on, okay, go ahead and let's listen to them. But whenever Trump's on the mic, just shut his shit off. Joel: Which actually, apparently CNN has done. Chad: Smart. Joel: They don't show the stump speech, they just go to the Q&A. Did you see Trump the other day bragging about being number one on Facebook, whatever that means. He's just so into himself. Chad: Yes. Joel: Anyway, talking about Trump is going to get me pissed off. Chad: Well, let's go to somebody who hates Trump just as much as you, maybe even more. Steven Rothberg tweeted us and here's his tweet. He said, "Just voted for the new #ChadCheese t-shirt design. I'm hoping this won't be the last vote I'm able to cast before the end of the year. #Covid-19. #Goodbye democracy." I'm hoping that we figure this whole voting thing out, that hopefully we can vote. Joel: I've actually looked this up because I was curious. The Democratic National Convention has been postponed. Chad: Yeah, in August. Joel: That'll be interesting. The whole Bernie, that'll be interesting. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Apparently a vote for president cannot go past I think January 20th, which is typically when the ceremony is that, that brings in a new president. From what I understand, and I'm not a constitutionalist, but I think there can be postponements in an election, although I think there's also never been a time in our nation that we have done that, but it is possible. But hell or high water, we'll have a new president or the same president or some vote deciding either of those things by January 20th of 2021. Chad: Let's get that done and let's pivot again back out of the darkness, pivoting to Joel: Oh, I'm just starting on the darkness man. Chad: ... to the t-shirt. The t-shirt without the ability for us to get the hell out of the house, obviously we can't get to events. But we're looking to find some really fun ways to get our listeners the new 2020 Chad and Cheese t-shirts. And the good people at Emissary.ai are going to help us figure that shit out. Because we can't stop the Chad and Cheese train just because we can't get out of the damn house. Joel: If nothing else, we're going to defer funds from shakers travel budget to build drones to deliver tshirts to everyone around the country I think. Chad: If we built drones that were like Joe Juniors like head, and they delivered, that would be it. I think he would get behind that too. Joel: I mean, come on, hokey-pokey Jersey drones flying around the country. I'm into it, I'm digging it. Chad: Next shout-out goes to Quincy Valencia, the queen of chatbots. Joel: The queen. Chad: She messaged me earlier this week just so that she could say, "Ha ha, I told you so. I got a prediction right." And I'm like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And this is it. She predicted that robots will continue to encroach on recruiter and coordinator spaces forcing companies to start radically redesigning how they do talent acquisition. And I said, "Are you kidding me? You're saying that you actually predicted COVID?" She said, well, no, she didn't predict that, but it did happen, so she wins. Joel: Nice. Chad: Anything for a win, Quincy, anything for a win. Joel: Nice. Can I spend my shout-out time getting on the therapist couch? Chad: Go ahead. Joel: Okay. Chad: Tell me what you think. Joel: All right. You and I have been through a few of these recession things, and so I was trying to find some solace in surviving 2008 which was as bad as I thought it could be, literally. End of capitalism, right? They were talking about that. End of the banking system, et cetera. But the thing that saved our industry back then was healthcare and probably certain geographical locations that weren't really stupid with the whole real estate thing. Knowing job boards back then and sites and companies or industry, there's no doubt there was a bloodbath, no question whatsoever. The shining light was healthcare, right? Baby boomers are aging, healthcare is still hiring, healthcare is still strong. And there were certain ... the whole service industry didn't shut down. People still went to restaurants, people still did things. Joel: When I say like going to a dark corner, the solace in this thing is, oh, it's going to be over in a month and then a month becomes two months and two months becomes three months and then three months becomes, okay, this thing isn't going to be done until we get a vaccine for it. And it's going to keep popping up and it's going to continue to be a thing. There's going to be a blood bath. There's so much uncertainty around, when is this thing going to end? What's the solution? What's going to happen? For me, I've had a really hard time sort of calibrating myself to what the future looks like, and I don't even know this show. What should the show ... We're historically a fun show, we're a couple of meatheads and then part of me is like, that's probably the least thing that people need right now. Or maybe it is what people need right now. Joel: I'm having a hard time figuring this out. And at almost 50 years old, I shouldn't be just trying to figure this shit out. That's been really tough for me going forward. Obviously money's going to dry up. People aren't going to post jobs. This thing is going to go deep. I don't know how long it's going to go. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people that say this is a really confusing time. There's no end in sight what's going to happen. April 1st just passed us by, rent's not going to be paid. Mortgages aren't going to be paid. $2,000, $1,000, whatever it is a month, only go so far for most people. I'm scared for the industry for the uncertainty. I'm scared for sort of the global impact of what's going on and what we're seeing. Joel: I mean, they're talking about 100,000 to 240,000 deaths as we record this podcast. I don't think we're at 10,000. What happens to the morale of the world when we hit a million deaths and 10, 20 million infected. It's just a scary time. And in all of this, we're all stuck at home with our families. I love my family, but I've got a three year old who needs care and feeding pretty much all the time. That's a challenge. We have roles as people where we're part parent, we're part lover, part husband or wife, part worker. And when you put all those things in one pot and say, "Okay, figure it out in this X by X foot space." That adds extra stress. It's just, this is good for me because it's a nice venting period. Joel: I'm not looking for answers but maybe I'm feeling similarly to how other people are. And I know we're going to talk about stories of feel good coronavirus stuff and companies stepping up and that's all great. But we're also going to talk about companies laying off people and shuttering businesses. And I just like you are getting more and more word everyday about layoffs at companies and shutting down and people I trust and respect that have been through this are really negative about the future. I just wanted to let that out and I feel a little bit better if nothing else that I did. So shout-out to my feelings everybody. Chad: Shout-out to Joel's feelings. Yeah. I mean this show was nothing more when we started this, two guys at a conference at a bar, what would they be saying? Whether they're at the bar or not, right. And this is what people are saying, they're talking about. And I agree, as long as we have leaders, whether they're state leaders or national leaders who don't understand that we have to lock this shit down as soon as humanly fucking possible so that we can start to contain it, identify who needs help, get them that help and then snuff it out. That's what we need to understand, right. Chad: And the thing that really blows my mind is this is what the military was fucking made for. This is why we don't have them in Corps of engineers. I mean really at full speed, the healthcare infrastructure of the military, those types of things. Yeah, I think, and I hope that we'll actually start to make those decisions as we have. The governor of Georgia yesterday, he just yesterday found out that people can pass this when they're asymptomatic. No shit asshole, we've known that for months. We just have to come out from under the fucking rock, be humans and care about more than just ourselves. You talked about the narcissist in chief. That's one of the things that we have to get away from. We have to focus more on community. And that being said, let me try to throw some good stuff at you. Joel: Sure. Chad: Little companies like Bauer Hockey that produce hockey equipment, hence their name. They repurposed their facilities and started repurposing protective face shields for medical professionals. We saw the organization who actually does baseball jerseys recalibrate it, and they're doing masks and they're doing protective gear. In most healthcare facilities around the nation, our local hospital here in Columbus, Indiana, they needed healthcare gear. They actually reached out to the community and asked for people to make masks for them and the people they assembled. And they got all the information, the types, the masks, the materials, how they're supposed to be constructed, all that stuff. And the community came together and my wife, she's not doing it now, but I can generally hear the sewing machine going. Chad: They've made over 2300 masks delivered to the hospital, the local healthcare community, including assisted living facilities around the area. I think from our standpoint, we as community, we have to quit thinking about self and we need to think about what we can do for other people. And right now let's stay the fuck home. And what else can we do on top of that that doesn't put anybody else in jeopardy. Starbucks extended pay for all workers through, whether they come to work or not, through May 3rd. The Chipotle interview that we just did, they amped up their salary by 10%. They're doing all these things. Chad: I mean, I think the biggest issue that we have right now is we don't have one solid voice at the national level actually guiding what the fuck should be happening. But still, even though that's not one voice, we're still seeing all these different leaders from different states, some states, from some companies actually taking this, pretty much the tiger by the damn tail. Like Elon Musk who said, "Hey, look, we've got this thing ramped up. We're not going to charge you and we'll send these to you." That is the spirit that we need to continue and actually beat this fucking thing. Joel: Do you think we'll live in a world coming out of this where we wear masks in the US? Chad: I think this will give us a better idea of preparedness and that we weren't prepared and we aren't prepared if this actually had a higher death rate than what it does now. Hopefully it'll put us in a much more prepared footing than it was prior. Joel: Yeah. I think if you're looking at some silver linings of this, I think at some point we have to realize that more resources slash money probably needs to go to things like the CDC and a global organization that can pinpoint when these things start flaring up much better than they do now. I was listening to a podcast the other day about the Spanish flu. I mean, Spanish flu just in America killed more people than all the wars of the 20th century. Chad: This is not something that is unprecedented. Joel: Yeah. In a world where we're more connected than ever, spending money and resources to fight these things and nip them in the bud is probably going to be a silver lining from this. The other thing is just the way the environment has benefited from human being shutting down. And there's plenty of stories about limitations on pollution, people are burning carbon fossil fuels, et cetera. And that's not my lane necessarily, but at some point there's going to be some value into saying, look what happened when we shut down the burning of fossil fuels. And having an urgency around clean energy and figuring out that part of the equation. Joel: The other thing lightheartedly a little bit is millennials will have had their first real struggle in the professional world. Most people 12 years back have only had really bright, lovely rainbow times. And this will finally be a little bit of struggle. And if you believe that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger then we'll be stronger out of this generationally. Chad: We're already in the topic, so screw it. As we're talking about 6.6 million Joel: Should we take a break real quick? Chad: No. You just keep it rolling for a second. So 6.6 million, and then we're seeing individuals who are trying to file for unemployment going to websites that crash. There's a story out of Florida, the Florida unemployment website crashed. The phone lines were clogged up. I can understand not having enough people to answer the phone, that's really hard to scale. But how can you have technology today that can't scale? We have cloud. We have all the different load balancing. I mean, there's just so much to be able to say as a state that we're going to take your taxpayer money and we're going to put it into this horse and buggy. This is not acceptable. Chad: But I also agree with what you'd said before. This is helping us to understand we need to do shit, but we're not prepared. The state of Florida in this case, not prepared to take care of their people. The governor, that is your job, taking care of your people. Again, I think it's one of those things, along with companies like Walmart who are now starting to do temperature checks at the door before employees come in and we just saw, just came down on the wire, Amazon's starting to do the same thing because they got kicked in the ass. 10 of their locations had COVID employees working. It seemed like on a daily basis. Joel: Sure. America has a long proud tradition of being unprepared for shit. Pearl Harbor, no one thought the Japanese would actually have the cojones or the wherewithal to come on our turf and bomb us and Chad: Guess what? Joel: It was that emergency that said, "Holy shit, we're not prepared for war." Even though most of the world had been in a conflict for two to three years before Pearl Harbor even happened. Chad: And they were still in conflict. Joel: Everyone knew a pandemic was eventually going to happen. And I'm sure somebody thought, well, Jesus, what if millions of people a week file for unemployment? Can our state systems handle that? Well, no, they can't. Let's get states on Amazon web services so they can scale up traffic and get them on Cisco servers and whatever else, because they're probably on some dudes basement somewhere that built the site in 1998. Chad: What we are seeing though is we're seeing companies like the San Antonio based Xenex who makes the full spectrum UV germ-zapping robot. Have you seen this? It's like a Roomba, but it's for hospitals. And they go into a room after surgery or after there's been an infected individual that was in there and they've been moved, and they send the disinfecting UV Roomba in there. I think this is fucking, this is brilliant. Obviously the demand for these have gone through the roof. But why wouldn't you as like an Amazon or a Walmart or all of these different places that people are still having to go because they still have daily needs, shit, they should be buying these things up by the boatload. Joel: Yeah. I mean you look at the industries that are going to be doing these things immediately are things like airline and any kind of travel service like Carnival Cruise Lines and things like that. I fully expect when I take a flight that they're either spraying down the cabin with disinfectant or there's some sort of robot ultraviolet light thing going through the cabin. I fully expect all those things to happen and that's where the immediate need is going to be. And hopefully that trickles into things like restaurants and schools and places of business as a result. Chad: Before we talk about JobAdX, I hope we learn that when we are at record profit times, we have a rainy day fund and we actually take care of our employees. My mini rant is over. Joel: We'll be right back after a word from JobAdX. JobAdX: Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits, with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ, with JobAdX. Chad: Into the big news man. Joel: Yeah. Real quick, I was talking to our friends at JobAdX today and they were talking about no surprise record numbers of job seekers coming onto the network in a record number for them of new publishers signing up to hopefully profit from the clicks that come from the network. So no surprise there, but to get some confirmation from them, more job seekers and more job sites or sites in general looking to make money hopefully as times get tough. Chad: Well, and that's interesting because we were lucky enough to get a video and we have the audio that we put out earlier this week of Ian, the CEO of ZipRecruiter. And he actually said job seeker traffic is down 25%. Their new employer sign ups are down 80%. I would assume for the most part, those are SMB employer sign ups. Existing customer churn, 60%. So 60% of their current customers are churning and they're likely to miss 2020 revenue goals by over $150 million. Those were really the reasons why ZipRecruiter was furloughing 40% of their workforce. Joel: And what was the timeline that he gave, that Ian gave in regards to if this goes on this much longer, we will cease to be in business anymore. Chad: Yeah. He said if they don't take steps now, ZipRecruiter could be insolvent by the end of the year. And I quote, "We must cut costs to survive." I mean, quick question for you. Do you think this was 100% COVID driven? Joel: Our Industry, mostly services are large contingent of customers, like categories, areas, et cetera. There was definitely a sense that we were a little bit frothy in the economy and that there was probably going to be at some point calling of the herd, right? There's going to be a little bit of pruning of the hedges, where companies started cutting back. Maybe they used, I don't know, slow growth in China to say we need to cut costs and people or there was something that happened. I think there was an element of that going to happen anyway. I think the coronavirus put that thing on steroids. Joel: And I think while a lot of companies probably used the coronavirus a little bit as an excuse to get rid of people, I don't think that they would have expected to lay off as many people as they had. Again, with the financial crisis, you kind of knew like, okay, we need to readjust and focus more on healthcare or focus more on taxes or focus more on whatever. But with coronavirus, you can't just make a business out of job postings for Grubhub delivery people. That's really hard to do. I think it's 95% coronavirus in my opinion and maybe 5%, hey, this is just, we were too frothy and we needed to cut a little bit anyway. Chad: Yeah. I mean, from my standpoint, I look at the business model in the outbound sales reps selling $300 job postings or $400, whatever they were, while Zip spends a shitload of cash on XM and podcasts didn't make sense, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: That's just not scalable and it doesn't promote great margins. I remember back in the Monster days in 99 and 2000, when we were printing money and sales reps were hand posting jobs because our ECOM was pretty much non-existent. That wasn't scalable in itself, but wasn't really addressed because there was so much money coming in until after the dot-com bubble burst. I'm feeling shades of this here where it's like, there is a problem, but man, we're just killing it and you're right, it's so frothy, we know there's a problem and then a bubble burst and it's like, shit, now we have to make huge changes into our process and our infrastructure and all those things and cut a bunch of heads to make this happen. Joel: I think you have talked about in length about sort of monsters need to continually feed the job seeker beast, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: And we've been in this environment so long of Indeed has to advertise, Ziprecruiter has to advertise, all these job sites. They have companies that want to hire, companies that want to give them money, but they have to keep feeding that job seeker beast. And overnight they've gone from way more job seekers than they know what to do with. Even though ZipRecruiter said they're down job seekers, I expect that to change. And you have at the same time job postings going to almost zero. How do you adapt to that environment? It's not easy, but like you said, you sure as hell stop podcast advertising on Serial for job seekers traffic. Chad: Yeah. My big question is, who's next? Will Randstad stay in the game or will they finally put Monster down or maybe sell it. I don't know who in the hell would buy it, but I mean, if this is the time to buy Monster data, I would think that this is the time to do it. CareerBuilder in itself, I wonder if that's just going to fade away into nothingness. Joel: Yeah. I think I've said on the show a few times that ZipRecruiter and Indeed have the most to lose in a downturn, for a little bit different reasons. And I was talking to somebody that I respect in the industry and they were surprised that Indeed, although we will talk about them after this, that they haven't done their big announcement. They're going to lay off people. I don't know how big it's going to be, but it's going to impact them. It's going to be a cultural shakeup because again, these are people that have not seen anything but good times at Indeed. And the Google thing was a pain in the ass enough and now throw this at Indeed. It's going to be really tough for them. Same with Monster in the general sites, any staffing organization is going to be really hard pressed to find prosperity, and this is probably just going to speed up that whole process for a lot of companies. Chad: On Indeed's publisher network, you received a message, "Dear Indeed partner, Indeed has recently paused all sponsored jobs API campaigns, where a cost per click payment structure was involved to drive traffic to jobs on indeed.com." What this comes down to is Indeed is, it feels like to me, it really seems like they're putting the boot on the neck of many of their partners in a time of crisis. Hey little guy, we know you've been sending traffic to us and we have been providing revenue to you. But from now on what we're going to do is we're just going to take that for free. Okay, little guy. Thanks so much. Joel: As I look back over these periods of time where the world ended for us, and 2008, there were a lot of job sites that said, "Why do I need a sales staff when I can just flow traffic to our site, have Indeed backfill and just cash checks." And for a lot of companies and little guys and its job boards that worked really well. More or less until Google said, "This isn't really good." And then they had to adapt to that stuff. But they kept getting content and money from Indeed. And you would look on the service and say, "Why would indeed kill this traffic slash profit center of all these job boards and sites and whatever else that's using their content to create revenue?" But it's really a gangster move to basically rip out the heart Chad: Trojan horse too. Joel: Yeah. That have been relying on Indeed's money. And it's really kicking them whether they meant to do this or not. Timing wise, I mean it's just a total rip of the heart out of saying, okay, the economy's going in the shitter, now we're going to really put the knife into the heart and take away everything by taking out the content and the revenue that you were generating from Indeed. Chad: It's like suffocating small and medium size job sites who at this point probably depended on that revenue. And I mean, my question is for all of those vendors that are out there and even companies who are watching this are now just learning about it. If you do business with Indeed, you know you're going to get fucked in some way, some form or fashion somehow. This is Indeed's game plan to a T, period. If you're going to bow to the altar, get ready for whatever you have to sacrifice, and it might be your actual business itself. Joel: Used to be where vendors would, or companies would say, "Okay, are we going to use Indeed or are we going to use Simply Hired? Or maybe we're going to use Juju for our backfill." Well, Indeed got rid of Simply Hired, they bought them. Juju is basically focused on text recruiting, on the text recruiting business as far as I know. There's really no competition. There's nowhere else that someone can go for pay-per-click dollars. So yeah, and I also don't think that Google is going to turn around and launch it tomorrow. Linkedin's not going to launch something tomorrow for publishers. So yeah, it was a total gangster move. And part of me wants to applaud the move, but it is ruthless for sure. Chad: This is the time when the newly launched talent.com and Adzuna and all those other networks. I mean, the JobAdXs of the world, the Recruitologys. I mean all of those, it's time for you to actually get in as the community, as we talked about earlier in the show, this is community time. You now have a bad guy. It's always been a bad guy. You've known there's been a bad guy. Now separate yourself from that asshole and start to create something in a bigger network. Joel: Agreed, agreed. And all those companies should be out marketing whatever ad dollars they had earmarked for whatever conference and spend it on that. Chad: Yes. Well, and then getting into the next Indeed story, Indeed shuts down Indeed Prime as we now know as Seen. Joel: Seen. Chad: Yeah. Seen. Which was just newly rebranded Indeed Prime. And I mean, Prime has been around since, what? 2015 or 16 or something like that. Joel: Yeah. I think 2015 they rebranded it and I think September, September of 19. And you don't usually, have its own brand and take away Prime, if you're not serious. The move to shut it down, maybe that's just sort of the froth, maybe it's part of a bigger cut back at Indeed. Maybe the product just wasn't catching on. Or at least the brand wasn't catching on. But to me it's sort of an omen of things to come. I expect more things to come on the newswire of Indeed stuff down, in addition to lay offs, like the whole Android app where you photograph help wanted signs and send them to Indeed. I don't know why that still exists in a time like this. And some other business, they've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall since Google for Jobs came on the scene. And I expect a lot of that to be shuttered in the coronavirus tsunami. Chad: Yeah. I have a comment on the socials as we posted this out. "Indeed's AI periodically recommends me fry cook jobs in Akron. Never done that. Never lived there. Now, maybe that's about where my skill level is. Sure. I don't think so. But I think maybe they need to tinker with preexisting tech before they try to launch a bunch of new quote unquote products no one is really clamoring for." I agree to an extent. I thought this might be an opportunity for them to perspectively mobilize technology and be more efficient for staffing. My question to you, because you were the big predictor in this, do you think Indeed will go into staffing at all now? Joel: Timing wise now, no. Staffing is ... I mean, I guess you could focus on certain niches like healthcare and that will still continue to grow. I just think, I've always thought Recruit Holdings, their parent company being a staffing company, that that was always part of the vision of what Indeed was going to be and maybe grander vision was that that's what it would be. It would drive job seeker traffic and then that would become staffing and they would ... and they've continually cut out all the middleman to their business. They've cut out staffing, now they're ... I think it's still on the roadmap. Joel: I just think that an asteroid has hit the world and everyone is trying to figure out what we're going to do. For ZipRecruiter it's make really deep cuts in their staff and their business. I think Indeed's is coming, I don't know how deep or how long we're going to have to wait, but it is coming. To answer your question in a roundabout way is, yes, I still think they're going to have to get to staffing. By the way, I think Google for Jobs is going to come out of this probably bigger and more prominent than they are now through this whole tragedy of coronavirus. But I think that ultimately Indeed is going to have to come out of this and really think about what they are. And I think more and more it's going to be staffing. Chad: Yeah. I don't agree. I think they're going to be more technology. And if they're smart, they'll focus on the text side while recruit does all of the staffing themselves. If they laser focus on technology instead of throwing all this fucking spaghetti at the wall, I think they have a really good chance of supporting staffing and TA. Joel: Time will tell man. Chad: Time will tell. Joel: We got to get out of this disaster first. Chad: What we can talk about on the other side of this break is the prospect of a disaster that I don't think anybody saw coming. Joel: We'll be right back. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvasbot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: Okay, for everybody, before we get into the story, I have to say this is a story from Reuters, okay. This is not some off-brand bullshit story. Joel: Only the quality publishers are what we're reading throughout the week Chad: Yes, exactly. Well, I wouldn't go that far. Joel: By the way, is there a better clickbait than a title like condom shortage looms after coronavirus lockdown shuts world's top producer. Is there better clickbait than something like that? Chad: No, there's not. And so Malaysia's Karex Bhd makes one in every five condoms globally. It has not produced a single condom from its three Malaysian factories for more than a week due to a lockdown imposed by the government to halt the spread of the virus. Now, not only are we having problems with milk and eggs and toilet paper, for God's sakes people we can't even have safe sex. Joel: By the way, just talking about this spurred my just consciousness of like, apps like Tinder and whatever else have to be dead right now. Who's dating right now? Who's hooking up right now? Although I say that and I see footage from the beaches of Florida where everybody's having a good time. I guess shit is still happening. But ultimately people should not be meeting or hooking up or randomly dating right now or dating at all. I guess this is for the people that are monogamous and at home all day and have lost their jobs and all they want to do is have sex all day. So good for them, good for them. I hope this condom shortage gets fixed. But as a married guy, whatever. Chad: I don't have a problem with it. The biggest concern as you read a little bit deeper is really more for the humanitarian programs in Africa, where safe sex is a matter of life or death when it comes to HIV and AIDS. As we'd think about it from our safe place, it does have bigger ramifications for some populations around the globe. Joel: This is why I'm your friend because when I steer off into meatheadedness, you pull me back into AIDS in Africa, so I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Chad: We are the world. Joel: There's a big waiting list for divorce lawyers in China. Chad: We are the children. Joel: Because being cooped up with your spouse for months on end leads to bad things like divorce apparently. Chad: Not me. It just leads to more of these protective masks [inaudible 00:42:29.05]. I've got to go downstairs and cut some more material. Joel: Yeah. You and I know nothing about divorce, right? Chad: Yeah. And we out. Joel: And with that, stay safe everybody, wash those hands. We out. Announcer: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts 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. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's 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. #Indeed #IndeedPrime #Seen #BeSeen #Staffing #Technology #ZipRecruiter #Monster #Careerbuilder

Katrina Collier, professional recruiter and author of "The Robot-Proof Recruiter," thinks employers can effectively battle the bots of automation and maintain job security as we drive into the 21st Century. Oh, really? We'll just have to see about that as Collier takes on Chad & Cheese, who are infinitely slurping from the bottle of robotic Kool-Aid. She surprisingly holds her own, as everyone comes out of the ring a little more black-and-blue, but still standing. BUY THE BOOK! Brought to you by the best in ROBOTS... Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Sovren: Google, Lever, Entelo, Monster, Jibe. What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996 and we can help improve your hiring process too. We love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com, S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo. 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, flash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. What's up? Robot proof your recruiting. Chad: Robot proof your ass. This is what it is. It's that time kids. Joel: We're talking to an actual human who wrote an actual book on paper and stuff. Chad: Yeah. They still do that. Joel: So we're super excited today to introduce Katrina Collier. Katrina, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad: Katrina and the waves. Joel: Walking on sunshine today. Chad: Walking on sunshine. Joel: Katrina is the author of The Robot-Proof Recruiter. Has Katrina said anything or she just so shocked. Katrina: No, I'm too busy laughing. There was singing, I wasn't expecting singing. Chad: There it is. A Survival Guide for Recruitment and Sourcing Professionals. Katrina, give us a little bit about you. Who the hell is Katrina Collier? Katrina: That is a very long and complicated question. Joel: What are you? Her therapist? Jesus. Katrina: Yeah. I have been in the recruitment industry since 2003. Like everybody else, of course, I didn't Joel: Oh, newbie. Katrina: Sorry, newbie, yeah. Just for 16 years. I didn't plan to ever be a recruiter, but I saw this little advertisement in the paper, yes, a newspaper, and I thought, oh, I can do that. Then I came out around the recession, 2008, 2009, and thought, oh, I'm going to start training. Everyone's appearing online, why don't I just teach how to source on social media? Way too early. Then went in-house for a period of time, proved to myself I could do it. Then from January, 2012 up until about 2018 that's what I was doing. Then Kogan Page asked me if I would like to write a book and it absolutely blew my mind that I was asked. The little inner child came out like, "You're going to let me write a book?" But I was also very aware Joel: It was that 50 grand advance, right? Katrina: No, no. Yeah. No. Joel, is this why you haven't had a copy yet? Joel: Because everyone gets rich writing books, I hear. Katrina: No, I have to buy my own copies of the book. Joel: Which is why I didn't get one, apparently. Katrina: That's why you didn't get one. I might send you one later though, if you're lucky. If you behave. But, one of the questions I'm sure you're going to say is, who the hell do I think I am to write a book? And that was exactly it. I thought there's one thing to be training sourcing, well, sure, I have to be doing it, but I haven't recruited for a while. I pulled in 74 voices from the industry to help me to back this up with lots of hands-on opinion and that made me really proud of it. Joel: Nice. Well, name drop. Drop some names so people can relate to some of the experts that you talked to. Katrina: Well, talking because of experience, of course there had to be the Mr Gerry Crispin. Shannon Pritchett wrote the forward, bless their cotton socks for doing that. Oh, I'm having to look at the acknowledgement, there are so many. There's a few [Crosstalk [00:04:02.28] Joel: Jim Stroud's in the way. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Of course, Jim's in there, but there's tons from Europe as well. Yeah. But I also wanted to make sure that I've got European recruiters and I got some from back in my home country, from Australia in there as well. So it's a really global book. I also wanted to get the job search sites. I've got Hannah Morgan in there, for example, she's really well known. So there's some names that are known, like Tris Revill and there'll be others that you're like, I don't know who that is. Joel: That's okay. Katrina: Because I wanted it to be global, as well. Chad: In that theme, what's the biggest difference between a recruiter from the UK and a recruiter from the United States? Joel: About 30 IQ points? Katrina: Well, other than we speak English properly, no kidding, what is the biggest difference? I would say, if you took a look at the way recruiters are perceived from an agency/in-house perception, I think the agency recruiters here are looked down on a lot more than the staffing are in the US. I think there's slightly more respect for recruitment in the US. Chad: Really? Katrina: I know that's a really strange answer to your question, but Joel: More respect in the US. All right. Katrina: A little bit more respect for what staffing do than what happens here. And I think that's unfortunately because of the cowboy attitude of the minority, has created that. But we have all the same challenges, inmails, spam, email spam, spam, just spam. Katrina: When they came to me and said, "Do you want to write a book?" And I sat there having a little like, "What?" Because I'm so blunt, right? I'm so sick of the BS out there about, well, we have a sourcing tool that uses AI and we can just replace you. I'm like, but you're sourcing from someone's ability to write a resume or a profile and people can't do that. So how can your AI possibly do that? You have so much noise around the technology can just automate everything you're doing and you're just going, people don't want to talk to robots now. In the supermarket, they go to the human over the self checkout a lot of the time, you see that all the time. There's still tellers in the bank, even though there's an automatic teller machine. I'm going, "Someone's career, are we going to give our career?" Joel: All the research and feedback we get is that job seekers like chatbots, because they're not dumped into the black hole of the resume database. So Katrina: But that's when the applicant has applied. So they've got into. Where you see recruiters being replaced is a lot of the sourcing side and getting someone to actually apply, reaching out to people. For example, I talk about Ben Gledhill and Yodel with the chatbot they've got on their website, which is awesome. You go there and they're always recruiting courier drivers. It's, "Can you carry boxes, 30 kilos?" But you're, "No, I can't." So you're out of the process. And it will step you through the application as a chatbot. That's when people arrive, keeping them engaged and giving them the clarity and the certainty, which I talk about all the way through the book. Use the technology to give clarity and certainty, not to replace the human touch. In that respect, absolutely, I would want to talk to a chatbot then, but I wouldn't want to talk to one when I'm just getting in touch with someone about their career and whether they want to change jobs. Joel: So you agree there are some levels of recruiting that are not robot proof? Katrina: Yeah. Joel: The entry, the first walking through the door application stuff? Katrina: Yeah. I do think so, and I don't think I'm ever going to change my opinion on that. It's a career, right? If you look at ... I think it's even harder in the US because of your health insurance. Chad: Yes. Joel: Yeah. Katrina: Therefore, people are more reluctant to change shops. So you've really got to woo them. [Amy Miller’s just changed jobs, they wooed her for a year. It's a big thing to change jobs. I just don't think that you can just get someone's attention with a spam email via a robot and start chatting with a chatbot at that point. Chad: And that's where I would say, it's changed with the job market. It used to be, we had a much longer span, but because of the job market being so hot, it's much easier to jump from job to job because you jump from one piece of healthcare to the next piece of health care. And yes Katrina: Okay. Chad: That is an issue that we have here in the US obviously, but when it comes down to engagement, I really believe that systems can provide more relevant contents, possibly to humans to be able to share and/or just directly out to candidates better than just humans can. That's not scalable for a recruiter. Right? Katrina: Yeah, I get that. If you're looking from a content marketing point of view, definitely. And where I was really talking about it. So, nothing ... And you're talking about that black hole as well. Nothing annoys me more than, you apply for a job and either you get nothing or you get that auto responder that says, "Gee, thanks to your application, the talent acquisition team might be back in touch with you, but more likely your resume just went in the bin." Chad: Right. Katrina: You get that, right? Joel: Yeah. Katrina: And I'm always saying to people, for a start, there are tools that you can use that will send a GIF, they'll send a text message, they'll send something much more exciting and say, "Katrina Collier, here's my email, here's my phone number, I get overwhelmed with applications, I might lose you and not mean to, can you chase me up if you don't hear from me?" A really real human approach. That's automated, the response bit, but then the human, it feels like they've got some clarity and certainty of who they're dealing with and then they can get in touch. Now, everyone goes, "Oh my God, I'll get overwhelmed." No you won't. Because it'll be like one in 100 people who get in touch, because the average person also wants to hide behind technology. You think of our finds and how we've got them within reach, but yet we ignore text messages and we ignore WhatsApps and emails and everything, even though our phone's right there. Chad: Candidate centric recruiters beat robots. Katrina: Yeah. Chad: That's in the book. The big focus here for recruiters and becoming robot proof, is really being more human. Right? Because tech can't be. Katrina: Yeah. Chad: Tell us a little bit about that. Just from the candidate journey standpoint, because it's not scalable for a single human being to try to personally get in touch with 100, 200 plus candidates per req. Right? Katrina: Yeah. Chad: If you have a req load of 20 to 30 reqs, which is pretty fucking high, that's not scalable. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It's not sustainable. So how can recruiters beat robots in this kind of scenario? Katrina: I wrote the book for recruiting people who are highly sought after. I didn't write it for high volume and I'm really honest about that in the beginning of the book. Chad: Okay. Joel: I've not done high volume recruitment, so I can't possibly understand what that's like. If you have 20 to 30 reqs and they're all completely different, you have a really different problem going on in your company. Either you should have more staff or you should be wondering why the hell you've got so many requirements, but that's another whole conversation. But I would rather that you didn't send one to 200 emails or InMails that are going to get a very low response and you actually sent some quality messages that would get a response by landing exactly where the person is communicating, which might not be LinkedIn, which is the one everyone tends to overuse. Chad: Right. Katrina: And you're going to get a higher response rate. You should be aiming for 80, 90% response rate, not mass, 200 people and one replies. And unfortunately that's what people do. Joel: So the message to the kids is don't get into high volume recruiting because that's the threat. Go out and recruit doctors and engineers and people that are in really high demand. Is that the message? Katrina: No, that's not the message. Joel: No? Katrina: No. I'm just saying that's my experience. I've always been in tech recruitment, so there's developers, like here in London, where there's five jobs for every developer, that's my experience. I've written the book from that angle and I've been honest about it. Where you have to make a huge effort to get someone's attention because you're at a bit of ... You haven't read it Joe, because Chad. I don't talk much about the actual messaging itself because I'm more about the, do you look worthy of someone's time. Does the company look worthy of someone's time? How do you come up under scrutiny, so that if I actually get your attention, you want to talk to me because I'm getting so overwhelmed with messages that are those bulk messages that the robots can send Joel: That's fine. Katrina: That I'm ignoring them. Hopefully that makes more sense. Joel: Yeah. I'm just curious about the threats. As a recruiter, obviously I think high volume is one that is something to pay attention to because that's being attacked by automation and AI and everything else. I think the other thing that I want to talk about is the burgeoning gig economy. Yes, we're seeing gig with driving, we're seeing gigs with service industry and things like that, but we're also seeing it with Chad: Developers. Joel: Healthcare and nursing and things like that. I'm just curious about your ... Yeah, developers. I'm curious about your opinion on the gig economy and how much of a threat that is to the future of recruiting human to human. Katrina: Just more from a company point of view, I suspect it's going to have a little rant, that's a little rough topic, I'm not answering your question. I'm not sure how many companies have actually woken up to the fact. Absolutely, go Collier, don't answer the question. Dodge. I don't know how many companies have woken up to the fact that they're losing knowledge workers, I'm going to say in the 40's range. Because like myself, and I could name like 50 of my friends who've all taken their knowledge, left the company and are now working gig because of course, we've got IR35 come in here, so we've got to be careful how we contract. So we're all doing lots of different bits of work, but we won't deliver that knowledge back to any companies that don't look after their people. That's why we left, we've come out. It's that age group where the boomers are going to retire, and this beautiful Gen X age group sitting in the middle won't be there to take those senior manager roles. Joel: Nope. Katrina: I know I'm not answering your question, but as far as a threat for a company's recruitment, I think there's actually a big problem there that most companies have not woken up to yet. They're so focused on boomers retiring and millennials apparently job hopping. Chad: Yes. Katrina: They're just basically doing what a normal 20 to 30 old would do, but they've kind of forgotten about this. And a lot will go and use the technology really confidently to be able to have that flexibility. Like I sat there this morning walking my dog so I didn't have to sit in traffic. Chad: You've said it and I think I actually I read it in the book and I've heard it all over the place, recruiters are lazy. Is that one of the ways not to be able to defeat the robots, is not to be so damned lazy and not to lean so hard on LinkedIn? Katrina: Yeah. I think it comes down to curiosity, and I don't think you can teach that. So if you want to be a lazy, high-volume, sorry, I'm not saying high volume recruiters are lazy by the way, but if you want to be a lazy recruiter and you just wanted to use technology to do bulk messaging and have a vaguely successful life, yeah great. But I think that the curious and the proactive are the ones that are really successful, and that have high response rates and high volume. They'll be curious enough to go, okay, I'm trying to get in touch with Chad, so let me look at his profile. Let me go off elsewhere. Where else is he chatting? Oh look, he's over on Twitter, maybe I'll send him a tweet or DM. Oh, he's on Instagram, maybe I'll send him a message there rather than using the mainstream. They'll go and become known to you. Chad: Right. Katrina: They'll interact with you. I don't know how you teach this curiosity, I feel like I just naturally am curious, and it's one of the things I want to address this year, is how can we make recruiters more curious and want to be? So that they want to look and delve a bit deeper before they go, "Hi, want a job?" Where's your buzzer when I need it? I need your buzzer. Thank you. Joel: Less lazy equals more successful. Wow. We've really broken some ground today. Katrina: Well, it's not horrible thing to say, it's true. Joel: No, it's just obvious. It's everything. Katrina: It is obvious. Chad: Well, yeah, it is, but yet we still have lazy people working for us and it's just Joel: Not on this podcast. Chad: And doing podcasts. I think one of the biggest issues, and I think actually plays into the book very well, is the lump of labor fallacy, right? So the lump of labor fallacy all is really predicated on, oh my God, jobs are going away. The jobs generally don't go away, the skills you need to do that job evolve. Right? Katrina: Yeah. Joel: The fallacy is jobs aren't going away. What's happening is they're evolving. Katrina: Yeah. Joel: What I read in this book actually aligns very nicely with really the remedy to this whole idea of, there aren't going to be any jobs. Well, there are going to be jobs, you just have to be able to move and evolve with the jobs. Can you tell me how does it help recruiters understand how they need to evolve? Katrina: I think it's because I go back and I just remind people about the human side of what we do. That it requires empathy and it requires listening skills and all these kinds of things that we seem to forgotten a bit while technology has gotten the way. Chad: Well I think you're forgetting one big word though, it's adaptability. Katrina: Yeah. Chad: We can't do things today the way that we did five years ago. Hell, the five months ago. Right? I think when you talk about, in the book you start talking about becoming robot proof, the center theme has to be adaptability because if you continue to be lazy and lean on LinkedIn and don't adapt, then your fault. Katrina: I had a very interesting situation with say, in-house versus agency situation. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Katrina: Everyone will remain nameless in the situation. This specific person sent a LinkedIn inmail on the 10th of the month and on the 30th of the month the person finally replied, because they finally went into LinkedIn and they finally saw it and they finally thought, oh, how can I reply? She then sat on it for eight days and then received the resume in from an agency recruiter and all she was concerned about was whether she would pay the fee or not pay the fee. And I kept going, "But what were you doing for the eight days? Why didn't you get in touch with them? You had eight full days to get in touch with them, what were you doing?" "Oh, I just stopped paying this fee." But you left the guy hanging, the guy's sitting there wondering why you're not interested. I know he took 20 days to reply to you, that's because people don't use LinkedIn. They've turned off the emails that auto send when you send an inmail. Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Katrina: He finally came in and saw your message and then you left him sitting for eight days, it shows you're not interested in talking to him. He's thinking you're not interested. And it was really interesting. I'm anti people's reliance on it. Joel: Is it fair to say you are anti-LinkedIn? Katrina: Get off it. Just get off it. Joel: Okay. And what advice do you give to recruiters to get off the heroin drip? Katrina: Hey, I'm old school, I'd say pick up the phone. I would certainly call first and then I would be emailing or texting if I have the cell or the mobile, but I would be getting directly to them. SMS has a 98 or something like that response rate, so I'd be aiming there. I'd be doing all the naughty stuff. I like the double tap texting and leaving voicemails with their favorite song, playing in the background. All the stuff I've picked up from these awesome recruiters over the years. Joel: Do you think LinkedIn has been bad for the profession of recruiting? Katrina: Yes. Joel: Do people rely too much on it and get away from the tried and true? Yeah. Okay. Katrina: Yeah. Which is LinkedIn's marketing. I've gone into hospitals over here training the recruiters in there and they're like, "Oh my God, saw this LinkedIn recruiter license." And I'm going, "So how many nurses are on LinkedIn?" And there's just silence. Because they've just spent 200 million pounds, I know, my outs are in the question area, but they've just spent like 200 million pounds or dollars getting their LinkedIn recruiter license, so they don't want to hear that. Chad: Let's pivot away from LinkedIn for a minute, they've got enough of our time. Let's talk about interviews because we are seeing that technology can interview just as well as a human being. As a matter of fact, there are actual research studies that show that a recruiter's "gut" is not reliable, and an algorithm is much more reliable than a human being's gut. What do you think about that? And how does a recruiter pretty much robot proof against that or do they not? Because interviews suck anyway, so just screw that and leave it to the robot. Katrina: First and foremost, did you that HireVue got into a bit of trouble over their algorithm during the video interviewing? Chad: That was because of their facial recognition stuff. If you take away the facial recognition stuff, because that's a total diversion. You take away that the facial recognition stuff and you just focus on the actual data that's being compiled, that's what I'm talking about. Katrina: I still feel it needs to have an element of both. Maybe if you're in the high volume and you're using it as an initial starting point, great. I didn't write about that in the book though. I talked about the technology that could support you during interviewing. So things like recording phone calls, Madison snippets off to the hiring manager rather than write it all out and send it to them. I didn't want to go into the bias side because I feel the algorithms are biased anyway because they're created by humans and we are all naturally biased. I personally think at the current time, both sides are flawed. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Katrina: Whether we're going to get to a point where it's not in the future? I hope so, It'd be lovely for all of the candidates. I do see, where I think it's great, certainly again, going back to tech recruitment where people can play games and get away from their CV or their resume altogether is brilliant because again, we can't write them, but that's sort of the initial phases rather than you still going to get to an in person at some point. Again, I'm kind of dodging the question. Joel: Finish your thought there. Katrina: I'm kind of dodging the question in a way because I just don't think I have the expertise in that space. Chad: I don't have a PhD but I have an opinion so therefore I say it on podcast. Joel: Katrina, thank you for joining us today. Katrina: Thank you. Joel: For our listeners who want to know more about you and/or buy the book, where should they go? Katrina: You can of course, buy the book at Amazon, but if you don't want to go to Amazon, which some people don't, you can buy it directly from the publisher, which is Kogan Page or if you come to thesearchologists.com, I've got some other links to some other places where you can buy it on the website as well. Chad: Yup. And the book is, The Robot-Proof Recruiter: A Survival Guide for Recruitment and Sourcing Professionals. Katrina: Can I just add something quickly? Joel: Sure. Katrina: All of the royalties from The Robot-Proof Recruiter, I can't pronounce my own book. Can I have a EHHHH. All of the royalties go to Hope for Justice charity, which aims to end modern day slavery, of which 40.3 million people are currently impacted and actually a lot of companies probably have. Joel: Wow. Good for you. Chad: Yes. Joel: I would have been much nicer to you if I knew that. Katrina: No, don't be nice to me. I don't like people to be nice to me. I like people to be direct and honest with me. Joel: That's exactly right. You're on the right podcast then. Katrina: Absolutely. Chad: Excellent Katrina. Thanks so much for joining us. We out. Joel: We out. Katrina: Thank you for having me. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad and his goofy friend, Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. The most important part is to check out our sponsors because I need new track spikes, the expensive shiny gold pair that are extra because, well, I'm extra. For more visit chadcheese.com. #Robots #recruiting #Automation #Technology

Disasters tend to showcase the best and worst of humanity, and the current pandemic is no different. On this week's show, the boys highlight companies like Hilton and CVS who are doing it right, as well as Amazon, who continues to stick its finger in the eye of its workforce. What's more, HR's most dangerous podcast covers news from Textio, CareerBuilder and Indeed. Enjoy, and show our sponsors - the ones who continue to support us even in these times of strife - some love (but don't get too close, social distancing and all): Sovren, Canvas, & JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad: And moving to the category of how to fuck up your brand in a crisis. 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: All right. All right. All right. The liquor store in my neighborhood is no longer an essential business, which means you may never hear from me again. Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast boys and girls, HR's most socially distant and awkward show, I'm your co-host Joel, curbside pickup, Cheesman. Chad: I am Chad, I love Chipotle Sowash Joel: On this week's episode, Amazon continues to behave badly. CareerBuilder has a new tagline which is guaranteed to turn that company around. And Hilton gets helpful. Grab your socks and hold your medical masks, we'll be right back after this quick word from one of our beloved sponsors. Sovren: Sovren parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: The first shout out should go to our sponsors, who in these times of strife are continuing to support this stupid show. Thank you so much sponsors. Thank you so much. We question your decision making skills, but we do appreciate it. Chad: And we love you. We love you so much. Joel: Love you long time. Chad: I think the next shout out has to go out to friend, listener Joel: I know where this is going. Chad: ... And wonderful human being, [Holland Domber[00:02:14.25]]. Hits Joel right in the chops with the tweet yesterday, which I love. Her tweet was, because Joel's always bagging on millennials, he's all about Joel: Justifiably so. Chad: He's always looking for the cohort. Right? He's like, "Oh, what group can I fit in?" Anyway, here's Holland's tweet, two tweets, "Joel and Chad, I caught the latest Chad Cheese and have to argue that for older millennials, i.e., me, who is used to be calling Gen Y, this is the second crisis we are living through. Entering the workforce in 2008 was rough," which I can get that. Now, this is where I think she really puts the icing on the cake. "Additionally, there are a lot of studies out there that millennials as a whole will be the first generation financially worse off than their parents, crippling student debt, skyrocketing rent, lost earnings potential to great recession, oh, and avocado toast." I love how she finishes off there with a little comedy, but just because their trials and tribulations aren't our trials and tribulations, I agree with Holland. Joel: I love Holland. Not going to hate on her. Not going to hate on her. I'm guessing that she did not have a mortgage, kids, all that good stuff, when 2008 went down. You agree with her, it's all good. Shout out. She's a fan of the show. We love her. And they're having hard times at Delta Airlines, I'm sure, she has much bigger problems than what I think about her generation. Chad: One of my favorite brands, by the way. Joel: One of your favorite brands, yeah. Are you missing the sky lounge? Chad: It is what it is. Joel: You miss those mimosas. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I know what's up. I know what's up. Speaking of last week's show, I'm going to give a shout out to all the fans that hit me up on DMs or emails or whatever, after my rant about end of the world, on the ledge, ready to jump segment on, I believe last week's show, it was real. Sentiment ranged from you're a pussy, snap out of it, to it's going to be okay, here's a virtual hug kind of thing. To our fans, as always, colorful and I love it. Thanks for the support and all the many ways that you did it. Chad: Yeah. We try to keep it real here and sometimes you just got to let the Joel emotions out. Joel: I did man. Chad: And Tim Sackett let his emotions out this week because Tim saw Tiger, and apparently he's falling in love with Joe Exotic. And I think if Trump does give Joe a pardon, which has been this stupid rumor that's been out there, Joe might actually just relocate to Michigan. Joel: Is that really a rumor? That can't be for real. Chad: It's rumor. It's not surprising. It's a good spin on the shit that's happening right now. Right? Joel: One of the greatest memes going around now is Trump's face on Joe Exotic's hairstyle and body with the tiger in the background. Classic, classic Chad: That's awesome. Joel: ... Move by the design team out there at Photoshop. I'm going to give a shout out to Jobvite, beloved sponsor with their Canvas product. They announced this week a new hire, someone that I know pretty well from my days as a Clevelander, Jeff Rohrs. Too many will not know, but Jeff was an agency guy, 20 years ago moved over to ExactTarget, which no one knew in the early 2000s, which was then sold to Salesforce. Then Jeff moved over to Yext, and oversaw their IPO process, and is now CMO at Jobvite. I will throw in a little prediction here, that adding folks with IPO experience is sometimes a little bit of a hint that a company might be eyeing an IPO. Chad: Ding, ding, ding. Joel: Jobvite 2021, Wall Street, IPO, I don't know. We'll see what happens, but a quick prediction for next year. Chad: I just saw on my LinkedIn that Jason Goldberg is starting a new company called Meetly. Anybody who remembers SFX: That's it man. Game over man. Game over. Chad: Jason Goldberg from the Joel: Jason Goldberg. Chad: The Jobster days, we'll find a little levity and we will probably also find brevity in that as well. Joel: Is this the new, the personal trainer thing that he's doing? Chad: No, I don't know that he's ... He might still be doing that. Who knows? Joel: Okay. Chad: The guy can definitely raise money. It's called Meetly and it's kind of like a production line, working with teams, online collaboration. Not that anybody else is doing this right now, but yes, it's called Meetly and Jason is the founder. Joel: Okay. Because he was throwing out tweets and whatnot about, "Hey, if you're a physical trainer, yoga instructor, whatever, hit me up. I'm looking at creating an app where we interact at home with people." The dude's a bouncing ball of ideas, he can't settle on one thing. Let's move on with our shout outs, I'm going to go out to [Kent Kyle Kevin Kiphagar[00:07:33.23]], who has found a landing spot at Appcast, apparently. Chad: Yes. Joel: Good luck there at Appcast. He Should fare pretty well when we come out of this downturn. Chad: Yeah. He's been there for probably about a month or so. He's good. Joel: We never talk anymore. Chad: That's because he didn't like you. Joel: He was one of those who talked me off the ledge, guys. It's going to be okay. Yeah. Chad: You see. Joel: The millennial hug. Chad: You see, that was a millennial hug and you needed that. Joel: Yeah. It's good. I did. Chad: He looked past you making fun of him and gave you that hug. Joel: Yeah. Holland kneed me in the nuts though, so it's a nice balance. Chad: If you need some good news, you should go out to YouTube and search for Some Good News with John Krasinski, this week's episode. Joel: That was nice. Chad: Okay. Last week's episode, I put out there and I thought, this is really good. It's fun, it's cheesy, it is amazing. You just have to watch it. Then episode two came out and I'm not going to run a spoiler here, but if you do love the musical Hamilton, this will blow you out of the fucking water. I don't know how he's going to be able to top episode two. Joel: Never seen Hamilton and I'm not sure how much desire I have to see it, but I'm sure the episodes great. Chad: If you like history Joel: I do. Chad: And you like good music Joel: And I love it in rap form. Chad: And rap music, yes. Then yeah, it's definitely ... Julie listens to the soundtrack as she works out. I think that's her most listened to playlist right now. Joel: I'm going to wait for the Disney original version to come out in a couple of years. Shout out to Cindy Sonya, our good buddy in the industry is now head of people at Camino, I think that's her official title now. But our buddies at Camino have added her to the roster and that's worth the shoutout. Chad: Yeah. Good for her man. That's awesome. Last shout out from me, I have to say, shout out to us because last week Joel: Oh wow. Chad: Our Chartable rankings, and I know this is fluid, but at least one week we've got to throw this out there, our Chartable rankings actually showed us, The Chad and Cheese Podcast was ranked number 54 in the business segment of podcasts in the United States, which I thought, wow, this is, this is ridiculous. And then, even more impressed by our ranking of number 75 Joel: Yeah. Chad: Globally. That's ridiculous. Joel: Now these were the business category, which is pretty impressive. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Careers, I guess you could see that, but yeah, business, top 100, both in global and US reach, that's really impressive, and it has to be a typo, and somebody must have hacked Chartable. But yeah, my 13 year old finally thinks I'm cool, that I'm on some chart, chartlist. Chad: Our stupid cartoon heads are there, yes. Joel: Yeah. That's great. Last shout out for me goes to David. I'm going to butcher this, but David Macciocca, from VideoMyJob, from Down Under, he just a very friendly manner, sent me a DM, I don't know if you've got one too, just saying, "Hey, times are tough. I hope you're doing well. I hope everything's going all right. We'll see you on the other side of this COVID-19 downturn." So David, man, Australians, love it. Shout out to you buddy. Chad: A bunch of people out there heard the cry from Joel Cheesman on the ledge and said, "You know what? We've got to get this fucker off the ledge." Joel: Yeah. I'm going to go search for the baby cry sound bite real quick Chad: No, we're good. Joel: Because it's never been more needed in this show. Chad: Events. Okay. It's interesting because obviously we have called off all events, but yet there are now digital events and these are brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing, our travel, that being said, by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. We got to thank these guys, because again, another one of our sponsors, damn good supporter of the show. And I remember just a little over a month ago, Joe and I were on a call and he said, "Chad, I'm your official travel sponsor, and I'm saying don't travel." Joel: Stay the fuck home, that's what he said. Chad: Big thanks to Joe. And he also loved my Shaker mask that Julie made me. It's pretty awesome. Joel: Yeah. Tell the people that didn't see that, the mask thing, what she did. Chad: Yeah. Obviously these material masks that are being made, so that we can go out. The surgeon general, actually said, "Hey, mask up." Julie's been making these in our basement when she has time and she's not running an organization for goodness sakes, she's been making those. I went down with the idea of actually doing one, an actual Shaker logo on the front, so when I'm wearing it, you see the Shaker logo across my face. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Made one of those, Joe loved it. And yeah, it got some good love on the socials. Joel: We have Death Match coming up, which is pretty exciting. It's virtual, so who knows what the hell kind of shit's going to happen. With this round of startups coming up in front of the judging panel featuring Pontoon Solutions as our premier sponsor and also on the judging panel. I'm pretty excited. We're doing that on April 28th, so if you haven't signed up yet, go to tatech.org, and get your tickets. And we're also doing May 19th. So we have to turn around real fast, and do a North American version of Death Match. Chad: Yeah. That travel is going to be rough. Big thanks to Pontoon Solutions, they're the reason why this is happening for your digital. They are footing the bill for all contestants to compete for the chain of champions. Usually the contestants have to pay a small fee to actually get onstage, Pontoon is taking care of all of that. The contestants, we have Daniel Fellows who's the CEO of Optimal, Alex Murphy Joel: Get optimal. Chad: Alex Murphy, CEO of JobSync, Nick Gray, CEO of SBOJ. I think they're actually going to have an entirely new name by the time. Joel: Get out of here. Chad: Yes. They're finally going away from SBOJ, believe it or not. Joel: We can take all credit for that, obviously. Chad: Yeah, no shit. Right? Last but not least, Mikhil Raja, CEO of SonicJobs. Those are the four contestants Joel: Supersonic Chad: That you will be able to, uh, experience as you watch Death Match. Then when we do the North American digital, which is happening May 19th, [Jovio[00:14:22.27]] stepped up and said, "No matter what's going on, we want to make sure that Death Match can still happen." Right? We don't have our four contestants yet, so if you are a startup and you want to participate in Death Match, this is your time for free, to be able to register for that. It's very simple, go to chadcheese.com, go down to the contact us in the bottom, and just give us a quick spiel on why we should pick you to be one of four in Death Match in May. Joel: Hit us up. And you did say free, right Chad? Chad: It's free. Thanks to Jovio and again to Pontoon Solutions, those guys really kicked ass and take names. Joel: Shall we get to the news, my friends. SFX: Hell yeah. Joel: All right. You'll love this story, Hilton Chad: Yes. Joel: Th hotelier, I guess, hotels are in a rough spot right now. not a whole lot of traveling going on. But Hilton stepped up and did something really cool. Chad: Nobody's really traveling right now, so nobody is using their rooms, so their rooms are empty. Their rooms are empty, so they don't need employees. On the first end of that Hilton and American Express is offering hotel rooms free of charge to one million healthcare professionals working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. Hilton and Amex will cover stays beginning April 13th through May 31st, and that's according to the Hilton press release right out of the gate. That's a great way for a company to give back to the community and build their brand in a time of crisis. But as we talked about, hospitality is still getting pummeled by this. So what do you do for those workers that are going on furlough? That's when they pivoted and they said, let's go ahead and create landing pages, coordinate with other organizations that have like jobs. They've brought in like 40 plus other employers who have jobs right now and work from home, warehouse, distribution, grocery and retail, senior living and others, and let's start to make those connections so that we can hopefully get our workers, our employees, our people that we care for, through this rough patch. Joel: Yeah. I think maybe people in the middle of the country don't appreciate how awesome it is that Hilton stepped up and provided rooms for health care workers. Because if you live in a big city like New York, where maybe you live an hour plus out of the city, the fact that you can stay in the city and take care of people that are sick, is a huge benefit to them. Big hats off to Hilton for that one. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And they basically created a better job board in no time at all, than most job boards that are out there, which is funny, which you can find at, I think teammembers.hilton.com/COVID-19. They also partnered with Mon Power, so if you don't fit a particular job or opportunity, you can text, talent to 44844, and they'll start giving you a process to complete your contact information, and then staffing professionals will get in touch with you to try to put you into a job that you do fit for if there's nothing on the job board that you find interesting. Chad: Taking that next step of those 40 plus companies, I have to make reference to CVS Health, because they've built a page welcoming Hilton workers complete with a letter from Jeff Lackey who is the VP of talent acquisition for CVS. I've known Jeff for over 10 years and this type of care and handling of people and brand doesn't surprise me at all. Here's just a quick excerpt of the letter, you go to the page and it says, "Corona virus is here and we need your help. Dear Hilton team members ..." This is CVS. This is the VP of talent acquisition for CVS actually writing a letter. There's these Hilton employees who've been furloughed. "Dear Hilton team members in response to the urgent and increased healthcare needs of Americans impacted by COVID-19 pandemic, CVS health is accelerating a plan to fill more than 50,000 full time and part time positions across the country while creating job opportunities for you and your colleagues." It continues to go on, it's a longer letter, but overall, out of all of those companies, I surf through them really quick, out of all of those companies, Jeff and CVS, I think took this as an opportunity to look at the crisis and really try to inspire those individuals who are in a bad place right now. You're getting furloughed and it's like, "What the hell can I do?" How does that not make you want to go buy stuff from CVS and go work for CVS? Joel: I was going to make that point. Remember when we talked about Delta Airlines, you know, with the revenue share with their employees and how we thought, well, if we're in this industry, we should support organizations that really value the employee and fly Delta. These are perfect reasons why when we get out of this mess to stay at a Hilton and do your shopping at CVS and any of the other companies that are stepping up that we've talked about, from Starbucks, I guess go buy a Tesla, that's a big request. But anyway, the companies that are really stepping up right now, I think we should remember them when we come out of this. I'll also add that, if you're with a big chain hotel, take some notes because Hilton is showing you how to do it right. I know our buddy, Jessica Lee over at Marriott, is probably watching this stuff, so if they haven't done anything, hopefully they'll be doing something in the near future because Marriott's a big brand as well. Chad: Yes, it is. Moving to the category of how to fuck up your brand in a crisis. Leaked notes from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership attained by Vice News reveals company executives discussed a plan to smear fired warehouse employee Christian Smalls, who we talked a little bit about last week, calling him, "not smart or articulate" as a part of PR strategy to make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement. They're trying to look at a cat that was really making a lot of noise because he didn't feel like he was in a safe place, and not to mention all of the employees that he worked with was in a safe place, knowing that 10 Amazon warehouses had come up with positive COVID testing. Now they're looking to smear this cat because he was a whistle blower. Joel: I was thinking thinking the other day, not just Amazon, but I don't know if it's ironic or sad or what it is, maybe you can help me with a good word, but the fact that the lowest paid, least educated in our society are the ones that we are counting on the most right now, I don't know if that's irony or what. But the fact that it's the warehouse workers that are continuing to deliver goods and services to places like grocery stores and Walmarts. The employees in those Walmarts and Krogers, the folks that are delivering food to us. Certainly, on the healthcare side, you're getting into higher echelon salaries and whatnot, but the fact that it's the heart and soul, the salt of the earth of this country that's getting us by this stuff, makes this story particularly a little bit disgraceful. Chad: Yes. Joel: Because Amazon is taking these stances. We've seen so many Amazon stories throughout the years that we've talked about on the show, but this epidemic or this pandemic has really brought a lot of these issues to head in that people are getting sick. These people want to walk out. They want to peek at Amazon, their employer, but they continue to stick with the job and stay with it. Chad: Because they need money. Joel: Right. The PR effort to smear the labor movement basically, which essentially is what this is. This is capital versus labor, it's an age old fight. We'll see how this pans out. But I have to think at some point this labor versus capital movement for Amazon is going to come to a head. I think at some point, maybe this whole COVID-19 pandemic will give rise to labor a little bit because they should have a seat at the table. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Literally, they should be on the board of directors. They should have representation there, which they definitely don't. And that doesn't even go into the whole point of Amazon not having to pay taxes like everybody else. They've really gotten a free pass and the fact that they continue to disrespect the labor that runs their entire organization and keeps Bezos rich and everybody else rich is really sad. I was also disappointed to hear that Bezos was actually part of the brain trust in the meetings that came up with this strategy. This wasn't some rogue PR agency, this was actually the head of the organization, which makes it particularly naughty. Chad: Yeah. Let's get this straight, Jeff Bezos is not a nice guy. Never has been a nice guy. We'll never ever be a nice guy. He's a devious son of a bitch. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Here's another story, an actual personal story. Friend of mine, he works at GE. He has a desk job. Okay? He was told that it doesn't matter what's going on, you need to come into the office, which is just total bullshit. It's like, I can do my work from home, and they had the capacity to actually do the work at home, although management Joel: GE has a few resources, I think. Chad: GE has plenty of resources, but they can get their job done at home, easy. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Well, guess what? He tests positive for COVID-19. Joel: No. Oh, man. Chad: Yes. He tests positive for COVID-19. And as we're having this discussion, I'm like, man, you do realize what GE is saying to you, and pretty much what Amazon is saying to their employees is, we don't give a fuck about you. Not only that, you're taking that home to your family. We only don't care about you, we don't care about your family. We don't care about your friends or anybody that you come in contact with. We care about shareholder value. Joel: We'll segue a little bit into our own industry. Textio, who a lot of people know and probably a lot of listeners have at least demoed if not are using currently, they help provide greater value to your job descriptions, they help you write job descriptions with their tools. Chad: Yeah. Because you suck. Joel: They went through a round of layoffs, which many ... Well, we talked about ZipRecruiter recently and they're not the end of the story and neither is this, but they laid off about 20% of their workforce, which equals about 30 folks, they were left with about 120 employees. So, a pretty deep cut there, 20%. I hope those folks land on their feet, or at least maybe have a job when things turn around and companies start hiring aggressively again. But for Textio, all those folks are bummed and they're going through hard times just like a lot of other vendors are. Chad: And I don't know if they have or if they haven't, but you have to wonder if the CEO, because this is still a pretty sizable piece of their workforce, if she went out and said, "Okay, I know the types of people that we're actually laying off, where can we find these people jobs?" That's the next step. I did see a tweet from her saying, "Whoever gets these guys, they're going to get some really good workers," and it's like, okay, that's great, what are you doing to help? Joel: Yeah. There wasn't anything in the story in regards to helping these folks find work. They live in Seattle for the most part, which is obviously harder hit than most areas in the US with the pandemic. So yeah, if you know of anything, or hey, if you're listening out there in this space and are looking for employees, we're happy to make those connections. Yeah, look for folks from Textio looking for new opportunities if you're out there. And with that, let's get a quick word from Canvas, and we'll talk about CareerBuilder's new tagline. Fire up everybody. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: All right, Chad, quick quiz man. Quick quiz. Ready? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Do you know CareerBuilder's old tagline? Chad: Work can work. Joel: Good job, my friend. Now did you know that ahead of time or did you look it up? Chad: No, I knew it ahead of time because it's only been around for a year. Joel: And we talked shit about it then. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But they have a new tagline Chad: What? Joel: Which is, are you ready for it? Chad: Please. Joel: Are you sure you're ready for it? Chad: I don't think I am. Go ahead. Joel: I don't think you're ready for it. Chad: I'm not. Joel: It's so bad, I can't even remember it. Let me go check. Chad: We're building for you. Joel: I'm sorry. Did you say we're building for you is their new tagline? Chad: We're building for you. CareerBuilder, we're building for you. Okay. So Joel: Nice. Chad: Yeah. A company launched the campaign, it's been in the works for more than a year, which is ... We'll get into that in a second. Despite COVID-19 and after launching work can work just a year ago. They launched work can work and then right after that they had to have started this, because what they're saying is, a year ago they started developing this campaign but they just put a bunch of money into work and work. Again, I don't understand anything that's going on here. Joel: The credit is, I guess, the word build is actually in the new tagline. Although taglines should be something that sticks around for a while, there should be like big marketing around those taglines. But anyway, that aside, they have a new ad for this, and the new ad, sort of like the old one, if I remember correctly, is essentially a bunch of stock video, and I'm sure there's some cool new stock video around COVID-19. Because there's some pictures of people putting up a sign saying, we're closed, COVID-19 or something like that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: A lot of stock footage. It almost looks like a Fiverr contractor could have put this ad together, slapped a CareerBuilder logo onto it. I will give them credit, however, in that there is a text campaign that's a component of this ad. You can actually text COVID to a short code, which then takes you to a website for COVID stuff and information, which is not that interesting. It should be an actual chat mechanism that gets you to apply to jobs, but we'll save that for another day. They do at least have a text component to their television ad, which is, I guess a step in the right direction. Chad: I don't think the message of the ad was bad. We are overworked, out of work, uncertain of what will work, but we are resilient. Right? Then it goes into an ad where it's more of like a stronger together rise up kind of place. I really dig that. I don't know, it's interesting that they had to switch their taglines. Either way I think CareerBuilder is pretty irrelevant, but yet this is definitely a time for them to try to get their brand back out there. I disagree with you with regard to this whole text piece because I was like, wow, they've got this text. Let's see, I'm going to start a conversation via text and see if they ask me questions. Is this an automated bot? How is this? Joel: Sure. Chad: And no, all it did was send me to a fucking website to do a job search. If you're setting an expectation to text, the expectation is, you're going to get a text response back so that you can start a conversation. If you don't have that tech available, just send them to your goddamn website, because that's all you did. Joel: Just all you did. I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that. But at least they're doing something. Right? At least they're trying to engage, text us for stuff, but they totally fail with it not being an actual text conversation or some chat bot where you could have an actual engaging conversation with somebody. Just sending them to your website and saying, search for jobs and a COVID-19 section, was a total fail. I totally agree with that. But I do agree it is at least something in the right direction, although they totally failed. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They went in for the kiss and got the forehead instead of the lips. I don't know. They fucked up there. Chad: Yeah. Got my ass instead. Joel: To me the message was familiar and forgettable. Chad: Again, we are being incredibly nitpicky. There's no question, that's what we do. The ad was okay, the text execution was shitty. I'm going to stay on par with that because that's exactly how I felt about McDonald's. That's part of what they did. Right? Joel: Every week with you and McDonald's and Alexa. Chad: This is the same thing though, just about. Right? So anyway. But that being said, last week you said something Joel: I did. Chad: And now you get to do a victory lap. Joel: Victory lap. Yeah, last week we talked about Seen by Indeed/Indeed Prime shuttered their service going offline in July. Well, users of their job spotter app, which for those who don't know or don't remember is where people take their phone, take pictures of help wanted signs and businesses and submit those to Indeed, which I'm assuming become sales leads for their sales team to go sell Indeed. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I predicted that they would continue to shutter businesses and job spotter was the one that I highlighted. So, break a bow, I was correct in my prediction, job spotter is shutting down. But don't worry kids, if you have submitted some help wanted ads or signs, they will still honor those Amazon gift cards. So you're in luck there. Chad: Yeah. They killed Indeed Prime AKA Seen and stopped paying publishers for traffic. They were listening to the show and they heard you say job spotter, they forgot about job spotter and they went, "Oh, uh" SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: We got to get back, that thing's still going on. Oh shit. Joel: Cheesman knows about it. Shut it down. Chad: Shut it down. Joel: The question will be, what do they shut down next? Who knows? We'll find out next week, I guess. They also launched, I don't know if you saw this, the happiness score for companies. Basically what this is, they already do reviews, which most of our audience knows, but now they're doing fairly lengthy questionnaires to employees of these companies, asking like, do you feel like you're engaged at work? Do you feel happy at work? Really pretty general questions. And then based on the answers, they're creating a happiness score. If you go to Indeed now, particularly with bigger companies like McDonald's, Apple, Microsoft, et cetera, on their profile page, you will see the happiness score. There's a little sunshine, it's just cute, I guess. You get a little sunny thing if you have a good score, you can drop down and see where each happiness score is on different levels. Yeah, they launched that this week. What I continue to be bewildered by is they're developing stuff on the review side that's separate from Glassdoor, who's their sister company. So I don't get if Indeed's testing it, if they're just not even talking to each other, is glass door going to have a happiness score that piggybacks off Indeed's happiness score? I'm really confused about the whole relationship with Glassdoor and Indeed. Chad: Yeah. Was it Careerbliss, this at one time. Anyway, I don't know if Indeed knows what Indeed is doing. To an extent, this feels more like a content play than it does an actual feature. We'll see. It'll provide content much like monsters, like index, bullshit index. I think it's more of a content play than it is anything else. And this just demonstrates even more to me, and I think anybody watching that Indeed literally has no focus right now. Joel: Yeah, it feels a little bit like a 20% project that somebody just dabbled in it and said, "This is a great idea. Happiness score. Yay, happiness score." Joel: Well, a company that hits a hundred on our happiness score Chad: Damn straight. Joel: ... It's JobAdX. Let's hear from them and we'll talk about investment stuff. Chad: People got money. JobAdX: Face it, we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect jobseekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets and templated job descriptions. Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's, joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage employ with JobAdX. Chad: J-O-B-A-D-X. Joel: People got money. Yup. So who's on the list? I can't believe money's still being thrown around. Chad: Space Jam. Yeah, Space Jam's on the list. Joel: Space Jam. Landing.jobs is on the list. Did you see this? A Lisbon company Chad: Yeah. Joel: Mid last month, landing.jobs, yes, .jobs. It's not just for direct employers, got 2 million euros to expand their business throughout Europe and North America. Chad: Yeah. Definitely going to out to those guys to see if we might be able to make a trip. Lord knows I need to do a market trip to Portugal again. Joel: Yeah. Some more retirement home shopping. There might be some clearance sales over there, right around this time. WorkJam Chad: WorkJam. Joel: ... Your favorite. Tell us about them. Chad: WorkJam, the leading digital workplace solution provider. Yeah. This company, I like from the standpoint of it is all frontline and it's an app. And I know because when I was actually instructing kickboxing for about five years, we had this app where you could get on and if you were scheduled for times and you had to switch out, you could actually ask other people in the app if they could cover for you or you could switch or swap or something like that. This is one of those, but it also has fast pay, messaging, it's a really cool app. The thing that really struck me was, they received 50 million in series C. okay? That's Joel: Not short change. Chad: That's not short change. But overall SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: ... They've raised 62. They haven't really gotten a ton of cash through, seed A and B, but right now they got the big payday. So they must be doing some things right. And I believe these types of apps, especially for work, I think they're big. Joel: Yeah. And this is a Montreal Canadian company and I want to know what's in the water. You guys produce Neuvoo/Talent.com. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Now you got WorkJam. There's something going on in Montreal. We need to invest in.. Chad: Is it Jobillico around there too? Joel: Yeah, I think so. And Workopolis who was casualty of Indeed recently. Indeed probably has an office in Montreal for all we know. Chad: Possibly. Joel: WorkJam. They need to hire a WWE, WrestleMania knucklehead to market their company. Anyway, lastly, let's go local, Lessonly Chad: Yeah. Joel: ... An Indianapolis company, that basically does learning, online lessons, raised 15 million in a series C. They're getting a little bit of buzz here locally. So if you don't know him yet, you will at some point. Lessonly. Chad: Yeah, they should. I think platforms like this are perfect for the "skills gaps" not to mention the constant evolution of skills for knowledge workers, you can come up with your own curriculum, and make it more customized for your people, and obviously for your organization. These types of platforms, I believe, are going to explode as well. Joel: Yep. Definitely built for a COVID-19 world. Chad: Yes. Joel: Good job Lessonly. And with that, we out. Chad: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts 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. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's 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. #Amazon #CVS #Hilton #GE #Careerbuilder #Indeed #Workjam #Lessonly #Landingjobs #Coronavirus #DeltaAirlines

Hey Google! Alexa! Hey Siri! Voice assistants are all around us, and getting more and more popular by the day. You can even get pizzas delivered with their help. The trend, however, has yet to really breakthrough on the job search front. That's why the boys have invited voice proponent, headhunter, and founder of My Career Fit, Gordon Collier to the podcast to discuss. Another exclusive interviewed supported by Sovren, software for humans you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities. Gordon: There is an opportunity in voice to really bring authenticity and literally a human voice to your employment brand. That can be really powerful. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. Alexa, we need a guest for today's podcast. Ooh, could she do that? Maybe one day, I don't know. Chad: Yeah. Joel: What's up everybody. This is The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad: I'm Chad, I love to ask Google anything, Sowash. Joel: I should've said Joel, still on the flu meds, Cheesman, so forgive me for any stupid statements that I will assuredly make. Anyway, we are honored to welcome Gordon Collier to the show. Gordon is founder of Pipeline Search Solutions, insert your own joke there. A headhunter and also My Career Fit voice assistant founder. Welcome to the show, Gordon. Did I get everything? Gordon: You got it. You nailed it. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Chad: You forgot lover of Fat Albert. That's what you forgot. SFX: Hey, hey, hey. Joel: Oh yeah, it's Fat Albert. Gordon: Love it. I love it. Joel: I couldn't find the Voices Carry sound bite by 'Til Tuesday, which I wanted to play for you. So we went with Fat Albert. What did I miss about you that the audience should know? Gordon: I've been in corporate talent acquisition, that's where I've spent the bulk of my career, probably going twenty ... I think I'm going on 25 years now. And about four years ago I started my own company. Basically just doing recruiting, headhunting for a variety of organizations and I've been doing that for a while now. And then last year, actually probably about two years, I started the My Career Fit Podcast, and then have slowly been kind of transitioning that into voice using Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. And I launched that actual product back in June of last year. Joel: And what is the podcast about? Just like job search help? Gordon: It really actually is probably more like a job search tool. I'm essentially just using the podcast platform to interview hiring leaders. It's everybody from recruiters to HR people to TA directors upwards through VPs and executives and CEOs of variety of different organizations. And we talk about culture and mission and their vision and we kind of take a deep dive into some of the nuts and bolts of what's going on in their organization, what their culture is like and what it would take for anybody to be successful within their organization. I tried to, I think it's been said a million times, job descriptions that are posted on the web are terrible. And they don't really tell you much of anything about the company and what you as a candidate or an applicant is going to get out of working there. Gordon: And so we really kind of get into that and they're short, they're highly informational. Somebody could listen to that probably eight to 10 minutes of it, which is basically, that's how long each podcast is. They can listen to that at work, you can listen to it in your car. I mean, that's the great thing about voice. You can listen to those things anywhere, you don't have to give up time. Joel: Sounds suspiciously like a lead funnel for your other business, Gordon, I don't know. Chad: Let's go ahead and jump into the actual topic, shall we? Today Joel and I love voice. It's funny because whenever my kids come to me and they ask me a question, I'm like, "Have you asked Google?" I mean, and then I'll sit there right in front of them, voice activate Google and I'll ask Google. There's so many things that we do today, whether it's set alarm or timers in the kitchen or whatever it is, it's all voice activated and we're excited to see that in the job search area. Today, we want to talk about some of the big, I think bait and switches, and then also the opportunity that is actually in front of us today. What can we actually do today versus what do you think we'll be able to do tomorrow? Right out of the gate, I want to get your opinion, Gordon, on the whole McDonald's drive thru apply debacle. What do you think? Gordon: I would agree and call it a debacle as well. I will say, I'll give McDonald's props because I think they're one of the first organizations who are out there who kind of pointed at the tool and said, "This could be useful." Joel: Can we get some context on this? Because I think Chad actually made it sound like you drive through McDonald's and talk to someone to get a job. That's not what's happening, right Gordon? Gordon: No. No burgers, no shakes, no fries. Chad: It was a voice initiated job search that rolled out globally, although it did not work in some areas. It was ridiculous at best. That's my opinion. And it did nothing more than drive more candidates into a black hole just in a different kind of a way. It was using the allure of voice with the same horrible application process. It was putting a new shade of lipstick on the pig. From my standpoint, any company who comes out literally with a piece of shit and throws it out there and says, "We're the first to do this." I'm in the whole camp of, that's fucking stupid. Right? That's my opinion. Yes. Gordon, you weren't a fan of it, but obviously you're not as harsh as I am. Joel: He might be. Gordon: Yeah. I think you're exactly right in what you're saying, but I think at least there was a massive organization, a massive brand that hires people, millions and millions of people all the time. And they pointed at this and said, "This actually could be useful." Now, hopefully that is the case back at corporate somewhere at McDonald's, but the execution of what they were doing I thought was just terrible. Chad: And the expectation. Gordon: Yeah. And they basically just, I felt like at the end of the day they just took what you could do on the web and they just bolted it on to Alexa. Joel: Is it still the same product that it was when it launched? Have they improved that at all, do you know? Gordon: I don't think so. Joel: No. Okay. Gordon: In fact, I haven't ... It's funny, they went gangbusters in advertising for that thing and then all of a sudden it just sort of fell off the map. I haven't seen any more ads. I haven't seen anything run for it. Joel: McDonald's heard our show, I think. Gordon: Possibly. I'm sure somebody there is paying attention to The Chad and Cheese. Chad: I know Paradox is, so that's pretty good. Joel: Yeah, we do know that for sure. Gordon: Yeah. I mean, I felt like they just took what you could do on the web and they tried to bolt it onto voice. And that is, my opinion is that that's a misunderstanding of how voice works and what you can do with voice and the problems that voice can solve for people. And that's really where you start I think, when you go to do something with voice, you're going to start with what kind of problem can I solve and how can I do it in the best way possible with voice? I just felt they just missed the mark on that completely. Joel: What should they have done differently? Gordon: Number one is some of the research that's come out has said that basically people are more responsive to the human voice versus the Alexa synthetic voice or the Google Assistant synthetic robot voice. It would have been a lot better if you could have had somebody actually, a representative from the company or somebody, an actual voice sort of actually doing that audio. The other piece to it was they just read, I mean they just basically sort of cut and pasted some lines from what sounded like something off of their website or their career page and had Alexa read it. And there's an opportunity in voice to really bring authenticity and literally a human voice to your employment brand, and that can be really powerful. In the same way that people love podcasts, people love podcasts because it's an authentic show. People love The Chad and Cheese Podcast because it's authentic. You guys are real when you have your back and forth and it's fun to SFX: Hell yeah. Gordon: Right. Exactly. It's engaging and you can do the same thing with voice and get that same level of authenticity and realness and just cutting and pasting some lines, a couple of sentences and having Alexa read it is just not going to do that. Chad: It didn't seem like it was well thought out at all. I mean, again, it was almost like a push to be first to market and saying, "Yes, we were first to the market." When you bring something to the market that is sketchy at best. I'm not sure that I would be proud of that. Gordon: Yeah, you can really do things poorly if all you're focused on is just being first, you're probably going to miss it. I think it's why so many companies fail, start-ups fail because they only either have is that dollar bill at the end when they sell the company, because they're building the company to sell and it's sort of like, when they did this with Alexa, they just built it to be first and that was it. The text me piece. I think that was valuable. That's a good piece to do because it can continue the relationship outside of voice and it kind of mixes and blends the different channels of communication. But the other pieces to it, I feel like they just completely missed the mark. There was so much of an opportunity to really bring the McDonald's brand to people in their living rooms, in their kitchens, in their car, wherever they are on their phone, and they just missed the opportunity. Chad: It's an experience, right? Gordon: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. I don't think people think of branding when they think of voice. They just think of it as a utility. It's an interesting perspective to say, hey, they should have had the McDonald's CEO or the head of HR in North America, whoever that is. Or if a company has progressive should have flow on the voice, walking people through the application process. Gordon: Exactly. Chad: Or the gecko with GEICO. Yeah. Joel: You like that? Yeah. That's free progressive. Gordon: That's good consulting work right there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's the point. And that the opportunity with voice is just that. And you can solve problems and you can also create an experience that really communicates who you are as an organization. Joel: After McDonald's did it, I sort of thought, hey, Taco Bell's going to do it, Burger King is going to do it just because McDonald's did it. But as far as I know we haven't seen that. Do you see something differently or is it going to happen with other restaurants? I mean, what's sort of your take on the aftermath of the McDonald's debacle? Gordon: Yeah, I mean I think that companies are probably kind of waiting out to see, how can we best use this? And I think McDonald's, like you guys are saying, I mean McDonald's went out first and they kind of blew it. And I think there's opportunities there for other organizations to learn some lessons and that may be what's happening, there is kind of holding off. It's funny because some of them are doing other things with voice like Little Caesars, I think it's a Little Caesars, no, it's Domino's. You can order a pizza through Alexa with Domino's. There's plenty of businesses that are using it to widen their multichannel branding strategy across voice. Gordon: There's other organizations that are using it too. Capital One, you can do banking through it, that kind of thing. There's businesses that are using it, but they haven't really translated that to HR and recruiting. And McDonald's may have kind of dropped the ball for everybody at least in the short term. But I think there's plenty of opportunity to experiment with this and create some really interesting experiences for the potential talent pool and the candidates that might come to your organization for opportunities to really learn more about you. Joel: Certainly strange with everything we know about Amazon in hiring lots of people that they haven't sort of built this into Alexa. Gordon: Well, you know it's funny, yesterday I was kind of playing around with Alexa and I just asked her, I said, "Alexa, find me a job." And the first thing she said was Amazon career opportunities. And she basically led you to the website. That was about as far as she went. But it was interesting that, that was the first time because I've been playing with this for a long time and that was the first time I've heard her do that, to say, "Find me a job." And the first thing she does is give you Amazon career opportunities and tells you where to go. That was interesting. I think they're probably seeing an opportunity, but they're so focused on everything else they're doing that's probably, that may not be at the top of their list right now. Chad: What can companies even think about doing today and should they even, is voice at the point where it can be used or is it one of those wait and see kind of scenarios, wait about six months, maybe the skills will be able to do more. What can they do today or should they just wait? Gordon: Yeah. Number one, I think, yeah, companies need to be jumping into this now. I think this is one of those places and technical opportunities where you can grab your space right now and just like it was on the internet, everybody waited and waited and waited to create their webpage or their career page back in the 90s and then they had to play catch up. The same happen with mobile, with apps and that kind of thing. And now everybody's trying to get to their apps. And the same thing is happening with voice. I think a lot of people are holding off on it, but the reality is 54% of people have used a voice assistant across things like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant. We're at this point where there is a bit of a tipping point that's starting to occur where more and more people are becoming used to using voice in their daily lives. Whether it's to, like you said earlier, set a timer, play music, get some information about the weather, that kind of thing. It's just becoming more and more of a natural thing for people to do and there's so much less friction involved. You can just ask the question and get a response. Gordon: And so yeah, I think absolutely there's an opportunity for companies right now to jump into this because at a time where talent acquisition and recruiters are just, employment branding is at the top of the strategy list these days. This is a phenomenal opportunity to really bring a voice to your brand, to be able to really clearly and effectively talk about your brand, and bring it to people in such a way that it's quick and fast and bring speed and efficiency to it. Versus having to go to a website and click here and click there and read this and watch a video and you've got to stop what you're doing to do all of that. Chad: Right. Gordon: With voice, you just say, "Hey, give me this information." And you get a quick response. Joel: It's commercial time. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now, based on that technology, come Sovren's artificial intelligence matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second, receive match results that provide candidate score by fit to job. And just as importantly, the job's fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: It's showtime. What do you think about podcasts? I mean, podcasts are voice, right? And they're really hockey sticking right now with the usage and subscribers. Should companies get into podcasts as an alternative or to supplement what they might be doing with different voice applications with Alexa or Google? Gordon: Yeah, absolutely. What's really interesting, I think I saw a statistic recently that most people who listen to podcasts typically have one or two voice assistants already in their home. People are really tuning into audio as a channel to get information. And podcasting is such a fantastic platform to do that. And what? I think it's 51% of people listen to podcasts and they listen to the entire thing, which is why so many companies are using it for, to have their own commercials on the popular podcast. I think that's another great opportunity, another fantastic place for companies to do branding, to bring a voice to their career opportunities, to really kind of talk about their culture and all that kind of stuff. I think it's a phenomenal opportunity to do that. Gordon: And it's multichannel, you can do podcasting, you can do voice, there's opportunities where you could do a podcast, you could break that up and turn it into something for a flash briefing on your Amazon Alexa. There's plenty that you could do there. Joel: We talked about the side of the employer, but as we know in this business you can't have job postings without job seekers. I want to talk about sort of the consumer side of this. And it seems to me like there needs to be something that happens that the consumer or Joe Public understands that, hey, I can actually do this, right? We didn't know we could search the web until a search bar showed up, right? We didn't quite know about this whole SMS thing until American Idol came along and said, "Text this keyword to this number." What needs to happen to educate the public at large that, oh, you can actually ask Alexa or Siri or Google or whoever it is, that find me a job at a certain company or find me a job near me. What's going to have to happen for that connection to take place? Gordon: I think McDonald's as an example, I keep picking on them, but as an example, they did a tremendous amount of advertising right off the bat when they launched that. I remember seeing the ad floating around on Facebook and then literally I saw an ad for it on Hulu within the first 20 minutes. I saw the ads and I was like, "Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?" And I stopped what I was doing and I started using it to see what it was like. And then they just sort of faded off the map and that is a challenge with voice right now across the board that I think a lot of folks have to think through. But I think the clear strategy right now is if you're going to build an Amazon Alexa skill, if you're going to build anything for your business, for yourself personally, Google Assistant, any of those voice platforms, you have to do a tremendous amount of marketing and generating content about the tool, about the skill. Otherwise, people are just not going to know it's there. Gordon: You've got your Amazon Alexa app, you can go in and search for skills, but your fear of even thinking about looking for a job, you've got to remember to kind of go in there and search, job search or job or career or something like that to find the skill. That's one of the things that I do. I feel like that's all I do lately is just a ton of content creation advertisement and marketing for the My Career Fit platform that I have. That's one of the things that people have to do. If you're going to build a skill, if you're going to build an action, then you've got to have a marketing strategy behind it to do it because nobody's just going to like naturally just discover, oh my goodness, you've got to, basically have a career page on Alexa. That's definitely one of the challenges. But I think we're starting to overcome that. Gordon: Alexa now, they have skills that will now talk to each other. I know they'd been beta testing that for a while. For example, if you look for a movie on Alexa, you can get your tickets through Alexa and then what she'll do is recommend another skill in order to schedule a date at a restaurant prior to your movie. Joel: What's the market share breakdown for the voice assistants? What's the priority if I'm building these things? Gordon: Right now, so Alexa owns the lion's share of the market. Second is Google assistant. And then the others follow, so Bixby and Cortana. Cortana really though, Microsoft has really focused primarily on business. Cortana, in fact, I think Cortana is getting away from just sort of playing music and things like that, and they're really focusing that more so on the business side of things. But yeah, it's pretty much Alexa and Google Assistant. I would say for anybody who's going to build a skill, absolutely build an Amazon Alexa skill, but you definitely need to have a Google Assistant. Because I do think in probably the next year or two, we're going to really see Google Assistant begin to surpass Alexa. That's just in my humble opinion, because it's Google. There's so much information that Google can acquire for you through voice and you don't have to go buy a Google Assistant. You can just download the app onto your iPhone, your Apple iPhone. Right now I've got Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant on my phone. And Google can pull all kinds of information for me. Whereas Alexa, she has to go out to things like Wikipedia, and places like Google can really pull a lot of information for you. Chad: Yeah, that's where I think we kind of missed the boat is that we're talking about all these quote unquote assistants that we buy separate from our actual phones. All of the droid phones have the Google Assistant already built into it for the most part. So to say whether it's the Home versus Alexa, I think it goes well beyond that. And if I want to do a job search and I want to voice activate it, I can do it on my phone or I can do it on my home. I tell you what, this is the first, I guarantee you of many voice focused podcasts that we're going to be doing. Gordon, I appreciate you taking the time jumping in. Gordon: Absolutely. Chad: Having some fun with us and and we will see you on the show very soon, I'm sure. Gordon: Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys having me on. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Hey Gordon, for our listeners who want to know more about you, where do they go? Gordon: They can find me on LinkedIn, Gordon Collier. And you can also follow the My Career Fit business page on LinkedIn as well. Joel: Very good. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Voice #Technology #jobsearch #Alexa #Siri #GoogleHome

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was popular in recruiting and then it seemed like nobody cared anymore. Then Google 4 Jobs launched and everyone started caring again . Venkat Janapareddy, CEO of Jobiak steps behind the mic to talk Google for Jobs, SEO, and what matters most when trying to get the most relevant eyeballs on your jobs. Welcome to the start of another VOICES in-depth interview series with Venkat Janapareddy brought to you by HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Morgan: Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and confident, while on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album, you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. Chad: What is the state of Google for Jobs today? Does it really matter? Is it going to overtake Indeed? What are some of the big questions and what matters right now with Google for Jobs? 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 Podacast. Joel: Yo, what's up everybody? Chad: The hell was that? Joel: Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast, The Chad and Cheese Podcast, I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad, with a new standup desk, Sowash. Joel: Ooh, fancy. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And, you may have heard about it, you may have listened to an episode, this is a new Voices series. We are honored to have with us for this one, Venkat Janapareddy, CEO and founder of Jobiak. Venkat, what's up? Venkat: Thank you Chad and joel. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. Joel: Very welcome. You sound very relaxed in all this virus panic. Venkat: Yeah. Yeah. This whole Corona is starting to hit us in Boston. We have almost 91 cases. A lot of working from home. Hopefully, it's going to slow down. Right now, it's really affecting us in a big way in terms of travel events. I'm hoping in the next couple of months it'll go away. Joel: Are you seeing any panic from customers or prospects at this point? Venkat: Not customers or prospects, but VCs and investors, they're starting to slow down. Definitely, that's a big concern, not only just for us, a lot of startups who are looking to raise money, that's going to be a big challenge because they're very, very conservative now. A couple of my friends who were close to closing around, they were sent away and they were told to hold up for six months. I think it's going to have a big impact on fundraising. Chad: Yeah. The market itself, obviously is sending everybody into shock. Again, it's all around managing a crisis overall. Yeah, hopefully we can get our arms around this shit. Joel: You've raised the money, just for listeners, what's the update on that for you guys Venkat? Venkat: Yes. We raised close to $3 million, predominantly from successful entrepreneurs from Boston. Some prominent people like Rajat Gupta, [Inaudible [00:03:23.05] from Dallas, a lot of Boston HR type guys. It's only five or six people, we're good for the next six to eight months, so we don't really have to worry about the sole fundraising. I think as I told you guys in December, we launched our product, the optimization product for Google for Jobs, and it's doing really well. Our customers are very happy, they're seeing all jobs ranking especially in top 20, which is what our new product does. That's good. We've got almost 18 customers in the last two months. We've got 40 more in the pipeline. All the hard work is really starting to pay us off. It's good time for Jobiak. Joel: Nice. And what's your staffing look like now? Venkat: We are close to130 people. When I spoke to you guys almost 14 months back Joel: Damn. Chad: Wow. Joel: Time out. What are they doing? Venkat: The technology, 90% of our staff is still tech. The optimization product is pretty intense, it took us 14 months of machine learning. It's not easy to build something to show up in the top 20. Joel: Right. Venkat: The product has been really good. Again, we are spread across the country. We've got a CTO in Bay Area. We have got people in France as well as in India. It's tech, but it's really intense to machine learning platform. Chad: In France and India. Tell us a little bit about the work habits, and obviously, you're incredibly well attuned with not just working here in the US but throughout the United States, but our listeners might not, how is it different working with individuals in India and France, let alone the US with regard to trying to getting things Joel: Longer lunches. Venkat: The number one is, first of all, obviously, the cost-wise India is much, much cheaper. They work in different shifts, so if you want to get a lot of work done when you're living in the US especially in the evenings, and they get most of the work done by the time you wake up. India is really picking up in terms of machine learning, it's extremely, extremely difficult to hire engineers right now, especially in machine learning. A lot of colleges are starting to educate and teach, so if you're looking for solid AI and machine learning engineers, you get them at a reasonable price from India. In terms of working with them, a lot of things have changed in the last 20 years for good, the kids are a lot smarter, kids who are graduating from college. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Thank God. Venkat: The work we get, it's really good now. The output is really good. It's smart, not about working 18 to 24 hours anymore, they do have a life after work now. It's used to be not the case. Chad: Are they ready for you when they come out of college? Are they ready or is there a lot of onboarding that you have to do to get them set up and ready to do what you need them to do? Because we've always heard about the skills gaps. Right? But it sounds like from you, at least the types of individuals you're pulling in, that might not be the case. So what does that onboarding timeframe look like or are they just a plug and play, get it done? Venkat: No, they're absolutely not plug and play. You still have to, especially if you're hiring fresh graduates from college, you really have to train them for six to seven months. It's an investment that you have to do. Once you'd go through the initial six to seven months investment as long as you like the company, the culture, they really work hard and they'll get going right after that. But it's not plug and play. I still have to do a lot of hard work. I still have to train them, mentor them, coach them. But after that, once you do that initial investments, it pays off big time. Joel: So these are all full time employees? Venkat: Yes. They're all full time employees because of IP reasons, investors insist that everyone of these guys are on our payroll. Chad: Everybody cares about Google for Jobs, right? They're not really sure if it's helping. Some companies like iCIMS say that it's the number three traffic provider for their companies. That's pretty big because it came up from number six for them within the past year to number three. From your standpoint, and you were obviously, neck deep in Google for Jobs, what is the state of Google for Jobs today? Does it really matter? Is it going to overtake Indeed? What are some of the big questions and what matters right now with Google for Jobs? Venkat: Yeah. It started very slow to be very honest. Google doesn't really do a lot of advertising. It's live now, most of the world. It's available in Asia, most of Europe, Latin America. The Google for Jobs little visit that you see Google organic says now accounts for 38% of all job searches, that's almost like 100 to 120 million clicks per day. What's happening now is it's initially, if you look at last year when you're pushing your jobs on Google, there was not much traffic, now people are starting to see the traffic, the visit is starting to pick up. Again, the Google for Jobs also has his own problems. Originally, it started with schema, they said just put in a schema then you're all set. That worked really well in 2017 and 2018 but it's not working now because every single job is published on Google for Jobs by hundreds of jobs boards, and Google only picks up six of them because it has a limit of six applies. So how do you show up on Google if your job is being published by a hundred other job boards? Chad: Right. Venkat: It's starting to become a big SEO play. It's no longer about the schema. Lots of people have figured out putting the schema. Most applicant tracking system have this technology in place, but most of them don't see anything from Google because it's SEO play. Chad: Well, and they get kicked out because they're not one of the six. So obviously, how do you become, and this might be some secret sauce shit right now, but how do you become one of the top six? Because it sounds like Google is picking winners and losers, at least the top six. Joel: Here comes the red meat. Venkat: Yes. It's all about landing pages. Whatever these RMPs doing, investing in career size, that's where it's really starting to pay off. If you have a good starting landing page, you are going to do well. The reason you see most jobs today on Google for Jobs, you see LinkedIn, Glassdoor, their landing page is loaded with SEO. They have just not the job posting, they have a lot of additional information, related jobs, training materials, significant additional information that will be helpful for job seeker. Various applicant tracking system, they don't really have good landing pages and they don't get any traffic. So you're now competing with 100 other job boards with the landing pages. For you to do well, you really have to understand the SEO for jobs and if you don't know the SEO, which most of HR tech guys, especially recruiters, there's still a CS, it's too technical for them and they're not marketed. So people are investing in SEO, which is basically RMPs, they're putting a lot of effort in terms of career pages and landing pages. They tend to do well, but if you are thinking you're just going to put the job schema and let it show up, 50% of your jobs do not even show up and not even searchable on Google for Jobs. Joel: Just for our audience Venkat, when you say the landing page, do you mean the job description page or something else? Venkat: It's the landing page on the company career site, which is the job description page which has the apply button. When you go to Google for Jobs and you find a job, say a Java developer, there's this apply on LinkedIn, apply on Glassdoor, most of these buttons when you click on them, they take you to a landing page which has the job details. That page has to have first, good quality in the formatting, the quality of the content has to be really good. Significant additional information you have to provide, just not the, just the job pays alone. But if you provide, related jobs, some keywords people are using to find this job, anything that will be helpful for job seeker, Google likes that. Once you have a lot of this information, then you tend to do well. Again, first you have a show up in the first six. Then the next big one is 50% of the people who will always click on the first apply. Either way, if you show up, if you are the second or the third or the fourth, it's like Google organic says, "Most people click on the first one," so once you make the top six, how do you make it to top one? That's where the SEO is to get to the top six, the optimization, the whole job posting optimization, meta keywords, there's a lot of stuff that goes on in optimizing your job. If you do well, then you show up being the number one. If you have number one, you get the same traffic as what you get from job boards. If you are not, you're not going to see much value from Google for Jobs. So if you're investing on Google for Jobs, you make sure you show up being the number one apply button on Google for Jobs, then you will see three to four X more applicants than what you're seeing today. Chad: Okay. So, like iCIMS, they're obviously doing well since they're seeing it being their number three, but most applicant tracking systems aren't, what are they doing better than everybody else? They're just focusing on that job description page and doing those things that you're talking about or maybe they have a better relationship with Google because they know Google knows that is the point of conception for the actual job itself, it's the original place? Do you think that there's any weighting that happens there? Venkat: No. Initially when Google for Jobs was launched, they partnered with about 16 to 20 different companies like LinkedIn, iCIMS, they got the documentation first, but as far as showing up on Google for Jobs ranking, it doesn't really matter, it's all about quality of your job and SEO. iCIMS does a good job, the problem with iCIMS is they haven't really figured out the apply button on the company name. Like Sangaze is a customer of iCIMS, when you go to any of iCIMS customers right now, it says apply on the client name-iCIMS. A lot of job seekers don't know what iCIMS is. When we went live 12 months back, all of our jobs used to sa apply in Jobiak, nobody knows what Jobiak is, what iCIMS is. If you put Deloitte, it says apply on Deloitte careers, it says apply on IBM careers versus LinkedIn or Glassdoor, the chances of candidate clicking on Deloitte is a lot higher. Chad: So you have control of that yourself? iCIMS has control of what that button says and Jobiak has control of what that button says on Google for Jobs? Venkat: It depends on what your implementation is. iCIMS is an applicant tracking system right now, they don't own the career sites. Especially RMPS, they have a good shot at controlling what it shares because you own the career site. The way you go about getting the apply and what Google recommends is make sure these jobs are on your career site, not on ATS, not on job boards. If you look at, take an example, iCIMS or Lever, most of their jobs have a url pattern of clientname.lever.com or clientname.icims.com. What Google is saying now, that's not good, put it on careers.deloitte.com. Chad: Right. Venkat: So if you have a job, and you use the deloitte.com versus deloitte.icims.com, the one at deloitte.com will always do better because Google learns that's the company that hosts these jobs. Chad: That's SEO 101. Right? Venkat: I assume it's nothing that they do, they do have some custom career sites for some other clients, but very, very small portion of that, but if you don't have that, you don't get the apply button. Joel: So are you guys setting up sub-domains and having the company point that to you guys to accomplish that goal? Venkat: Yeah. We have a couple of implementations. When we are working with companies like Phenom, it's a lot easier because they already own these career sites. So there's a stair to put a pixel to get our platform on it. We work very similar to Google analytics, they have to put in a one time pixel code, then they're all set. We do all the machine learning, we make sure your jobs are showing up on top 20 and you're getting a lot of traffic. But if you don't have a good career site, which is the case for most of the applicant tracking systems, then we do what Joel just said, we just create a sub-domain and have them point to one of our servers and then we build pretty much what RMP stay in terms of landing page. We only focus on landing page, we don't do he whole career site and all of that, but we provide significant additional information on the landing page, which Google really, really likes it. What we provide and say, that's really our secret sauce, but that's been really working out. We didn't have this at the beginning, we were like anyone else, just putting the schema, that didn't work out for us and most of the applicant tracking systems, but with this new SEO and optimization, things are looking really good. Announcer: Look for more episodes of Voices, this Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #GoogleforJobs #Google #SEO #Marketing #RMP #Recruitment #recruiting #Technology #Jobiak

Last week Careerbuilder launches a new slogan and ad campaign while this week hundreds CB employees are laid off or furloughed. What kind of Jedi mind f#%k is that? The boys get deep into that and also talk: - Amazon does it AGAIN... and AGAIN! - Facebook & LinkedIn in court after Zoom shenanigans. - Marc Benioff does what the President won't - "Hey Alexa, talk dirty to me" is really a thing? Enjoy, and show our sponsors some love (but keep your distance): Sovren, Canvas, & JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks, so how's your day going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody, I'm your co-host Joel, still in a dark place, Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad, work from home, Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, our favorite dumpster fire of a job site drop kicked a whole bunch of employees this week. Amazon is still fucking up. And grandma, like all of us, needs a beer dammit. Chad: Now. Joel: Grab a cold one while you still can get them. We'll be right back after a word from Sovren. Sovren: Sovren parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: I'm loving my weekly time on the couch with my therapist, the Chad. It's nice. How are you doing man? Chad: Good. It's been a busy week. This whole ... We work from home as it is, but this is just an entirely different fucking animal. Joel: I am cabin fever to the max dude. Whew! Man. Well, I got a three year old with a fever that won't quit and he's on antibiotics that aren't working and now he has the shits. Again, the offer to trade your three teenagers for my three year old is still on the table, if you ever want to take advantage of that. Chad: Yeah, I'm good right now. Yeah. Now is good. Joel: Okay. All right. Chad: Yeah. I have enough passive aggressive shit. I deal with higher level stuff, but yeah, I don't need the shits right now. Joel: Shits are bad, shits are bad. Yeah. Should we get to shout outs? Get this thing going? Chad: Yeah. Let's start out with holy Recruiting Brainfood moly, Cheesman. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: Hung Lee, I don't know if you saw the Joel: My favorite pornstar by the way. Chad: Oh my God. Yeah. The favorite pornstar of the recruitment industry. Hung Lee had this crazy idea, which is very standard for Hung of course, to have a 24 hour Brainfood marathon event, which was a virtual event on steroids. Seriously, he literally broke the damn internet. The event had over 2200 people on at one time. The Crowdcast platform was probably busting at the seams. There were just amazing people, amazing content and I'm not sure anyone else would have thought of anything this big and could have pulled it off. Congratulations to Hung Lee and kudos to everybody who participated. If you want to watch the recordings, just go to recruitingbrainfood.com, they'll be there. You can watch Julie and my discussion slash argument with Hung Lee. We argued whether technology and process efficiency makes good organizations less or more human, that was a fun conversation. It was a back and forth little spat. It's like a normal day with Julie and I. It was fun. Joel: Yeah. Are we sure that the title Hung Lee Video Party didn't get out on social media somewhere and get mistaken Chad: Should have. Joel: ... for like pornstar aroma and have a bunch of people show up? I don't know, I'm not convinced. Chad: It's good marketing. Joel: Sounds like a lot of fun. Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm going to start off my shout-outs with a little counter punch to our favorite millennial Holland McCue. If you listened to last week's show, and I believe you took her side if I remember correctly. Chad: Of course. Joel: I didn't quite understand the millennial breakdown and how much hardship that they have seen in their life having gone through 2008. Well, a New York Times article came out this week talking about millennials and how they haven't really had much hardship economically up until now and that this is a real punch in the gut. The first sentence of the story was basically, so-and-so was in high school when 2008 happened and it seemed like something far, far away. You guys can be in one corner and the New York Times and Joel Cheesman will be in the other corner, and I'll take that bet. Chad: Well, it's funny because I was speaking to Kyle, our show millennial this week. Joel: Uh-huh (affirmative). Chad: And a couple of others, and I think what we've all come to understand is that, Joel, you're really a closeted millennial. Whiner, always pointing the fingers at other people, I mean all of the basic things that you point at millennials, I mean it's one of those, oh, wait a minute, Trump kind of things, I'm pointing over there, but really it's me. Yeah. Thanks to all of our millennials for listening and connecting with me to really break this out that Joel is just a closeted millennial. Good job, guys. Joel: I'm going to argue that I'm bleeding over into like Clint Eastwood, grand El Camino or whatever that movie was, where like, get off my yard. I feel like I'm less about being younger than I am getting into like, get off my yard stratosphere. Chad: As I'd said before, I think you focus too much cohort groups. A super marathon shout out to Liz Van Zyl, or Zyl, Van Zyl, Van Zyl, she's in Australia and they probably say it a hell of a lot more sexy than I do, from PASS Technology. I was sitting just sitting back and watching the Recruiting Brainfood marathon happening, I was waiting for a vendor pitch to start.The vendor was late and Liz saw me over on the side. She brought me on screen to fill time, like comedy relief or something and then she kept me on asking vendors questions for the next half hour or so. Nothing is better than being an impromptu guest host, so thanks so much Liz, I appreciate that. Joel: Nice. Nice. Did she have any Foster's? It's Australian for beer. Chad: Yeah. No Foster's on her. Joel: Shout-out for me from TikTok. TikTok this week released that they'll be hiring 10,000 people. And there was also a study by Piper Sandler, no shit, Sherlock News this week, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok are the favorite apps of teenagers and young adults. Shout-out to them. Chad: I have to say I love me some TikTok. Some rapid fire shout-outs, new listeners, longtime listeners all the way around, Matt Stone, director of Talent Acquisition at Rock Central, Anthony Peter over at ZipRecruiter. Joel: Nice. Chad: Chris Richards and Jonathan Abreau over at iCMS. Joel: Abreua. Chad: Abreau, he's a bro dude. And last in my quick shout-outs is the shout out to the dude in Indiana who received $8.2 million in stimulus money. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: He walks into an ATM to pull out $200, right? And he looked at his balance and it was over 8.2 million in his account from the stimulus money that apparently our government is just throwing out in chunks and hoping that he will distribute it for them, I guess. Joel: Okay. When I first heard this I thought, okay, this is going to be like a funny story, $8 million, he goes to the bank and like haha, fix it, then they fix it, right? Or I was going to say, he cashed it, whatever and went to Bora Bora and it's the end of the story. But East Chicago, is it East Chicago he was from? Not the best area, if you know Indiana or Chicago. Chad: Yeah. North-West Indiana. Joel: The dude is older, he's got meth mouth, he's a volunteer firefighter. Chad: Yeah. Joel: You feel really bad for him and it feels like there's somebody sticking it to him. Chad: Yeah. Joel: He's getting the carrot and then he gets the rug pulled out from him as he sort of thinks that life is good again. I feel bad for the guy. It's a funny story. But Chad: It's what I like to call a Jedi mind fuck, is what it is. Joel: Is that real? Yeah. He did something in the past life that was not good, looking at that guy. I'll switch it around and a shout-out to beer grandma. SFX: Yes. Joel: I'll paraphrase this story as I know it. Chad: Okay. Joel: A grandma was quarantined, lived alone, she ran out of Coors Light and put a picture out of her window saying, "I need beer", is this correct? Chad: Yeah. Joel: And Coors Light apparently sent her a lot of beer. Chad: Yes. So 93 year old, Olive Veronesi of Seminole, Pennsylvania, she just held up a sign, as you'd said, asking for beer from Coors Light and the brand, actually the Coors Light people said that they sent 150 cans of Coors Light. Joel: There is still good in the world, Chad. There is still good in the world. Chad: There's still good. Joel: And I actually talked to someone from Pennsylvania yesterday, who told me that liquor stores are no longer essential businesses. You can't even get Curbside delivery or drive through, you can only get beer and wine from the grocery store. I can sense Pennsylvania is probably a little bit stressed out, you can still get Coors Light, but if you're looking for a good bottle of bourbon, you're out of luck if you're in Pennsylvania. And apparently you can't even get it mailed to you, which I asked, they said, no, they don't deliver it to Pennsylvania, so fuck. Chad: Ridiculous. Joel: Ridonculous. Chad: Ridiculous. Something else that we thought was ridiculous is when Indeed kicked their partner publishers to the curb. And we mentioned on the show, we're like, "A smart competitor should just swoop in and take all of this." Well, go figure, talent.com aka Neuvoo Joel: Neuvoo. Chad: That's right. Talent.com, they did just that. If you're a publisher and you just got the ritual Trojan Horse fucking from Indeed Joel: Kick in the nuts. Chad: That's right. You can go to employers.talent.com/publishers and you can sign up. You can go ahead and try to replace that Indeed revenue stream with talent.com. Again, it's employers.talent.com/publishers. Joel: Shout out to the Cleveland Browns unis. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Which were launched or released this week. They're going old school again. Love it. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's the traditional look, nothing fancy. Most importantly, they took Cleveland off the front, which is ridiculous because no pro team in the world in football has the name of the city on the front of the jersey. So good for them. The Colts as well, new Jerseys. Falcons are going old school again. The Rams are the worst, the new logo is awful. Any thoughts from you on the new jerseys, new logos, everything, new fonts that are out there in the NFL? Chad: Yeah. Then the new Colts alternate, not symmetrical, I know we love as human beings things to be perfect and symmetrical, it's actually pretty cool. The negative spaces is the state of Indiana. The new Colts font, again, little changes, but the news Colts font is pretty stellar. I like Tampa Bay's change. I don't think that the Falcons are that bad. Everybody's bitching about the Falcons. I haven't seen the Patriots yet, I know that's coming out. And the rest of them it's just like, man, you're making subtle changes, okay, cool. But I just want to see fucking football. Joel: Yeah. And actually like I mentioned the city on the front, the Falcons actually have ATL on the front on some of the jerseys, which I think is cool, like the ATL. Chad: It is the ATL, yeah. Joel: That's okay. But if it was Atlanta, that would be kind of cheesy. And the jury's out of whether or not we'll actually see Tom Brady play in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform because the mayor of LA is saying nothing sports-wise until 2022. Yikes. Chad: Yeah. That seems a little ridiculous. It seems a lot ridiculous. Joel: A little bit of California drama for you. Little LA drama. Chad: Yeah. Just what we need. My last shout-out is going to go to our listeners. Last but never least, thanks to all of our listeners who helped us break into the top 100 in the Chartable business podcast rankings, number 54 in the US, number 75 globally. And they're like 800,000 podcasts out there. I have no clue how we did it, but we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you. Joel: Yeah, this is clearly like the guy who got 8 million in his bank account. Like, obviously Chartable fucked up Chad: Why are you jinxing us? This is killing me. Joel: ... And put it on the top 100, and they're going to realize the mistake at some point and put us back in the top million. All right. I'll go through my final shout-outs quickly. Chad: Okay. Joel: A restaurant called Dig out on the East Coast, lays a bunch of people off via SMS. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And then I think they got a voicemail, if I remember the story correctly. Anyway, employers out there, don't lay people off via text message. It's just a bad look. Chad: How do you have to tell people that? I mean seriously. Joel: I don't know why. I don't know. Especially, this is a people business, right? Service and dah, dah, dah. Anyway, that's fucked up Dig, bad on you. You suck. Shout out to Sean Horton, an Indianapolis resident who's a big fan of the show and works at Jobs in Logistics, which I'm assuming is one of the few job sites or networks that's actually having a good time right now, with trucking and logistics and warehouse workers and everything else. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Shout out to him. And then lastly, the gang at HiQ. I know we haven't talked about them in a while, but the HiQ versus LinkedIn case is still on. And I've been told that by August of this year, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear the case. That could be an interesting development as we get out of summer, they'll keep us abreast. But shout-out to HiQ for continuing to fight the fight. Chad: Yeah. We have events, and one of the events are Chad and Cheese Virtual Travel brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right, our friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing want to keep us safe and said, "Keep your asses at home." SFX: Hell Yeah. Chad: "Do whatever you can virtually." The very first one is actually one that's going to be happening next week, it's the HR Hackathon. So Eva Zils puts on an HR Hackathon every year. And this year Joel: Is she German? Chad: She is. Yeah. Joel: Is it German? Chad: You listened to some of her videos, they're in German or they're in French. Joel: Yeah. They're good. Chad: And the only thing that you can understand are the American curse words that she uses, so I love her. But she had to go virtual this year, go figure, which I don't think it's going to hurt at all, to be quite frank. Because think about it, you don't need to be in the same room to do a hackathon. Plus you can pull hackers in from all over the world, who couldn't afford to travel before. I believe this is going to be pretty awesome. I'm going to be one of the judges, Bill Boorman, a couple of other smarter people who are going to help Bill and me out. But it's around building apps, prototypes, and technology, which can help in this new COVID world we live in. There's already been 40 plus project pitches thus far and are pretty stoked. If you want to get involved, you want to just linger and lurk and watch and see what's going on with the hackathon, you can go to hrhackathon.net. That's hrhackathon.net. Eva, you are a one woman band. You're just killing it man, just killing it. Joel: Let me understand, is this for start-ups or new sort of sandbox beta projects that people will pitch? Chad: Anybody who wants to come in, pitch a concept and develop. That's what it is. Joel: Okay. Chad: Yeah. And if you're bringing some stuff in that you already have to repurpose and you have the code, great on you as well. But it's all about re-purposing around this new purpose which focuses on obviously the COVID community. Joel: Got you. Chad: And again, not just developing the product, but also pitching the product to the judges as well. If you're just bringing in your shit and saying, "Hey, this would be great for the new COVID world too." It's like, "Hahaha. Get the fuck out of here." Joel: TAtech Death Match coming up as well. Chad: Yeah. TAtech Europe Virtual Death Match. Joel: TAtech Europe from your computer. April 28th? Chad: Yeah. Joel: April 28th. Yeah. We'll be doing those in the next couple of weeks obviously. Three companies Get Optimal, JobSync, Supersonic... Chad: Sonic Jobs. Joel: And SBOJ who's getting a new name apparently. Chad: That's right. That's right. I have a new update on that one. First off, none of this people could happen without the support of Pontoon Solutions . That's right kids. Joel: PoonTang Solutions. Chad: Call and meet RPO professionals at pontoonsolutions.com. We're going to have, Craig Rhodes is going to be judging with us. We had a conversation with them earlier this week and I think we're all going to be drunk on every single one of these. Joel: Oh, that's a guarantee. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: Yeah. The Death Match contestants are Daniel Fellows who is the CEO of Get Optimal. Joel: Former Indeed guy. Chad: Yeah. Alex Murphy, not Robocop, CEO of JobSync. Nick Gray, who's the CEO of SBOJ, oh wait a minute, not SBOJ anymore, they're changing to CloudRPO. Let it sink in. Let it sink in. It's a dot com, so you got to love it. CloudRPO. Joel: It's a dot com. Chad: It's a dot com. And last but never least, but of course Mikhil Raja, CEO of Sonic Jobs. Just go to chadcheese.com, click on the reaper, find out a little bit more about what's going on. You can even listen to some past Death Matches, which are pretty cool. Listen to Aman Brar, who was the CEO of Canvas at the time. He won the very first Death Match. He's now the CEO of Jobvite. You can listen to Anoop Gupta. You can listen to Andreea Wade from opening.io and many, many others. Check it out, chadcheese.com, click on the reaper. Joel: Cavalcade of champions is what you'll be listening to. And is it true that Craig Rhodes is related to Randy Rhoads, former guitarist of Ozzy Osborne? Chad: Yeah. We're going to have him riff while he's on. I think that'd be awesome. I think that'd be awesome. Joel: Nice. Chad: And then May 19th, we have North America coming up too, so we have, again, slots open for four, that's right, only four start-ups. I think we have two of those possibly already filled. Joel: Yeah. I think we verbally promised one. Talk about that yet or not. Chad: Yeah. If you want to get on the virtual stage with Chad and Cheese and do a Death Match, this is a time for contestants. It's free of charge because our friends at Joveo are sponsoring this bad boy. Again, making sure that the virtual vibes keep happening for TAtech. Joel: The fact that we have start-ups is a good thing, we should celebrate that no fee. Is it news time yet? Chad: Topics. SFX: Hell yeah. Joel: Let's get to the news. All right. Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. No surprise Chad: Layoffs. Joel: We've covered ZipRecruiter ... Yeah, layoffs. Chad: Lay offs. Joel: We've covered Zip. I think we've talked about ALIO. Chad: Lever. Joel: ... and quite a few others. Indeed shutting down businesses. Lever. If you haven't caught up, check out our latest shreds where we cover most of this stuff. But anyway, Careerbuilder, our favorite dumpster fire, job board world, has laid off, rumors have it, just under 200 people. We've heard 60%. We've heard a lot of furloughs that probably won't be coming back speculatively. I do have to their credit an official statement Chad: What? Joel: Which I'll kind of paraphrase now because it's pretty standard, but it's, "The spread of COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to the economy, which has adversely impacted the talent acquisition and human capital management space." No shit. "As a result of these rapid changes, we made the difficult decision to lay off or furlough a limited number of our employees. Careerbuilder is committed to supporting the individuals impacted while continuing to serve clients and job seekers through this extraordinary time." Chad: Huh. I wonder if it was a difficult decision because last week we just talked about CareerBuilder's new slogan that they rolled out, and commercials on last week's show. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It feels like a real, again, Jedi mind fuck that's happening here. They come out swinging with commercials focused on helping everyone in this time of need, during COVID and the very next week they lay down the chop. Again, I feel no balance here whatsoever, and I wonder again, they're CareerBuilder, the monkeys are definitely running this bitch. Joel: By the way, Irina, our favorite CEO, is at a whopping 36% approval rating on Glassdoor. You know shit's good at CareerBuilder right now. Chad: Yeah. We actually talked about this last week too is, what is the Zip and the Lever and what do we think is going to happen with Monster and CareerBuilder? And we just thought, CareerBuilder would fade away, we wouldn't even hear much about them. We were wrong about that. It might be the other way around. Monster might fade away and CareerBuilder goes out with a big chop. Joel: I'm still convinced Monster energy drink is going to drop 25 million and just take the domain and it'll be over. That'll be the announcement. Chad: Yeah, that'd be good enough for them. Joel: And Baird will just take all the resumes and whatever and it'll be over. That'll be it. Chad: Randstad. Joel: Yeah. Chad: That being said, we're talking about layoffs and trying to get the good vibe in here. Our friends over at Candidate ID this week or last week created a platform called Talent Pipeline. It's a not for profit talent acquisition industry initiative to connect furloughed or redundant TA and employer brand professionals with employers looking for their skills. It's free to use and it takes no time whatsoever to get registered. If you are from one of these organizations that we've been talking about or if, even more important, if you are the employer who's doing the laying off and the furloughing go to talentpipe.org. You can sign up, it's free, and you can start to hopefully make these connections for your employees that you're either laying off or furloughing. This is a really important thing. Knowing that ... And I think we're talking about Lever where they said, "Yeah, anybody who gets these people, that's awesome, they're great people." That's great. What are you doing to try to help make those connections? What kind of partnerships are you making as an employer to make those connections? This is just one example. Talentpipe.org, where you can go in and you can start pushing your furloughed candidates that way. Contact Candidate ID, I'm sure they would love to try to help you out. Not to mention if you're an individual you can just go in as an individual, so check it out. If you're an employer and you're looking for good talent, this is the time to find it because they are out there. Joel: Yeah. And even in our industry, I mean stories still about chatbots still hiring, programmatic, a lot of the newer players, they are potentially looking at people to add to the roster. It's not super dire, but yeah, it kind of sucks out there for sure. Over the last time the world ended, some of our greatest start-ups were born out of that time. Keep your eyes open for maybe the next great thing. But yeah, Amazon continues to fuck shit up. Chad: How? Joel: Hates workers with an opinion and the need to unionize and try to make things better at the company. Chad: They fired two Seattle based employees who publicly criticized safety and working conditions at its warehouses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Washington Post reports, "User experience designer, Emily Cunningham and Marin Costa were both fired on Friday after they tweeted criticism of the company and offered to match donations to warehouse workers. Both had previously criticized Amazon's climate policies, as well as circulated a petition internally calling for improved sick leave policies, hazard pay and childcare for warehouse workers." According to the New York Times. They're trying to advocate for themselves and obviously for all of their peers, their employees, the people that they share a lot of their time with, right? And these are essential workers. But yet Amazon doesn't want them to have a voice. Joel: Yeah. And don't forget, last month they fired the warehouse worker who helped organize a walkout in the New York office, I think it was Staten Island. This is a long time trend of just basically being combative with the workforce. I think that it's going to be one of two things, either the government is going to step in and unionizing is going to become a thing and government's going to realize Amazon is this huge juggernaut of a retailer and has to be put in check, whether that's via paying taxes in a way that's fair and treating workers in a way that's fair or robots are just going to replace all these people and it doesn't matter. Chad: That's what Jeff wants. Joel: That's what he wants. He'd love to have people out of the process all together. And it's additionally hard because you have all these people out of work and Amazon is still hiring tons of people. It's a catch 22 for everybody, Amazon's great because they're hiring, but then they're also a minister society because they're fucking shit up with taxes and they're making shit really bad for their workers. I don't know what to do, it's a tough problem. Chad: They are a big piece of our infrastructure. The supply chain, if you think about it, you can't treat people like this. I don't care how big a part of any system you are, I don't give a flying fuck. You can't do this from your ivory tower. We have to treat these essential roles like they're essential. Like for starters, paying them essential wages. It's ridiculous that everybody's talking about 15,16 dollar wages. People, that is $30,000 a year for an essential worker, that is ridiculous but yet acceptable. No, it's not acceptable. And that's what we have to get away from. Suppression of voice is not acceptable and saying it's against policy is total bullshit. And then they try to smear, as you'd said, Christian Smalls, they tried to smear him because he was trying to do the right thing. Joel: Yeah. I think we focus a lot on Amazon and fairly so, but things like Uber and Lyft are doing. They're not employees, they're not beholden to benefits and paying certain taxes, they're contractors. Chad: Yeah. They're gaming the system. Joel: So when they're not working, Uber has the gall to go to the government and tell the government that they should be paying and bailing out the drivers of Uber, instead of Uber actually treating them like they're workers. You know what I mean? There's this weird dynamic like, Uber wants it both ways, right? They don't want the government to be involved as long as they're contract workers and they don't have to give benefits, but then when shit hits the fan, they're going to the government saying, "Hey, bail out our drivers." You can't have it both ways. Chad: Sounds familiar, everybody, yay, capitalism. "Oh shit. Government, can you give me a handout? This would be fucking great. Thanks." "Yeah. No, I didn't save any of that money." "No, I know we had record profits. No, it's my bad." Joel: Yeah. Chad: Ending this segment on more of a positive, I'm trying to be positive here because I don't want Joel to go into his negative millennial place. Joel: That's good. Chad: Staffing firms announced partnerships amid COVID-19 pandemics. One of those, because there are many of them and we'll actually put the link on our website, but a friend of ours over at Cross Country Healthcare, they are currently collaborating with JetBlue Airlines to provide free flights to healthcare providers traveling to SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: ... New York to fight COVID-19. Healthcare professionals working through Cross country will get information on flights and once they've received their active assignment, boom, they're gone. Now we've heard these types of initiatives happening with Delta Airlines, staying in Hilton hotels and we hope to hear much, much more. And if there are other initiatives that are going on that we're not talking about, listeners, feel free to fire those off to us on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever you can find us. Joel: Yeah. New York's a mess. My heart goes out to the New Yorkers, particularly New York city where, let's be honest, a lot of people live in close quarters. A lot of families live really in close proximity to each other. I'm going crazy and I have a large Midwestern house. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I can't imagine being in a small enclosed space. Chad: That's a new level of stir crazy. Joel: It is a new level of stir crazy. But thanks for that positive note, and then I just brought it down like a fucking Debbie Downer, didn't I? Jesus. All right. Let's hear from Canvas and talk about LinkedIn and lawsuits and all kinds of other shit. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: Speaking of bad news, I hate to say, this just came across the news wire. This is Thursday as we record this. Brian Dennehy has passed. Chad: Another great actor. This wasn't COVID related, was it? Joel: Natural causes it says. Chad: Okay. Joel: Not COVID related. I loved him in First Blood as the sheriff. Chad: Oh, as the sheriff. Yeah. Joel: And Tommy Boy. Chad: That's range right there. Joel: Yeah, that is range. That's what you deal with, with me. Chad: Should have a Brian Dennehy movie, kind of like Film Fest this weekend. Go ahead and treat yourself to that on Netflix, Amazon, and wherever you get your movies. Joel: Cocoon, I haven't seen in a while. I think he was in that too. Chad: Yeah. That's a while. Facebook, LinkedIn sued for allegedly eavesdropping on Zoom users. Now this is straight from, from Dennis Tupper, I want to definitely call this out because I love when listeners find good shit like this. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: A California resident has sued Facebook and LinkedIn for allegedly violating Zoom users privacy by eavesdropping on their video conferencing. The federal lawsuit filed Monday by Todd Hurvitz, also alleges that Zoom violated user privacy by sharing data with outside companies. Who doe o quote unquote accurately target users for additional services and to convert them to paying customers. While we are in a global pandemic, people need to connect and yet they're being taken advantage of because Zoom sees an opportunity that is put in front of them by Facebook who's a bad actor as it is, and they automatically jump in the bad actor pool. If we want to say it's frivolous, eh, I'm going to say this is again, a bad actor sucking in a new actor that now is going to be playing in the bad actor pin. Joel: Okay. So if I hear this correctly, Zoom is working in tandem with LinkedIn and Facebook to basically pass over data from Zoom and whether that's what? Transcription and all kinds of other shit, I guess? Chad: Actual voice, listening in. Yeah, listening in. Joel: Okay. Actual audio recordings of what's going on. Chad: Or recording or live stream. Zoom allowed users of Apple's iOS operating system to log into video conferencing services through their Facebook plugin. That's where a lot of this gets really fucked up because of all these single sign on kind of scenarios. And Zoom knows about this, the information that was actually collected, personal data, IP addresses, time zone details, device information, we're talking about your mobile phone. Joel: Well, yeah. Every voice assistant on the planet is listening to what you're saying every time of the day, what you're watching on television, your conversations, anyway. Chad: Yeah. Well, if we start to standardize and think that this is okay, then Joel: Well no. I mean, at least with voice, you can turn shit off apparently, there are things you can do. But yes, if you're logging into Zoom with one click registration with LinkedIn or Facebook, and then there's some relationship with Zoom and Facebook in this example that they're passing over audio from your conversations, then yeah, that's kind of fucked up. Chad: Audio information from your mobile phone, who knows what the fuck next, right? Or you're using the single sign on from your laptop, either way. But if you're Zoom, to me this just looks like a short term money grab, unless you're working with Facebook on an acquisition play. I mean, why feed Facebook when they could possibly create a similar product? Facebook with messaging and things like that, they could obviously pivot and become quote unquote a Zoom, unless they could be looking at acquisition. Joel: And look, one of the strengths of Zoom is not only simplicity but also free, right? And the old adage of, if you're wondering why our product's free, it's because you're the product. If Zoom has the same mentality of Facebook where, yeah, we'll be free for a lot of people, we're going to make money on the data, this is a way to make money on the data. Chad: Yeah. I didn't see that it was only free accounts. Joel: No, they have a paid version, right? Chad: Yes. Joel: But the strength of Zoom is, it's super easy to get on, to join, the basic level's free. Chad: Still not good. Joel: Anyway, Facebook now, in the feed now, it'll have your company page and it'll say, "Hey, posting jobs or need to hire people? Click here to post jobs now." They're starting to throw in your company page on your feed and trying to entice you to post jobs. That's a little bit of a newsworthy event that we didn't have on the list at first. Chad: Yeah. And also another newsworthy event, as we always, we don't talk about enough. If you're out there in the market, you need to buy local, right? SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: And we were just talking about Amazon and buying shit, fuck that, buy things that you can local. And one of the reasons why in my Facebook feed, 450 North Brewing Company, which you know, amazing pizza, amazing beer, they're doing a lot of curbside stuff, and we go there at least once a week. They just did a beer drop and it was with nine different beers, and they went on sale at 11 and they did a virtual beer drop. You could go online and buy the beer, they're sold out. So get out there and support local. And staying somewhat local, the next topic is Salesforce, and we'll talk about job or Joel: Labor hoarding. Chad: ... labor hoarding. And now the reason people, I know in San Francisco there's a bunch of Salesforce employees and whatnot, but here in Indianapolis we also have the Salesforce building as well. Joel: The tallest building in the state is Salesforce. Chad: That's right. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who I'm sure you all know, made a pledge at the end of March, not to drive any significant layoffs over the next few months while the pandemic is expected to be in full swing. Benioff also extended his commitment further by challenging other CEOs and encouraging them to commit to a no-layoff pledge. Every CEO take a 90 day no-layoff pledge. I love to hear that, and then we hear this new term of labor hoarding. What is labor hoarding? Joel: It's pretty much what you just said. It's basically hoarding your labor when times are really slow or stopping and paying them while they do nothing till times get better. And granted Salesforce is a strong company, a lot of money, most of their workforce are really high level engineer folks or educated folks. As far as how real it is that a lot of companies can follow this pledge, apparently CareerBuilder didn't get the memo, it's going to be tough. And I think as a Silicon Valley celebrity if you will, I think you'll see some of this stuff from the Twitters of the world, the Facebooks, the Apples, you'll probably see very similar. By the way, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, and speaking of Amazon and other folks. Jack Dorsey gave $1 billion to COVID-19 relief efforts. And I'm not sure specifically what it was. But $1 billion represents 28% I think they were saying of his net worth. I mean Chad: WOW. Joel: And in contrast, our buddy Jeff Bezos at our favorite company that's not a job site, Amazon, donated a bunch of money, but it represented I think like 0.7%. It would be like you or me giving $7 to a charity. Chad: Well, I have to say that this type of leadership we really need in government to be able to pull everything together. One company, Benioff or Dorsey, they just can't do it. They can challenge others, but when you have a leader who's in charge of a whole fucking country that's entirely different. In Denmark, the country quickly instituted a policy to help companies keep their employees for the duration of the next three months, preventing the company from experiencing the mass pay off spike that happened in the US. It's important for us to understand that when we have people that aren't getting paid now or after COVID, those people cannot contribute to the economy, they can't pay their bills. They can't do the things that they need to be able to do. And we're already putting trillions of dollars into the system. It's just the way that we're doing it is just so wrong-headed. Joel: Can we talk about sex robots and really end this thing on a nice note. Chad: That would be awesome. Joel: All right. Let's hear from JobAdX and sex robots. JobAdX: Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate dropoff. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing, joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ, with JobAdX. SFX: Hell yeah. Joel: Sex robots. Chad: There it is. Yeah. You shared this podcast with me and I thought, ah, this is really going to be interesting. I mean, because we've talked about sex robots so many times. And yeah, dude, it was interesting as fuck, I couldn't believe some of the things that's going on out there. Why did you share this in the first place other than it said sex robots? Joel: Yeah, I actually read about it from an AI newsletter and it's from a podcast called Hidden Brain. Chad: NPR. Joel: I recommend if you listen to podcasts, which you obviously do because you're listening to us. But it was ... You either expect sex robot conversations to be comedic or sort of sci-fi speculative, whatever. Like they're going to fuck us out of existence. I didn't know what to expect going in, but Hidden Brain tends to be pretty smart and had a lady on who's basically her life is basically studying this whole phenomenon. And it was a historical perspective from the days of Greeks and Romans where they would make statues and Pygmalion, sort of the folklore around that, to the 70s blow up doll phenomenon, to obviously sex toys which were sort of early intro to robots as companionship. Joel: And now going into companies that are taking 16 weeks to create very lifelike robots that are like people. And she went into it thinking, hey, it's going to be very sexual. These are going to be Barbie dolls. They talk about how the perception or the stereotype of someone that would want one of these is living in mom's basement, no human contact whatsoever. And she sort of goes into refuting those myths and talking about sort of the typical buyer. If you're interested in sort of technology and culture and human sexuality and the future of relationships, it's a pretty interesting lesson. Chad: Yeah. For me, we just finished, we put out this week the Alexa job search podcast. And the thing that I thought was interesting was the voice assistance like Alexa that are being asked to talk dirty to them. There's a market for that apparently. And an app called Harmony is a sex chatbot and an app for your phone. I guess, is that a sex chatbot in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? That in itself I thought was interesting because it is, the things that we talk about from a chatbot standpoint process efficiencies, engagements on and so forth. This is so much more simplistic, but there is quote unquote AI to it. That was one point that stuck out to me and I was like, "Wow, okay." I didn't think about that, didn't think about asking my Google home to talk dirty me. And then the second part, which was really unnerving was sex dolls that could prospectively be custom made to look like someone else. Let's say for instance that chick that would never go out on a date with you or that dude that would never go out on a date with you. You could actually possibly get a doll made in their likeness. And at that point, I just had no words. Joel: Some privacy concerns there, right? Chad: Yeah, I was like, I just had no words at that point. And coming with the regulation that would have to come behind that to be able to not allow something to be made in somebody else's likeness without their permission. And I was like, "Oh my God, this is going down a fucking rabbit hole that I never thought about." Joel: In light of the sex robot podcast, if you haven't seen Her starring Joaquin Phoenix, it's a really interesting movie sort of having digital relationships and what that looks like. Chad; With an operating system. Joel: An operating system, right. And then the other one would be, Whitney Cummings is a comedian and she has a Netflix special. But she actually partnered with a sex robot manufacturer to make a sex robot look like her. And in her stand-up she actually brings the robot out to talk to her about the whole thing. If you're into this thing or interested, check out Whitney Cummings stand-up on Netflix. And if you can find Her starring Joaquin Phoenix somewhere, check that out if you haven't seen it yet. Chad: No words. We out. Joel; We out. Walken; Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant.. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts 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. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's 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. s this surprise? Joel: It shouldn't surprise anybody. Zoom, the hottest tech company in the world right now probably, that burst from 10 million users to 200 million, probably up to 250 million by now, had no context for what growth like that would mean from a security perspective, from a PR perspective, from just a light being shone on your business perspective. It's no surprise that some lawyer saw a story about security risks and figured out, okay, who can I sue with a lot of money that's integrated with Zoom to put some bank into my bank account? You know what I'm saying? To me, from what I read on this was super frivolous, try to find a chink in the armor of a start-up and then sue big companies a lot of money. I think it's totally baseless. I think it will be thrown out. But who knows, maybe they'll just write him a check to make them go away, and if anything else he gets some good PR and maybe some new clients at his law firm. Chad: I saw that, I thought that kind of at first, and then I started researching it and I found other articles, one on law360.com where Joel: Look at you on law six ... what is it? law360.com? Chad: Yeah, law360.com. Facebook, it seems as if ... And the thing is we have to think here, right? Who are the players in this? Facebook, we know has been harvesting data from users for ever, right? Joel: Run by a site. Chad: Unapologetically, right? LinkedIn, we know does it, they just do it in a much more silent stealthy way. And Zoom is this new player, It's just like, okay, I can start to believe how this could perspectively happen. They're harvesting personal information, Facebook seized on these profiles to boost its targeting advertising business while Zoom also profited from its newly enhanced ability t #Amazon #Facebook #Linkedn #Zoom #Salesforce #Alexa #GoogleHome #Voice #SexRobots

On today's show, we have a heavy hitter. Kevin Blair is a Talent Acquisition veteran of Cisco, IBM, and Salesforce so sit back, relax, and take notes. Kevin joins HR's Most Dangerous Podcast and covers everything from banishing "recruitment socialism," sales tips for HR tech vendors and how TA can genuinely articulate value to the C-suite. It doesn't get any better than this Nexxt exclusive. You're welcome! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Chad: Kevin, I'm going to flip the script here real quick. First off, I'm going to go through your resume just so people understand just the depth. Director of recruitment, EMEA for Oracle, senior director EMEA recruitment for Salesforce, global talent acquisition, Cisco, global vice president, talent acquisition, IBM. With all of that experience, what advice can you provide to TA about how to do their job better every single day? Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. Hong Kong Phooey, number one super guy. Chad: Number one super guy. Joel: What's up everybody? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast, I am your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Captain Caveman Sowash. Joel: And today we have Kevin Blair, VP talent strategy from Beamery on the show. Kevin from the UK, welcome. Kevin: Hey, thank you. Good to be here. I appreciate Joel: You sound not excited at all. It must be happy hour. Kevin: Yeah. I was just drifting into Hong Kong a few weeks or so, yeah, so you're taking me back, man. Chad: Just so everybody knows. If you don't know Hong Kong Phooey kids, definitely YouTube, Hong Kong Phooey, that's Kevin's favorite childhood cartoon. We were having a discussion before that Joel: When kids of the 70's have podcasts. Chad: That's what happens. Kevin, give us a little background, just history, you haven't been at Beamery your entire life, obviously. You've done many different things beforehand, very steeped in the talent acquisition side of the house. Tell us a little bit about you before we jump into this. Kevin: yeah. No, absolutely. Happy to. First of all, I am a career recruiter and that's not by accident or lack of opportunity, it is entirely by design. Obviously like the usual path being a search consultant and then moving in-house really before in-house was a thing, certainly like a thing it looks like today. And so I took the opportunity to go in when I had the opportunity don't work for one of my clients and then was lucky enough to work at some of the world's biggest companies. First major role with Oracle. Then went did a couple of years at Salesforce. Then a big transformation body of work at Cisco over about four, four and a half years. And then open sale a couple of months ago, I spent just over two years, two and a half years working at IBM, driving the transformation of their internal recruitment team, so that it delivers that 52,000 hires into the organization. Yeah. I then obviously have many opportunities to move into other parts of HR over the span of that career, but I like the product, right? I like the fact that value is so tangibly obvious in terms of how we create value for an organization and how we impact business performance. I've always liked the idea of moving away from anything that is, I think could be less commercial. It's not to say all the parts of HR aren't, but I really enjoy how you can make that connection through TA. And now I'm going to be able, as you say. Joel: All right Kevin, you're not getting away that easily. We rarely cross the streams with practitioners coming over to the vendor side and vice versa. Was the move to Beamery more about what was broken in TA and you hoping to fix it or was it Beamery and what they offered was just so great that you know the allure of IBM, Salesforce and all these big one own companies drew you over there? And it's also interesting to know that you didn't leave for an indeed.com or ZipRecruiter or maybe like a big brand job site, Beamery is just off the beaten path. So I want to dig in a little deeper into what's maybe wrong with TA, and why you left, and what's really going on there. Kevin: Where it came from, there's a couple of things. First of all, one of the opportunities I got through my work at IBM, and partially through Cisco, was being able to work with a multitude of companies in different sectors and really sought to democratize the experiences I'd had over a long period of time. Walking in the shoes of many of the people that solved the same 12 problems, irrespective of business size and scale. When I was thinking about what's next and some of the things I wanted to do, I was very prescriptive about the fact that I want to build things. That's the most important thing, I want to build and create, and I want to be pivotal to working as part of many companies transformation, either as a constituent components or as an advisor or just getting in deep around the tech stack and how they can re-engineer it. I guess where it came from with Beamery was when I met the founders and there was a connection there. I also looked at the roadmap and the development path they were taking the company towards and expanding out beyond the current portfolio if you like, and actually starting to impact other areas where I think vendors maybe not stepped into as a practitioner that I would've really liked. So if I think about me as the buyer, and I've been the buyer in many situations of many different products, offerings and streams on there, there's a couple things that I always thought could be orientated a little bit different. The first one is, what I would always do when I looked at a product is, I could immediately see through whether it was just a shinier bell or a louder whistle, right? Selling to me all features and benefits isn't a great way to position something with me, because to me to get those features and benefits means me ripping out big system, potentially purging a load of data, it's a lot of change in management in my team. And just to go for, as I said, a shinier bell or a louder whistle isn't exactly the thing that I'm going to orientate towards. You find yourself making do with latency or wastage or redundancy in your systems. And so for me it was like, what do I need? I need something that's going to impact my operating model. I need something that's going to turn dumb data into smart data. How does that happen? Being able to, for them, being able to say, okay, I should be constructing my organization like this because my systems are orientating my operating model to deliver greater value. A bit of a long winded answer, but I was at the heart of it. Chad: Okay. Well let's dive into that then. What will actually impact your operating level? You're talking about specific things that Beamery sold you on from a roadmap standpoint. What is a roadmap? A roadmap is really vision, right? And trying to put that into tactical terms. What did they sell you on that you saw happening with them that you didn't from all these other brands that were out there? Kevin: It's not necessarily what I saw, it's that I saw my ability to impact that roadmap and co-curate it with them. And so that's what you want to chat with me, is I'm able to sit down and say, okay, I'm not interested like many vendors, and again, being on the receiving end of sales calls is like, "When's your RFP?" And I'm like, "Dude, are you asking me because you think that's helping me solve my problem?" It's like going way back. It's like, come and talk to me about what am I diagnosing? What's my problem statement? How am I getting the route to value? I think it's really interesting within HR now, and I've used this comment before, I always think about HR and where it is today. When I first went into the workplace, and you guys probably do as well, do you remember the IT director was like ... When I went to the workplace, the IT director was provisioning email, maybe put rolling out the Citrix thing client network and maybe reaping and or reinstalling your Microsoft Office product, right? And then at some point the CEO said, "Hey, IT director, I need you to be the CTO and I need you to get my sales people 30% more productive. I need you to simplify and automate and standardize some of our processes. I need you to do this." And so the CTO was born, it's like technology became value to the business, right? I think the same question has been asked of the HR leaders and that's where the personnel department transitions to CHRO. Now they've been calling themselves in title CHRO when the C-suite configured itself in that way. But actually if you look at that journey that they're going on, it's like, okay, like how are you going to demonstrate value? How are you going to create value? What does the CEO hear? What does the CHR here? What does the CHRO say, and how does the TA leader operationalize that? I've been in that situation, therefore, it's about putting a practitioner's mindset on the, okay, well if recruitment's going to change, and it fundamentally needs to change, we need to stop hanging onto these opinions. There's some of the things I talked about, like the arbitrary set of KPI's, the talk about productivity and it's all about experience. I was actually having a conversation this morning with a peer in a large company, and I said, we were joking and saying, "We could drop ourselves into any company, anywhere in the world and impact their recruitment KPI's positively." That's not to say we'd have a better service. It's definitely not to say we drive a better experience, but what we do know after 20 years of doing this, I know exactly what levers to push, right? Now that might be like, you tang something or we remove assessments all of a sudden hired inspired face, quick cap, right? It's like, yeah, let's not pretend that that actually defines value and then that creates value. So Chad: But Kevin it seems like, okay, so you were at some huge fucking companies. Most of those companies could impact their roadmap. You know that, right? There's no question you impacted roadmaps at IBM, at Salesforce, at Cisco. You could do that. What this feels like to me and what I'm not hearing is that they need somebody on the inside, almost like you need to be an evangelist, almost teacher to the rest of talent acquisition out there because they're fucking shit up. Kevin: Yeah. Not everyone is, for sure. I'm actually ... But there's a lot, a lot of it comes from the 20 years or 30 years or maybe like a thousand years, depending on how long you think the idea of tasking people to do roles and rewarding them, so when recruitment began. I think that we've all been pushed towards this belief and maybe this position of performance data is a defensive shield to insulate us from budget cuts as opposed to turning into a windshield to show where a company could go. So yeah, you can infact ... And if I think about where I started with it, I didn't start ... When I think about the products I'm going to co-design and the work that we're going to do here at Beamery, I didn't start and say, what product do I need? I started by saying, what are the things that I'm trying to solve? And I actually wrote down, I started writing this, if you like, talent acquisition operating manual where I said, okay, ignoring technology, because technology will be the enabler, where does it stir that we need to look at these things to fix? And currently up to 34 chapters in that operating manual, right? It's literally winding back to, okay, what are we trying to drive? What's the outcome we're trying to have? How are we trying to transform to a point of demonstrating and articulating value so we can go on the front foot? Technology is a part of it, but it is actually starting to, not to destroy the evangelism, but it's creating some definitions and standards. So I'll give you an example. Everybody talks to me, when they talk about recruiters, they post, "I want a 360 recruiter," or, "I want a full stack recruiter," right? What does that mean? The recruitment role is so individually defined from company to company, particularly in enterprise right now, and I'm like, okay maybe we need five definitions of recruiter. How do I know if I have an agile recruiter in my team and I did a lot of work and I built a huge agile practice. If I have an agile recruiter, how do I know that that definition of my agile recruiter in IBM has the same definition as one at Microsoft, and SAP, and Oracle and all of these other companies. How do I know that we're actually ... Because if you go to sales, you have global account executives, you have key account executives, you have SDR's, BDR's, there's a pretty clear definition or a narrower channel on what that work is. What is sourcer? What about swarm and source? What about agile source? And what about end to end sourcing? We just haven't got definition that enables TA leaders to exchange information between each other to curate their operating models that actually talk in a consistent way to all of our benefit, not so I can steal people from another company, but so have you have standards between companies. Announcer: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first, we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Joel: For clients that are married to email, what would you tell them in terms of the metrics versus text messaging? Andy Katz: The big difference between text and email is the open rate where texts are getting a 96 plus percent open rate, an email could be getting in the 20s on average. The click through rate in emails is somewhere between one and 6% on the high end. The click through rate for text messaging is somewhere between 15 and upwards of 40%. Again, it's really more engaging because people are specifically opting into that form of communication, that's what they want. Announcer: For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X. Hiring.nexxt.com Chad: Well, sales is accountable with their operating model by revenue, right? Kevin: Absolutely. Chad: That's entirely different. The entire sales industry is predicated on being able to perform, around being able to sell. Therefore, there are lines that are drawn in the sand in creating these new methodologies. From our standpoint, who are we accountable to? That's the biggest question. And should we not just change the operating model overall? Is that really what you're trying to push toward? Kevin: 100% we should. I think, and first of all, who are we accountable for? We're accountable for the revenue. This idea of recruiting socialism that every requisition has equal value to a company is ridiculous. When recruitment leaders set their capacity models, I am one of the leaders that when I look at a hundred roles and I have five recruiters, I do not give five recruiters 20 each, I give one 50, one 30 and three on 20, and those 20 is what drives revenue and growth for the company. This idea that we arbitrarily peanut butter to all of our capacity, all of our utilization against our demand is ridiculous, right? And so first of all, let's move away from that and I start thinking, okay, how do we create a route to value? How does recruitment show it is a profit center, not a cost center, not a process optimization operation? It actually is going to create money and growth for the business, because that's what we can do. We're in a unique position, we're not doing engagement processes or projects that may or may not impact productivity or revenue growth because we're not exactly sure how we would measure that. We have very specific measurements about what we do. If you're running recruitments in a consultancy and there are billable consultants, if you increase the velocity of your recruitment around billable consultants by 10 days, you drive tens of millions of dollars to the bottom line. Facts. We've got to start to orientate towards that, and so as we get into that, we've got to be more deliberate on how we define and curate these operating models. I think a big factor here by the way is get away from these ideas of things like TA delivery managers, right? That's the UK delivery manager. That's the US delivery manager. That's the North America sales delivery manager. If we're going to have different types of recruiters and as a result, that's the fallout of having prioritized work that's based around business volume and complexity therefore, we have different services attached to the types of roles and work that those recruiters do. We should have product owners, not just managers. We should have products to find in agreement. We should have service lines. We should be measuring the resource capacity management utilization. We should be acting like a services business, we should not just be acting like a process business. Joel: Hey Kevin, I'm curious, you touched on this a little bit, a lot of vendors listen to our show, a lot of salespeople in this space listen to our show. I'd be a miss to not ask, you've been through a lot of sales pitches, a lot of sales calls Kevin: Yeah, I have. Joel: And then you took that knowledge of what works and what doesn't and you took it over to a vendor. I'm curious, what was Beamery doing right? What were they doing wrong? I'm talking more tactically here as opposed to strategic, what did you change and what was good at Beamery from the sales process after having so much experience? Kevin: Yeah. I'm early stages into the company, I'm here, now eight weeks. Living life, because as I said, I've got this three pronged role of running talent acquisition in Beamery, helping customers that we have today enable themselves through moving further back away from the product. And obviously, as I said before, getting into the design of new products, new offerings, that kind of stuff. What I'm able to think about is exactly what we said before around, it's having the conversation at a different point. If you think about seven stages of the process, you have diagnosis, problem, root of value, business case, budget, tech stack alignments and RFP. Right now vendors mostly come at you in stages six and seven, tech stack alignment and RFP, maybe in budget. Very rarely was I ever attempted to be engaged at a place further back. I remember when I was going on the transformation journey and I was a long way from thinking about like, what's next for tech and where are we going to go and how are we going to maybe collapse the stack a little bit and go more horizontal and vertical with these big entrenched systems. And I remember someone on the phone to me, and I wasn't being playful, but someone phoned me, I encountered this after the call and they like, "Heard you're doing this transformation and we sell this product, we do this." And I remember on the phone I was saying, "Oh yeah, we're not going to be at that point for 12 months." Then they hung up the phone, and I was sad that they did. Okay, but I'm not doing all this. So this felt like, you can absolutely help me with this crap if you are able on the basis that I still have like millions of dollars aligned to that transformational piece of work, but you just want to know where my RFP is. Right? And that's not aligning to my values. That's not aligning to what I need the value, sorry, from this conversation. So there's an element of like, it's actually having the conversation at different stages and understanding like, how can you help? Because I don't know what I'm doing in every single situation, but I have the benefit of a lot of networks I can pull on to get experiences. I have a lot of friends in the sector. I have a lot of friends in vendors. And I have the benefits of being able to lean in and say, "Hey, I'm trying to solve this problem, how do I do it?" I think the vendors can hold themselves more to account in a very positive way for helping with that and actually curating their experiences from their customers and trying to create this opportunity to bring that together. And I think that's a big part of it and I do truly believe in ... I know every person that's in the buy in stages and being on the other side and maybe someone who has a lot of different opinion of mere nonsense, but if you were a partner and you were an absolute partner and you consulted ... I think about some partners I've worked with over the years, someone like John Wilson, Wilson HCG is someone I've partnered with them a couple of times now through a couple of different cycles, he would validate, they go deep in my company. If you're in, you're deep, you're in everything, you're not just staying providing head count and resources, I'm all over you for all kinds of services, support, all of your insights and data. I'm always so, so I can help refine what I need and it's not just tied to, what is the product I'm buying off you? Chad: Kevin, I'm going to flip the script here real quick. First off, I'm going to go through your resume, just so people understand just the depth. Director of recruitment, EMEA for Oracle, senior director, EMEA recruitment for Salesforce, global talent acquisition, Cisco, global vice president, talent acquisition, IBM. With all of that experience, what advice can you provide to TA about how to do their job better every single day? Kevin: When I talk about some things like at like agile methodology or requisition prioritization, one of the things I did, I did a presentation recently to a group of UK recruitment leaders. It was through Jamie Leonard’s group. I presented to that group and I remember someone coming up to me afterwards saying, "It feels like some of that is easy for you to talk about, this operating model, this business value, this looking into difficulty of of hire and then applying agile to work on the most effective roles, because you have to scale the organization. I'm like, what is it really? Because I have that? Do nothing you can take these principles down to even 10 requisitions or a five person recruitment organization. Do you think that I create disproportional workloads for recruiters to drive better outcomes for high value? I didn't do that because I had scale, I did that because it was the right thing to do. So as you are in this everyday work and process, think about applying principles and methodologies, not just applying wholesale enterprise level changes. And it does work. I see as much, I get involved with many, many smaller organizations where I actually see the tangible impact of those things happening in real terms. Just because you're in an enterprise, you're talking about big names, we talked before like big organizations a lot of highs, do you think proportionally my budget was always bigger than everybody else's just because it was? Or do you think I was actually more squeezed to drive operational efficiencies? I'll leave you guys to figure it out, I'm sure you have an opinion. Chad: I'm going to go with the latter. Kevin: Right. I'll tell you. I sometimes go into these smaller organizations and they're like, "We can't possibly run it to the level that you're on, like this hyper prioritization. There's all kinds our cost per fill is like six and a half thousand dollars." I'm like, "Whoa, it's as much as that. Wow. You could do a lot more with that if you want to." So I think the first thing is, don't feel like some of this stuff that feels like it's enterprise level is excluded from any scale of recruitment operation at any scale of recruitment business. And then the second thing is lean on your vendors. These all have experiences with other companies. Ask for their support and help. Even if it's not really the part of that, I know sometimes there's trust issues where people are like, "Yeah, but they just tried to up-sell us, cross-sell us, resell us, whatever. Right? Okay. So you feel like they're controlling the conversation and you don't want to put yourself in that position. Well, take back control. Like say, "Actually I'm doing this. Who else are you working with that's doing that? And how are they solving? And introduce me to that, because we're both customers. And I want to go and talk to that customer about different a problem. There's nothing to do, you're a vendor, but you have a connection with them and I want that connection. I want to leverage your networks and your customers to help me do my work." I think that's a powerful thing. Joel: Kevin, thanks for your time man. Kevin: My pleasure. Joel: For our listeners who want to learn more about you and/or Beamery, where should they go? Kevin: First of all, it'd be a miss of me being a recruiter not to say, just hit me up on LinkedIn. Right? Because that's a whole lifeblood right there. So definitely hit me up. Go to obviously, beamery.com for the products, but actually for a personal connection, reach out to me via LinkedIn. As I said, like the employment for me is, I want to democratize my experience as much as I can. And if I can't help you, I know people who can. Just reach out and lean in. Honestly, the only way we're going to doit is do it together, and that's why it's all about this co-creation piece, get on board with. Chad: Make that connection people. LinkedIn, Kevin Blair. Excellent dude. Thanks so much. Kevin: Thanks man. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #TalentAcquisition #recruiting #business #IBM #Beamery #sales #ATS #CRM

I cannot think of a brand more innovative, inclusive, and just plain fun. The Harlem Globetrotters are the epitome of success, culture, and a brand everyone knows and loves. That's why when The Chad & Cheese were offered an interview with a real Harlem Globetrotter they were giddy like 10-year-old boys. Enjoy this Cult Brand podcast supported by our friends at Smashfly Technologies. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Brent: We're a brand that stood for something before it was cool and trendy to stand for something. Thank you to all the beer companies now that spend their millions of dollars talking about that they stand for community and fellowship and all that stuff but we've always stood for goodness, we've always stood for kindness. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinions and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: Dude. Joel: What's up gang? We're back [Inaudible [00:00:51.10] doing some recordings. Chad: No, no, no, no, we got to go right to it. I have a Harlem Globetrotters sitting in front of me. Joel: It's pretty fucking cool. Chad: Dude. His name's dragon. Okay? Stepbrother's reference. I don't know what we're going to talk about. What we're actually going to talk about. Talk about where you got your name and all that other stuff but Joel: Is there a Nighthawk on the team too? Dragon: There's a Hawk on the team. There's a hawk. Chad: It's close. So we got Dragon DeAndre, what's your last name? Dragon: Taylor. Chad: Dragon Joel: 45-inch vertical leap. Chad: Dude, he's a specimen. That's all I got to say. Joel: Which is 48 ... Wait, I don't know the math. Chad: You're a negative, dude. Joel: It's about 38 more than me, I think. Yeah. Dragon: Just put a phone book underneath his feet and have him jump, he'll trip over it. Chad: Credit card. Joel: Same idea as the phonebook. Chad: And then we got Brent Baldwin. Joel: The fourth Baldwin brother, allegedly. Brent: I'm better looking though. Joel: The better looking. Yes. Chad: Director of brand marketing, all things Globetrotterdom, tell us a little bit about what you do. Brent: Yeah. If it relates to the brand, it falls to me. So marketing, strategy, creative development, a little bit of putting together rthe strategy behind the show. I'm a blessed department of one. Chad: Department have one for a brand that is known world wide. How old is the brand? Brent: We are 94 years old. We're in the midst of our 94 season and known by 94% of the world. Chad: Good God. Wow. Joel: I have to throw this in because if my 10 year old daughter listens 30 years from now. You also ran the Disney Frozen show. Correct? Brent: Yeah. Disney on Ice. Joel: Disney on Ice Frozen, which is made for Disney on Ice, right? Okay, got you. Brent: Yeah. That was probably the highlight of my daughter's impressions on my career. Joel: Exactly. Brent: Getting to go and hang out with Anna and Elsa on a Saturday in a private Disney on Ice show, it's all been downhill from there for her. Chad: Well, also, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, you've got all these ... Disney, just the the Disney on Ice stuff and then you end up here less than a year ago. Brent: Yeah. I love kitten family marketing. Chad: Why? Brent: Maybe because there's still a 10 year old boy inside of me, and I want to fulfill that excitement and joy for me to this day. I do say that a lot, I say, "Would 10 year old Brent be happy with this?" When I ordered brussel sprouts at dinner the other night, 10 year old Brent ... When I was at Disney on Ice and I was trying to figure out what dress Tiana wears on a certain part of the Princess and the Frog, would 10 year old Brent like this? But Joel: Does 10 year old Brent love fart jokes as well as much as ... Brent: 10 year old Brent and 20 something year old Brent on his first day at Cartoon Network was in a meeting, should we develop a fart app? Joel: Boom! Thanks for listening everyone, that's the end of our show. Brent: That's legit. Chad: There's the the mic drop. We're going to talk about Dragon here for a minute, okay? Because we don't get athletes on the show, right? Joel: Other than me. Chad: Okay. We don't get athletes on the show. Tell us about, you played Pro Ball, right? You played College Ball, right? Tell us a little bit about you and how you actually became a Harlem Globetrotter. Dragon: Well, I played in Northern Michigan University and after that I played in the NBA D League now it's called the G League. Chad: Okay. Brent: And I played overseas. I actually playing in Canada, in the NBL. Chad: Oh really? Dragon: New Brunswick's St. John. A little bit colder than here though. [Crosstalk [00:04:27.13] Joel: A little known fact. It's cold up there. Dragon: Yes. Very cold. Very cold. I bounced around a couple places and I was at home one day, and I got a call from The Globetrotters. I was like, "Oh my god." Chad: Did you apply for the job? Dragon: No, this was Chad: No? Okay. See, this is.. Joel: You didn't go online, to find jobs? Dragon: I didn't go online. I didn't go on Indeed or ... I'm not sure if you can do it with.. Chad: You know what? Because Indeed sucks. Go ahead. Dragon: I got a call from the Globetrotters and they said they seen my highlights on YouTube and they heard about me and they said they think I would be a great fit. I went in and I still had to try out. I went in for a trial, it was a genuine five on five, no tricks involved. And I just displayed my best talent and they asked me questions, they wondered how I was as a person, my personality and how good am I interacting with people. And most importantly, with The Globetrotters they want to see if you are not just a basketball player, but are you a good person? Are you able to interact with people? Are you able to express your personality? Chad: This is a family show. Dragon: Yeah, it's a family show. And adults love it too. Chad: Oh, yeah. Because we grew up with it. Dragon: Yeah, exactly. Chad: It's like we get to harken back to when we were that little 10 year old Brent. Right? Joel: Yeah. We're the guy that says, "Where's Curly Neal?" Chad: We talk about adults calm, there's still that 10 year old Chad and Joel and Brent that are there. They're just in bigger body and all that. Dragon: Yeah, I agree. Sometimes after a game we have autograph session, which is one of the things I love. We get a chance to interact with our fans, called The Fifth Quarter autograph session. After the game, we take pictures, take selfies and just interact, they ask these questions. And sometimes I get people at my line like, "Hey here, could you sign this basketball? This is for my granddaughter?" I'm like, "Sure." "Are you sure this is for ..." "It's okay, I'll sign it." Joel: My granddaughter, Frank. Yeah, "Can you sign it for Frank, please?" Did you go through multiple interviews? Was it one and done? Did you go through a process of it? How did that work? Dragon: Well, I went through ... I sat with the coaches. We have legendary coaches as well. All three of our coaches, actually, they played with the Globetrotter, so they teach us a lot of things. I went in and they asked me a bunch of questions. The would throw a few jokes to see how I interact with things. Then I got on the court and they wanted to see how good I was playing on the court. And after a while, when you're on the court, you eventually express your personality and it's like a trial period, they want to see how good you are interacting with people. And my first game, theree was 10,000 people. Chad: Wow. Dragon: They threw the ball at me and they was like, "Do a trick." I'm like, "Hold on. Wait, this is my first day." And I put the ball around my back and threw it to one of the other players and I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a long season." Joel: It's going to be a long game. Dragon: Then after that, later that night, went into the hotel, tried some tricks, broke a few lamps. And then now I'm seven years in and it's just an amazing experience. Chad: The Globetrotters found DeAndre before he was Dragon through Joel: YouTube. Chad: YouTube. Joel: Is that the typical scouting strategy for the for the Globetrotters? Dragon: Well, it depends. We go some people that's in the dunk contest, the College Dunk Contest. Chad: Yeah. Dragon: And we have a draft too. We have a annual draft, we actually draft players as well. Chad: How come that's not on ESPN? Dragon: It should be. Right? We should tell them about it. Yeah. Brent: We're going to talk to them later today. Dragon: Yeah. Joel: How do you draft players? Dragon: It's just a draft. We pick certain players through the draft. Some come and sign, some take. Joel: So it's like an invitation? Dragon: It can be invitation or some people, people like them. Joel: It's not like the Washington generals are drafting people and then you are. I'm just kidding. Dragon: I don't know what the Washington [Crosstalk [00:08:04.06] Joel: We'll be going to that as well, how they find those players. Dragon: Yeah. We draft people each year. Usually we draft some of the College Dunk players. Love the guys, some of them sign. We have one guy by the name of Devin Douglas, nicknamed Beast, he was a College Slam Dunk champion. He's been with us for four years now, and he's made 63, amazing Doug. We have another guy by the name of Doug Anderson, he was a college dunk champion and he billing us for a few years too. Joel: Are you guys full time employees? Are you on contract? Is everyone on the same kind of contract? How does that work? Dragon: Well, yeah. Think about, if you been with an organization for 18 years or 50 years, I don't think that the money will be exactly the same by that time, but we all have contracts, we go in each year and Joel: Are they usually annual contracts and they just renew each year? Dragon: It varies. Joel: Okay. Dragon: It varies from each player. A lot of the players are very talented and skilled. It is all dependent on how well you are on the court, like when you got players like LeBron James, players like Kevin Garnett. Joel: So each player is dealt differently based on skill Dragon: Yeah. Joel: Similar to how a regular NBA team would act? Dragon: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel: Okay. Chad: Well, plus, you're entertainers too. Dragon: Yeah. Chad: You're athletes, number one, that's why you're chosen. Brent, tell us about the whole culture thing. Okay? Because so many companies, so many companies say that they want to hire for culture, but they just can't figure it out. You guys, we don't see things in the press like we do with the NBA with the Harlem Globetrotters. Right? You have a brand that you have to be able to guard because it's really a family, family brand. How do you do that? Brent: Yeah. We're blessed that we have probably 50 of the best men and women in the world, as people and as individuals, that just happened to be amazing entertainers and amazing basketball players. If you think about it every year, there's about 18,000 men that come out of college that want to play professional basketball. There's about 16,000 women that come out that want to play. Not everybody's path is the NBA, and the Globetrotters are a great path for for a lot of players. As Dragon was talking about the tryouts and the process, you got to hoop you got to ball, you got to show us that you can play. But probably more important, you got to show us that you can entertain, that you can be a good person. Chad: I would think connect too, right? Brent: Yeah. Chad: Because you got to connect with kids and the crowd. Dragon: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Brent: And that comes through being the living embodiment of our brand 24/7. You probably have countless stories of rolling into a hotel at 1 a.m. in the morning after playing a doubleheader being exhausted, and there's little Timmy and he sees you and you pull the ball out and you spin it on the finger and you pose for a photo, and that kid now has the globetrotter story. That because we hire well and have the best people first, before anything else, that's how we're able to be so comfortable with our brand. It's how I, in my protective mode of the brand, don't worry on a Wednesday night when we've got three teams all over North America, because I know it's going to be excellent. And beyond just our players, it's our operational team, our tour staff, that work just as hard, that are the ones that are dealing with like the diva, dance mom during a halftime performance, music cut off three seconds short and now she's ... It's just amazing and amazing people that were able to find. Dragon: Yeah. One of the questions I always get asked all the time is like, "How come you're not playing in the NBA?" Or "How come you're not playing somewhere else?" I'm like, what I do now, I enjoy it. I love it. I get a chance to travel the world on someone else's expense. We create memories and interact with people and I love that. Chad: It's gotta be fulfilling for you too. Dragon: It's fulfilling for me, the kids are our future and I get a chance to touch kids lives. I got a quick story, I met this one kid, he was with the Make A Wish Foundation, he was battling brain cancer and his number one thing in life was to meet a Harlem Globetrotter. And that touched my heart, that was his one thing he wanted to do was meet Harlem Globetrotter. I got a chance to meet him and I got a chance to show him joy and make them happy. That's really important to me. And that's one of the things that kept me around. I get a chance to ... We have hospital visits, we have schools visits, we do things all over and I just love being able to enjoy and have fun with people. Joel: Yeah. You can't put a price on that. Announcer: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a Cult Brand is not easy, which is why you need friends like Roopesh Nair, CEO of Smashfly on your side. Chad: To become Cult Brands, companies need to build from the inside out. How can messaging and technology facilitate that type of growth? Roopesh Nair: It's easy to booth so called employer brand in paper and say, hey, this is my EVP, and these are my pillars of EVP. But it is much more difficult to activate it internally and ensuring that as you build your EVP, that activation is top of your mind. I've seen a lot of organizations build these awesome EVP's which stands for who they are, but then not necessarily using that effectively internally. And other times it's because the EVP is not created in a very genuine way, then obviously it will not stand the test of their internal activation. Hence, you need to ensure that your EVP is credible and aspirational as you think about the future. But at the same time, spending that time to ensure that every persona in your company understands what your differentiation is, what do you stand for as a company and why is it relevant to that particular individual in that particular role. Is very important as you basically ensure that you're building that culture or employee value proposition inside out, then it's easy to activate it because then you can use your own employees to really activate your EVP and your brand as you think about external activation. Announcer: Let's Smashfly help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smash fly.com. Chad: That's giving back to the community. We See all these cult brands and all these other brands that talk about activation and all these things, but really, I feel to be a cult brand, to be something that has long lasting, almost a century long, you have to give back to the community, you have to be a part of the community. And it feels like just for me personally, that the Globetrotters have always been something that I feel like has been a part of the community. Brent: I like to say that we're a brand that stood for something before it was cool and trendy to stand for something. You know what I mean? Thank you to all the beer companies now that spend their millions of dollars talking about that they stand for community and fellowship and all that stuff but we've always stood for goodness, we've always stood for kindness. Everybody remembers how you make them feel, and we make people feel good. You feel better when you leave a Globetrotters game than when you walk in, and that creates that longevity. Who doesn't want to engage and interact with the brand that makes them feel good. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Talk about some of the ... You guys are a real Trailblazer with diversity and inclusion. I think the first woman player to come out of college. Talk about how you guys have embraced that throughout the years and been a real Trailblazer with diversity. Brent: Yeah. I love that we're not just part of culture, we help define culture. It's probably one of the things that I'm proudest about our brand. In 1984, Lynette Woodard, who was just the woman in female basketball coming out of the University of Kansas. Joel: Olympic as well. Yeah. Brent: Yeah, she was an Olympic gold medalist. She became the first woman to play in an all male basketball teams. We broke the gender barrier, and almost 40 years before that Chad: That was in '84? Brent: In 1984, yeah. Chad: Wow. We still have problems with that, right? Like 10% of the the CEOs of major corporations, I think maybe that's too high, are females, right? You guys were starting to do that the 80's? Brent: Yeah. To this day, we have female Globetrotters that are the most gifted, talented basketball players, entertainers and people in the world. What's amazing to me is the lines of the autograph session for our female players are full of boys that look up to them and admire them because of who they are not because they happen to be a man or a woman. Joel: Tell the Lakers story, about when you played them twice, because they didn't believe it was real. Brent: Yeah. In the late 1940's, the ABA, which is the precursor to the NBA, it was an all-white League. And the Minneapolis Lakers were just the resounding champions year after year after year. Abe Saperstein, our founder was so confident that Globetrotters were the best basketball team in the world that he challenged the Minneapolis Lakers to a game and we won on a buzzer beater at the last second and nobody believed it. There's very limited photography. There's almost no video. Joel: Wasn't televised. Brent: I know, right? And nobody really believed it. And he's like, "Okay, let's play again." Year two, we play again and we win again. And it was that moment of everybody going, "Wow, these guys are amazing. They're talented." And that very next year, Sweetwater Clifton became the very first African American to play in the NBA, who was the Globetrotter that was on that team. Chad: Amazing. Brent: It's an amazing barrier, and it's an amazing part of our history in a cultural defining moment. Joel: You mentioned your founder. I'm just curious, how's the, not the ballplayers, but the actual organization. Is there a CEO? Or is it an executive director? How many employees are there? What kind of flow do you have for resumes? I assume you have a big demand to work at the Globetrotters, but I have I have no idea because I see the face of the team Chad: Everybody's looking at Dragon, right? Dragon: Yeah. Chad: Like there are people behind Dragon (Inaudible) Yeah. Brent: Yeah. We were a family of 187 families. We're led by our general manager Jeff Munn, and then we roll up as a part of the Herschend Family Entertainment Company. So we say as Herschend were a family of brands owned by a family that focuses on families. It is. It's a very lucrative company, people are excited to work for us. I could probably butcher what HR software and things we use to manage, all of that. Chad: That's our boring shit. But yeah. Brent: Yeah, it is. But we do. I genuinely feel that we hire on culture, because skills can be taught. And if you are the right person, and your mind is in the right place ... It's the Dragon story, couldn't do the tricks, but he is a wonderful man, and I love DeAndre more than I love Dragon, the tricks came and all the pieces came but he was the right person for this organization. Chad: Dragon, do you get like a text at two o'clock in the morning saying, "Hey, we need you for a PR thing," or something like that? Because these guys are like ... Press, they're doing all these promotions and all these things. Are there anything, out of the blue that happens and you just know that you're on call? Dragon: Yeah, we were always on call. There's times, throughout my career, I've gotten messages like, "Hey, we have an important interview that's five, six in the morning." You got to be ready, you got to have that coffee 20, 30 minutes before, so you have the good talking voice and you have the energy. Most importantly, it's so natural to us, I'm used to it, so it doesn't really bother me. If I'm able to do an interview at four, five in the morning, I'm able to have five or 10,000 people to see that interview. That's amazing. That's good to be able to just do that. So, yeah. Joel: I'm curious on top of that, you have to be highly skilled all the time, and you have to stay fresh with your skills. We're in Banff, Canada right now, where there's not exactly a surplus of courts and weather that you can go out and practice. How do you how do you stay fresh? How do you stay skill to level you have to be when you go on the court and do what you do? How do you do that? Are you in your room, doing push-ups and throwing the ball against the wall? How does that work? Dragon: For me, I've been doing it for seven years now. We practice three, four hours a day before the game. I've been doing it for quite some time, so it becomes a second nature to me. I'm used to doing things. And there's times where I've done tricks that I actually made a mistake by doing a trick and I was like, "Wait, that was kind of cool. Let me try this again." So for me, I'm used to it. I spin the ball every day. I do tricks every day. And it's easy for me, I can take a couple days off, four or five days off, and still be fresh with doing things. Joel: Yeah. Dragon: I actually got a chance, yesterday, I hiked up Silver Mountain. It took me about two hours. Brent, he kept telling me, he was like, "I'm telling you, you should pack a coat." I'm like, "Okay. Yeah, sure. I travell, I'll pack." He said, "It's going to be cold here. It's different with the Canadians." He's like, "This is the mountains" Chad: Yeah. Dragon: So I got a chance to pack a coat and I didn't pack the right coat. I'm about an hour into my hike and this guy was like, "Good job." He's like, "You're about halfway finished." I'm like, "What?" My hands are cold. So I told him, I said, "Before I leave here, I'm going to get a Canada Goose. I have to." But I got a chance to take a break, and relax and have some fun. Today was a busy day, I got a chance to do a couple things this morning. I'm used to the schedule. So, yeah. Chad: We were at your presentation yesterday. And I thought it was amazing because they announced that we had an 11 year old here to the gathering and these tickets Joel: Paid attendee. Chad: These tickets are not cheap. Yeah, paid attendee. I think the presentation was great, especially the background and being able to talk about Dragon and talent and all that other fun stuff. But having Luke, is his name, the 11 year old there was like magic, because I think everybody in the room was like, I remember being that kid. That interaction, spinning the ball on your finger to his finger, again, it brings back all those memories and really reminds us why we care about The Harlem Globetrotters. Again, your job, and I don't want to put any more stress on you, Brent, this is like one of those, don't screw this up, thing. Right? 94 years. Joel: Don't let us down man. Chad: Yeah. You know what I mean? From you, when you go in, you've been in the family kind of business for a very long time, do you think about that at all? Brent: I do. One of my philosophies as a mantra is I love to put my thumbprint on every brand that I have the privilege of working with. And you're right, I hope I just don't put maybe my big toe on it instead of my thumbprint this time. Everybody has a Globetrotter story, I have this amazing story from my dad and my childhood and how it's foundational to my youth. And that is one of the things that carries me every day is, if I can remember how I felt when I was a child, and then how I felt as a dad when I took my daughters last year to their first game, and I just use that as the filter for everything that I know I'm not going to screw up and hopefully I'm going to leave this brand in a better place every day that were there. But yeah, that really was a special moment, seeing Luke and the crowd, he could have been the only person in that audience and it would have been just the best presentation, the most fulfilling. Because something about our brand and our experience resonated with him enough that he said, "I'm going to go find out more about that and I want to deepen my relationship with them," and that's so fulfilling as a marketer Chad: Dragon, do you have like radar when you go into a room? You know now it's like, kids in the room, that's my target market. Do you hone in like, "Oh, we got a kid in the room. That's frickin awesome." Dragon: Actually I look at the adults to see their faces, and sometimes the adults be shy to come on. I'm like, "It's okay. Come on, you come up and talk to me." So it's pretty much everybody. I love being able to talk to the kids of course. I got a chance to spin a ball on his finger, we gave him a basketball afterwards, and his face was just… Chad: I saw him walking around with it, he was glowing the entire day. Dragon: Amazing. And I saw the adults looking around like, "Do they got any more basketballs left?" Yeah, I love being able to interact with anyone, it doesn't matter the age. Of course, I love the children as well. I actually have my first child, so the experience is amazing. Chad: Congratulations. How old? Dragon: She's not even a month yet. So Chad: Holy! Dragon: She's fresh, yeah. Chad: Well, sleepless nights for you my friend. Dragon: Yeah. Joel: Well guys, it's been an honor. I really mean that. Chad: Truly. Joel: For the for the big kids out there listening to the show that don't know you guys or want to learn more about the Globetrotters where should they go? Brent: Go to harlemglobetrotters.com. Everybody has a Gobetrotter story, if you don't have one, get one soon. It'll enrichen your life. Joel: Awesome. Chad: How can we follow you? Because you've got channels all over the place. Dragon: Yeah. I have my Instagram is called dtaylorball24, that's my Instagram. You can actually go on a globe, it's on Instagram as well, you just type in Harlem Globetrotters, it'll pop up. We on Tik Tok. We're on Twitter. Chad: My favorite. Dragon: We're on Facebook. We're on everything. I get a chance to see a lot of stuff that we do to history, the fun and pretty much everything and also the website as well. Chad: Excellent guys, we appreciate it. Joel: Thanks guys. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Dragon: Thank you. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad and his goofy friend, Cheese. You've been listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. The most important part is to check out our sponsors because I need new Track Spikes, you know the expensive shiny gold pairs that are extra because, well, I'm extra. For more visit chadcheese.com #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #Marketing #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Branding

While the planet largely remains in lockdown, turns out, employment is still where a ton of activity is still taking place. Plus - Layoffs at iCIMS & Greenhouse - Oyster & Remote getting seed money - Karen.ai evolves into Hourly - Bullhorn is rumored to be on the market - Are all COVID TV ads by the same agency? Plus, the boys chat about the future of events ... is the future virtual, in-person or a hybrid of all that shit. Enjoy this quarantined episode, brought to you via social distancing and Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides comprehensive website accessibility testing with personalized recommendations to enhance usability for people with a variety of disabilities or situational limitations. James Ellis: Employer brand isn't something you sprinkle on your recruiting like magic fairy pixie dust to kind of make it better. It is both a craft and a calling. If that's the kind of work you want to do with your employer brand, come join me James Ellis at the Talent Cast. 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: It's quarantine time boys and girls. Chad: Still? Joel: Another 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment this week, bringing the COVID total to 26 million, so how's your week going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody. I'm your co-host Joel almost out of toilet paper Cheeseman. Chad: And I'm Chad get me the fuck out of here Sowash. Joel: And on this week show, Karen joins the ranks of the unemployed. Indeed embraces it's inner warm and fuzzies. And yep, layoffs, they keep coming. Chad: Layoffs? Joel: Going to check my mailbox now to see if Chad has sent me a pink slip. Be right back. Sovren: Sovren parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: Yeah. Now you'll probably get an SMS from me. Joel: Do I sense a little cabin fever setting in there my friend? Chad: Oh, no kidding man. I mean, I'm looking forward to the NFL draft tonight. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: The numbers keep mounting as you were talking about the unemployment and I mean just everything that's going on. You're just trying to find shiny bits. Yesterday was gorgeous. We got to spend all day outside working, which is awesome. Today it's rainy, so I'm really kind of pissy. But yeah, this is a perfect time to do a podcast. Joel: Yeah. We get a weekend of rainy, cold, nasty weather here in Indiana. So I'm looking forward to that. Shout-out quickly to Big Red Liquors. If you're in the Indianapolis area, they have a sale 25% off everything made in Indiana. If you're in the neighborhood Chad: That's a good call. Joel: ... good discount on some decent alcohol. Chad: Yeah. Now that's a given. And we do beer and whiskeys pretty well. Shout-out to Daniel Fellows from Get Optimal. He gets a shout-out because he has an adorable kid that thinks saying Chad and Cheese is hilarious. And it was funny, you saw his face when Daniel actually said, "Chad's in the army." And the kid looked at him like, why did you make this not funny anymore to dad? Joel: We used to have our kids do the outro of our show and hearing him say, "Chad and Cheese." In an English accent really made me opine and long for the days when the kids did the outro. Maybe Dan, we can convince him to have his son who I don't know his name, do a little outro or some sort of soundbite for the show because I think that would be fantastic. Chad: Yeah. Now, I think I might be able to actually capture off that video. Not to mention his kids, I believe helped make him that custom Chad and Cheese t-shirt we've seen on social media. Double shout-out to Dan and kids. Joel: No doubt. There's your teaser for the upcoming Death Match on TAtech's conference. I don't know exactly what we're calling it now Unleash Online or something, but that's Monday. Chad: TAtech Europe Joel: Digital. Okay. That's coming Monday. If you haven't signed up for it, head out to tatech.org and get registered. We have four awesome start-ups that we're bringing on to Zoom to Q&A. It's a lot of fun but a little bit different. Chad: Certainly is. Joel: And speaking of more events, there aren't enough online Zoom meetings out there. Our friends at Skill Scout are having their first ever. What are they calling it? Chad: It's a film festival. Joel: Film festival. Yeah. It's humans at work. The URL is unique. It's humans and then the word at, and then dot work. If you haven't signed up for that yet, got some great guests and entertainment and big brains presenting there. So check that out. Chad: Yeah. I think with all the webinars, the COVID shit that we're hearing today and whatnot, we all need a break from that. This whole, I guess focus was really just bringing the humanity back into work. So very unAmazon like. Good job Skill Scout. Good job. Joel: Who better than Elena and Abby Cheesman, no relation whatsoever, believe it or not, to bring a little joy into the industry. Thanks girl. Chad: Somebody had to. Joel: Somebody had to do the name Cheesman right, so I appreciate that, because I'm dragging it through the mud. Chad: Thanks to Bruce Reed from PracticeLink for calling us a must listen podcast. Love the PracticeLink peeps, Ken and the gang over there you got to love it. Joel: I'm going to give a shout-out to Ford Motors, sorry to bring it back to COVID. But the company is testing wristbands for their employees to alert you through good vibrations that someone is within six feet of you. Ford's doing a little bit of R&D I guess with protecting their employees, which is a good thing I guess. Chad: Yeah. They're just taking those haptic bracelets that Amazon had to be able to track their people when they went to the bathroom, and they're using them for good instead of for evil like Jeff Bezos does. Joel: This is going to be really bad for office romance. It's going to be really bad for office romance. Chad: Ariel Lou Biag says to keep our insights and perspectives coming. We appreciate it Ariel. It sounds very French Canadian. Joel: Yeah. We have the strangest names that love our show. Ariel Lou Biag. Chad: We're global. Joel: Global. Yeah. And speaking of global, the folks at Adzuna let me know that in light of our story of Indeed crushing former publishers of their content, that talent.com was an option. Adzuna wanted our listeners to know that they were also an option if you needed some content for your job site. Chad: That's exactly right kids, get away from the evil empire we know as Indeed. Checkout Adzuna or talent.com today. Caroline Auto from Berlin won the HR hackathon selfie challenge. She and the wonderful [Eva Zilz 00:07:09.29] who actually orchestrated the entire hackathon event online will be wearing brand spanking new Chad and Cheese t-shirts. Joel: Love it, love it, love it. Shout-out to my mood, which is pretty good right now. And in light of the NFL draft tonight and the Browns picking 10th, it's definitely an absolute yes that they will fuck my mood up later today. I'm going to give a shout-out to my current mood, which is relatively good considering the circumstances. Chad: While we'll be watching, I'm sure Julie actually made a mention while we were watching TV the other night and I guarantee you we're going to see it tonight too. The COVID ads are all over the place and it's almost as if every company out there, every brand is going to the exact same ad agency and they're getting pitched the exact same thing. And all the brands are like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I want." And then it's like a week later all their ads come on TV and they're all watching the same damn ad with different brands on them. Joel: Yeah. If not the same agency, definitely the same copywriter. Chad: Oh yes. Joel: Somebody on Fiverr is getting rich with all these COVID ads because they are ... Who published the YouTube video that had the snippets of all the ads and how similar they all were. Chad: I can't remember but it's hilarious. We'll share it in our transcription. But yeah, it actually puts all those brands together, at least the bigger brands. And it demonstrates how they are all the exact same ad. They might have different imagery or what have you, or a little bit different music, but they're the same damn ad. And that being said, we also saw the same damn ad from Indeed. Joel: We did. However, I will give some credit that with 26 million Americans unemployed, it's a pretty good time to advertise your job site if you have the money to advertise your job site. I will give them some credit for that. It is a good time to do that. Chad: If anybody can actually make it through the whole ad without falling asleep. That's one of the problems I have with these COVID ads. Joel: Yeah. They don't really bring tears to my eyes anymore. Chad: Yeah. No. And last for me, shout-out to Jimmy Stroud for always sharing the best stuff, especially the El Chapo medical masks that seem to be quote unquote popular in Mexico right now. I wonder if the CareerBuilder staff have to wear those, at least the ones that are left. Joel: Can we talk about this trend of design face masks? I think that's not going to go very well historically. Chad: I don't think it's going to go away. Joel: Yeah. Oh, it's totally going to be a thing. Yeah, the El Chapo, the serial killer face mask. I want Ted Bundy on my face. The whole thing is pretty disturbing, but it is a sign of the times. Chad: That said, don't forget Death Match we've got going on next week. And if you miss it, you shouldn't. But if you do, it's all going to be recorded, go figure. SFX: Hell yeah. Chad: Death Match contestants get ready kids. Daniel Fellows, CEO of Get Optimal. Alex Murphy, not RoboCop, CEO of JobSync. Joel: Nick Gray. Chad: Yeah. Nick Gray, CEO of not SBOJ, but cloud RPO. Joel: But he was happy to see us. Chad: Yeah, of course he was. And last but never least, Mikhil Raja the CEO of SonicJobs. Just go to chadcheese.com and click on the Grim Reaper to look more. If you haven't registered to attend the TAtech event, go to tatech.org for the Europe digital event. And then there's also the North American digital event that's happening May 19th. Register for all of them, be there and there's also another Death Match that's going to happen in May. Joel: Did you ever think you'd say click the Grim Reaper ever in your life? Chad: I was always hoping that I could. Joel: News. Layoffs. Chad: Greenhouse and iCIMS baby. Whoo. Yeah, we've got two, I would say two big names in our industry. Number one iCIMS is I'd say top five in our industry from an applicant tracking system standpoint, Greenhouse about top 20, right? Greenhouse cut, they have a much smaller staff, but they cut 28% of their staff, about 120 people. iCIMS, been around forever man, I mean since I think 1999 they were founded, had a 10% cut and so about a hundred people. And I think it's interesting because the way iCIMS really didn't come out publicly with it, but Greenhouse did. Did you get a chance to actually read the Greenhouse letter? Joel: I'm sure it was a CEO blog post, wasn't it? Chad: Yeah. Joel: It was definitely a post from the company, which I'm pretty sure the CEO had quotes in it or something but Chad: No, it was from him. Joel: Okay. Talked about hiring the people, they're great people, it's a shame we had to let them go, yada yada. The layoffs don't even faze me anymore. It's almost like a surprise if someone isn't laying somebody off. Chad: Yeah. I actually reading the letter from Daniel thought it was interesting. And if this wasn't a crisis situation, I'd be a hell a lot more heavy handed around his response. Because if you read into it, it actually, I'm hoping that PR and marcomms actually did this and this is not coming directly from Daniel. The reason being is, it wasn't really human to see in this time of crisis. It was more focused right out of the gate on our customers, right? And if I'm a customer, I really want to make sure that your people are getting taken care of. That's because if you're taking care of your people, then I know that your people are going to take care of me. And really the main thrust of most of this letter was the customer, right? And everything's going to be fine, the customer, the customer, the customer. And it's like, I kind of stepped back and I was like, I think in a time of crisis like this, you shouldn't be focusing on the customer. You should be focusing on the people and the customers are going to understand and that's what they're going to want to see. Chad: And I don't think that this letter until the end when he really started talking about the people at the end, it really to me fell flat. And I know Greenhouse is still a very young company for ATS, being in the ATS space. They're incredibly successful and I've heard nothing but great things about their tech, their ability to partner, working there and those types of things. Again, not going to be heavy handed about it, I just think that from now on marcomms and PR and Daniel and whoever the hell is out there in your messaging, make it more about your people and less about your customers because your customers will appreciate that. Onto the iCIMs side. I mean, Steve Lucas comes in, he hasn't even been in the chair, I don't think six months yet, and he's smacked in the face with this. I'm sure as a new CEO this is definitely not something that they were, anybody was planning for. Joel: No one was expecting this. Chad: Yeah. As I'm sure with all tech vendors, they planned a big growth for 2020, and that's obviously not going to happen. Everybody is dialing back expectations. The big changes that we've seen over at iCIMs, Colin stepping away from CEO, going onto the chairman of the board, having this equity money coming in, really pushing some things around. I believe they have made a ton of the changes that they were going to have to make at this point. Luckily, they made them beforehand. From my understanding and not a formal knowledge, but informally I've been told that this is more than likely going to be the last that they need to do this. Most of the work was already done upfront. Joel: Yeah. I think one of the points that you landed on that struck me was the comment about people over everything, right? And when I think about the government's policy of letting businesses get money in return for not firing people. It'll be interesting how we look back on this period, but I feel like that was a big mistake. I feel like you can protect people, but you can't protect jobs. And I think a lot of these companies, number one, I think a lot of them needed to cut back anyway, and they were going to do it no matter what. But they aren't obviously keeping people in light of getting money from the government. Joel: I think a lot of people are losing their jobs. They're getting very minimal help from the government, whereas businesses are, we talked a little bit about Harvard getting 9 million which they gave back. I mean, also in the news recently it was like Shake Shack got a bunch of money. Chad: 10 mil. Joel: They got hammered for it. They returned the money. Ruth's Chris was getting money, a lot of businesses that are fairly rich and public and have a lot of resources are getting money. And I think when the autopsy is done on this period, that's not going to be a very favorable outcome. We're putting corporations and banks, giving money to corporations over giving them directly to people and that's probably a bad thing. Chad: Yeah. It's what happens when we're ill prepared not just the government but companies and individuals were all for the most part ill prepared for something like this to happen. I mean it's not that blame goes across to all because I mean that person who only has $400 in their bank account right now and they weren't being paid a living wage, those are the issues that are really bubbling up now that we're going to have to take care of. And if we don't, we're going to get further down into this hole of disparity. Joel: Yeah. Which is probably why I think it'll be interesting to see how much quicker Europe bounces back from this. People aren't afraid to go to the hospital if they're sick. Whereas people in America who don't have health care don't go to the hospital. And who knows how many more people they infect because they're not going to the hospital. They're giving money I believe more directly to folks. People in general are more better off. I think companies are less apt to fire because there is the safety net and it's a lot harder to fire people in Europe. One of the things we do really well in America is fire people which we're doing really well right now. It'll be interesting to see how we bounce back versus Europe as we start coming out of this thing. Chad: Yes. Well, let's end this segment on a positive note, shall we? Joel: Sure. Let's do that. Chad: Alexander Mann Solutions, a very big RPO organization, unveiled a conversational hiring experience called Hourly, which was created to drastically simplify recruiting hourly workers. And we remember months ago when AMS acquired Karen and apparently Karen was put to rest. Now Hourly is the new thing. Joel: You had some comments about her hair on The Shred and I don't remember what her hair looked like. Chad: Karen basically always has bad hair. Joel: Fair enough. And it was one of the many female names of chat messaging that were out there at the time. This is a shift from Olivia, Karen, Maya, et cetera. Chad: Yeah. What I like about it is it's more shifted and targeted toward the hourly workers segment, who are big users in the SMS and messaging space. It has Jovial on the front end to start the engagement through programmatic ads. Then it leads into a conversational experience, complete with screening from Tradify and SMS interview scheduling just in the first launch. As we talk about chatbots and everybody loves chatbots, and then we talk about conversational AI or whatever it is, right? I think we've spoke way too broadly about how the applications could be used in AMS in a very, very smart way. They're focusing in on where they can do the most damage right out of the box. And if that works, they can spin that into other areas, other industries, et cetera. Chad: I think if you're a start-up and you're looking for models to mimic, and whether you're a chatbot or not, it doesn't matter. This is a good one to mimic. Joel: It essentially launches next month, I think I saw on the press release that went out. And I'm curious to see sort of how it flows. Because if you go to the website, I think it's wearehourly.com is the URL for the new site. If you look at the screenshots on a mobile phone, part of it looks like, I'm guessing either a web based service or hopefully not a native app, although it looks sort of native appy on the site. But then as you scroll down, there's obviously an SMS text messaging component to it where you're sending scheduling info, directions for interviewing and things like that. I'm curious to see how the flow is from I'm clicking on a job and then clicking on apply to what happens from that piece to the actual SMS and connecting with people that way. Chad: And I'm sure very soon we'll get a full demo. You hear that AMS. Joel: I smell a DEMOpocalypse. Chad: Full demo, with the Queen of Chatbots more than likely. Joel: Quincy, talking to you babe. DEMOpocalypse, got your name on it. Quarantine episode of demo apocalypse. Chad: Beautiful. Joel: Canvas. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: Linked or online events. Chad: I think LinkedIn working from home. Joel: For sure. LinkedIn has been churning out the data, the infographics, the surveys, as have a lot of other people. Chad: Content. Joel: Yeah. Because the marketing folks need something to do. But so they did a recent survey basically entitled, goodbye office, remote job posting surge 28% in March. And they also found that remote work jumped 28% as I said. And then job searches involving the keywords remote or work at home were up 42%. Clearly that's not a surprise to anybody. But the question for me is, does this hold firm or do people eventually go back to the office and lick trees and do everything that they did before? Chad: That's a good question. Do people want it? Yes. Do employers want it? I'm not sure. The current landscape has the employers in control. And usually when that happens, the candidates wanting to become the employee gets screwed. Or the employees who just want to retain their jobs get screwed too. The big question is, will hiring companies see enough during this quarantine time of possibly money savings or what have you to change their behavior overall and stop this bullshit 1950s, 9:00 to 5:00 kind of work ethic kind of scenario. I'm not sure, again, I think we're humans, we're all about routine and control and I think most of this goes right back to where it was before, even though it wasn't what humans do best. Joel: Interesting from the survey. The biggest boom in applications was for customer support representative which saw a 400% increase for the month of March, so just little tidbit there for you. And there also was a story out this week about how the workplace is going to change. And one of the biggest takeaways for me was doorknobs need to go, either get rid of the door or have automatic doors or hooks that people can just use their elbow to open up and close. Chad: No more doorknobs. Not to mention you make it easier for the dogs to get in and out because they don't have opposable thumbs. Joel: That's right. I didn't know that materials like copper and bronze kill germs. Apparently the other thing is if you do have doorknobs, make them copper or I think bronze also kills viruses. I've learned so much this week from medicine and architecture I guess. Get out of the house please. Chad: Get me out of here. One thing that's not going to happen is you're not going to get out of the house to go to an ERE event. Joel: Yeah. That was a great segue to this story. This isn't really a story, but there was a conversation on social media where David Manaster, head of ERE, and a lot of our listeners have been to the ERE conference or know about it at least. And that David's comment was essentially that they were moving to online only even before the coronavirus whole thing happened. I sort of disagreed with that and you said I was missing the bigger picture. I'm curious as to what that is because you said let's save it for the podcast. Chad: Now you said that that does it for the Chad and Cheese tour bus and I was like, "No, I don't think so." I think we might be on the same page here. I mean we've been talking about consolidation and events dying off for a couple of years now. This is just another progression I believe of that conversation. If David and ERE can get $1,500 a ticket for an online event, then there'll be kicking ass and taking names. They'll probably bring the price down. But if they can't, it will all be a part of the evolution and, or extinction process, what we've been talking about for years. I mean, we've been talking about either events dying or being consolidated and bought up acquired. I think this is just another piece of that now, right? It's like, okay, well, instead of can we cut costs and go to online. Chad: And then again, I think it's definitely going to shake out, if you can create an online event like Hung Lee did, a marathon, 24 hours of content, which was ridiculous and it was cool. And he had, I think when we first got online it was like 2200 people in the room watching shit. And I was like, "Wow, that's amazing." Could that be taken the next step? I don't know. That's what I think we're going to have to see. Joel: David's comment and partial comment was until they, being the attendees, feel safe again, my company being ERE is not going to be able to make a living running in person events. The question is, Hung Lee who's super cool dude. This is pretty early in the whole online thing can hold an event, a lot of people show up. But at what point does he charge 199 to attend and he gets a lot smaller audience? I think virtual events suck for the most part. You're at your desk, you got, your dogs wants out or whatever, you get alert on your phone, you got an email. There are way too many distractions for me and I think I speak for more than just me that the virtual thing is just really hard to get into. Joel: And let's face it, for most people the best part of the event isn't even the event, right? It's the after hour stuff when you're networking and talking shop with people and meeting new people and that's where the magic happens and that's where all that gets lost in a virtual conference. I for one hope that this is not a long term trend that we start going back out in the world meeting people talking about stuff because it really is at the bar over a few drinks or at lunch that you really get to know people and really get to see opportunities and find things to make it happen man. Shake and bake does not happen in a virtual environment. Chad: No, I agree. I agree 100%. It's going to come back. The question is how many of those brands that we knew and we loved are going to be coming back as well. And that's going to be the big difference. Joel: Yeah, it's survival really. I mean it's, can these companies who exist because of conferences survive in a virtual only environment until the world comes back. Because we're a long way from people getting on a plane and going to an event with hundreds of people that they don't really know. Chad: And I think what you're talking about with content versus actually meeting people are two entirely different components. Being able to get really good content at a virtual event. I believe you can do that easily, not to mention I think there are a lot of times I miss really good stuff because I'm either out having conversations prepping for something or there's a reason why I just can't be in the room. And in a virtual event I can go back later and I can watch it or watch it again. I think that is really cool that you don't get from a live event. I think virtual events will get better and smarter from a content standpoint and it's going to be more just content focus. Now what we're going to have to do is look for other vehicles to be able to get that face to face moment that we're looking for, because those are important to everybody I believe that goes to a conference. But they are two different components. You've got the content piece and then you have the obviously face to face doing business piece. Joel: Sure. And I think the other piece of this that's huge is the vendor side of it. For a lot of companies, I mean trade shows and expo halls are a big part of how they get in front of prospects and customers. And that just isn't going to happen in a virtual setting. Chad: I think they can because if you think about it Joel: Really? Chad: Yeah. Because I was thinking about this when Hung was pitching the whole marathon event, I thought, this could almost be, especially if it's taped like a TV show. You're sitting there and you're watching the content and now a few words from vendor A or whoever it might be. And it almost becomes kind of like integrated into the actual content itself, which Hung Lee actually did with some of the pitches on some of the different tracks. But I think there are ways to smartly do that. And that's how you pay for the event as opposed to asking attendees to do so. Joel: Yeah. I mean a hybrid would be interesting and companies are going to have to go to more QVC style shit to sell stuff. There's going to have to be a clock and they're going to have like a whole thing. And I mean that would be interesting and that could definitely happen. Maybe at the end of this we have a hybrid of the physical event mixed in with some sort of a virtual event and there's interesting ways that people can market. I'm also intrigued at how much money flows to alternative advertising mediums if there isn't the money going to conferences. Obviously as podcasters we'd love to see more money come into podcasting, not just for us but everybody. And hopefully that'll happen for the podcasters, kind of bad for the conferences though. Chad: Yeah, that's interesting for us because we are seeing an uptick and we've always had companies coming to us, but we're seeing more companies coming to us because they're looking for alternatives to get into the heads of people that they want to be able to reach. And just real quick side note, Hung Lee, I have an idea, it's called Brainfood TV. Call me. Joel: All right. Now we're off the hook. And speaking of who you'd like to get a call from and a great sponsor, let's hear from JobAdX and we'll talk about people getting money and maybe somebody getting sold soon. Chad: Whoo. JobAdX: Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate dropoff. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing, joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ, with JobAdX. Chad: With JobAdX. Joel: Money is still flowing, although I'm sure most of these deals were in the making before the COVID phenomenon. But we've got two companies getting some good money. This is seed money by the way, both out of the Valley, Oyster and Remote. Oyster Is getting 4.2 million in seed and Remote is getting really a whopping 11 million in seed money. Remote definitely sort of like how it sounds onboarding all that stuff through virtual means and not physical means. Chad: It's funny because I think I know why Remote got 11 million and Oyster got 4.2. Joel: The name. Chad: Maybe. Remote can easily articulate what they do, Oyster not so much. They pretty much do the same thing, at least from what I'm getting here. And here's what Remote does. Remote takes care of global payroll, benefit, compliance and taxes so you can focus on your people. That's their tagline. Here's Oyster's, Oyster is a distributed talent enablement platform that lets companies hire, manage payroll and get local benefits to their full-time employees anywhere in the world. All that gobbledygook of convoluted distributed talent enablement platform. It's like all that shit we don't need. They pretty much do the same thing. Joel: Yeah. If you go to Oyster's website, which is oysterhr.com, the headline is talent without borders. So yeah, same thing, pretty much. Chad: But they're both remote and I mean if you're a start-up, especially a global start-up, this is definitely something that I would look for right out of the gate so I wouldn't have to deal with all this, mainly for that one word called compliance. Joel: Yeah. If you have a remote work thing or a video thing or something, you're going to get money. I'm trying to remember, shit, somebody bought a Zoom competitor. Chad: BlueJeans. Yeah, Verizon. I think Verizon just bought BlueJeans. I mean, BlueJeans I've only been on a couple of times, didn't really like the experience but to be quite frank it doesn't fucking matter. I mean from a remote standpoint if Verizon can do something with this company, great, don't see it happening. But yeah, good for them. Joel: Yeah. A little side note, Linkedin uses BlueJeans, at least they used to. I'm sure they use something from Microsoft now. Anyway, good for them getting money, man. I thought that shit would dry out, but I guess if remote work is your game, some checks in the bank. Speaking of banks, the bank accounts that won't be getting full I guess post COVID world is some recent rumors that Bullhorn was on the block. Insight and Genstar, their investors, look like they were prepping a sell. This out of a story of PE hub, which we have talked about before. They seem to be a pretty reliable source for M&A activity. Anyway it goes into quite a bit about Bullhorn in terms of sort of whisper numbers of revenue. The company generates apparently 200 million in revenue each year EBITDA ranging from 70 million to a hundred million. Valuation at right around a billion dollars. But like you and I talked about, this story is from February. We're just now getting it because PE Hub is not exactly read extensively in the HR blogosphere. Chad: Should be. Joel: But yeah, dude, a sale was probably in the works, but post COVID I don't see it happening. Chad: Yeah, timing is a bitch. From a good standpoint, I mean if you think about it, Clinch, our buddy Shane Gray last year, Clinch was bought, it was great timing. SmashFly was bought by Symphony Talent. I mean the timing means everything in the market. And unfortunately for Bullhorn the market, the bottom fell out. Joel: Yeah. Thank God for Herefish who Bullhorn acquired in January I think. They just got into the wire, so way to go Herefish. Chad: Here fishy, fishy, fishy. Joel: And with that Chad. Chad: Get me out of this house. Joel: Another one is in the books. We out. Chad: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts 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. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's 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. It's so weird. We out. #Events #Technology #AMS #hourly #funding #Bullhorn #ERE #Herefish #Smashfly #Clinch #iCIMS #Greenhouse #ATS #text

Everybody wants the secret sauce, tricks, and short cuts to drive better and quicker hires. In this episode of VOICES Venkat Janapareddy talks: - Tricks and secret sauce - Pay transparency - Recruitment Marketing Platforms and more... Brought to you by Chad and Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Subscribe at chadcheese.com. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Morgan: Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and comforting. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, you're now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese, that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys. Chad: Companies are always bitching and moaning of how they are not showing up first in Google for Jobs, but yet they don't want to put the salary or they don't want to put some of the different pieces of information that Google wants, because that's better for the actual user experience for the job seeker. How do you help those companies understand or how do you provoke them into a conversation around putting salary information in a job because that's going to help their rankings. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation up with entrepreneur and CEO of Jobiak, Venkat Janapareddy. Joel: I want to go back to the question of have more robust content on your landing page or your job description page. Do you think that the value is coming from just having more content or is the value from I'm a job seeker, I click on LinkedIn or wherever and my engagement is higher because there's more content and things that I can do or learn from that page. Or if it's both of those things, do you have any sense of dividing which one is weighted more or which one is more important? Chad: So it has to be relevant. I mean it has to be hyper-relevant really, right? Venkat: Not only hyper-relevant, it even gives more preference if there's similar jobs on Google for Jobs. If they're not, so you show them 10 of really good similar jobs and those guys are not on Google for Jobs. It still is good, it's better than nothing. But if those 10 jobs are also on Google for Jobs, then you automatically rank higher. Now how Google calculates similar jobs is basically very, very, it's secret sauce. Basically if you go to LinkedIn or Glassdoor, they show similar jobs. But the way Google likes it is they've got their own internal database based on how this is. They have kind of a relationship between all these job titles. They got this 20 million job title and skills knowledge graph. They have to believe that they are similar. Venkat: If they don't believe they are similar, then you are going to get penalized. They think you are keyword stuffing. It's a very typical hardcore SEO 101 intense. The jobs you're producing, so one of the things we do, how we find out the similar jobs is we basically went to Google and looked at 30 million jobs, searched for 500,000 titles across dozen cities. And we looked at how Google thinks about these jobs. How does it look at similar jobs, and as it is, similar jobs and meta keywords, same thing with meta keywords. If you put in additional information, again with our keyword stuffing, Google likes it, especially this is a really good tip for your listeners. Venkat: If you are in low population cities, especially let's say towns that have very few jobs, Google really likes anything additional information, it actually uses that for ranking jobs. But if you're in Boston and you have thousands and thousands of sales jobs, sometimes it just goes by with the schema. But in low popular cities, any additional information you provide, whether it's meta-tags, similar jobs, category. Category plays a huge role. Many people must be thinking, why does LinkedIn on the landing page put a category? Google doesn't say anything about schema providing a category. Venkat: But let's say most people, now Google for Jobs provides what keywords that people are using on Google. So you get an idea and then you're showing up on search results. A lot of times these guys use, hey, jobs near me, nursing jobs near me, construction jobs. The category plays a huge role. If you put the category on the job landing page and also the schema doesn't have a category, but if you can put it in Google accepts that. Even the Google only talks about nine different schema points, but it accepts up to 60 of them. I'm only telling you one of them, but the rest of them are our secret sauce. But category plays a huge role. So the list goes on, especially little, little things, having links to your social sites makes a difference. Location base, which we'll talk about in a second, but it's become an optimization SEO. Joel: Do you have a sense for how much, like say bookmarking a job or sharing it on social media or somewhere else has on ranking? Venkat: Yeah. Anytime you have that linking that someone else is referencing how Indeed got popular. Indeed never publishes any of the landing pages. They do all these listing pages. They say, hey, Boston sales jobs, or Boston construction job. They show up number two today and then you click on any of that, they go onto a landing page and from there you go to the actual detail page. That's the essence of SEO. And anytime you share the social media, the blog, anytime you have all this backlinks referencing jobs, especially the referencing blogs on sites and socials that have good authority, you tend to do much better than not having any type of backlinks. Chad: Companies are always bitching and moaning of how they are not showing up first in Google for Jobs, but yet they don't want to put the salary or they don't want to put some of the different pieces of information that Google wants because that's better for the actual user experience for the job seeker. How do you help those companies understand or how do you provoke them into a conversation around putting salary information in a job because that's going to help their rankings. Venkat: Yeah. Salary plays a huge role, but 90% of jobs on Google for Jobs don't have salary. We encourage our customers to put in the salary, if not salary now Google has done a good job of if you partner with Glassdoor or Salary.com, at least put an estimated salary which they did a good job. You tend to do well, but convincing employers, it's a complicated problem. Some people feel that as a leverage to negotiating the interview process, but we got past that, putting the estimated salary will help you. Again, partner with any of these companies who does estimate, that is as good as putting the actual salary. But it's not good for a job seeker, obviously job seeker wants to know the actual salary. Chad: It's a band-aid. Venkat: Yeah, it's a band-aid. It's a long battle. Employers don't like it, but that's not something we are trying to ... we try our best with our customers. But again, by the time you get the jobs which is in the little feed, it's a complicated process. Chad: So much bullshit, right? We can put a man on the moon, but we can't change a goddamn job description. I'm going to go down a rabbit hole real quick. I mean, we're talking about pay equity overall for individuals, and that's a big topic right now. A lot of it has to do with transparency because companies aren't transparent about what they're paying people today, which is one of the reasons why we don't see salaries because of quote unquote negotiation. Well, there is no negotiation if you know the fairness, you know what's going to be paid. From your standpoint, you're in this industry with us and I'm sure you hear a lot of this going on. Do you believe that transparency is directly linked to pay equity? And if so, should we be moving in the transparency direction? Venkat: Yes and no. When I used to work for Deloitte way back, for certain positions it ranges anywhere from 60,000 to 120,000. A lot of things come into play, especially if you're graduating from top 10 colleges, that automatically puts you at least 30% more there. Chad: Laszlo Bock who was at Google says that's all bullshit. Venkat: No, but actually it does matter. If you look at Google, I'm sure they don't go to every single college, they have Chad: No, I'm talking about top 10 colleges. They don't even focus on top 10 colleges anymore, because they actually have data that demonstrates that the individual's not coming from top 10 colleges are outperforming the others. Venkat: That may be true. Google is different, they're tech savvy. But if you look at in general based on, again, my experience working, this is 15 years back. There's always that gap, how to bridge that gap a lot depends on candidate to be honest, it's how you negotiate. I see even ... I work at a WeWork place, we have 200 start-ups. In every role that we have, the salaries are significantly different and the company is different. It depends on how you negotiate, how much demand you are in especially right now if you are a tech, the demand is ridiculous. Even graduates from colleges who are entering tech jobs are getting $90,000 to $100,000. Chad: But that's different from a Fortune 500 company. I mean because you really have to split this up and start at the top, right? Because that's where a good amount of the jobs are, and that's where really the standard should be set. If we're talking about Fortune 500 companies, the ones that you're working with, the ones that Google wants to see salary on their jobs, don't you think that's a good place to start? Venkat: It is. I wish they can put in the salary so it's pretty transparent for all the candidates, but we have tried. We didn't, of course, an year back we didn't know a lot of the secrets that Google is looking at it, of course then everyone thought only salary is the key. But we have many other factors that do well. But to your point, we are trying, but unfortunately we're a small fish and a start-up. We try our best, but it's a very difficult problem to tackle in terms of convincing employers to put the salary on the postings. Chad: Got you. So try to divert back to what we were talking about a little bit SEO, but also another acronym, RMP, Recruitment Marketing Platform. Do you think that, and is it like your stance that it is smart for every company, especially these big organizations with tons of jobs to have a recruitment marketing platform because that is the cosmetic and/or designed for Google platform, which the applicant tracking system is not? Should they have both? Venkat: Absolutely. I think RMP is the whole career sites. The concept of job ads. Chad: Like the experience, right? Venkat: Yeah, the whole experience. Candidates are starting to go to career sites, more and more job seekers really want to know more about the company and the culture and benefits and all that. You don't get a lot of that LinkedIn job ads. RMPs especially we are starting to work with Phenom and those guys, they do a phenomenal job really building solid career sites. And it's not just Google, everywhere else, it's not just for Google for Jobs. You have a good career site, the organic search is going to pick up. Some of our customers get more traffic from Google organic than Google for Jobs. Before Google for Jobs your career sites never got any traffic. Because you type sales jobs or even you type Microsoft jobs or IBM jobs, the first page is always job ads. But now Google for Jobs, every single job you publish in Google for Job, they also show up in organic, but there's a trick to it, how to certain area as lots of people look for company by job. Venkat: If you're looking for UT Health East Texas job or Microsoft jobs, you now see actually all of Google for Jobs on the organic. As a result, some of our customers are getting almost 30% to 50% of the traffic from organic. And RMPs are really shining there, that's where it's not about schema. If you want traffic from organic you don't need to have Google for Job schema. That's very glad to have good landing page, not only for summary of a career site but benefits, details, additional information. I really like this concept of RMPs and building this career sites and investing, because that's basically the future. I think job seekers are always going to go to career sites and company as opposed to job ads. We've been helping some of these RMPs and we're seeing good there. Chad: Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcast or wherever you get your podcast, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Recruitment #RMP #CRM #Google #GoogleforJobs #PayEquity

Newly minted iCIMS CEO Steve Lucas has had quite a whirlwind since heading-up the company in February. Aside from a global pandemic, which led to a round of layoffs, the company has gotten snuggly with a little company called Microsoft and acquired hot startup and Death Match WINNER Opening.io. So, the boys obviously had to get him on the horn and find out the 411. Oh, and longtime friend of the show Susan Vitale, the company's CMO, joined in the fun too. Enjoy this exclusive podcast brought to you by Nexxt. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. James Ellis: James Ellis from The Talent Cast. You may not be aware of this, but a couple years ago, I lost a bet, so now I'm contractually obligated to say nice things about Chad and Cheese. Well, I took that, let's say, lemon and turned it into lemonade. I took interviews from Chad and Cheese and turned it into a book, but I added a lot of other people you're going to want to talk to. It's called Talent Chooses You. It is Hiring Better with Employer Branding, and it is available on Amazon, June 15th. You should go and buy it. Bye. 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: All right. All right. All right. What's up everybody. I am Joel Cheesman, co-host of The Chad and Cheese podcast, and I am joined by my faithful, Robin, Chad Sowash. Chad: Fuck you. Joel: We didn't really work that out before the intro but Chad: Superman. How about that? Joel: Yeah. All right, fair enough. Fair enough. And we are pleased to welcome Chad: Yikes! Joel: ... Wow, what an honor. The newly minted CEO of iCMS, Steve Lucas, and our good buddy, Susan Vitale. Holy crap! What deal with the devil did we make to get you two guys on today? Chad: I don't even want to ask. Joel: Welcome to the show guys. Chad: Okay. So I've got to say... Right out of the shoot, I've got to ask, because Steve, you've literally been in the seat for like four months, so you were hit square in the chops by COVID-19. And everybody is reeling, we weren't prepared for this crisis. The nation wasn't, companies weren't, it's ridiculous. You are in the seat for four months, but yet there's a lot of shit happening at iCIMS. So tell us how you guys, a global company, you're navigating in this global crisis. Steve: Yeah. Well, and first of all, I appreciate the latitudes. Actually. I've been in the seat, technically speaking, next week it'll be 10 weeks. So Joel: Old timer. Steve: Exactly. I'm still bringing the baby version of, you measure in weeks, and then at some point you get to it. I started the week before the global pandemic really hit in full force, and it's surreal to start at a company and... I've had nothing but good feelings and happy to run the company, and I look back and I go, hey, over the past two and a half months, would I do anything differently? No, I wouldn't. It's been hard, and it's been hard for everybody. This whole weirdness of work and family and home, and we all like to compartmentalize things and it's like the Seinfeld thing where all my lives are coming together and intersecting but it's Joel: Worlds collide. Steve: Yeah. More people with kids and cats than they ever have before. It's been challenging. It has. More because, I don't know how you guys feel about it, but it's just like this intensity to like, Zoom meeting, Zoom meeting, Zoom meeting, Zoom meeting, and there's no bagels. And I need a bagel. Joel: No bagels in Jersey. Are you kidding me? Susan. Steve: Yeah. Well, no pauses right now. So it's been ... The intensity level is way up, and I think the biggest thing for everybody, me included, is, where is the work-life balance? Right? So we got to figure that out. But the company's leaned in, we're 100% remote, which is good, kind of scary, I had to make that choice on day nine. Chad: Wow. Steve: Yeah. But, Susan, partner in crime here, along with... There've been... The good news is there's a lot of long time, execs at iCIMS, so I wasn't exactly operating in the blind, so to speak. Chad: Yeah. Well, and you had to make hard decisions already. Let's go ahead and slap this one on the face, 10% of a cut that you had to make. And as we watched a ZipRecruiter go with 40%, CareerBuilder, we saw all of this, and then we heard this coming from iCIMS. This, obviously it's not something that you have to do, that's easy, but can you tell us a little bit about the guide that you took from leadership that have already been there for years and how they helped you through all of this? Or did you just come in and know exactly what you wanted to do? Steve: I could unequivocally tell you that the day I started, this was not my plan. And I don't mean to make light of this at all, because to me it's the hardest decision that you can ever make as a leader, is impacting people's lives and their jobs. And you think every day, every minute leading up to, and post that decision about the impact that you're having, and how disruptive it will be for the people that are affected. And it's a gut punch. And as hard as it is for you as a leader, you also have to pause and think, but it's a lot harder for the person losing their job. And that is not lost on me. And when I came into the company, even just, I'd been at the company four weeks and you're sitting there staring into a bit of a economic abyss, where some CEOs and economists you talk to they go, "Well, it's the end of the world as we know it, and we're just going to go, kind of implode." And another is saying, "Well... " It's like, I heard more sharp V's and shallow U's and all this in like a two week period, then I carried a dialogue on for the rest of my life. But when I looked at the data, I tend to run a company and make decisions as a leader a lot like how I would run my household. Which is, it's a very simple thing, is if we have to cut back on our spending to live within our means, then that's what we do. And those are hard things to choose because it can affect people in not so positive ways. So for us, we walked in Jan one, we said, "Hey, this is going to be our biggest growth year in history. We've continued to grow," and by the way, we are continuing to grow, but we staffed up to record levels. And when you look at that on the left hand, then you just have to be as a CEO, your job is to, on the right hand, say, look, I have to create stability and security for our employees. Yes, absolutely. Number one. But also for our customers, we have to deliver a service. And if you started to do the math and say, well, if we're going to have economic instability and top-line revenue may be unpredictable, we have to make a decision. And I'm not one to sit on things. And I think as we... There's no credit due here, it's just, as we made the decision very early, to work from home to protect our employees, and I think we helped protect people as best we could, we've also made the decision to, protect the company, and did it in a very challenging environment. And I think you can always question, did we communicate it the right way? Or was... There is no perfect way to handle things like this. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, working from home, Steve, and Chad, and I know that you guys have a beautiful headquarters facility, that's empty right now. The plan going forward, if you had a crystal ball, will you guys be staying at home for the foreseeable future? Will you slowly, gradually move back into the headquarters? What's the plan there? Steve: Well, definitely stay at home until we feel that... Especially in Jersey. Yeah, we do have an awesome facility, like day one when I showed up, I'm like, "Holy crap! There's an iCIMS flagpole. I love that." Joel: You knew you made it at that point. Steve: Exactly. You've arrived. So, for me, we've got to get back into the office, we have great facilities. The good news is, we actually have access to an extra floor that we can build up, because we're totally going to have to social distance in six feet cubicles or whatever, that's just not going to work. So we are going to get back into the office, we're going to do it in a staged manner, and then we'll practice some, I like to call it physical distancing. Because I just think I'm a little on the like, I actually don't want to socially distance, I just don't want to get coronavirus or whatever. But for me, it's definitely making sure that we ethically source protective equipment, like, we can't be buying it in front of a hospital. So that's a big thing, we've got to give people protective equipment, we've got to social distance and then we're going to turn the lights on for the office one switch at a time. Joel: I'm curious about the state of the business. You mentioned that you guys were still growing, but obviously businesses are challenged right now. Do you find some attrition in some places? If you are growing, where is that growth coming from? I think for the most part, people think of ATS's as largely protected because you make a big commitment to have an ATS, but businesses are certainly challenges. So where's the growth coming from? And where are the hurdles that you're seeing now? Steve: Yeah. Well, I think we have the good fortune of, our business is fairly balanced across our core ATS that we've been building for a long, long time and innovating on and in. We have our communication suite, which is all about texts engagement on the left hand and on the right hand, our recruitment marketing platform. And those came through the acquisitions of text recruiting, Jibe, as you know, that are now many moons ago. But having a more balanced business is a really good thing. So happy about that one. And then two is, yeah, I think, an ATS is a big investment. For us, we've been actually using, it's anonymized, but our aggregate data to help guide our decisions. So if you look at the 4,500 customers that are using iCIMS, I can tell you in advance what unemployment's going to look like next week by industry based on job postings, hires happening all through the iCIMS system. We can literally correlate and there's a super tight correlation. We've got our analytics team. So Ray is now handling that and it's a good set of data. It's actually very good. And so for us, it's like making decisions on, hey, it looks like there's hiring in domestic manufacturing. Great, let's supply salespeople there. Or... And by the way, we've not held this data for ourselves, we're sharing the full set of data with all of our customers. Chad: That's awesome. Let's move a little bit into the iCIMS snuggling up with Microsoft, area of the conversation. That to me, I think incredibly smart. I know that Microsoft has used iCMS as their applicant tracking system for years now, but tell us what that actually means to iCIMS to partner with the Microsoft ecosystem. And providing, that's your software, in the Dynamics 365 human resource, like the comprehensive suite that they have. What does that mean for you, overall from a growth standpoint? Steve: It means everything. Chad: Expound. Joel: Yeah. Steve: First of all, it goes without saying Microsoft, their scale is, I don't know what measure we're going to use here on this nice podcast. Let's just call them intergalactically huge. Right? For me, we have great partnerships with a number of companies. So ADP, Ceridian, Ultimate, we're going to continue to do that. And what is cool to me is like, if you look at the HCM landscape, we now partner with four or five, I don't remember, Susan, you have to correct me, of the seven largest players out there. Right? And that's exciting, number one. And then number two is, for Microsoft in particular, they dabbled in talent acquisition ATS. They kind of liked it and they built some stuff and they pulled back from it and sunset things. And for us, it's about we're coming in and we're delivering the best product, obviously bias, but the best product that we've been doing for freaking 20 years. Right? So we're committed to this space if it's not demonstrated by two decades. And that's what we're going to continue to do. What this unlocks for us, Microsoft has one of the biggest, if not the biggest software sales forces in the world. They've definitely got one of the biggest, if not the biggest ecosystems These guys have 80,000 reseller partners. So yeah, this is scale that's really unmatched. Chad: With that scale, you're going to have to deliver. Are you guys ready to deliver at that scale? Because again, that's intergalactic scale, Steve. You've never, ever had to deliver at that scale. Steve: Yeah. I think that in some areas we are well prepared and ready and in other areas we will be. I think the reality is like, do you have the confidence in your technology platform that you can extend it laterally to scale out? Yes, we absolutely have that. Are we dialoguing with a technology vendor or a strategic player around how we do that at intergalactic levels? Yes, more to come on that. Chad: we'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Joel: What kinds of companies should be leveraging programmatic? Andy Katz: Every fortune 1000 company out there. Anybody with extreme volume of jobs. You're recruiting for 20 positions a year, you don't need programmatic, you can go to a recruitment marketing agency or a job board and do a direct email with your company only. You're not in with another 20 companies and a job alert, or you're not just on a career site or a job board. You could do banner advertising, buy premium placements. So where programmatic again is one piece of the puzzle, it's not going to ever be the end, all be all. And I do believe all the programmatic platforms out there have ancillary services to support that, knowing that you can't just survive on a one trick pony. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's Next with the double X, not the triple X. hiring.next.com. Chad: What about LinkedIn? What about Talent Hub? Because that's an entirely different product. What's the connection there? Steve: Well, look, we're big fans of LinkedIn. We think the data from LinkedIn on the right hand, which is just amazing. The data on the left hand from iCIMS seems like it's a match made in heaven when you bring it together. And we know that, we've been doing some work with them to match up certain data elements and provide value to their customers. And we'll continue to do that. I think that we approach the need so differently than a LinkedIn, for example. And we're doing it reach scale, depth and breadth, the product feature function. And it's also the persona you focus on. Like we're focused on recruiter, hiring manager, candidate, you got to focus on all those. How do we deliver analytics to the CHR? Or it's this ... I'm not saying that [Inaudible 00:15:35.05] it isn't well-rounded, but we've been doing this for a long, long time and for very big companies and customers. And I think we've got that enterprise swagger, we're confidence, we've got that experience. Joel: So when Chad goes high, I go low. He talks upstream with the big boys, I'm going to bring it down a little bit. And we talked to quite a few startups and HR tech startups, and they always ask about, what platforms should I integrate with? Who should I start with? And we were fairly critical last year of app stores or platforms that charge quite a bit of money to let technology firms build on their platform, and you guys went free late last year. Susan will correct me if I'm wrong. But you guys have a free ecosystem now. And I'm curious, what has that meant to the business? What has the growth been in the app store? How important is that to your future growth? And for anyone out there that's a startup or looking to build on a platform, I would think that this relationship with Microsoft would be added incentive to build onto iCIMS, agree or disagree? Talk about your platform. Steve: I think Susan should go first because she was the powerhouse behind that decision. Susan: You're right. The open marketplace, so to speak, where we didn't charge partners to participate, was actually a decision from the start. Where we felt it was important to really drive community and abroad ecosystem. I think they're going to be different models that we'll continue to look at over the years as they expand, as we go into new regions, as we move up market, et cetera. But I think it's still important that even with strategic relationships and these new models, that the power of scale and choice in the ecosystem will be there. And it shouldn't be prohibitive for two dudes in a garage to join this type of ecosystem. Joel: And what's the growth been? And how will the Microsoft relationship impact the growth of the platform, do you think? Susan: The growth has still absolutely been there? So we're at around 300 validated, integrated partners today. I think overall, we're closer to 700 vendors within the ecosystem. So that's certainly been really impactful for us. There are certain categories that we see go up and down just as things change. We actually, during the early days of the COVID crisis, we actually worked with a number of partners to offer free solutions to the customers, if they were mutual customers of ours, which was great to see. So there is power in the sense of the ecosystem. I think we're still early days in some of the Microsoft conversations, but if we put scale and scale together, that should be exponential for the community at large, no doubt. Joel: Double the scale. Susan: Double the scale. Steve: scale wins. Like that's it. But for me, it's like, we got to take this whole thing of, is the app integrated or not? You just got to take it off the table. Like, yes, it's integrated. So I like the free aspect to it, I think we should continue to do that. For me, I think the question is, how do we help our customers better understand, okay, so it's integrated. What does that mean? Is it single sign on? Is it data? And have we certified the app? There's just a lot more that we need to do there. So we've got a good plan, and the Microsoft thing is just going to give us more and more scale. Chad: Diving in further with the marketplace, this has got to be Mike Wilcheck's like favorite thing in the world, being able to snuggle up, look at obviously, the text recruits, the Jibes, now the opening.ios. Talk a little bit about that from an acquisition standpoint, because you guys obviously, are still playing off offense, which I love. You're not in the corner, in the fetal position, waiting for this thing to go away. ICIMS is playing offense, Microsoft big, big partnership. And then just yesterday, opening.io acquisition. Talk a little bit about that and how the marketplace is helping you really guide some of those decisions. Joel: By the way, I think it's officially Death Match champion, opening.io. Chad: Good call. Steve: Yeah. I saw the badge. We'll definitely take that. So the marketplace itself is huge for us because it gives us a good sense of direction, which customers are adopting, what, and what do they like the most? And Opening happened to be one of those very, very popular things. By the way we used it, I know Microsoft uses Opening, and so it was like, I wish I could claim that it was more than just basic math, but like I can add, right? This was a no brainer for us. And so for us doing the talent matching capabilities, skill discovery, all that, our customers need that. And we're delivering that, and Opening gives us the extra lift that we need versus like, okay, let's just crack our knuckles and build this from scratch. But the marketplace itself, incredible insight, when you have that kind of scale that Susan and the team built, even prior to my arrival, the ability it's like it's just so enjoyable to walk in and go, okay, well, we've got like 700 different things that are... It's 700 different partners. There's 250 apps there, there are companies that have integrated apps. There's five or 600 now apps that are integrated. Just looking through that landscape and the intelligence you get out of it, it's not many companies in the industry that have that. Chad: Yeah. Well, and big kudos on that acquisition. To be able to see matching over top of a candidate database for me is exciting because I know that your clients are spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year to drive candidates into that database. And then all it does is atrophy. And they continue to spend more money to get the same candidates over and over and over. So you will become more of a core system than before I think with this acquisition. But you talk about the Microsoft connection, how important was it that opening.io is a Microsoft house? Azure, AI, ML, machine translation, because it seems like just from the outside, like there's this courting that's happening between iCIMS and Microsoft. Microsoft couldn't put together an applicant tracking system, it sucked, but wait a minute, there's this iCIMS thing over here that's been kicking ass for 20 years, what kind of courting is happening? Joel: Cue the Barry white. Steve: That is an interesting thing to think about. What I will tell you is, I think that Opening, the whole Microsoft using it, this is validating for us. Right? Microsoft has a really, really, really rigorous qualification process for the technology they let in their door. Right? They're in a good way, very picky. And by the way, I actually applaud Microsoft, because to be a vendor for Microsoft, you actually even have to adhere to their accessibility standards. Your product has to be accessible for differently abled people. It can't just be, well, here's the software. So it's multilanguage, it's scalable. It's all that, but there's more to it. I applaud them for using their platform that they have, for forcing, forcing is a strong word, driving people to more positive... Look, it drives us all to make our technology and our companies better. So I actually like that. The Microsoft using Opening, hugely validating for us. Joel: So Steve, I know you're a busy guy, I'll let you out on this. What's the future hold? I know that you've just come into this company, but you must have had a vision. I think your experience at Marketo is very intriguing. I want to know what the future looks like. Steve: Well, the future, obviously, first of all, it looks like us doing what we do today better, faster, bigger, with more scale and reliability. But the first thing is, and this is like focusing on the companies that have kept us in business for 20 years, and have fueled our growth. We owe those customers innovation in terms of the look, the, feel, the experience of iCIMS that you walk away going, "Wow, that is next gen, it's cutting edge. Love it." And so we're focused on that UI UX experience. We also, we got to deliver, we're on the whole promise of, hey, we bought these other companies, we're integrating them. So that's like blocking and tackling, got to do that. Beyond that, for me, is our future is well, okay, we've got Opening. So we look at all these candidates sources out there that are outside your company. Why can't we help you look inside your company? Why isn't the company as a source for brilliant talent and understanding strong skills inventory, why isn't that part of what we do? And it should be. And so I would say that that's very much part of the future because I think the reality is, is that, especially in the world we live in, I think people are going to look inside as much as they look outside. That's one. And then two, is unequivocally, analytics, and I mean analytics in a unified, single lens across all of your candidates inside, outside, whatever that may be. We have to do that. And so we're going to do that. For me, those big areas of analytics, whether you want to call it companies, candidate source and term mobility. And then the biggest thing is driving real usable machine learning, not a clever name, like Athena or Bob, but it doesn't do anything. We're focused on our stuff, just works. Chad: Well, you've got Al in place to make sure that that happens. And now you have Andrea, who is, she's going to be your portfolio manager on the AI ML side. So you should be set up pretty well for that. SFX: Hell yeah. Steve: Yeah. She is a gangster and I love what she does. She is that absolute rock star. Chad: She is. Well, Steve, I appreciate you taking time out of the day. Steve: Thank you. Chad: Obviously anybody who wants to find out more about iCIMS can go to icims.com. Everybody knows that. Is there any parting words that you'd like to share with us about what's happening now or in the future with iCIMS? Steve: We are playing offense. Chad: Amen. Joel: Boom. Chad: And on that, I'll have to say, are you ready Susan, we out. Joel: We out. Susan: We out. Joel: One more. Susan: No. Outro: This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #iCIMS #Openingio #Acquisition #Microsoft

Do you need a personal brand? Wait, is that even a question in today's social media heavy landscape? Of course! On this episode of The Chad & Cheese we welcome personal brand and marketing specialist, Carlos Gil, to the show for up close and personal talk on: - Personal Brand - AI Influencers - HR AI aka Robot Resources and Stop Being a Wimp and POKE THAT BEAR! All brought to you by the Bear Pokers over at Smashfly - bringing great User Experience (UX) to job seekers all over the globe. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. James: Hi, I’m James Ellis from the Talent Cast. You may not be aware of this, but a couple years ago I lost a bet, so now I'm contractually obligated to say nice things about Chad and Cheese. Well, I took that, let's say, lemon and turned into lemonade. I took interviews from Chad and Cheese and turned it into a book, but I added a lot of other people you're going to want to talk to, it's called Talent Chooses You. It is Hiring Better with Employer Branding, and it is available on Amazon, June 15th, you should go and buy it. Bye. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. What's up boys and girls, we're back from dance. You know what we do, that podcast thing. Chad: There are a lot of people to talk to thing. Joel: We'd have a lot of people to talk to. A lot of great people at this conference. A lot of interesting folks. And on that note, we are joined today by Carlos Gil, who really has more titles than I have time for. Like what- Chad: Bestselling author slash ... Carlos: Depends on the audience, right? Because you have to play to the who's in the room. So there's times where its bestselling author and then I just say that The End of Marketing is my company. Gil Media Co, is my marketing agency. So I'll say, owner or CEO, brand marketing executive. Joel: Yeah. Carlos: Titles are just that, its titles. Joel: So this was interesting when we came down to meet you, you came up to me and said, "We have history." And I knew who you were, and you're the rare marketing guy on stage preaching to the choir, who actually started out as a job board in Florida. So, you rarely get asked this probably, but tell us your job board story and how that was a springboard into where you are now. Carlos: It's funny Joel, because when I saw your name come over on a text message saying, "These guys want to interview you for their podcast." As soon as I saw the name Joel Cheeseman, I was like, oh my God. Chad: Not that fuck. Not that fuck. Carlos: I'm thinking, oh, man, this is the same guy that I was like, 25 year old, starting off in HR with a job board in 2008, just knowing the shit of everyone in the space, and it's cool that we're at this intersection in time, right? Where- Joel: Our roads are crossing. Carlos: ... We're both older in our careers, right? Joel: Yeah. Carlos: There's that mutual respect. But, I started my career in social media marketing at 25, I worked in banking and I lost my job. And the same day I lost my job, I joined LinkedIn. And this is November 5th, 2008. And as you remember back then, the economy took a nosedive. There were 100's of 1000's of people losing their jobs and I was a naive 25 year old that just wanted to help people find jobs. I felt like, I've got a young family, I'm getting fucked by this whole thing. I was working for AIG, I got low severance. Joel: Oh shit. Chad: Just fucking way. Carlos: Within just a day of joining LinkedIn I realized, there's so many other people out there, that are in the same position as me and I became motivated to help them. And I didn't have a background in HR whatsoever. I learned how to code, and bought a script and then customized it, and made my website, which is Jobs Direct USA. It's funny that we're sitting here, because it's embarrassing. I didn't have the best product out there. It sucked. It was really basic. Joel: You didn't have to back then. Chad: But most job boards did suck back then. Joel: And Craigslist still sucks. Chad: And they still do. Carlos: It's true. Joel: And it's making a billion dollars a year. Chad: Exactly. And they still suck. But again. Carlos: One of the key moments of my career early on was, I remember, within being like a month into Jobs Direct USA, it was through networking on LinkedIn. I meet this venture capitalist in Jacksonville, Florida, where I lived at the time. And I'll never forget this meeting, because this was a very much pivotal moment of my life and my career. We meet three days in a row, the first day, the guy absolutely loves me. The second day he tore me to shit. The third day, he's like look, you don't need my money, what you need is to actually go out and build a business. And if you go out and get 50 paying clients, meaning you go through the onboarding process, as a vendor for 50 different companies, come to me and I'll write you a blank check. I never saw the guy again. I went out, I hustled, I worked. I started doing these events called pinkslipped parties, all throughout the U.S. And in the process I learned social media marketing. I started building a network. Yes, I was like the King of spamming through email back then, but who wasn't. And it led me down this path where I'm at today, where I've had the pleasure of working as an employee for some really cool brands, including LinkedIn. Joel: So did you sell the job board? Did you just say, "I'm moving on and close the doors, does it still exists?" Carlos: Man, such a good question. I didn't have a seven figure exit, like a lot of people nowadays exit from their businesses. The easy answer is- Joel: Not from job boards. Carlos: ... No, the easy answer is no. The business just went away. I got hired by Winn-Dixie, which is a supermarket chain based in Jacksonville, to start social media for them at the end of 2011. And for about a year, I moonlighted where, yeah, I still had the job board. I hired someone to do job fairs because I'd learned in the process that job fairs were actually pretty profitable, at least back then they were. And then about a year and I was like, you know what? I'm good with my six-figure cushy marketing job. And then the job board just went to the wayside. Joel: So it does not exist anymore as far as you know? Carlos: It does not exist as far as I know. Joel: You don't own the domain. Carlos: I don't own the domain. Joel: Okay. Carlos: What is fascinating is that the LinkedIn group that I started back then still exists, has about 35,000 members. But what I did, and this was like growth hackery, to grow the job board that I said on day one working at LinkedIn. Your first day working at LinkedIn, every employee in new hire orientation has introduced himself or herself to Jeff Wiener, the CEO. And you have to say, what's one thing that's not on your LinkedIn profile? So what I said on my first day was, "I know how to growth hack LinkedIn." And I did so, to build the startup during the recession and he was first thing, he was like, well, how'd you do that? I said, "Well, what I did, was I created multiple LinkedIn groups." And everyone was like New York jobs, Atlanta jobs, Chicago jobs. Chad: Yeah. Carlos: And if you guys remember, back then you could customize the welcome message, to your group on LinkedIn. So every single time someone would request to join a group on LinkedIn, they would be prompted with an email that will come from LinkedIn. And it would say, "While we review your application, visit jobsdirectusa.com, to sign up as an employer or as a job seeker. And I did this enough times to grow the database. And ultimately, the email database of Jobs Direct USA. And it was all using LinkedIn for free. Joel: So the auto reply grew the job board essentially? Carlos: 100%. Chad: And Gary V is just now finding this out. Joel: So Winn-Dixie, you had an interesting story. Tell our audience about your presentation, where you talk about, because it's obviously guerrilla style, not which you would typically expect at an event. So what do you typically focus on in your presentations and what did you to talk about here at the gathering? Carlos: So my presentation here at the gathering is based on my book called, The End of Marketing. And for starters, I'm not a textbook marketer. It's very apparent when you see me speak on stage, that much of what I teach throughout my book, what I teach here are my keynotes, has been self-taught. It's what we're talking about here. It's actually getting in the weeds and trying to start a job board with no marketing budget. So, the whole premise of not just my book, but the talk is, really how to form human connections through social media, how to be less a brand on the corporate side, how to depend less on your logo and how to rely more on your people. So it's very much walking marketers through the harsh reality that today, you're not just competing against your traditional brands, but you're competing against people. Every one of us, three of us, we all have reach, we all compete for market share, not just against each other, but against other people out there. And brands just because they are billion dollar, trillion dollar companies, are not immune to the fact that we're all competing for digital market share in this giant digital ocean as I refer to it. And in order to stand out and rise above the noise, brands need to start relying more on their employees, which is where I think HR really should be taking notice of employee advocacy, isn't just a nice to have, but it's really a must have. And as I walk marketers through this progression of where we are today to where we're going, AI, artificial intelligence is getting ready to replace a lot of core functions, in the workplace today. And if professionals don't start honing in on, first of all, what makes them unique as personal brands and then B, how that cascades over their jobs, they're really going to be in trouble, over the next decade. Joel: You have a great story, Publix versus Winn-Dixie. And Winn-Dixie's main competitor in the grocery chain business, was Publix and you had an idea of how to poach Publix customers into Winn-Dixie, but you were turned away. Tell us that story. Carlos: I'm glad that you bring that up because again, putting on my old school startup founder hat, I learned in the early days of social media marketing, that social media marketing back then isn't much different than what it is today. What social networks really are, are search engines and you can find virtually anyone depending on the social network, speaking about any topic that's of interest. So back in the early to mid-2000's, I was looking for people that were hiring. I was looking for people that were looking for jobs. When I got hired by Winn-Dixie, I was looking for people that were buying groceries and not just people that were buying groceries at Winn Dixie, but buying groceries at Publix. So, I recall, and this was 2012, going into my CMO's office and I had this revelation I wanted to share with her. And it was literally screenshots from Twitter. I was like, "Hey, look Mary, these are people that are mentioning us in Publix and they're never tagging at Winn Dixie or at Publix." That means that nobody on Publix's community management team, is paying attention. This is an opportunity for us to swoop in and engage with them. Maybe we send them a link to sign up for our loyalty program and we have $25 loaded on their loyalty card. Now this is new customer acquisition. We know that they're going to go into a store, they're going to have to spend the $25 gift card. No one goes into a supermarket chain and just spends 25 bucks. They're going to spend more money. This is a brilliant idea and we're going to be able to do this and no one's ever going to know about it. She looked at me and literally said, "This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard." Chad: Why was it a bad idea? Why did she think it was bad idea? Carlos: Her literal words to me and I will never forget is, "We don't want to poke the bear." Chad: We don't want to poke the bear. Carlos: Yes. Chad: We're comfortable where we're at right now. Don't kick Publix in the nuts. Carlos: Correct. Chad: Okay. That sounds, not like a growth organization. Carlos: I looked at her and I was shocked and said, "Well, with all due respect, Mary, where we're at right now is down here," referring to the bottom. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Carlos: "And our competition is all the way up here. Do we want to be even halfway in the middle? Or are we okay with being down here?" And she literally looked at me again, said "This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Thank you for your time." Joel: Wow! Carlos: And I walked back to my cubicle feeling so rejected, like a complete failure and I said to myself, "One day someone is going to find value in this." And it's a story I tell throughout my book. It's a story that now I'm telling marketers and professionals like yourselves, at conferences. Because the fact of the matter is, look, social media is what it is, it's a search engine. Joel: And you know that, even before you probably did that there was a handful of recruiters that thought of social networks as a search engine and were looking for people, commenting on how they hated their job, to recruit them for their company. Chad: Easily. Carlos: You guys telling me that. Chad: Easily, yeah. Because recruiters, especially the good ones, okay? Carlos: Yeah. Chad: They're the ones who like reverse hack everything, right? So companies have these huge marketing presence and you were talking yesterday, about being very corporate and very sterile. Those marketing organizations are run by people. They understand what they like, but yet they're putting out this corporate sterile bullshit. Why is that happening? I just don't understand that. Carlos: Yes. There's so many reasons. I think we could just sit here the rest of the afternoon, talk about this, there's so many reasons. First of all, silos. Every single organization has silos and most of the time they don't speak to each other. So I always advise any client that I work with today, that if you want, for example, launch an employee advocacy strategy at a company, you need to work with each silo individually and create a strategy for them because they're the client at the end of the day. So you go to HR and they are your business partner, and they are your client also. And you develop a strategy for them, then you go to sales and you develop a strategy for them. You go corporate comms and PR, you develop a strategy for them. That's not happening. Chad: No. Carlos: Most companies or most departments are in their own little boxes. And let's just be very honest, I'm all about the real talk. Most people that work in corporate, are just trying to get that check. And stay under the radar, and stay in that cushy job as long as they fucking can. Chad: And stay comfortable, like old girl at Winn-Dixie, right? Carlos: And you know what? I say this now because I'm on the flip side of it. Chad: Yeah. Carlos: Right? I worked my ass off in corporate for almost 10 years and I worked at four different brands, in very similar roles and I realized, there's a reason why I don't last at companies. And it's because I pride myself in being a disruptor and I bring that entrepreneurial experience to the brands that I worked with as an employee. And now on the flip side, same thing. Most people aren't wired that way. They want to just coast to the 15th and the 30th. And they will do the bare minimum to what it takes, just to stay employed. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, especially when you're sending candidates into a black hole, which is why you need friends like Roopesh Nair, CEO of SmashFly on your side. Joel: Having someone submit a resume that just goes into the black hole is devastating for candidate experience. Do you need to close the black hole and ensure everyone has a great experience when applying? Roopesh: Well, we're doing a group of things out there. One is to ensure that the application experience itself is seamless, by integrating with ATSs meaningfully and providing that status as back and forth. And ensuring that the levers communication are activated every time there's a status coming back and forth from the ATSs. So just kind of providing transparency, in the application process, by leveraging our candidate relationship management solution. The second aspect is then actually ensuring that we're using our matching algorithm, to bubble up people pretty quickly, where they are a great fit for that particular role in the company. And ensuring that the conversational engagement starts right away, and the recruiter is notified while the engagement is going on. It's critical, then that ways, we are prioritizing those engagements which are needed to the most important applicants right away. And then eventually ensuring that anyone who is not necessarily a good fit at that point, we are continuing to engage them, whether it is the job they applied for, or for any other job, or for that matter, just general brand awareness and general engagement around, what might be a good fit for those guys, ensures that that black hole is minimized. Chad: Let SmashFly help, activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit, smashfly.com Joel: And in your message, in your session was, if you want to survive and thrive, you have to be able to get through that. You have to bust through it. And you have a great example of Wendy's, where I've enjoyed many a burger and how they're not ashamed to take on the competition, put it in Chick-fil-A's face. So talk about that and how hard you think that is to get marketers to do that. And how much more difficult it would be for employers, and talent acquisition teams to start doing that. Chad: So poking the bear. Carlos: The challenge that loud marketers have that I see, is that they themselves... So the marketers that work inside of brands, they themselves don't have personal brands. They're not leaving work at the end of the day and consuming content. Again, they're working their nine to five job and they know what they know. In order to thrive in this space, you really have to be a practitioner first. Chad: Well, this sounds like it runs parallel with HR. Carlos: 100%. Chad: Because recruiters should have their personal. I mean, the hiring managers, I mean all the way through, there's got to be personality there, which is what we're lacking, right? Carlos: 100%. And that's very much the basis of my talks and my book, which is going forward, you need to replace the logo with a human face. So if you're at a company where there's 20,000 employees, you should be doing everything you can to activate those 20,000 employees, to tell your brand story for you. Empower them, teach them. Teach them how to use Instagram stories, empower them to take over your Instagram account. Chad: And don't be afraid for them using Instagram stories and tagging you in it. I think many companies are afraid, oh, wait a minute, what the fuck are they going to say. Joel: Legal is going to have a problem with this. Chad: Yeah, legal is going to have a problem. Carlos: Fuck Legal. Chad: Exactly. I think, well, yeah. You don't ask for permission, right? Carlos: You just do, because here's the thing. At the end of the day, you're trying to do what's best for the organization, and that's to help the organization grow and thrive, and create stickiness through content. The reality is this, your employees are already on social media. They're already indicating on their Facebook that they work for you. Even if they never speak about you, they're indicating on their LinkedIn. They have it in their bio on Instagram, what they do. So, you can't escape that, whatsoever. What you can do is you can train your employees and teach them how to advocate for you and give them the keys to the Cadillac. And if they fuck up, they fuck up. There's guidelines right in place. There's rules, but- Chad: It's their personal brand though. If they want to retweet something, or like something that's not on brand, well fuck you, it's not your brand it's my personal brand, right? Carlos: … Here's what I tell brands when I go in to consult for them on employee advocacy. Instead of thinking about this, of what your employees can do for you, you need to have the mindset of what you can do for your employees. Employees don't give a fuck about you. They give a fuck about the paycheck and they give a fuck about their careers. That's just facts. So, what you need to do is make them feel like you're empowering them to grow their personal brand. Because what's going to happen is this, two years, three years from now, when that employee leaves you, his or her LinkedIn is still going to have your logo on it. So you want to ensure that where they go, they're set up for success, because you want to share that whoever comes through these doors, always is going to go, to a better opportunity, or do bigger things like, look at me, right? I'm proud of the companies I've worked at. I haven't always had smooth transitions out of them, but hell, look where I'm at in my career now compared to where I was 10 years ago. I was a social media manager, working at Winn-Dixie. Joel: So, talking about careers. There's a part of your talk, where you get into AI and none of you are going to have jobs in the future. And that's one of the things that we talk about quite a bit. And you even have a segment where you talk about companies that have CGI created Instagram accounts, where you don't even need people to go be advocates for you on social media. Chad: That is just so fucking weird. Joel: Let’s talk about that. Chad: It's like animate shit. Joel: And how that might affect the talent acquisition. Carlos: I think you guys and girls in HR are going to be the ones that really mess things up. Chad: As soon as they do any type of AI that can do a podcast, we're fucked. Okay? Carlos: Yes and no. But, what I will say is if you can take... How many episodes have you guys done? Chad: Over 300. Carlos: Over 300. If there is some sort of technology that can take all 300 episodes, it already knows your voice, it already knows every word that you say and just mixes it up, then yeah, you really don't need, you guys anymore. Chad: We can live on though. That's the beautiful part, right? Carlos: That's the cool thing that you can live on. But, what I refer to through my talk and why personal branding is so important, is because once AI can replace human jobs, then why do you really need a person? And that's where I call it the battle of AI versus human or AI judgment day. Because people will always relate to people, I have no interest in following or engaging with a CGI influencer. Because I know it's not a real person that will ever be able to meet. Some people find this shit cool cause there's an art aspect to it. But again, where I say, I really think HR is going to be the one that drives the ship on this, is as you learn how affordable AI technology is, you're going to have conversations with your clients or you're going to have conversations, if you're listening to this and you work on the inside of a brand. You'll have conversations with your executives, you're going to say, “Hey, we're paying a marketing manager 65 grand a year. We're paying a graphic designer 75 grand a year. We could actually pay an AI $12,000 a year. We can pay this company that's going to program AI to do all these functions. No health insurance, no 401(k) match, no benefits.” Chad: No sick days. Carlos: No sick days. Chad: No kids that you got to get- Carlos: They're always on, 365, 24/7 right? That's, the world that we are getting ready to be living in very soon. And you're already seeing it happen. You're starting to see IBM Watson. You're starting to see, these commercials popping up for AI. It's always going to be presented as a value added benefit, but this is where it goes back to, if you, right now in the year 2020, are not focusing on growing a brand for yourself, I feel sorry for you. Joel: So, I'm the HR person that's doing the layoffs now. I'm the one having those meetings and I eventually know that I'm going to have to look in the mirror and say, AI can do my job too. What advice do you give that person? Carlos: Such a good question. What I would say is, you always have to be the individual that's steering the strategy, steering the ship. You can't make yourself be replaceable and there will always need to be human bodies around to manage, even an AI workforce, as crazy as that sounds. Joel: Robot resources. Yeah, we talked about it. Carlos: Well, think about, how you can be the leader, steering the ship. Not everyone will, there will be thousands of people that lose their jobs as a result of AI. But one thing is for certain, people will all always relate to people. People will always trust and confide in people. And I think we're going to take marketing from where it is today, where it's very noisy. And we are already starting to see this happen with Slack groups, WhatsApp groups, private communities on Facebook. I think we're actually going to go right back to an early 2000's, type era, where marketing communications is very much siloed in a way. And it's not as open as it is because we're going to start valuing one-to-one and peer-to-peer group communications much more, than we do today. Joel: I was talking to a colleague and talking about 30 years ago, if you wanted to apply to a job, let's say a very simple job, you went down to the local grocery store, restaurant and you said, "I want to apply to a job." And the GM came out, gave an application, probably said, "Hi, my name is so and so." You introduce your.... There's actually a human connection there and there's actually a brand transaction, right? "So, hey, would you like a Coke? I'll get you a soda while you fill out the application." Where today it's so much colder. And to me I feel like we're just starting to realize that we've dehumanized the application process so much that we're losing out on that human connection. I think part of the reason why Chad and I are at this conference is, how do we get marketing to realize that there's a connection that can be made there with that? And so when I think about AI, maybe am I being too optimistic to think? Maybe we'll go back to those days where there is a human-to-human interaction, where we do have job applications and people at companies actually talking to each other, when they get together. Carlos: I'd say 100%, we're going to need to go back in time. And in the last chapter of The End of Marketing was, the hardest to write, because I don't have a crystal ball. I can't predict what the hell is going to happen. I can only go based on data and make very much educated guesses. But what I do predict, is we will go backwards in time to where one-on-one relationships means more than anything. The value of your social network, the people you're connected to will mean more than money itself, because as we all know, we can all attest to it, where would will we be today if we didn't have our LinkedIn network? Where would we be today if we didn't make the investment 10 plus years ago to build our own brands? So it goes back to what I said before. If you're just getting started now, you're very much behind the eight ball, but there's still time to catch up. Now, in terms of like the application process for jobs, I don't think you'll go backwards that much, but I think the criteria, I'd love to hear your thoughts since you guys work in the weeds and HR. And I think nowadays, when someone Google’s you, that's really the first step for them to see how legitimate you are as a potential candidate. Is that a safe assumption? Chad: Yeah, that's a safe assumption. I literally don't think we're going to go back to the humanto-human. And the reason why, is scale. We talked to Yeti today, where they post a job and they get 30,000 resumes, right? So you can't scale that human-to-human. So what you need to do, is you need a ... And there's also research, I think Sherm paid somebody to do some research that showed that job seekers really would rather get touched by a chatbot, not a human, than go into a black hole. So I think what's going to happen, and it's almost, like folding in what you're talking about, with regard to automation. We're going to automate ourselves out of this, because it scales faster, it learns faster. So all those things, I don't think we're going to have that human-to-human until, we get to the point where we know it's whittled down to the core group of who we want to interview, right? And who knows what that interview process looks like at that point. Because it might not be a human, right? It might actually progress out of that, because humans want to use their gut. And research shows, your gut sucks. So where do we go from there? And that's the hard discussion, for recruiters. It's the hard discussion for HR. I was a hiring manager. That'd be fucking awesome, I hated interviewing people. I hated all this gut check stuff, right? To make that last decision over two people. If I just had an algorithm that said, "Hey, history says this," right? And it worked in all the diversity components and things, and gave me a diverse slate. Fuck yeah, let's do it. Joel: And see, I think... I have 6,000 some LinkedIn connections. I literally know could actually call up about 100 to 150. And a lot of studies show that, you can only have 150 or so actual human relationships before your brain blows up and you can't handle it anymore. So, when I think about the future, I think about the gig economy and knowing that 100 to 150 people. And can you make a living, knowing 150 people and you probably can, you can probably work for a dozen companies, people, projects, to make a living as opposed to just, I'm going to work for one company for the next three to five years. So when I look at the future, although I think networks are important, I think they're very shallow. And I think we have to get to a point where, I have like 100 people, that I love, I do projects for, they do projects for me. And that little community, is what gets me through. Chad: But link LinkedIn as a social network. I think that's where we start going to a marketplace, right? So the marketplace actually demonstrates and shows the projects that are available. And then that matches up against the individuals who have the skillsets. Who are looking to do projects? Joel: Yes. But you can only take on so many projects. Chad: No. And that's when you're done, right? When you- Joel: Yes. Everyone will have to start in a marketplace and get that one or two things, get your brand out there, get your name, get that referral and then you're off to the races. So I think the marketplace has to exist for that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But I think it's those deep communications are what's... Because I've worked for the same people or with the same people for over a decade. And I can just keep going back to them like, I got an idea or hey I want to help you do this, or they come to me. So the future I see is something like that, as opposed to the big corporate model of big brand. Carlos: So it goes back to personal branding though? Joel: Yeah, it does. Carlos: You have to make yourself marketable as a candidate. Joel: Yes. Carlos: Because when you're using these resources... I don't look at LinkedIn as a social network. I look at it as just a directory because- Joel: And that's how Microsoft looks at it's staff. Carlos: And that working isn't really happening on LinkedIn. Nowadays, LinkedIn is where you have your own presence on the web, but it's also very limited. I think we can admit, because it's, one professional headshot, your professional accolades. But if you really want to get to know someone, either A, you go over to Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook or B, what we haven't really addressed is the value of in person networking. I see tremendous value in doing this right here, coming to a conference, going outside of your comfort zone. Even if you make a handful of good solid connects here, at a conference, its worth so much more than just arbitrarily connecting with people on LinkedIn that you will never meet. Chad: I totally agree. But wait a minute, the gathering, so this our second year here, right? And we go out as who we are, right? It just, it is who it is. We go to most of these events, they're HR, recruiting events. And there's that person that's inside that doesn't come out, because it's a professional event right? Here, it's like a safe place and everybody talks shit. And we know, I mean we're on stage with Yeti and he's like, yeah, I know we haven't figured this shit out. As a matter of fact, he's taking notes, as we're going through and he won the Icon Award last year. Right? I mean, and he's just so human, and that's what we're seeing here. But most of the events we go to, we can't have these discussions. Carlos: Can I tell you why? Chad: Yeah, please. Carlos: Because, you're speaking to the wrong audience. You have to go outside of your comfort zone and go outside of your circles in order to thrive. Chad: Where do I go? Carlos: You have to speak to people that are not in HR. Chad: That's what we're doing here. Carlos: So I struggle with this too, because I go to a lot of events and I have a lot of marketing homies, that do social media marketing for a living, but I also have different pockets that I go into and weave in and out of. So, this right here, these are the homies that I used to be one of them, corporate marketer. I'm not corporate marketer anymore, but I know their jobs very well. So I can blend in here, in a couple of weeks. I'm getting ready to go, social media marketing world. Six, 7,000 social media marketers, they're going to be there. We all know pretty much the same tactics, the same hacks, the same everything. So it's more of a social thing. I'm not going to go there necessarily be teaching someone new tricks, because we all are on the same level playing field, which is like what HR is for you guys. So I think, you have to force yourself. I spoke a couple of weeks ago at Upper Deck Trading Cards Conference. I was a keynote there. It was a dealer conference. It was probably one of the best conferences I've ever been to. Such a good question cause I learned. I learned so much, about trading cards. I learned about the business model of trading cards that I left there feeling like thankful, that I went to a conference or actually learned. Chad: Yeah. Carlos: And it wasn't the other way around where I'm just there, just to go onstage, teach and then get the hell out. Chad: You're giving while you're there, but there's got to be some take, right? You got to be getting something and that's one of the things that again, I love about this conference. Joel: Yeah, I love that you force yourself out of those comfort zones. And for me, weirdly enough, that's YouTube. Like I'll think of something I want to learn more about and I'll take my ass to YouTube, I'll learn more about it, than I ever thought I ever could. Chad: You're so much of that. Yeah. Joel: Now I don't know if that helps you professionally or not, but I think it helps me as a person. Well Carlos, man, thanks for hanging out with us. For our listeners that want to know more about you and your personal brand, where do they go? Carlos: You can follow me @carlosgil83 on Twitter and on Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. If you're into books, I encourage you to go to, endofmarketingbook.com, to get The End of Marketing. Joel: Thanks man. Chad: Excellent. We out. Joel: We out. Chad: This has been The Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors, because they make it all possible. For more visit, chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #Brand #CultBrands #CultBrandSeries #Marketing #Automation #Robots #Smashfly

The world is working from home and the WFH phenomenon looks like it just might be here to stay, as companies like Twitter and Google are in for the long haul. So who better to bring on the podcast than Robert Ruff of Sovren, whose company has been WFH for over 10 years. He's spilling the good, the bad, and the ugly on this Sovren exclusive. Topics: - When WFH efficiency dies - Hiring WFH-type talent - Staying in the FLOW - The new "Wage Ceiling" - Outsourcing isn't - Work from EVERYWHERE Enjoy ... and wash your pajamas, they stink! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now, based on that technology comes Sovren's, Artificial Intelligence Matching and Scoring software, In fractions of a second receive matched results, that provide candidate scored by fit to job. And just as importantly, the jumps fit to the candidate, make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today, by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V- R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: Are we ever going to get back into the office? Google says they might not go back through 2021 and Twitter might never fully return to the workplace. Companies are seeing efficiencies rise and the thought of lowering overhead is pretty enticing. But what happens to work, culture, relationships, when companies go full work from home? Is the panacea real? All of those questions and deep discussion with our friend, Robert Ruff, President of Sovren, on today's, The Chad and Cheese 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: Ain't that rough enough? What's up everybody. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. This is The Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman, joined as usual by my co-host Chad Sowash. And today we are honored to once again, bring back, Robert Ruff, CEO, founder of Sovren. Robert what's going on, man? Robert: Just working from home. Like everybody else. Joel: What a favorite? Chad: Okay. So, that's nothing different for you, it's nothing different for Joel and myself. We've been working from home for years. I mean, your company actually went to work from home in 2006. The thing that everybody's talking about, well, we're so used to work from home, we're seeing more productivity and so on and so forth. There's less overhead, is it as rosy as everybody thinks it is? Robert: So I think the answer is yes, people are seeing huge increases in productivity and that is actual, that's really going on. That's the good news, the bad news is, it is not going to last. So our experiences that this is a fairly simple thing to produce and work from home, is just one way to produce it. So if you want to change morale, or you want to boost productivity, in an office, all you have to do is turn the lights down 30%. So you save on your electric bill and for whatever reason, no one knows exactly why, the people feel like, wow, you've really done something for me, this environment is better. And they pay more attention for a while and they do become more productive, but it doesn't last. So eventually what you ended up doing is turning the lights back up and you get the same effect all over again. It's not the change, brighter or darker, it's just the fact that you did something different. And we're seeing that right now, work from home people have measured, and I'm like, wow, I have more productivity out of my people. Like, yeah, that's true. But it is going to stop. It is actually declining right now, what we have are failures to measure properly, right? So you can't just measure once and say, "Oh, it worked." No, it's like a week later, a month later measure again. And you're going to find it's not as effective as it was. And in fact it is on a continual decline. And I describe it to people like this. It is a form of alcoholism, so it's not actual. But a lot of people are having a problem with alcohol right now at home. I should Joel: We've redefine what alcoholism is in this last three months. Robert: ... So, what's happening is, people aren't making a conscious decision to become less productive every day. But eventually, you will need to have the same kind of intervention with them about their work life, that you would have to have with an alcoholic about their alcohol life. So you literally have to sit down and say, "We don't know when you cross the line," and you don't either. That's the thing, the employee could never say, "Yeah, it started with this." But it's the death of a thousand little Nicks. So what ends up happening, is people go from long stretches of being in the flow initially, to by the time you have this intervention, work is five to 20 minutes snippets that they give you in between walking the dogs, getting ready to make lunch, making lunch, eating lunch, cleaning up from lunch, thinking about how good lunch was, talking to somebody in the house about that lunch. Joel: Taking that dump after lunch. Robert: Right. Chad: The lunch dump. Robert: It becomes that they still think, well, I'm giving you all this time. I gave you eight hours today. Those are the worst eight hours of their day, not the best. And that's what we continually emphasize to our people is, I want your most productive eight hours. And if you think you're going to slot that in, a few times an hour for 15 minutes, that's not going to work for us. Chad: So how does everything degrade? I mean, so it just happens slowly, right? Because you have this great boost in productivity, because things are different. They're excited, they're really into it and then it just becomes routine. And then you start to see this degradation, right? So how do you upfront knowing it's going to happen? How do you plan for that? How do you manage that? How does that work at Sovren? Robert: So let's talk about some of the strategies that our people are trying to do right now. First strategy is surveillance. Okay? So we're going to find key loggers, we're going to find things that we'll take, screenshots every 10 minutes or randomly, and we'll be able to, "Monitor what you're doing." Alright, surveillance, telling people that you're now confined to home by law. And by the way, you're in a police state, is not what I would say, "Hey, how do you feel about your job?" And then the answer you're going to get is, "Oh, very productive, I feel great about it, I trust my employer as much as they trust me." Chad: Yeah. Robert: Which actually is what you're going to get out of that. People will eventually feel like you're turning this into a game, I will game it. So surveillance is not going to get you anywhere. And then the next thing people try is management. Okay, well, it's really hard to manage people from home. So what you're going to end up doing is probably micromanaging. So you're going to say, "Here's a task, I need you to do it, get back to me when you've finished it." Okay. well, you know what they're going to do between task? Nothing for you. Micromanaging someone's work life while they're at home, doesn't work. And in fact will turn them into a much less capable, much less valuable employee. So surveillance doesn't work, management doesn't work. What you have to do is lead and you have to lead by helping people remember, why are we doing this? Chad: What's the purpose? Robert: Yeah Joel: For the vision. Yeah. Robert: At Sovren we have a very crass not popular, and like, no one will ever ask me to give a Ted Talk on, what our corporate mission is. No we've had this conversation with people that are business consultants we brought in and they're like, well, what are you really trying to do? You're trying to connect people with jobs and employers. No, that's not what we're trying to do. We're actually in business to get rich. And they're like, well, yeah, no, but really what are you trying to do? And we're like, you need to understand the point at which this business doesn't make money, we're not doing it anymore. This is the reason we do this. It's a great business and we enjoy it, but the enjoyment is not enough of a payback. We're actually in it to make money. Joel: How many employees do you have Robert? Just for the listeners. Robert: We are in the work from home sweet spot because we don't have a lot of employees. Joel: Yeah. Robert: If you have 30,000 employees working from home, you have to have, a layer of management that is just going to make sure that people are taken care of. They're getting the resources that they need, that type of thing. Chad: Virtual handlers. Robert: Yeah. Pretty much it, you can kind of have to organize it like the army where you literally have a chain of command and people split up into, I'm responsible for these eight people, 10 people, that kind of thing. You can't have people responsible for 100 people working from home. Chad: Right. Robert: You have to set it up into different units. But one of the parts of leading people is, instead of micromanaging their work life, you go to them and you do something counterintuitive. You give them something that they're not the best at. So I need my people to get better all the time. But if I only give them the things that they already do well, they're not going to get better. They're just going to knock that out of the park and do it again and again, and eventually it becomes very repetitive, very boring. I want my people cross-trained and I also want them talking to each other in productive ways. So yeah, we can talk about the dog or whatever for awhile, but really I want you having a conversation about how to do your job better. By giving Davy, something that Patricia is good at and giving Patricia something that Davy or Johnny is good at. I then kind of force a mentoring relationship there, where there are productive conversations and people are challenged, and it's interesting, and they are going to do good work, because they're into it. It's counterintuitive, but it's the best way to handle it. You talk to people and you find out what they want to do. And essentially instead of dividing up the work for them, you more give them the ability to divide the work up among themselves. And you hold people accountable, for the bottom line results. Tell me how long this is going to take and then don't give me an excuse or an explanation that you think is an excuse, at the end of that period bring it. Joel: Do you guys use contractors? Have you ever used contractors? And if not, is there a reason why? I think work from home has forced the question for a lot of companies of saying, "Why do I have full time employees if we're all working from home, anyway, I can just employ contractors from around the globe?" What are your thoughts on that? Robert: I don't think it's appropriate for our business. So, we want to hire the top one or 2% of programmers and salespeople and their professions, because we believe that you can get 10 times or more the productivity out of the top people, in coding and software architecture, than you can out of average people. And because of that, contractors aren't suitable for us. The other thing is this is why software has gone open source. The reason it's gone open source is big companies can no longer protect their intellectual property, if they're shipping it all over the world to 1000's of people it's out there. Joel: Yeah. Robert: So instead of making your money by protecting your source code, you have to make your money by services and value added about those products, and not just by protecting the source code. And our business, we're in a small enough niche with a small enough company. We still are fanatically about protecting our intellectual property and by bringing in contractors, that is not going to be possible. Chad: Yeah. So when it comes to, again, trying to hold on to that top 1% money, one way to do it, but keeping them interested is I think, even a bigger piece of it, what do you do to ensure that once again, these people, aren't just, making the donuts every day, they're doing something that challenges them. You said that you want to throw different types of tasks at them. Can you give us an example and how your staff actually reacts to some of those projects? Robert: Well so, for instance, we have two kinds of applications that we do at Sovren. One type is only for our internal use to run our business. And the other type is the product and the SAS service that we deploy publicly. So the cool software for most people coming in is, Oh, I want to do the public stuff. I don't really want to work on the internal apps, but the fact is, is that the internal apps, although they don't get as much, maybe respect day-to-day, are what makes us super productive. One thing that's a problem is if you have a person that is primarily responsible for that internal system, and that's all they do and they leave, that's a bad problem, but they also get too comfortable. So instead of just saying, "I'm going to give you what you're best at." You have to say, "I'm going to show you something else now, I'm going to put you on the product side." Take a product guy and say, "Look, this isn't permanent, but for the next six months or a year, you're going to get in on the internal app side, and I want you to take a fresh look at it, and we're going to work on taking it to another level." Chad: Well, isn't that, isn't that exciting though. I mean, because we've talked about before, how you hire troubleshooters, right? You hire people that are problem solvers. And if you redirect them and say, "Hey," make them feel special and they're going to, because they should. "We' have a problem over here," or "We would really like to revamp this entire system and we want your eyes on this." Instead of saying, "Well, it's boring because it's an internal system." That's a challenge and you would think that a problem solver would really rise to that. Is that why you do it? And is that what you're seeing from your staff? Robert: Yeah, that is why we do it. People get stale and when they get stale, they're not really focused on productivity and giving you the greatest value. They're really more in putting in the hours to that point and watching the clock than they are getting in the flow, and doing something that they're super interested in, and doing it well. So you have to remember that, if you keep somebody in the same job for forever, you've done something bad for them and they're not giving you as much as they could either. Neither one of you has done it on purpose, but it was a big mistake. Chad: It's comfortable. Robert: It's comfortable and being uncomfortable in a safe environment is what really boosts productivity. Good people like to be challenged. Joel: Robert, curious about the hiring aspect and a lot of people that are moving to a work from home environment, obviously, hiring is a little bit different, right? They're not coming into a big office enterprise, lobby, meeting folks. You've been doing this for a long time. What tips and tricks would you give to someone that's now hiring in a work from home environment, as opposed to a in person environment? Robert: So most of our employees that we've hired, I have not met until months after they were hired. And literally never even had a video where I saw who they look or ... Joel: Really? I think most people would be surprised by that. Robert: Yeah. We're not interested in what, you know, we're interested in how you got to what, you know, we're interested in. If we give you something you don't know, how are you going to find the information out about that? Chad: Right. Robert: You said we want troubleshooting, we want problem solvers. We want people that look at it like, there's an answer out there somewhere. And where am I going to get that answer? And we also challenged people on, how did you vet that answer? Right? So we want people thinking deeply about the task and the best way to accomplish it. Joel: Right. Let's get granular on this. So I assume you post a job out to the world, people apply and then what? You have a phone conversation, there's no video. Is there any kind of testing or prescreening that you're doing? Is there any litmus test for, there'll be successful working from home? Talk about that. Robert: So we actually don't very often post jobs. We go to recruiters. So we have a lot of recruiters that are our customers and we have one recruiting firm in particular, we do it multiple times over the years and we go to them, we give them the job and we have them do all of the initial screening. Joel: Okay. Robert: And then we will interview those people that they have. They'll go over with us, here are your candidates. We'll select candidates from the candidate pool. And then we'll take typically five, and we'll interview those. So what we're trying to find out, is what the truth is about what you've accomplished. So we find a lot of people list things on their resumes that, I worked on a team that did so-and-so, or like, yeah, but what did you do? Right? So did you write the core algorithm or did you look at the guy that wrote the core algorithm every day when you ate lunch? Right? So, if we really have to drill down to what have you actually done? And then what we try to find out is, some task that we're familiar with, that they are not, and give it to them to do live. And if they can't do it, we can't hire them. If I tell you, go find everything you know about this and write a program that does X, Y, Z, and you can't do it while we watch, you're not our person. Joel: Yeah. Chad: If stage fright is a problem, sorry. Robert: Stage fright is a problem because it's typically a lack of confidence. Chad: That you've said, "Flow," on a number of occasions and I'm sure that you guys talk about that, because that is, it is not just about getting into work, but it's having the discipline to stay in work and not get distracted. Right? So staying in that flow, how do you know when somebody is getting out of their flow? Because I think this is one of the big issues, that companies are going to have as they see this productivity and then people start falling out of the flow. They don't know how to identify, what's happening, when it's happening and how to counteract it. Robert: Yeah. So, over management and micromanagement will kill flow every time. Sovren is doing about a third more business today, with 30% less employees than we were about a year and a half ago. Chad: Wow. Robert: Okay. And the reason was, is we had a layer of management that was put in, it was supposed to be part time management. So like, we're going to take you and put part of your workday into this management task. And that person decided that they wanted to make it a full time management task. Okay. Well, what they did was systematically destroy the ability of a whole development team to stay in the flow, by constantly contacting people, asking questions, getting on the phone, having long conference calls. And, we had a ton of management and nothing was worth managing. So we actually, don't have that manager anymore. They weren't supposed to turn it into a full time job by taking that person out, what we found is that people now, don't feel like they're being nitpicked, second guessed and taken out of the flow. Because in programming, you can go for an hour in the flow, and it doesn't just seem like five minutes. And if someone interrupts you, it may take another hour to get back to that. Chad: Yeah. Robert: So if you look in golf or in tennis, the people that are winning the tournament, they're in the flow. So what do you do in tennis when your opponents crush you? Chad: Try to break their flow. Robert: Exactly. So you suddenly get a horrible cramp. Chad: Yeah. Robert: Now we got totake 15 minutes out. Yeah, of course, it's a strategy. Chad: Are you arguing with the ref? Robert: Exactly. So let's talk about one of the things that's going on right now. I just talked to a lot of people around town and they're like, oh, I am so happy that I can work from home now. And I'm like, oh, you realize that your real wages have been kept, your real wage is at its peak right now. And they're like, what are you talking about? Work from home is actually a disaster, for middle management jobs and most white collar jobs. You want to talk about why that is? Joel: Sure. Robert: Alright. Well let's just say that I'm in Austin. I have an office in Austin and everybody has come in the office all day long. All right, I need a person that can do X, Y and the pool of people that can get to my office every day and do X Y is within a what? 40, 50 mile radius of that office. Alright, Austin is 11th biggest city in the United States, 1.6 million people I think. Fine, what if now I no longer have to worry about people coming into the office. I can hire somebody from anywhere. I don't care if they're on the phone, 10 feet away, or on the phone, two continents away. What do I care? Just the conversation is the same. Now, the people that I can draw from to do your job is, let's just narrow it, it's everybody in the United States. So it's a 200 times bigger job pool, bad news for you is, I guarantee you, in that 200 times bigger pool, I will find somebody who's actually better than you at your job and willing to work for less wage. Chad: Ouch. Joel: Yeah. Robert: Yes. This is a disaster for good earning people and white collar jobs right now. And people are like, oh, this is fantastic, I can work from anywhere. I look at them and I say... And let me explain how that works. You will work from everywhere. I travel about 40% of the time and I'll spend a month or two on personal travel and a month or two on business travel, every year. My personal travel looks like my business travel, but I take the 80/20 rule and flip it. Right? So I'm going to carve out, a known area of time for me today, that I want you to bring me questions or things that need talking about. Joel: Yeah. Robert: And then only contact me for an emergency after that. That's when I'm on vacation, but I have to do that every single day, no matter where I am. I can literally be 10,000 feet up on a mountain in the Tetons and I have to check my phone. Joel: One of our favorite guests, has been Douglas Atkin, who wrote a book on branding. And he was head of culture at Airbnb. And we've bridged this topic about work from home. And he's not a fan at all for the reasons of company culture, sort of what he calls, rubbing together until it becomes sticky. So rubbing employees together until, the culture becomes something that's prevalent. Is culture important to your organization and in a work from home setup, how do you keep culture alive? How do you cultivate it? How important is it in the world, that we're seeing going forward? Robert: I think people have to know what you stand for and why you're in business, and how you go about your business. So one of the things we want people to do, is always know that they are valued here. If you treat your employees poorly, they will treat your customers poorly. Chad: Amen. Robert: If you blame your employees for everything that goes wrong, whether it was their fault or not, they will treat your customers that are having problems, as if those customers are personally failing you. Joel: And culture is probably more important in bigger organizations. They're important in every organization, but my guess is if you had 500 plus employees, keeping the culture would be more important than having, a dozen. Robert: It's surprisingly important in a company like ours. So, I was talking to our accountant. So we have an internal accountant, CPA that works for us and her replacement, the woman that she replaced, trained her. And she made a comment the other day that, "Yeah, when she trained me ..." The first thing that really caught my attention is she said, "We don't let people bully us." She goes, "This may a small company and we have literally the largest companies in the world as our customers, but we do not get bullied. So we will work with anybody and work with where you are, and what you have, and what you need, we're going to try to fit your needs, but we will not let you dictate to us and bully us just because you're bigger." Chad: Not to mention, and correct me if I'm wrong, your culture is, and you're picking the people, which obviously creates that culture, is one of the reasons why you can be so damned efficient and so damned good at what you do, with not having 500 people, right? So it has to be important. Robert: Correct? We have to have everybody that believes that they are being treated fairly by the company and fairly on a relative sense. So remember, the biggest morale killer in a company is the person that continues to irritate all the other employees, by getting management attention, while they are basically mucking up the company and tormenting everyone else. Again, when we got rid of the management layer we didn't need, productivity soared. And we found out that people despised the person that was in that job. Chad: Yeah. And that's a message to all those companies out there, who probably have two or three layers of management, which are redundant and also a pain in the ass. You probably don't need those now, let alone in a work from home scenario, but Robert man, we appreciate you bringing yourself, not to mention your knowledge of actually having a company who've done this. Because again, we have so many companies that are out there today, who see this as a new way forward, but they don't understand the potholes in the road. So thank for bringing those potholes. Robert: All right, guys. Thanks for having my honor. It's always good. Joel: Thanks Robert. Robert: Thank you guys. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Outro: This has been The Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors, because they make it all possible. For more visit, chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #WFH #virtual #Work #Talent #Wages #productivity #Hiring