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Mason Wong, is a VETERAN of recruiting and currently responsible for Lyft's applicant tracking system to support their recruitment team. Mason has his finger on the pulse of the Recruiting community and shares those views with Chad & Cheese at Jobvite's Recruiting Nation LIVE! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad : Here's another hot podcast, recorded live, from San Francisco at Jobvite's Recruiter Nation Live. We had a chance to catch up with leaders in the recruiting space, so, we turned on the mics and got a Lyft. Enjoy. 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: Welcome, long time listener, first time interview, Mason Wong, to the show. Joel: Mason Wong, everyone. Chad : Live from Recruiter Nation Live, by Jobvite. Yes. Well, our live audience is very subdued at the moment, otherwise they would give you a standing ovation. Mason, welcome to the podcast. Give us the elevator pitch on you, for those who don't know who you are. Mason: Well, thanks Joel and Chad. It's actually a bit surreal to be here. So, thanks a lot. Chad : You bet, man. Mason: The elevator pitch. So, today I am the recruiting system administrator at Lyft. I'm responsible for the applicant tracking system, supporting our recruiting team- Chad : A little know ride-sharing company, out there, that many of our listeners know. Mason: My background is actually in recruiting. I started as a tech recruiter, I did some college recruiting, I was the head of recruiting for a number of software companies in the Bay area. And about seven years ago I started an independent consulting practice focused on helping Jobvite customers, because I had been an already, a repeat customer of Jobvite. So, I was doing a lot of reconfiguration, custom training, implementations. So, I got really very, very involved hands on, as a practitioner of applicant tracking system. Chad : Now, was Lyft a Jobvite client before you joined? Or did you transfer them over to- Mason: Yeah, it's an interesting story. Many years ago, like a lot of tech companies, Lyft was a Jobvite customer. Then they switched to Lever, and then they switched to Greenhouse. Chad : That's a lot of switching. Mason: It's a lot of switching. Joel: That's a lot of switching. Mason: And then they hired me. Chad : Hello. Mason: And the interesting thing is that, they gave me a shot at taking care of the applicant tracking system without me ever having touched Greenhouse before. Chad : Was this something you volunteered to do? Or did you... Because I can't imagine somebody wanting to do. Mason: So, as I've mentioned, my consulting practice was already focused on applicant tracking systems, so I kind of have an interest in it, and it happened to be very Jobvite flavored. But a recruiter gave me a call, and I was just coming off of a consulting project, didn't have any leads at the moment, and they said, would you like to take care of Lyft systems? And I said, let's talk. And when it turned out to be a great learning opportunity from a stance of, of course, learning Greenhouse, and also becoming part of a larger recruiting organization, and it's just a fast growing, popular tech brand, it seemed like a good deal. So, I joined. I've been there six months. Chad : I'm assuming you weren't in an Uber when they called you for the job. Mason: No. Joel: If not, he jumped the hell out. Mason: No. Chad : Excuse me. Pull over real quick. And I'm out. Chad : So, you've been doing this for a long time, the recruiting game. I'm curious. Let's start out with your big picture, what you see happening now, what's interesting, what has legs, what's going to disappear in the next, four or five years. What's your overall macro view of recruiting technology? Joel: Life according to Mason. Mason: Wow. Well, I mean, we could go back to where my recruiting career started way back in the 90s, and obviously the technology was different. But a lot of the fundamentals are basically the same, in terms of the challenge of finding candidates, courting them, getting them to call back, and show up for the interview, you've still got to assess them and all of that. All of those fundamentals are the same. Managing recruiters, and influencing hiring managers, all of that is still fundamentally the same. Mason: Obviously the technology is different, the reach is different, the social media is different. So, we have a bit of a different landscape. The economy, of course, is different. Especially in tech hiring, is very, very competitive right now. Of course, there's questions with the global economy, but at least today, US tech hiring, hotter than ever. Thinking back to the .com talent wars of the late 90s, it's crazier than that back then. Joel: So, back then, the only way that you could get to somebody faster was to dial faster, right? Mason: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, besides the dialing, we were still, we were doing things like YouthNet job postings. Chad : Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mason: The early versions of online career center, and all of that. Joel: Don't forget the Porsche Boxster signing bonuses that you were giving. Mason: Well, Joel, that was because of your Cheesehead days, right? We were talking about that. Joel: I never got a Boxster, though. Chad : Yeah. You got to talk about it though. Joel: Good times. Chad : So, today's entirely different, because- Joel: When you mentioned callback, has that changed to text back? Mason: Well, from what I hear, obviously, text recruiting is an emerging practice, and it clearly has nice high response rates. In terms of the companies that I've either consulted with or work with, I haven't seen it be a widespread practice yet. But, that's not to say it's worth pursuing, so. Chad : So, why not, though? I mean, if you're seeing that kind of, high level of interaction and engagement, why wouldn't every company jump on this bandwagon? Joel: Is it just a time thing? It's just going to take some time? Mason: It takes time for practices to change. And it's one of the key challenges of my role is change management as we adjust processes, adjust systems. So, to switch to a practice of doing more text recruiting, I'm sure plenty of recruiters that are around where I work, they are texting their candidates. I'm sure that's already happening. But in terms of, like, centralizing it onto a managed platform, that's a change in practice, and I don't know how soon that would happen. Someday it would. Joel: And you recently did a survey of recruiters. Mason: Yeah. Joel: I don't know if you want to talk about that or not, but you have some pretty cool insight on what in aggregate recruiters are interested in. And more interestingly, maybe what they don't care about. Mason: So, I did launch an internal survey of the recruiting team at Lyft. Chad : And how big is the team? Joel: It was pretty big. Mason: About 300 folks. Chad : 300 folks. Mason: Yeah. Chad : Jesus! Mason: So, we're recruiting to support a corporate organization of over 5,000 employees, and that's separate from the 2 million drivers that are involved with Lyft. The survey was to, in in my role of taking care of the applicant tracking system, I wanted to get a sentiment of how the recruiters are using the system. And one of the questions we posed was, What other kind of recruiting tools should we be researching to have an opportunity for integration? And just overall what are your interests? And I guess it's a reflection also of, what are the pain points? Mason: And I categorize a bunch of different tools, possibilities. And interestingly, the recruiting team, number-one answer was sourcing tools. So, and that could be reflective of, it's a challenging market to just source candidates, so, they just want help from a tech tool standpoint. But amongst other possible tools that were listed, it beat out, scheduling automation, it beat out candidate discovery from database. And on the bottom of the list, I know you're alluding to this, was the interest in chatbots. Joel: The basement. Mason: Yeah. Chatbots, very little interest from that team. Chad : They didn't give two shits about chatbots. Mason: No. Joel: Now that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that chatbots might put them out of a job, does it? Mason: Absolutely. Disintermediation, right? Chad : Yeah. Mason: It's unlikely- Joel: It's like a truck driver not caring about driverless trucks. Mason: To an extent. I mean, obviously there are automated trucks happening now, right? But, I mean, recruiters... Joel, you didn't ask me, but my opinion is recruiters are not at risk of being displaced for a very long time. Chad : Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tasks. The menial tasks, the repetitive tasks, the scheduling, some of the sourcing pieces, I mean, all of that, that takes a lot of time, can be done better by machine or process, RPA, or whatever it is, right? But, that doesn't take the entire job away, right? Mason: That's correct. That's correct. I mean, there's been definitely opportunities to incrementally introduce automation at certain parts of the process, and that's, I think, that's going to be the story of how automation enters all of our lives. One big question, Lyft is involved with this, is the autonomous vehicles. People are asking, when are self-driving cars really going to happen? Chad : Yeah. Mason: The reality is that certain aspects of driving are already a little bit automated here and there, and that's just going to keep going. And it's going to be a long time, in my opinion, before there is truly, level five automation in self-driven cars. Mason: But, with recruiting, there's always going to be these little process opportunities to automate, like, as you mentioned, scheduling. And I think chatbots have a place somewhere in the process, but whether AI is really going to take over an entire screening process, that's not going to happen for a long time. Chad : It's interesting that scheduling wasn't on the top, because I would assume that... I hate scheduling shit, and if something could automate scheduling for me, I think that would be the top of my fricking list. Mason: Yeah. Well, obviously there has been a number of companies over the years that have tackled automating scheduling, and one of the popular tools is the self-scheduling on Calendly, right? But if you remember some years ago, there was a company called Reschedge, that they were doing some pretty impressive stuff modeling schedule models. If you had multiple interviewers involved, you could get their availability, and then a candidate would say their availability, and the system would generate these models. I know Jobvite created a similar tool, while others don't have that. It's actually a tougher challenge than it seems because what I just tried was kind of the theoretical side of, you just match up everyone's availability, you get a model. Chad : Yeah. Mason: But, there's all kinds of complications. And these tools were trying to handle nuances, like, Oh, this interview should always be first, or this interviewer needs 45 minutes, not 30 minutes. They were trying to accommodate all of that, but in the end- Chad : Them there's room scheduling- Mason: Room scheduling. There's a lot of different factors, and the tools only really went so far. And even just, how do you display 10 people's availability on a screen to then pick what model you want? So, they were impressive tools, but I'm not surprised that they weren't very widely adopted. So, automation... I know it's a very popular topic on this show about how automation will change the future of recruiting. Chad : Yeah. Mason: I take your perspective that it is interesting and innovative, but it will be very slow to be adopted in the industry, just because there's a lot of these nuanced challenges. Joel: We've had Johnny Campbell on the show, a popular recruiter on the circuit, and his quote, which we found very interesting, was, "98% of sourcing can be automated.". What I'm hearing from you is, "Hold on a second", "Not so much", "Your folks have a high interest level in tools for sourcing.". So, what are your thoughts on, sort of, the future of sourcing? Is Johnny wrong? Mason: So, I know there's been predictions about sourcing be, kind of, the bigger segment to be replaced by automation. I see very expert teams being put together to focus on sourcing, because there's still a depth of understanding of what qualifications are needed. A complication of hiring managers having to express what they are really hiring for. Joel: Right. Mason: You can't automate what hasn't been clearly articulated. Chad : Oh, yeah. Mason: And that has to iterate, it has to... There's a whole... So, what I see happening at my employer, Lyft is growing a very talented in-house sourcing function, with specialists taking on different aspects of sourcing. And I'm very impressed with what they're doing. And while the team has an interest in what tools to be used, I think ultimately the professionals, the experts that are being put together, will be the difference maker. And ultimately not, not the technology. They'll need technology to scale and be empowered, but ultimately, it's the experts that are put together. Chad : I think scale is the big one. Joel: Score one for the sources! Mason: Yeah, I think so. [Crosstalk 00:13:05]. Chad : Yeah. I think scaling is the big key, right? Because from a competitive standpoint, you're just talking about how hard it is in the tech, the scope of trying to hire people in tech, well, it's all about who gets to the best candidates faster, and who can nurture them, and so on and so forth. Humans can't scale that way, right? Mason: Right. And we're just talking about the sourcing side. Even on the candidate side, right? Chad : Yeah. Mason: To what extent do the candidates provide structured data that's enough to be matched, right? Chad : Yeah. Mason: The perennial challenge of, is it an eHarmony for Jobs and Tinder for jobs, you know... Are the hiring managers articulating enough details? Are the candidates providing enough details to be matched? And someday, there will be a technological force that will do that, but today... If you think back, what was it... I don't know, 10 years ago, the former CareerBuilder folks built a product called Jobfox. Chad : Yeah. Mason: Jobfox, they had an interesting idea of taking candidates through this, in a decision tree of indicating their qualifications. Chad : Right. Mason: It took an hour for a candidate to just provide- What passive candidate is going to spend an hour to provide that information? Chad : And remember, having- Joel: That's where we note that job Fox is no longer around. Chad : I remember having a very long discussion with Rob McGovern about how, there's no way in hell, this is ever going to go anywhere. Because, you're right. I mean, to be able to get all of the data that you need to, to be able to, hopefully, match somebody up with a job, there's two sides of this. First and foremost, the job description sucks ass, and then we don't have enough data on the candidates, right? So, we can't actually get that match happening. So, I think you're right. It's all about data, and being able to expose that data. But, then we have the whole, kind of, like, LinkedIn. Now, you might be able to get that data, right? The high Q decision. Mason: Right, right, right. So, there will come a day. Chad : Yeah. Mason: Not right away, not tomorrow, but some years out and maybe it's a LinkedIn, or maybe it's a Google, or someone else, that takes the huge dataset, and then creates, kind of, these pre models of who your target hire is. Chad : Right. Mason: And you almost don't care as much about what hiring managers want, or you don't care as much about what candidates say they can do, and somehow you just have enough data to match it up, because there's so much behavioral data to do, so much results data to match up that the system is able to predict. Now, how we get there, I don't know. But it's not today or tomorrow. Joel: What would be something that Lyft strategically would do to attract drivers, that might surprise us? Mason: I want to clarify that my role, and the recruiting team that I support, we focus on the corporate positions. So, we actually are not at all involved with the drivers. Joel: Then I'll rephrase my question. What does Lyft do, in terms of strategically engaging or finding talent at the HQ side of things, that might surprise us, outside of the job postings and things like that? Mason: I'm proud to say that Lyft has a real commitment to inclusion and diversity. And I know that's, kind of, a hot topic, almost a hype topic. Chad : Yeah. Joel: Super hot. Mason: I've seen- Joel: Toasty! Mason: I know the folks who are doing this work, and I've seen what they're practicing, and I'm very impressed by the outreach, the campaigns, and as well as the internal work that's going on to improve practices and culture, and it turns into real hiring results. Now, moving the needle on diversity, in tech, is not an easy task, and I honestly don't know the overall progress, but in terms of the concerted effort, the real commitment by the people who are doing this work, I'm very impressed by that. Joel: Now you're speaking Chad's language. Any specifics around that? On how you're doing that? Mason: I can share one story because we presented this at another conference. Mason: There was an effort to increase women in engineering, in Lyft's New York office. And there was an effort to do a relatively simple email campaign, and there was research done using some LinkedIn tools. And the email campaign drove attendance to a special event held on-site in New York. Chad : Nice. Mason: And it had excellent attendance. I don't know the numbers, but it was well over a hundred attendees, and in a cold February night in New York. And the sourcing team worked on this, and they got some really great hiring results. I can't talk exact numbers, but definitely, they were able to hit some targets in terms of targeting talented women in engineering. Chad : Gotcha. So, do you think that Facebook's, kind of, like, taking away their targeting for jobs is a bad decision? Because, I know that some companies were using Facebook to be able to target females who might've been engineers, or what have you. Mason: Sure. Chad : Do you think that's a bad way to go? Mason: From a tech tool standpoint, it's an unfortunate loss. I'm sure the entire legal dimension that they faced, that I, obviously, I don't have awareness of, but there are other tools available, in which demographic data is a factor to, how do you reach out to candidates? Chad : Right. Mason: So, fortunately... And I'm not aware to what extent Facebook was being used at my current employer anyways. For a long time, Facebook has been trying to muscle and way into recruiting, and I guess they've had some success, but I'm not... Yeah, I mean, Facebook turning off those tools, it is a little bit of a loss to the market. Chad : Yeah. Mason: But there's definitely other choices to get that done. Chad : What about the other big loss? Google hire. Hire by Google. What about that one? I mean, did that surprise you? Because it surprised the shit out of us! Mason: It didn't surprise me, and I know- Chad : Really? Mason: we've tweeted slightly different perspectives on this. Chad : Yeah. Mason: I know you and others have talked about the antitrust concerns that, perhaps, Google is trying to steer around. I take the stance that building a mature ATS takes years and extremely difficult, and that it is a relatively limited economic opportunity, and that in the grand scheme of things, Google may have just decided to, this is not big enough for us to pursue. That's why I'm not surprised. Chad : They just went into enterprise, though. I mean, it's like they just made these decisions, right? Mason: Right. They had just announced approval chains, they just announced more data reporting, and so on. Chad : The sapling, HR, integration, which was supposed to be big, and all these things. Mason: But then you've got to ask the question, why are the Alphabet investment companies not using it? Chad : Yeah. Mason: I mean, they're choosing other applicant tracking systems. Chad : Yeah. Mason: So, Hire by Google, I believe they had a bit of a slow start, but then they more recently got some customers that were happy. But it was very much, kind of, an entry level product. Very rudimentary. And the integration, obviously, with Gmail, Gcal, obviously fantastic. I'm sure they had an integration with search, which I'm sure was fantastic as well. But, an ATS has way more depth and functionality, a mature ATS does, and they were a long ways away from being a mature ATS. Chad : Yeah. Mason: So, maybe that long ways was just a distance too far to commit to. I don't know. Obviously, we're just speculating. Chad : So, you're believing the economic models didn't match up? Mason: That's my opinion. Chad : Yeah. Mason: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously, Google, as a whole, has the resources to stand and fight, but they just chose not to. I don't know. I don't have an opinion about the antitrust angle. So, it could be quite real. That I don't understand. Joel: So, another news item recently, HireVue, getting some private equity and selling some of it's share of the company- Mason: Yeah. Joel: Which to me is a bad sign for video and recruiting. Do you have any opinion on that? Is Lyft using any tools that you're bullish on? What's sort of your overall opinion of video with recruiting? Mason: Yeah, I heard your earlier comments about HireVue. So, the thing about video interviewing, and I think you've described it as, kind of, video in recruiting overall, has it's interest in, obviously, conveying brand and so on, has some value. But, the specific practice of video interviewing, I would take that HireVue was offering not the chance to do a video interview, but to centralize it and manage it on a platform, and whatever value that brings. Because recruiters have been using Skype and other platforms to do individual, de-centralized video interviews for years. I mean, I can even remember back to 1990s- Chad : It's like the texting conversation, right? Mason: Yeah. Chad : It's all centralizing into a platform. Mason: Correct, but the practice of actually meeting a candidate remotely by video... I remember in 96, we were going to the Kinko's shop to turn on the video conferencing tools there to interview candidates there. And then, once it moved to PC's, and then we had Skype, and there's obviously competing platforms to do that. I don't, you know... Video interviewing happens, and it was going to continue to happen, but the value of centralizing and keeping it managed on a platform, I never really got that. Even our hosts here, Jobvite, has a JobVite video tool that is interesting and has value, but it's not the Panacea of- Joel: Video was not mentioned in the keynote today. Mason: It's a part of... I don't even know if it's still a feature, but JobVite video was a way to do, kind of, video prescreens, in these prerecorded answers to pre recorded questions. Chad : Yeah. Mason: That's just not been a typical practice. The handful of companies where I was, when I was consulting with JobVite customers, I would say, Would you be interested in rolling out JobVite video? Most of the recruiters said, Nah, they didn't see the need for it. They would still interview candidates by Skype, but in terms of the structured process, they didn't see value. Chad : I think... So, taking a look at it from a recruiter view, they don't care about all that, but I think from a director, VP, or what have you, that it's all about getting the data into a centralized place, and also risk mitigation, right? You don't think about that, especially when you're... It's like, okay, so what questions did you ask? How did you ask them? Well, I did it over here on Skype. Do you have record of it? No. Right? Same thing with texting and those types of things. I think that's the conversation that we have to have at a much higher level to say, if we want to do all that ML, if we want to do something that longterm is going to work, we've got to have the fucking data, and if we don't have the data, we can't do it. Mason: Right?. Right. Let's combine a few of these past questions. What if Hired by Google had tapped into Google Hangouts Meet, and put in their video conferencing tool, and tied it into the recruiting system to record the interview for compliance purposes. Chad : Yeah. Mason: Maybe throw in some automatic transcription of the text. Chad : Right. Mason: But none of that happened, because I don't know if there's really a demand. And as I'd mentioned earlier, recruiters don't really change their process real easy, and that would've been a massive sea change to have video interviews, centralized, recorded, transcribed, all of that. There's not really... It's all fun to think about the possibility. I don't see the- Chad : So, it's the herding of the cats, is what you're saying? Really. Because they're all doing their own thing. It's like, you've got to get them to change change their routine. Mason: Change is difficult, but the other way is, it's not a pain point, right? Chad : Yeah. Mason: Right? There's not really a true pain point in centralizing video interviews. Joel: What I'm hearing is, virtual reality is the future. Chad : You want those Oculus glasses. JobVite is giving away, as a prize, Oculus glasses, and- Joel: I hope they have some security around that. They may just walk away mysteriously. Mason: That's if you hit up every vendor that's in the expo here, then you get into the draw. Chad : Or we could you do that. Mason: Yeah. Chad : I mean, that's not hard. Joel: What did we miss? Anything you want to talk about? Mason: I'm just glad you guys are here. It's good to see you guys. So... Joel: Anything else? Chad : We're just glad you're here, so we can actually sit down and have this discussion. Mason: Yeah, it's good. Audience member being on the show is awesome. Joel: You mentioned, social media, and to me that was, like, a major wave of change in recruiting, but it's also been an amazing way for people like us to know each other virtually, and have moments like this, where we can talk and feel like we've known each other for a decade, or so. Chad : Stop it, I'm tearing up. Joel: We're getting the feels way too early in the morning. Chad : Getting the God damn feels. It's not even lunch yet. Joel: Well Mason, anyone who wants to know more about you or connect with you that aren't already connected with you, where would you send them? Mason: You can find me on Twitter. Mason Wong, M-A-S-O-N W-O-N-G, on Twitter. Chad : Very nice. Joel: We out. Chad : We out. Ema: Hi, I'm Emma. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad, and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors, because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Lyft #Jobvite #ATS #Texting #Canvas #JobviteText #HirebyGoogle #Google #RNL2019

Jeremy Roberts, VP of Customer Experience from Hiring Solved takes the HR Tech stage with Chad & Cheese to talk data and a shocking new announcement. Do you believe in something so much that you would shut down a product because of that belief? Hiring Solved explains data, HiQ ruling impact, and why they are shutting down Prophet - their Chrome sourcing extension. Nothing but the best from your beer buddies Chad & Cheese :) And of course your friends at Jobcase, who supports great EXCLUSIVE podcast content. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities.​ Jobcase: This Chad and Cheese exclusive, HR Tech podcast is sponsored by Jobcase. Jobcase is on a mission to empower hourly workers to achieve work-life success. But don't take my word for it, listen to the words of a Jobcase customer, "Jobcase, there is no one like them. The urgency, the communication, the data, the scalability by brand and by location. The niche versus the standard, they get it all. Jobcase understands our business and the deliverables of high volume hiring teams," Cat Barcelona, Senior Recruiter, Whole Foods Market. Jobcase: How can Jobcase help your company, your clients, or even partners? Check them out at Jobcase.com/hire. That's Jobcase.com/hire. 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: Start it off? Joel: Yep. Chad: Go ahead. Start it off. Joel: What's up everybody? HR Tech 2019, let's give it up to this rowdy Thursday. Chad: Hey guys. Joel: Hung over crowd. Chad: Vegas. Joel: Very nice. We are the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: And we are loud. Joel: For those of you who don't know, we cover industry on a weekly basis. We do a lot of other fun content. I am your cohost Joel Cheeseman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: Is your mic on? Chad: Is my ... you give me a little bit more? Joel: Hot mic. Chad: Gave me more. Oh there it is. Joel: And- Chad: Man back there is hooking me up. Joel: I'm surprised a lot of return visitors from yesterday's show, which we were going to do the same content and we said, no, that's not going to work. So we wanted to bring on a special guest, so everyone give it up to Hiring Solved former source con head, Jeremy, you're looking at me like I'm doing this wrong. Jeremy: You're doing well. Joel: You want to take it over? Jeremy: No, you're doing well. Joel: All right, Jeremy, do you have a nickname? You need a nickname, I think. Jeremy: I don't have one. Let's not do it off the fly. Joel: Racing cap ramer or something, I don't know what it is. All right. Young blue eyes. Because it's the third day and we're taking it easy, we're just going to tap open some Guinness for today. We have a few extras if anyone's interested and to make it more enticing, these are actually from Ireland. Chad: That's right, Shane Gray from Clinch. [crosstalk 00:00:02:53]. Joel: Can I get a hands up for anyone that wants Dublin Guinness. Jeremy: Is Shane here? Chad: He's outside. Joel: There we go. Chad: Who wants a beer? Woo, there we go. Joel: Let's hear for ... Chad: Guinness, Anyone? Jeremy: She's even wearing a shirt. Joel: My name is Shawna Williams. I am ... Chad: Where's Barry at? Barry wants a beer now. He's over there talking, selling shit. Russell? Joel: From Dublin dude, come on now. Jeremy: He's still on coffee. Joel: All right. All right, so everyone knows who we are obviously. That's really good. Jeremy: That is good. Joel: Give us the elevator pitch on you, Jeremy. Jeremy: My name's Jeremy Roberts. I'm the VP of Customer Experience with Hiring Solved. I've been in recruiting since about 2002 I started off in the agency world and then moved into corporate. I started some sourcing functions with different companies. My last recruiting job, I was a Sourcing Manager for a large RPO and had a team of about 25, and then I moved over to Source Con and I was the Source Con editor and conference organizer for about three and a half years. And from there, I made the transition to the HR tech side and started working with Hiring Solved, so. Joel: Anyone not know Source Con? Sourcing candidates. Okay, good. So we wanted to bring on Jeremy because there are some really hot issues going on right now with privacy, GDPR, data, profiles, collecting data from all over the web. I want a little bit of a historical perspective of what sourcing data used to look like, simplified. And then we'll get into the dark world that it has become. But I want to set the stage for what 2013 looked like in terms of going out on the internet and getting data. Jeremy: Yeah, no that's excellent. So basically when I started in recruiting, I remember being in the office and we had to actually, we would print files and resumes. We had what we call back files, just huge file cabinets full of resumes. Chad: Wow, cabinets. Jeremy: There was not a lot of electronic things going on. Chad: Back in the file cabinet days. Joel: Do you have folders full of women too? Jeremy: Fast forward, and then we had LinkedIn started and there started to be a lot more data online. So then when I joined as a Source Con editor- Joel: You don't want to throw this. Jeremy: When I joined Source Con as an editor in 2013, it was a very manual process. So we were showing people how to go find a profile on a social or professional site, and then how to find them- Joel: Google query type stuff. Jeremy: Right and how to use boolean to find all that person's other social presence and then kind of construct this unified profile, and then go find their contact information. If you couldn't find it, how do you guess it? But it was a very manual process. So then in about 2012, 2013 the people aggregator movement started. And I remember we did a panel at the first Source Con I organized in Seattle in 2013 and Sean Burton from Hiring Solved was there. They were launching their first version of hiring solved. Jeremy: And then we did a panel, people on the panel included like John Bishky from Entelo and Pete Kazanjy from TalentBin. And then we had Dice Open Web, Shravin Goalie was there. And then there were a couple more. So there were a lot of aggregators at that point, and they were all doing the same thing. They were just crawling for public information about people, creating profiles and selling it. And at that point, if you could match a Github profile, to a LinkedIn profile and a Twitter profile everybody was excited. And then if you can find a phone number, they were really excited. So it was pretty innocent at that point. And there was a market for it. Joel: When did LinkedIn sort of look at this automation thing and say, nah, we're not for that, or we're not happy about that? Like tell talk about the early days of LinkedIn's reaction to the aggregation automation game. Jeremy: Yeah. So I started to see them right about this time, they were at every conference I organized, they were in the audience kind of listening to what sourcers and recruiters were doing, and I would write an article and then all of a sudden the URL would change. And, oh, they changed the URL pattern now that doesn't work anymore. Joel: What URL would change? Jeremy: Well, if you would teach someone how to do something on a social network, and then you publish it. Chad: URL patterns, right, patterns. Yeah. Jeremy: So you say, okay, write your search query like this based on this URL pattern, and magically the URL patterns would change. Joel: Interesting. Jeremy: So I started to notice that in like 2013. Chad: So that's your whack-a-mole thing. Joel: The first whack-a-mole was sort of that, right? Jeremy: If you remember like back when Shally would release his job machine, they would release their cheat sheets, those things would work for years. You would print them and pass them around the office and then you can use those- Joel: Yeah, that used to be his business card. Jeremy: Yeah, you could use those Google queries for years. Now pretty much every company with public information, they changed their URL structure and kind of the way everything is out there. So those break in a week or two, you could never circulate something like that for very long. Joel: All right. So the dawning of the automation game starts, LinkedIn isn't happy about it, starts doing some basic whack-a-mole. Jeremy: I think everybody did, yeah. Joel: Okay. Jeremy: Yeah, everybody did. Joel: This was around the time, because then Entelo's original model was, we're going to look at LinkedIn activity and say someone is about to leave the company. Right? So they just updated their profile, they added something or they're searching for stuff. So LinkedIn really early said this isn't cool and Entelo had to change their business model. Am I correct on that? Jeremy: I have no idea on Entelo's business model. Joel: Okay. I seem to remember I covered their launch and there was something like that. Jeremy: I do think there were a lot of people who would say they're going to watch everything going on socially to make those kinds of predictions. Joel: Yep. Jeremy: I don't think any of them, I don't think the people who are not the owner of that data are doing a great job of making predictions based off social data. Joel: Gotcha. So at some point in this you guys had some legal, I know you weren't there with the company at that point. Jeremy: Yeah, I was covering it. Joel: But there was some legal stuff. Talk about that. Jeremy: So I was covering it from the SourceCon perspective, and there are a couple of good articles, and there's Matt Charney wrote one a on Recruiting Daily and then I had some on Source Con and there's an interview I did with Sean before I worked at Hiring Solved right after the case settled. So if you could go find those, that would be- Joel: What were they mad about? Jeremy: Due to the ... Basically they just don't want people crawling their site and repurposing the data. Chad: Hello. Joel: So you guys settled out of court. Jeremy: Right. Joel: Terms not to be disclosed. Jeremy: Due to the terms of our legal settlement I can't go into a lot of detail. Joel: Correct. Jeremy: But one of my favorite things about Hiring Solved, this was before I worked there, they had to destroy the servers and they actually went to the desert, as a part of the settlement they had to destroy the servers and instead of just deleting the data- Chad: Like office space. Jeremy: They went to the desert and blew it up with military grade weapons. Chad: Yeah. C-4, yeah that's cool. Jeremy: It was pretty awesome. So that was a pretty neat way to do it. Chad: Take that god damn fax machine out to the desert. Yeah. Joel: So the birth of more sites like this come about. We have SeekOut, Hiretual. You could go on and on. Jeremy: Yeah, no, it's gotten really popular. Joel: And then there's a case with HiQ, a site that does that similarly, and then they currently won again against LinkedIn to basically have these profiles available to scrape and use. What's sort of your take on that legal decision, does LinkedIn give a shit? They're just going to keep whack-a-mole and make it harder and harder to scrape, we'll get to a point where the data is already there, so no one cares anyway. But talk about the case with HiQ, what LinkedIn's status is now, where are the other companies that are scraping data, how they feel about this decision. Jeremy: Yeah. Well first off, can I go back and then if I don't answer the question? Joel: You're our guest man, you can do whatever you want. Jeremy: Okay, I want to go back a little bit. So 2013, it was pretty innocent. Everybody's just gathering this information, creating unified profiles, adding contact information and selling it. That was just, it was new, it was exciting and everybody was excited about whatever you could provide them. Fast forward, there are all kinds of data breaches on the internet and then wow, these Chrome extensions right after that big breach that was in the news, there are a bunch more email addresses on the Chrome extension out of Poland, or wherever. And so as this has happened, the data is becoming more and more commoditized. If you guys have been paying attention to the news, there's a file that was found on AWS with 400 million cell phone numbers from Facebook. Chad: they tie to profiles, right? Jeremy: Tied to profiles. Chad: Tied directly. Jeremy: Directly to profiles. Chad: So they're not just numbers. Jeremy: Not just phone numbers. Joel: Let me repeat that, 400 million. Jeremy: 400 so that means your cell phone numbers. Joel: There's 325 million Americans. Jeremy: Have been released. Chad: Thanks, Facebook. Jeremy: So not this guy's. Chad: Fuckers. Jeremy: So, anyway, the point of this is, this was because of ... It was a bug in the system. Basically if you put a phone number in, it would say, yes, this phone number belongs to this profile and this person, it would show the person's face and then you can match that with the LinkedIn profile. So now you know the number associated with that profile, and there are about 600 million phone numbers in the US, so you could write a script and bring back every phone number and which profile it's associated with in a very short amount of time. Jeremy: And so at Hiring Solved, we knew about that. Irina Shamaeva, if you guys know Irina made that knowledge ... She basically pointed it out to everybody that that was possible. So Hiring Solved knew how to automate that and we never did anything with it, just because ethically it's a little odd. There are kids in numbers in there and you can't control what people do with it. Chad: Well taking stolen data- Jeremy: That's not stolen. Chad: It's just public. Jeremy: It's public. Chad: Just public. Jeremy: But if it's kind of a gray area, I don't think there was anything illegal about it, it was a bug. Chad: Wasn't illegal. Jeremy: Right. Chad: Man, that just doesn't feel right. Jeremy: It doesn't feel right. Chad: Yeah. Jeremy: So situations like this have, in my opinion, made data, public information like this, it's very commoditized marketplace. At this point, we've got the early people to the game in 2013, the TalentBin, Intello, Hiring Solved. We were all kind of doing it on a more innocent level. At this point it's gotten a little bit shady, and the ones who win are going to be doing things that others might not feel comfortable with. The good news for the consumer is the price is going to go down. Everybody, imagine all the people who heard about that file and are hacking away building a Chrome extension right now in some little apartment. Chad: Yeah. Jeremy: In the Soviet Union. Chad: Everybody's doing it. Joel: I think that's an important message, is that developers, hackers, whatever you want to call them around the world now know how to create databases with this information of cell numbers, profiles, data, where you work, all that information. Jeremy: Oh yeah, well there was a Business Insider article about it. Joel: That's a mainstream publication. That's not some hacker black hat stuff. Jeremy: And then on, I think it was Hacker News, there was a, how to crawl everything. Joel: So are we going to see an influx of these tools of Chrome extensions and sites that you can search all this data for whatever purpose you want? Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. Joel: Absolutely. Jeremy: Absolutely. Joel: Okay. Jeremy: I would say there are a bunch, the price is going to go down. Joel: Okay. So for the companies in this expo hall that make their living on that data, as that gets commoditized- Chad: Where are you at? Joel: Prices get cheaper, but so do profits, profits gets less, right? Jeremy: Yeah, a lot less. Chad: Margin. Joel: Not only your own company, I mean you're in this universe as well. Your decision of what to do about it is one thing, but as a whole, are we going to see more solutions here at HR Tech for finding data? Are we going to start seeing less because there's no money in it? Jeremy: I think you'll see less. I think they're going to start to disappear. So the great thing about being an early entrant to this space, so our founders are, when they gathered, we had about 500 million profiles starting in about 2012, and so they connected those to neural networks. So our algorithms have been learning from that data since 2012. When I joined in 2016 we were complete, all of our revenues came from selling data. But the algorithms used to manage that data were getting smarter and smarter. And then so today, luckily we've transitioned our business model to where we're using the algorithms, the search and match and find me, you know, here's the job description, which person is best for this job based on all of these profiles? I mean it's trained on those 500 million profiles, but now our revenues, the majority of our revenues come from enterprise data, so large ATS and CRM systems and matching and managing that data. Jeremy: So we're no longer dependent on data sales, so it's great to say as- Chad: Big data is everywhere, everybody has big data. Jeremy: Yeah, everybody has it now. Chad: Again, you can't make money off of it. So therefore you guys are looking to make a smarter way, or you are making a smarter way to make that match against the job description versus all the candidates. Jeremy: The job description using all of your ATS. So you've got 3 million in your ATS, 500,000 in your CRM and you've got a 2 million from a legacy ATS. Chad: So it's your database. Gotcha, yeah. Jeremy: So which is the best from all these candidates you already own. That's what we're using it for now. Chad: Gotcha. Joel: Now, you guys have a really popular solution called Prophet that's a Chrome extension that a lot of people use. Are you guys going to keep that around? What's the future of that? Jeremy: I think it's safe to say that we'll be moving on from that. Joel: Really? Jeremy: In the very near future. We'll take care of clients with contracts. But I think as other tools get deeper and richer with data that we're not willing to use, it's like money that hasn't been laundered. Joel: How many sourcers use Profit right now? Jeremy: How many people use Profit? Joel: Yeah. Jeremy: I think 50,000 per month, active users. Joel: Okay. There might be a few pissed off users. Jeremy: Most of them use it for free. Joel: Okay. Fuck them. Jeremy: But I think that there will be other alternatives. If you're just going after a phone numbers and email addresses, I think there are going to be quite a few alternatives. Joel: Let's talk about the privacy, the regulation side of things. So last year Europe implemented GDPR, which were some really strict privacy rules. What was your company's response to that? What does that mean for sourcing there and the new California rule that's as close to GDPR as we have in the States, and do you have any predictions for what the United States will do to follow GDPR? Are we going to be independent from that? Separate from that? What are your predictions there? Jeremy: Yeah. Well first off, this goes back to the public information thing. So if you follow GDPR to a T on the public information side, it's really risky. I mean there's a lot of rights, so holding that information, being the controller of that information is a pretty risky thing. And it also, it creates, you have to get an opt in to deal, there's a lot around that. So it makes the public information piece even more difficult. And then when you're dealing with ATS and CRM data, it makes it a lot more of something that we can handle because we are just the data processor and that situations. So we have a ton of- Joel: What was your company's response to GDPR? Which I thought was interesting. Jeremy: Yeah, so we're GDPR compliant and basically I am going blank on the ... I was in on- Joel: So we interviewed Sean last year at your annual event, and he had announced that, I think it was 29 million profiles that you just said they're gone, because when they're going to deal with this stuff. Jeremy: Yeah, we did, we deleted them and just didn't even want to fight that fight. So other people- Joel: Did other vendors follow suit? Jeremy: No, I mean I think there were some that they would, you know, hey, here's a profile and then you would click on it and it be like- Chad: But that fight is still going to be fought here in the US. Jeremy: Yeah, so it'll happen here too. Chad: Yeah. Jeremy: Yeah. It would be- Chad: Is that going to be just a public dump of all your data and then you're just going to serve off of the ATS data or the client data? Jeremy: Yeah, eventually, that's why we're moving more towards ... Luckily the algorithms are trained, we're having success and yes. So yeah, we would eventually, we're in a position to walk away from it now. Chad: Right, right, right. Jeremy: Absolutely. Chad: So do you think other companies will actually follow that lead? Because this is really kind of a squirrely- Jeremy: If the have a ... At this point we're not dependent upon that revenue stream anymore. Chad: That data. Right. Jeremy: So we can do it right now, and we've been working hard to make that trans ... When I joined in 2016, that was my biggest anxiety because I had been at Source Con reading about GDPR and hearing all of this, and I knew that that we needed to evolve. I call it an evolution instead of a pivot because we didn't ever turn, we just kept growing forward. Chad: You're doing the same thing, it's the data that you're using. Jeremy: At this point now that we don't depend on those revenues, we could turn it all off today and it wouldn't affect us. I think people coming into the space right now within the last two years, crawling Github and get selling phone numbers and things like that, I mean if their revenue stream is 80% dependent upon selling data, they're going to have a hard time making the transition. Chad: So the Seek Outs of the world, they are totally off of LinkedIn and Github. That's where they get all their data and it's all public data. I don't believe they have their own database. Right? Joel: Yeah. I think all those companies that are funded and here in exhibiting, real companies are going to have to follow your example of how do we survive a world where this is a commodity. Chad: Especially if I'm making money just doing that. Joel: And where this is illegal to me. Chad: Yeah. Joel: To me, and correct me if I'm wrong, if anything close to GDPR hits the US, that thing, that's an asteroid T to the industry of sourcing automation. Jeremy: Well it becomes an opt in world. I mean it's back to job boards. No, seriously. Joel: You hear that job boards? You're back baby. Chad: You're back. Jeremy: You're coming back. Joel: CareerBuilder can't hear us. Chad: Job boards are back. Jeremy: They're in the front corner. Joel: 10 by 10 booth in the far corner. Jeremy: And there's only one of them there this morning, I'm sure. Joel: Yeah, there's only one of them there today. That's interesting. Does LinkedIn ultimately, are they the biggest winner in this? Because everyone that's on LinkedIn chose to be there. They're relatively active. In a world of privacy that we're building, to me, LinkedIn is the biggest winner. Am I wrong? Jeremy: Yeah. I mean it appears that way. Joel: Okay. Jeremy: It appears that way. Chad: Aren't they still going to have to jump through some hoops just to ensure even though you put your data there, it's your data and you have to have the ability, public, private, whatever it is. I mean they have some of those things, confidential. Jeremy: Well it will be interesting. You asked about the HiQ settlement. The HiQ settlement basically says they cannot claim control of your, it's- Chad: Our data. Jeremy: They can't own the fact that I am who I am and I have the job title that I have. That is not theirs to control. So what will be interesting to me is do they just make everything private? Because they could do that at this point I would think. I don't know ... Chad: Why wouldn't they? Joel: They don't need Google anymore, right? Jeremy: No. Chad: Yeah. Jeremy: I don't think so. Joel: Search traffic. Jeremy: So I don't know it. Chad: Why wouldn't they? It just makes sense. Jeremy: It doesn't make sense why they would- Chad: Just go ahead and make it a wall guard. A real wall guard. Because they've pretty much shut Google out for the most part. Joel: Now I guess one angle would be if they did that, then your LinkedIn profile wouldn't show up on Google when people searched PHP developers in Seattle or whatever. Jeremy: Right. Joel: So that they would suffer from that. Jeremy: So for SEO purposes, it'd be interesting how much it would affect them to just limit maybe one job title, one company. Joel: Yeah, they could show Google an abbreviated profile, but then, okay. Chad: They'd just making it available on bing. Joel: Bing, yeah, bing and job boards are back baby. Chad: All right, bing. You're going to do it baby. Jeremy: You have to use Explorer. Chad: This is it. This is your one chance. Joel: Do you have any take on Google Hire shutting down? Chad: I was kind of bummed. We used Google hire. Joel: Oh your company used Google Hire? Jeremy: Yeah. Chad: Tell us about that. Jeremy: Rally good. Chad: Tell us about that. Jeremy: And they were- Chad: Seriously, you liked it? Jeremy: It's was a good experience for a company our size. We vetted everything out there and we're pretty, under 40 people. It always worked out well for us. It was easy to share information, the recruiter would put us on teams. Chad: You're a Google shop already. Joel: G suite? Chad: Yeah, G suite. Yeah, so too easy, right? Jeremy: Yeah, so it was easy. They took no training to share a candidate with a manager and walk them through the process request them back. Chad: So why do you think they shut down? Why do you think they're looking to shut down in a year? Jeremy: I don't know. I guess like is cute to them, it's just they have so much money that this whole room, the biggest room in our industry is just kind of cute. Chad: A little bitty [crosstalk 00:25:44]. Joel: Yeah, this is their cafeteria. Chad: Or wash room. Yeah. Jeremy: I don't know, I guess they just, yeah. They just have so much money that it's not worth ... Joel: Do you want to see if there are any questions? Jeremy: It's a very difficult space to understand. I mean people try to simplify what we do but there's so many layers and so many- Joel: I have some insight in this, and I think you might have some insight as well, but what my understanding was they were using a third party to parse resumes within the system and that the relationship with that vendor sort of went away, and Google couldn't parse resumes effectively enough to provide it as a service to hire. And my understanding is parsing jobs is a far easier thing than parsing resumes. Now you guys deal with data and profile data all the time. Does that make sense to you or no? Jeremy: I don't know. Sean, is it easier or harder to parse resumes or jobs? Joel: Jobs versus profiles or resumes? Jeremy: A little harder on resumes. Chad: A little harder on the resumes. Joel: A little harder on the resumes. Jeremy: A little harder on the resumes. Chad: Do they shut down because of that? Jeremy: So there's one vendor we could thank for getting Google out of our space. Chad: That could be. Jeremy: Is that what you're saying? Chad: I don't think I'd say that. Joel: My understanding there were three main reasons. One was the parsing of data. Two was the G suite users, they had less than 5% penetration of G suite users. And the customers they had were more or less small businesses that were a pain in the ass. So it was sort of a business decision to say, do we want to continue to sort of service these folks? And then the third one was the privacy issue, because they ultimately wanted to build a LinkedIn competitor. So yeah, you can search your own resumes, but eventually they wanted to do a web search where you can search the web. Jeremy: Bring back Google+. Joel: Yeah. So once GDPR and privacy happened, they were like, well fuck it. We're not going to be able to compete with LinkedIn because of that data is not ours. So those three reasons sort of built the foundation for them to say, we're fucking out. Jeremy: Hasn't GDPR been around? Joel: And you throw in any throw in, which we talked about on the show was the antitrust issues of like, do we want to be in court with every single country in the world for the next 25 years? Chad: Yeah, end to end. Joel: They said, no we don't, so we're out. Chad: Yeah. Not worth it. Might as well cut that limb off for little HR because search is where it's at. Google for jobs, my beers out. So I'm done. So I'm going to go ahead. We're at time. I'm going to cut this off and I want to give away some tee shirts. So if you guys want to pop up. Joel: Awesome. Chad: Awesome Chad and Cheese t-shirt. Feel free, to come get it. Thanks guys. Jeremy: Thank you guys. Joel: First come, first served. Chad: Thank you, Jeremy. Joel: Thanks, Jeremy. We out. Oh, we have Tau Route tee shirts too. 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 pair that are extra because, well, I'm extra. For more, visit ChadCheese.com. #data #HiringSolved #Matching #social #HRTech #LIVE

RECORDED LIVE from the 4th Street Bar in Columbus, IN. Joel gnaws on tasty 4th Street buffalo wings while Chad drinks a 4 Day Ray and they talk: - HackerRank playing it smart with LinkedIn - Jobiqo finds them a sugar daddy - Recruit Holdings believes in Blockchain - Talenya joins the "bot craze" - The Irish & Techfynder are Comin' to America - Joel blames millennials, while Chad blames robots ...and more on this weeks episode of The Chad and Cheese. Brought to you by those lovely people from JobAdX, Sovren, and Canvas. BIG APPLAUSE! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities. Jim Stroud: Jim Stroud here, and you are listening to my favorite podcast. I listen to it every day, it's amazing, it's wonderful, it's... okay, help me out. Who are you guys again? Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: All right, recording and ready when you are. Joel: Finishing my celery stick here. Chad: That makes you feel good. Joel: These are some monster, steroid, Columbus, Indiana chicken wings man. Chad: Oh, yeah. We don't do shit wrong. Joel: This is like ostrich wings. Chad: Yeah, we do it right here in Columbus, Indiana. Joel: Obviously. All right. Chad: Other than Mike Pence. Joel: All right. Here's the intro. Ready? You should throw in that first part. Anyway, what's up Chad bots and Cheese heads? I just made that up. Chad: That's pretty good, I like it. Joel: We're recording from a bar in Columbus, Indiana today, so that means the WiFi is sparse but at least the beer is cold and the wings are hot. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Four-Day-Ray-Beer-In-My-Hand Sowash. Joel: I like it. On this weeks show, HackerRank gets LinkedIn, that's a verb and a noun, boys and girls. Jobiqo gets paid and it's all the millennials fault. Obvi. Grab a local brew and join us for some podcasting goodness. We'll be right back. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent 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 twenty 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: And we're back. Joel: And we're back. Chad: I love it, I love it. So NCAA football, I've got to start off with this. Sackett is still in the fetal position, over in the corner after the Buckeyes whipped the shit out of Sparty, dude. Joel: I totally missed giving him shit for that. I totally spaced. Chad: That's why we have a podcast, so we can do it here together with beer. Joel: A podcast. Chad: Podcast. Joel: That's all right, we'll be routing for them against Michigan here soon. Chad: Yeah, no, I mean, either way it's good because we're going to beat both of them. Also, last weekend Iowa played the team up north, so I texted Adam Godson from Cielo, the tech god over at Cielo, and I'm like, "Dude, are you glued to the TV?" Chad: And he was like, "No, I'm not quite glued to the TV." And he sent me pictures from the fourth row in the big house. He was at the game with the family fourth row, in the big house. Joel: Fourth row? There's like a million rows in that stadium. Chad: Yeah, no, he was like on a the field, dude. That was good shit. But it was hilarious because I just texted him, he's a Hawkeye fan, you know, "What are you doing Hawkeye fan?" It was a boring ass game so hopefully they had a good experience. Joel: It was close at least. Chad: Close but boring as fuck. Joel: Boring as hell. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Good old-fashioned defensive battle. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Big time. Chad: Ready for shout outs? Joel: We're ready for shout outs, I guess. Chad: So the very first shout out has to go to my daughter, Ema- Joel: Nice. Chad: Who is turning 18 and she has the best birthday ever. It is binary and it symmetrical. It is October 11, 2001. Which is 10, 1-1, 01. Amazing. Happy Birthday, Ema. She's going to be enjoying her new super Beetle, or Beetle, I'm sorry. Beetle Turbo- Joel: That is kind of a super Beetle. I've driven in it. The tinted windows are nice. Chad: Yeah, it is the mac daddy of all Beetles. Joel: If she wants a career in drug dealing, she can do it. Chad: We don't need that, thanks. We don't need that. So happy birthday, Ema. Joel: I'm going to give a shout out to our buddies at Candidate.ID for giving you a shirt and neglecting to give me a shirt. Chad: Oh, you didn't get one? Joel: That's some bullshit. Chad: Oh, well it's a hoodie. Joel: I have to attribute it to my golf clap that I gave Gordon in their firing squad debut. Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Chad: Not to mention, I am now an investor from the whole crowdfunding thing. So not only did I give them the big applause, I also gave them money because I believe in the organization. So of anybody hears me talking good about Candidate.ID, I mean, let's just be transparent- Joel: Full transparency. Chad: I want them to do incredibly well. Let's talk about that. Joel: Now, the shirt wasn't in response to being an investor. Chad: No. Joel: Okay. All right. Chad: It was in response to- Joel: For being Chad Sowash. Chad: Meeting Tim Sackett. Actually had this fishing vest thing that he had on during HR tech that had a Candidate.ID patch on it and I was making fun of him and then a few days later I get a hoodie in the mail. So that's how we do things. We talk about beer, we talk about swag, and it comes in the mail. Big shout out to Zach Jeans, VP of marketing from AbsenceSoft. Believe it or not, that is his name, Zach Jeans. He was really geeked out to meet us in Vegas. Joel: Is that J-E-A-N-S? Or G-E-N-A-S? Chad: Yeah, just like the jeans I'm wearing right now. So he was really geeked out to meet us live in Vegas and he's been giving us Twitter love all week. Thanks, really appreciate the love, Zach and moreover, thank you for your service, brother. Really appreciate it. Joel: I'm going to give a shout out to Cleveland, Ohio, which I am visiting this weekend. I know we do have some listeners up there. Chad: Home of Evergreen Podcasts. Joel: Evergreen Podcasts. Yes, good segue into that. We're taking the family though. The Browns are in town, but I will not be attending the game, so I'm a bit torn about this whole thing. Chad: Oh. Oh. Joel: Which means they'll beat Seattle on a last second field goal by one point. Chad: Let's go over something real quick. The Browns aren't beating anybody right now. Joel: Lies. Chad: Yeah. Unless it's the Jets, which they've already played and beaten. Joel: Without Sam Darnold, by the way. Chad: Without Sam Darnold. Oh, man. So, yeah, big shout out to Evergreen Podcasts. Once again, we're part of the Evergreen network. Go to Evergreenpodcast.com. Check them out, they have a huge selection of podcasts. Joel: Soon to grow bigger. Chad: Soon to grow bigger in the HR space. That's right. Moving on, big shout out to Chris and Ryan from The Gathering and Tom, JZ, Raquel and Alise from SmashFly, for supporting the Cult Brand Podcast. We are getting rave reviews from the talent that we have, interviews and the stories from those things man. They are fucking awesome. If you haven't listened to them, just go to Chadcheese.com, click on podcast, look for anything that start with Cult Brand, listen. Listen all day. Joel: By the way, published this week was the "What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas," basically campaign. Interviewed the chief marketing officer of Vegas tourism and whatever. Chad: Yeah, she's pretty much the CMO of Vegas. Joel: Pretty much it, yeah. So if you love that campaign, you got to listen to that podcast. Shout out to Brian Blanford, who is a national recruiting director at Bankers Life. Big fan of the show, he reached out to me and said, "Keep up the good work." Chad: Nice! Joel: Brian, we will. You keep listening, we'll keep talking. Chad: Yes. And for everybody that's out there, love the show, hate the show, doesn't matter, give us reviews. Give us reviews. We really appreciate those. It's good, we like to hear how we're doing. Joel: If you don't have haters you're doing it wrong. Chad: That's exactly right. Can't be a Cult Brand unless you're pissing somebody off. Big shout to Amy- Joel: Look at you with the balls claiming us a Cult Brand. Nice. Chad: That's how you do it. Big shout out to Amy Miller. This week, she actually helped me better understand what mansplaining was. She tweeted a t-shirt that said, "I survived the great mansplaining debate of 2019." And I responded with, "As a dumb white dude, where does the line of mansplaining actually start and end? What areas should I just shut the fuck up? I know everything is a fun answer, but really what is mansplaining? Help me out." And her and several other females, thank you very much, actually helped me out. Joel: Shout out to Teg Grenager. Chad: Oh, Teg! Joel: Many will know him. I'm inspired by your uncommon t-shirt. Which is a quality t-shirt, by the way. Chad: I love that man. Yes. Joel: But as you know, Uncommon is getting out of the game. Teg is no longer CEO but he sent me a nice message saying "Hey, I really enjoyed hanging out with you guys and working with you, I'll miss you. Sincerest, Teg." Joel: So whatever Teg does probably will not be in our space ever again. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: But whatever he does, good wishes to him. Good guy, best of luck. Chad: He is a good guy. Last but not least for me, I realized after this Amy tweet, I kind of thought a little bit deeper about what we do. Joel: You thought deeper? Chad: Yeah, weird huh? Joel: Wow scary. Chad: I believe we go above and beyond to try to bring diverse speakers onto the show, and just this week, every single interview, all three podcasts have been female leaders. Angela Hood from This Way Global, Dama Aberg Cobo from Collegia.io, she was on Firing Squad and then we just talked about Cathy Tull, who was the former CMO of Las Vegas on the Cult Brand Podcast. So really happy that not only can we get our voices out there, but we can elevate other people's voices. That's what makes this so much fun. Joel: Shout out to these wings that I need to eat and let's get on to our travel schedule. Chad: All right, you and I as a rule, we don't promote shows that we aren't attending. Joel: Not usually, no. Chad: Yeah, mainly because if we're promoting our listeners believe that we're going to be there. And they're looking for us to be there, get t-shirts, high fives, smacks in the face, whatever they want to do. Which is cool. We're going to make an exception to the rule this week and promote Fairygodbosses, largest community for women. They're hosting their third annual Galvanize event, making women's resource groups powerful. This is a summit in New York City on October 29th and 30th. The theme of this year's summit is engaging men as allies. Joel: I like it. Chad: This is one of the reasons why. I mean, we're not going to be there, guys. Joel: And they're going to engage us as allies but we're going to be out of town. Otherwise, we might be engaged. Chad: Yeah. Unfortunately, we're not going to be around. If you're in and around New York City- Joel: Lot of people are. Chad: Yeah, check out Galvanize, man. This is good stuff. And again, if you're a company who is talking about diversity in the workforce and you're just talking and you're not doing, this is a good opportunity to actually go to an event to learn how to do it. Stop talking, do it. Joel: Yeah, and if you haven't heard our podcast with Romy, co-founder of Fairygodboss, I encourage you to do that. Chad: That's right. Where are we going next? Joel: Paris. Chad: Paris, UNLEASH World in Paris. Joel: [Foreign language 00:12:09]. Chad: Chad and Cheese brought to you by SmashFly. Joel: Love those guys. Chad: Technology. You got to love it. So October 22nd at 11:45 Paris time, we're on the influencer stage at the Paris Convention Center, again, brought to you by SmashFly. We're going to have a panel with Chris Ray, group head of recruitment from Sainsbury's, Brandy Ellis, head of recruitment marketing from the SmashFly, and Adam Yearsley, global head of talent management over at Red Bull. And Adam just wrote a pretty cool article called HR's Talent Management Working with Marketing as a Force Multiplier. We'll pepper him with questions and the rest of the panel with questions around that. Because talent acquisition has been really bad about engaging. And creating really a narrative to engage marketing, that's something that we need to do much better. Joel: This panel's going to rock. Chad: This is going to be some fucking awesome stuff. Joel: You called them The SmashFly, are they like The Facebook, where they used to be The SmashFly and then they had a domain battle? Chad: No, it's like The Ohio State University. Yeah, okay. I just threw that in there. Joel: Okay. My bad. Chad: I'm sure SmashFly marketing doesn't like when I do that. Joel: I got to check to The SmashFly and see where it goes, dot com. Chad: We're going to be in Arizona in November for ICIMS Influence. There's so much going on. Joel: Hot yoga. Chad: Hot yoga. Joel: I just threw in hot because it's Arizona. Chad: Goat yoga. Yeah, so we're going to be there in December on December 6. We're going to be at Talent Net live in Dallas, where I believe, I think we've come to terms with we're going to do the Naughty and Nice Show. Joel: I think we're doing our much celebrated Naughty or Nice episode live from Dallas. Chad: You know what I think we might need to do? We might need to pull in a guest for that one so we can make fun of somebody. Joel: Okay. Any thoughts? Chad: I don't know, we're going to have to think hard about that. If you're going to Talent Net in Dallas and you want to be on the show- and you want to be on the Naughty or Nice edition, I say you come up on stage. Joel: Sassy Texan, I think we got to get. Chad: And you want to be on the Naughty or Nice edition, I say you come up on stage. I think I'm going to call Carrie Corbin out right now. Joel: Oh. Chad: I think I'm going to call out Carrie Corbin. Joel: I wasn't going to bring Carrie up but you did for me, so good. Chad: If you think you can hang with the Chad and Cheese on stage talking about who's been naughty and nice in 2019, I say you take the challenge and you come up on stage. Joel: This pretty much guarantees that an Amazon Echo is going to be on the stage because we are going to give McDonald's application process a spin if Carrie's on stage. Chad: You know it, you know it. All right. We ready for topics? I know you're ready for more wings. Joel: These are the biggest... I swear to God, what are you pumping the chicken with in Columbus? Chad: Dude, I told you. Here in Columbus, Indiana, we do things right. Joel: Oh my god. Let's get to HackerRank. Chad: HackerRank integrates with Talent Hub. Last week, we talked about Talent Hub and I'm still not convinced that Talent Hub has a differentiator in the market. Just because of the whole haiku ruling. Joel: Not even the 650 million LinkedIn members? Chad: No, I don't, because guess what? Those are public members, therefore, available to any database that's out there. So what's the big differentiator? I love HackerRank making it smart for people and easier for people to use their system inside of Talent Hub is you're using Talent Hub. But what's the market differentiator? Joel: Well, you and I both have talked a lot about platforms, one platforms to rule them all. Chad: I agree, yeah. Joel: I think we're both in somewhat of an agreement that if you're going to have a platform for everyone, you have to have a vibrant app store. Chad: She's going to get me another beer. Joel: Where you can use third party apps, access them in a nice, integrated fashion. So I think for a long time, LinkedIn obviously has a ton of people, a brand that people trust, Microsoft behind them. But to me, good for HackerRank and I encourage people to go listen to the interview with their CEO because it's great. Good for them but to me, it's a better signal that LinkedIn is going to take seriously third party vendors providing their solutions on their platform. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And they would probably be about the last that I would consider actually doing it. So I'd love to hear either LinkedIn or HackerRank, what it takes to be integrated, I assume there's a process, there's money involved, all that bullshit. But for LinkedIn to take the step toward third party apps in their solution, says that they're on the right track to being a one service solution, or at least as close as one-stop-shop as you can get in our industry. Chad: So think of it from this standpoint, I think incredibly smart from HackerRank because companies don't want to hop from platform to platform to platform. They want to use one core platform and they want an integrated solutions, whether that's one solution or a customized solution that's integrated, Smart for HackerRank, no question. What's the big upside here with respectively the integration of Github, along with HackerRank. Because Microsoft owns Github. Joel: Well, do you have the techies, now you have the tech testing system. Chad: Yeah so if you have the techies and you can integrate that and I'm not saying that Github is integrated into LinkedIn, because it's not. But what's the opportunity for LinkedIn and, or HackerRank through this partnership to really blow this out of the fucking water. Joel: Let me just say now that LinkedIn buying HackerRank, is going to be a 2020 prediction from me two months before we do the prediction show. Chad: That was my next point. What's that I smell? Joel: Acquisition. Chad: Yeah, I think I smell acquisition. Yes. That's what I smell. I smell acquisition. Joel: Feels a lot like techs recruit integrated with ISIMS or Canvas integrating with Jobvite. And what a great way to test drive a company, integrate their stuff and then make sure it works. Chad: Yeah, guys okay, if you're a startup out there and you don't understand what the fucking recipe for acquisition is. First and foremost, pay attention. Second, it's very simple, do exactly what we're seeing here with HackerRank. Get a deep integration, prove that people want to buy your shit and then guess what? Acquisition. Joel: Yeah. By the way, your stuff is already integrated into the motherboard. Chad: Fucking simple. Yeah. Dude well I mean, we take a look at Canvas integration to Jobvite. But then Jobvite buys three players that are big acquisition targets. And then guess what? It was like six to nine months and they ruled out a total integration with all three of those products. Joel: Shocker. Chad: It's a shocker that it happened that fast but it obviously, again, from a roadmap's standpoint. This is one of the problems that I had with Uncommon is that they didn't focus on these tight integrations, deep integrations. This is how you get acquired or die. Joel: Yeah. And one step further, if you are a startup that wants to be acquired, make sure you integrate with the most likely to buy you ATS. Chad: Yes. Joel: If you're a text recruiting solution, don't worry about integrating with Jobvite or ISIMS. They've already been there, done that. Pick one that doesn't have your solution and your odds go up exponentially that you're an acquisition target. Chad: Let's talk about a- Joel: Jobiqo, Jobiqo, Jobiqo- Chad: Jobiqo. Joel: A miracleque. Chad: Jobiqo. Joel: Jobiqo. Chad: Jobiqo. So they sell a majority stake to Ross Media International. Joel: How majority was that stake? Chad: Okay, first off RMI is a huge investment firm in Europe. They sold, they being Jobiqo, sold 50.1%, which means a majority right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Because that .1%- Joel: That's commitment. Chad: But my question was, why not fucking 85%, why not pull a Chris Foreman? Why not pull a Chris Foreman, do 85%, 90%, get paid and then you still have money in the system, so you have some controlling factor. What are you thoughts? I actually talked to Martin Lenz earlier, this morning. Joel: You're on this way more than I am. Chad: Yeah, yeah. What's your thought? Joel: Well, my first thought was this sounds like my wife when I tell her, we're a 50, 50 partnership. She's really nice and goes... well, it's actually like 50.1 when I know it's really more like 99 to 1. Anyway Jobiqo to me has always been this site that's hanging around. They've clearly grown organically, slowly, I don't know much about them. Chad: Totally organic. Joel: To me this sort of says, they did it right, they grew the right way, somebody took notice, and they're obviously not giving away a lot of control even though they are giving a way control. Chad: But the question is why? Why not give a way... I mean why- Joel: Timing? I don't know, maybe. Chad: So this what I got from Martin Lenz, who's actually the CEO. We had a conversation this morning. Guy is awesome, we've known him for a while. It's pretty simple and it make sense. If you were a company that believes there is a ton of growth in this area- Joel: Break it down. Chad: You want as much of shares as you can. Joel: Sure. Chad: You don't want to sell them off because again you're just selling off the prospect of earning more money later. They now have 50% almost of the business, and at the growth opportunity is huge. From my understanding RMI wanted controlling investment. They wanted an opportunity to be able to, if things are going off the rail, get in and take over. Totally understand that but Jobiqo wanted the opportunity to actually have flash cash to go and start getting guys like Richard Essex. Richard Essex is an old broad being guy who knows the industry, has major connections. Chad: This kind of money allows them to make those types of moves. Before if they wanted to do something different more than likely they would have to develop. Now, they have the cash to prospectively acquire. Joel: Yep, and by the way, again to Uncommon as you're wearing their t-shirt again. To me, Uncommon was a little bit of a canary in the coal mine in terms of the opportunities that are going to present themselves. One as the cycle of money that came in around '16, '17, '18, starts to turn over but also if you're looking at a looming recession, which I think a lot of people are, number one, you want a little bit of cash to keep your powder dry. And number two, you want a little cash to go clearance shopping so when these Uncommons, whoever else go on the chopping block- Chad: Buy them up. Joel: Become available that you buy them up on the cheap and then you look like a genius two, three years from now when the economy's back on its feet. Chad: You are a genius. Joel: Sure. I mean it's a playbook that's well-known but at least you're reading the playbook. Chad: From my standpoint, I like this move. The overall first question was why did they keep so much on the stake side of the house? It make sense. If they think that there is room to grow especially in Europe, Amalia, what have you, then this is awesome. They are positioning themselves as more than a job board type of company. They have programmatic, they have matching, they have all those different things and I think it's interesting because how many job boards did we see at HR Tech? Joel: Not many. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Less than 10. Chad: And I believe the job board industry understands that, I hope, hello Monster, we're talking to you. CareerBuilder, sell your shit or do something better. You have to evolve with that data that you have. You have shit ton of data, you have to evolve into something bigger and better. That's all there is to it. You can't just be a job board. Joel: I will say Jobiqo's PR should have released this during HR Tech. Chad: Yes. Joel: Bad on them for missing that window because you and I would have gone. Chad: I don't think they were actually at HR Tech. They were in Austin the week before, but I don't think they were at HR Tech. Joel: Yeah, I just think they missed an opportunity. This is always a slow show because everyone spends their load during HR Tech because people like us talk about them. So Jobiqo probably could've gotten a little more legs from this. Although you could argue, hey, there's no other news, we're talking about it. Chad: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I think last week we wouldn't of talked about this Joel: Crazy Europeans. Chad: So much going on but I think they were incredibly smart and waiting until the whole wave was done and then they're like drop that shit when you know there's going to be a void. Joel: Fair enough. Chad: As we talk about waiting, I'm going to go ahead and take a few swigs and a bio break. Joel: I may need a bio break. Chad: And we'll be back right after this message Joel: Let's hear from one of our beloved sponsors. Chad: And we love them. 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 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 sovren.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren: Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: And we're back. Joel: Shout out to the creator of the moist towelette. Otherwise, how would we eat our buffalo wings? Chad: And that's the word you can't say around Julie= Joel: Moist or towelette? Or moist towelette? Chad: Moist. Yeah, she cringes every time. If I say it I get smacked. Joel: Does she crave a dry cake on her birthday instead of a moist cake? Chad: Yes, she would like just the wet towelette. Joel: Fair enough. Fair enough. And shout to the Columbus Indiana all still Camaro that just drove by. 80's hashtag. Chad: Love it. Companies that got money, making investments, that kind of thing, this whole segment, we're going to rapid fire through. First and foremost, Talenya Joel: Talenya. Chad: Receives 6.5 million, which is up.... they're up now, total funding 9.5 million in total funding. The company's develop bots powered by, AI go figure, which serve as virtual recruiters capable of locating suitable talent for open roles by gathering and processing information from hundreds of online sources. Joel: This is Gal new company. Gal was real match before he moved on and yeah, it's been a while that I've talked to him about this company. Chad: These are talent sourcing bot. Joel: Yes, I'm trying to remember exactly... looks like marketplace for retired recruiters or people who are retired in general to learn recruiting. Chad: Now. Joel: That's what it used to be. Chad: Yeah, it's a matching platform. But what they've dones is I feel like they're using the chatbot frenzy, the whole, oh I need a chatbot, I need a chatbot. How do we switch matching, which is really cool and turn this matching into a quote unquote bot? I don't think it's any different. Joel: Clearly a little pivot from the original idea. Chad: Yeah, so with a very small amount of engagement in manual work, this bot will help companies find candidates that are qualified for the position's that they actually put in the system. Joel: Gal has a track record of success. Whatever he's doing now I have some trust that it'll work. Chad: Talenya. Joel: Talenya up in ya. Offices in Israel and Hoboken and can you name the most famous Hoboken resident? Chad: No. Joel: Frank Sinatra is a proud son of Hoboken, New Jersey. Chad: Oh blue eyes. Joel: Stick that in your cap and smoke it. Chad: I love me some Frank Sinatra. Joel: Some old blue eyes. Chad: Old blue eyes. Moving on, Recruit a company that we all know, hate and or love. Joel: Indeed's parents, Glassdoor's parents. Chad: Invests in- Joel: More money than God. Chad: Watching, what do you thinks going on here? Joel: Well, to me it's a little bit of a boat of confidence on block chain. He says hey, we're going to dip our toe in this thing, see what it's about. To me it's just smart business. Look, you see trends, these guys have more money than God, let's throw some money at this thing and see what happens. Now, this is a none staffing company that they're investing in. I'm assuming they're hoping that the knowledge base and the solution could transfer over to employment otherwise they're really out of their element in this move. This has to translate into employment somehow. Chad: The name of the company is NODE Anstalt. It was created earlier this year. A Liechtenstein-based firm that works in the block chain space that focuses on scalability. This will help promote adoption. I think they're so early that recruits they have a chance to actually guide them, navigate them to a specific area in and if you can get scalability in other sectors can we do that in our sector for a background checks. Joel: For sure, and by the way Recruit has an actual tech fund dedicated to block chain. So they're kind of serious about this and they have some fairly smart people. Chad: Yeah, they should be. Joel: That have identified this as an opportunity to pursue. Let's watch this block chain space. Chad: Irish IT Recruitment Platform called Techfynder. Fynder with a Y. Remember- Joel: We need Shane here to help translate Techfynder with a Y. Chad: We were in Ireland and we were driving around Ireland. Everything was .I-E. They would always end the commercial with whatever the domains are which were . I-E. Joel: By the way you driving in Ireland is more like you drag racing in Ireland compared to the other drivers. Chad: It was fucking awesome. Joel: The two foot wide roads are really fun there in Ireland. Chad: Of course I'm going to do it's coming to America. Joel: Neal Diamond. Chad: Techfynder Joel: Sinatra, Diamond, who else we going on this podcast? Chad: Headquartered in Dublin, it's intended to open office in Austin, Texas early next year. Joel: Everybody's doing it. Chad: Also targeting opportunities in Germany and Britain. This is a market place for IT people. Joel: Yep. Chad: Really what it is. Companies need IT contractors, where you going to go? You're going to go to LinkedIn, you're going... where you going to go? You're going to go to Techfynder with a Y. Joel: And you know what country needs tech people to be connected with companies? Chad: Every country. Joel: Well, the US in particular. Techfynder not currently in our great land but assuming this fund or this new interjection of energy and people we'll spur them to come over to the states. As always, the Irish are coming. Chad: Yeah, the Irish are coming. Joel: Yeah, on my way back from Vegas, I watched Gangs of New York again for the umpteenth time. If you want a little less history lesson kiddies and some great acting, check out Gangs of New York. Chad: Yes. Joel: By the way The Irishman coming out Martin Scorsese, it's just epic. I can't wait for that. Chad: Yes, can't wait. De Niro, yes. Joel: For sho. Chad: Emplify closes 15 million- Joel: Boom. Chad: In a round of funding. Joel: An Indiana company, which means that's more like 90 million dollar investment if they were a Silicon valley company. Chad: That's exactly right. The cost of living here in Indiana versus Silicon Valley- Joel: Very competitive. Chad: Very smart. Very smart. Joel: That's why Jobvites moving here. Chad: Yes. Building a culture that attracts, engages, and retains talent. This is more of an employee base. More on the internal employee side of the house. This reminds me of the Cult Brand Pod that we just recorded this week with Douglas Atkin. Joel: Yep. Chad: Former head of global community at Airbnb called, Don't Fuck Up the Culture. If Emplify understands how to position and market this, I believe it could be a winner. So don't fuck it up. Joel: Yep, so first of all, with Emplify, they're giving us the cold shoulder to date. We'd love to come in and visit, we'd love to come in- Chad: Do they not like beer? Joel: I don't know what the deal is. Chad: I don't get it. Joel: By the way they're in my neck of the woods. They're in Fishers. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: So shout out to Emplify. They're PR of marketing team. You have a great resource in your backyard, you might want to reach out and say high to us. Chad: Just a quick hint, canvas our backyard, death match acquired. Next question. Joel: Second things on these guys that I find interesting is they bring a human element to their service. They have the data side, the engagement, tracking all of that stuff. But don't they have experts come in and help you read the numbers and then have an action plan to basically improve engagement with your company. Chad: That's great, sounds expensive and not to scalable. Joel: Sounds real expensive and scalable. Chad: Not very scalable but most companies start out that way. Joel: Which is why they only got 15 million and not 50 million. Chad: In most companies start out that way. They do things that aren't scalable and they figure it out later. So I would expect them to figure this out. Joel: Yeah, they need to create Empy the engagement robot that can partner with Tengi to wheel in a robot to your company and help you improve and get engagement. Chad: There is some puzzle pieces right there guys. Jesus. Joel: We're putting together the whole puzzle of being this strict. Chad: I think we need to take another break. Joel: Another break. I'm almost empty. Chad: Okay. Joel: Bear me. JobAdX: Nope, naw, not for me. All these jobs look the same. Aww, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just have heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it, we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions. Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits with JobAdx. JobAdX: 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 1505 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. JobAdX: Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinusatjobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdx. Chad: And we're back. Joel: We're back. We're rehydrated. Chad: You have a Facebook story that I think is epic and just- Joel: Epic? Chad: And pretty much on par with the stupidity of fucking Facebook these days. Joel: Well, I wouldn't call it epic by any means. I would call it a little bit of a cautionary tell. Here's my story. I run this little start up that's some listeners may know about called Ratedly. So Ratedly targets employers. It's a software solution for them. I from time to time use Facebook and other advertising platforms to market Ratedly. Chad: Good medium. Joel: So we had a blog post out recently, the title was essentially Why You Should Stop Ignoring Your Online Employment Reviews, or something like that. The engagement has been really good on LinkedIn and other places. When I see a blog post that gets good engagement, I say let's boost this baby and see if we can get it out there even more. Chad: Boost this baby. Joel: Boost this baby. So I go to Facebook, which we know now has... if it's an employment opportunity, a mortgage, loan, or whatever, you have to specify that this is a specific to those categories. Now, although I target companies and employers, I don't employ anyone, there are no jobs on my site, it's not a job board by any means. Chad: This is an article. Joel: It's a blog post. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's targeting employers, I'll give them that. But anyway I submit and I get denied immediately. I think well okay this is just the algorithm saying employment or whatever keywords are in there saying hey, this is banned. I go okay well I'm going to appeal this obviously. Any thinking person would see this and go this isn't a job. Chad: Exactly. Joel: This isn't a job opportunity and oh yeah there aren't any jobs on this site. Chad: Unless you're an intern and still looking around. Joel: This is a B to B solution for companies. Chad: And it's an article. Joel: I submit the appeal and very quickly soon thereafter, get denied twice by saying this looks like it's an employment opportunity, you need to specify it as such, blah, blah, blah. Chad: Makes no sense. Joel: So my ad is now on LinkedIn. You're not getting my money, Facebook, sorry. Chad: Okay, here's one of the reason why I think... this is an epic fucking fail. Julie and her company, Disability Solutions, they're looking at actually driving candidates to a hiring event and these are individuals with the disabilities. Joel: Yep. Chad: To a hiring event with smart recruiters. Guess what Facebook does? Joel: Denied. Chad: Denied. Yeah, we don't want to help individuals with disabilities. Facebook does not want to help people with disabilities, they don't want to help you target the people that you should be pulling into your organization. This once again is a major flaw and epic fail from the motherfuckers over at Facebook because this I kid you not this has been a great resource for companies like Julie's, Disability Solutions. Joel: Totally. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That's the sad part. Chad: Yes, that is the epic fail that's happening here. Joel: Facebook is I think a fantastic medium to get in front of women, people of color, diversity. The downside, the dark side of this whole ruling in decision is that companies like Julie's and companies that want to get in front of these people with jobs, that's a whole different issue but cannot do it anymore because of this ruling. Chad: We're going to end on your favorite subject of all time. Joel: Yes. Chad: Millennials are to blame. Millennials are to blame. Joel: Millennials are clearly to blame for a lot of things. But this is from a story from CNBC, the headline is there's a theory that stingy millennials are to blame for this sluggish economy. Well, US personal savings rate is rising and it's holding back the economy. This is from Raymond James, savings rates... this is a quote from Tavis McCourt, I like that name, Tavis. It's like Travis but not. He wrote quote, savings rates are now high leading to excess supply seemingly everywhere in the economy. Joel: Basically millennials living at home with mom and dad aren't spending any money, they're saving money. How dare they go out and spend some money, get this thing cranking again and let us blame Gen-Z for the next bout of problems. Chad: We're talking about a generation that is strapped with debt right out of the fucking gate. If they're getting paid more money and not in debt up to their fucking eyeballs already, then they're going to buy cars, they're going to buy houses, but guess what? They aren't. That's the big issue. When I started college, $40,000 for the military. That would easily get me through four years. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It was not a problem. Today, four years, you're looking at getting strapped with over $100 K. Not to mention car prices have skyrocketed as well and wages have not kept pace. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to be smart. They're really looking at the market and they're living in mom and dad's basements and we look at them as x-ers and go, fuck you guys. We got out when we were 18. But guess what, it was so much cheaper. Even boomers, boomers fuck they didn't pay shit for fucking college. Joel: True. Chad: Not only that, they didn't pay shit for fucking cars or anything like that. They have three fucking summer homes, all that other bullshit. Joel: Here's your four year degree for $200. Chad: Exactly, here you go guys. Merry Christmas. It's like fuck you guys, but here's what I believes to blame, out of Bloomberg article, automation has contributed substantially to reducing the portion of national income that goes into the US workers over the past two decades with rapid advances and robotics and artificial intelligence, AI, robots can perform more jobs and tasks required by humans only just a few years ago. So we're blaming immigrants, we're blaming millennials, we're blaming all these motherfuckers and it's like no, that's not the problem. Joel: Millennials are a part of the problem. Chad: I don't think they're part of the problem. Joel: I'm convinced- Chad: I don't think they're a part of the problem. I think this is the whole Dan Pink cohort group thing. Joel: But I love the CNBC first line of the story. Millennials, the selfie obsessed avocado toast loving generation might be behind slower economic growth. Whoever wrote that is a Pulitzer prize winning author for sure. Chad: I think just because you like the avocado toast doesn't mean you're not smart about investment, in saving money, and I think that's what we need. Joel: People of that age are getting married, they are having children, they are moving to the suburbs. A lot of that stuff is happening but not to the rate that it used to. Chad: They have to because they're almost 40. Joel: Yes, the oldest one is almost 40 aren't they. Chad: Yes. Joel: That's why Gen-Z sucks. Chad: And we out. Joel: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to what's it called? A podcast with Chad & Cheese and we talk about recruiting, we talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs to people you don't even know and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one, cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, swiss, so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or whatever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode and why 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. #Hackerrank #Linkedn #TalentHub #Jobiqo #jobboards #Programmatic #Talenya #RecruitHoldings #Blockchain #Techfynder #Emplify #Millennials #JobFairs

When you think of iconic brands, names like Nike, Budweiser and Apple come to mind. However, cities can become cult brands, just like products. And perhaps the most well-known city in the U.S., with the most well-known brand, is Las Vegas. Say, "What happens in Vegas ..." to anyone, and they'll likely be able to finish your sentence. In this episode, the boys bring on Cathy Tull, former CMO of Las Vegas' Convention and Visitors Authority, who oversaw this positioning and lived to tell the tale ... and she's telling it to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Enjoy this Smashfly exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Chris Kneeland: Hey everybody, this is Chris Kneeland, the CEO of Cult Collective and cofounder of the Gathering of Cult brands. Excited this week to introduce you to Cathy Tull. Chris Kneeland: I'm excited to introduce you to Cathy, because my relationship with her began all the way back in year one of the Gathering when she came to accept the recognition for all of the wonderful things that the City of Las Vegas had done through their What Happens Here Stays Here campaign. She has been instrumental in not only encouraging us to turn the Gathering into an annual event, but also in helping all of us think about destinations as Cult-like brands. Chris Kneeland: We've since gone on to look at the city of Austin, the Island of Manhattan, the country of Iceland, all these other wonderful destinations have gotten onto our radar because she helped us think differently about how destinations have to market themselves. Excited to hear what Cathy has to say. 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: Oh, yeah, it's a Monday. Our guest is so laid back I feel like I should turn it down a couple of notches. It's like we're turning into NPR. Chad: She's out of Vegas, too, so we shouldn't be all laid back. Joel: Yeah, maybe because it's Monday. Maybe if we talk to her on a Friday, she'd be all cray cray. Cathy, welcome to the show. Cathy: Thank you. Good morning. Chad: Cathy Tull, today. Joel: Not related to Jethro, as far as we know. Chad: Exactly. Cathy, tell us a little bit about yourself. Cathy: I was formally the chief marketing officer for Las Vegas, and I joined Cult just a couple of months ago. I really believe in this whole idea of creating Cult-like movements, and I'm excited to be a part of a new team. Chad: That's awesome. First question right out of the gate. You've got to tell me. You were the CMO ... You were with Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for 14 years, but 10 of those years, you are the chief marketing officer when What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas was going on. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because that is a campaign that I think everybody across the world knows. Cathy: Yeah. The campaign was started by my former boss, Rossi Ralenkotter and R&R Partners, who is an agency here in Las Vegas. They created What Happens Here Stays Here, and then luckily for me, Rossi hired me. I was able to really take that and then help shepherd the brand and shepherd the growth, and use that whole campaign, What Happens Here Stays Here, to attract four generations of travelers. Las Vegas gets 43 million visitors a year. It's an amazing product that continues to change all the time. To be part of that is really something that you can't repeat, I don't think ever again, in my career. Chad: Before What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, there was this duality of Las Vegas where they weren't sure what they wanted to be. Did they want to be Sin City, or did they want your kids to come into the casino with you? Can you tell us a little bit about how it all came to be that you found your way? Cathy: I think, as Las Vegas grew, there was product being built that was oriented to families, but really the destination itself represented adult freedom. The agency and the LVCVA did a number of research projects around, "What does a visitor want? What do they expect when they come to Las Vegas?" What they really wanted was this chance to be who they are. Cathy: There's very few destinations and very few places you can go in the world where you feel like you're not being judged. Las Vegas is one of those, really a judgment-free zone. What Happens Here Stays Here was really meant to embrace this idea of adult freedom, and say, "You can come to Vegas, and if you want to sleep all day and stay up all night, you can. If you want to sleep all night, and go to the spa, and play golf, and go shopping, and dine, you can do that." Cathy: What happened was the city built product to service those consumers who love Las Vegas. When you think about Las Vegas, you either love it or hate it. There's not a whole lot of people that are in the middle. It's something that we have something for everyone. Creating What Happens Here Stays Here was about those moments that people have where they can really feel like they're free. Joel: I have a quick question. I'm trying to envision the office space for your organization. Were there roulette wheels in the lobby? Did you have a daiquiri machine in the coffee room? Or was it a cubicle farm? What was your workspace like? Cathy: What's interesting is the LVCVA is a government organization. The organization itself is pretty buttoned up, but the agency is a free for all. When you're looking for crazy things happening, that would happen at the agency where I spent a good amount of time. Then the office itself was pretty buttoned up. What's interesting is that the resort partners in Las Vegas actually make less money off gaming and more money off everything else, shopping, dining, spas, than they do gaming itself, which is a myth. Everyone thinks that all the money comes from gaming, and that's really not true. Joel: You had the best of both worlds, if "buttoned up" could be one of the worlds you want to be in. Cathy: You know what? It's a great opportunity to have a dual personality where you can do one thing in the office, then go to the agency, and it's a whole feel. Joel: My real question. I'm glad that you mentioned global ... Like people from around the world come in to to see Vegas. What was the ad campaign from a global perspective? Did you target certain countries? Why did you target certain countries? What was the messaging? To, maybe, the difference between England ads, or French, or German, or Australia? Talk about the global campaign. Because Chad and I, and most of our listeners, we're aware of the ads that we saw here in America, but what was the flavor like globally? Cathy: Canada, Mexico, and the UK are the top three international markets for Las Vegas. When you look at what works, the What Happens Here Stays Here campaign works in Canada, it works in Mexico. It's different in the UK. The British humor is different, and therefore the campaign had to be different. Cathy: The campaign did not necessarily translate globally as far as Europe went. In Europe it was really more about what you could do here, how people could come, the ease of travel to Las Vegas, and then the variety of things we have to do. Cathy: Then, if you looked at places like Australia, Las Vegas is part of a larger itinerary. Consumers from farther away would come and they would make the West Coast tour, and Las Vegas would be part of that stop. Making sure that we were within that itinerary and people could see that they could come and have three or four days in Vegas and really have a great time, and then continue on with the national park tour, or wherever else they were going to go ... We're situated in a place that allows them to do that. Depending on where you're sitting in the world, you're going to get a different message. Cathy: However, in the last couple of years, if you think about how social media has really come to pass, at the end of the day, it's people encouraging one another. People are going to listen to a trusted friend or colleague before they're going to listen to a brand. Making sure that, all social media across the world, we were personable, we had a personality, was really important for the brand. Joel: Did you target China and Russia? Cathy: We targeted China, so there's nonstop service from Hainan, on to Beijing, to Las Vegas. That was a market that we were in. We did not target Russia. It would be really hard to get here. You'd have to go through one of the major ports, LA or New York. Chad: Did you develop personas for all these different areas? Because it seems like you have different brands for the different geographies that you're trying to hit. Cathy: We developed personas for visitors. We looked and we said, "Okay, who are the visitors?" For example, one time we did an exercise that said, "If you're coming from South America, what does that visitor look like?" Cathy: What we found through the research was that visitors literally would come here with an empty suitcase, because their plan was to shop and to fill that suitcase up. That's what made them happy. They wanted to go out, they wanted to party, they wanted to have a good time, and they wanted to go shopping. Talking about those opportunities is what made that market go, "Oh, yeah, okay, Vegas is the place I'm going to go." Knowing who your visitor is, regardless of where they sit in the world, is the key. Chad: What about purpose, though? Because we know that Cult brands, really, the foundation is heavy in purpose. What purpose were you guys really focusing on to be able to, not just for your employees, and for your organization, and for Las Vegas, but what was the purpose you were trying to push out to the individuals all over the world? Cathy: Cult brands absolutely have to have a purpose. They have to stand for something. What Las Vegas stood for was adult freedom. If you think about it, Las Vegas has been criticized for that, but it is a place that is celebrated because of it. That's what we pushed, this idea that you could come here, and you could. If you wanted to shave your head and walk around for a week, you could. If you wanted to come here and stay up all night, you could. If you wanted to just come and relax, you could. Cathy: It's one of these places where, and if you've ever been to Las Vegas, you've seen this, you can go to dinner and you can see everything. You can go into a show and you'll see people dressed in all kinds of clothes, and it's acceptable. That is what people want. They crave to be accepted. that's what Vegas stands for. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a brand isn't easy, which is why you need people like Thom Kenney, CEO of SmashFly, on your side. Chad: All right, Tom. Engagement is key to becoming and maintaining Cult brand status. How are your clients actually focusing on that today? Thom Kenney: First we need to think about engagement in general. You can engage a bunch of people a bunch of different ways. The first thing is recognizing what's a positive engagement and what's a negative engagement. You really got to be able to focus on the value proposition of what it is you're trying to communicate. Thom Kenney: The second part of that, after you understand what's really the positive engagement, it's maximizing the brand value. It's just like if you're out and you're shopping for a car, and what you're really, really interested in is how that car feels when you drive it. You sit behind the wheel, and you're smelling that new car smell, and you feel comfortable. You ease back into that seat, and, just, you feel the power behind the wheel. That's a positive engagement. But, you don't get to the dealership unless you're really promoting the idea of what that car feels like. Thom Kenney: In many ways, employer brands need to be thinking that way. When you're talking about scenarios where it's really, really hard to hire people, you can't create an engagement strategy that says, "Hey, we have jobs," and, "Hey, you should come work for us because we have health benefits." It's crap. It's not going to get you anywhere. You've got to create some sort of a mode of response that, when you're communicating in that level of engagement, it's a positive response that gets people excited. It gets them to want to sit in that chair behind the desk like they want to sit in a Porsche seat. Chad: To find out more, go to smashfly.com. Joel: Cathy, a lot of our listeners are in the employment space, HR talent acquisition. Branding is a relatively new term for a lot of them. If you were to give them advice on the basic things they should look for in building an employment brand, or an overall Cult brand to attract talent, what are some of the things that you would give them as starting blocks? Cathy: I think what's really important is you have to remember that you have to inspire from within. Your team has to believe what it is that you're trying to sell, and you have to create that from the inside out. Your internal audience is so important, and I think sometimes gets pushed aside for the external message. But, if the internal audience doesn't believe it, then it's never going to ring true to the external audience. Cathy: I think that idea of culture is really important. I think this idea of being remarkable and creating spontaneous conversation is really important, not only with your external fans, but with your internal audience. Because if your employees don't believe in whatever it is that you're trying to sell or service, that's going to come across. Chad: What you're saying is, I'm going to say it again because I don't think employers, and we're really focusing on the employer side right now, really focus hard enough on this. Is that, culture does kick strategy's ass every single day. Because if you don't have a culture, then everything else falls apart. Is that what I'm hearing? Cathy: That's exactly what you're hearing. If you don't have a culture that can support the strategy, then the strategy will never be what it could be, regardless of how good the strategy is. Chad: Yeah. Vegas, pretty much, is not for everybody, right? But you guys, in being able to be pervasive, to be able to really embrace that Cult brand ... Did you have casinos, and did you have, pretty much, businesses coming to you saying, "Wait, you're killing my business. We want to be more general. We don't want to be so locked down in this 'adult' sector"? Did you have any of that? Because you were serving, pretty much, many masters at that point, weren't you? Cathy: Yeah. In the very beginning of the campaign, there was really a big effort put in by my boss and by the head of the agency at the time to go around to every one of the partners and talk about what was happening and why. Because, until then, advertising very much had been around showing product. The idea of What Happens Here Stays Here was not about showing product, it was about emotion. Convincing people that it was a good idea and was going to work was a heavy lift. Cathy: Then I think what happened over my tenure was making sure that we continued to test it. It continued to work. We continued to refresh it so that it stayed up with the times and was still relevant. You can't just sit back on your laurels and go, "Okay, that's great, and we're just going to float off that forever." We spent a lot of time making sure that we were changing up the campaign and talking about visiting Las Vegas in ways that were most appropriate throughout my tenure. Chad: Zappos comes to mind as one of the most prominent, probably, Las-Vegas-based companies that really sold almost a connection to the Vegas mentality with how they looked at employment. People who don't know Zappos, or have seen ... I've done a tour of the company. Very lively, personalized. It's a very fun workplace. Chad: Did you see more companies than Zappos embrace the Vegas lifestyle? I can think, for example, healthcare is a big thing to get people to come to Vegas and work in healthcare, because there are shortages there. Did some hospitals embrace the Vegas lifestyle, and, "Come here, and have a good time"? "Work hard, play hard"? Were there any companies that came to you and said, "Hey, can you help us guide our brand in terms of attracting talent," in that way? Or did you guys yourselves attract talent by using the whole message of What Happens Here Stays Here? Cathy: I think what we saw for the most part is this idea of working with economic development, city economic development and regional economic development, and making sure that they had the materials they needed to talk about what the city had to offer. Vegas was considered a place that people visited and didn't really live. There are 2 million people that live here. I think you saw that most front face forward after the events of October 1st, but prior to that, it was all about making sure people understood what we had to offer. Chad: That all led back to economic development, right? Because you had to do more than just come up with catchy brands. You had to focus also on the economic development piece, as well. There was a lot of moving parts. First and foremost, the customers. How are they involved in this whole Cult branding? Second, how did that affect your economic development? Cathy: We talk to our customers all the time. When I was working for the bureau, we made sure that we were always in touch with what our customers wanted, what they expected, what they were receiving, so that we could be sure that we were talking to them in a way that they wanted to be talked to in places where they were going to be listening and engaged. Because you can't buy their loyalty. You have to earn their loyalty. Cathy: The only way you're going to earn their loyalty is to have a two-way conversation. Making sure that we were in that conversation, and listening to what people really wanted, and then relaying that back out to the local community was really important. That was one way that that happened. Cathy: Then what we also saw was that we needed air service. When you look at Las Vegas as a location, you can either drive here or fly here. There was no train. We made sure that we were involved in airline development, and making sure that we are talking to airlines about how they could fill both the front and the back of their plane. Las Vegas is one of the number one location cities for trade shows, the trade show 200. The largest trade shows in America come to Las Vegas. We would have business conversations around the idea of, "All of these business meetings are happening. Trade shows are happening. People are buying business-class seats, so we should have more air service." Cathy: Because we know we're a leisure destination, we know we can fill the back of the plane. But, we had to make sure that we were making the business case that we could also fill the front of the plane. Chad: This is so in depth. Because most big brands, they don't have to think about all these different moving parts, not in this manner. Plus you have the workforce development side, so you're looking to get the engines of economic development moving and growing. You're looking to make sure that, obviously, airlines are getting the people that are there to be able to consume what Vegas is putting out. Chad: But what about workers? Did you focus on workforce development, as well? How did that work within the actual scheme to ensure that economic development might be booming, but you have to have the people to be able to do the work? Cathy: Yeah, making sure that we were talking to our internal audiences about what we were doing and why was really important. We spent a good amount of time and marketing resources in rapping walls within the building, and having a message internally to employees about, "We are Vegas." We that live here are Vegas. We're responsible for help creating this Vegas experience. Making people feel like they're empowered and they're part of something bigger is really important. Cathy: We spend marketing resources, time, effort and energy creating those with internal audiences. What did we need, how could we do it, and how could we support it? Often marketing and everything else that happens in culture is separated in companies. When you can bridge some of those gaps, admit it, marketing is usually where the budget is, and everything else is not where the budget is. Bringing those two things together is what makes it successful. Joel: So true. Vegas is an ever-changing animal. Certainly the Vegas I first visited 20 years ago is not the same Vegas as it is today. You have online gaming impacting the business. You have concert and personalities and celebrities taking root for months at a time doing shows. You now have professional sports teams moving into the city. Joel: How important is establishing a brand that can stand the test of different things that go on? Companies that have to deal with ever-changing landscapes are very similar, a similar animal. What are the tips that you would give to make sure that you have a solid foundation for an ever-changing world when you look at building your brand? Cathy: I think the number one thing is to be flexible and to not fall in love with your own idea. What's interesting is that we work so hard in marketing, and creating and bringing to life this idea that we think is going to motivate people. The downside of that is you begin to love your idea so much that you forget there's other ideas out there. There is a danger in that. Cathy: Remaining flexible, being open to feedback, making sure that you're willing and ready to change if you need to be willing and ready to change is key, I think, to success because the world is ever changing. It doesn't matter what you're selling or what you're servicing, something in that is going to change. You have to be prepared for that. The only way you can be prepared for that is to be open to change. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first a quick question for Chris Kneeland about the gathering of Cult brands. Joel: Chris, one of the things that really blew me away when I attended the conference was, just, the lineup. It's a who's who of marketing celebrities, if you will. Chad: Crazy. Joel: I'm curious. When you started, how in the hell did you get these people to come? More importantly, how do you keep them coming, and how do you one up yourself from this year? Chris Kneeland: Yeah, it's certainly easier to get them to come in year seven than it was in year one. People frequently ask, "Are we going to run out of Cult brands?" I think maybe I wondered about that, too. How can I get 10 years, 20 years out of this conference? Chris Kneeland: Then we started doing things like destinations. We started doing nonprofits. Last year we did our first celebrity, which was Tony Hawk. We could go into politicians. There's lots of different places that actually have Cult-like followers. I think it's got a nice, long, healthy runway of Cult brand honorees. Chris Kneeland: We get them to come for two reasons. One, I think there's a lot of substance. We do about nine months of vetting. We've partnered with IBM, and we use Watson technology to help us cull through tremendous amounts of data. We do phone screening interviews, we do onsite visits. I think there's a lot of rigor that goes into making sure that these brands are as awesome as they appear to be on the outside. Chris Kneeland: Then, secondly, I think part of the secret sauce is that we're giving them a product, an offering. We don't even call it a conference. That's why we called it the Gathering. We didn't want to call it a conference, because we think most conferences suck. We said we had to build a place that these types of people would actually want to go to. The whole format and the whole location and everything was chemically engineered from the ground up to be highly desirable. Chad: Register now at cultgathering.com. Joel: Speaking of external influences, one of the things that our audience from an employment side have to deal with on a regular basis are employee reviews. You may be familiar with sites like Glassdoor, Indeed reviews, Twitter, et cetera. Joel: How involved were you guys, you mentioned social media, from external comments about Vegas, and what people were doing, and whatnot? Did you get involved? Did you have an account that would talk to people on social, or did you just let the exterior commentary run without any influence on it? Cathy: No, I think community engagement and community management is really important. Making sure that you know what people are saying, because there are some things you can respond to and help provide clarity. There's other times you just have to let people say what they want to say. What's interesting is that sometimes people see the audience being engaged, and check one another. The brand doesn't have to even do that, but it's important to know. Cathy: It's important to know what people are saying about you. It's important to know when you need to have a voice. Again, I would go back to, after the events of October 1st when the shooting happened here, it was really important that the brand have a voice. We spent some time making sure that we had the right voice. Cathy: What we ended up using was user-generated content, for the most part. We took what people were saying about Las Vegas, and just put that back out again, because that was the most important message that we could send. Making sure you're engaged with your audiences is really critical. Joel: Tactically, how did you do that? Did you have a separate account for Vegas? Was it the tourism account? Tactically, how did that happen? Cathy: It's the Las Vegas account. It's monitoring the Las Vegas account and making sure that we had people that were responding, that were pulling content. We had people that were watching the Instagram account, and the YouTube account, and the Facebook account, and pulling quotes that people were saying. Cathy: That happens all the time on a regular basis, But making sure that we know what people are saying. Like I mentioned earlier, hearing from a friend or a colleague has more weight than hearing from the brand. Being able to echo back those statements was really important. Chad: Joel and I were actually at the Gathering last February, and we had a wonderful time. One of the things that we noticed from every single Cult brand that was out there was exactly what you had said. Where everything starts from within, and ensuring that your employees not only buy in, but they understand the purpose, and they're a part of the purpose that you're trying to push. Chad: We talked with Douglas Atkin from Airbnb, and he said that they started out there, but every now and again they would have to do some checks to make sure that things weren't going, his words, "getting wobbly". What did you do, what did the organization do, to ensure that everything that was from a purpose standpoint, being pressed out and pushed out from a marketing standpoint, and whatnot, was still being embraced by employees six months, 12 months, 18 months down the road? They still felt like they were a part of the brand? Cathy: I think creating rites and rituals internally is important. It's an opportunity to help people that are insiders feel like insiders. That's how they really embrace this idea of what's happening, and why it's happening, and how they play a role in that. Cathy: We had regular conversations internally about what we were doing and we were planning on doing, from an external perspective, and why. People could understand, they could feel like they had a heads up. We would make sure that when we cut new commercials, for example, we would show them internally. People would get a sneak peek about, "This is what's coming." Cathy: They had a sense of ownership before it was pushed out to the external world. I think that is one of the keys, is making sure you're talking to your internal audience, and giving them a heads up, and letting them feel like they have the inside track. They will be much better salespeople for you than they would ever be if they felt like they were chasing what was happening. Joel: Have you met the guys from The Hangover, and which one would you most want to party with? Cathy: I have not met the guys who are in The Hangover, and I think they scare me. Joel: Which one would you most want to party with? Cathy: Yeah, I don't think I can do it. I'm too old. Chad: That's exactly what Joel would say. Joel: Zach Galifianakis, if it's an age thing, I guess. Cathy: Can't do it. Chad: "I can't do it." Can't do it, not going to do it, get over it, Joel. Cathy: Not going to do it. Joel: She's learned what not to touch and what to touch, being in her position there in Vegas. Chad: Last question, Cathy. When it comes to brand and it comes to to to messaging, what was the hardest thing to do? Of all the steps, of getting it out there, making it polished, all that, all of it, what was the hardest thing to do? What's the biggest obstacle you believe most companies are going to face when they try to actually be true to themselves and focus on purpose? Cathy: Coming to consensus I think is the hardest thing to do. Because we would have a lot of really great ideas, and a lot of things that we thought would work. Being brave and saying, "Sometimes deciding to go with something ... " Cathy: Think about it. There is an idea that it's safe, and there's an idea that may be considered not quite as safe. Making sure that you're leaning in and you're saying, "Well, the idea of that ... Maybe not quite as safe, really. Could have more legs," and getting consensus to do that, I think is one of the hardest things, because it's human nature to say, "Well, I can do this, and everybody's going to be safe, and nobody's going to get fired today." Leaning in and making sure that you're being brave both internally and externally is really important. Chad: The being brave part, what did you have to do to be brave? Were you challenging everybody else to be brave with you? Cathy: Yeah, you have to build a consensus. You have to make sure that you have your key audience is aligned. Not everybody may agree, and you have to be okay with not everybody agreeing. But, at the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision. That's important. Somebody has to decide they're okay being in that role. Chad: Yeah. We're in HR and talent acquisition, which is one of the most risk-averse areas in any organization whatsoever. It's important that they hear that. "Be brave," and actually take those steps, because people do matter. They're the ones who build, not only your company or your widgets, but they are your brand. Cathy: That's exactly right. Joel: Cathy, thank you for being brave enough to come on our show today. For our listeners who want to know more about you or your organization, where should they go? Cathy: They can go to www.cultideas.com. Joel: Outstanding. Chad? Chad: Excellent. We out. Joel: We out. 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. 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 #Branding #Vegas #Smashfly

You probably know Mailchimp. And if you don't know Mailchimp, you've definitely received an email via their platform, which enables marketers to send messages in bulk. For the most part, the concept is still pretty alien to most recruiters, but Collegia is here to change that ... or at least they hope so. Can they bring recruiters and email marketing together, finally? Checkout this episode of Firing Squad to see if they've got what it takes to survive the big guns. Enjoy this Talroo exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. 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, 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. 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: Chad, the Brown's lost last night, so I'm a little bit trigger happy. Chad: Ain't surprised. Joel: So this episode of the Firing Squad could get ugly. I don't know. Either way, please welcome Collegia. I hope I said that correctly. And their founder, Dama Aberg Cobo. I probably butchered that one too. Dama, welcome to the Firing Squad. Dama: Thank you. Thank you guys. No you said it perfectly. Dama from Collegia. Joel: Nice. Nice. So we'll get to the company in a second, but give our audience who doesn't know you, a little background on what you're all about. Dama: Sure. So I'm originally from Argentina. I have a business background and I started a startup in human resources and then after that one I did Collegia, which is this new startup. Joel: Chad. Chad: Yes. Joel: Tell her what she's won. Chad: Dama, what you've won is the opportunity to give us a two minute pitch of Collegia. 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 to ramble, or they just get boring, Joel's going to hit you with the crickets and that'll be your cue to move the hell along. Joel: Keep it going, Dama. Chad: At the end of Q and A, we're going to grade you, and you could receive a big applause. Joel: That's the one you want. Chad: Yep, that means, get your bank account ready. It's time to to knock this bitch out![ Golf clap, that means you might be there, you might not. And the one you don't want to hear, the Firing Squad. That's right, hit the bricks. Joel: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: Just close up shop. That is one big pile of shit. You should just try something different. Joel: Find another line of work. Chad: That's right. So that's Firing Squad. Are you ready? Dama: I'm ready. Let's go for that big applause. Joel: Two minutes. Starting in three, two- Dama: So Collegia is a platform for recruiters to engage the talent and identify the active prospects in their database. How we do this is we build micro communities, segmenting the candidates based on their industry skillset and location. Then we curate high quality content and we send it out to them. So what's trending in your industry? What new tools or processes are going on? What events or conferences can you attend in your city and what continuing educational content can you do, like courses or certifications to grow in your career? Dama: We also share job opportunities, the ones that the recruiter is hiring for and other opportunities in the candidates' location. So this is giving a candidate-centered approach, giving them a 360 degrees overview of what is going on in their industry. And based on how the candidate interacts with the content, we rank them, and we provide the recruiter with a short list of active candidates. Collegiate resurface high potential candidates from the recruiters' database. It reduces time to placement, and it positions the recruiter as a mentor and a thought leader that takes care for their talent, and maintains an ongoing communication to guide them in their career. Joel: So we'll help you out here. Where can we learn more? Dama: You can learn more on Collegia.io. That's Collegia.io. Chad: Which is where my first question is going to start, is being in sales for a word that's... Is it commonly used? I don't even know if it's in the English dictionary. You're going to have to tell us about that. Collegia. How did you come up with Collegia, number one the name, and was the dot com taken? Because you have a dot io, so help us out with the name, the origin, and why you couldn't find a dot com for something. Joel: And do you worry about being confused with a college recruiting website? Dama: Okay, great question. So actually the name Collegia comes from Collegium. Collegium is a guild, right? So if you could think of an association, a professional association. We're trying to build these new modern communities for any professional to join and to network and connect with their peers. So it's the modern guild or modern collegium. Does that make sense? Joel: Yes. Dama: Okay. And the dot io, it's what we chose. The dot com yes was taken. So Collegia.io is what we got. Joel: And what is Collegia.com doing? Dama: Oh, no idea. Joel: Okay. You might want to check that out just in case. Chad: Especially if it's a porn site, or a competitor. Dama: No, no I think we're good. It's not a competitor for sure. Joel: So when you're rich and famous, you might buy the dot com. Dama: Yep, probably. Joel: Right. Dama: I like the dot io though. It sounds technical. Joel: Sure, roll with that, you know the checks cash the same no matter what your domain is. Dama: Right. Joel: So I was trying to figure out as I was looking at the site, which is in beta, so there's not a ton of information, but the best example that I could come up with was sort of a MailChimp, email marketing on top of an applicant tracking system or like a CRM. Would that be a good way to describe your service to people that don't know or am I way off base there? Dama: No, correct. It's a good way. So we're helping the recruiter by providing the content. A recruiter is an expert in connecting people with work. But they might not have the time to know what is going on in each industry that they hire for. So it's the MailChimp, but with everything ready to send out and then the report. Joel: All right. So let's talk about the emails and the segmentation. Does the solution integrate with an ATS and then as people apply to jobs, is the email address like automatically uploaded into the system and then when you send out jobs, how do you know from the email address or the information that they want a marketing job or they want sales or nursing, so how does the segmentation and sort of the uploading of emails happen? Dama: Great question. So recruiters today have amazing applicant tracking systems that do great segmentation. So we're working with them. Our tool today is the first version of the product where the recruiters just import their list of candidates into our platform. But we're heading on version two to integrate with the applicant tracking systems. So they don't have to do that manually. And then we're going to provide the applicant tracking systems with the information that we get from how candidates interact with the content. So there'll be able to search active candidates and those ones would be pulled up in their database. Joel: And which ATSs will you be integrating with first? Dama: Starting with Bullhorn for sure. Chad: Ah, very focused on the recruiter side. I like it. So how do recruiters actually build these micro-communities? I understand that there is some sort of segmentation in applicant tracking systems, but not all of them are segmented, right? So how can a recruiter actually build these micro-communities? Dama: So that is really simple. On our platform, the recruiter just decides what industry and position they want to focus on to start off. For example, their top candidates are IT project managers or accounting consultants. And in just one business day we have that community set up for them. Joel: And how does the curation of content happen? Does the recruiter, someone actually have to go out on the web and is it from publications and then like, "I want all the stories from Fast Company or something to come into the newsletter." And then do they curate based on, if it's marketing it would be marketing type stories and if it's nursing or accounting, it would be those kinds of stories? How does the curation of the content happen? Dama: Correct. Yeah. So the recruiter doesn't have to do anything. We do it like in an autopilot mode for them. We have community managers that are industry experts for each industry and they curate the content from professional sources. So if we're talking about technology or whatever industry, we'll talk about where we're connecting with universities, associations, newspapers, online magazines, depending on each industry. So TechCrunch, Fast Company, Forbes, everyone that knows what is trending and going on in the industry we're making sure to put that high quality content out there to the candidates. Chad: So this is already segmented is what you're saying. You have all these publications that you're already getting RSS feeds in from. At this point, you know how to segment the data or the articles that are actually coming in to be able to build these kind of like stock newsletters, is that what I'm hearing? Dama: Yes, correct. And our tool with AI is going to be able to personalize the content even more each time when the candidate interacts with it, we're going to be sending them what is most relevant to them. And on the other side, the AI is going to also pull up not only the active candidates but the ones that are more qualified for the jobs. Chad: Did you hear that? She jammed in AI, Joel. So that's automatic, that's a tick mark. Joel: That's good. That's good. Yeah. Waiting for machine learning. Chad: Are you going to be moving also to text and messaging as well to be able to push out this content or just email? Dama: So that's a great question. Today, we're only email, but we know that youngsters are in texts and in push notifications. So we're going to go there too. Chad: She said youngsters. Joel: What's the target market for this? I mean you mentioned Bullhorn, so I'm assuming recruiters, but will this be also a good enterprise product? Where will the sales team and the marketing efforts focus? Dama: So right now we're focusing on independent recruiters and small staffing firms up to mid sized staffing firms, not large enterprises. So these firms are needing help to outsource the content generation and really make their database work for them and maximize their database. Joel: And will you target global globally, or will you focus sort of the U.S. because I assume that with the content piece, doing different languages would be challenging or no? Dama: Yes. Right now we're focusing on the U.S. to start off, but then this has a potential to be global. We want any professional, and that's why I said youngsters, and we want them to start young in their careers to be able to join a community in their city to help them guide that career development. Joel: Chad and I say "Yoots" instead of youngsters but that's- Dama: Okay, I like that. That's cooler. Chad: Why not enterprise though? Because that's where the money's at. Now I understand that the small and the medium size recruiting organizations, there are a ton of them, but the enterprise has money not to mention might be a great acquisition strategy or is that not what you're looking at from acquisition? Dama: So that's a great point. Right now we've seen that our early adopters are the small and medium sized businesses because we've got a first version of our product and they have patience with us. They're able to do this manually, import the list of candidates. But as we grow and we make this process more seamless and as soon as we're integrated with the applicant tracking systems, we're shooting for enterprise as well. Chad: Enterprise is a pain in the ass is what I'm hearing. So you're going with the easier to integrate. That's what I'm hearing, right? Dama: Yeah. Joel: Lowest hanging fruit is what you're hearing. Have you guys raised money or are you looking to raise money? I guess seed round at this point, but what's the plan on funding? Dama: Correct. Yes. So we have one angel investor and we have 10 active staffing firms using our community, our platform and have their active community sending content every two weeks or every week. And our goal is in the next couple of months to start speaking with investors and to raise a seed round of $500,000. Joel: Okay. And what's the team look like? Is it mostly you and contractors or what's that look like? Dama: We're two founders. I'm the CEO and I have my co-founder who's the CTO and he's developed the software. And then we have the senior advisors that are experts in the staffing industry helping us out, they're part-time of course. And then we have the community managers that are contractors at this stage. Chad: Any partnerships at this early stage? And if not, or if you do, what is your target partner right now? Dama: Yes, we are working on some partnerships with back-office providers to the recruiters. So companies that already have a bunch of recruiters as their clients and are going to offer Collegia as a benefit to them. Joel: Talk a little bit about the intelligence piece. Because I think it's really interesting in terms of you know when emails are open, you know the frequency, you know maybe how long someone was on after clicking. And then what I'm hearing is basically that your algorithm algorithmically ranking people based on the interest level. Am I right about that? And can you talk more about the vision and why you do that, and how much of that will be automated to say, "Hey, if someone is high interest, we're going to hit them with these emails" or "We're going to hit them with different messages." Dama: Yeah. So the recruiter wishes that they could really know at all times when is the candidate ready for a new job, right? And that's something really hard for them to track. They don't have time to speak with everyone in their database. So with Collegia we're identifying when is the right time to reach out to your tier candidates and which candidates. So of all the candidates that you have, there's going to be a great number that is happily in their jobs, but there's going to be that short list that will change every couple of weeks. And those are the ones that are open to new opportunities or are ready for a change. And our platform is allowing the recruiter to identify that right timing. Dama: About the automation. It's also just reading the engagement, how they like the content, what's the open rate, where are they clicking on, what courses are they taking, and what jobs are they applying for? Something interesting about Collegia's that we're not only posting the recruiters jobs but other jobs. And this gives an additional piece of information to the recruiter because the candidates can apply to whatever they want, right? But with Collegia recruiters know that candidates might not be happy with the position that they're posting but are applying to other jobs so they can have a conversation with them and try to guide them to what they're looking for and help them get it. So this positions the recruiter as a mentor and sponsor. Chad: Okay. So overall, and we understand how it works. I like it seems very simple, but what problem are you trying to solve for specifically? Dama: Well, our ultimate goal is to increase the number of job placements. So help the recruiter get more candidates and jobs. And our mission is to help these professionals grow in their careers and get upskilled so get better skills and get those dream jobs that are better jobs that they're looking for. Joel: Do you feel like there's a big risk, and we mentioned the text messaging piece or the messaging piece, more and more email marketing is becoming really challenging. And I could imagine most recruiters don't understand that if you send out a thousand messages via mass email, maybe 10% are opened and then less than 1% are replied to. Are you seeing different kind of metrics? And if so talk about that. But I guess my overall question is do you fear risking someone sending out a bunch of messages and then going to look at the analytics and saying like, "Oh God, only 1% actually click on our emails and this isn't worth the trouble or the money that we're spending, and we're off of this thing." Whereas something like text messaging, you're looking at 95% open rates, 90-85% read within the first 15 minutes. Do you think there's a big risk with email in terms of people getting turned off by that, or email becoming a dying communications mechanism, particularly as you go younger and younger down the chain? Dama: Yeah. Well, email and our newsletters are performing really well, above industry average. So in the staffing and the recruiting industry, you have about 20% click rate, sorry, open rate, and about a 1-2% click rate, which is low. But we know that there's going to be a short amount of candidates that are active and engaged, and we want to reach that target, right? So providing the recruiter with that short list is going to make their job easier for them to focus. And going back to email, our newsletters are performing really well. We're providing high quality content and we believe we're adding value to those candidates that are eager to learn more, right? These are professionals that are low to middle skilled professionals. They're not executives that are already online and already know what is going on. Joel: And when you say performing really well, what does that mean from a percentage standpoint in terms of opens and- Dama: It goes, for example, open rates go from 18-40%. So there's a couple of below average. But that's normal. And it goes pretty high. And then click rate is right there on the industry click rates, 2-3% a bit more than the average. Joel: And do emails come from Collegia or do you send it from the company's URL, do you sync it up to their email address or is it all through Collegia? Dama: So think it as bloggers can write on medium recruiters or mentors can send content through Collegia. So the email comes from Collegia and prosourceIT, for example, which is a staffing firm that uses our product. And if the candidate wants to reply, they reply directly to the recruiter. So the email goes to the recruiter's inbox. This generates more conversations for the recruiter and their candidates. Chad: So is that done just by a different link in the email or is that a part of the integration? So that when I hit reply, I don't reply to Collegia, it actually replies to the recruiter. Dama: Correct. It's directly hit reply and it goes to the recruiter. It's integrated. Chad: Okay. So from a roadmap standpoint, kind of digging deeper into the engagement side of the house, how fast are you going to get to SMS? Dama: Oh, good question. Well, we're going to be launching our version two with the integration in 2020 with integration with Bullhorn. And as soon as we have that, we'll be ready for the SMS. Chad: Q1? Q2? How fast? Dama: Yes, yeah. Q1. Q1 of course. Chad: Ah, okay. (w/ Disbelieving tone 😉 Joel: I want to know about pricing. What's this thing cost? Dama: Perfect. So recruiters pay $500 per month to use the platform. And this starts with one community and the content in that. Then the price will vary depending on the number of the different communities that they have. So the price increases with the different content. If you have many communities, because we have many locations, but it's one position and one industry that's the same price. But if you're going to hire in tech, in sales, in finance, then it's going to be a different one. Joel: So community is essentially defined as a target market. Dama: Yes, correct. Joel: So $500 if I have a million email addresses or a hundred? Dama: Yeah. No matter how many. Joel: And what's the grand goal or mission of the company? Like in five years. Do you hope to flip this thing? Do you hope to IPO this thing? Do you hope to have a nice little business with employees? Like what sort of the grand vision? Dama: Oh, this is going to be big. It's not a lifestyle business. Our goal is to have this platform for any professional in the world to be able to join their community and be able to really enrich their careers, thanks to Collegia. And this also allows the future. Today where we're offering this to recruiters, but in the future when any professional, for example, you want to say, a mom that had to leave her 9 to 5 job, wants to help youngsters or wants to help others in her career, she could join and build a Collegiate community, have her followers or candidates, and really give them that opportunity, opening connections to them and to helping them grow in their career. So it's a platform that will help anyone really be a recruiter or help people get work. Chad: Okay, so back to the pricing real quick. That's $500 per month? Dama: Yeah. Chad: Okay. And if I have more than one community, it's $500 per community per month. So if I have two communities and I'm a tech recruiter and I want to splice that off into like a developer community, which could be different than my overall tech community, that'd be $1,000 per month per recruiter? Dama: So it doesn't double directly. The price will increase, but it doesn't double. You're not going to have to pay $500 per each new community. It's going to increase because the price increases with the new content that we're generating. But yeah, it's the idea that you have to go with is $500 per community to have constant automated content out to your candidates and identifying the most engaged candidates every week or with the frequency that you want. Chad: Gotcha. And are there volume discounts for the staffing companies? Dama: Yes, of course. Joel: So last one from me. Can recruiters or companies or customers only send out emails when stories are curated and there are jobs, or could I at any time sort of blast a message out to all of my subscribers? So let's say there's a job fair or something that we're doing, can I just send a message with custom text and send it out like I would with a MailChimp or something similar? Dama: Yes, of course. So we can share any information that a recruiter wants to with their community at anytime. Chad: Easy enough, I think we're ready. Joel: You good? Chad: I'm good. Joel: All right. Dama, are you ready to face the Firing Squad? Dama: Yes. Joel: I'll go ahead and go first Chad if that's okay with you. We talk a ton on the show and you're a listener, which we love cause some Firing Squad guests don't actually listen to a lot of episodes. I know you're a fan, so I appreciate that. But you know that we talk a lot about the intersection of recruiting and marketing and we generally love tools that help recruiters become better marketers. And email marketing has been around for a very long time, but by and large recruiters and employers haven't really grasped the power of email marketing. And although I do believe that the impact of email is waning, I do think that the black hole is still a problem. And I think that candidates who apply to a company or a job appreciate getting messages from the company and keeping abreast of what's going on, what new jobs are opening or are currently available. So I think that the fact that you're simple is sort of a bridge between marketing and recruiting is a great thing. Joel: I think that you're going to have some challenges with getting employers to grasp this from a manual standpoint. I'm going to love to see you get to a point where you integrate with an ATS, a message or... Someone applies to a job, that email address goes directly into the database. I don't have to download the database and then upload it to your system. Like that's all automated. The day that curation becomes easy or there's easier ways to create content. I'd love to see video may be at some point make its way into the curation and maybe it is, but we didn't talk about that. So ultimately I think that you're on the right track. I'd love to see a lot more integrations with ATSs, I do think there's a little bit of a risk that you become more of a feature than you do a product. Joel: So to see ATSs add this to their suite of products is a little bit of risk to the company. The pricing is probably about where it needs to be for most companies to sort of try this and use it. So for me, I think you're definitely on the right track. I think for me it's simply you've got some work to do, some tech in there, create more automation for companies to make this even more no-brain than what maybe it already is. So for me, a golf clap. Keep working, keep trucking, and hopefully in five years we'll reconnect again and you'll be well on your way to boats and hoes. Dama: Awesome. Thanks for that feedback. Chad: All right, Dama, are you ready? Dama: Yes. Chad: So I have to say right out of the gate, I love the understanding of not having to babysit enterprise right out of the gate because they do suck, especially when you're a small organization and you're trying to prove not just that the platform works, but the whole concept obviously works, but you've got to remember that's where the cash is at. So yeah, there's no question from a staffing standpoint, being able to hit all of these different smaller staffing organizations is smart, but the problem is scalability at that point, right? You might be able to get to that scalability with Bullhorn, depending on your integration, how deep the integration is. Not to mention how closely you partner with them to be able to have an opportunity to get out into those logos and start to prove to all those brands that they need the content. Chad: We're big believers in marketing meets recruiting, in brand meets recruiting, and in the mentoring piece. Overall, roadmap, there's no question you've got to get to SMS fast to those youngsters. You've got to get to messaging fast because of not just the youngsters. I mean today I actually receive from a service articles, content about four or five times a day that I share throughout my network. Right? So I'm not a "Youngster", I think this is something that is more broad-based, but I think you've got your head on straight. I think you're going to have to take a look at the pricing as you move forward. But for me the big one for you is getting this Bullhorn integration and that should be your launch pad. I don't agree 100% with Joel of trying to be a "Product". I think if you're an amazing feature that an organization like a Bullhorn needs and/or wants, there's an opportunity for acquisition. So I'm also going to go with the golf clap. Dama: Okay. Thank you guys. Joel: Well done. How do you feel? Dama: I'm happy. I'm happy because I know there's good progress since we've launched six months ago and there's a lot to do, so I'm excited about that. Joel: Yeah, it's worth noting that you don't even have really a site yet, so this is really early in your evolution. And hats off for even coming on without having a website yet. Dama: Thank you. Thank you. We do have a website, but it's true that it's in beta mode and we're having those recruiters testing it out and we're opening it up just next week, so you'll see it soon. Hopefully all the listeners today will be able to see the full site soon. Joel: And what is that URL again Dama? Dama: It's Collegia.io. Joel: We out. Dama: Thank you. Announcer: This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast. So you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com. #Talroo #FiringSquad #Marketing #Brand #Branding #Collegiaio #Email #Engagement

Chad & Cheese are always looking for legitimate excuses to consume beer, chat-up start-ups and provide quality podcast content. Enter Brew Review, where they check all the boxes above. You're welcome. Enjoy this very first show, with special guest Angela Hood, CEO of This Way Global from Last Stand Brewing Co.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Okay, what's up everybody? This is Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm joined here today by my cohost Chad Drinking-Good-Beer Sowash. Chad: Chad loves Me and my goddamn beer Sowash. That's right. Yes. Joel: And your ears are going to thank us. Today, we are doing the first ever— Chad: Ever. Joel: ... brew review. Okay, here's how this is going to work. Chad: What is a brew review? Joel: Here's how this is going to work. Chad: What is this brew review? Joel: When we travel and we travel quite a bit. Chad: We do. Joel: We're going to sucker somebody, some company to come in and buy us beer, review the beer, and tell us about their company. Chad: And talk about the company. Joel: Very, very casual, very relaxed. We're live here from Austin, Texas for the TAtech Conference. And we are joined here today by Angela Boys in the Hood, Hood. Chad: Yes. That's right. Angela: All right. Okay. Joel: With This Way Global, which sounds like a travel agency- Chad: It does. Joel: But it is not. Angela, welcome to the first ever and maybe the last brew review. We'll see how this goes. And we've got to say, Angela, really Texafied this brew review. Chad: She killed this dude. Joel: We thought, "Let's get a pub. We'll order a beer, and we'll do this up." They said, "No, you're in Texas. We're going to a brewery, we're getting barbecue, we're not doing one beer, we're doing a whole flight of four." Chad: Yes. Joel: So Angela, God bless you. Welcome to the show. Angela: Oh, thank you. And we do not half ass things in Texas. So, yeah. So we- Joel: We know this. Chad: Yeah. We now know this. Angela: We're bringing it. Joel: The Aquanet is out. Angela: That's right. Joel: Tease to the moon. Angela: That's right. Chad: We have the hair to Jesus moment happening. This is a beer to Jesus moment. Joel: I've never been so close to God as I have been at this moment. Well, Angela, for those who don't know, tell us something a little bit about the company, and then we'll go ahead and sample, good Lord, Texas Forever. Angela: See? Texas Forever. That's right. Joel: That's the kind of show this is going to be. Chad: The first beer, Texas Forever. Angela: Yep. Well, we are headquartered here in Austin. We specialize in one thing and one thing only. We match the crap out of people to jobs. So, that's what we do. Joel: Is that your tagline? Angela: That's it. Joel: We match the crap out of people. Chad: That's the slogan. That's the slogan. Yeah. Angela: No, so we really do. We focused on this one thing. I know a lot of companies do about a hundred different things. Chad: They try. Angela: I see these huge things where we're from end to end recruiting. And we said okay, we're not going to be end to end recruiting. Chad: Oh, she just busted out on AllyO. Oh I heard it. Angela: I didn't say anyone specifically. No. Joel: Have you been leaving Glassdoor reviews? Angela: I have not. Joel: On AllyO? Angela: No. So, we said, "Let's just do one thing. Let's do one thing really well." We picked matching. Joel: Yeah. Angela: And so, we find that it's been a tough road for the last couple of years because the market wasn't quite ready for what we proposed. And then, I don't know what happened six months ago, but I'm really glad it did. The flip was switched or switch was flipped. And I have not even had any beer yet. Chad: Oh, you had one. Angela: But wait till— Joel: And how long have you been doing this? Angela: So, it started with the concept in 2014 at University of Cambridge and went through lots of trials and tribulations. We failed 13 times. Not bragging. I'm just saying that it's a— Chad: They say that's an unlucky number. Angela: Yeah. Chad: It doesn't sound like it's unlucky. Angela: Yeah. Well, 14th time— Chad: Is the charm, right? Angela: Right, exactly. And so, now we're there. Joel: I'm assuming that this isn't Cambridge, Texas. Angela: No, this would be Cambridge, England. Joel: Yeah, a long way from Texas. Angela: Yeah, yeah. Joel: Okay, all right. Angela: Where the narrow roads and the roundabouts and all that. Joel: Yeah. So, before we get started and we get maybe too drunk to do this, let everyone know where they can find out more about you in case we're too drunk at the end to remember. Angela: I'm so happy that you said that because I always forget this part. Joel: Yeah, we don't. Angela: Yeah, so thiswayglobal.com. Our suite is called AI 4 Jobs. So, A-I, the number 4 jobs.com. Either way, you find us. And we're at HR Tech this year. We're exhibiting. It's very exciting because we also were selected for top 10 innovations for 2019. Joel: Congratulations. So, where are we? What brewery is this? What part of Austin are we currently in? And then, we'll sample Texas Forever. Angela: Great. So, we are out on the edge of Austin. We're almost to Dripping Springs. We are at The Last Stand Brewery. It's been around for a little less than five years, has amazing beers, and we're very fortunate that one of our elite sales team is also family member of the brewers. Chad: You got the inside. Angela: We do have an inside track. We do. Joel: The inside at the Last Stand. Chad: You know what he's thinking right now? She can't get rid of me. Angela: No, that's right, yeah. And then, he went and got the barbecue too. So I don't know. Chad: Ah, there we go. Joel: Brown nose. Chad: He's legit sales. Angela: Yeah. Chad: That's legit sales. Joel: The barbecue sauce is about the same shade as his nose right about now. Angela: Maybe. Joel: All right. Well, let's get into Texas Forever. I'll start by saying that this is a light beer. The color is very modest yellow. You can see through it. Chad: It's very light. Hence, the light, yes. Joel: Not much of a head. This looks like the quintessential sort of Texas summer refreshing beer. What do you guys think? Angela: Yeah, very much so. It's like a summer pale. Chad: She's already knocked it out. Is it? Angela: Yeah. That's to me. Chad: I'm going to try it. Angela: I like it. Joel: Do we say cheers in Texas or Cambridge? Angela: Well, we say cheers here. Chad: You say cheers anywhere. Angela: We just say down it, cheers, whatever. Chad: Yeah. So, this is the beer after you get done mowing the lawn, this is the one that you can— Angela: Cool off beer. Joel: Yeah, I would compare this to a PBR, an old style back in the Midwest. Angela: I think that is terrible. Joel: Yeah, I would. No, no, no, no. Angela: What are you talking about? Joel: This is an everyday beer. Angela: Oh my God. He's lost it. He's lost it. No, totally disagree. Okay. That's a shame that your taste buds do that to beer. Joel: PBR, for me, is not a diss. Angela: No, it's not? Joel: No, it's not. Chad: It's a total diss. Joel: It's not a diss at all. Angela: This beer is much better than PBR. Chad: I love it. Angela: All right, so this is the Texas Forever, right? Joel: All right, so let's do this right away. Let's give this a one to 10 ranking, 10 being heaven in a glass and one being absolute piss. Where are we putting Texas Forever? Angela: Well, hold on, hold on. Today, it is almost 100 degrees in Texas. I think that needs to be taken— Joel: And it's September, late September. Angela: Shh. It's the first day of fall. This is what our fall looks like. Joel: Fall is 94 degrees. Angela: Okay, I'm going to go with... I'll say a seven. Joel: Going with the even number. Okay, seven from Angela. Chad? Chad: I'm going to tell you right now. And again, I'm going to say if I come out of a hot summer day, mowing the lawn, I'm reaching for this. Joel: Yeah. This is an eight in my book in that scenario because I was always like to think of when am I going to drink this beer? I don't just drink this beer anytime. This is one of those beers that— Angela: You're contextualizing this— Chad: Yes, exactly. So, I'm using AI. Angela: You are. Chad: My internal AI. Angela: Your internal AI. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I'm going to go a little bit below that. I'm going to go at like a 6.8. Angela: Wow. Chad: Really? The point? We're doing that. Joel: I'm doing a 6.8 because that's how I roll. That's all I roll. Angela: He's been watching The Food Channel too much. That's what's happened. Joel: Like there's something wrong with that? The Food Channel's great. Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives is my favorite show. Angela: Okay. Joel: All right. Well, let's talk about product. What are you guys building? What's cool? What are customers loving right now? Angela: I think the most popular conversation that we ever have is, "Hey, our matching integrates into your ATS in the background. You do not have to go out to a Google Chrome extension or anything else to use it." They're like, "Seriously, do not toy with us if that's the truth." I was like, "That is the truth." Chad: What do you mean don't toy with us? Because they're looking at all these add-ons and whatnot that have to, okay. Angela: Yeah, they've been told it's going to live inside your ATS. And the reality is, when they go to try to use it, it really does not, and it changes the workflow. Chad: Oh, they're getting faked out. Angela: Yeah. Chad: They're getting the head fake. Joel: Bait and switch. Bait and switch. Who do you consider your main competitors? When you're on sales calls, who else are you selling against? Angela: So, I would say the one that probably comes up the most is Eightfold. And the reason why is because we are also talking to large customers. They are too. So, it's kind of in that space. Angela: But, the thing that I think separates us the most is the way we remove bias is not like clicking a button and saying I don't want women or I don't want men or something like that. It's just baked into the product because the removing the bias is paramount for us. It's not an afterthought. Angela: And then, the second component is we can match on any candidate base size. So, it doesn't matter if you have 20 or if you have 200 or 2000, the system still works. Joel: And what ATSs is do you currently integrate with? Angela: So, Greenhouse was the first full grown integration. We have a Teleo integration that kind of is a 17, or I'm sorry, 19A integration. So, we will be doing in 19B as soon as it's released next year. Salesforce, this is massive. Chad: That's big. Angela: We have not announced this publicly, little company. Chad: Salesforce, they have a tower in Indianapolis. I don't know if you know that or not. Angela: Yeah, right. Salesforce partnership with a full integration and that, we've already sold hundreds of thousands of dollars on, and we haven't even released it yet. Chad: Hello. Joel: Very cool. I had thought Eightfold was passed by ten, sorry. Chad: That's kind of like Seven Minute Abs where you can do it in six minutes. Angela: Yeah, four minute abs. [crosstalk 00:10:07] Chad: Exactly. You went four minute abs. Joel: Careful. Can we get to our second beer? Chad: Our second beer is ... Okay, so this one is the Fuzzylicious? Angela: Yeah, Fuzzylicious. Chad: Fuzzylicious? Angela: This is your pick. Don't act like you don't know what this is. Chad: No, I love this beer. Just so you know, I love IPAs, but I love hazy IPAs. So, this one, it better knock it off the charts for me because—. Joel: Very hazy. Can't see through this thing. This is a gold drink. Chad: This is my standard. This is my go to drink. No matter what, I will pick one of these up. Angela: This looks like a cocktail to me and less like a beer. Chad: No, it's lovely. Let's go and try this. Joel: My fear is there's going to be a lot of lemon in this. Angela: Cheers. Women? Joel: Yeah, it smells a little citrus-y. Angela: Oh, I like that one. Joel: I smell a little grapefruit. Chad: Oh, that's citrus-y. The hops. Angela: That's nice. Chad: Oh that's .. Oh, see? That's a good beer. Angela: Yeah, it is a good beer. Chad: So now, you can drink this thing. The problem is, I'm looking for the ABV because generally, these things are going to kick you on in the ass. Joel: 6.4. Chad: Not too bad. Not too bad. That's good. I like that. Angela: What was the last one we had? Joel: Texas Forever. Angela: Yeah, but what was— Joel: We're looking at the board here. Texas Forever might be off the menu. I don't know. Angela: Because I feel like this one's a heavier, stronger beer. Chad: Texas Forever, yeah, is a 4.3. Joel: This is a settle in and get comfortable. Chad: Oh yeah. No, this is a good beer right here. Angela: Yeah. I like this one. I think I like this one better than the last one. Chad: So Joel, will you go first on this one. Joel: All right, I'll go first. So, this is a solid, probably like 7.8 for me. Chad: A 7.8, almost. We're going to round that up. We're going to call it an eight. Angela: Okay. You're an integer guy is what you're saying. Chad: Yeah. Angela: Okay. All right. I'll do an 8.5. I'll take your lead on this. Joel: Oh, there you go. See? Angela: It's catching. Joel: It's catching on. Chad: Peer pressure. Angela: Well, it's not a 9 for me. [crosstalk 00:12:00] It's not, but it's— Joel: Sometimes, you don't want to go all the way. You've got to—. Angela: Yeah, ease into it. Joel: Just the tip. Sometimes—. Chad: Here's the thing that I love about this tip is that it is— Joel: and Chad knows a lot about tips. Chad: a little bit, yes. I played that game a little. Joel: You have heard the podcast before you agreed to come on. Angela: I have. Chad: So, this being a little over six means I can drink more of it, which is exactly what I want. Generally, I'll get a beer like this, and it'll be like eight close to 9%, and it'll kick my ass. Angela: Oh, that's a great point. Chad: This one right here? Angela: Yeah. Chad: Not so much, which means I can drink more of it. Angela: You can 11 or 12 of them. Chad: That's exactly right. So, I'm going to go with a solid eight. Joel: Okay. Chad: No, no— Joel: That's okay. You be you, Chad. Chad: Eight. Joel: If round numbers are what you do, man, then stick with that. Chad: So, if we stay any longer and the Uber's late, This is what I'll be having. Joel: Yeah, this would be a good sort of pint after the flight is done. Yeah, this could be good. Angela: Yes, there you go. Yeah. Joel: So, I want to know more about Pitchfest at HR Tech. Give us sort of a preview on the pitch. Chad: So, how many minutes do you get? Angela: I get three minutes. Chad: Three minutes. That's ridiculous. Angela: Two minutes of Q and A. Chad: Yeah. Angela: I know what the questions are going to be. Chad: Okay. Angela: Yes, the matching works. This is how we do it. Joel: Do they give you the questions before? Angela: No, I just know. It's always the same questions. Joel: Oh, you just know. Angela: October 1st, 5:30 to 6:30. What I've heard is there's four or five companies that'll come up— Joel: Do you know the other companies? Angela: And it's the first round. Nope. So, we stand up three minutes, do the pitch. I went with a pictorial pitch. I've got lots of big images. Joel: Okay. Angela: And I have learned I still have to kind of watch what the crowd's doing. Are they understanding what I'm saying? Nope. I need to maybe be less technical, or you can kind of tell if they want to know more specifics, you can sort of see it in their face, and I get more specific. Angela: So, when I've done talks at TAtech, I can get more technical there, and people are like, "Okay. Yeah, don't. She's answering the questions." Where other places, you can't necessarily. Joel: And if you win, what do you get? Do you get money? Do you get a trophy? What? Angela: Yeah, So I think ... It's either $25 or $50,000 in cash, and then you get a free booth the next year, which is worth a fair chunk of money. Chad: Well, hello. That is a fair chunk of money. Joel: It's a 10 by 10, and you have to upgrade, but that's a different story. Angela: Right. It might be, yeah. Joel: You get a kiosk. Angela: Right, you get a kiosk, right. And then, you get something else, like something about promotion or Upwork or whatever. I don't know. I can't remember. Angela: We've got a book release. We were covered in a book, a Victor Assad. He wrote a book called Hack Recruiting. It was released, and we're covered in it. So— Chad: Love it. You two are slow, by the way, just so you know. You haven't finished it yet. [crosstalk 00:00:14:43]. Joel: Let's get to number three. Angela, how about you? You want to set this one up? Angela: All right, sure. So, I picked one that I've thought was a little odd. So, this is the Watermelon— Chad: Kolsch. Angela: Kolsch Watermelon, yeah. And I've never had a watermelon or a Kolsch. So, I was like, "Let's do something different." Chad: Kolsch is a good beer. I thought it was interesting. I thought it was very, interesting. So much watermelon went into this. It was like 300 pounds of fresh watermelon went into this beer. Angela: Right? Yeah. That's crazy. Chad: This is how you get your fruit. Angela: And there's no seeds. There's no seeds. Chad: Well, yeah, they're all smushed in there. Joel: It's like a single me of watermelon. Angela: A single you of watermelon. It's a vision I wasn't really expecting. Joel: Color wise, this one's in between, I'd say, the Texas Forever and the Fuzzy. Angela: Okay, so I'm color blind. Joel: Are you really color blind? Angela: Yeah, I really am. So, is it a color? Chad: One hazy. Joel: Yellow means nothing to you. Like I can't explain color to a color blind person. Angela: I know, but is it pink or— Joel: Do you even know what pink is? Angela: Well, no, but watermelon's pink. I know that. Chad: So, it does not look like watermelon. [crosstalk 00:15:51] Joel: But no, this is not pink. Angela: Okay, it doesn't look like watermelon. Chad: It looks a little bit more of a tingy kind of a look than the Texas Forever, Joel: The watermelon's very pungent. Chad: Is it? Angela: All right, whatever. We'll see. Chad: Pungent watermelon. Joel: It's noticeable. Angela: Oh yeah, it's definitely a watermelon. Chad: Just so everybody knows. This is how Joel is going to get his fruit for the year. Joel: Touche. Angela: He's got his protein. Chad: Ooh. Joel: Ooh, that is not my jam. Angela: No. Chad: That's not your jam? Joel: Nope. Angela: No. Joel: Some people love the fruit, the fruit beers. Angela: Yeah. Joel: I'm not one of them generally. Chad: Okay. Joel: Lemon and stuff, I can deal with, but you start rocking watermelon. Chad: Angela, you go ahead, and let's get a score out of this. Angela: I'm like a four. Chad: Okay. Joel: Ooh, damn. Angela: I know. I either I love you or leave you, and that is how I am. Joel: I was going to go higher than that. Chad: Let's just make this clear that everybody has different taste buds. Joel: Sure. Chad: They have different likes. Joel: The weather's different for different— Chad: Angela believes this is a four, Joel. You do not try to peer pressure her into a 4.2, okay? Joel: I'm just surprised. I thought she was going to like this one. Angela: Why, because I'm a girl? No. Chad: See how that is? We're in Texas, Joel. Joel: Because you picked it. Angela: No, it was wrong. It was a bad choice one. Joel: I wouldn't have picked one I hated. Angela: I went out on a limb. Joel: Anyway, yeah, I'm going to go 3.6. Chad: 3.6. See? Really? Yeah. I'm going to have to go to a two. Joel: Really? Chad: Well, I'm not a Kolsch guy. She picked a beer that I'm not. Joel: All right, so we have our first stinker of the flight for us. Chad: That's just, that's me. Angela: Yeah, but again. I'm not a fruit... I like red wine, dark beer. That's what I like. Joel: Well, you're going to like maybe the next one- Angela: I'm so excited about the next one. Joel: That's a little teaser for the next one. Angela: Yes. That's what I'm excited about. Chad: We have the brewmaster looking at us right now. Angela: I know, he's eyeing us like we're in trouble now. He's like, "You just get out of my place right now." Chad: Okay. So to be fair, we're in Texas and this is a watermelon beer. Okay. So carry on. Angela: Okay. Joel: Let's look at some of the news here of late with profiles and scraping data and the intersection of GDPR. Chad: Have you heard about this? Angela: No I don't know anything about it. Chad: We'll tell you, don't worry. Joel: So for those listening that don't know HiQ, a little company on San Francisco has fought the good fight against LinkedIn, have currently won in court to be able to scrape LinkedIn profiles and data and make it accessible in their solution. So there's a lot of things going on in this space with it's OK to scrape and then you have privacy issues and Facebook is, you know, making everything accessible to advertisers. And so I'm wondering just your thoughts, maybe not company wise, but just your take over all of personal data online, scraping that data and making it available for recruiters. What's the future of that look like from your perspective? Angela: I actually think it's a huge challenge. I think it's huge for individuals and for companies right now. So if we use data- Joel: Companies being employers or? Angela: No, just companies in general. Joel: Just companies, okay. Angela: Like yeah, they did not just employers, but if you think about like data can really be used to empower some pretty great outcomes if you use it correctly. And if you use it fairly and you don't abuse it. Now this is the line, like what is abuse and you know, California is trying to put some bounds around like this is what's allowed. GDPR started it and the people complain, like when I'm back in Europe trying to access something I'm trying to access, it takes me four levels of clicking through saying I agree that I want to see the thing I've just asked to see. Chad: Then the experience sucks. Angela: Yeah, it's terrible. And I don't think that was the intent, but that's what's happened. And so I- Chad: I think the intent was to protect people. Angela: Right, yeah. Agreed. Yeah. So we as a company, I'll just tell you what we've done. We don't scrape. We never have scraped. Right. The reason why we don't do it though, is a business reason. The data is very noisy when you scrape and it's unreliable. So we prefer if you have quality data, you have quality matching, right? So for us it's better to get single source or unified source data. Chad: And that's generally applicant tracking system data? Is that your main source? Angela: Well we have 3000 partners and so we aggregate data from them, but it's by permission. Chad: Who are these partners? Joel: Like job boards or? Angela: So, sometimes, but more it's trade unions, colleges, graduate programs, professional organizations that give certifications out, things like that. Right? So that's more of our partners. But because people look at how much data we have and they're like, "Oh, did you scrape this data?" And they get kind of, you know, like pre upset for it, and then you're like, "No, we don't." Chad: In their bonnet, yeah. Angela: Right. Joel: Pre upset. I like that. Angela: They do. They're like queued up to go- Joel: I'm so pre upset, don't make me upset. Don't put, me there. Angela: Pre upset. So this is how we talk about it. We're like, "So-and-so's pre upset. Like they're not upset right now, but they're going to be upset tomorrow. You can feel it coming." Chad: That is the funniest shit ever. Joel: My wife is pre upset. Don't push her dude. Don't do it. Chad: First off, your wife lives on pre upset. Joel: Yeah. Angela: Wow. Joel: Although in her defense, a lot of wives live in pre upset land. Angela: Well, maybe it's because a lot of husbands do a lot of pre upsetting. Joel: We're not around Texas women, probably. That's why. Angela: Gun toting. That's the thing that abates that. Joel: Gun toting and pre upset. Angela: That's all right. Chad: Okay, just so he doesn't die, I think we should move on. Angela: Okay, all right, very well. Joel: So I want to sum up here. What do you think is the future for companies that are scraping, because you guys have obviously made a decision not to. Are they, do they need to evolve or are they out of business soon? Like what does, I mean, because most people, I think a lot of people think, well now that LinkedIn is open, I mean it's going to be whack-a-mole and LinkedIn is going to be fighting this battle of like, "Don't scrape our stuff, and we're changing URLs" and all kinds of stuff. So what happens to those companies that are making a living off of LinkedIn and other- Angela: Yeah, so LinkedIn slash Microsoft- Joel: Sure. Angela: Might've heard of them. They kind of know what they're doing- Chad: Who's this? Angela: Right. I know, I know it's a big, maybe not heard of them. So they're going to figure that out. I think really what is left to is smaller companies to figure out how to differentiate themselves without scraping. I think is you're just going to scrape then that's table stakes and you're going to be like everyone else. Joel: It's a commodity, I guess is what I'm hearing. Angela: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah. So I just think you got to get away from it, you know, but so many companies have built their entire architecture off of scraped data, and so now they are not illegal. So that's good. I think HiQ really fought the battle for a lot of companies. And they won. But did they really win? I know it was a very expensive battle. Chad: Well, not only is it expensive, but then GDPR came- Angela: There you go. Chad: Right. So I mean, it's going to be hard conversation. It really is. Angela: I think this, that companies and users, so you would say the candidates are much more sophisticated than they used to be. They have a much higher standard. There's more competition. And I think all of this is, you know, if you want to think startups, we have to focus on differentiation and providing quality regardless of what we're doing. That's the way we win. If we don't do that, we lose because we are a commodity like you put. Chad: So I'm going to go ahead and push us to this next beer. Joel: I was going to say, speaking of higher standards- Angela: Yeah, there you go. Joel: You've been eyeing the stout- Angela: I have. Joel: At the end of the flight, so- Chad: And you've tried this one, so. Angela: Yeah. Joel: I'm going to give you the honor as the final beer is making you really excited. So- Angela: I know I love this beer. Joel: And preface this by saying it's 94 degrees and you guys just got done saying the lighter beer when it's hot outside is better. So we're rocking a stout in 94 degree weather. Do you think that will skew your review of this beer? Angela: I do not think it will. Joel: All right, well cheers. Angela: Because it is Nitro. Joel: It is Nitro. Chad: Exactly right. Joel: This is a Texas Guinness in terms of look. Smells a little more chocolaty. Angela: That is tasty. Chad: This is better than Guinness. Angela: Oh my God, did you just say that? Joel: Oh damn. Wow. Chad: Yeah. I love Guinness, but Guinness doesn't have the chocolate notes- Joel: Yeah, this is very chocolatey. Chad: That's in this. Joel: This is like candy. Chad: And again, this is- Angela: Greg, where are you? I have some Irish people in my team. Greg it's going to be okay. He didn't mean to say that. Joel: Very sweet. Chad: Greg can get the fuck over it because this is good beer. Joel: Yeah. This is very chocolatey and sweet, like you. This is like a candy bar in a glass. Angela: This is so good. Chad: This is delicious. So I'm going to go ahead and knock this one out. Angela: So I see like this with ice cream. This in coffee. Chad: I don't see that you can do many of these. Angela: Just by itself. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't do many of these. Angela: You take a nap. Chad: You do one. Yeah. Right. And it's on Nitro, which makes it even more kind of like milky, smooth- Angela: yeah, it's nice. Chad: Which I love. Joel: Little easier on the digestive system. Chad: I love these guys did Nitro, first off, but it's a Nitro milk stout. Smooth, creamy. It's a 5.4 ABV Very easy. Joel: Very comparable- Chad: Very easy drink. Joel: To Guinness. Chad: But it is more chocolatey on the notes. Angela: But it doesn't have any bite at all. Joel: I'm going to have you give your review or score of Guinness and then give your score of this one, if you think it's better than Guinness. Chad: Well, here's why I think it's better than Guinness, because I think all craft beer is better than just mainstream stuff. Right? I love Guinness. So- Joel: And are we talking about the Guinness that you can get in Dublin? Because you've had that. Chad: Well first off I'm not in Dublin right now. Joel: But you've had it. Chad: Yes. And it was amazing. Joel: So are you saying this is better than Dublin Guinness? Chad: Here's what I would do. I'm going to do a Joel Cheesman. Joel: He's backtracking, Angela. Angela: Yeah, I'm going to see what it looks like. Chad: I'm going to say a Guinness in Dublin is a 10. Joel: Agreed. Chad: This is a 9.6. Angela: Wow. Joel: So an American Guinness would be? Chad: American Guinness would be about an eight. Angela: I do agree with that. I agree. There is a two point differential for American Guinness. Chad: This is much better. If you're looking for a beer like a Guinness like stout in the US and you can have this beer, the Nitro Milk stout here at Last Stand Brewing. You do this. you pass the Guinness. Joel: Now, Angela, are you willing to do a Dublin Guinness review? Angela: Absolutely. Joel: Review this and American Guinness. So go ahead and give us your scores. Angela: So I didn't love Guinness, I liked Guinness before we were in Ireland and then we were in Dublin and we were in the brewery and we had, and I was like, "Whoa, what is this?" It's like infused with oxygen and goodness and- Joel: leprechauns and gold posits. Angela: Yeah. And so then I was like, I'm with you 10 like you just can't beat that bear. So I would say that this is a nine. Joel: High score. Angela: Yeah. But it is not Guinness in Dublin. But the thing I would say about this in Texas though, I would prefer to drink this because of the heat. I think that Guinness is a bit too heavy. I think I would rather have this if I'm in Texas. Joel: Okay. So this is a nine what is this one? Angela: Well, here it would be a 10, but I'm just saying like, if you- Joel: So Guinness Dublin's 10. This stout is- Angela: Nine compared to- Joel: So 10, nine and what's your American Guinness score? Angela: Eight. Joel: Eight, nine, 10. Okay. Yeah, I'm on board with Dublin Guinness being a 10, like- Chad: Yeah, you can't beat it. Joel: Yeah. If it's worth going to Dublin just to drink the Guinness. Angela: It is, yeah. And then you find out what it's supposed to taste like. Chad: And that night have Jameson. Go to Jameson. Joel: I however, do not agree that this is better than the American Guinness. This is a little sweeter. Chad: It's a taste buds thing. Joel: A little sweeter than I probably would prefer. I do like this a lot. Angela: He has older taste buds. That's okay. Joel: I'm going to put this one at like a seven eight and then I would put an American Guinness at like an eight seven still very high scoring, although not a 10. Angela: Yeah, that's pretty high scoring. Joel: So let's review these four beers. Number one is the stout, which we liked. Number two, we're going to go with the Fuzzylicious, Fuzzyluscious whatever we're- Angela: Which I have to say, this is the big surprise for me. Chad: The number one was the Texas Forever. You're already drunk. Joel: No, the score wise. No I'm saying score wise. Chad: Oh, number one. Yes. Joel: Yeah, stay with us Chad. Chad: I agree. Joel: Number one is the stout. Number two is the Fuzzylicious and the Texas Forever was at three and then the watermelon everyone hated pretty much. Angela: Well, you didn't even drink yours, so. Joel: I did taste it though. We have video that I did taste it. So that basically concludes our first ever Chad and Cheese brew review with Angela Hood. How do you feel? Angela: I think it's awesome. I really liked the fact that you allowed us to be the first for the brew review. Joel: We would have known you were going to have such hospitality. Chad: Holy shit. Joel: We would've flown down just for this. Angela: This is the best thing about Austin and about Texas in general is I think that when we even work with other companies here, there's this like comradery that we don't have with most other places and it's very cool. I will get a new customer in Austin and they'll send us breakfast tacos. I'm like, "Oh wait a second. Like it's supposed to work the other way around but we'll take it." And so then we ended up sending them like apple pie. And so there becomes this banter back and forth about who can take care of each other better. Chad: Is there a bigger trophy than breakfast tacos though here in Austin? Angela: A bigger trophy other than beer and barbecue? Wow. Chad: Because breakfast tacos are like the thing, I hear people get out of bed in the morning and I mean that's what gets them out of bed. Angela: Yeah, well you've got to go eat the good breakfast tacos. Yeah. I mean, I guess the only thing I'd say is probably if you're having the breakfast taco on like Travis or maybe floating down Lady Bird Lake, something like that. Yeah. That's the step up. That's how you know you're really in a deep conversation. Joel: Well, let's book end this thing with telling people again where they can learn more about you and the company. Angela: All right. Awesome. thiswayglobal.com I'm Angela Hood. I'm the founder and the CEO. You can actually reach out to me through our website. The contact email does go to a desk that's 10 feet away from me. You saw today where these desks are sitting. I sit right in amongst my team. They're in Austin. So it will actually find its way to me. And I don't know. I have got people yelling at me right now about our- Joel: Your marketing team is so proud of you right now, by the way. Angela: I have a Twitter. Because they're like, "Is she going to say Twitter or not?" Okay. @Angelahood90 is my handle directly. Joel: Well the t-shirts have a hashtag that I don't know. Angela: Yeah, AI for jobs. Joel: Yeah the t-shirts we got say "I got 99 problems, hiring aint one." Angela: That's right. Joel: So I like the play on Jay-Z there. Well if you come see Angela, just don't buy her the watermelon Kolsch because she is not a fan. Chad: No. Bring her the Fuzzylicious or the Nitro Milk. Angela: That'll work. Joel: Hey Angela, can we get a we out? Angela: What is a we out? Joel: That's how we end our show. We out. Chad: We out. Angela: 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. #BrewReview #beer #ThisWayGlobal #Matching #AI #ML

It's Recruiter Nation LIVE Chad & Cheese style of course. We chat with a lot of recruitment solution makers, but it's great to connect with the actual buyers and users whenever possible. Jobvite's Recruiter Nation Live event, which recently went down in San Francisco, was a great time to sit down with some practitioners and get the nitty-gritty on what's getting them hyped about the future of TA tech. Enjoy. Enjoy this Jobvite Exclusive with David Draper, Director of Talent Acquisition with Lewis Group of Companies. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Chad: During our time in San Francisco at Jobvite’s Recruiter Nation Live. We had a chance to catch up with leaders in the Talent Acquisition Space, so we turned on the mics. Enjoy. Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion ,and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It’s time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: it's not even be- Joel: There's been two, just the tip jokes in the last 30 minutes. Like that's a good sign for a great conference. Chad: Well that was because we were talking to Mason from Lyft. Joel: Everything goes south when you're talking to Mason. David: Everything is about tips. Chad: I had for everything when I'm sorry. Joel: I'm sure he loves that you put Lift in there when you're referencing tip jokes. Chad: Tips, Yeah. Joel: Well they do have a tip system, so you could- Chad: that was when I was talking about that's why I went with Lyft originally over Uber because of the tips and that's where you have the... Yeah, I'm a tip guy. Joel: Chad's a tip guy. Chad: I'm a tip guy. Joel: Not the whole, just the tip. David: Just the tip Yes. Joel: David did you know you're on a not safe for work. David: I did. Joel: Podcast you jumped on. Okay, good. Well let's introduce David. David: Yes. Joel: David don Draper. I'm sure that changed your life when mad men became famous. David: I'm the handsome one of the two of them. Chad: Yeah no, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. So David Draper the better looking of the Draper's. Yes, and you're with whom and what the hell do you do David? David: I'm the Director of Talent Acquisition at the Lewis Group of Companies, which is a very large real estate development company, property management company in Southern California. Chad: Okay, okay. Yeah. So, so how long have you been at Lewis Group? David: I've been at Lewis for 16 years. Chad: 16 Years. David: When they hired me, they had no recruiting presence in the company. There were only two people in human resources. Chad: How big is the company? David: About 700 employees. Chad: Okay. David: In our section of Southern California, there's really nobody in our league that does what we do. Chad: Oh gotcha, okay. Joel: And we are here at the Job by Recruiter Nation Live Conference. So I'm assuming your a job by client as well. Tell us about That. David: We are a job by client. We have been for about five years. This is my second recruiter nation live. I'm very happy with the product. When I joined the company that I'm with, we had a... First of all, when I first joined them, we had no ATS at all. We were putting ads... The company was putting ads in the paper, you know- Joel: Oh my God. 5 years ago. David: Craigslist, flyers. This is 16 years ago and- Joel: Not five years ago. David: Not five years ago. Immediately we got hooked up with Monster, CareerBuilder, all the usual suspects, but pretty soon it was time to pick an ATS. Joel: Yep. David: At the time we had another ATS, which will remain nameless- Joel: Boo, come on David. David: But it was... It starts with a Ceridian and ends with a Ceridian. Joel: Rhymes with Meridian. David: But I investigated a handful and faraway Jobvite was doing some really cool progressive stuff, specifically in the ease of application, the referral piece - Joel: And what year was this? David: Five years ago, so they had- Joel: Okay, five years ago. David: 2013, so a little bit more than five years ago. And yeah, it's been a big hit. My recruiting team is not that big. Currently we're three at our largest we were five, but three is a good number for us for what we do and what we need to fill. Chad: From a director standpoint, when you're looking at systems, and you're looking at pretty much what's happening out there today, cause there's so much noise, all the startups, all the AI, all the RPA, all the acronyms and shit. What does it boil down to for you? What matters most for all of those systems? They can have all the bright and shiny shit, but what really, what brass tacks for you? David: Yeah. I think when you're in recruiting, you got to look at what works for the company you're employed by, the jobs you want to fill, the type of candidate you're attracting. For Louis, what really works is the candidate experience and connecting that to the culture, and then over that is the brand. Where we are in Southern California, we're in a marketplace of Southern California where we're the leader, and a lot of people on the street know our company. They're probably going to rent a Lewis Apartment. They might shop at a Lewis Shopping Center. So we- Chad: That's a brand people know. David: Yeah. Okay. We got to make sure that experience is good when we're putting candidates through the whole process. Because as I like to say, if a candidate has a great experience with recruiting, they're probably going to rent a Lewis apartment. And if someone has a creative experience renting an apartment, they're probably going to apply for a Lewis job. It's all connected. The candidate is the customer, the customer's a candidate. Chad: So how long did it take you to actually arrive at that? Because most of HR and recruiting, they haven't made that connection just yet. That your brand overall does transform into whether that candidates are looking for product or- David: Sure. Joel: And is that communicated with your marketing team? Like are you in close communications with them? David: Yeah. Well, to answer your question about where it started, it started with a friendship. Chad: Okay. David: When I joined Louis, when I hired a guy who was our social, I forget what his title was, Automated Marketing Specialist. Chad: Social media dude. David: When we hired him, he was all about revenue marketing. That's it, revenue marketing, but he and I- Chad: Is he in re-gen kind of stuff? David: Yep. Re-generation. Chad: Gotcha. David: He and I connected over coffee and beer, throwing ideas around. David: And we realized- Joel: That it was either a long meeting or a real interesting meeting. David: Especially the the beer meetings. But you know, a lot of those ideas come after the second beer, we always joke. And we had some really cool ideas of how to take marketing into recruiting, how it's really all the same thing. David: And I'll never forget, we went to a LinkedIn conference way back when, probably about seven years ago and it was really cool because everyone at that conference was telling us, "You're the only company here, you're the only recruiter who brought your marketing guy." And it was really exciting to know that we were, we were touching on something that the big guys were just starting with or knew about. And here we are, a little real estate development company in Southern California and we're on the right track. And it all again, goes to the culture of the company. It's a great company. The family's been doing it since the 1950s they're very well known. And so when you start with that in TA, when you have a trusted brand, I think that's gold. If you can take that, wrap yourself around, it turn into a process into content and lead generation. That's where we were and that's what we did. Chad: Well in those words, if you go to a CEO, CFO, COO and you say lead generation, and it's coming out of recruiting, that will get their attention. Because it means that it's actually impacting their bottom line right? David: Absolutely. Chad: So what was T tell me a little bit about that process when you took it up. The, I mean, did you have that conversation? Did you start having different narrative with the C-suite? How'd that work? David: Well, to a certain extent, we, at the very beginning, we kind of just did it. Because luckily the C-suite at our company is, I can, no, I can't put this any other way. They're just cool. They, they like to hire good people, and they kind of let them do what they do. Chad: Do their thing, yeah. David: They might not understand a little piece, but when it starts working though, you know, call you in and go, what are you doing and why are you doing it and tell me about it. David: And those conversations were always positive with our head of marketing, with the owners, with the VP of asset management, they were always very positive. So luckily I had that culture, that management that let me kind of do what you do. And I think to your point, if you're in the C-suite, you obviously want to hire great people, let great people do it, let them do it. Of course talk about it with them, have them report on it, but if you're a company that likes to say you hire fantastic people, let them do their work. Joel: Earlier this year, Jobvite raises $200 million, they buy three companies, starting to integrate those, get a new CEO. You as a customer, What were your feelings when you first heard about the acquisition and what have you seen since then with using the product that has been sort of a exciting? David: Well we have very... Right off the bat was Canvas job via text. That was something really early on that my friend in marketing, we really knew. The unemployment rate was going down, candidates were wanting more out of the experience, a recession was in our rear view mirror, and then of course me personally I hate answering the phone and I hate checking my email but I love text. And so I knew that that was an ex... That's the next step. And so we very quickly signed up with Canvas and that has been I think a game changer for us to be that ahead of the curve, to be able to talk to candidates quickly in real time, in minutes or less, to have them fill out our application, do our online assessments, set up those interviews and have that connection all the way through past day one. Chad: So is it anti ghosting magic? Did you see... Have you seen the ghosting happening because the of the job market and is it really anti ghosting magic? David: I've seen the ghosting, we've all been frustrated by it, and absolutely I think job via text absolutely helps with that. Particularly during the interview process. And particularly when they can communicate, not with just with the, with the recruiting team, but the managers of they could potentially be working with. Joel: So I'm assuming you see a lot of new products, vendors getting phone calls, devoting their product. What are some things that you've seen in the last say six months that has you excited in terms of technology? David: Well, I think programmatic advertising of course, again, taking that marketing space and putting it into TA. I think the use of chatbots is really interesting. Probably not right for our company. I don't... we're not a company that hires thousands and thousands of people every year, but I can see where that would be exciting and keep that communication flowing both from that first touch point with the person interacting with some of your content all the way past, past day one. So it's those two things. David: So something really cool that we did, is we had candidates who are applying through our website or careers website, which is a very low cost source. We had an opt in page where we said to the candidate, you know, candidate would click on apply here now and then they would go to an opt in page and they could learn about deals for apartments, deals for single family homes, deals for shopping searches, basically local deals. David: And we had an 80% opt in rate, and we now turn those candidates into marketing leads and then we could send them content and information about products. And we actually in one year turned, we had 16 leases of apartments from candidates who were turned into marketing leads, which is, it's basically revenue. Chad: Yeah. No, it is. It's not basically revenue. It is revenue. David: It is. And that I think is a pretty exciting concept to look at candidates as a potentially marketing leads for products. It's the same concept of candidates or customers. You do the same thing when you're shopping on a company's website and when you're shopping on Amazon, you're putting in your information, you're not thinking twice about it. Chad: It's a holistic experience. It's not just a career experience. It's not just a buying experience. You could go to Amazon and who knows, maybe look for jobs or something like that. Right. While you're buying a book or what have you. But in this case, what did the C-suite say? Or what did the boss say when you said, "Hey look, this is what's happening and this is what we did." David: We're looking more into it right now. But they were pretty... It was an eyebrow raiser and it was interesting, tell me more. We're in that tell me more phase. But it all goes to what I believe in, and what you guys believe and what I think smart progressive people in our space think, should know is that experience is the same. If a candidate is going to buy your product, they probably are going to apply for a job, and if they hear something negative about your company, they're probably not going to apply for a job. I mean, you might be wanting to go apply for a job at a company, but when you read an article that they're dumping chemicals in the river, suddenly you're not going to buy their product and you're not going to apply for their job. Chad: So what do you say to those purists that are out there that really believe that there has to be separation between church and state, between sales marketing, and employment brand marketing. What do you say to those people? Cause they're out there and they, and they talk this separation all the time. David: I say why? Well I think that. Why be so firmly in place when I bet you're probably not firmly in place on many of the things you do. Chad: Especially when it's good for the overall business and obviously good for the, I mean this is an opt in thing. You're not making them- David: correct. Chad: Take care of your deals or what have you. This is something that's an opt in kind of scenario. David: Correct, and if you're a company that believes you have a positive brand, why not use that and be honest about it. Don't, don't fake it. I think candidates, and you know, people will know that- Chad: Sniff that shit out. Oh Yeah. Joel: You mentioned earlier that you are a talent agent. I'm wondering if there's a funny Hollywood type talent agent story that you have. David: Yes. Before joining Lewis, I was with Robert Half International and then way before that I was with a talent agency in Beverly Hills. We weren't a William Morris here or a CAA, but we were about a B plus boutique agency. Chad: Still, beautiful people, I mean come on. Joel: Okay. David: Oh, it was a lot of beautiful people. I always say we tended to make people stars, and then they would leave, you know, they'd get on a cool pilot that took off or they get the movie and then they'd say they thank you, they go to William Morris. Joel: See where the mid market of talent agencies till they moved to New York or LA to play sports. David: Couple stories I always tell is we had Salma Hayek. We would just come up from Mexico. And we got her in a few television shows, a couple on HBO. She would always come in the office. She was super cool, super friendly. She treated her career like a business. Really took it seriously. So I wasn't surprised that she took off, but she left us right before Dusk Till Dawn From Dusk Till Dawn, which of course everyone listening to this should watch if you haven't already. And then my funny story- Joel: That was a Tarantino one wasn't it? David: Tarantino yeah. Joel: I don't know if he wrote it... I don't think he directed it but he wrote it, I believe. David: Robert Regus directed it, but he wrote it. Cool story was actually... Tarantino we got... He was at Sundance Film Festival with Reservoir Dogs, and so at that same time he had all these screenplays out there that everyone was trying to get on board with. So it was cool reading all of his screenplays before they became movies or before they even got picked up. That was kind of neat. My other funny story is that I put an actor on a recurring guest star role on a little sitcom called the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Chad: Oh no. Really? David: Yes. And to support my actor, I would go to the tapings. Since it was a new show the tapings would go really late, till like 11, midnight, cause everyone was really nervous. And so we would always go out, go get a pizza or some beers, and so we would hang out with the cast. And everyone was really cool and Ellen wasn't... She was just a stand up comedian who hit it on a show, and I had a big crush on her and I thought I was getting places like chitchatting with her. Chad: On Ellen, with Ellen? David: Yes. I mean- Joel: Little did you know. David: Of course. Chad: And then he's watching, he's watching the show and he's like, wait a minute, what just happened? David: This was before she came out, and she was super chill and really personable and down to earth. And this was, I mean, this wasn't like her and I in a room, this was just groups in groups of people. but I remember having this little [crosstalk 00:16:45]. Chad: You thought she was into you. David: Crush on her and I thought, Hey, do I have a chance? Chad: She's totally, and she's totally into me. Yeah. Joel: So you're saying there is a chance. David: But I do remember she was really nice and friendly and then all that, just what a young actress comedian who's kind of at the hit it big or potentially could hit it big. Joel: or at least now, you know, it wasn't you. David: It wasn't me. It wasn't me at least that time. Chad: So last, last question. If a vendor wants to be able to get your attention, how do they get your attention? David: That's a really good question. I think, [crosstalk 00:17:21] yeah, there is. I do get a lot of emails and a lot of calls and everybody's great. They just want to work, and they just want to get their product out there, but I would say to a vendor is do a little bit of homework on the company you're trying to sell it to. And you know, something that could work for the Geico, and the Netflix's of the world, is not going to work for the majority of companies out there. Because the majority of companies are thousand people or less. So look... Call them up or just look at their space out there on social or on the web, and gear your sales pitch to them. David: To say, "Hey, you know, you might not be our Chatbot customer, but you are a customer for this other piece that we do." And I think that would be an easy kind of in that a sales person or a rep could do. Joel: can I squeeze in one more? So you're, you're in the real estate development business, and you guys are sort of on the front lines of the economy and what's going on. Do you see any cracks in the economy based on what you're seeing in the home development business or the real estate development? David: I'm in TA, but I interact with all of the major players, development VPs and they're all great men and women. What I see out there right now is probably single family homes are going to level out, quiet down. David: That might kind of slow down, but what I hear and see is apartments are red hot, and they probably won't stop being red hot. And I think they're going to change, you know, amenity heavy, more upscale, more and more upscale and then moving out into the suburban areas. But I think it goes to that demographic of who wants a place to sleep and a place with a roof over the head. It's completely different than the idea of my parents had, and our parents had. Now it's, you know like we were talking earlier about people not buying cars anymore. I don't know if people are going to think of where they live as that longterm thing anymore. Joel: But you're still optimistic on the economy at this point? David: Yeah, I would say I think we're going to see a dip in 2020, I do. That's my personal view. I don't think we're going to get anything- Joel: Hope the floor's not going to fall out from under us. David: Hopefully it's now the 2008, no one wants that, but I think we're going to see a dip, and I hopefully you see home prices be a bit more reasonable for everybody. But I think we're going to see higher and higher rents and not just in the major urban areas. Joel: Well, David, thanks for sitting down with us today. For anyone who wants to know more about you or your company, where would you send them? David: Well, the best place is our website, Lewiscareers.com and of course I'm on LinkedIn, David Draper, and then on Twitter we're @LewisRecruits. Chad: Excellent. Thanks man. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Chad: This has been the Chad and to youth 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. #Jobvite #TalentAcquisition #RNL2019

Recruiting at Intel is becoming smarter and smarter. Driven by PhD Tyler Weeks, the company is strongly committed to analytics and automation. The boys explore exactly what that means in this Nexxt exclusive. Enjoy and learn something, would ya'! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Chad: Okay, so we've already established texting is probably the best way to connect with candidates, right? Plus Nexxt stats show 73% of professionals are open to receiving job opportunities via text. And with a 99% delivery rate, you cannot go wrong. Those are two big reasons why you got to love Text2Hire from Nexxt. That's right. Text2Hire from Nexxt, with the double X, not the triple X. Nexxt has over eight million candidates who have opted in to receive jobs via text. And you and your clients need qualified candidates. Nexxt can help you find and target qualified candidates who have opted in for job opportunities via text. And in today's competitive market, you need an edge to reach qualified candidates faster. You need Text2Hire from Nexxt. Just go to chadcheese.com, and click on the Nexxt logo to learn more about how you can gain a competitive edge with opt in texting. Text2Hire from Nexxt. It just makes sense. 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 everybody? Got a special show today. We got a super fan on the line- Chad: Super fan. Joel: As well as being a super smart guy. What's up everybody? I'm Joel Cheesman. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm joined today by- Chad: Tyler Weeks. Joel: And Chad Sowash, who said Tyler Weeks. So Tyler, superfan, head of the fan club, great style, by the way also. Welcome to the show. Give us a little bit about you for those who don't know, give us the elevator pitch. Tyler: I'm so well known, I'm sure it hardly needs- Joel: That is true- Chad: Everywhere. Joel: You are a bit iconic. Tyler: Everywhere. I'm a bit of an oddball. I'm a physicist by training, jumped out of research and development, and right into talent acquisition. And I've been in the space for almost four years now. And I run a team called Analytics and Automation. And we're looking at how to be competitive using technology and machine learning. Joel: Well, what a great coincidence that we talk about automation so much on the show that you happen to be a guest today. Chad: Physicist. Let's break this down real quick. So how do you make the jump from being a fucking physicist to going to talent acquisition? I don't know how that works, I need to understand how that works. Joel: And have you had your head checked? Like drug addiction, is that in there somewhere? Tyler: Right, this is what it looks like when we wash out. No, actually, you know, it's interesting. Even in going through grad school I was really interested in business problems and I liked playing around with things in the business school and talking to VCs and was sort of set on having my own billion dollar startup. And I jumped into a career doing research and development but never lost that drive for business development. And at some point I kind of realized that I really wanted to get out of the lab and go tackle those types of problems and it took me quite awhile to rebrand myself and upskill. Joel: What kind of timeline are we talking about? So you graduate at what age and then you did that for how long and then it took you how long to get into talent acquisition. Tyler: So I did that for about five and a half years. The research and development, I would say probably around about halfway through that I decided that I wanted to change, but I didn't want to just like jump into something I didn't want to do. So I took my time, spent a lot of time talking to folks about business roles and learning how to talk about business, crashed and burned in a lot of places with interviews that went nowhere and resumes that were garbage and all that stuff. And really learning how to tell my story became part of that journey and then I, through some networking, found this role in HR and honestly like, I was really skeptical about it because in my mind HR was just Toby from the office. And I was just like, I- Joel: And you were wrong how? Tyler: I was just like, "I just don't know what this thing is," but it was in talent acquisition and I had a few friends that were like, "No, this is actually a cool role." And I hopped in in a purely business role, it was running the recruiting strategy for all of Intel's manufacturing globally. Joel: Where you at Intel previously or would- Tyler: Yeah, so I've been at Intel for about nine years now. Joel: So you convinced them to take this jump to take you from one profession to another one. How did that go? Tyler: Someone who just took a big chance on me, they took a huge chance on me and I don't know if it is a good idea or not. And so I did that for about a year and then we had just adopted Workday- Chad: Ouch. Tyler: Basically that was Armageddon in terms of like, you know, just complete meltdown of all our analytics. It's like driving a cruise ship by just bumping into the shore. Right? Like, there was no visibility into what was happening. And so they asked me to join our analytics team and then... Because I'd kind of become this weird unicorn where I understood, after this crash course of a year, talent acquisition and the analytics. And now I'm here and I do a lot of storytelling and a lot of building our technology roadmap. Joel: Intel, not a small company, but you lead analytics and automation and you lead that team. How big is the team? This is one of the things that got me, everybody listen, how big's the team? Tyler: So I've got about 15 people globally. Joel: Okay, wait, say that again? Tyler: About 15. About 15- Joel: 15 people globally, I mean you guys, just on your analytics and automation team, probably out number many of the recruiting like branding teams or anything like out there. Right? Tyler: Our leaders, in talent acquisition in particular, have invested heavily in analytics. Joel: That's awesome. Tyler: And they've done that intentionally to try to drive up the ROI of the team. And we actually accomplished quite a bit of work with a very lean team of recruiters and sourcers in recruitment markets. If you look at the number of people we have worldwide doing talent acquisition, I think we're actually fairly small as an org. But I think it's because we invest strategically in things like automation and analytics to help us make smarter decisions rather than just kind of brute force, let's hire the planet and have a thousand RPO contracts all over the world. Joel: And that today is why we're here. Right? Tyler: Yeah, that's exactly why we're here. Joel: So Tyler and I, after he got off stage, him and Allyn were on stage at SmashFly's Transform conference in Boston earlier this year. Got off the stage- Chad: Allyn is? Joel: Allyn is... What's Allyn's title? Tyler: Allyn Bailey, she is Yoda. I think, she's our resident Yoda. She is our transformation program manager. So she had this role of basically modernizing how we do talent acquisition. Joel: So putting the puzzle together is what Allyn does. Chad: Sounds easy. Joel: Yeah, not so much. So they had this amazing presentation around the infinity loop, which instead of using recruiting funnels, you should be using infinity loops. But anyway, afterwards I caught up with Tyler and said, "Look, you know, this is great stuff. You have so much data." And then we got into this kind of like ROI rabbit hole, which is how this podcast came to be. Tell us a little bit about that conversation and really where your passion is when it comes to, obviously, analytics and really the big focus on ROI when it comes to business impact. Tyler: Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that I often find myself doing is helping build a business case or what's the story, what's the thing that we actually want to accomplish? Because constantly running into folks that are making... There's a few common mistakes that people are making. And one of them that I really try to challenge is people mistake their budget for their value. Joel: Yes. Tyler: And that to me is the biggest miss. Like if you were to go and articulate, what's the value of having a talent acquisition at your company? It's enormous. Like in terms of landing the right talent to hit your product timelines, drive your sales, to have your marketing team up and running, like pretty much.. I mean, I'm speaking to the choir here, but pretty much every component of your company is enhanced or kept alive by having strong talent acquisition. And when I see folks advocating for more head count or new technologies, they're typically articulating that the benefit to the company in terms of cost savings, "Oh, we have X amount of dollars in our budget, we'll save this many dollars if we go get that new tool." Tyler: Well if you're looking at the ledger for the company and if your company is making a hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, the $500,000, your saving is nothing. It's not really a compelling story. And so then you kind of go back with your tail between your legs cause they were like, "Well that sounds great, but we're not really willing to invest in that. We're going to go put our money where we're going to get a huge return for the company." So figuring out how to tie what you do to the actual revenue of your company is the name of the game. That's how you demonstrate ROI, not just to your manager, but to the company in general. Joel: I want to go back to your team of 15 folks. When Intel made the decision to create a team of 15, or however many it is or how however many it will be, was it based on data that you already had? Was it a guess that this is where the puck is going and if it was a guess, has the guests been sort of come to fruition that it was the right decision? Like I'm kind of curious how you came to the 15, the decision that was made, was it a guess or was it a done by data? Tyler: You know, that's a great question. I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I would say it's a little bit of both. I think there was some intuition there, that, "Hey, we need to get good at this," but I don't think it was as intentional as saying we are going to invest X amount of dollars. What really happened is that we invested in having a team that sat in Europe, a team that sat in the US, and a team that sat in Asia and kind of supported the three regions. Tyler: One of the journeys that we've been on and really kind of pulled those people together, was moving from being a team that was just data. In other words, you would come and ask us for some data and we would spit out an Excel file and email it to you to providing insight and making that jump from just talking about how many hires you have to forecasting what your demand would be, or even defining what demand is, required the team to kind of work as a cohesive unit. And so over the last couple of years, that's really been part of my vision for the team. And what I've really driven with us is getting out of the business of just being data monkeys and really delivering value. I 100% focused on providing value for the work. How can the people on my team help you make a decision, because that's really what people want. Joel: Do you expect the team to grow over the next five, 10 years? Tyler: Not necessarily. It could if we maybe changed systems or we... Actually, I'm going to contradict myself. Yes, but not purely in analytics, in focused on analytics. You know, as we're adopting technologies and as we're bringing automations in, somebody's got to be watching the robots. Joel: Because they're ornery suckers. Tyler: Right. No, but there's this thing where like folks think that, "Oh I'm going to bring in this automation and then the ROI I'll get is I'll reduce my head count." No, you're going to trade your head count. You need folks that are sitting in the background making sure that you're not going to pull an Amazon and have some biased system that is systematically excluding people. You simply can't do that. And beyond that, beyond the ethical concerns of having automation, you would never go hire a human and not monitor their performance and make sure that they did the thing you hired them to do. I see, in particular in HR, where folks are not necessarily coming up from a pedigree of engineering, or science for that matter, that they want to go buy a black box tool, put it in and assume that it's solving the problem. Tyler: I want to know did it actually solve the problem? You know, if we're saying that we want sourcers or recruiters to have great candidates, so we're going to put in a machine learning algorithm that matches resumes to Rex. Okay, great, well is that actually making their job easier? Does it actually do any... I don't know if anyone can actually answer the question if that actually does anything, right? It seems nice and it's easy to sell, but does it solve a problem? I don't know. And you need a team of folks that are focused on connecting the solution to the actual outcome. And when we talk about outcomes, that's all analytics. So, yeah, I think there is going to be a bigger demand for teams like mine, not just at Intel but at every company that's hoping to take advantages of these technologies, Joel: Right. Because most companies have all that data, but it's just sitting there and they're not like looking at the outcomes or really trying to better understand what is going on within their systems. I'm going to take that a little bit deeper as you're talking about the data in back to what you'd said around product timelines, right? So yeah, we're looking for return on investment. We're looking for outcomes and those types of things, but the thing that we don't do, or at least I don't feel like we do enough in talent acquisition, is marry that back to everyday practicality being what does that product timeline look like with those three seats empty? And what does it actually mean if this product can't launch or we can't make X amount of widgets or what have you. What does this mean to the actual bottom line? Do you see us tying talent acquisition, people, brand, sales back to the bottom line enough when it comes to talent acquisition? Tyler: No, absolutely not. We totally missed the boat on this. You know, talent acquisition likes to borrow lots of concepts. We like to borrow concepts from sales and marketing, from supply chain, from manufacturing, and those are helpful constructs. They are helpful but they're limited. We are like a sales org because we are selling our company. We are like a marketing org because we are marketing. However, where limitations come in is that, like you're going to hire exactly the number of people that you post recs for. So you can't say, "Oh my marketing was really good because we hired more people this year." Doesn't work that way, that's not your ROI. And so when you have to... When you're diving in and looking at what value you're providing, you immediately start bumping up against, "Well, what is my company trying to accomplish? What are our corporate goals and how am I serving those-" Joel: Purpose. Tyler: The purpose. And if I start to look at like... Look, everybody in the world, and there's probably people who are going to disagree with this, if they go and take the average or the median of their time to accept from the day they opened the rec to when someone accepts. For most people it's somewhere around 45 days and as far as I can tell for people that have been in the industry for a thousand years... But if you went and asked Jerry Crispin, he'd tell you, "Yeah, it's about 45 days, give or take." It's always been that and our experience from then to about the time somebody actually starts, there's a huge variation, but you know it's about another month or so in reality. Like you know folks negotiate that start date, so call it a quarter, call it 90 days from the time you open a rec to somebody sitting in the seat. Tyler: Well, there's a huge amount of influencing that needs to happen because finance doesn't understand that. They're talking to the business and they're saying, "Okay, well you need this many more people for this product by the end of the quarter," it's already halfway through the quarter. It's too late already, they've already missed the boat. And then they'll come and they'll beat the shit out of talent acquisition saying, "Hey, you didn't get us people in time." That's simply not how it works, we have to go find the talent. And so being able to tell that story, that specific story of here's what it takes to find talent, even if you're the fastest in the world, here's what it takes to help you hit your product timelines. That all comes back to that analytics and really equipping our people with that story so that they can go influence. Joel: And also taking those, we actually come up with our own terms, right? Like time to hire. That's not something that the CEO and board actually talk about, right? But how do you tie in when a CHRO goes to a C-suite meeting and they throw time to hire or time to fill on the table, everybody looks at them like, "Oh, isn't that cute? They came up with their own, Aw, look at that. That's cute." Instead of actually tying it back to that time to hire and then onboarding, like you're talking about, what is that actually costing the company? Tyler: Right. Joel: What is the cost for a senior engineer position to be open right now? How long is it going to take for us to fill it? How long is the onboarding? What does that cost to the organization, to the bottom line? That's, I mean... Are those questions being... Are those stories actually happening today? Tyler: Those are, but here's the thing is I think that's just scratching the surface. Joel: Okay. Tyler: I think that is the most obvious connection and it's the place that we can go influence the business on is, "Hey, you're not going to hit your product timeline." I think there's a deeper layer of ROI that I really want to figure out. I haven't figured this out, this is just one of the things I'm pushing to look at is moving beyond the value of a hire, what's the value of a candidate to the company? Because if we can start to identify how much a candidate is worth to our company, then we can start to talk about ROI for recruitment marketing, right? We can say, "Hey look, we only hired X amount of people, we're going to hire X amount of people every year, so why would I invest?" This is why I think recruitment market teams fail to get investment is the company looks at and goes, "Well, why would I invest in that? What am I getting for it?" Tyler: But they don't understand the value of a candidate. And the analogy I keep going to, that I think is helpful here but I haven't quite crystallized it, is if I look at the way professional sports teams scout talent they start in high school. They start in high school looking at who the best potential talent is. They start building relationships with them young. They have no intention of hiring them anytime soon. There's no rec open for point guard, right? Like they're just building a longterm relationship with them. They're understanding who has what skills, what strengths, so that when they have a position open, they already know who the best is. They have a catalog of like, "Hey, we've talked to this person, we saw this person play here, we know they're on that team, they signed this contract." They have like this... And that's their IP, like that black book, or that book of business of who the best talent is and who they've talked to, is incredibly valuable to them. Joel: That's easy to justify when you have players worth millions of dollars. It's less so with everyday employees. Right? Tyler: Right. So how do you scale that up? That's exactly the problem. That's exactly, I think, where the potential value is and when we... You know, you mentioned the infinity loop. Really what that is is talking about building those longterm relationships and that, and this was just referencing my talk at Transform, the places that I'm hoping that TA tech can start to innovate is helping scale up that solution. How do I know who the best talent is? There's that McKinsey report from several years ago called The War for Talent, and they basically say that to win you need the top 5% of the labor market. Well, who are they? If you bumped in the street, would you know who they are? And if we can start to talk about that top 5% and the impact they have on your company, and the value of having them in your CRM, or however you're keeping track of folks, and the value of that relationship with them, then you're talking about a whole different level of ROI. And a story that I think is much more compelling than simply, "Hey, we're able to fill recs faster," or, "We're able to have more people accept our offers." Tyler: I think, to your point, those those have limited appeal to your C-suite. They're like, "Okay, all right, our accept rate is 80%, what do I get if it's 85?" Joel: Yeah, but if you can tie those numbers together, it actually makes sense for them. If you can put a dollar amount to them, they can make the decision if they give a fuck or not. Right? Tyler: Right, right. Exactly. And so I think talking about the dollar value... I know that sounds... Probably need an actuary on here to talk about the value of a life. But the the dollar value of having a candidate and having a relationship with them, I think there's a dollar value there or a way to estimate that, that is robust. Like something that I think your finance controllers can get behind and that your C suite can get behind. Joel: We talk a lot on the show about vendors that provide a lot of services to this industry. And I'm curious, obviously Intel, you guys get inundated with vendors wanting you to buy their services. How do you, your department and you specifically, decide on what vendors to use, what do you build internally? Is there a process by which of that comes along with a service and you say, "Hey, maybe we should build this ourselves." How does that work? Tyler: The best tee shirts, that's how we choose them, the swag. Joel: And booze, right? Tyler: Yeah. Booze and pens, very clickable pens really just sell me every time. No, so actually that's a really interesting question. So, I'm in the process of building a new function here, as sort of a build out for my team, that I'm calling an innovation lab because like every, I think, giant multinational corporation, we struggle to test new technologies quickly. There's so much bureaucracy between our purchasing and legal and IT that it takes us an ungodly amount of time to actually get in and pilot some new technology. So we might see it, we might talk to a really interesting company at HR tech and go, "Oh man, we'd love to try this." But we almost sort of like give up and we're like... Just the amount of work to try it is a barrier in itself. Joel: And how about building it yourself? Is that an option when you view some of these services and solutions? Tyler: That's certainly an option. Joel: And is that more bureaucratic than deciding who to buy? Tyler: Not necessarily. Let me wrap up the innovation, they all come back to building ourselves. So, the intent of this innovation lab that I'm trying to build, and this is for talent acquisition specifically, is to set a goal. Like a goal that we can march towards of can we turn around a test in 60 days? What would it take? What sort of agreements do we need with purchasing and finance and IT? And can we build a new bureaucracy? Can we just sort of like Neo The Matrix and just say, "Okay like-" Chad: Streamline bureaucracy. Joel: Nano bureaucracy. Tyler: What world do we want to live in and can we go architect that, that will allow us to innovate faster. And that's what I really am trying to drive with this team, is that 60 day turnaround and we just pulled that out of thin air, but hey we figured if we can meet you at HR tech, decide we want to try your technology, we can run a quick pilot, we can actually calculate ROI or business value and then come back with a recommendation. It doesn't mean we have money to go do it, but just to come back to recommendation and say, "Hey, this actually solves X, Y and Z problems for us. We recommend that we go with this one." That's our end state. Now that to build it ourself, that is always a possibility. I think there's sort of a fault line here or like on the one hand it's nice to build it yourself because you can prototype quickly. I run a team that operates more or less in an agile structure, so we can iterate quickly, we can customize it. Tyler: My challenge is that for some technologies, like anything that's using learning, the pooled experience of that algorithm across many companies with developers who are incentivized to keep it state of the art I think is advantageous. So I think there's actually, there's quite a bit of motivation, in my mind, to purchase solutions that include machine learning or natural language processing, that they have the horsepower behind them in terms of an ambitious company and an ambitious set of developers who are actively working on the problem. If we build it ourselves, we're going to build it and we're going to put it in and it'll do its thing, but it will do that same thing for a long time until it becomes a problem. We simply don't have the bandwidth to proactively be making it better all the time. We're going to get it good enough and then let it collect dust until it breaks. Joel: So that being said, what are some solutions that you've tested or used or bought in the last 12 months or so that you've been impressed with? Tyler: There's been a couple of different spaces that we've been exploring and wanting to make sure that we're really good at. Like one thing that I would love... And I keep pushing CRMs when I talked to them and maybe you know the who can do this but I haven't seen anyone actually do this. Is when you're building a recruitment marketing campaign, borrowing analogies from product marketing, you tend to look at just volume. Like clicks and impressions and... But all you're looking at is interest. How much interest are you driving without connecting it to what skills you're attracting? You have no idea whether or not it was successful. Tyler: Success does not mean more, success really means the right kind of people. So it may be that if I go set up a campaign for goat yoga in Santa Clara that I will get like 80% of the mid-career software engineers with experience in firmware. Right? Like it just might be that the people that are good at that are really interested as a population in goat yoga. And if I don't build personas around skill sets, then I'm not doing the right experiments. I'm not doing the right AB testing. Does that make sense? And I haven't seen... Where, I've seen CRMs starting to use AI, they're still focused on filling recs Chad: In some cases, AI... And we actually had Amanda Bogan on from Upturn, they're an agency that's focused on equity and justice on the AI side of the house. And they were doing some research with Netflix just to see that even though the algorithm didn't have gender or race, it found a way to make what they were providing, from a movie standpoint, more bias. Which was weird. Now going back to the goat yoga piece, what if only white dudes that are like close to 50, like Joel and I, are doing goat yoga, right? Is that not just a way to perspectively... The machine's going to find in some cases, much like Amazon's did, they're going to find bias whether you input gender or race or anything into that. Tyler: Yeah. This might sound controversial, but I don't think it is. I think when you're talking about non-biased algorithms, it's absolutely critical if you're trying to replace the recruiter. If you're trying to match people to a job and say this person is more qualified than that person, that absolutely you need to take all the bias out of that you can. When it comes to recruitment marketing, I think you want bias. You want to use it and I know that sounds... It's probably an allergic reaction from the entire set of listeners here, but what I mean by that is if your company is disproportionately white, middle aged men, and that's who you disproportionately attract, then you have to go intentionally build campaigns to attract the people that you don't already bring in. And you don't know if you're doing that or not if you're not looking at it. So, if you're saying... Like exactly to your point, it may turn out that goat yoga just reinforces the current makeup of my company, I will never make a change. I'll never make a difference if I don't look at it and go, "Oh, I'm actually not appealing to these 10 other populations that I really think are important to represent in my company." Chad: Somebody in talent acquisition, or even vendors... I mean, what would you say today they should walk away with from an actionable standpoint, what did you do? What have you guys done at Intel that has really moved you toward understanding what ROI is and being able to really present back to the business, to big business, that you know you're worth more than just the budget. What's that step they need to take? What would you give them to take away? Tyler: So I think at a very actionable point is to go look at what are your company's goals? What are the corporate goals? And most companies are going to have them, they're probably going to come in different formats. They're probably released at different times of the year. It should be in the form of, "We want to increase revenue for this department by X percent. We want to sell this many units. We want to expand into this many other markets." Right? What are those? And start by telling the talent acquisition story related to those problems and work backwards from those. How are we helping that? That's as simple... It seems obvious and it's a very simple thing. What you'll quickly see is like, "Oh, maybe I'm missing data. I can't tell this story because I don't know which projects I'm hiring for." Right? It may be that the only thing you're capturing is who the hiring manager is and which organization they work in, but really this project is a horizontal and it reaches across several departments and you have no idea if you're supporting that project or not, and it's maybe the company's biggest priority. Tyler: You'll quickly start to see, "Oh, I don't know, we seem to be opening requisitions in the same quarter that we say we need the head count, but that's simply not feasible." And so then you start to kind of see where those gaps are. If you just do that simple exercise of taking the corporate goals, which usually include revenue in some form and just work backwards from there. When you actually start to do it, it's not as simple as it sounds, but I think it's an important exercise. Joel: All right, I'm going to let you out on this one. And first of all, by the way, your answer to my last question albeit very diplomatic was garbage. Soundbyte: That is one big pile of shit. Joel: You didn't mention any vendors, you didn't put your balls out there. So I just had to say that that was pretty weak, dude. I'm going to hope that you save yourself on this question, it's sort of a fun one. We were talking about it before we hit record. It looks like around 2011 you guys hired will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas to be your what? Chief creative officer or something? Tyler: Yeah. Joel: And you had an interesting take on what having an outdated nineties music icon did to your recruiting. Talk about that. Tyler: This is either going to be a great answer- Joel: Don't be weak, man. Come on. Tyler: Or I'm going to... No, it's cool. Like I'm willing to get fired for the [crosstalk 00:32:40]. Joel: But are you willing.i.am to be fired? Tyler: Am I will.i.am to get fired. No, you know... Actually we were talking about the sort of hyper color, fab workers that used to be part of Intel's campaign. You know, they dance to like Island in the Sun and they had this whole thing, and I sort of offhandedly said that it was easier to hire back then. You know, Intel... If you know what Moore's law is, if your audience knows what Moore's law is, it's one of our, one of our founders- Joel: They don't. Tyler: Okay. So Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, has a thing called Moore's law that he had, which was basically an industry standard, which said that every 18 months we were going to double the number of transistors on a chip. That cadence has been the drum beat that's driven innovation in Silicon Valley for 50 years. That is like the heartbeat of Silicon Valley, it's why, for so long, your laptop shrunk and your phone shrunk and continued to get more powerful. Right? So there's a lot of companies around now that are the darlings of Silicon Valley, right? It's Fang. It's the Facebooks and the Apples, and that was Intel. Intel was that Silicon Valley unicorn that everybody wanted to work at and our brand was so strong, especially in the days of Intel Inside and the dancing fab workers and- Joel: The '90s. Tyler: And the '90s were great to us. And you know, you didn't have to have a strong talent acquisition strategy because you just open your door and the world lined up. Right? You said, "Hey, we think we might hire..." I'll bet you back then you could have done an experiment where you just opened a job with no job description and no job title and you'd still have applicants. Joel: Just a blank screen with apply now. Tyler: Yeah, just apply now, no information and people still would have applied. And I think, if you go talk to... I'm sure Facebook and Apple and a lot of those companies still enjoy that right now. Like where they're at in terms of their brand strength. And in some segments I think we still do, right? Like we're still known as a chip maker and every person getting a degree in electrical engineering knows that Intel is the largest chip maker in the world. So certainly in those segments that's where we still thrive but we are a growing company and we're trying to address a much larger market that includes things like autonomous driving, includes data centers and memory and all these places that we're not necessarily known for. Nobody thinks of us as an automaker. Tyler: So where our brand strength is high, sure it's easy. Where our brand strength is not high, then we struggle just like everybody else to attract the right talent. But the will.i.am thing was funny because I think somewhere there was this idea.. This is where I'll throw you bone here. Somewhere there's this idea that Hey, we need to be cool. I'll bet you, I would bet money, that the conversation in the room was like, "Hey, how do we get cool like Apple?" And somebody was like, "Well let's hire somebody cool to go talk for us." And they're like, "Yeah my kids like the Black Eyed Peas, let's get William." Joel: Let's get William. Chad: Because Fergie was busy. Tyler: Fergie was too expensive, I'm sure. We weren't going to spend that kind of money. And so like he even had like... He was even... I don't know if he hosted or he read like one of the awards at like the Grammy's or something but you could probably go find it. He like reads this card and at the end he's like, "And Intel is awesome." And then he like steps off the stage and I'm like, "All right, that's all all right, that's ROI right there, mother fuckers." But that was the same time I think Polaroid hired Lady Gaga to do the same thing. So you know, we weren't- Chad: I don't know that I would want to put Polaroid next to Intel but hey that's all on you, man. That being said, well, go ahead- Joel: You do you, bruh. Chad: We'll go ahead and we'll slowly close out this, wind down this show. Tyler, we appreciate you coming on. We definitely want to have you again, because we have so much to talk about around just the business aspects, obviously, of talent acquisition and analytics. But appreciate you coming in, man. Tyler: Yeah, this is a blast. You guys are fun. Joel: For anyone who wants to know more about you and/or Intel, or wants to apply to your invisible jobs, where would you send them? Tyler: Well, you know, there's obviously our site, our job site. I'm on Twitter @prostalent, like not poems but pros, pros talent, and- Chad: Lever. Tyler: I'm on LinkedIn too. Joel: Tyler Weeks, pretty easy guys. We out. Chad: We out. Soundbyte: That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over. 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. #Intel #Automation #analytics #Recruitment #recruiting

What a week. A Death Match winner announced Alexa is serving up McDonald's jobs w/ a side of Paradox Neuvoo gets paid Nike puts on a cult brand clinic Monster drops the axe Uncommon calls it quits after 18 mos. and $18 million ... and much more. Enjoy this week's show, powered by Sovren, Canvas and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities.​ James Ellis: Hey, this is James Ellis from the talent cast podcast and you are listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast, which I guess is your choice. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors you're listening to. HR is most dangerous podcast Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hers complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Bottle up boys and girls. Chad: Yeah. Oh that's so loud, dude. I got a headache. My bad, my bad. Hey gang. Joel: The liver assault small continues as we had the HR Tech in Vegas this week. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. HR's most dangerous and apparently thirstiest I'm your cohost Chad: Joel Cheesman and I'm Chad. Keep it down. So wash on this week. Show new blue, makes it rain. A uncommon slips into the Deadpool and Mickey D's is now serving jobs with those fries. Maybe Alexa, we have a problem. Grab them, make orange, 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. 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: Spent some time, spend some time with Robert Ruff this week. Joel: CEO with our buddies over at Sovren. Chad: Those guys are, they're just fucking smart. I mean, that's all I can say. You see all these companies that go out there and they just try to squeeze people and then that generally doesn't work long term. These guys have a solid, it's solid tech, don't get me wrong, but the way that they do business is pretty legit. I enjoy it. Joel: They quintessentially quietly grow organically. They don't, they don't puff their chest all that much ever. They just do it right, man. They just send the shadows provide a good service, make money. Good stuff is good to see. Robert, we'll see them at a HR tech where bourbon will be on, Chad: On the table. So let's say we have some Pappy stowed away for Chad and cheese. Yeah. We, we pushed him for a little higher quality this year. He'll see what I'm like, yeah. Coming back from TA tech dude, Austin food, music and bats and my, my, my liver fucking hates me right now. Joel: I'm kinda glad I left when I did. Right about now. You were, you were there with family and a, I'm assuming drank Chad: All weekend. Yeah. Yeah. We drank all weekend. I mean, there are places in the U S where you can get great food. One of them is Austin. It just the, it's, it's kind of like the weird, cool atmosphere, amazing music, sad, this whole bats thing, like every night, right at sunset, over a million band bats under one bridge launch. So everybody comes to see that and get all fucking weirded out and shit. It was just really weird, really cool. Craft beer scene is awesome, which we, we found out one of the mom and pop brewery during our brew review with our friends over at This Way Global. It's not a travel agency, not a travel agency, but big thanks again to David from Assess First. Brian from Pez.ai, Arran over at Job.com and Anoop from Seekout for having the balls to get on stage in front of judges like Quincy Valencia from Alexander Mann Solutions. Chad: Cindy Songe from Talroo, who I actually had to pull her back. Man, she was like, she was like a pit bull. I loved it. It was awesome. She was pit bull in sneakers. Then Robert Ruff, who just talked about from Sovren, he had the single word question… Blockchain. Yeah. And then he kind of made a sound after that. And then, and then, and then you and me. Right? So there were five of us and it was just, it was a blast. So I'm congrats to Anoop over at Seekout. Chad: We're going to have all of those pitches packaged up Chad: And they're going to come out as their own individual podcasts. Again, you know the guys over@job.com Pez dot. AI assess first and seek out. You'd be able to hear those. And it was a, it was a fun time. Yeah. Joel: And don't forget, Andreea, who was our winner and Lisbon. Yes. From earlier this year we're giving away now the champion chain. Yes. This is a gold chain, not real gold, cause we're not that rich. It's a, a pseudo gold, but it is heavy and not, she feels real. Yeah. This thing is 10, you know, 10 pounds or so. So we crowned Andreea who was there with the chain and a new, what a great like coincidence that he was wearing a boxer's robe that he was able to sport the chain. We'll be posting that on, on the socials, on the website at chadcheese.com. Um as usual. All had a great time. Death Match. We'll do it again Chad: Next year. Oh yeah. Well, and Andreea and she didn't go back to Ireland. She was actually going to, to Vegas and she only had carry on and she was like, I don't know if this thing will fit in my carry on. I was like, you're going to Vegas, you're in Austin. Just wear it. And then just tell them, Oh, I'm going to Vegas. And then like put it in the and whatnot. Oh yeah. So he was like, Oh yeah, no Vegas, you're good. Joel: And by the way, Andreea, is this, I don't know, five, four, you know, with heels on, I mean, she's a little, she's not, you know, this thing is, it would look large on us. It looks especially large on a, a a fairly petite a woman. Yes. Keeping on with the shoutouts a, you mentioned brew review, but a, this is coming out soon. Give everybody heads up. We tested four beers a microbrew in, in Austin. That was a lot of fun. So that's releasing, coming out this week I think. And this way global will also be at HR tech. I think 1953 is their booth. If my memory is good enough, go check them out at 1953, they're also going to be at Pitchfest, I think one of eight companies that are going to be doing that. So hats off to them. I know they're excited. Go check them out. Chad: Yeah. And also big shout out to the entire Tengai team, Charlotte, Elin and Sinisa who were decked out in there, Chad and Cheese t-shirts, at TAtech. Tim Meehan from Pontoon was sporting is Chad and Cheese T. And I got to say Emissary.AI they've got their money's worth out of these t-shirts, man. And we still have more to give away this week at HR tech. Joel: Yeah, we're excited. It's a good shirt. People are good in that. It's a, it's nice a shout out to our buddy Chris Dunn, who we had released a book, the nine faces of HR sounds a little bit I don't know, scandalous. It's a, you know, nine faces to know. Sorry. So check that out. I have not read it, but if Chris is behind it, I'm sure it's a stellar read. Remember the faces of death, a movie afterwards, seventies and eighties. Classic man. It wasn't at blockbuster. It was at like the local you know, riffraff video store. A lot of people don't know what this is. It was this video of people dying and it was totally fucked up. Chad: Video. It was a series. Faces of Death one too. I mean they just kept going. So this is Kris Dunn's version. Kris, the basis of HR death, the nine phases. Joel: What do you remember is like the creepiest death in the, in the movie? Chad: Oh, whatever. There were just really some creepy, nasty, horrible shit like there where I stopped watching this areas is somewhere like in Malaysia or something like that. They had this monkey, ah, the restaurant. Yeah. At a restaurant. And what it was is that you ate fresh monkey brains, but you had to kill the monkey right in front of you. And dude, I mean, I just, I was like, I started, why I'm that this can't be real. It was real at that point. I stopped watching. I just, I couldn't do it anymore. It was bad. See, when you're a human being and you're dying just because you're a fucking idiot, that's one thing. Kind of like the Darwin awards, but that kind of shit. Joel: Yeah, the monkey brains was met fucked up. But yeah, I agree. Like the dude falling in the alligator pit. Like that's a stupid human shit. But the monkey didn't hurt anybody. Like you know, it's, it's all good. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's get off of a memory lane and a are demented childhood and get back to a shout out. Chad: She shot off the Kelly, Darren, and Allister. They just took ContentApp.AI is now rebranded as Paiger.co. P. A. I. G. E R dot. C. O. Yeah, and from what I'm hearing, they're giving out free demos. Joel: Oh, I didn't notice. I didn't realize. That's funny. Yeah, they don't do free demos. Every demo is free anyway. I didn't realize I had so many recruiters using their service. Good for them. Chad: Great. If you guys haven't seen the product, check it out. It's again P A I G E R dot C. O. I use it and it is like amazing cause it just sends you content that is pretty much curated for you, but it sends it to you via text and if you want to send it out via your socials, you to set up your, you set up your different social media accounts and choose the choose the ones yes or no. Send me another one, whatever it is, but your do it via SMS. Right? So you're not having to go to another platform or anything like that. It's really easy. Cool. And I actually find a lot of shit that I wouldn't have found before. Oh, there you go. Seal of approval from Chad for Peloton dude. Yeah, I like the ease of use. All right. Are we done with shutouts? One more. This is hilarious. A very close source, very close source to indeed tells me that a indeed marketing hates us. And I thought about it really hard and I said, you know, we haven't said anything bad about indeed marketing. Have we? I can't, I can't, I can't personally remember, Oh, they hate us. They hate us, Chad and cheese. So I don't understand cause I mean we don't talk shit about indeed marketing Dewey. I mean we might have Joel: Sure that we do. We've painted on their commercials before, which by the way, I don't mind their new commercials. They're pretty good. Like the app, like you know, the kid who gets a job and his, his parents look at his phone and it's like, Oh, you have three interviews scheduled. They're much better ads recently. So we haven't really talked about those. But to say something nice about indeed marketing the new ads pretty good indeed has much bigger issues than us talking to them, which is why Chad: Surprise me events. So Chad and she's traveled sponsored by shaker recruitment advertising. That's right. Trains, planes, automobiles, Sherpas, all that sponsored by Shaker. Thanks so much. Joel: Shout out to Joey Jr who's Cubs will not be in the playoffs this year nor will my Cleveland Indian. So I feel you brother. It's all good. Chad: Stake to the heart. We're going to be at tech as we said this week on stage in the expo hall, two days in a row. This one is brought to you by our friends at Jobcase. That's right. 70% of people are not. Chad: Not on LinkedIn. No where they were. They probably are. They're on their way to Jobcase. Chad: That's what they're doing. Joel: I see him in the street right now. There they go, Jack. Okay. So I find them. It's that way. Yeah. Boston's that way. Boston is East. Yeah. Go that way. Chad: Check out the expo hall agenda I think were like on the tech connect stage or something like that. Wednesday at one 15, Thursday at 1115. And hopefully I won't be dead by then and my liver hasn't shut down. Yup. And if we're not there, we'll be at sovereign having perfect prop. God help us. It's nice to, we're having a good break after this one and no shit. Right. And before we go to where Paris, France, yep. October 22nd. SmashFly is sponsoring our little soiree... Chad: ...Over In Paris on the on the Influencer stage at the Paris convention center. We're going to have Chris Wray group, head of recruitment from Sainsbury's. Yup. Adam Yearsly, global head of talent management from Red Bull and then Brandy Ellis, a head of recruitment marketing from the SmashFly. So that's going to be fucking awesome. I can't wait. Joel: Red bull gives you wings. Did you know that? Chad: I guess we'll figure that out, won't we? Joel: I like it. Like it. Then we get to go to beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona or Nevada ice NIMS meeting in November and to round out the year unless something else comes up. A talent net live in Dallas. A lot of people know Craig Fisher out there. Yup. Recruiting icon. A Dallas has a great recruiting community. Johnny's out there. I'm blanking on people, but Carrie Corbin's out there like a lot of people recruiting. The people will know we'll be there. And so looking forward to I guess ending our travel tour for 2019 in Dallas. December 6th. Chad: What exactly are we doing out there? Do we have any idea yet? We're doing the show. Are we doing the show? Yeah, we'll do a live show. Should probably, we should probably take requests from the listeners. That's the last show of the year. Joel: We could do a holiday, you know, finale have people's wish list or are they going to ask? Chad: Here comes Santa Cheese, here comes Santa Cheese right down Santa Cheese lane. Joel: Santa cheese. I like that. That's good. I like that. Yeah. And the way my waist is expanding, I'm almost... Chad: ONTO THE TOPICS! Joel: God, let's do this thing. All right. Neuvoo. Yes. I hope I'm saying that right. A French Canadian company out of Montreal I was in the news recently raised a whopping 53 million in Canadian, which if doing the calculation is 40 million us dollars, which is still nothing to sneeze at. I mean the, c'mon people, that's chatbot money. Chad: So when this came out, it was funny, an analyst, I was actually having a conversation with another analyst and, and he was like, what's all the hubbub about Neuvoo? And then I asked him these questions, I said, okay, how much money is indeed polling in number one. Number two, who is Indeed's competition in that specific space? Right. And number three, how many companies flat-out hate indeed and are looking for an exit? There's your answer. Joel: There's your answer. There's your answer. You know, I was surprised. They, Michael O'Dell, who's the U S operations had, I guess Dallas, so industry a longtimer he, he showed me some data that showed Neuvoo traffics or passing a CareerBuilder fairly recently in America. Now I know we dog on CareerBuilder. They're definitely on the way of the shrinkage issues, but I mean, that's still, that's still a nice little milestone to make. If I'm an investor, I'm, I'm thinking, you know, Hey, indeed is worth how much okay, I'll throw in a few million to this other vertical job search engine thingy. If it's just a 10th of what you know, indeed is worth, I'm going to make a hell of a lot of money. So it certainly makes sense from an investment standpoint. Now, whether or not Neuvoo can, you know, brand itself well enough around the world build its product, make it better really cut through the clutter. We'll be we'll be interesting and we will be watching, but good luck to them cause the market needs alternatives. Chad: Oh. God. Yeah. Well, and bringing, bringing guys like O'Dell in. I mean, you know, he's been around this space for awhile, so one of the problems that we have is when you start building teams with really successful individuals who are not from this industry. So they really don't know where all the, the, the potholes and, and really the pitfalls are. O'Dell knows. Right. So I love that. I love that they're actually looking for people who are steeped in this industry that know what's going on. They have their connections. So, you know, good luck to those guys because again, even if you do play second fiddle to indeed, that's still a hell of a lot of cash. And it was funny at the end of the conversation with, with my buddy, he had said, okay, so what I'm hearing is cause they're Canadian and they're coming to the U.S. They're there. Just the much nicer indeed. The more well-mannered indeed. I'm like, yeah, you could, you could definitely say that they're not assholes. That's for sure. Joel: I, I'm sensing a tee shirt idea in the works, so I, Oh, Michael's listening by the way, talking about quality people. We'll get to this story later, but a lot of good salespeople are on the market now from job boards. Chad: Maybe they're just going to Alexa or Google Assistant and saying, Hey, find me a job because that's where McDonald's feels everybody should be going. Joel: I don't think you can order a cheeseburger ad on Alexa, but you can now powered by paradox apply for a job now on its face. This is super impressive. I mean I've, I've been talking about this for a while. I'm sure you have as well. But to be able to voice search, you know, Hey Alexa, I want to apply to for a job at McDonald's, right? Like, great. Okay, what's your name? How old are you? Can you drive dah, dah, dah, whatever those questions are. And then those become an actual application that goes into McDonald's. And then you get a call back. Or maybe you actually schedule an interview through Alexa. So on its face, this was really exciting. But as some people started to dig into it, it was a little less sort of less exciting. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. So I received an email from a listener across the pond. It was hilarious. And here's, here's the emails, a couple of series of emails. Have you used this yet? What a pile of horse shit. You go through all of the effort to get sent a text with a link to a us only job board so bad. It asked me which country I was in, in German language. First I think this person is not in Germany. Then I said UK, then it sent me a link to the U S site for fuck's sake. Joel: Yup. Yup. And we had a, so we had aim group. Yeah. It was probably the, the best vendor and industry news source. So they did a search in Portland, Oregon that was unsuccessful. That Alexa came back and said McDonald's is not supported in your area near Orlando, Florida, where they tested at a, Alexis said, welcome to McDonald's, apply through a and added that in order to apply we would have to supply our first name and phone number or dah, dah, dah. Do you agree? So at least in Orlando, it looks like the process works. Now, if, if in the U S I have neither Alexa or Google, so I can't do this, but if you, if you go through the apply section and then they just text you a link to go to a webpage, that obviously sucks. But look, every rookie quarterback sucks in their first game. Everybody gets better. Companies that are eight. So you know, you have a lot of moving parts politically here. McDonald’s wants one thing, paradox wants another, compromise happens, technologies limited. Hopefully they'll figure this shit out. I hope that they are at least someone else figures this out in a way that doesn't send you back to a webpage or go to the store and fill out an application or some other antiquated process. Chad: Okay. This is exactly why you do not launch shit, because it can affect your brand negatively affect your brand if you're sending people to sites around the world or it doesn't matter. Even saying that you know, a, a brand like McDonald's is not supported in your area, that is fucking ridiculous. And we had this discussion, it was a discussion slash kind of argument with Quincy Valencia, the queen of chatbots where she just said, Hey look, you don't put shit out there. Joel: And we talked about this. And I think, I think everyone has a certain level of I don't know, patience with new technology. So I tend to look at stuff and go, okay, well they'll figure it out. You tend to have less patients could sour people on that. So I do, I do agree that if you're McDonald's people have an expectation that shit's gonna work or at least there's a promise there that should be fulfilled. Whereas paradox doesn't have the same sort of expectations. So I agree that, that there's some misalignment probably with what a user expects. Certainly a kid who's 18 does not expect to like get a text message and then go to a website. Like they do not expect that at all. They expect, talk to me like a person, take my information and then have McDonald's call me or text me back up scheduled interview or whatever. So the expectations are probably not aligned. And hopefully they'll figure that out. Chad: The kid doesn't know who Paradox is and they don't give a fuck who Paradox. But here's the thing, McDonald's. Knows who Paradox is. And if they're saying all this shit and it's all fucked up Paradox or McDonald's might not know who Paradox is very long, just because somebody is throwing money at you, you just can't put shit out. Right. Yeah. I totally get it. But you've got to remember that brand means something to that company and if it is tarnishing their brand, it's a very, very easy way to not just lose that one huge fucking client, but to use a ton of other clients. Joel: Yeah. And it would, would've been prudent to test this on a few areas first. Oh God. Yeah. apparently there was, I mean PR nationwide on this and of course we picked it up and a lot of people picked it up so it wasn't even billed as, Hey, this is sort of a quiet launch in Atlanta or Toledo or something. This was like, it's global and we're ready to go and there's McDonald's everywhere and Alexa is everywhere and this thing is working. So yeah, they, they probably took some missteps with the promotion of it. Chad: Take a page out of Google's book, put beta on the fucking thing. You saw how burger King launched the impossible burger just in st Louis, which have I think like 60 stores or something like that. So I mean that's what you should have actually talked about launching the test and then setting the expectation as opposed to going, Oh, it's ready. I can't wait. Ask Alexa or Google for a job. And then, Joel: Yeah, definitely. They definitely should have known that when they launched this, like a lot of people were gonna go, Hey Alexa, I want a job at McDonald's just to see what the hell was going to happen. At least from what we've heard. The preparation for that wasn't awesome. Chad: And Paradox knows better. Joel: They just got so excited at second life. Second life Island. So excited. Well, let's get a word from Canvas. I get hungry and hungrier for lunch and we'll talk about some employer brand shit. Sound good? Excellent. 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 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: Got to get a date with Aman Brar, the first winter of Death Match so that he can get his bling. Joel: He's going to look good and a champion chain Death Match chain or whatever the fuck we're calling it. Chad: I like it. Joel: He's sort of a Mack daddy motherfucker. Anyway put a big ass gold rope on him, man. It's, it's going to be lights out as far as I'm concerned. Already legit. This is just going to put the stamp on it fo sho employment brand. We've got a lot of shit going on. They're a Nike first. Chad: Now let's go with Burger King first because Burger King, this makes my soul feel good. Joel: It makes my stomach growl too. Chad: Yeah. Burger King does this cool fucking marketing campaign. It's called a day without Whopper. So Burger King took a day away. They're not selling their Whopper for a day to support proceeds of McDonald's Big Mac sales being donated to support child cancer research. Much like much like cornering, kind of like The Impossible Burger this is a cult brand move. It's like, look, there's something bigger than us. There's something bigger than hamburgers. There's something bigger than competition in a marketing campaign actually shows two hands holding. It's the Burger King and supposed to be Ronald McDonald. Joel: The King and the clown. Chad: And then we saw, Oh, so we also see research that just came out from morning consult and advertising week that said liberal and well educated Americans are far more likely to stay or get away from companies, political stance, right? So they all stop buying you or they'll start buying you because of moves like this, whether it's a political stance or just one of these heartwarming moves, even though burger King telling people not to come buy from them because of the whole reason of it, people are wanting to associate themselves with a brand like Burger King. Joel: Sure. Burger King is historically gone outside the lines for marketing, whether it's in the competition or that's case, you know, propping up the competition. So, you know, I, it must be a lot more fun being in the marketing department of sort of number two or number three than it is number one because number one, it has to play it so safe. Yeah, that's gotta be pretty boring compared to what the marketing folks, me at Burger King and Wendy's and all the others get to. Chad: Yeah. But I don't agree because wouldn't you say Nike is the number one brand in sports apparel? Because they don't play it safe. I mean it take a look at the, the whole Kaepernick thing, right. And they focus on really standing for something and they believe in something even if that was Kaepernick taking a knee. Joel: So there's difference between drawing outside the lines and taking risks. To me, burger King takes risks and draws way outside the lines. I think Nike, Nike would not do something corny or silly like put someone in a King's mask and creep, creep one kids or something like, I agree with you. Like risk taking is every brand should be doing it. And this goes back to like Seth Godin, purple cow shit. Like, and if you're not doing stuff to stand out, you're not going to get noticed. And we're all really day trading on attention right now. What's fascinating to me with Nike and their campaign is that ultimately these are all commodities, right? Like cheeseburgers are more or less commodities. Tennis shoes are basically commodities. What Nike is able to do with its advertising is create a link between Nike and a mission statement or meaning something or purpose. Yeah, yeah. And like, and that's something that I think is missed on Adidas and Under Armor and all the competition, like what they've been able to do is just fascinating and they're crushing it. I mean, in terms of bottom line growth, et cetera. I mean Nike is crushing it because they're able to take a commodity like shoes and create a mission and purpose behind it. It's genius. Chad: Quoting one of the articles, when you try to reach a new young consumer on their playing field and on their terms, it's no longer simply putting out a great product. You now have to be a company that can stand behind something because the consumer today is demanding that. So all of you bland, boring, we're going to just kind of take a, a defensive posture kinds of brands you're going to lose every time. And I remember critics giving Nike shit because of this and they stood behind it. And this to me in bodies, what a cult brand is. If you do not want to buy my product and you don't believe what I believe, that's you don't have to buy it. You don't have to believe in what we believe there. There are the products out there, right. And they know that they have a segment who they want to stand for. That means something. And that really I think embodies cult brand. Joel: Yeah. And it's something that we greatly miss in our industry. Chad: It's horrible. Joel: Very little of what's our purpose. I mean we just talked about Neuvoo, right? Like Neuvoo is in a prime opportunity to build a brand as the anti indeed. Chad: Well, even beyond that, let's take a look at the actual talent acquisition side of the house and actual brands, right? So Randstad, employer brand survey, do employer reviews even matter? Right. So 57% of job seekers, job candidates avoid companies with negative online reviews. Yet only 34% of HR managers say unflattering reviews actually matter. That's, that's only a third of the population. The rest of the population is like, ah, that shit doesn't matter. Brand doesn't matter? What the fuck? Joel: To me, that's a whole lot of bearing your head in the sand and hoping it goes away because employers who think that job seekers aren't going to sites to check out reviews and the real dirt and the real nitty gritty on a company are just fooling themselves. How many people aren't even applying to your jobs because you have shitty reviews? Like those people aren't even calculated in the equation. Right? But that's a real thing. Chad: This is our opportunity in talent acquisition to actually start to make the business case and educate the rest of business, not just losing top talent, but customers. As soon as you can tie that top talent to, to actually the bottom line and how it's impacting the bottom line. Number one, we're not getting top talent because of this. Right? And that's impacting the bottom line. Then taking it a step further to conversations, CEO, COO, CFOs, what about the customer? How's it affecting the customer? Because those individuals that we're impacting could perspectively be influencers or customers. So we're not just screwing ourselves on the top talent side. Shit. It goes well beyond that. Joel: People like working for companies that have purpose and if yours doesn't, you're losing out Chad: When you get up every day. What gets you up out of that bed everyday? Yeah, I've got to pay my mortgage. I totally get that. But that's not what inspires you to go do good work off my high horse. Joel: That's all right. That's all right. Let's breathe a little bit here from job ad X and we'll talk layoffs and Deadpool's. Ouch. JobAdX: Nope, 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 have heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it. We live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we 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 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 employee with JobAdX. Joel: So we're going to end on a downer. Yeah, well there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's trying to think about the ladder's purpose. I had a blank. I don't, I don't know. I don't know how I'm gonna. I'm gonna sleep on that one. Chad: I think their purpose is, is great. Clickbait. Joel: Great clips. I mean, clickbait. Yes. Click mate. Yes. Yep. So Monster was in the news this week [inaudible] in the news and everything else. So they're, they're sort of unlikely. They have an office here in Indianapolis where we are located, so you tend to get a lot of the, the gossip pretty quickly, no fault of their own. But anyway we had an email come in from Indianapolis, the office saying, Hey, we're restructuring. People are gone. And sure enough it looks like the VP of sales a regional manager, the regional manager and eight to 10 sales reps were laid off just here in Indianapolis. Joel: We reached out to Kate Rambo, PR at Monster and basically, I won't read the whole statement, but blah, blah. We're committed to growth. We're committed to innovation. Sometimes we've got to make hard decisions. And this is a direct quote here to accelerate our progress towards sustainable, profitable growth. That Monster we have made the difficult decision to reduce a small percentage of our workforce across our global organization. These actions are part of a wider business restructure and realizing efficiencies with our parent company, Ron Stott. We regret the impact this will have on our colleagues and their families. We plan to do everything we can to support people affected while treating them with the utmost dignity and respect, including providing outplacement services to help ease the transition, which was an email that said, go to indeed.com. I think I'm kidding about that. But anyway yeah, thereabout. According to LinkedIn, about 5,000 employees at Monsters. So, you know, if it was just 5%, you know, that's 250 people. That's, that's a lot of people effected. So hard decisions being made, you know, to me, you know, they're talking about, you know, quote, we have made significant progress in transforming our technology, delivering innovative new products, blah, blah, blah. And I don't know, name one outside of partnering with video, my job for video. Chad: Right. And that's not actually building it to product. Right. Joel: Yeah, I challenge anyone to start rambling off the innovations at Monster from the last year and good luck. Chad: Yeah, and this is a called a Monster right now. If two guys like us can't outline your innovations, and this is one of the things we do for a living that's on you. You guys are fucking up. You should be force feeding this shit to us or it doesn't exist and I'm going to go with the latter. That shit doesn't exist. This, this is not foreign to a company like Randstad. I mean they, they can shed 400 people fairly easy cause they're a very large organization. We also heard, and it's from my standpoint, I know businesses are connected because the, I'm the CEO of Randstad North America. She's not just controlling Randstad. She is also to an extent controlling Monster. I don't know if this is like a kind of like a top down restructuring. Hey, we need to look at everything. Which makes sense. I totally get it. But again, you know, you can't just throw fluff out there and hope that everybody you know, believes you because we need to see what these great innovations are. We need to hear about one of the these great innovations and we need data to be able to demonstrate that these in fact are great innovations. Joel: Well, I assume Monster's going to be at HR Tech. I assume they're going to be rolling out some new shit and it's on them to make it, you know, remarkable enough that you and I want to talk about it, or at least customers start wanting to talk about it. You know, it's been roughly a year since Scott Gutz took over as CEO and they've, they've had their people in executive positions. So I'm still waiting. Let's hope that HR tech, they announced some cool shit because the innovation is not there. Chad: Any of these companies and this is really a challenge to these organizations. If we're talking about you and we're challenging you like this, it's probably because you did something stupid or you haven't done what you said you were gonna do. But it's a challenge, man. We want to see you do well. We want to see you pull yourself back out of that fucking hole. You used to be on the goddamn mountain top. We would love to see the return. The problem is we don't see your path to getting there. All we see is a bunch of fluffy clouds and shit. Show us different please. That'd be awesome. Joel: Remember it was Bobby Knight who said, if I'm not criticizing you, that's when you should start worrying. Yeah, exactly. It's much better to be a company in our crosshairs than a company that never gets talked about at Chad: Exactly. Joel: And one unfortunately that won't be talked about at all moving forward. Uncommon. Joel: Yeah. Chad: You received an email kind of give, you could go through that [inaudible] in front of me, Joel: But it was, it was essentially I assume sent out to a lot of CEOs at companies who were potentially in a position to buy the assets of uncommon who full disclosure has been a long time sponsor of ours. And we liked those guys a lot. Oh yeah. They have some cool tech that certainly gonna be favorable for an acquisition to buy the bits and pieces. And we, we did here at TA tech that at least one of the businesses or pieces of the business is in the process of being acquired by someone whether or not that'll be public. We don't know. And yeah, they, they were on a short runway, 18 months, they had $18 million and doesn't seem like a short runway. Well, yeah. Well it was shorter than I guess they thought a BI about 18 months they went through 18 million. They're having a garage sale and calling it quits. So I suspect we will not see tag or their, his other co-founder in the employment space ever again. Good luck to them. Whatever they do. A nice people, but they're out. Chad: Well, let's make this very lesson worthy, right? These are two individuals who came into this space with over a billion dollars in exits. Okay. Not dumb by any, any thought or imagination, right? They're two incredibly smart guys. They had incredibly smart team when they came on firing squad. Their focus was incredibly smart, programmatic job distribution. They had great technology to be able to start thinking about the, the, the passive side. So they had the active with, with the programmatic looking toward the passive, which was great because it's kind of like a two for one, right? The only problem was they stopped focusing on the programmatic and having like a one two punch and they just went to the, to, to the haymaker and instead the hard part, and this is for all startups, especially startups who are not from this industry, is that take a look at the recipe for acquisition and you know, I'm sure they were looking to get acquired. Chad: Take a look at the recipe for acquisition. It is incredible discipline in an area specific, right? And then focus on integrations. If you're going out there and you're trying to sell this single platform to a bunch of low level recruiters or even hiring managers, that's going to be hard as fuck, right? What you need to do, and again, just my advice to you is focused on integrations into core platforms. If you don't put resources around that to ensure that you can get deep integration. They just don't fucking do it because it's all going to be fanfare and you're going to crash and burn. And that is sad. Nobody wants to see that shit. Joel: Product, sales, partnerships and repeat and repeat and rinse and repeat. Chad: And... 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, pepperjack, swiss. So many cheeses and not one word, so weird anyhoo. Be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or whatever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out. #Neuvoo #Uncommon #Monster #Indeed #McDonalds #Paradox #Alexa #GoogleAssistant #Brand #Marketing #Branding #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Randstad #BurgerKing

Best-selling author, branding expert and former Airbnb global head of community, Douglas Atkin, returns to The Chad & Cheese Cult Brand Series of podcasts. In this episode, Atkin breaks down the importance of companies living their purpose, first and foremost. Douglas also authored Purpose Must Come First on Medium. Enjoy this SmashFly exclusive. 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. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad. Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where hurts complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: What's up Chad?!? Chad: Oh man, I am so geeked right now we're back with Douglas Atkin former head of global community at Airbnb. Partner chief community officer at Meetup.com. Chad: so this is the second in a long series of podcasts that we're actually doing with, uh, the, the gathering and also guys like, uh, like Douglas who really know their shit. The first one was about how Airbnb found its purpose and why it's a good one. And today we're going to talk about The Purpose Must Come First. Joel: Yeah. Are we sure Douglas is still there? Douglas, did you come back for a second round with us? He is there. Awesome. Yeah, Douglas: I did indeed. Joel: He's a glutton for punishment. We're going to talk about opera oper uh, operationalizing and that's a mouthful. Uh, your, your brand and your purpose. So Douglas talk about that, which was sort of the second, uh, second segment of the, of the, uh, the blog that you're putting out on medium. Douglas: So, um, I, if you find it hard to say operationalize, which is a really a horrible word anyway, very corporate, you can, you can say living your purpose, you know, how do you, how do you write better? Yeah. How do you and your organization live your purpose? So in the previous podcast we talked about, um, how to get your purpose and how to make sure it's a good one using airbnb as an example. So that's fine once you have a really groovy purpose. But, um, you need to, the point about a purpose is it needs to be used. It's, it's the, it's the rudder that guides the ship. It's basically the why of why your organization exists. And so therefore you have to be using it every single moment of every single day in every single thing that you do. Everyone actually in the organization needs to be using it for everything every day. Douglas: And that's really, really hard because one of the characteristics of a purpose is as we discussed last time is yes, it needs to be grounded in a truth, but it also needs to seem almost impossible. It's going to make the world a better place in some way. And so, um, it is inherently idealistic as well. And so trying to execute an ideal is always hard in the face of, uh, the daily grind of turnover, profit, pleasing clients, whatever you have to do in your daily life. And so that's why I wanted to write about this because I'm not completely, but Airbnb's made a very good effort to operationalize belong anywhere. The three founders are completely committed to it. They see it as the most important thing they do. In fact. And, um, we found this out because in a a, I had a session with the founders in 2016, I think it was March, 2016 where I gathered them together, the three of them, one Sunday afternoon in the office. Douglas: Again, no dreaded off site in the office and a guy was getting them together. And this is going to be the subject of another podcast, which is how you find your core values. And when I had got them doing was um, was figured it was identity cause I wanted them to base it in reality, not wishful thinking. I asked them to identify all the kind of critical moments of the in the history of the company and so far all their, what I call meaningful moments, those moments where there's great meaning attached meaning that, you know, you made some decision on principle that uh, you know, often that was an Accenture existential threat. Uh, but where you made it on principle, we've talked about this a in a couple of other podcasts and so one state identifies all these moments. I then ask them to extract the main figure out what the principles were that they had used. Douglas: And then I asked them to order them in terms of importance. And the first thing that each of them had, God basically, first of all, they all agreed on all the important principles. That was good, that will create a problem if they hadn't. Um, but w even more interestingly, they also agreed, which was the most important one, and that is that your purpose must come first. And so, um, when I, when I asked Brian, well, what do you mean by that exactly? I'm gonna read you actually what he said, because you will never have heard this from a CEO of a company before. I guarantee it. He said, so I said, which ones should come first? And he said, mission. And by the way, it may be calls its purpose mission. Sometimes it causes vision. Sometimes you called its purpose. And I know a lot of people get their knickers in a twist about the differences between those words. Douglas: I don't give a damn, to be honest. I think it's overthinking it. All you have to do is make sure that everyone knows that you're talking about the why, why we exist, right? So you can call it anything you like. Anyway. We call it mission in Airbnb. So he said, I said, what comes first? And he said, mission obviously mission led. The simplest way to describe it is the mission comes before everything that comes before the personal gain into the people who work at the company. It comes before the valuation. It comes before profits, it comes before business performance, it comes before all the other values. It theoretically comes before the quality of the product. I mean, I could keep going on. Right. Chad: That's amazing to be able to hear a CEO say it comes before valuation, before profits, before business performance. I mean that is, that is amazing. Douglas: Well I mean, yes and he's saying that it didn't like you don't sit here CEO saying that. In fact, in fact for most CEOs their mission is profit and turnover. So um, yeah. The, the reason why he was saying that is that as they had rude sat down and reviewed that that Sunday afternoon they realize that there were some really big, big, big, big common things that had sort of United them from very early on. And that was, they didn't just want to get rich quick. They wanted to make a dent in the world. They wanted to sort of do what they were doing. And do what they loved and uh, hopefully make the world a slightly better place as a result. And, um, and they look back all these kinds of moments which we can talk about in later podcasts and realize what we were doing every single time was, uh, making decisions for the long term, what the short term. Douglas: So in the, in the long term, we want a company that creates a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And in the process of doing that, of course you have to have business. You will definitely have to have profits, uh, and so forth. But you need to keep your eye on the sort of the north style, which is why we are doing this. It's not just to make a turnover and profits for shareholders is to have this legacy effect. It's time, make a sort of a dent on the world in the process. And so what he would also argue is if you put your mission first, you will end up delivering turnover and profit. Because if it's the right mission and it's wanted and people buy into that mission and vision and subscribed to it and they're committed to it, then in the process you're likely to be able to sell profits or that are premium, you know, grow your business and so forth. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. And building a brand isn't easy, which is why you need people like Thom Kenney, CEO of SmashFly on your side. Joel: Hey Thom, it seems like a lot of companies look for that silver bullet approach to recruitment marketing, but you guys have a little bit different approach in terms of a multi-tiered strategy. Talk about that. Thom Kenney: It's building this connection with people. It's building the time that they want to be engaged and they see the value in that particular brand. So when you're doing single stream and you're just thinking, well, I'm just going to send out a bunch of emails, or I'm just going to throw a chat bot on a page and you're not really thinking about it holistically, you're not going to really develop a cult brand. You might develop a brand, you might have a brand value and you might end up with a brand value that's kind of negative. So you've gotta be careful with that. Chad: To find out more. Go to smashfly.com Douglas: so, you know, I said to him after that, uh, well a couple of things happened after he said that. The first thing was he said, ah, okay. So if that is our collectively what we think is the most important principle that we have or value that we have, which is we need to put the purpose first, then it's my job as CEO to, um, set expectations. Everyone including investors and the board. Ultimately, if we go public shareholders, and he said, I have to go now to the board, which is repeated and tell them, okay, you have to judge me not just on how well we're doing on, on growth, turnover and profit, but also how well we're doing on achieving our mission of creating a world. But anyone can belong anywhere. And fortunately, you know, the board is occupied by some strategic investors, visionary investors, and they've totally bought into it and understand why it's important to have a purpose that leads everything. Douglas: Um, but he's also going to be doing, and he's, there's not been much publicity about it so far, but there will be over the next few months he's launched this concept called the 21st century company, which is, um, a company that, uh, puts its mission first that thinks about not just shareholders or even shareholders and employees or even shareholders, employees and customers, but thinks about the impact they're having on the world at large. And in other words, he is setting expectations before they do an IPO. Basically. I think I'm setting the expectation that the purpose will come first. So that is one thing that happened. Joel: Hey Douglas. Yeah. When it seems like it would be really important to get someone in terms of recruiting early on in the process that can buy into the purpose. Yeah. So was there, was there any talk about purpose and say the job descriptions or when people would come in to interview with the company? Was it talked about so that you knew who we were getting, what had already bought into the purpose before they even walked into the door for their first day? Douglas: Yes. In fact, Airbnb started in 2012 just before I turned up there in the middle of 2012, the company was now like 150 strong in HQ and about another 150, 200, I think globally of people. And the founders were realizing that they couldn't be in every single meeting and they couldn't interview every single candidate, especially globally. So they had to set up a center of a set of principles or values that were proxy for them being in the room, making sure all those principles are being lived. And they created these six core values, which we can talk about later. The first, um, the first one of those core values is, is champion the mission. You know, remember the words live the purpose. And what they also did is, uh, they set up in 2012 and it's, it's even bigger now as you can imagine that a, when someone is interviewed, they'll have probably six, seven, eight interviews that measures the skills and the discipline that they're applying for. Douglas: You know, whether they are a good marketer or engineer or whatever it is. But then they get interviewed by two people, had nothing to do with discipline and they're called core values interviews. There's now 500 of them in Airbnb globally. And their job is to see whether your personal values align with the core values of airbnb. And if they don't, then the core values interviews have veto power. In other words, they could be sitting in front of the best engineer in silicon valley, but if their values don't align, they can say, nope, it's an Ohio with their care how good he or she is. The values don't align with ours. And um, so they're not hired, so yes, you're absolutely right. It's incredibly important and we make sure that people coming in the door are already aligned with the values as best we can. Chad: Well, and, and from the company standpoint and looking to be able to draw great talent into their organization, you know, how do they differentiate because everybody says their mission led, right? And, you know, cause I do, that's a bunch of bullshit. How can you tell the difference? Or how can you, how can you differentiate yourself from the posers that are out there that say they're mission led, but they're really focused on profits and valuation versus how do you become that brand who really can articulate and get that purpose out there? How can, how can you different? Douglas: You have to live it. You have to at it. And the only way of assessing whether it's bullshit or mot is taking a look at the organization's actions that they've taken and comparing it against the intentions as expressed in the purpose. And if there's a dissonance, then you know, it's full of bullshit. So, I asked, uh, again, after they will put it first, I said, okay, so give me some examples of where you think you did put the purpose first, um, of creating world where anyone can belong anywhere. And, uh, so one of the ones he mentioned was, uh, and the way he expressed it. So the, the, the, the, all three of them talked about this space is that he said, you know, uh, you make some decisions that make no sense in terms of growth or in terms of, um, profit at the time. Douglas: But what you're basically doing is you're putting deposits into a bank account of culture and of achieving your mission. You know, you're paying, you're paying for things now that will reap benefits later. So he said, for example, you know, we had just had this big, big meeting called one Airbnb. This was in 2016. Every year a BNB flies in the now thousands of people from all over the world who worked for Airbnb to have one week together. And the purpose of that one week is we have, there's a bit of training. Yes, there's some product announcements and this, that, and the other. But the whole purpose of that week is to make sure that the people, that the people that work at Airbnb feel like they belong there, that they've, they form relationships with each other, they have fun together, they work together, they get to know each other and they feel like they're part of one big family basically. Douglas: But you can imagine. And he said, that's a, this is, let me just, um, quote what Brian said at the time. He said, I think the decision of having One Airbnb, like even this year, I got pushed back for doing it. The pushback I got for flying in all the employees is expensive and time consuming. Some people say it's not the best use of time or money. Well, we do think it's the best use of time and money and he goes on to say it on your horizon long term, you need these investments. If you're trying to build a company that outlives you, then people have to believe in the purpose and values. They have to be believers and they have to be wanting to go way above and beyond. And he saw one Airbnb as sort of one of those ways of creating that kind of belief and alignment around the purpose and values. Douglas: Even though it costs like know 2 million, $3 million to fly everyone in, have everyone for a week, not doing their job. And I'm putting them up in Airbnbs and so, but there are many others. I mean, he also said, for example, the very first hire they made aside from the three of them was an engineer and they desperately needed an engineer. It was just Nate, one among the founders who was the, I'm the only engineer I had. Uh, but they interviewed hundreds of people and waited four or five months until they found the right person. Which when you're a startup, you know, and there's only three of you, then that three or four months means three or four months of not launching critical product will make the difference. Could make or break you, right? Because you don't have an engineer, but they will not willing to settle on the kind of fit this person was gonna have. Douglas: They weren't gonna hire a high performing engineer who is a complete asshole. They wanted to wait until there was a someone that they felt shared their own values at the time. And so there are these costs you make, you know, there are these deposits as Brian puts it, that you, that are really quite costly in terms of money or time or energy at the time that you make them, but will pay off longer term investment. So long story short, to answer your question, you need to look at the actions of the organization and see if they aligned with the purpose. And if they don't, then that purpose is on a mug somewhere in the organization and might exist on a PowerPoint, but it doesn't really live. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first a quick question for Chris Kneeland about the gathering of coke brands. Joel: Chris, one of the things that really blew me away when I attended the conference was just the lineup. Uh, I mean it's a WHO's who of marketing, uh, celebrities, if you will. So I'm curious, when you started, how in the hell did you get these people to come? And I guess more importantly, how do you keep them coming and how do you one up yourself from this year? Chris Kneeland: Yeah, well it's certainly easier to get them to come in year seven than it was in year one. And people frequently ask, are we gonna run out of cult brands? And you know, I think maybe I wondered about that to help me out. Can I get 10 years, 20 years out of this conference and there'll be started doing things like destinations. We started doing nonprofits last year we did our first celebrity, which was Tony Hawk and we could go into um, politicians. There's lots of different places that actually have cult like followers. And so I think it's, uh, got a nice long healthy runway of cult brand honorees and, you know, we get them to come for two reasons. One, I think there's a lot of substance. Uh, we do about nine months of vetting. Uh, we've partnered with IBM and we use Watson technology to help us call through tremendous amounts of data. Chris Kneeland: We do phone screening interviews, we do onsite visits. And so I think there's a lot of rigor that goes into making sure that these brands are as awesome as they appear to be on the outside. And then secondly, I think part of the secret sauce is that we're giving them a product, a, an offering. We don't even call it a conference. That's why we called it the gathering. We didn't want to call it a conference cause we think most conferences suck. And so we said we had to build a place that these types of people would actually want to go to. And so the whole, the whole format and the whole location and everything was sort of chemically engineered from the ground up to be highly desirable. Chad: Register now at cultgathering.com. Joel: We talk a lot about retention in our, in our podcasts as well. So recruiting is one piece of it, but actually keeping people in the job as an important part of, you know, recruiting. Um, I'm guessing that retention was really good at Airbnb. Can you talk about that? Douglas: Yeah, it was, it was and is still really, really good. Well, a lot of people, a lot of people came for, um, for the mission, uh, belong anywhere for the culture and the other people in the, for the values. And we know this because we ask them. So, and I did a, there was a period, um, later in the history of the company in 2015 when, when it went through massive, massive growth, doubled in size from like a thousand to 2000 people in just in San Francisco. And it was the, the culture was creaking a little bit. And I went out at Joe's request to find out whether the culture was kind of being resilient or not or what was going on. So I asked people, why are you here? Why do you stay? You can earn much more money somewhere else, I'm sure, but why do you work these ridiculous hours and do these crazy things that Airbnb and everyone, there was one person who said, I, I'm in it for the money. But every single person I spoke to and I spoke to over 300 people, all different levels, seniority, different disciplines, different locations around the world. They all said we're here because of the culture. We're here because of the, I believe in the mission of creating lobe where anyone can belong anywhere. And I can see that the companies making decisions that executed, I'm here for the core values. They're real, they're being, you know, lifted by. Joel: I'm just curious about the people who did leave the company. Do you have any sense of like what the main reasons were that they actually left and did they still appreciate the mission even when they left the company? Douglas: Yeah. Good question. Um, yes, one of the dominant reasons why people leave is the reason I left, which is burnout. Ah, it's, it's not a good thing. Burnout. Um, but especially when you, you know, you started early on in like 2010, 12, 13, uh, there's only a few of, you are doing a hell of a lot. And what was great about it is that you were inventing all the time because what we were doing had never been done before. You know, there was no manual. We were inventing a whole new marketplace, a whole new economy, and actually a whole new behavior, which is trusting complete strangers that you've never met before to sleep in your bed. Literally it's what it man was. You know, your adrenaline gland is open all of the time. So that the, the one of the biggest reasons people were leaving is a, we're just really, really tired, but they still appreciate it and love the mission and the values. Interesting. Chad: Yeah. Well that, that people is one of the reasons why the purpose must come first. And, and when you're building a company like that, obviously, uh, you know, you are going to have, you're going to have people test you a from your brand and your purpose standpoint. And the big question is, are you walking the walk and not just talking the talk. So, Douglas, we appreciate you guys taking the time again. Joel: You're the man. Douglas. It's my pleasure. Thanks very much. Cheers. We out 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. #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #TheGathering #Brand #Purpose #DouglasAtkin #Smashfly

Nothing quite compares to U, and nothing compares to tech recruiting. To say it's a competitive landscape is a major understatement, and HackerRank is doing all they can to make the process as efficient as possible. To learn more about what's going on, the boys interviewed HackerRank CEO Vivek Ravisankar. Dude's smart, and surprisingly hilarious. Enjoy this Talroo Exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related 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 snot. Bottle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Bow-wow-wow-yippee-yo-yippe-yay. Chad: Here it is. Joel: Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is Joel Cheeseman, your cohost. Chad: And this is Chad Sowash. Welcome. Joel: Welcome. On today's show, we have the long line of people smarter than us gets longer and longer. We have co-founder and CEO of HackerRank, Vivek Ravisankar, I probably said that incorrectly, with us today. Vivek, how you doing man? Vivek: I'm good, how's it going? Joel: How badly did I butcher your last name? Vivek: Yeah, I think you should have probably said, "Vivek R." I think that might've been better. Joel: How about Vivek Ravi? Vivek: Yeah. Joel: Oh, well anyway, Vivek, from now on, for those who don't know, and the list is probably small, but for those who don't know, give us just a brief intro of you and a maybe slightly longer rendition of what HackerRank does. Vivek: Yeah, sure. I'm the Vivek Ravisankar. Like how you guys say? Joel: I was super close. Vivek: Yeah, absolutely. I wish I could take that back. Joel: Asshole. Vivek: I'm one of the founders and CEO of HackerRank, I was a developer prior to this at Amazon. I used to do a lot of technical interviews, which is where I found there was a lot of inefficiencies in the way that we do our recruiting process. Started the company, this is our seventh year, maybe sixth year, after we went live. Seventh year, totally, since we launched HackerRank. We have about 1,500 customers using the product, assessed over 6 million developers, 250 people. London, Bangalore, Mountain View, and growing quickly. And here I am in a podcast, which hopefully you guys have promised that it will increase our revenue, so I will be tracking that. Joel: And for listeners out there, Vivek has a team of about 30 PR people supporting his podcast interview and he actually has a scouting report on the Chad and Cheese podcast, which basically says, "these guys are assholes. Watch your back." Basically. Vivek: Just a correction. I just hired one person today, so it's 31. Joel: So it's 31, nice. touche. Chad: As he sipped his tea, somebody actually dabs his lip. So let's jump right into it: HackerRank. We've talked about it on a podcast for a while now and I think it's amazingly smart for all companies who touch the technical side of the house. You have 1,500 companies global, is that global? What percentage of that is here domestic in the U.S.? Vivek: Yeah, 1,500 is global. I would say about 70-ish percent is in North America. The remaining is in India and Asia Pacific. Chad: Okay, so now the 6 million developers, which is a shit ton of people, can you give us kind of the same breakdown of the 6 million. How much from here domestically versus India, et cetera? Vivek: Yeah, so that one is a slightly different combination. It's about 40% to 45% is in India, while 30% is in North America, and the remaining is in India. Why you would've guessed the population of these countries are higher and the population of developers in India is definitely more than U.S. Joel: Yeah. Curious about your take on the world, cause you have a really unique view on the world from where you sit. What is the economy like in terms of technical talent? Where's the growth? Where is there a huge need? Just sort of give us your state of the union in regards to a tech talent around the world. Vivek: Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two big shifts that are happening in the market. One is every company's becoming a software company. It's no longer a retail store. The first thing that you're going to look to figure out if you're going to buy or not is download the app and see if the product is available in that store versus going. So it's no longer retail, it's tech. It's no longer financial services or banks. I've had people switch banks because their app was buggy. I mean, you would never have this reason 10 years back. So it's no longer financial services, it's also tech. Vivek: On your cars, people ask about, "Hey, when is autopilot going come or does this have a Apple play?" Those things become important criteria now, just not there 10 years back. So it's no longer automotive, but it's also tech. So there's a giant change that's actually happening in the world. And by the way, like only 3% of companies are classified according to the SIC codes as tech companies. The remaining 97% are in all of these different industries that I mentioned, but pretty much everything is a tech company. So that's a gigantic shift in terms of the number of companies who are looking to hire developers, and they come in and transform themselves. Vivek: That's on the demand, and if you look at supply, which is the developers themselves, it's just getting easier for you to learn how to code and build things. One is internet is ubiquitous. You could just say, get a Mac and connect to the wifi and that's it. You could now go ahead and start to learn how to code. There are not many boot camps that have actually come up in the last few years which teach you how to code, and people are starting to realize that developer, a Javas developer is more lucrative, so more and more people are studying computer science in your college. Vivek: And what this has led to is over 70% of the developers who call themselves developers right now are self-taught, which means your resumes are not going to look really pretty. It's not going to look how I went to this prettier school, I did X school and I got four GPA. It's just going to say, "Hey, I did a bunch of these projects and I learned on my own." So these two are giant shifts. If you just think about it from a supply and demand perspective, supply meaning the developers and demand being the companies. There's just a huge number of companies that can hire developers and the configuration of the composition of the supplier, the developers have also completely changed to being self-taught and learn-on-your-own. So, how do you match the two? And that's kind of what we do. Joel: So that being said, what are the different ways you actually work with companies with HackerRank? I would assume testing. Is there training? What's kind of like the portfolio that companies are getting into to try to help pretty much fill that skill gap? Vivek: Yeah, that's a good question. I think the way we have fundamentally changed, and we operate a lot in the recruiting space and there's definitely an opportunity for us to operate in branding, employment branding, and attracting talent. As well as, once that employee joins the company, how do you up skill this person to continue to learn more and more skills? So there's definitely opportunity for us to expand across the board. But right now our major focus is just on recruiting. And the fundamental shifts that we've been able to make is people used to look at resumes as your first level of screen. So, that used to be the first step by default. Okay, you apply to a job. I'm going to look at a resume, I'm going to do some keywords, and if those keywords match with the job description, and if I know the school, and you have good GPA, I'm going to pass it on to the hiring manager to conduct further interviews. So then the hiring manager has his or her own biases, and it's just like a long denominator process. Vivek: We just cut off the entire idea of resume screening right at the start. So, a majority of our customers don't even look at resumes, they actually create a coding challenge or a real world challenge that is relevant to the role that you're looking to hire for. So if you're a full stack engineer, I'm going to create a full stack engineer code challenge. If you're hiring a data scientist, I'm going to create a data science coding challenge and so on. Vivek: And now as a developer, my first step is for me to showcase my skills. How good am I each of these different roles? And then you get a scorecard and these are the skills that you're looking for, these are the candidates trends and this that these are the areas the person needs to get better or you can continue to interview or prove more into the process, and that eliminates so much bias, and that actually sort of expands your talent pool much beyond what you originally thought, where it was a, super constrained view of the world. So that's like a big, big shift, which is kind of like the reason why we are growing in companies that are adopting us pretty fast. Joel: Okay. So identification is really your big key right now, is being able to identify individuals who actually meet the skill sets, companies need to be able to code in their organization. The hardest part, I think right now is that it's almost like many companies are robbing from Peter to pay Paul just because there's not enough talent there in the first place. How much time is it going to take for you guys to get into the upscaling or the teaching of coding? Vivek: Yeah. So there are two parts here. One is, is there a talent shortage? And the second one, is what do we need to do to up skill people once you joined the company and how do you get better at it? Joel: Yeah. Well, what's your runway in to be able to get there? Is really my question. Vivek: I actually don't think there's talent shortage and I know it's like a controversial opinion about this. And I think talent shortage is a myth. So we actually did a recent blog post, which got covered by a bunch of publications like CNBC and others; we had over a million students attempt our assessments and challenges over the last year, across different colleges, across the globe, we assessed all of these different students across different dimensions. What skills do they have? What are they good at? What schools are good and what kinds of skills? And you'd be surprised. And one of the most interesting stats that we found when we were doing this research is the Ivy league schools, and the top 10 schools done by U.S. News or some publication, if you put those two together, only 9% of CS students graduate from that list, and all you and if you sought the schools based on skills, okay, this is not sorted based on Ivy league or your, Whatever, how many patents you submitted, by like just on raw industry skills that you need, which is kind of like what we assessed. Vivek: It was exactly one Ivy league school that was in our top five, but it's unfortunate that every company, or like most companies, are just focusing on these 9% or these 10% of the student population and just completely missing out on the 90%. And by definition, Ivy league schools are one of our ex-top five. And even if you don't seem open, your numbers are super aggressive, okay fine. Let's say it's not 9%, let's say it's 20% like double it, or slightly bit more than double, you're still missing out on 80% of talented people. And this is just in the university section. Now, if you start to expand this across the horizon, across professionals and others, so by definition, you're missing out on all these great talented people because the fundamental unit of how you approach recruiting is based on resumes and profiles. So I actually think the talent shortage is a myth, and the more you're willing to open up your aperture to identifying candidates beyond the top 10, top 20, and the companies that you look at, the more success that you're going to have, and that's what we are enabling. Chad: It's commercial time. 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, right? You can go to Talroo.com/attract. Again, that's Talroo.com/attract, and learn how Talroo can get you better candidates for less cash. Joel: Or, just go to ChadCheese.com and click on the Talroo logo. I'm all about the simple. Chad: You are a simple man. Chad: It's show time. Joel: So you guys put out a blog post fairly recently about the best colleges for tech talent. Tell us about some of the other alternatives to Ivy league schools, and I also think, it sounds like you have a fairly strong opinion in regards to how important a degree is anyway. It's more about things you've done, your portfolio. Talk about that crossover between the college education, where to get a degree, versus do you really need one. Vivek: Yeah, that's a good question. I think there are two parts to it. One is do you need a degree for for you to get a job? And second, does college education actually correlate to industry, to success in professional? I think the rate at which technology improvements are happening is such a rapid pace that I feel university, the curriculum, the things that they actually teach, is still 10 years behind. There's a new JavaScript framework that gets launched, I don't know, every six months or every year, there's a new language that people just stop to work on. Vivek: Now, Go is the most hard language and everybody's trying to be backing services on Go, and I don't think universities are teaching Go, they're still stuck in trying to teach people how to do C, C plus plus, which is good. But you've not progressed further. So, there's that one big dissonance between what you get taught in schools versus what the industry or the companies are looking for. And which sort of makes of, by definition, the college degree not super valuable, except for the brand and pedigree that the university has been able to accumulate over the last few years. More like decades, not few years. Vivek: And the second part about it is, if you think about it, if you want to hire right there a musician and, if you take any other profession, or if you want to hire somebody for your restaurant, you don't have to get a resume. You don't say, "okay, you are a good cook." I mean, like what else would you see on a resume if you want to get hired in a restaurant. But the first thing that you say is, "show me if you're a good cook or not." Or for any of the profession, if you want to hire somebody for content, or PR or just writing, I'm going to say, "Hey, show me your write examples." But unfortunately, and this is the biggest irony for developers, which you would assume that it's the most technical of professions across any other fields. It's still stuck on resumes, so you have to be able to showcase your skills, which is far, far more valuable than saying, "Hey, I have a four year college degree." Vivek: If I had to guess, right? I think, well firstly, the importance of college degrees is starting to go down every year. I don't know if you saw the news, maybe six months back or nine months back, Apple and Google have dropped all college requirements on their website, on their career space. So you no longer need to have a college degree. So, and by the way, that will just trigger the rest of the company and the rest of the industry to fall as well. So, the requirement of college degrees starting to drop year over year, coupled with the fact that you can learn what industry wants online versus going to school, so I think the next 15 to 20 years, I think there'll be a very small percentage will actually want to study computer science in college. And I mean less than 20% of what is happening right now. Chad: What it sounds like, and we know with the gig economy, that a HackerRank and knows the skills of the individuals who are obviously members or users of HackerRank; do you see HackerRank becoming a marketplace for individuals with these types of skillsets, so that instead of somebody hiring an FTE, they're just going in, it's all project based and you're actually going and hitting up a portfolio, or a tribe, of individuals to be able to tackle this project? Vivek: Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's going to be progressive for us. I think the first step would be for us to sort of create a developer resume, and that resumes based on skills. So we will know, hey, if you have to get a job as a front end engineer at Airbnb, here are the skills that actually matter to them because we know what skill they're recruiting for, and we have those skills, we will actually recommend you to the right job at Airbnb. So that's sort of the first level of progression where we can completely transform a market based for FTE so to speak, to recommend developers from our developer community to match to these companies. Vivek: The second step would be, okay, so now I want to spin Up a team and this is a common challenge. If you go to a large company and they want to work on a new project and say, "Hey, I need to spin up a team that has eight people, two front end, two backend, one engineering manager, one principal engineer, and a couple of dev ops people, and one machine learning it. So it's a typical composition, if you have to spin up a team, and if you have to start from scratch right now, okay, I have the idea to spin up a team, it's going to take you six months to get all these people together and then they should work really well together. And by the time you actually launch the project, it's going to take you 18 months. Vivek: So, if you have a really great idea right now, from the inception of the idea, to building a team, to making sure that they work together well, and you'd have some nutrition, or you have to make some changes to actually getting the product line, you're taking 80 months, that's a really long time. So how can you compress that? One is, of course, you can make your hiring process efficient, and in fact, hiring is just kind of what we're doing. The other way is if we have these aggregation of skills of developers and millions of developers across the globe, and we can say, "Hey, by the way, there are a bunch of people who are looking for part time, or can build you the prototype, and then they want to go on other projects." You can spin up a team, okay, you have the idea today, you could spin up a team of eight people by next Tuesday and get started. That's massive improvement in the way that you can think about how it's going to impact your top line, and just economics, and that is the next level. But in order for us to do all of these things, there's a foundation of skill infrastructure that needs to be laid out, which companies need to buy into, which developers need to buy into, and to start it with recruiting in that. Joel: Gotcha. So what types of partnerships are you guys pulling together with universities? Are you doing anything to be able to test their students to see if they're actually at the level that some of your companies are ready for? Just to be able to ensure, again, they have the skills necessary to get back, or to get into the actual market, and make a dent into some of these companies. Vivek: We have a developer portal, or developer community, where you can go ahead and sign up and practice these challenges; get on the leader boards and these challenges mimic typically what companies look for in their interviews, what companies different in different skills, so it's a free for all. Specifically, we don't have super strong partnerships with certain number of universities, but what we've seen is once a few students in the school start to use the product, it just spreads like wildfire, and everybody starts to sign up and practice all these challenges, and it will always be free for developers. We never want to charge developers for them to come and practice, and hone your skills, so they can understand where they are, what does it take to get a job at one of these companies. Joel: Vivek, also in regards to competition, I'm sure you're aware, Google recently launched Byteboard, which is a bit of a competitor, and I'm sure you're aware that Github is now owned by Microsoft, which also has LinkedIn. Talk about the competitive landscape from that perspective. Does Google keep you up at night or not so much? Vivek: So does Google keep me up at night? I mean, well Google is in every industry, so I don't think, I mean, they're doing from autonomous driving to, of course, the surge, to phones, to knowledge recruiting now in jobs and all of those things. So we've not seen much come from Google. In terms of from competitors and others. And it's also not straightforward, for any company for that matter, to come and get the level of depth that we have, in terms of understanding what skills do companies need, what kind of assessments can you actually build and what do developers need. The second part about it is kind of developer trust; so, ultimately developers, and we care about this a lot, we have a core metric called developer love, which we call DLI, developer love index, which we measured super rigorously. Vivek: Like after every assessment, every challenge. What comments do developers give, what's the rating that they give, what's the score that they have? I literally go through every feedback that a developer gives. Actually, that's what keeps me up at night, not Google, and making sure that we are constantly improving. So I think there's a developer trust that we have built, which is going to take years for you to go ahead and build that, which Google doesn't have, which Github has by the way. So I don't think, I mean, I view that as a positive, which is, Hey, if Google is coming, that's good. I mean, then they're coming because they believe that there's a big market opportunity. I mean, if Google Byteboard can only generate, I don't know, 10 million or a hundred million, that's kind of peanuts for Google. Vivek: They would probably invest their money and time in some of their projects. They assume that it's a big industry, okay, great, game on, let's make it happen. Except that, don't just screw it up with our SEO results. When we try and do it, as long as do it, I'm good with that. On GitHub, yeah it's very, very testy. I know Nat Friedman, the CEO of Github, I've met him a couple times. Fantastic guy, great person. We're trying to see if there are partnerships that we can actually work with or put on Github, but I think the strength of Github, or jeez, if you look at the things that they're actually launching, it's more on developer productivity, developer workflows. How do you help developers to work efficiently? Productivity versus helping them more on recruiting? It's very tangential. So, I think I see potential for partnerships. I don't think they'll make the real competitor. That's what I would say. Basically, I'm just saying we're the best. That's what I was trying to say. Chad: Yes, and please Google, don't fuck with our search engine results, thank you. [crosstalk 00:23:36] So, we talk about competition, which is awesome, but also talking about partnerships. Are you partnering any applicant tracking systems now? So that when somebody is applying for a software developer position, that they don't have to just slap a resume into the system, they can go through a HackerRank test instead? Are you doing anything with applicant tracking systems? Vivek: Yeah, absolutely. We're partnered with every ATS except for Google Hire. So, don't ask me why Chad: He's got jokes. Joel: He has jokes. Vivek: So, if you think about the stack we have on the sort of smaller sized companies, you have Greenhouse, Lever, which we have very, very strong partnerships with, I don't know if you've interviewed Sarah, the CEO of Lever, and Daniel from Greenhouse. They're just great folks to talk to, although, don't have both of them in the same podcast, they're competitors. But, so no, I think we partner with them, and then, I can see go a little upstream, you have SmartRecruiters, Jobvite, which we also partnered very, very closely with. And then as you go further upstream you have iCIMS, Workday, Faststream, Taleo. So we actually partnered all the ATS systems that I just mentioned, we work with this very strong interoperability two way, where you can send an invitation to a candidate through the applicant tracking system. And once that candidate completes a challenge, it reports and the scores fall back into the tracking system, so that it's just very, very clean. We have pretty strong partnership and it's essentially, if you want to get into the recording workflow. Joel: Last year, you guys raised $30 million. It was a series C, it looks like you raised around close to $60 million total. What are you guys doing with the money? And when are you going public? Vivek: Yeah, the first thing is the thirty people that I've hired in my PR, sorry, 31, I need to pay them. They're very expensive, as you probably know. So, that is where most of the money's going. Public, I'm thinking just anytime tomorrow, or day after, I mean we're just trying to figure out what's the right time to go public, so sometime tomorrow. Joel: I need the joke drum for this cat. Vivek: Look, I think it's a long way to go for us to get to figure out, if in a way we can go public, in honest, but my goal is to build a large independent company because the market opportunity is big, and in general, there's always going to be more and more problems that you can solve the recruiting. I think that's the most exciting thing about building this company that I've seen, and we've done lots of exciting things, but one of the most exciting things is unlike kind of consumer type companies. Vivek: For example, if you are trying to build, I don't know, a food delivery company in Mountain View, or San Jose, or wherever, if one person in Mountain View, or the city, has a problem, it's not necessarily that everybody in Mountain View will have the problem. But when you're trying to build this enterprise company, if a financial services industry company has a problem, you can pretty much assume that every company obviously have that problem. So you actually know you can measure: what kind of problem? Who has this problem? Who you actually go and talk to? Who would actually be able to give you a solution to the problem? And once you get into the company, you can actually see, oh wow, they're so many other problems that we can go and solve in this organization. So, just sort of managing, hiring people, upskilling them, making sure your employment brand is good and making sure you're constantly getting better, it's just like four number problem. So once you have a sort of wedge inside a company, you can just to keep going on. So that's my goal to build a very large independent company because they got opportunity here. Joel: All right, Vivek, we'll let you out on this. Curious, you said branding earlier, and I know a lot of companies feel a ping pong table and a coffee machine are enough to attract top talent in tech. But what things are you seeing in terms of what employees want from an employer? And particularly, what are your thoughts on Gen Z, the up and coming generation? Vivek: Yeah. You know Gen Z is coming and I was, the whatever the meme of winter is coming, kind of a thing. If you want them, Millennials are hard. I'm a millennial, so I think I can make fun of myself. So, Millennials are hard to manage. I think the big change, and we actually did a research report on this, it's actually on our website, research.hackerrank.com, this is my blog by the way to our blog posts, and one of the most interesting things that changed was they care about the type of projects that they are going to work on and their professional growth more than anything else. So we are helping companies craft a message and story. Hey, just don't do these candid job descriptions that you always have. Would you copy from one company to another? Vivek: We just say, "Oh, I need three plus years of experience, you need to be proficient in ABC." Talk to them about the kind of challenges that this person will solve once he or she comes and joins the company, and that is a high order bid to solve, or suggest, candid job description; so, that's one big thing. The other part of it was in terms of how much the value, the compensation and perks. Just kind of like what you were alluding to in terms of ping pong tables and others, it's actually less competitive previous generation, less or equal, on par, which was surprising. You would have expected, Hey, people would just want to make more and more money. You know they want more professional growth and just interesting problems to solve. Joel: Those crazy kids. Well Vivek, we appreciate your time today for- Chad: Thanks for stopping by. Joel: For those listeners who want to learn more about you and/or HackerRank. Where do you send them? Vivek: HackerRank.com. Our Twitter @HackerRank, and my Twitter is rvivek, and I'm not making fun of you, it's really rvivek, that's the handle that I got. And yeah, so, feel free to email me, contact us. I'm also the Vivek at HackerRank, so feel free to send me a note. Joel: Excellent. You're totally making fun of me and... 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. #Hackerrank #Talroo #Screening #Technology #community

All the big boys were active this week. - Indeed realizes their brand inadequacies - LinkedIn tests - Google for Jobs invades Switzerland - FBI is knocking down MyPayrollHR doors - Rumspringa!!! - and what podcast these days would be complete without TikTok and how it's probably a Trojan horse for the Chinese government. Enjoy and show JobAdx, Sovren, and Canvas lots of love and affection. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. 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. It's time for the Chad & Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: Time to do it again. Let's get after it. Chad: Shit. Joel: Welcome to the Chad & Cheese podcast. HRs most degenerate duo of idiocy. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: I'm Chad Rumspringa Sowash. Joel: On this week's round up... No one knows what that means, but they will after the show. On this week's episode, Indeed pulls a John Cena. Google for jobs continues to expand, and my payroll HR leaves customers holding a big stinky bag of shit. Chad: Pee yew. Joel: Grab a cup of Swiss Miss instant cocoa. We'll be right back after this word from Sovren. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job boarder 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: And I do. Maybe for some drinks. Joel: CEO Robert Rough of Sovren will be joining us at Death Match next week. So maybe it's a good time we shout out to mention TA tech next week in our cavalcade of startups who are going to throw down. Chad: Damn straight. Joel: For chance at winning death match. Chad: Assess first. I can't even say it right now. Assessed various assessments in job.com, pez.ai and our friends over at SeekOut, all sponsored by the people we know and love over at Alexander Mann Solution. Joel: Let's see. I can check and Quincy is going to be a tough judge. Chad: Quincy's tough and everything. Just so you know. I've known Quincy for 15 years. Joel: Yeah. By the way, no one knows chat bots like her, so Pez better button up because they're going to be grilled. Chad: Yeah, she knows a lot of stuff. I don't think any of them are safe to be quite Frank. Joel: Yeah, I'll agree with that. Chad: KRT Recruitics... beer, but anyway, have a big box unbox it. There are four big bottles of Pliny and Elder, and one of them has a hold my beer KRT Recruitics koozie on it. Fucking awesome. Joel: Now you got to tell them the backstory with the hold my beer because that was all us. Chad: I did a shred when KRT and Recruitics. They made the the announcement and it was kind of like in a hold my beer moment because we had all of these programmatic companies being bought, and right at the end of that Recruitics and KRT came together and I just felt like that was their hold my beer moment. Oh, I see what you're doing there. I see what you're doing there. I see what you're doing there. Hold my beer. So I did a shred that was pretty much hold my beer KRT plus, you know, Recruitics sequels, hold my beer and they just ran with it. Which is again, one of the coolest things, I think about the podcast, is we see some of these companies who really understand marketing. They key off of different ideas and they just run with it. And it's really fun to see that shit happen. Joel: Yeah. And leave it to a marketing company to know what's going to get them love on the show: alcohol. The whole industry is just one big enablement to my liver being killed. Thanks everybody. Chad: Yeah, I'm going to have to do a who did it better because Baird sent us a whiskey and bourbon- Joel: Whiskey and bourbon combo. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. And then, and then, you know, KRT Recruitics sent us four big fucking, you know, Pliny and Elders. I mean, that's going to be a hard one. We might actually have to pull our listeners on who did it better. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk about Evergreen. I think that's, it's fairly big news for our listeners and for the podcast. Chad: I agree. People are asking about it. Joel: Yeah. So a bunch of dudes from Cleveland called us, which was, you know, our step in the right direction for sure, at least in my book. Chad: (laughs). Joel: And so this is a podcast network, Evergreen Podcasts, and they were really loving the show and interested in having us, sort of, join the network and we said, sure, you know, from my standpoint it means less work on our part in terms of production, in terms of sort of a little bit of marketing and whatnot. So I think for the most part it means maybe more shows. So if you love the show it could mean more and more content because there's less, a little less work on our end, especially your end as production to get shows out and sort of join a network where there's a little bit more power and resources to make this thing happen. Chad: Everybody listening in and actually following us, they understand. Two guys in 2019, we've worked our asses off. We've been everywhere. We've done a lot of shit and to be able to scale something like that, doing it like we're doing it right now, it's not sustainable. We had to look for partners that had the same kind of thought process that we did about the actual industry itself. And we did, we had plenty of podcast networks, come pretty much knocking on the door and these guys, we really felt, jived best with us. And for all those who had questions out there, no, we were not acquired. We still have total control of our content and we won't be dropping the F bomb any more or less. So nothing will change from that standpoint, but there will be some things that we will be announcing in the very near future. So - Joel: Yeah, it means exciting things for the industry. So stay tuned. This is just the first step march to dominance in this space. Chad: Talking about dominance. So let's give a shout out to Hung Lee who loved the Dan Pink interview. He's taken recruiting brain food to another level. And I know that they've started to do a podcast on their side- Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: -and hopefully, we might be working with those guys a little bit too. Joel: Yeah. And a choice or a chance, if you haven't heard the Dan Pink interview, we've got a lot of love for that one. Go back and check it out in the archives. It was a great chat. Chad: Great stuff. Joel: We're always good for a top ranking or listing of best podcasts in the industry. Top five ranking. We were number one, they didn't say it was any particular order but we were number one on the list, and that was the candidate ID lists, right? Chad: Yeah. Top five and we're suckers for lists. We've said that. Joel: Everyone's a sucker. Chad: Yeah. It was interesting because there was another list that was out there that pretty much reused Hung Lee's Recruiting Brainfood list and it was like the top 100 it's like what the fuck man. I mean that was literally just clickbait. So no, you're not going to get a shout out for that list because you're just using Hung Lee's work first off. But yes, Candidate.ID Siobhan, I think is how you say her name. Brady, thanks so much. She's on marketing over at a candidate ID. Joel: Well done. Well done. Amber Ferrari at Canvas, so I guess maybe she's a job bite employee now, but she was- Chad: One of the best names. I mean, come on Amber Ferrari. Joel: That is true. Chad: At first, I was like, come on. I mean that's not really, no, that's, yeah, no, it's Amber Ferrari. Joel: Yeah. She's not allowed to get married. She has to be Amber Ferrari forever. Also, she gave us some great love. We were out there last week for the a Recruiter Nation Live conference. Had a great time with those folks and always accommodating, always nice. Amman Brar, if you haven't heard the keynote speech from him, I think we published that earlier this week. That was a great insight into not only their company, but I think the industry as a whole and where it's going. So make sure you check that out and thank you, Amber. Chad: Yeah. And this is a shout out to all of those companies, especially our sponsors. Take, come to chadcheese.com, take a look at the sponsors on the site. All of these brands understand that you get behind something that has the same kind of focus and or purpose that you do. This is a partnership. This is where you get into a relationship where you do things more than just podcast, right? Joel: Yeah. We're bringing services and buyers together. Feel the love, everybody. Chad: Yeah. Yeah, it's not just a fucking transaction, people. Joel: So I have a a surprise shout out. It wasn't on our list, but I was remembering it as we were talking. So we get reviews on, I think every podcast platform. We have a really solid 4.5 out of five on them on iTunes with about 35 or 40 reviews. But one came in last in July actually, that I thought was pretty funny. So they gave us one out of five stars, which frankly, for the fact that we just have microphones should give us at least two stars out of five. That should be at least, like the litmus test, for having at least two stars. Joel: But anyway, so the review was pretty entertaining. So he said, I found a list of recruiting HR podcast. So we were on another list. I guess that's good. I really tried to like, but content not actionable with a paid for TV who will be sending me to source convo and then this is you, which I really love. Chad's tangents can be frustrating, also not worth your time. So random an anonymous reviewer, thank you for that. That was much appreciated. Chad: And what I love is, and again, if you don't like the show, this is beautiful. Don't fucking listen. Everybody's not going to like you. Let's just put it that way. Everybody's not going to like you, and we embrace that. So the one star out of five, thanks so much and fuck off. Joel: On the road again. Just can't wait to get on the road again. Where are we going to be next week? Chad: Very Austin-like. That's a Willie Nelson and Willie, an Austin guy. Yes. We're going to be in Austin, Texas next week for, as we talked about, Deathmatch. Chad: If you're going to be in Austin. If you're already in Austin, if you want to be in Austin, go to fucking Austin and then come to Deathmatch, check out the TA tech. Obviously go to TA tech.org, check out what's going on. A lot of great stuff. A lot of fun. A lot of parties. I mean I think there are more parties during this TA tech than I think I've seen before. Joel: The the list of attendees is stellar, particularly the list of international and attendees are our friends from tin guy. I'm assuming the robot will make an appearance in Austin. A lot of people that we know around the world are going to be at this show, so yeah, I'm pretty pumped to go down. Plus, my dad and step mom live there. Hopefully I'll get a chance to eat some tacos with them. Chad: Oh yeah. My brother in law lives there and we have a couple of friends coming down from Indiana. We're actually spending the weekend. So you get time to go to Austin, you spent time in Austin. And not to mention gem and Thomas from Talent Nexus. Joel: Oh yeah. Chad: They're coming down renting Harley's, because they're going to be in Texas, and I believe we're going to go ahead and hit a shooting range while we're there because they're from England. They don't get to fire weapons. Joel: Yeah, that's good. And I think the Swedes are going to like four football games while they're in town. So that's a, that's their bit of Americana. Soak it up, Europeans. Chad: Love it. Love it. Joel: America. Chad: Then right after that, we're going to Vegas. So HR Tech on the stage in the Expo Hall, two days in a row, Wednesday, October 2nd at 1:15 and Thursday, October 3rd, 11:15 and when we're not on stage, I guarantee you we're more than likely going to have one or two things in our faces, not those, who are going to have either a mic or a beer slash bourbon in our faces at that point because we're in fucking Vegas. So there. Joel: The show that banned us last year is having us onstage this year. You got to love that. You got to love that. And then we got France, right? Chad: On the leash orally. Yeah. Paris, France. Joel: This panel is insane. Chad: Dude, this is fucking awesome. So we've got it all shored up. October 22nd at 1145 Paris time on the influencer stage. Paris Convention Center. We are going to have Brandy Ellis, head of recruitment, marketing and strategy at SmashFly. Chris Wray head of recruitment at Sainsbury's and Adam Yearsley. Yeah. Adam Yearsley, global head of talent management at Red Bull. So big fucking people on stage. Hard questions in France, should be a blast. Joel: In France, we're hoping to get some great interviews outside of that. The show's really accommodating with who do you guys want to talk to while you're out here? And some of the brands that are there are just stellar and someone from Heineken is there, which they're going to have beer. So we got to talk to the Heineken guy. He is going to be there, Spotify. We should be able to get some really good interviews with some really top TA executives while we're there. Chad: I agree. I agree. Joel: Onto the news. Chad: Yes. Joel: Indeed Prime, their tiptoe into the staffing business, which we've been talking about for how long now that they're going to get into this thing and they're owned by a staffing company and they're scared shitless of Google for jobs. So they're looking at getting into the staffing business and if you were questioning it up until now, I think all of your skepticism should be destroyed because they just launched Indeed Seen. It's Seen powered by Indeed. So the polo John Cena you can't see me and launched Seen. Chad: Yeah. Indeed Prime is now Seen and you can go to this new Seen site at beseen.com and it is primarily for tech talent. It's a subscription model. Their plans allow for unlimited hires, but this is all around that. The contacts, you only get so many contacts per month unless you're in the unlimited contact arena and it's not really that expensive. You're a company who is currently using staffing companies and you want to get away from the per, you know, 20%, 15% model. This seemed to be much cheaper. Joel: Yeah, they have a nice little, not surprising roster of companies using this service, particularly for tech hires, which I think it was mainly what Prime's goal was. But you've got all state Twilio, Overstock, Grubhub, eBay, Capital One, a lot of the usual suspects. Now what my question is, does Indeed not have enough money to just go by seen.com, and was I the only one who thought of Monster's failed, BeKnown when I saw Be Seen? Did you think that too or was that just me? Chad: I did. But here's the thing, it's pretty much forgotten by now by most of the industry. Yeah. I would think that Seen itself would cost a pretty penny Be Seen, not too bad. Two words that you can pretty much spell pretty easily. I think it's interesting from the standpoint of, you know, it's a subscription model, makes it easier, has a matching component. So what they call Fast Match is it's kind of like this little matching assistant thing that that contacts candidates that match your profiles and your roles, and then they go straight to screening. So this is interesting, right? And how that applies against your subscription and all that other fun stuff. You can get the details there. But overall, I see this is, personally, I see this as Prime really trying to break away from Indeed, to an extent, and create its own brand because we all know Indeed has a shitty reputation for fucking people. Chad: So it's, I mean it's serious. I mean the companies who actually built Indeed job boards, staffing companies, those are companies who built Indeed, indeed, fuck them. Too easy, right? So what happens is, what you do is you're like, okay, don't look at this over here, this pile of shit reputation. Don't look at this. Look over here at this new reputation, this Seen. Now I love what they've done thus far. The big question is, will they be able to pull away from first and foremost, Indeed as a brand number one and second, you can do that. But if you don't actually start treating companies or treating your customer the right way, it's not going to matter what new colors you have, what new name you have. None of that shit matters unless you actually demonstrate that you are different. Joel: That is a great point. And my question when they first did it was why go away from the Indeed brand? I mean it's, it's still employment. It's not like, you know, you're starting a robotics company or something, right? So to get away from the Indeed brand was really curious to me. And I can only think of things like, you know, well it's a totally different business what job secrets they give Indeed they don't want them to think about that in terms of the new brand. Joel: But your point I think is right on as you were saying it, like they have such a bad reputation from a sales perspective with so many companies over the years. It's going to be much easier for a salesperson to call up and say, I'm Joey with Seen. Let me tell you about what we do. As opposed to, Hey, I'm Joey with Indeed Prime. I know that we screwed you over a year or two ago with the normal paper clips thing or the whole water war we're doing. So instead of getting hung up on, at least the company will give a listen to what the new company is and they can sort of leave the Indeed brand behind from that perspective. So that was, I think that's spot on by you. Chad: Well, and also if you take a look at what they're looking to do, they're looking to scale staffing with a platform. Right? And you have a subscription model, so you have less human friction to an extent. Joel: Yeah. And it's a business that Google will never get into. Chad: Oh fuck no. Joel: So they're, they're at least strategically doing the right thing in terms of doing something that there's no chance that Google will ever get into. Chad: Yes, definitely. Yeah. They don't want to risk the antitrust shit when they can make all this money around search and everything else that they make money on. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. And this is a very people-heavy business that Indeed is getting into. So I will caution some bit of excitement because this isn't the nice lean and mean money machine printing money in the corner office. This is a real tough business to be in. So good luck. We'll see how it goes. Chad: Yeah. But I think they're going to take a shot at making it more lean and mean, less people friction and they're doing that around tech types because tech types, in most cases, I'm going to generalize, they don't like fucking humans. They don't like people, right? They like technology. Start with this platform. Hopefully we see an integration with Sift and then you can start to see where this could perspectively be scalable in some industries without all of the headcount. Joel: Yeah. It's tough to launch a new brand. It'll be fun to watch this thing evolve. Let's talk about another 800 pound gorilla. LinkedIn is in the news this week. Chad: Some assessments they rolled out globally this week. These assessments are short multiple choice tests that users can take to verify their knowledge and areas like computer language, software packaging and other work related skills. And when it was in beta they had 2 million tests that were actually taken. So it's pretty amazing. I mean English languages test covering 75 different skillsets. So pretty big. Joel: Yeah. This is really similar. Upwork has been doing stuff like this for quite a while and I'm sure other sites have too. But basically as you're looking through candidates to talk to a recruit, knowing that they are proficient in English, are they a native English speaker or are they proficient in certain coding languages and things like that. Like to already sort of have these tests done where they're getting graded as proficient or not in certain skills. It saves the recruiting team a lot of time. And this also is a little bit of a leap frog of services like HackerRank where you give people the test as you're interviewing them. If you know that they're proficient ahead of time, that's sort of a nice, a nice thing to have as you're recruiting. So definitely not a new thing that they're doing, but it is a nice to have and a nice feature both for recruiters as well as for job seekers to stand out if they really do have good skills in these tests. Chad: Yeah. So they're going to show this on your profile that you actually took tests and it's going to be the in the skills and endorsements area. The big question is, is this data scrapable? So we're talking about the whole high Q, right? So there's more data that's being added to your profile through these tests and LinkedIn, through proprietary tasks and those types of things, are actually providing all of this new data. Is that scrapable? Apparently it is. Because that is your profile and the test that you took. So what do you think? Joel: What's becoming more and more legally scrapable? The question will be if LinkedIn's whack-a-mole defense strategy against scrapers can keep them away from this data and I think that'll be a continual challenge for scrapers. Legally, it won't be their data per se, but it'll be really, really hard going forward to actually get it off of LinkedIn. Let's get a quick word from our friends at JobAdX and talk about Google. Chad: Google. JobAdX: Nope, 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 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. 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. Join us at J-O-B-A-D-X.com that's join us at J-O-B-A-D-X.com attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: Have you ever been in Switzerland, Chad? Chad: I have not been to Switzerland. Joel: Neither have I. It looks beautiful though. Chad: I'm open to it. Joel: Yeah, they have mountains there, I guess. No snow and Google for jobs is now available in the country known as Switzerland with about eight and a half million people. So by no means a large market. Chad: No. Joel: But another step into global domination by the folks at Google for jobs. Chad: Yes. Yeah, so when we were in Sweden less than a month ago, we were talking about Google for jobs and until it gets there, everybody's like, yeah, is it really going to come here? So yes, it's going to come here. Sweden has about 10 million people, smaller companies, Switzerland a 0.5 so yeah, there is no question. Joel: Country. Chad: It's rolling. Yeah, it's rolling out everywhere. And Google has, it seems they've partnered with Job Channel and Job Channel has an entire landing page dedicated to Google for jobs or as they would like to refer to it: Google job search experience. Joel: That's right. A Jog Channel's Kristoff Arthur though, cool name, says that the site reaches roughly 700,000 users per month with job advertisements. So Google's making it happen. They're not, they're by no means closing shop like they did with Hire by Google with this whole Google for jobs thing. Chad: And the way that you defend this is that it's just search. It's content that's being searched and people search for jobs. Joel: Ah, I see. What you did there. Like Google for jobs is the Switzerland of job search. So they had the launch in Switzerland, right? Chad: Had to, had to. So it's interesting because Job Channel's doing something, it's almost like they're taking a page out of KRT marketing's book. KRT had a Google for jobs or has a Google for jobs resource center and it's like that's what Job Channel is creating. They have a white paper, you can go learn more about Google for jobs or the Google job search experience and they want to be the place where everybody comes for that info because again, they're not in a very large country, so therefore they probably don't have that much competition. So it was probably easy for Google to kind of attack these guys on the shoulder and say, hey, what do we have to do to make this happen? Joel: Yeah, it's like opening a shop in Illinois. Not too hard to do. Not too hard to do. So let's talk about the shitbags at MyPayrollHR this week. Chad: How, how can that shit happen? Joel: How can it happen? It's pretty easy to happen. I don't know why these crimes keep happening in our space. It's just another in the long line of fucking like dirt bags that are screwing people over. This one is particularly behead. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Okay. So MyPayrollHR, I never heard of them. They're by no means a big deal, but they really help small businesses with their payroll services, right? So the diner down the street, the short cleaners, those kinds of businesses. So this company essentially made sure everybody got paid, the business paid into the end of the payroll service, just like paychecks or any other kind of company that you might use. Joel: So they basically close shop. No one knew about it, clients didn't know about it. Michael Mann, who is their CEO is in upstate New York. It's sort of closed shop, took for the Hills. They don't know where he is. The FBI raided his place this past Monday. They have about 13 employees who I assume were just thrown out on the street. The big thing though is that there were like $35 million in funds from companies that were into the system that have not been recovered. So all these people that work in large part paycheck to paycheck are totally screwed. All these businesses that are probably bootstrapped as it is now, they need to come up with the money to pay their employees. It's just a real big shit sandwich. And if Michael Mann is, you know, in Bora Bora right now with $35 million, then fuck him. He's a dick. Chad: Well fuck him anyway. I don't care where he's at. I hope he's hiding in some corner somewhere in the fetal position. Fuck him wherever he's at. But yeah, this is interesting because it is impacting like around 4,000 small businesses. So whether we knew it or not, it's still impacting a lot of people. And the big question is, what is the faith in platforms being out there, right? I mean, because we take a look at this, right? In a company, a company focuses on being able to utilize a payroll system like this. And I mean this was totally bullshit. There was, there was no message saying, hey, we're going to shut close down shop. You need to roll into another system. Nothing like that. But yeah, even when companies do it the right way, like Hire by Google, you have companies who are putting a lot of time and a lot of effort in these platforms. How do you know, even with a big name at Google, that it's going to be fucking legit? Joel: Yes, it's hard and it screws over every sort of legitimate business that really does care about making a good product and making customers happy because you do get pinched and it does make people gun shy about using new services. Although a lot of these small businesses they don't think differently about that. I got called from this company or I found this site on Google. They must be okay because they're on the first page of Google. Don't trust things that are really, really important to you to start ups or companies that haven't been around for a while or who are reputable or have a lot of money and investment. It's very risky and buyer beware on a lot of this stuff, unfortunately. Chad: Well and this company had 4,000 businesses so it's not like, hey, we have 20 businesses on the platform, you can trust us. They had 4,000 businesses, so once again it's really hard to be able to say, hey, we don't know the name of this company. It doesn't matter. They had a shit ton of businesses using their system from a small business standpoint, but then you take a look at what Google just did. That's a big name. That's a very big name. Users are paying them now. They they are scaling it down I guess you could say the right way by actually going through and giving all the notices and things like that. You have a year to get off the system, but still, the time and money spent to be able to jump onto a system like this goes beyond that monthly subscription or whatever it is. I mean, it's, it's the faith and trust that we're really fucking with right now. Joel: It's, it sucks as 4,000 companies and all those employees that are expecting to get paid. Chad: Yes. Joel: 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 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: Amber, Ferrari, everyone. Joel: Ferrari, the voice of Canvas advertising. She's just such a rock star. Chad: You know where I bet Amber is right now? She's on TikTok. Joel: (Laughs). She's working diligently to advance the interest of Jobvite and its other companies. I'm sure. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. And one of those platforms, from a partnership standpoint, might be TikTok. Joel: Yeah. But we've taken a little look at TikTok and some stories that have come out and there are some warning signs that we should all be aware of. So TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, which I don't think a lot of people know. I'm sure very few people know. I didn't really know it until a couple of weeks ago. If you think that the government isn't sort of listening and also collecting or has access to the data on TikTok, you're probably mistaken. So they're a little bit of of fears here of like what's going on and this platform is just growing like a fucking weed. If you're Facebook, you're super concerned about the growth of, of TikTok. So you know this is from the story. This caught my eye from one of the stories that we looked at. Joel: So quote, "Facebook faces a serious global rival from China in TikTok. In 2018, TikTok ranked fourth worldwide as the top non-game app, downloaded at 663 million behind only Facebook, which was at 711 million and its related apps. WhatsApp and Messenger," this is from Sensor Tower data, "TikTok's in roads in India and it's young, mobile-savvy population is a big reason. It's soaring about one quarter of TikToks downloads come from India. That's interesting. Chad: Wow. Joel: TikTok added 188 million downloads in the first quarter of this year. Surpassing Facebook, but only trailing WhatsApp and Messenger. So this thing is a monster. Chad: Yes. Joel: And it's time that we kind of take a look at the dangers of it and the risks of using it. Chad: Yeah. If Joel Cheesman is waiting for a flight, he's watching TikTok. Joel: It is oddly addictive. Chad: No, it's totally addictive. But the thing is, TikTok uses an algorithm that pretty much dictates the entire feed. So if you take a look at Netflix and Spotify and YouTube and so on and so forth, those are our recommender systems and they will recommend things. TikTok not so much. So I mean it pretty much chooses what is going to be in your feed. You have some, obviously, opportunities to like things and then it helps the algorithm but it doesn't really recommend, it just forces things in your face. Joel: It is, it is super smart and I think it does show some of the advancements that China has probably made on an AI front that's effective and also a little bit scary I guess. But I also think if you're thinking you're going to use TikTok to source candidates, I think you're wrong. There's no search for, you know, who went to Stanford. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Or search for any particulars. So if this is the future of social media and how we create content online, I think sites like LinkedIn, how do they adapt to this new world? Because if this is how young people are going to interact, they're not going to fucking go to LinkedIn and type out lengthy profiles and engage with people that are sharing news stories in that way. So very interesting. We'll see how it pans out. But if you're a recruiter hoping to like leverage tick talk to source, I think you're going to be really disappointed. Chad: If you're in branding, this is your platform. So this is what you should be looking at. You should be looking at, so let's say for instance, you're with Skill Scout or you're with VideoMyJob or something of that nature and you're using those types of platforms. How can you create these segments, these viral video types of segments to show your company or your jobs or whatever it might be. How can you leverage this platform? Can you search for candidates? No. Can you brand the fuck out of yourself? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yes. So, look at the mechanism in which you might be able to use TikTok and if you are a company, you should, as I said before, the NFL, it's a company. They have users, they have brands, those types of things. That's what you should be looking for. Joel: I hope at the gathering, there's some sessions in terms of this whole platform and how to build brand in this whole world of quirky, short videos on mobile devices. Chad: We'll be having discussions about it. I guarantee that. Joel: Let's go from high tech to no tech with our next story. You found this one in- Chad: Rumspringa. Joel: Incredibly interesting. Yeah. So explain to people what that is. Chad: So Rumspringa, if you don't know what that is, the Amish community. Joel: It's not the surf strumming that we've been talking about. Chad: No, that's not the nasty fish. Rumspringa is in the Amish community. There's a time, I can't remember what the year is, but there's a time in which they allow their kids, getting ready to go into adulthood, to go out into the rest of the regular kind of community and try out new things. Go get drunk, go to a fucking techno party or whatever the fuck. Anyway- Joel: Put on some parachute pants and party. Chad: Yeah. Use electricity, ride in a car. So apparently two Amish males, I believe we're experiencing Rumspringa were pulled over by a cop. They were drinking spiked ice tea. I guess when you don't generally have something to drink you go for something that you might like. So spiked ice tea then a case of Mich Ultra on the top of their buggy. Joel: Yeah. That probably tipped off the cob. If you're driving around with a case of beer on your hood, you're going to get pulled over. They must've been in a really fucked up. Chad: That's not why the cop pulled him over. The cop pulled him over because he saw a stereo in the back. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: A stereo. It's like- Joel: You don't read a lot on horse and buggies anyway. Chad: No. Joel: Or ever. Chad: Yeah. So pulled them over and they were drinking, obviously, and they bolted. Joel: Yup. Chad: They're gone. Yeah. They run into the end of the tree line. So they went into the woods. Chad: They impounded the buggy and the cops are like, look, we understand this Rumspringa thing happens, but hopefully you come and get your horse and buggy. I can only imagine these two kids and having to go to Jedidiah and Ethel, mom and dad, and tell them what they actually did. Joel: Sir. Can you explain the two youths that you saw? Yeah. They were wearing black with little beards and that's all I saw. These dudes aren't going back to the Amish life. They're going to move to New York or Philly and become Rebel Rousers. Chad: I disagree. I think that these kids will be scared Amish. They will go back to the Amish life. They will live the Amish paradise life. Joel: You had to work that in, didn't you? Chad: Well, that's a pretty weak Rumspringa is what I'm saying. 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. Walken: It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepperjack, 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 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 #BeSeen #Seen #IndeedPrime #Staffing #LinkedIn #Assessments #GoogleforJobs #MyPayrollHR #TikTok #Rumspringa

There are a lot of myths floating around out there about recruiting. Contrary to popular belief, the sky really isn't falling, Chicken Little. Not at all. Author Steve Lowisz joins the boys to talk about his new book, Recruiting Sucks ... But It Doesn't Have To, to dispel the seven most popular myths hovering around today's recruiting environment. Enjoy this Talroo exclusive.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. 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, 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. 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: Aw, yeah. Chad: There we go. Joel: We're back with another exclusive. What's up, people? Welcome to the Chad & Cheese Podcast, I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: Right on. Hey, we are blessed today to have recruiter, author, all-around good dude, I knew him from his days, or days at Qualigence, which I assume he's still CEO, Steve Lowisz. I'm saying that correctly I hope. Chad: There's a Z at the end though. Joel: How are you, man? Steve: I'm doing well, guys. How are you? Joel: Great, thanks for joining us from beautiful Detroit. Chad: It's Lowisz not Lowis-z? Joel: Lowis-z. Steve: It's actually Lowisz, pretend there's a Z, no S. Take the S out. Chad: Ah, got you. Joel: I get a little sleepy when I look at your name. I don't know what that is. Chad: Steve, he's always sleepy. It's not just your name. Steve: It's all good, man. Joel: So Steve, man, long time we've known each other. It's great to finally have you on the show. Most of our listeners have no clue who you are, so give them the elevator pitch on you and tell us why we're sitting down and chatting today. Steve: So simple, 25 years, actually 26 years of recruiting. I started when I was 22. Do the math, you see how old I am. Still CEO of Qualigence, as well as a couple of other firms related to recruiter training and so on. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Steve: But I decided, and this is why we're on the phone or on the podcast, I decided last year to start writing a book, and that's what's bringing us to today. I wrote a book called Recruiting Sucks ... But It Doesn't Have To. Chad: And that's kind of scary, right? Writing a book because you're like, "I've got a lot of shit to talk about," but then you get into it and you're like, "Oh, fuck, now I've got to finish this thing." Joel: And is this the first book that's called Recruiting Sucks? Steve: It is. Joel: Wow. Good for you. Steve: So we though it would ring true, but where the title actually came from is all the crap that I hear from people that I know that recruiting sucks, recruiting's this, recruiting's that, and I'm like, "Okay. Help me understand why." And here's the reality: it doesn't have to be that bad or viewed that bad. Joel: Now will the followup be called Recruiting Swallows, is my question? Steve: I don't think so. I think I'll let you guys do that one. Chad: Yeah, that would be right down Joel's alley. Joel: That's right. That was just so easy. Sorry. Steve: I walked into that one. Joel: Yeah, you did. You did. Steve: But I'll give you guys that one. Chad: We're talking about, and the book has some of these basic myths, right? Steve: Yeah. Chad: Is it really predicated on all these myths of all these people that are outside of recruiting who believe that recruiting sucks because myth one, two, three, so on and so forth? Joel: Yeah, and are these in order of priority or- Steve: They're not. Joel: ... did you just randomly pick them out of a hat? Steve: They're not. It made the book flow well with the stories, so they are random, relatively speaking. But there's six of them, but here's the thing, it's not just from people outside of our industry. Chad: Right. Steve: Some of this actually came from people in our industry, so I had to have some more conversation around it. That's ultimately why I wrote the book, because a lot of these younger recruiters are like, "Yeah, this is what we believe. This is what we believe. We've never been taught anything different." And that's what causing this whole idea of recruiting sucks in the first place. Chad: Well, let's talk about that first. Joel: It sounds like it could've been called Millennials Suck, basically. Steve: Hey, I'm not saying it's just millennials here. Joel: Oh, okay. Steve: I did not make that correlation. Joel: That's what I heard, Steve. I don't know. Chad: Not to mention, Joel, I think Dan Pink went ahead and made sure that you understood, this is not a cohort group thing. We're going to have to get you back to therapy. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Chad: So let's talk about the individuals inside the community that are saying that recruiting sucks. What are some of the main myths behind why inside the community we believe recruiting sucks? Steve: Well, from the recruiter's perspective, because there's that inside outside, right? The thing that kept coming up is it's all about LinkedIn, that's the only thing that I'm going to worry about, that's the only way I reach out to candidates, all this other crap out there just doesn't work, so I'm going to focus 100% of my time on LinkedIn. That was one of the ones that came from a plethora of recruiters, just a crap load of recruiters that were like, "That's it." Steve: One of the other big ones that kept coming out is you know what, I'm a recruiter. I'm not responsible for quality of hire. It's the hiring manager who's responsible 100%- Chad: Ouch. Steve: ... for quality of hire. Chad: Ouch. Steve: Think about that one. Chad: What the fu- ... I mean, yeah, somebody needs to take a ball bat to those people. What the hell? Steve: Wait a minute, though, because this, it came as a result of one of the Facebook groups I'm in where the conversation came up. I posed the question, are recruiters responsible at all for quality of hire? And I got lambasted that, and these were all recruiters that are saying, "Are you freaking kidding me? Of course not. All I'm responsible for is putting candidates in front of the hiring manager that they hire." That's it. Chad: Dude. Steve: Yeah. Chad: I mean ... Okay. So let's dig into this a little bit deeper, because this is obviously a fucking problem. Steve: Yeah, you think? Chad: So we really believe, as recruiters, and I'm not going to say that these are our top shelf recruiters, because they're obviously fucking not, but that we don't believe that what we put ... We don't put quality in front of the hiring manager so that the whole process goes cleaner, smoother, not to mention better retention, etc., etc.? I mean, is there not a long-term understanding here? Or do they feel it's better for them that if there is high turnover because they are giving shitty fucking candidates that they're going to have a job? Steve: So here's the thing. I thought it initially it was going to be all coming from third-party recruiters like me, right? Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah. Steve: Because you get paid if you fill the damn role, right? Chad: Yeah. Steve: We all know that, right? Chad: Right, right. Steve: But what happened was about 45% of the people that commented on it were corporate recruiters. Chad: Oh my god. Steve: Yeah. Think about that. So that's why I put it in the book, because it's like, guys, if you give the hiring manager and they're desperate three shitty candidates, what are they going to do? Pick the best of the three. They still got a crappy candidate that doesn't meet the bar in the first place, so how can you say you have nothing to do with quality? That's just crap. Chad: So yeah, and not to mention if those hiring managers are getting shitty candidates in the first place, don't you think they're just going to turn around and blame recruiting? Steve: Well, what do you think they say? Recruiting sucks, right? Chad: Yeah. Steve: That's the impetus of the title of the book. Chad: Okay, okay. So in some cases, not all, I'm sure, we're creating this own shit storm for ourselves. Steve: I would say yes for many, that we created the problem, it's now our time to fix it. Chad: Well, let's talk about this on a strategic level now, right? So if talent acquisitions, if they know what the fuck they're doing on the director level and manager level, they will be getting feedback and they should be able to train and get the right people in those positions. So there is some blame to be had, no question, in the trenches, in the tactical discussion, but this should all be rectified by talent acquisition and the management set. Because they should know what's going on with the hiring managers and retentions, etc., etc., and know that they are a big piece of this. Steve: Well, hold on a sec, and I agree with you, but let's think this through for a second. What are many of them, and let's just kind of the run of the mill manager director inside in a corporation, what are most of them held accountable to that they don't push back on? It still comes back to, in many instances, it's how many roles did I fill in the archaic days to fill and all this crap, even though they may have to fill it 18 times that year, they're held accountable to metrics. What are those people going to do? They're going to drive their team to deliver on the metrics that they're being held accountable for. Let's think about this. Chad: Yes. Steve: Because I've dug into this with TA leaders and they have the best of intentions, guys, but when it comes down to their pay and their job, what are you going to do? Joel: So should the metrics change? Steve: Absolutely they should change. Joel: To what? Chad: Goddamn straight. Steve: Absolutely. Let's talk about now you've got some issues with it, right? But if you started looking at quality of hire, if you could measure it, sales people it's easy. They either performed or not, right? Now then you're going to hear the side of well, the manager is the reason. Okay, you got to take that into consideration- Chad: To an extent, yes. Steve: ... I absolutely grant you that. But that's where you got to pull an HR and so forth. But if we started measuring retention and performance, then that's assuming we understand what performance, how it's going to be measured, creates a whole different can of worms here to start talking about. But even from a recruiting perspective, we don't even think about performance of candidate, we think skills of candidate. Very, very different. Chad: This should be a holistic discussion first and foremost, because yes, the manager does have something to do with whether that individual does perform or is retained, right? But also upfront, talent acquisition has to be responsible for performance and retention as well, because that individual might not have been a good fit and they shouldn't have been in front of the hiring managers in the first place. Steve: Here's the thing that I found. This cracks me up as I started digging into this, and again, both corporate and agency, I'd be like, "Okay, tell me about what does this candidate have to deliver? What's the responsibility of the job? Not in terms of technical responsibilities on the job description, but what do they have to deliver in the next 90 days, 180 days?" And about 88% of the recruiters couldn't answer it aside from what was on the job description. What does that tell you? Chad: It tells you they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Steve: Thank you. You said it better than me, right? But so then I'm going to ask the question again. Did we create our own problem? Are people looking at us as recruiters and saying, "Recruiting sucks," is it solely their fault or did we train them years ago to view us negatively because we never delivered in the first place on what was really important to them, and that was people that actually have performance? Chad: And we don't align with actual business metrics anyway. We don't talk about or even focus on how these candidates impact the bottom line. I mean, if we talked about the bottom line and how these individuals or the lack of individual, right, or retention of those individuals actually impacted the bottom line, then the SeaSuite- Joel: Process center. Chad: ... would give a fuck. They would give a fuck. Steve: You think? Chad: They would give a fuck, but yeah, what do we talk about? Time to fill. And then guess what? CEOs and CFOs and COOs, they pat us on the head and they go, "You guys are cute. That's a cute little stat. I don't even know what that fucking means." Joel: I'll say. Chad: Yeah. You're a cost center. Steve: I love the metrics that we provide leadership overall, right? It's like well, we got it down to four candidates per hire. Okay, that's great, what does that mean to me? Right back to your point. So these days, when somebody asks me what I do, I don't even say I'm a recruiter anymore. I say, "Look, you've got three big problems: people, their performance, and profits. If you want to talk about those, let's have a conversation about how I can help." It's very different than, "Hey, I can just find somebody to fill your freaking role." Think about it. Chad: Right. Joel: Steve, I want to get back to the book real quick. One of my favorite myths that you have in number six is recruiters will be replaced by technology, and Chad and I discuss this topic probably every week on the show. We've interviewed sourcers that say 98% of sourcing is going to be outsourced and automated at some point. We talk to recruiters that are scared for their jobs. So talk about why this is a myth and what we can expect from the future in terms of recruiters being replaced by technology. Steve: Let me give you some perspective on this, so when I started in the business 26 years ago, all we did was source. That was it. No recruiting. We did name generation and very, very kind of light sourcing. Chad: Right. Steve: Today, my research team continues to shrink, right, because the need is now let's leverage some of the technology and tools that are out there. I don't understand how that's a bad thing, because what we've done is move those sourcers into recruiter spots. But let's think about it from a recruiting perspective. What's the job of a recruiter? Our job is to work with the business to make sure that we're driving the business, right? To what you just said, let's just stop thinking about position, how many positions did I fill. Chad: Right. Steve: So if we take that perspective, you can't completely replace everything a recruiter does when it comes to empathy and providing guidance to the business on what they should be looking for, why they're looking for it, and understanding that in a candidate. Outreach can be done automatically. I don't have a problem with that. Assessments can be done automatically. But there's a lot more to a candidate that today, and in your lifetime and my lifetime, it ain't going to replace us. It's just not going to replace us. But it's going to automate a lot of that crap we spent a lot of time doing that doesn't create value to the business. They don't care how many hours you sourced. They care that we've got the right freaking candidates in the first place. Chad: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:14:30]. Joel: I got to ask because we've seen an actual robot that recruits out of Sweden. Chad: Interviews. Joel: I've got to know your thoughts about a real-life sort of robot interviewing folks as a solution to filling seats. Steve: So it depends on what it gives me. What's the data that it gives me after the fact, right? First of all, is it a natural conversation, can it engage in a natural conversation with somebody? And maybe at some point it can. If it gives me data, awesome, because I have to spend less time dealing with a bunch of candidates and I can focus my efforts on that three or four candidates that gets through the robot to help make the right decision for the long term of the company and the hiring leader. How's that a bad thing? Joel: All right, score one for the robots. Steve: I'm good with it. Chad: Score one for the robots. Steve: If it drives the right thing for both sides. Joel: Yeah, exactly. Steve: Experience is a lot. We know that. Chad: Back to the actual business conversation, right, so if you're talking to TA leaders, are you telling them to scrap what they're doing today or to start to slowly bring in some of those real key business figures that CEOs and the SeaSuite actually give a shit about? Steve: So it depends on the circumstance. If it's an education piece, if they've got a pretty good ... If their process of recruiting is pretty good internally, start to make the shift a little bit slower, because if you just try to do it overnight and it's not broken, sometimes the business will actually revolt, even though the end result is what they want. If it's already broken and there's already challenges, scrap it, start completely over right now. But either way, in the next couple of months, you better be able to start talking the terms of business. Quit talking about filled seats and start talking about impact on the business, revenue generated or if you keep leaving that position open, revenue lost. Customers lost. Chad: Yes. Yes. Steve: But we're afraid to have that conversation. Chad: Well, and time to fill, shouldn't we, again, shouldn't we be talking about the amount of time that seat is open, first and foremost, and the prospective product or service loss or whatever it is, we've got to understand that that open seat actually equates to dollars that impact the bottom line. But also, if it's not the right person, there's going to be a shit-ton of turnover and retention also costs cash as well. Steve: Is time to fill part of the symptom or the cause of the problem? Chad: The symptom. Steve: Of course it is. Chad: Yes. Steve: But yet we focus ... So think about what happens. Now let's take that one step lower. I'm the director of TA and I'm going to measure time to fill. I'm going to talk about quality candidate, quality candidate, quality candidate. But the thing that I'm going to hold my recruiters to is time to fill. What are they going to do? Joel: [crosstalk 00:17:24] Chad: They're going to fill them with whatever they can, yeah. Steve: Exactly. It's the same thing we create. That's the problem with some agencies, when that's how they live and breathe, right, let's think about this for a second, are they going to be focused on just the quality of hire? Of course not. That's how they live. So we've got to be careful both internally and externally with some of the models that we have today. It's got to change. And if it doesn't, guess what? Recruiting continues to suck, guys. Joel: Myth number three, one of my favorites also, is recruiters don't need to be marketers. Talk about that and then specifically, what are, say, three things that an old-school recruiter who doesn't want to be a marketer should start doing immediately? Steve: Yeah, so the whole idea of demand generation, right, let's think about this, we've all got access to LinkedIn, we've all got access to all these other tools out there, right? Chad: Right. Steve: That's what we do. We love those tools. How do you differentiate yourself from everybody else that's out there? You're going to send the same spammy message or you're going to start to build credibility. Example, you go look at a corporate recruiter's LinkedIn profile. It doesn't say anything about the value that they provide to their candidates in business X. So if I'm a technology recruiter and I don't talk about building great teams of technology folks that do A, B, C, knowing how to move them from company A, whatever that is and building up my credibility as a recruiter to that industry, I've lost a real basic marketing opportunity of building a brand and that brand is me as a recruiter. Whether I'm a corporate recruiter, an agency recruiter, it makes no difference, number one. Steve: Number two, you know what marketing automation is, right? Chad: Right. Joel: Yeah. Steve: Salesforce, Pardot, HubSpot, all of these things, some are CRM, some are marketing automation. What do they do? Why do we use marketing automation? Chad: To be able to keep the customer- Joel: Funnel full. Steve: Well, there's two cases. Chad: To keep [crosstalk 00:19:13] Joel: Keep them engaged. Chad: To keep them warm. Steve: You're talking about the second piece. What's the first thing marketers do with a tool like that? I send, let's say I sent out 100 emails. What does that tool allow me to do? It measures response rates. Is the message that I'm sending even resonating? So the message I used 10 years ago, if I'm a recruiter, I've got a great opportunity for you, is that resonating today? And if we're not looking at oh my gosh, I sent out 100, I got two responses, whether it's an in-mail, email, it doesn't really make a difference to me, there's a problem with your message and we don't look at it like a marketer, we look at it at what we want, not what the other person wants to hear. So start changing it and start measuring it. You can get cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap tools to see if your emails are even landing correctly, if they're even getting opened. If they're not getting opened, what happens? You get no freaking response. Joel: Yep. Steve: Right? Joel: Or just move to text messaging instead of email. Steve: Well, it's the same, so text messaging, we love it. Love it, love it, love it. But here's the problem, the same thing's happening. They're getting so inundated that if the message isn't correct even on text, you're just using another medium and screwing up that medium. That's two. The third thing is what you guys were talking about, to answer your original question, right? It's that constant nurturing or putting into the community. I'll give you a real quick example. You go to LinkedIn, you get into one of the groups for technology people or finance people, whatever it is, and you start posting a job right away and it becomes all about me. Steve: You're sucking out of the community but you're not putting anything into the community, whether it be with valuable content or providing some level of value, right? And all you want to do is pull, pull, pull, pull, pull. Well, you know what? You're just looking like a recruiter who's not going to provide any value. You just got a job to do and that's to fill those jobs. Chad: That's like all those in-mails that you get that are really just shit in-mails. They're like, "Hi, my name's Steve and I'd really like to sell you this, or I'd really like to get you into this position." It's like, Steve, I don't even know who the fuck you are, first and foremost. Second, get the fuck away from me, I never want to talk to you again. And then generally I kick them out of my network because that's bullshit. Joel: For sure. The new one is connecting with people and then I feel like I'm on an email list because I start getting emails. So that's got to be automated too, which really pisses me off. Steve: And there's nothing wrong with automation if you're sending the right message. Joel: And if the expectation is you're going to send me messages. Steve: Yes, that is correct. Think about who the hell you're sending messages to. Marketers think about personas. This is what interests this persona. What interests a tech guy or gal? What interests a VP of digital marketing? Send a message that's appropriate to the interests of that person and continue to provide value and you'll have a number of them coming to you before they start responding to all those other spammy mails, or emails. Chad: And stop selling shit. Just stop. Selling. Shit. Don't sell the fucking position, don't sell the company, don't ... Just be more fucking human about the conversation. That's the thing. What would you want to hear from somebody else? If you ask yourself that, would I want to receive this email? Would I want to receive this text? That is probably where you should start. Steve: So there's a furniture store up here, I don't know if you guys have an Art Van? Joel: Nope. Chad: Nope. Steve: Okay, so we have this big furniture store here in Michigan, one of the largest in the country, but they've got this reputation, the minute you walk in the door, you got like, 10 of their sales reps coming out on the floor saying, "Well, we got this on sale, this on sale, this on sale, this on sale." And they've trained them to do that. Just think if you walk into something like that and they say, "Hey, you walked in, what are you really looking for? Is there a need that I can point you in the right direction?" It's completely different. So to sell a position that you think is cool versus finding out what inspires somebody, what drives them, you're selling something that you want, not what they want. Chad: Exactly. Joel: No kidding. Hey, Steve, we'll let you out on this one. Going back to myth number two as LinkedIn is the end all, be all for sourcing for recruiters I'm curious about LinkedIn was in the news this week, they're in a legal dispute with hiQ and others that want to scrape their data. We've got GDPR in Europe, we've got heightened privacy regulations in California. Does all this sort of personal privacy thing change your mind about LinkedIn, because LinkedIn may be one of the few bastions of sourcing out there? And what are just some of your overall thoughts on personal privacy in recruiting? Steve: Well, I think if you put your information up on LinkedIn and you make it public, there's nothing personal and private about it. Let's start there, right? So if you're saying here's my profile- Joel: And the courts seem to agree with you. Steve: And they do, and that's why ... And I said that even before the courts agreed with me on it. If you've marked it as private, then I think there needs to be something, there's some question about the legalities of some of the scrapers that still scrape some of the private with your login, right? I think that even though you can do it, is it the right thing to do? I don't think so. Now GDPR is a little different story. Because GDPR says you can gather that information but you can't use the information unless you have their approval to actually use it. That's different. I don't see that coming here to the U.S. any time soon. That's pretty extreme. Even with what California's doing with privacy and now New York's starting to do with privacy, it still pales in comparison to GDPR rules. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And we will see. Steve, hey, man, thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate it. Joel: That was awesome, man. Chad: We had a great conversation, definitely want to have you back after you've been on the show, now you're going to sell at least another 20,000 books, but man, we appreciate it and if somebody wants to go buy the book or maybe they want to find out more about you, where would they go? Steve: You can go to Amazon and just look up Recruiting Sucks, it pops up number one, or you can go to my website, Stevelowisz.com and there's a little click on there for books that takes you to Amazon anyways. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thanks, Steve. Chad: We appreciate it. Steve: Thanks, guys. Chad: We out. 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 & 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 bikes 00:25:33], you know, the expensive shiny old pair that are extra because, well, I'm extra. Tristen: For more, visit Chadcheese.com. #recruiting #business

"We - Jobvite - have a responsibility to empower hiring companies with the data to explain business outcomes they are achieving." - Aman Brar, CEO Jobvite Listen 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: Hey it's Chad. Joel and I just landed from our time in San Francisco at Jobvite's Recruiter Nation Live, and we wanted to drop this stand-up comedy/vision keynote speech from our buddy, Aman Brar, the newly minted CEO of Jobvite. Enjoy. 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. Aman: Thank you Amber. I got to admit my first 12-18 hours here, had a series of awkward moments. I walk into the reception yesterday, and someone says, “Hey, Soledad,” and I thought, we both have amazing skin tone, but that's kind of a stretch. We'll have to do a side by side who wore it the best later. I'm take a few steps further down, probably getting a snack or something, and somebody says, “Hey, Aman." I said, what? They said, "You're like the Donald Trump of the HR tech-CO game.” I said, was I an unexpected surprise? He said, "Yeah, that's what I mean." I've been thinking about that for a good 12 hours now. I think I want to stop exploring it any further. Aman: Big round of applause for my friends Chad and Joel of the Chad and Cheese show (applause drowns out speaker). I should explain that I should not clap. This is very loud. We're really excited to have our good friends, Chad and Cheese, here. They've really helped launch Canvas back in our legacy Canvas days. Aman: I woke up this morning, opened my hotel room door, and stepped into the hallway. And there's just Cheetos's bags, Doritos, Oreo cookies, and pizza boxes. I was super confused. I had been confused for about 12 hours. It dawned on me. Having Chad and Cheese, and a few hundred recruiters in a state that legalized marijuana was maybe not (laughter drowns out speaker). When they go back to their home states, like Indiana, please be mindful. Take care of our fine folks out there. That's the end of the fake news segment of this program. Aman: I did read an article this morning in the Wall Street Journal. I thought it was worth mentioning as a brain teaser, as we get started with this marketing mindset in this recruiting world. The article said that the number one enter into the job force right now on a monthly basis is a female. And it's a minority female. Raise your hands if you feel like you've spent enough time thinking about that opportunity. Many of us haven't spent an hour or two thinking about how we need to evolve our recruitment marketing game, how we need to evolve our employment plan to capture what this new workforce looks like. Aman: Jobvite made a big leap. We raised a couple hundred million dollars, brought together a team of companies, Talementry, Canvas, RolePoint. It really took an amazing leap forward for the industry earlier this year, so it's been a very exciting year. A lot of people ask what you've been up to. We haven't heard a lot about the story. When I tell you what I've been up to is trying to take care of our people. Until our people understand the new vision, it doesn't make much sense to tell the world about the new vision. Today is the beginning of that journey. We spent the last few months meeting with our folks all over the country, with Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, San Francisco, Kitchener near Toronto, London, New York, Indianapolis, and in India. We're really excited about what we're building and how we're integrating as one company, one team, one group of people, fighting for a common cause, which is to help people and companies grow. Some things have changed. We've taken a big leap with technology, big leap with teams, but at the end of the day, it's about helping people and companies grow. Aman: I was thinking about why do I care about this space so much. It is a special space. There's only a handful of things in our lives that can create as much growth, concern, excitement as a new job. You might buy a new house. You might get married. You might have a child, but you've got a finite number of new career opportunities you're going to take on in your lifetime. All of those have a mix of excitement and anxiety. The thing that is really important, not just as a company, is that while we're no doubt going to embrace and enable and drive automation in this space, we've got to keep the people at the center of it all. It's a type of process and of opportunity that still deserves and should have the right to have people engaging in such a critical part of our life's journey. I'm thinking every day about our people, how we can help them grow. We're thinking about our software and how we can help your company and your people grow. Aman: Growth is not easy. It's incredibly hard. Recent survey data from Jobvite and recruiters articulated the three top challenges. 67% said the lack of skilled or high quality candidates. Really tough on us, so we've been thinking about the top of the funnel together. Intense competition certainly proven by the number of fistfights that occurred at the happy hour last night. Then I thought about the data and it all made sense. And lack of budget. This is an important one. I think there's a responsibility that Jobvite companies like us have to empower you all with the data to help explain the business outcomes you're achieving. At the end of the day, you need unified data to help you explain the business outcomes, open up budget, prove value, prove ROI. Job seekers, basically all of them are open to new job opportunities. We've got this classic three bucket problem. We're bringing in new candidates, people are leaving. We've got boomerang candidates now. The whole thing has gone bananas, but it's our new reality. 60% are looking externally for career growth. As we get into the sessions, thinking about your mobility is more important than ever. Aman: How about this one: 29% have left a job within the first 90 days during their career. Just really reinforcing the value of strong onboarding programs, really creating that cohesion early on. We've now jumped the gun to pre-boarding. We're thinking about it well ahead of the actual onboarding time frame. Aman: With all that, our role has really expanded. In the past, supply and qualify and the outward and tracking portion. We're thinking about recruitment marketing, employment branding, so much more recruiting, things like SMS, and multichannel. I mentioned the pre-board, the onboard, gift packs when kids go back on campus, employee referrals, and term mobility. It's become a very big job with so much scope. Who's been in the industry for more than five years? A big chunk of this room. Five years ago, did you think you were going to get into something called bot builder today? That is not what we were thinking about in the recruiting tech space. Now, many of us are spending our days building and managing bots and automating workflow. It really is a new horizon. Aman: All this opportunity is capitalism at its finest. We've got a proliferation of capital, both intellectual and financial, that's surged into the industry. This is awesome. Lots of problems have been solved. New entrants like RolePoint, Telemetry, and Canvas are ultimately getting an opportunity to join forces with Jobvite wouldn't have happened if these signals weren't out there, if we didn't believe there was opportunity in this space. But if any of us look at our inboxes everyday, the number of SDRs that are reaching out for a new point solution is quite overwhelming. Aman: HR originally quoted that a company may have up to 26 different HR systems. This creates some problems, so while there's opportunity, there's some chaos, challenge. We think taking this approach leads to an incomplete solution, creates a lot of process inefficiencies, and, more importantly, you can get your data in one place. There's a real lack of visibility. The powers that be defeats us with our investors. With Jobvite, they saw a real opportunity in this space, to bundle a group of key technologists together, to drive technology's simplicity, to drive smart automation. We're going to talk a lot about automation these next couple of days, a bit about that in our story we're going to get into later. Aman: A better candidate experience has been something that's been top of the line forever. It's hard to find an HR tech company that isn't talking about candidate experience. I really think this cluttered environment has lead to a non-optimal recruiter experience. We think the bundling of our technology, the integration, the unified data's really going to lead to a better recruiter experience, so you know how to make your next move and better visibility. How do we help you prove your value? We're taking that really, really seriously. At the end of the day, it's a data game for many reasons. We're at this new data explosion. We think we've got the best depth in the industry that leads to better data, better machine learning, etc. Ultimately, you need the data to manage your business. You need the data so when your CFO calls, you've got clear answers as to how you're delivering value to the business. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcast, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit chadandcheese.com. Oh, yeah, you're welcome. #Jobvite #Talemetry #Canvas #Rolepoint #RNL2019 #Recruitment #EmployerBrand #E #EmploymentBrand #ATS #CRM #Events

You heard it first on The Shred, and the boys go deep into the legal case pitting hiQ against 800-lb. gorilla LinkedIn that's left LinkedIn licking its wounds. What's more, McDonald's is making acquisitions that will impact workers while Walmart is working to employ teens while California says Uber drivers aren't contract workers anymore. Oh, and Trump is reportedly launching a Facebook-killer. - HiQ FTW over LinkedIn - McDonald's gets auto wit it - Cali gets giggy wit it - Walmart goes teeny and payday loans WTAF? - Trump social network will divide and possibly conquer? Enjoy and pay respect to the sponsors that make it all happen: Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas. 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.​ 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. Time for another show, another podcast. It's the jet lagged edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad "Delta Lounge" Sowash. Joel: On this week's episode, LinkedIn feels the agony of defeat, McDonald's embraces AI, and California says gig workers are more full-time employee than contractor. Get ready to party like HiQ's legal team, we'll be right back 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 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. Canvas: 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: Oh yeah. Joel: Great seeing the Canvas crew this week. Chad: That's right. Amber, she was on stage all week, and she was just on stage here at Chad and Cheese. Joel: Dude, Amber's a rockstar, man. Chad: She is. Joel: She's introducing Soledad O'Brien, she's introducing delegates from whatever. I don't know who the guests were. Chad: I don't know. Joel: She's a pro now, man. She's all growed up. Chad: She's all growed up. She's killing it. And Jobvite overall, we had a great time in San Francisco. Yeah, had to stay for a little- Joel: Totally blast. Chad: ... Soledad, but a lot of great information going on. We got some interviews that are going to be popping out here in the next few weeks, but yeah, no, man, we had a blast. Joel: Yeah, for sure. Go check out #RNL19 for photos, updates, and highlights from the show. Chad: Yeah. And while we were there, shout out to Jonathan Duarte for bringing us beer. Local beer. And Giants tickets, baby, and we're not just talking about any Giants tickets, we're talking about on the fucking field Giants tickets. That was good shit. Joel: We're talking third row. Now granted, they're not very good and it's towards the end of the season and tickets are pretty readily available, but still- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Third row is still third row, so Jonathan, major shout out. And it's always nice to be out of the Bay winds that come up when you sit higher up in the stadium, which I have definitely done before. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Down by the field is much warmer. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Well, also shout out to Anthony Garcia, founder of HMFIC over at Purepost. He joined us, starting to work a little bit with the guys at Purepost, it's a translating platform for veterans, and I've been one of the biggest assholes when it comes to a lot of these crosswalks and shit because I actually hit one once, and I said, "The only way this shit's going to get done the right way is if you build it from the ground up," and these guys actually built it from the ground up, and I knew it was legit when I was introduced to these guys by Google. Google reached out to me and said- Joel: Nice. Chad: ... "Chad, you guys, you know some things about this. Why don't you hook up with these guys? Because I think it's a good marriage." So they're legit and they're doing it the right way, but they're in total startup mode and it was great to finally meet him face to face. Joel: Now is HMFIC actually on his LinkedIn profile, or is that just something that's special to you guys? Chad: If it's not, I should be. Head motherfucker in charge should always be- Joel: It sure as hell should be. Chad: Yeah, wow. Joel: Shout out to Mason Wan, long-time listener, fan of the show, fan of all things what we're doing, got to connect with him at Recruiter National Live. He's now at Lyft making miracles happen at the ride-sharing service, and I sat down with him for an interview, so double shout out for seeing him as well as sitting down for an interview. Be excited for that to drop here hopefully in the near future. Chad: Good stuff. Joel: Good dude. Good people. Chad: Shout out to Nathan Perrott over at AIA. Dude needs to eat a fucking cheeseburger. I sent him a medium Chad and Cheese T-shirt- Joel: That's a medium? Chad: That's a medium, and the dude had to wear a shirt underneath it, so Nathan, you know you're not like 6'2 or anything like that, but still, dude, eat a fucking cheeseburger. Joel: Dude, we're going to have to start getting shirts from Baby GAP if that thing's a medium. Good lord. Chad: As we're talking about some really good shit, some social media sharing shit, Recruitics plus KRT equals hold my beer. We did that podcast- Joel: Fucking brilliant. Chad: ... a little while ago, and then these guys took that shit and ran. They actually created a logo, a hold my beer logo, and they sent us pictures of Josh and Mona, and then there's another picture of a bunch of employees on a boat with the Statue of Liberty behind them, and they all had hold my beer koozies and they were KRT and Recruitics. It was awesome. Joel: Now built some context around this. This was born out of our show. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And when they made the acquisition to Recruitics, your comment, I'm giving you full credit, was "Hold my beer." I think you social media'd that shit, and they grabbed onto it and got fucking koozies and the whole staff is touring, I guess, New York City or something with these koozies, and it's fucking ... It's like game over- SFX: That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over. Joel: ... for any other company to give us props for our show. That was fucking awesome. Chad: This is how ... We always talk about Tengai and some of these other companies who listen to us, and they troll us or they use our shit, this is how you do it. Just have fun with this shit. Quit being so stuffy. Joel: Get a koozie, goddammit. Chad: Get a goddamn koozie. My last shout out is, you're going to love this one, this is fucking hilarious, John Thurman saw one of those food delivery robots on a sidewalk delivering in George Mason University and he shared it on Twitter. Joel: That is awesome. Chad: Yeah, because we were talking about how they were deploying them at Purdue, and now we see they're at George Mason, so man, that is freaking hilarious. Joel: I just want to know if this was before he took an aluminum bat to the moving cooler, or spray painted it with a penis or something, because that's going to happen. Chad: Maybe. I'm telling you right now, buy stock in aluminum bats. Joel: Well, let's get to our travel schedule before we get to the news. Chad: Oh, real quick, we had a question from a listener. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: So a listener- Joel: Oh, okay. Chad: ... actually asked, because of Appcast and their purchase, or they were purchased by StepStone, they didn't believe that Appcast was still doing distribution to Indeed, and that is wrong from all accounts that we know, that's a big no. Appcast is still working with Indeed, so if you've heard rumors out there, is that long-term plan, who knows? But right as of now, all indications that we have is that there's no question, Appcast is still working with Indeed. It would make no sense for them to cut that line of partnership off right now. Joel: And not that making sense ever made sense in our industry, but yeah, cutting off Indeed from Appcast would be a really bad decision by Appcast, so I don't think that's happening. Travel schedule. Chad: Sponsored by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Joel: That's right, powered by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Chad: Powered by. So TAtech in late September, we've got about a week and a half until we go down to Austin for Death Match. We're really excited about Death Match. Who's on the schedule there for Death Match? Joel: Oh, man, we're talking Pez, not the candy. Chad: Pez.ai. Joel: We're talking Seekout, we're talking Seekout with founder Anoop, former direct- Chad: Advisor. Joel: Bill gates, we're talking Job.com- Chad: Yep. Joel: And their crypto blockchain credit card haven startup stuff, and then we've got ... Who am I missing? Chad: Ass is first. Joel: AssessFirst, French company, whose founder is incredibly animated. Chad: Good. Joel: So getting him onstage is going to be a trip, for sure. And I've just ordered the hardware for the winner, which I don't think we've revealed yet. Chad: No. Joel: But pretty excited about the winning hardware that the company will receive for being champion. Chad: Yes, said trophy. And all of this brought to you by, get ready, step back- Joel: I'm ready. Chad: Alexander Mann Solutions. That's right. Joel: Woo. Chad: This is the Chad Cheese TAtech joint, but this baby is fueled by Alexander Mann. Joel: I think it's worth talking about the judges if you're talking Quincy- Chad: Oh, fuck yeah. Joel: Cindy from Talroo, we just added Robert from Sovren, president, CEO. It's a star-studded cast, not only on the stage but also at the table judging them. And then we go to ... And then our HR Tech is shortly after that- Chad: HR Tech, yeah. Joel: ... in early October. The show that banned us a year ago now wants us to perform, which is fucking ridiculous. Chad: Twice. Joel: Yeah, love it. Chad: Twice. Yeah, we're on stage twice on the Tech stage or something like that in the Expo Hall, but yeah, Jobcase said, "If you're going to TAtech, we're going with you." So thanks to Fred and the kids over at Jobcase, yeah, everybody loves a little HR Tech, but we're going to be able to love it from the stage a couple of times and do it in style, due to Jobcase. Joel: The Jobcase hats are fat, so I'm going to be supporting that puppy in HR Tech. Going to be a real upgrade from my Emissary T-shirt from a year or two ago. It'll be nice. Chad: Then we go to Paris, France for Unleash. Joel: Oui, oui. Chad: SmashFly is partnering with us to have a little fun in Paris. You're going to have to come to Paris to see what that fun is, but we're going to have a star-studded panel, and again, we're going to be in the Expo Hall doing all of this, but excited about Unleash, not to mention our newly formed podcast, again, brought to you by SmashFly, is the cult brand that we just launched. Brand-spanking-new, we have about half dozen more of these podcasts already in the can, ready to launch, and we've got many more that are already scheduled, but this is bridging cult brand and HR, really the understanding of how do you create a cult brand, companies like Airbnb, Chili's Bar and Grill, Las Vegas What Happens Here, Stays Here, so we've got a ton of really cool brands and journeys to be able to sit back and just listen. These are amazing stories. Joel: Yeah. We're wedging a Golden Gate Bridge between recruiting and marketing. Can't wait to see the content that we produce from that, and just published the one with Douglas Atkin, head of community at Airbnb, talking about their culture, cast of characters, the start of the company. I think it's some of our best work to date. I don't know how you feel, but really proud of what we're doing in the cult brand series and hope that everyone listens into that. Chad: Not to mention we just had fucking Dan Pankow, man. It's going to the next level. Joel: Yeah. Eventually people are going to wake up to the fact that we're a bunch of idiots and will stop talking to us. Chad: Shh, shh. Joel: But until then, we have some pretty smart people on the show. Chad: Why don't we talk about some pretty smart people? What about HiQ and the win that they just had- Joel: What about HiQ? Chad: ... over LinkedIn? Joel: Yeah, let's get to the news. So you and I have been covering this news, jeez, almost from the start. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Basically LinkedIn sent out cease and desist letters to a bunch of companies that were using their data to provide services and info and intel about profiles to their clients. Most of the companies they sent letters to said, "Yes, sir," shut down, stopped doing it, whatever. One little company out in San Francisco said, "Suck it, we're going to take you to court," and HiQ, the company that basically scans, scrapes, takes LinkedIn data, makes sense of it for their clients, took them to court. They've been in court a couple times, a couple appeals, a couple of shit that goes in if you want to search our archives, feel free to do that. Joel: But most recently, the court ruled against LinkedIn, again, in court, federal appeals court Monday ruled in favor that scraping data from LinkedIn profiles was basically okay. The opinion by three judges in the 9th U.S. circuit court of appeals held that LinkedIn does not own the data posted by its users, and thus cannot block HiQ, a recruitment data marketing company, from compiling the information sorting it or otherwise using it. One of the quotes from the news that was interesting, from one of the circuit court judges was, quote, "Giving companies like LinkedIn free reign to decide on any basis who can collect and use data-" Chad: That's right. Joel: ... "Data that the companies do not own that they otherwise made publicly available to viewers and that the companies themselves collect and use risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest." So- Chad: So ... Joel: There you have it. Chad: Hoping to have Mark- Joel: Scrape away. Chad: And maybe even Darren on from HiQ sometime soon to be able to talk this through. I'm sure ... This is awesome, man, and it says a lot really how we're going to be looking at data, but here's the thing, as with GDPR becoming a standard, is this really winning? Now I agree, it's not LinkedIn's data. Fucking get that. But that doesn't mean that you can just come in and scrape shit, because as we start moving to a GDPR-like society, it's owned by the candidate, 100%. So the big question is for companies like HiQ, which these are questions that I want to be able to really hit them with, is how are these candidates ... You're going to have to get buy in from these candidates before you go take data. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It doesn't matter. Before you do any type of scraping whatsoever, you're going to have to get buy in, and so is LinkedIn. Just because you put your shit in LinkedIn does not mean you own my shit, right? So LinkedIn doesn't have, and again, this is pretty much what this case says, LinkedIn can't just do whatever the fuck they want with this data. So my big question to them is, how are they going to deal with GDPR on the LinkedIn side, and then how are companies like HiQ going to deal with it because you're going to have to get that opt in? Joel: Yeah. And we don't know how many of HiQ's customers are really focused outside of the U.S. in places like Europe where that's a big deal. We both agree that- Chad: It's a big deal in California right now. Joel: [crosstalk 00:16:42] privacy will be a big deal. Yeah, California, it will be a big deal, so I think to me, question not only is privacy and who owns the data and taking it from the web is obviously most likely going to be a no-no at some point. I don't know how hard HiQ is partying when they look at the future of privacy, but also, if LinkedIn is losing on a judicial front or legislative front, I think they're probably winning on a technological front, and they're doing so many interesting savvy, clever things to make it really hard to scrape their data in the first place. I've talked to some people that are really good at this stuff saying that LinkedIn is starting to randomize the data that shows up for robots that go in and try to get stuff. And they're just getting better at that, so it's becoming a whack-a-mole situation where you just have to consistently tweak your algorithm or tweak your stuff to be able to get LinkedIn's data. Joel: So for most companies- Chad: It's not LinkedIn's data, though. Joel: [crosstalk 00:17:52] Chad: See, that's the thing. Now because of this, companies can start to think about taking LinkedIn to court, if they try to play this whack-a-mole bullshit game. Right? You can't- Joel: Well, good luck with that. Chad: This changes the conversation dramatically. Joel: I don't know ... That's going to be a nasty black hole to try to legally tell LinkedIn that it can't put up technological protections against spiders coming to the side, etc., because that's a whole issue of bandwidth and using our service, making it slower for other people that are actual people that are using it ... Chad: That was part of the defense on this current case. Joel: It wasn't about bandwidth, it was about who's ... Do they own the data or not? Chad: It was also about maybe not bandwidth, but it was also about taxing their technical infrastructure. So they were putting out those defenses. It wasn't just about who owned the data, it was much further than that. So this result will smack that square in the fucking face. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I don't know. Because I think it's ... At what point can they declare intellectual property in terms of how- Chad: It's not their data. Joel: ... they ... Chad: It's not their data. Fuck you. It's not your data. Joel: But it's their website. Chad: Well, and that's fine. It's your website, but that doesn't mean ... I mean, you don't own the data within that website. That's what I'm saying. This conversation changes dramatically. I'm not saying it's a simple conversation, I'm saying it- Joel: No. Chad: ... changes dramatically and when you start playing those whack-a-mole games, as we've talked about for well over a year now, can you do that now? Because that's not your fucking data. Joel: Yeah, these are all questions that will have to be answered. Chad: I'm so excited. Joel: By people smarter and wealthier than us. But yeah, I think the privacy is definitely going to be an issue regardless, and then how sites protect their data. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Publicly data, or can they do that? And what is intellectual property? Can you declare intellectual property? I don't know, dude. Chad: See, and there's a big difference. So the technology itself is the intellectual property. What you're doing with that data is the tech, right? The data is not the tech. So it's fairly simple to spread those things apart and say, "Okay. That's the data, candidate stuff that they actually put in the fucking system, their content, all that stuff, is the data. How you slice and dice and do all that other shit to be able to do predictive analytics or whatever it is, that's the tech." That's where you start to split the conversation, and that is what this decision does. It says, "Look, it's not your data." Split that decision, now the conversation is so much different. I love it. Joel: I know, but if I want to present my data in a way that's impossible or nearly impossible to scrape from a robot, am I breaking the law or am I breaking that ruling? Chad: That's the question. I don't know, but that is the question that now can be asked. That's a question that can be asked because they're infringing the opportunity of a smaller business to actually do business, because they're fucking with somebody else's data. Joel: Well, clearly we have to get some smarter people on the phone and find out exactly what's going on. Chad: It just opens up a conversation that I love. On to more things that we love and we were just talking about California and regulation- Joel: California. Chad: California approves a bill that will turn gig workers into employees. So benefits and protections, and from my standpoint, this is incredibly interesting because what's happening is what we're seeing to happen now, is the pendulum swinging back and forth. So unions were just incredibly strong, and we were talking to Mason about this in San Francisco, he's with Lyft. Unions were just so incredibly strong and powerful and they misused some of that power at one time, that pendulum swung away from them to employers where they just broke up all those unions in many cases, but I feel like it's going back to the union conversation and I think this in itself is one of the indicators that that's where ... We're on the road to actual basic protections that we don't have today and we need to have those unions to be able to organize that. Joel: Yeah, to me there are two sides to this story, as most stories have. One is the contractor themselves. And for the most part, if you drive Uber or Lyft as a job pretty much, you're doing it on a basis that's almost like a full-time job, it's great news to now know that you'll be treated like a full-time employee, which includes benefits and all the things that come with being a full-time employee as opposed to just being a contractor. But to me, that's fairly straightforward. I think the real questions become for Uber, Lyft, and anyone else that is a platform for work is this a good thing or not? Joel: On one side, I can see where yeah, you should treat people in a certain way. They're working for you for 40 hours plus a week or whatever that is, and on the other side, I can see well, okay, that's a whole layer of intricacy and complexity of doing business. You and I talked to Mason at length, who's a Lyft employee, and there are real questions about their business model, both Uber and Lyft, in terms of profitability and are they going to be able to turn a profit, right? So adding this complexity of having full-time employees and giving them benefits and maybe healthcare and everything else, that makes it harder to do business arguably. Does that keep other potential competitors out of the space because now they know it's not a contract business, it's an employee business? Does that create less opportunity, which generally is a bad thing? Joel: So I think on the surface, you can say, "Yeah, this is great for employees. They're going to get benefits. This is great." But looking deeper into it, I don't know the impact on the companies, but I would imagine they're probably not super happy having to deal with what you sort of referred to as labor unions, which essentially is kind of what we're dealing with. And when we talked to Douglas Atkin from Airbnb, talking about mobilizing his community, it was sort of like a labor union situation, so these contractors, these gig workers, have a lot of power and to what extent they use this to get benefits and full-time employment and who knows what else will be very interesting as we move into the future. Chad: Yeah. Well, I think any company out there that doesn't focus on the employee first, and the human being first, to ensure that they're getting what they need in benefits and healthcare are obviously fucking part of that. If they're talking about the bottom line and how that's going to hurt profits, fuck you. You shouldn't have a fucking business. You need to focus on your goddamn business model. If your business model isn't working, guess what? You need to innovate and evolve or die. That's what capitalism is, but you have to take care of your fucking people. That's job one. You take care of your people, your people will take care of you. If you have a shitty business model, that's on you. Joel: Yeah, and clearly many of these companies are built as tech companies. They're not built as people companies, per se. So now at least in the case of California, the government's saying, "Look, you have to start thinking of these people as people and not machines that are going around and you're getting 15% off of everything." So I agree with you, it's just does this speed up the process of automation, right? Which it probably will, because if you have all self-driving cars, then there aren't going to be drivers anyway. That's another question to think about as well. Chad: Yeah, yeah. But I mean, we're talking about the possibility, and there's obviously arguments on both sides of this, but the possibility of getting rid of those jobs in the first place is going to evolve and create different jobs. The thing that we need to focus on here first is making sure that we treat the humans right and we make them the center, if they're a part of this, that they're the center of our thought process, right? Because if they're not happy, well, we're not going to retain them. They're probably going to do a shitty job. How's that any good for the company in the first place? And if they don't have healthcare and they don't have different types of benefits and they're worried that a $400 expense could prospectively submarine them, that's ... Chad: Nobody should live that way. Nobody should live that way, and if a company is worried about the profits over the people, they need to get the fuck out of business. Joel: I also think this is probably a good thing for traditional businesses that do have to treat people as full-time, part-time employees and have to be under the same regulations, because up to this point, the Ubers of the world have been above or below, however you look at it, from the traditional way of doing business. So I'm sure the businesses that we know are pretty happy about Uber having to do business as they do. Chad: Yeah. And this discussion, we're talking about pretty big companies right now, this discussion is much different, but it is the same for small business. So the small business, and we've heard this talking to different restaurant companies and whatnot, saying, "You know, if we're going to have to pay a $15 minimum wage, we're going to have to give benefits, then we're just not going to be able to be in business." And the answer is, okay, so you either evolve and learn how to take care of your people, or you're right, you're not going to be in business. That is a very hard discussion, but guess what? If you can't fucking take care of your people's basic needs, then you shouldn't be in business. Joel: Yeah, and I also wonder, with small business that are under 50 people, they're typically not under the same sort of regulations that companies over 50 are. So I wonder at some point we're going to look at these gig platforms and say, "Okay, if you're under this many people, you don't have to adhere to some of these regulations," so maybe we don't stifle some innovation in new companies. Chad: As we continue to talk about cult brand and whatnot, we have the discussion coming up with Fiasco Gelato, which is a very small mom and pop type of a shop, but their focus is taking care of the people and this is the kind of ... These are the types of discussions that we need to have. They are hard, they are uncomfortable, but guess what? If we don't have them, we're never going to find the answers. Joel: And we're here to have them, right after this word from JobAdX. JobAdX: Nope. Nah. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Ugh, 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? 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 brand videos that just sit on a YouTube channel, begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@JOBADX.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: To all beef patties, lettuce, sauce, pickles, cheese on a sesame seed bun. Was that the song? That's good. Wow, that's some memory. Chad: Probably eaten a few, so ... Joel: Stop. That's not true. That's not true. [crosstalk 00:30:31] McDonald's in the news. Chad: Yeah, we come off of talking about, again, workers and whatnot in California, and go straight into talking about McDonald's and automation. Now McDonald's employs over 300,000 people, right? And we've heard, and we've talked about automated fryers, Flippy the burger robot ... Joel: The kiosks. Chad: Yeah, yeah, the kiosk, and we were talking about all these things through automation that is probably going to make that 300,000 go down substantially, or who knows, maybe it comes more cost effective and they open more McDonald's. Joel: Yeah, who knows? Chad: But now, McDonald's buys Apprente, I think that's how you say it, Apprente- Joel: Yeah, sounds right. Chad: A startup building conversational agents that can automate voice-based ordering in multiple languages, so this is pretty much a chat bot with NLP that does the drive through order, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Or they could even do this at the kiosks, if you think about it. Joel: I love this story. We don't normally talk about these sort of traditional brick and mortar businesses buying a business like this, so the fact that we're even talking about it is really cool and I hope that more and more businesses that are brick and mortar-established do this. But yeah, to me this is genius. If nothing else, to speed up the process, create efficiencies. How many times have you been in a drive through and you can't hear the person- Chad: Sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher. Joel: ... But also, we're a country, maybe less so since Mr. Orange got into office, but we're a country of multiple languages, and I'm sure for someone who speaks Spanish to go to a McDonald's is intimidating, because the people in the drive through is probably speaking English. So to think about the market opportunity of wow, how many people that speak Spanish are now going to come through our drive through because we can instantly speak their language or any language, or that matter, I think is great business to use technology to do that. It's fantastic. So I definitely applaud McDonald's move to start getting smarter with their voice communications with customers. Chad: Yeah, yeah. So in the disability kind of range, it's called universal design, so you're designing for anyone, not just the individual with disabilities, but for anyone. And this is really being able to take that holistic, universal design and make it easier for everybody, and this is also what I'm seeing as an acqui-hire by McDonald's because they're creating a new Silicone Valley-based group called McD Tech Labs, with the Apprente team becoming the group's founding member. So we were just talking about business, and how if business ... If they can't do business and they can't make the profits, then they have to evolve. This is it, kids, and yeah, it's McDonald's and yeah, they're a big organization, but we have a little bitty company here locally in Columbus, Indiana called Fresh Take, and all they ... They have kiosks up front. That's the only way that you can order, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Right out of the gate, they're looking at efficiencies. These are the things that we have to look at when we start having these conversations. How do we evolve and stop this bullshit 50s mentality? Joel: Just don't change the Quarter Pounder too much. That's all I ask. That's all I ask. Chad: Unless, you add the Impossible Burger to it. That's awesome. Joel: Well, I love that they're now fresh, but they're delicious, and so yeah, keep doing that stuff, McDonald's, no matter how much tech you add to your services. Chad: And earlier this year, they actually acquired another ... It's an online personalization startup with the goal of creating a drive through experience that's customized to things like the weather, restaurant traffic, all these different things, so that when you come up, if it is a little busy, you're going to have a better experience because, who knows? Maybe they're going to entertain you. Maybe you can listen to the Chad and Cheese Podcast- Joel: There you go. Chad: ... while you're going through the drive through. Joel: Yeah, and we use their app, you pre-order, you drive into a specific spot- Chad: Yeah. Joel: You let them know that you're there, they bring out your food. It's great. McDonald's is doing some really great tech shit. Chad: Well, and there's another company that I've talked about plenty of times on this podcast that is really focused on convenience and battling against Amazon, and that's Walmart, with their pickup delivery? That is amazing. Julie will be on the coach and we'll be going through orders and we'll need this, need that, all that other fun stuff, and we have a pickup the next morning at 8:00. We don't have to step inside to get our groceries and whatever we're looking for. Joel: Just one more step to our Wall-E future of sitting in chairs all day and having our pie holes stuffed on demand. But speaking of Walmart, our next story ... Chad: Yes. Joel: ... talks about hiring teens, which apparently is a big deal because when you and I were teenagers, it was very normal to hire teens in the summer and hire them for part-time work, but we've gotten away from that. But Walmart, fortunately, is trying to get teens back into the labor market, mainly because there's an increasingly tight labor environment, but anyway, from the news, to entice high school students to come aboard Walmart, the retail giant has started offering free ACT and SAT prep courses. It has also followed the lead of employers like Starbucks, and has begun to offer tuition assistance to part-time employees. From the study between 2000, 2018, teen non-summer employment in the U.S. fell from 43% to roughly 29%, that's according to peer research. Joel: So I think teens not working is, we're losing a very valuable window where people can learn really good skills about doing work and getting paid for it and what that entails, because the rest of their life is going to be a lot of that shit, so you might as well learn it in your teens so you're more comfortable doing it later in life. Chad: Right. Well, and we need options nowadays, because kids are strapped with college debt that they weren't strapped with before. Boomers didn't have $100,000 that they had to pay in debt for fucking college. Xers, we didn't either. This is ... It's really changed the game, so we have to look at different ways to be able to subsidize going to school, you know? And I believe every company that's out there who wants to be competitive and they want to go after that new talent. This is Walmart, for goodness sakes. They want to turn these kids into regional directors, managers. This isn't just about being the greeter, for goodness sakes. Joel: Sure. Chad: They're thinking long-term and building talent pipelines. This is incredibly smart, I believe, and I think every company should be doing that to be able to focus on getting those really talented kids into positions and then hook them up on a contract, you know? We'll pay for your college and you stay with us for three years, or whatever the term is. Joel: Yeah, let's be real, not every kid is going to throw up a Shopify store and get Kim Kardashian to wear your shit. Not every kid is going to be a Fortnite champion. Chad: Right. Joel: Most kids will have to have a similar road to most every other person on the planet, so doing these things I think are a great way to get them off the couch and get them into the workforce. Chad: Agreed. And one thing that I see Walmart doing that is really pissing me the fuck off is there's a Wall Street Journal puff piece where they talk about, and here it is, "A growing number of companies are helping workers gain access to payroll advances and loans reflecting concern over the impact money problems are having on productivity levels and worker retention." So instead of paying these people more, right, and we talk about $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, that's around $30,000 before taxes, right? And in many cases, they're not even making that much at Walmart, but yet they want to try to get them into a payday loan kind of scheme. It's cheaper than going to the loan shark on the corner, right? Joel: So instead of 25% it's 17% or something, is that what I'm hearing? Chad: Dude, I mean, so it's like $6 a month for fees, right? Joel: Okay. Chad: But if you think of it, especially from the standpoint of the company that they partnered with, PayActiv, so they have 380,000 Walmart employees using this process right now. If you think of $6 a month, you're instantly making millions of dollars, every month. Every fucking month, and once again, this all revolves around making sure that you're taking care of your fucking people by paying them enough to live on, not strapping them. So they also talk about retention, right? They have a retention problem because of this, so instead of, and here's where it really gets fucking crazy and this is a bullshit puff piece from the Wall Street Journal, it's like oh, yeah, they're giving all these great benefits. It's like no, they're fucking shackling them- Joel: Indentured servitude. Chad: Yeah. This is a fucking company store kind of scenario. Don't goddamn unicorns and fucking rainbows glaze over this. You're fucking people who should be paid more and overall, what you're doing is saying, "Oh, that's okay. We're not going to pay them any more, but we're going to go ahead and shackle them into this whole company store scenario, so they'll never be able to fucking leave." SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: What the fuck? Joel: Well, I've got good news for you. We're going to take a break and listen to a word from Sovren, and then we're going to calm you down to talk about Donald Trump. Sound good? Chad: I can't wait. 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: Here we go. Joel: Here we go. So politico reports this week a Trump social network readies for launch. Okay, so his campaign plans to launch its own app, professionalizing its operation to track quote "the army of Trump", end quote, and keep supporters donating, volunteering, and recruiting. So if you've been spouting off neo-Nazi stupidity on Twitter or any other social media and got kicked off, you can come to Trump App or whatever they're going to call it, it says Rory McShane, a Republican strategist, quote, "Trump supporters are more dedicated and committed. If there's any campaign where they have a shot at making this work, it's the Trump campaign." And according to our talk, one of your family members will be the first to join the Trump App. Chad: Okay, so full transparency, I have been a Republican my entire life until this orange motherfucker came into the political existence. Yeah, there's no question, I mean, if there is a channel for him to be able to really spew propaganda, this is it. This is incredibly smart, but the problem is dividing the nation even more. It's kind of like the news channels, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, if you hear a specific news story from one to the next, it's going to be entirely different, colored with opinion, not fact. It's kind of like wanting to have state TV, but it's going to be state social network propaganda. Joel: That's an interesting take. This certainly ... It does circumvent Facebook, Twitter, or really any other medium. If they do open it up to people just creating user-generated content that is really out of bounds, at what point does Apple get involved? Because they have terms of service, Google Play I think less so, so Android users might be fine doing whatever the hell goes on with Android, but yeah, this could really spin out of control and just be really bad on a lot of levels. Chad: I just don't know why any politician would want to have quote-unquote, "an app." They should have the discussion out in the open. Joel: If people just start gravitating to something like this for all of their unfiltered news, then what have we become because we're ignoring legitimate journalism? Chad: Yeah. The hardest part right now is being able to discern journalism for many people that only go to one source. They don't try to cross reference with other sources. When I have discussions with individuals about politics or economics or workforce or whatever it is, I always try to look at not just BLS data. I try to go beyond that and do a little bit more reading and research to better understand all the different flavors of what's going on. Something like this is totally counter to that. Joel: Yeah. It's kind of a big joke. We talk about Trump App, but if this becomes a major deal and a large part of the society and community gets their news from this because it's "the truth," in quotes, that becomes really scary. Chad: Being able to make bad decisions in this administration seems to be par, so this seems to be on par. Joel: Well, now I'm depressed. I need to hear Christopher Walken to cheer me up. Chad: I thought you were going to say Christopher Cross. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast, with Chad, the Cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing, just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one, cheddar, bleu, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses, and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way, you won't miss an episode, and while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com, just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. Walken: We out. #HiQ #Linkedn #Privacy #Walmart #Amazon #McDonalds #GDPR #California #regulation #Uber #Lyft #PayActiv

Companies know WHY becoming a CULT BRAND is great for business, but do they know HOW? Best-selling author, cult branding expert and former Airbnb global head of community, Douglas Atkin, joins Chad & Cheese to start unpacking the HOW. 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 helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. Intro: 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. Chris Kneeland: Hey everybody. This is Chris Kneeland, CEO of Cult Collective and co-founder of The Gathering of Cult Brands. I'm really privileged today to introduce you to Douglas Atkin. Douglas has played a really powerful role in my personal life in that I read his book about a decade ago, which was called the Culting of Brands. Which really changed the trajectory of my career, gave me the courage to devote my life, my agency to helping other brands create cult-like followings. And I've gone on to study his career and the application of those cult brand principles when he led all of the community initiatives at Airbnb. Chris Kneeland: And we were just delighted to have Douglas actually on stage at The Gathering in February of 2019 to share his ideas about how every company can improve the way they think about internal engagement and external engagement; if we apply the principles of community building, grassroots activations, the things that create global movements and applying those to creating global companies. So he is absolutely a master of these kinds of principles and I've been his apprentice for several years and look forward to hearing what he has to say. 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. All right. All right. All right. Let's talk some marketing today. Chad: Yeah, a little bit employer branding, cult brand. Hey, this is Chad from Chad and Cheese podcast. Today is the introduction to something entirely new that we are calling our Cult Brand series of podcasts. Joel: I like that. Chad: I know right. We're collaborating with the team over at The Gathering, the number one marketing and branding event in the world to bring our listeners closer to the people who build and nurture cult brand. Joel: Love those guys. Chad: So here's the big question, Joel. Last year, it was an impromptu thing, Ryan Gil said "You knuckleheads need to come to Banff and check this out." What happened to us there that brought us to where we are today and even wanting to have this cult brand series. Joel: Yeah. And I still don't say Banff the right way either. Just so you know, it's still "braff" to me. But anyways, this thing is a big deal. This is by Forbes, this is the number one marketing conference in the world. You're right. Somehow we got through the cracks and ended up at the show. Joel: The brands, there are big deals. We're talking Lakers, we're talking Yeti, we're talking Disney. We're talking the biggest brands that people know. I think what really struck me and both of us was how much the brands talked about people and talent and how their employees were ground zero for building purpose, building brand. But yet when we talk to them, there's a real disconnect between HR recruiting and the actual people running the business. So we set out to say, "Hey, how can we fix this?" Chad: Yeah. And today we're going to start the fix by bringing on Douglas Atkin, former head of global community at Airbnb, partner chief community officer at meetup.com and author, if you've not read this book, you got to read the book. Author of the Culting of Brands. It is a must read. Douglas, welcome to the show man. Welcome back. Douglas Atkin: Thank you. Joel: Live from Tuscany. I love it. Douglas Atkin: I know it's very hot here. 40 degrees, which is about 105 degrees in your language. Joel: Holy cow. Chad: That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. Douglas Atkin: It is ridiculous. Chad: After our first, after our first podcast together, I knew we needed to have you back. And I said, "Hey, we'd like to have you back on the show" and you're like, "wait, wait, wait, wait. I want to be back on. But I have some things that I have to do." Chad: And you are writing or in the process now of writing a series of articles on medium.com. Tell us what those are about. Because we're going to dig in deep, but give us an overview of what those are about. Douglas Atkin: Yeah. So I gave the keynote at this Cult Gathering conference in Banff and the keynote was about basically why you should have a purpose and more importantly, how you operationalize or execute it. And I got some really good feedback from that session, though I think people liked the fact that it was maybe a little bit inspirational but also very practical. We did some really practical things to make sure that we're living with the purpose of Airbnb. Douglas Atkin: And so I thought, well there seems to be a real hunger for the 'how' if you like. How do you get a purpose? How do you make sure it's a good one and then how do you live it? And so I thought that you can only do so much in a speech of about 45-50 minutes. I thought I'm going to just give it a little bit more detail and tell the story of how we did it at Airbnb. And that's what I'm in the process of doing. It's a little bit like 10 shortish articles, 5 to 10 minutes each about how we found what Airbnb's purpose was and then perhaps even more importantly, how we figured out how to operationalize it, how to live it. Chad: So from our standpoint, for our listeners, what we're doing is we're doing compliments to what Douglas is doing in the article. So he's writing them down and then we're digging in a little bit deeper. So the very first article is how Airbnb found its purpose and why it's a good one. So that's the one we're going to start with. Joel, go ahead and hit it, man. Joel: Yeah. Douglas, I'm curious when you, when you walked into Airbnb, they were about four years old according to the first article that you wrote. Douglas Atkin: Yeah. Joel: And I assume that there was probably some sort of culture there four years in and I think a lot of employers that are listening to this right now are saying, "Hey we're a 10-year old company. We've been around for five years. I'm going to have to engage on a brand perspective. Talk about how you went into a four-year old company that already had some culture and changed that around. Was that tough to do or what were the steps to get that done? Douglas Atkin: No, it wasn't tough, I mean it was tough but not impossible. The reason why I think is four or five years old is about the right time to figure out what your purpose is, why you exist. Because you've been in your marketplace for a decent amount of time and you've dealt with the market realities. So that when you put together your business plan and you're making your pitch to your investors about what it is you're going to do and why you're going to do it, quite often, a few years later, it's quite different. Because there's all kinds of stuff that was thrown at you that you'd never expected. So three or four years in is a good time because you know who you are and what you're about. But also importantly, in terms of purpose and culture and values, is that you've accumulated enough people and the interactions between those people have created the culture. Douglas Atkin: The culture basically is this sort of social soup or an accumulation of all the interactions between all of those people and the principles that are behind how they behave, how they decide things together, how they relate to each other. So there's enough to go on. You're not inventing it out of thin air, there's some stuff there to work on. Douglas Atkin: But four years is also good because it's not too late. It's early enough in the organization's history to set the foundation for the rest of it's life basically. So it's soon enough and about the right time to commit to these big, big things. Which once you commit to them should never change. Douglas Atkin: What happened with Airbnb was that I had weird entrance into Airbnb. I think Joe had read my book, the Culting of Brands and a few of my blog posts. And we met for breakfast in New York in September 2012. And then he invited me out to do a fireside chat, which is where they get experts in to talk about stuff that they know about to employees. At the time I was really focused on community and I'd written this book about community, which is about cults. Douglas Atkin: so I talked about that. Then after that they asked me to come back and work with them for a few weeks, which I did. And when I showed up flying in from New York that night and saw Brian, the CEO/co-founder again, he said, "Hey, you know a lot about brands. Can you help us figure out what ours is?" Douglas Atkin: And and I said, "Interesting." I was totally expecting a different kind of brief, which was, "Hey, you know a lot about community, can you help us figure out how to make ours better, and bigger, and stronger?" Douglas Atkin: So I said, "Let me come back to you tomorrow morning," Which I did. And said, "Look, I think instead of figuring out what the brand is, we need to figure out what Airbnb's purpose is." Douglas Atkin: Because clearly you've got a very strong community here of hosts and guests and employees who are also hosting guests and they're incredibly committed to Airbnb. Why? What difference does it make in their lives? What role does it play? If you can figure out what that is, the reason why you exist, then we can figure out everything else really easily including what your brand is. Douglas Atkin: But it's really the most important thing you need to get straight in your minds because once you've figured out your why, your purpose, your mission, whatever you want to call it, everything follows. The kind of products you launch, how you design your offices. What kind of people you hire, what kind of people you don't hire, who you merge with or buy or who you don't match with and buy. And yes, what your brand stands for. Because it should really, really go back to that purpose. Chad: Purpose isn't something that companies are really revolving around as much as they are really profits. Right? It's the other 'P'. Douglas Atkin: Yeah. Chad: But your focus was really ground the purpose in an experienced truth. So it wasn't just find a purpose and then put it on a PowerPoint slide. Douglas Atkin: No, no. Chad: You really wanted to get deep into this. So tell us what the experienced truth is. Douglas Atkin: So when I said all this to him, he said, "Okay, do that." And I'm going, "Oh shit." Douglas Atkin: So in about three and a half weeks with some help of some people at Airbnb. And by the way, there were only 150 or so people in head office at the time in San Francisco. I mean now there's, God knows, 3,500-4,000. So then it really felt like a small startup. Douglas Atkin: I said, "Okay, if you want me to do this, then what I want to do first is go out and talk to those hosts and guests and employees who feel so committed and find out why and the reason why they're committed." Douglas Atkin: And the reason why I want to do that is because I think all good purposes are grounded in a universally experienced truth. Meaning that they're grounded in something that's real. The way a lot of organizations find their purpose, by the way, is to take the most senior people stash them away in some expensive offsite site in Aspen or something. They study their navels and they indulge in too much wishful thinking and then they come back with something which is probably not true, but they wished it was and very likely not differentiating. Douglas Atkin: Because here's the other benefit of finding something that's an experienced truth is, it's true for you, it's true to you. It's a truth about your service or product or whatever it is in the minds of all these people and therefore, is likely to be differentiating. Douglas Atkin: I mean, if you look at the purposes or the mission statements or the business statements of many, many companies, they almost seem exactly the same. It's like they've taken the same statement and put their logo on top of it. Douglas Atkin: So in that three and a half weeks, I and this small band of people went out around the world and took to almost 500 hosts and guests and employees and we found out all kinds of really, really interesting stuff. Douglas Atkin: And eventually found out that basically the truth, the essential truths, the fundamental ones that covered everything was that the Airbnb guests did not want to be tourists. They thought tourism or tourists was a dirty word. They wanted to be a traveler. They wanted to be an insider. They wanted to go to a place and go to have an experience of some kind in a city like Berlin or somewhere in Bali or whatever, that only the locals experience. They wanted to feel like a local, if you like, the world's local, wherever they went. Douglas Atkin: And the host wanted their guests to feel that way. They wanted them to sometimes feel almost like part of the family. And so what the host would do was say, "Go to this restaurant, not that, go to this neighborhood, not that one. These are the tourist traps, don't go there. Take this bus, it's better than that bus." So really, really equip them to feel like they belong or in control in this strange place and have this inside view. Douglas Atkin: So ultimately what I came back with to the founders was this idea of Airbnb exists to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. You're staying in the home with a local and they are weaving you into the social fabric of this place and making you feel like you belong there. Douglas Atkin: And wherever you go in the world, even if it's somewhere very strange and unusual, you don't speak the language, it's a very different culture. Like the Western Europeans or Americans going to Japan or China feels a little bit that way. It doesn't matter because you know you're going to belong there because you're going to be in a host's home or stay with a host and they're going to give you the inside track. Douglas Atkin: So that was the first thing that I made clear that we needed to do and did is ground it in an experience truth. Douglas Atkin: But here's the other thing that you need to be looking for when you're trying to find your purpose is yes, ground it in a truth, but make it reach for the stars. "Make it" seems an almost impossible vision of what could be. Don't try and paint a picture of the world as it should be rather than it is now. Douglas Atkin: The reason you need to do that is because the point of purposes and vision statements is partly to inspire people to do the impossible to make them happen. And they do. They do happen. I mean, one of the examples I think of are things like marriage equality in the US. Chad: Yeah. Douglas Atkin: I'm a gay man, I've been with my partner for 30 years and 10 years ago the idea of marriage equality seemed impossible. Absolutely impossible. Bush was in power I think at the time, or maybe it's slightly more than 10 years ago. Douglas Atkin: Anyway, the army accepted gays and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed, some court battles were won and a lot of people started this movement and worked really, really hard and now it's a reality. So what seems impossible, it's often just improbable, but you just have to work very, very hard to make it real, to make it happen. Douglas Atkin: And those people need to be inspired every day to get out of bed in the morning and make what the seemingly impossible happen. Chad: It can't be too impossible though. Right? Because if it feels like there's no way we're ever going to be able to reach it, won't they just shrug it off? Isn't there like a risk of that? Douglas Atkin: Yes, there is a risk of that. I mean, in a way, you might say a creating a world but anyone can belong anywhere is one of those, perhaps. It seems crazy. But then if you can look at the organization and see what it has been doing and get some confidence. "Wow. They're creative, they're disruptive, they change economies, change human behavior." Like we did basically to get people to trust strangers to the point that they're invited into their homes. Douglas Atkin: Then you begin to think, well, maybe it's not as crazy impossible as it seems. Maybe we can. And even if we make it happen a bit, the world is better off than it was before. You know what I mean? Even if we were 50% successful over say 10, 20, 30 years, the world's going to be a lot nicer place than it is now. So it's still worth going for. Chad: We'll get back to Douglas in a minute, but first I had a quick question for Chris Kneeland and about The Gathering of Cult Brands. Chad: Okay Chris. So what is The Gathering of Cult Brands? Chris Kneeland: So The Gathering is this annual coming together of what we call enlightened brand leaders. Those brand leaders can be business owners, marketing leaders, HR professionals. Really anybody who assumes some stewardship over how their business is perceived and how it goes to market and how it executes. And we gather together for three days in the secluded 200-year old castle nestled into the Canadian Rockies in the dead of winter. Joel: It's awesome. Chris Kneeland: We're sequestered there to both be educated, to learn things about what audience engagement and employee engagement looks like in the 21st century, as well as to celebrate. It's also a bit of a chance to honor lifetime achievement awards, if you will, for brand leaders that have built these iconic businesses that frankly most people don't talk enough about, either in the advertising or in the HR communities. So we like to shine a spotlight on them. Chad: You can register for The Gathering of Cult Brands event at cultgathering.com. Joel: Do you believe any sized organization can be on this track of finding purpose? I mean, if I'm a regional, small software company say in Chicago? Douglas Atkin: No, I don't see why not. Absolutely. Well, I mean at the time, but remember when we were doing this, Airbnb was not well known. It was not a household name and there was only 150 of us. We felt like that little regional office you're talking about. So I don't see why not. Douglas Atkin: I mean you have to measure the will of the founders or the leaders in the company and the rest of the people in the company to do it. And that's one of the first things. The first three people I did a workshop with and interviewed on this journey, was the three founders. And we didn't go on an expensive offsite to Aspen. We went to a guest's home, had a takeout Chinese food and I grilled them for a couple of hours. Joel: Were any of the employees part of your Q&A? What was some of the feedback from the employees that you got in terms of the purpose? Was it the same as the people opening up their homes to visitors? Talk about that. Douglas Atkin: Yes, we found a lot of stuff when you're asking about the role of Airbnb. So for example, one of the things that was very clear is that many hosts found it a transformative experience in many, many different ways. Including going from someone who used to work for the man, to being an entrepreneur, mini entrepreneur and having their own business effectively. And they found that a transformative experience. Douglas Atkin: But that didn't really relate to the guest experience. And so you had to find something which is relatable to the main stakeholders. And for us that is the hosts, the guests, and the employees being the main stakeholders at the time. Douglas Atkin: Now we've grown with stakeholders to cities and communities and everything else. But that was a different time. And yes, so you have to find something that is common to them all and this idea of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Douglas Atkin: We knew it was right because almost a year later, Brian and Joe... Brian, Joe and Nate are the three founders. Brian is the CEO. So Brian and I worked mostly with Brian and Joe over those years. Brian, Joe and I went to New York to talk about the new logo that had been developed. And the new logo or symbol, as you want to call it, it was the first thing that we used the purpose to define. Douglas Atkin: I don't know if you remember, but we had a very humdrum logo before. It was in blue and white and it said lower cased Airbnb. So they wanted something that was going to be more like Apple or Nike that can be recognized without any words next to it. They wanted a symbol that would stand alone. Douglas Atkin: The important thing about a symbol is it has meaning attached. It's not just a graphic design, it's a graphic design with meaning attached. Like the dove of peace or the Red Cross or whatever. Douglas Atkin: So the meaning that they attached to it and briefed the design company with was this purpose of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And they came up with the new logo that has been around for the past five years or so. What I call our equal opportunity genitalia logo. There's something in there for everyone. Joel: You get a lot of heat for that logo. There was a lot of criticism around that. Douglas Atkin: I know, I know, even in the press. But a lot of fun around it actually. Even The Guardian said "Is It Balls, Vagina or Both," in a headline. Douglas Atkin: I know. So anyway, before we launched the logo and before we announced our purpose of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere, Brian, Joe and I went one weekend in April, and let me see, this would have been 2014, to New York and spoke to some hosts and guests in a loft in New York. We gathered together there. And Brian and Joe took them through the development of this new symbol, which we called the [balo 00:22:00], which is short for blogging. And then showed the logo and I and they talked about this whole idea of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And there were tears in the eyes of these hosts of guests. Douglas Atkin: There's one guy I remember in particular called David, who is a photographer and a Airbnb host in Brooklyn. And he said, "I knew that was what I was doing this for but you've said it exactly right. And it's even better because now I feel I'm part of something bigger than just myself." Douglas Atkin: And guests said a similar kind of thing like, "Yes, that's exactly it. We don't want to be tourists. We want to feel like we can belong wherever we go that we're the insiders. We're locals." Douglas Atkin: Actually that night Brian, Joe and I went to several dodgy bars and clubs, got quite drunk. And I remember Brian looking me in the eye at one point saying, "This is the most important day in the history of the company." All of it's four years, five years by then maybe. Because we had figured out what our purpose was and it was resonating with the people that matter most. Which was the hosts and the guests and the employees who we had spoken to before. Douglas Atkin: But there's a couple of other things though that I want to talk about in terms of what makes a good purpose. So I just covered number one is grounded in experienced truth. Number two is make it reach for the stars. Make it inspirational and aspirational. Number three is it should be about one, just one, very big thing. Chad: Yeah. Douglas Atkin: And the reason why we used to be about one thing is that the purpose is like the rudder that guides the ship. It defines where you're going and what you're doing basically. And so it's a guardrail, it's a brief, if you like. It's a template. It's the thing that says "do this, don't do that." But it needs to be big so that for the next 100 years or 200 years for however as long as your organization exists, you'll never run out of runway of products to launch, services to have, things to do that, that executes your purpose. Douglas Atkin: And so that's the third most important thing. And a good example of this is, so the first thing we used for the purpose was to design the logo. One of the next things was to launch Airbnb's second big product. The first being staying in people's homes. The second one is hosted experience by locals. Douglas Atkin: So we launched experiences a few years ago where you don't have to stay in an Airbnb if you don't want to. But you can certainly sign up to learn kayaking or go surfing with a local host who can teach you how to do that or give you an insider's guide around Rome or Paris or whatever it is. That basically extended our purpose to an even greater audience of people making you feel like you can belong anywhere. Because you are getting a local's point of view about something they were passionate about and sharing it with you. Douglas Atkin: And so that extended the purpose to all these other people. One of the most important purposes of the purpose is to define your product roadmap basically. It's to define what products and services you're going to be launching. So that's the third one, one big thing. Douglas Atkin: The fourth, I just modified this one actually from the speech I gave in Banff. Because I thought it was obvious to begin with, but then of course it's not. The fourth most important thing is it has to be memorable. It has to be memorable. And the reason why is extremely simple and that is that every single person in your organization needs to know what the purpose is. It needs to be almost tattooed on their foreheads. That's everyone from the person on reception to the truck driver, the cleaner and the chairman and the leadership team. Douglas Atkin: From top to bottom everyone should know what the purpose is. Because otherwise your organization won't deliver it unless it's being collectively driven by everyone in your organization to deliver it. Therefore it has to be memorable and so belong anywhere, which is what we call it for short or creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere is memorable, is short, is one sentence, is one idea basically. And it definitely works in those ways. Douglas Atkin: I got a kick out of wherever I went around the world to Airbnb offices or to meet hosts. Everyone knew that that was the purpose. It was belong anywhere. You'd see signs, it would be scrawled up on whiteboards, it would be in presentations, it would be in whatever. Douglas Atkin: The hosts loved it because it defined, I mean it gave them a role even greater than the one they thought they were having and it's a true role. Which is you're welcoming complete strangers into your home. In the process of doing that, you're bringing down barriers of geography, language, class, gender, sexuality, all of these things to make someone feel like they belong in your home. Douglas Atkin: So they love this idea of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. In fact, now over the past few years, you can't sign up to be a host or a guest unless you sign a pledge that says you are signed up to this mission of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And that also means that you can't refuse people based on gender, race, class, all those kinds of things too. So those are the four key ingredients that I think make a very good purpose. And fortunately I think our purpose in Airbnb has them all. Joel: Brilliant. Chad: I think the best part about this is this is just the first conversation we're going to have with you, Douglas. Joel: Lucky Douglas. Chad: The follow-up, we're going to do the steps. The next one's going to be the purpose must comes first and we're going to have a podcast specifically around that and then step number two. So this is really a how-to guide on focusing on purpose, brand, and how Airbnb became a cult brand. Chad: So thanks again Douglas for joining us and I'm looking forward to having you back pretty much going further down this purpose rabbit hole. Thanks so much. Douglas Atkin: Thank you. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Douglas Atkin: 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. #CultBrands #Brand #CultBrandSeries #Airbnb #Marketing #DouglasAtkin #TheGathering

Grab your aluminum foil-covered cap and check-out our recent convo with Dennis Tupper, who thinks Indeed has delusions of staffing business grandeur. This is a Talroo exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. 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, 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. 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: Feeling fine and cherry wine. What's up peeps? This is Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, joined today by Chad Sowash. Chad, how are you? Chad : Hello. Joel: And joining us today on the show for conspiracy theories is industry icon and veteran as well as Chad and Cheese super fan. Dennis Tupper. Dennis, welcome to the show. Dennis: Thank you. Joel: Well Dennis, let's get right into this thing. You've got some conspiracy theories about Indeed that you'd like to share. So I'm going to let you have the floor and Chad and I will unleash on you when you're done. Dennis: Yeah, sure. So if you're paying attention in the industry for things long enough, you kind of noticed some trends and got a feeling that Indeed might be trending towards becoming more of a staffing firm than they are a job posting platform. Joel: Which is when I interject the fact that I predicted that months ago. But, keep going please. Dennis: So, I've just been paying attention to this for years now because when they came up with, I think it was Indeed Prime, I remember having our Indeed rep in the office for a meeting and then just literally turning the screen around and say, "What's that?" And it was an extremely uncomfortable for them and inquisitive for us at the time. It was just, "Oh yeah, it's just an experiment. It's only a couple markets," et cetera. And today, Indeed Prime is 50,000 plus candidates they boast, and in 80 different markets that went from eight to eighty. So is that a is that an experiment or is that a staffing product? Joel: There are two companies that did the exact same fucking thing. Monster and CareerBuilder, and where the hell did they end up? SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Dennis: They didn't have Daddy Warbucks recruit behind them though, right? Joel: Yeah, exactly right. Dennis: They got deep pockets. Look at Google, they have deep pockets. They can kind of throw money around and test anything and fail, and it doesn't matter to the bottom line. If you look at what their recent release was in terms of earnings and stuff like that. I think Indeed Glassdoor, like 46% revenue increase. Chad : Let's ask why, because I think once we ask why we can get into some of the more nitty gritty, but why is Indeed doing this? Dennis: I don't if it's evil genius, long-term planning or something they stumbled into but, the way they built their business model is off of first job boards and then staffing and now they're really kicking off job boards and then staffing is getting treated differently than were in the past year and so I could talk about it at length and now staffing is being treated a little bit differently and then they're bringing on all these different products in terms of we can get into it with acquisition. Dennis: It's like Syft, for gig and ClickIQ and Hire for Perm , which they're advertising that they're hiring, hiring specialists and recruiters. So, is that staffing? Chad : Indeed is the stereotypical hit it and quit it playboy, aren't they? Dennis: So, I don't know if it's some long-term plan but, you look at from inception, back in the early two thousands to present day, that would make a lot of sense if that's a long-term plan and it's being executed and very well. Or someone just got crazy-ass lucky in that luck keeps continuing. But, something tells me at a place that big with a backing like that, that it's probably more so a long-term plan. Chad : I'm going to throw in a why, and you tell me if you think I'm right or not. I think a big why in this whole staffing strategy is Google for Jobs. And I think that Indeed realizes that the cash cow of clicks for job postings is waning and they need to roll the dice on some other businesses. They're already owned by a staffing company. So it's not a real long stretch to imagine that getting into the staffing business where, gee, that's kind of a profitable business anyway, is probably a good move in light of what Google's doing. Agree or not? Dennis: Agree. You've got to differentiate yourself, especially from a giant, and you can get just completely eaten up if you don't differentiate yourself against Google for gosh sakes. Right? Chad : And staffing is something I don't think Google cares a shit about. Dennis: No. Chad : There's no way that you're going to see Google reps recruiting. Dennis: It's too much work. And if you look at what indeed does, they have the supply, they have millions and millions of relevant resumes. You can argue that the higher-end ones, they might not be as mature as a database for, they don't have that, they don't boast millions of resumes, but their legacy from like 2001. You got the demands. The demand's there. They have the contact info of all these companies, the hiring managers, procurement leads, owners, their names or phone numbers, all that stuff. And then they got the data. They can look at demand trends by company, by geo, by skill set. And then they have the infrastructure of ... they have a so many salespeople banging away at the phones. And their call centers in Tempe and Austin and wherever, where, those people have to have thick skin. Dennis: Think about recruiters, you got to be banging the phones, working hard, sourcing. You gotta have thick skin, you got quotas, you got process, you got metrics. That's a staffing sales environment. They have everything in place where, I don't know if you saw the documentary or movie on Snowden, but he was just like, all this stuff was there. It just takes one person to flip that switch. Joel: So companies have tried to do this before and as I'd said, Monster and CareerBuilder, they didn't have a recruit holdings backing. But they've tried this before. They've tried to edge into staffing. And in some cases, they went in with a sledgehammer and at least tried to break it up. Do you think that the big reason why Indeed's going to be a successful, or maybe they won't be, but do you think it all revolves around really the holdings company? Dennis: I think that's a big part of it in terms of the ability to take risks and fail and still financially keep going. At the same time, I wasn't in the trenches back when Monster did it as I have been for the past like seven or so years, so I don't know as much about their attempts to do so, but I mean the backing is just unparalleled. And the types of products that are out there to help support it, weren't there now that are there now in term ClickIQ and Syft and stuff. Joel: Here's the big question though. Why the fuck are staffing companies still fueling Indeed? Because they're paying them now. They used to have free organic traffic, all that other, everybody was happy. It was all rainbows and fucking unicorns. Then, they ripped all that shit away and said, you're going to pay for everything you get. But now taking a look at the growth of Indeed Prime and the prospect of going full staffing, why our staffing companies, why are RPOs, why are they fueling this specific competitor? That's exactly what Monster did. That's exactly what CareerBuilder did when they got on the heroin trip. Why are they doing it? Dennis: I think it just comes a time when, what are we fueling, but what's our ROI and are you willing to sacrifice some revenue for them for revenue, what you get back? Which, okay, if- Joel: That's so short-term dude, that is so short-term and so bullshit. You don't, if you're going to war with somebody, you don't feed them with ammunition. You don't pay for their big-ass bombs. And that's what staffing's doing. Dennis: ... Yeah. If it's not big enough at the time, then it's okay to do it. If it continues to grow, then you've got to make a decision to not be a revenue stream for your competition. Short-term, long-term, once they interfere with you or become more of a threat then yeah, you got to make that [crosstalk 00:08:51]. SFX: Fuck this man, game over man. It's game over. Joel: So let's stay on the Syft and the ClickIQ. Let's break those out a little bit. So Syft, obviously more focused in one specific area, where ClickIQ I think is an entirely different animal. That's a UK platform. Both of them are actually. So, what's the next step for something like Syft? Do they grow it in the UK or do they just go ahead and try to absorb that and bring it to the big money maker here in the U.S. and try to make it work here? Dennis: Yeah, we're just a market where it's going to be more prevalent and I would think it'd be the U.S.-based so, it's a good acquisition to absorb over here and bring it into the biggest market that there is. And it was a good move, especially with gig where everything's going. There's so much there. All you had to do is just ... with them and buy it, implement it, watch it run. Chad : What does Indeed look like in five years in your opinion? Dennis: I think they could be more of a staffing company than they are. They'll look at everything they have interviewed as a product I think that they have there for personality and skill assessments. And they bought resume.com which can just pipeline more resumes. So I feel like they're going to make the shift. I think their model is still, and again it's all one big conspiracy thought that we're having here but, at the end of the day, there's a big body of work there and a big trend line and I think that they will be more of a staffing firm than they are a recruitment. Chad : Do you think more revenues will come in from staffing then clicks in five year? Dennis: Absolutely. Chad : Well, okay. Dennis: To your point with Google for Jobs, you got to differentiate yourself and feel, be different. That's the way they can kind of get away with it yet compete in a different manner. Joel: Yeah. Eventually Google is going to turn on their click machine as well and companies are going to have to decide where the budget's going to go and inevitably some of it's going to come away from Indeed. Dennis: Oh gosh, yeah, a hundred percent and I wish there was more transparency with partners on how much ... obviously they're not going to tell you how much traffic you're getting from Google for Jobs through partnerships from direct employers or Dice or Zip or something like that. But once they flip that switch too, it's also going to be questionable on how much of an impact is it having with those partners that once they monetize and go direct to staffing and everybody else, what's going to happen to CareerBuilder, Dice, direct employers? If they're getting that traffic taken away and it's a large percentage of it, what's that downstream effect going have? So when that day comes, I have no idea. But that's going to be a hell of a day. Joel: Which is a great segue to our pane view conversation that we had earlier last week Chad. Chad : Indeed. It's interesting because they differentiated themselves from job boards by being a job search engine and now they've come full circle and there they are, really a traditional job board. All of the postings are seen on their site, but the thing that's different is duration-based versus performance. It's still performance. The big difference here though is that half the amount of traffic is actually finding its way to the employer's site and it's costing about twice as much to get half the traffic. Obviously as staffing companies now have to pay for their dinner, they're lunch, their whatever to be able to get those candidates. They're paying twice as much and getting less clicks. What are your thoughts on that evolution and also again, does this mean that staffing is going to have to eject and really look for alternatives much faster than they thought? Dennis: I think at the end of the day, you take yourself out of your seat and say, "What is best for the candidate experience and to make them keep coming back?" And then, there's going to be a model and it either works or doesn't work and I feel like that for the candidate experience makes it better. So you're going to have much more return traffic to that site. So, it comes at a cost to us, the people who are doing the advertising on it. But the industry changes and some things work in your favor, something don't. Yeah it sucks, but at the end of the day that's just the way that things are working. And so we don't have somebody coming over to our site from that redirect and then looking at our other jobs and whatnot. And all the free views at that point. Or lower your cost-per-view if you attribute it to the initial, wherever they're coming from. Dennis: But yeah, at the end of the day you need to make the the experience good for the candidate no matter what. So, different companies including our own are investing heavily in terms of making that experience good here. So that way you don't have to rely as heavy on external sources and you've got people coming more organically, but that's pie in the sky stuff. But you aim for it, you work towards it and go towards the best result. But, something called the cost of doing business. And that is better for the candidate, better experience, and that's just the way that it goes to get a deal done. Chad : So it seems like the overall indeed platform really wants or is pushing for companies to get rid of CRMs, to get rid of that career site experience because it can all be done through Indeed. If you are just hitting easy apply as you get onto an actual job description, well hell, I can send the information directly into an applicant tracking system and then bam, you're done. Now, we can have the argument around easy apply, is that really good for the market or not, but still if you take a look at everything that they're trying to do, you have to ask yourself from an ROI standpoint, are they trying to cut out CRMs? Are they trying to cut out all the cosmetic user experience that a company is building videos and content and all that stuff around their corporate career site just to be able to do a shotgun method, an easy apply method through indeed. Dennis: It is, but then people draw a line. And I remember what they tried to do was, do you guys recall hearing about the fact that they were trying to say that we're not going to let you advertise our jobs if you have a career site that has a join our talent community on it? Do you recall that? Dennis: What's Joel's favorite word? Hubris, I think. So that was extremely forward but it goes along with that type of thinking. But at the end of the day I think, is that part of the strategy or is that just what happens when you're making it two pane and just keeping them there? I don't know specifically but it does work in their favor. There's no doubt about that. Joel: To ask you about your opinion on the future of job boards, and I want to bring Chad's point on the job search side to Google search in general, and SEOs have been complaining for a long time about what's called no-click search. You go to Google today and directions to the airport or your search and meatloaf recipes or you search, almost whatever, right? How old, when was Abraham Lincoln born, et cetera, right? You can get those answers within Google, right? Like they have little snippets from websites that have the answers, so you don't even have to click on the site or the link to find the answers to your questions. Well, that might be great for the user. It might be great for Google. It's very good for Google because they stay on Google, but it's probably really bad for the site that actually created the content, right? Joel: So, you don't go to the site, you don't see their ads, you don't get their retargeting code for more ads about what they're pushing. You've basically created a webpage, Google's taking your content and creating answers for people, but you don't get any of the benefits. And I think jobs is sort of a unique case because most people don't care if their job postings are all over the place because they're not thoughtful blog posts or information about stuff. But, I also think that it puts job boards in a situation where they can get the job posting that's on your site without ever actually going to your site. Which inevitably means less traffic for the job sites, less revenue from banner ads, et cetera. So where do you see job boards say five, 10 years from now? Dennis: Man, that's a tough one. Everything's evolving so quickly. So I wish I had a better answer for you, but ... SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Dennis: I don't know man. If I knew the answer to that. I think maybe partnerships, content partnerships. Joel: Is there more consolidation? Are we getting to a point where jobs are just on the ATS, they're on Google, they're on Indeed, they're on a few other places and then the smaller players are out of business or they get bought up? Dennis: I believe so, yeah. I think the strongest survive because I don't feel like the future is going to hold the environment that it is today, where some of the small people can still kick around. Just the changes are just too fast. And you got to be able to keep up with it. And if you don't have the financial backing or the ability to do dev to keep up with things, then you're probably just going to end up selling out to somebody larger. And it's going to as you said, probably consolidate. Chad : So ClickIQ, we haven't talked about ClickIQ. What's the big move here? Obviously programmatic is big, we're seeing acquisitions all over the fucking place. But, what do you think Indeed's going to do with programmatic? Do you believe that they're going to use it mainly for their system to try to bolster a better ad service? What do you think is going to happen or do you think they're really going to try to and leverage overall networks? Chad : A little bit of both, and in the same time, it can help grow the European market. Because they're not a hundred percent strong over there and you've got to do somethings through acquisition to do so. So it's good technology and they can use it here in the States, but also use it as something to grow over there quickly. Growth through acquisition in Europe seems to be kind of the way to go when it comes to coming from here over there versus trying to organically start something over there. So I think it's mainly a play for that. Joel: Well Dennis man, we thank you for your time today and your insight on conspiracy theories around Indeed. For our listeners who want to know more about you, where would you send them? Dennis: Send them over to LinkedIn, I hang out over there. I've got about 7,200 connections from my days of recruiting and I honestly, I love networking with people and just help them connect dots. Joel: Oh, that's sweet. So is it linkedin.com/in/dennistupper? Dennis: Just search Dennis Tupper. Joel: Just search Dennis Tupper for God's sakes. Chad, 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. #Indeed #Staffing #TwoPane #ClickIQ #Syft

Video recruiting has been touted pretty much since the dawn of the Internet. And we're still waiting for it to be the huge success it was supposed to become. No company encapsulates this more than HireVue, who was in the news this week as the boys discuss the future of video in the recruiting game. - Is HireVue still viable? - Workable kicks Hire by Google when they're down - Stupid #diversity tricks - Joblift becomes the Indeed.com of our industry? Enjoy and show Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas lots of love. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community.​ Tim Sackett: HI, I'm Tim Sackett, and you're listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm not sure why you are, but hey, you do you. Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Joel: Are you ready for some football? Chad: God damn right. Joel: Welcome to the football is back, abbreviated Labor Day episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, HRs most concussed entertainment. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, is it time to start questioning video recruiting? Firing employees via virtual reality headsets and bots, bots, bots, and did I mention bots? Beep boop bop beep. And did I mention football is back? Stay tuned. Canvas: Canvas is the worlds 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. We make compliance easy, and are laser-focused on recruiter success. Canvas: 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: Guess who we're going to see next week? That's right, Canvas. Joel: The whole Canvas team. Chad: That's right. Jobvite, a little Recruiter Nation Live. Joel: Recruiter Nation Live. We're going to corner Aman Brar, and get his fantasy picks. I mean, get his take-aways on the industry, and where Jobvite is going under his leadership. Sorry man, I was in two drafts last night, simultaneously, so I'm still a little bit Fantasied out. Chad: It is so smart to wait this long to actually do your draft picks, because those of you who actually drafted before Luck, obviously, retired. Or, most of those others who actually tore ACLs and whatnot, I mean, that's kind of the bitch, right? Joel: Yeah. On the flip side, ZEKE signs the biggest contract in running-back history. Chad: Yup. ZEKE. Joel: That happened yesterday. So if you were drafting, that was kind of nice to know that he'd actually be suiting up in week one. Chad: I have actually paired it down to just one. I usually do three or four, but this year I've paired it down to one,- Joel: Cool. Chad: ... because I'm busy doing this Podcast thing. You know? Joel: Loser. I'm in two. We'd actually discussed a Chad & Cheese Fantasy, which we'll have to revisit that next season, I guess. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And, believe it or not, the Browns have some hype and might actually be good this year. Chad: Oh, whatever. Joel: SO, I'm pretty excited. Chad: Yeah, no It would be good to see the Browns do well, for once, in a very long time. Joel: I know, right? Chad: So, back from Sweden. We're back from the robes, slippers, bikes, and swimming in cold water with your ancestors. That was a blast. Joel: That was a blast. So, we had a list of things we wanted to do. I don't think we realized we were going to be in sort of a resort area. Chad: Right. Joel: But we swam in the North Sea, which technically was Kattegat. Chad: Kattegat, yeah. Joel: If you watch Vikings, it was extra cool because that's the name of a town that they live in, in Vikings. Chad: Yeah. Right in that area, man. Joel: Robes everywhere, super rich people vacation there. I mean, it the whole European Scandinavian experience. I was stupid enough to agree to eat this- Chad: Surströmming. Joel: ... horrid fish. It's Surströmming. It's rotting fish, basically. I assume with the cold winters, they had to figure out a way to preserve fish just long enough. Chad: That's not how you do it, by the way. Yeah. Joel: You smelled it. Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: Underwater, it was horrible. Chad: Oh, it was ridiculous. Joel: So what you have to do with this thing is, it's in this tin that looks like it's from the Civil War, and you open it under a bucket of water, so all the nasty... Chad: Yeah. Joel: Then you take... We actually got the whole fish, it wasn't the filet of fish. So, I appreciate Elin and her team making sure that we had the actual full fish to deal with. So then, you throw the fish in another bucket and then, you pour water on that. Then you cut this fish up, without throwing up, if you can help it, because you're still smelling this horrible, horrible stench. Chad: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Joel: Then you cut up this fish that's sort of slimy and boney, and then you put it on a cracker with cheese and whatever else- Chad: [crosstalk 00:05:22], yeah. Joel: ... was on it. Then you eat it. And as only two people ate it, me and another woman from- Chad: Madeline. Joel: And most of the Swedes had never tried this stuff. So, I feel like I get major points in the Scandinavian area, for being an American, coming there and doing that. But I will say that there wasn't enough TUMS in my room to extinguish the stank. Chad: It stank. Dude, it stank. It was a level- Joel: Yeah, it's- Chad: ... of stank that I have... And I've lived in Third World countries, people. But we'll spare you, because we have a video that will be coming out, with Joel in his white robe, eating the Surströmming. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: That, to me, that was classic, and it was horrible all at the same time. But tell us about the '90's party, because that, that was a blast. Joel: The '90's party. So, if you've never been to Sweden or know any Swedes, they're some of the most polite- Chad: Quiet, yeah. Joel: ... sort of reserved people. Which is very unlike Americans, who love talking and talking over each other. So, we have this '90's dance party, I'm in basically clothes that I actually owned in the '90's. An Oasis T-shirt and a Grunge-style flannel. You're in sort of a Beastie Boy-inspired outfit.,- Chad: Yup. Joel: ... and Julie looked like the lost Spice Girl, kind of, your wife. So, the beat start, right? This is some Euro-Electro dance party thing. Chad: It was like Eastern Bloc shit, is what it was. Joel: It was like Night At The Roxy, right? Like (singing), and the Swedes lose their minds. Chad: Yes. Joel: I'm trying to figure out how to explain it, but it was sort of like Sprockets, if you remember the old SNL skit. It was like Sprockets- Chad: "Touch my monkey." Joel: ... it was like a mosh pit where no one touched each other. Chad: "Touch my monkey." Joel: It was like a Kung Fu fight where no one touched each other. It lasted until 5:00 in the morning. We weren't up that long,- Chad: Right. Joel: ... but the party raged for like eight hours. Chad: Dude, I was looking for great '90's music, right, and there was none of that. It was all Eastern Bloc techno shit, the entire time. Joel: But they knew every song. Chad: They loved it. Joel: They knew every song. Chad: Yup, yup. Joel: But yeah, people lost their minds. We got some video coming your way. It was a great time, major shout-out to Sweden, and the folks at Tengai and TNG. I speak for both of us when I say we had a great time. Chad: We had an amazing time. And a big thanks to, I'm going to say his name wrong, but at least in English it's Joachim, for actually videoing you dancing. Got a little bit of me and Julie dancing, but the show was Joel Cheesman dancing, with a beer, not spilling a drop. Joel: By the way, the Swedish pronunciation of my name is Joele. Joele got down, at the '90's party, for sure. Hey, no shame, no shame. Chad: And Monster, while I was in Sweden, they totally attacked my Twitter account with Swedish Monster ads. And they hit it so hard that I came back to the US, we landed on Monday, two days later I was still getting Swedish Monster ads. (singing) So yeah, shout-out to you Monster, for... Yeah, that's some shitty targeting right there. Joel: Is Sweden a huge market for them? I'm a little confused to why that was- Chad: The US isn't. Joel: Go conquer Sweden, Monster. Good job. Chad: Yeah. Big shout-out to Jonathan Duarte, who enjoyed one of our latest podcasts. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: It was entitled AI Versus RPA, where Max Armbruster joins us to talk about AI, RPA, and where his company, Talkpush, is focusing today. And last on the shout-outs is, that we, if you haven't heard the teaser for the cult brand series, we are about to hit you in the head with a podcast series, that is one to rule them all. No, seriously. We're actually collaborating with the guys over in The Gathering,- Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: ... and also with SmashFly, to be able to bring you guys a new podcast series that is focused on cult brand. Joel: We're building bridges, Chad, that's what we're doing. We're construction workers building bridges to marketing and recruiting. It's a beautiful thing. Chad: We all know why, at this point, we should do this shit, now, we have to have the how. And we're bringing in some pretty big names to talk about the how. Joel: Dude, I'm impressed with the names. People will be shocked to know the brands that we're bringing on the show. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I'm excited. Chad: Events. We already talked about Recruiter Nation Live, next week. Joel: Yup. San Francisco, if you're going to be out there the 9th through the 11th. Chad: Yup. Joel: Come by and say hi, have some Anchor Steam with us. Chad: That's one of the things I was really impressed about with Sweden, was their beer. And the reason being, I was actually talking to a couple of guys in the bars, is they're mimicking US IPAs and beer making, because they know how well we do it. And this is a shout-out to Rob Prince, to once again... And everybody in England. Remember, you guys came up with IPA, but the US, we're kicking your ass, because we have so much better IPAs out there. Joel: TAtech, let's talk about that real quick. We got Death Match coming, our third annual... not annual, but our third Death Match competition. Chad: Yup. Joel: We're talking Job.com, we're talking AssessFirst. Chad: Yes. Joel: We're talking SeekOut, and we're talking Pez. It's going to be a throw down. Chad: Yes. And we have two incredibly smart ladies, who are going to be doing the hard part of the judging, Cindy Songe from Talroo and Quincy Valencia from Alexander Mann Solutions. Those guys are coming up big as the big sponsor to this, so we're really excited. And, really excited about the "trophies". Joel: Yeah. Let's keep that a secret until we actually unveil it. Chad: Okay, okay. Joel: I'm pretty excited, but I don't want to ruin that for anybody else. Quickly following TA Tech in Austin, we've got HR Tech, the- Chad: Vegas. Joel: ... I don't know, the 800-pound gorilla of HR conferences,- Chad: Yup. Joel: ... in Vegas, happening, I'm guessing, October 1st through the 4th, or something. Chad: Yup, yup. Brought to you by Jobcase. That's right, Jobcase. The LinkedIn for the other 70%, so that's for most of the country. We're going to be in Vegas. After that, going to Unleash World, onstage with a panel, asking the hard questions, in Paris. Joel: Oui Oui. Chad: And that one's brought to you by our friends at SmashFly. So, SmashFly is taking us to Paris with them, so we can have all the wine, cheese, and panel goodness that anybody can handle. Joel: I love me some cheese. ICERM is coming up as well, their analyst meeting for the year. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We're still contemplating yoga, at this point- Chad: Yes. Joel: ... as one of the activities. I figure if I can eat rotting fish, yoga should be pretty easy. Chad: I think you can do it. I think you definitely have to do the leg warmers, the head band, the wrist bands, those types of things. I think that is perfect for you. Joel: Yeah. I know that James Ellis, our buddy, is a big Wish shopper. If he could pick me out some leg warmers, maybe a head band, and wrist bands, and maybe something glittery, that would be great James. Chad: Yeah, I don't think James Ellis is your personal shopper, but, okay. Joel: He's got style that I simply don't have, so, I need some help in this area. I'll also mention for Jobcase, a little shout-out, they had a big deal with the state of West Virginia- Chad: Oh. Joel: ... in the news recently. So, shout-out for them, for that big win in the big WV. Chad: Yeah. And we should definitely get Fred on, to talk about that, because that, I think, is very big for platforms and marketplaces, to be able to partner with state workforce. So that's, I think, a big win for them. Joel: Well, we love Fred and Fred loves us, so I think we could probably make that happen. Chad: Boom. Joel: Let's get to the news, shall we? Chad: Yup. Joel: Biggest news in a shortened week here in the US, thank you Labor Day, the biggest news came out of HireVue. We had talked about some rumors, a few shows ago, about some private equity coming in, buying up some of the shares of the company. HireVue, obviously, refuted those rumors, of course, they were true. This week, private equity came in, numbers were not disclosed. We know HireVue has been invested to the tune of 90+ million dollars, over the last 15 years. I have nothing to add, news-wise on that, but is it time to question the validity of video recruiting? Chad: Well, before we get to that. I think, HireVue, we've talked about facial recognition, we've talk about all those kind of like unicorns and rainbows shit,- Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: ... but they do some pretty cool fucking stuff. I mean, they do assessments through coding challenges and games, plus, they have an interview scheduling module. I mean, they are really an efficiencies platform. The big question is, for me, I think this to me is more of a warning sign than anything else., because if HireVue was really worth it, and they could be a strategic play for a much larger system, thinking about applicant-tracking systems and even bigger than that, they would have been bought by now, right? Joel: Yeah. 15-some years they've been around. Chad: Yes. Joel: They are the gold standard, I guess, in terms of video recruiting and interviewing,- Chad: Yeah. Joel: ... and they're still chugging, right? They've got $90 million, and we've talked about this many times, when you get that kind of money, people want to liquidation event. They want an IPO, they want to sell the company for 10X, and that hasn't happened. So I have to wonder, is video really that beneficial, in terms of interviewing, right? No one else is doing it, they have little competition. The only video stuff we see is like branding videos out of VideoMyJob and our friends in Chicago there, Skill Scout, and others, which is beneficial. But you throw it up on YouTube and you throw it up on your site, and people are kind of done with it. Joel: So, I just don't know what the value of video is. We've talked about it being this huge thing for a long time, we talk about the internet being over-run with videos, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, it's all about video. But it's just not happening in recruiting, and maybe it's time soon, unless some app comes around that I don't see, to maybe bury the whole technology, or just commoditize it and move on with other stuff. Chad: I think companies like Vervoe, those guys have video interviewing in their platform, but it's not centered around that, so they give you so many options to, obviously, interview in so many different ways. So I think HireVue went big, right out of the gate, as a video interviewing platform, now, they've turned into something entirely different, although, still centered around video. They're doing all these gamification types of things, and there's a lot of money, like you said. Trying to get 10X out of 93, not to mention this new investment that's put in, that's the warning signal for me. If they haven't been bought yet, and they are demonstrating efficiencies, there is no question, okay? Chad: They are the gold standard when it comes to certain aspects of the interviewing and being able to make the process more efficient, but still, the big question, "Why the fuck are they still not a part of a larger system?" Or, as they see themselves, and this is actually a quote from HireVue, "HireVue's market-leading SaaS platform and suite of recruitment solutions, assist global enterprises in finding, engaging, and hiring the best talent." Now, that doesn't sound like just interviewing system. So maybe they are trying to becoming their own version of an applicant tracking system. Joel: Yeah, I just think the fire's going out on video interviewing and video in general. I mean, I remember when it was huge. I remember when companies would actually mail little web-cam cameras to people, when they weren't on every device,- Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: ... and the little camera would have your logo on it, and you'd connect it to the people you were interviewing. I think the coals are burning, and the fire may be going out, on videos. And I think the whole branding stuff will remain sort of a fringe little work-life balance business, where people who like video go to companies, and companies pay for that and that's fun, but that's not a billion dollar business. And it's more and more looking like HireVue is not a billion-plus dollar business either. Chad: Yeah. I think as companies start to try to focus on that brand, and they can start having dialogue around how brand is actually impacting the bottom line, then I think there's a huge opportunity for those types of organizations, not just a dip into employment branding dollars, which isn't a huge pool by the way, compared to the overall marketing dollars, right? As soon as they can start bridging that, I think there is a humongous opportunity, but it's not just in dipping into the pool of HR dollars. Joel: I mean, I think the platforms of, we talked about Snapchat, Instagram... I mean, clearly, people like video, they like watching it, 5G's going to make it real easy to stream everything. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I think that your Smart TV, Roku, Apple TV, et cetera, will have apps to watch job postings on video. I agree that it's a thing, I just think companies really aren't that into it, and I don't think job seekers are all that into it. Chad: I think a lot of it, again, has to do with application, how they're using it, and not just doing video, much like we talked about before, companies saying, "I need a Chat bot, I need a Chat bot. I have no fucking clue why I need one, but everybody's talking them," same thing with video. "Oh, that looks all cool. We need video, we need video." It's like, "Okay, let's focus on the application, the actual user experience, and see where that fits in." All of that makes a lot of sense. Then, once again, I'm going to beat it like a dead horse, it's being able to bridge beyond HR, and being able to bring in marketing, in the big brand, to be able to help them understand how it actually impacts. Chad: All these millions of people that come to your website, that are looking for jobs every year, how can you effectively impact those individuals? That's not coming out of the HR pool of cash, which is not huge by the way, compared to marketing and big brand. Joel: Yeah. Well, I'm not ready to dig the grave yet, but I've definitely opened up the coffin, at this point. Chad: It sounds like you're also picking out the clothes that they're going to wear, as well. SFX: That's it man. Game over, man. Game over. Joel: It wouldn't be a show without Google this week. Chad: Yes. Joel: They're in the news again, what's going on with them? Chad: Right out of the gate, dude, this is the funniest fucking thing in the world. So, Workable and RecruiterBox are on the Hire by Google attack, right now, and this is fucking hilarious. So, in a Facebook group, and somebody actually posts screenshots of ads being run on Google, one of them by Workable, and here's what the ad says. "G Hire," Hire by Google, "is shutting down. Hire on with Workable." Then obviously, it's an ad. "Google Hire's dying," or, "Hire by Google's dying, come see us." Then RecruiterBox, "Google Hire is going away, we are their number-one competitor." Chad: So, the body is not even cold yet, right? Workable and RecruiterBox, and I can't imagine all the other organizations that are out there, that are looking to dive into this fresh carcass. So I thought that was incredibly funny, and smart at the same time. I mean, it's a cut-throat market, no question,- Joel: Yup. Chad: ... but from what I understand, some of the sources that I've heard from, they've had, well, thousands of companies using this product. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So, now it's time to jump in. Joel: The buzzards are flocking and the sharks smell blood. Hats off to the marketing departments of those companies, because they're being creative, they're thinking outside the box, and God love you, you're using their own platform to talk trash. Got to love that. Chad: Using Google to attack Google. That's awesome. Joel: Yeah. And fortunately, Google has bigger problems than Workable's marketing budget for pay-per-clicks. Chad: Yes, they do. Joel: In the news this week, to the tune of 200-some million dollars in the EU, Google had to pay up for targeting children, re-targeting children, collecting data on children users. Not a good thing, they're writing a big check. Again. Chad: Yes. From our standpoint, and again there're definitely more theories about why Hire by Google is sunsetting next year. Recruitics had a blog out this week, the top three things that they believe, and for me, it was number three, it was anti-trust. Joel: Yup. Chad: And it did have people on Facebook this week saying, "Well, yeah, that was a factor." Yeah, I know it was a factor, it was the biggest fucking factor that's out there. And this anti-trust thing is obviously big. And if you go to Google for Jobs in Europe, you'll notice that the UI is a tad different than how it looks here in the US. They have some of the competing favicons on top of the actual search itself, so that you could go to StepStone or Monster or whatever, and this is more, just to be able to defend themselves against some of these anti-trust allegations. So chopping off the Hire by Google limb to save the body, In this case, it was more of a pinky- Joel: Yeah. Chad: ... to save the body, was something that needed to happen. Joel: Yeah. The screenshot you shared, and you should throw that up on Chad Cheese as a blog post somewhere,- Chad: Yup. Joel: ... or throw it up on the socials. It was clear-cut. Like dude, above the fold, "You could also look for jobs here." To me, that was a clear indication that Google is really concerned about anti-trust. Chad: And once again, Google is in the search business. They are focused, keenly I believe, on defending their position on Google for Jobs, to be able to monetize that down the road. And, if they had to cut off the pinky toe of Hire by Google to be able to do that, then so what, that's not going to bother them. So I think, from all of the theories that are out there, and go figure, yeah, from a business standpoint, there's not a lot of money in HR, versus the rest of the world, and so on and so forth. Totally get that. But, from my standpoint, that is minuscule compared to this anti-trust issue that they have, that could perspectively impact their biggest line of fucking revenue. Joel: Yeah, yeah. The employment stuff was a fly on the search businesses elephant's ass, and they decided to kill it, and life will go on for everybody. Chad: Easy enough. Joel: Let's hear a word from Sovren and talk about robots. Geez, we never talk about that. 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. Sovren: 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 hope in Austin, we can possibly go to dinner, that'd be great. Joel: Yeah, we need to reach out to the folks at Sovren, who are located in Austin. We don't talk about investment too much, but this one I love because you had a great line. Joblift got 17 million in funding. They're basically Indeed. In fact, their homepage says, "All the jobs, one search," which used to be Indeed's line, back in the day. So I thought that was amusing. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And your line, equally amusing, was- Chad: Hey, somebody's got to do it, because Indeed's not doing it anymore. Joel: Indeed's getting out of the game, so someone might as well do fucking vertical job search again. Chad: Yeah, because I mean, this is pretty important for any job search or any job search kind of site that's out there. Indeed is turning into an old-timey job board with their new Ping-view model. The amount of candidates that are delivered is cut in half, and the pricing, per this new UX, has actually doubled. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: So, remember the day when you would go to a job board, you would click on the job, you would view the job on the job board, and then you would apply? Joel: Yeah. Chad: You could click on the Apply, and then it would take you off to the corporate career site. Well, that's what Indeed is today. It used to be that they were a job-search engine, much like the search engine of Google. You click on it, and then you're blasted off to the job on the corporate career site, and that's how they built their pay-per-click model. "Hey, we're going to send candidates to you, on your site." Period. Now it's, "Well, your site sucks, so we're going to keep them on our UX, on our site." And really what that's done, is it's closed the loop. It's taken them from job search engine to, back to job board. They're a fucking job board. So, this is a great opportunity for organizations, who are looking to make a change, to perspectively become a job search engine. Joel: Yeah. There clearly is a little bit of a window here, to say, "Look, Indeed is not focused. They're getting into job fair events, they're getting into staffing, they're getting into taking pictures with your phone of help wanted ads. They're getting into all this weird shit. How about if we just focus on being a really good job search engine, and doing that?" Joel: And if Google for Jobs, ala Hire by Google, decides to get the hell out of the business, then, hello, it's game-on again, in terms of search and whatever else. And with more opportunities to market with video, and social media, and everything else, there's a little bit of an opening. So Joblift, use that 17 mil well, and it could work out for you in the end. Chad: I think any job site that's out there, looking at the perspective vulnerabilities of Indeed, and again, they're a strong organization, don't get me wrong, but still, they're a big organization who has to actually defend many different flanks, which is why they're doing all of this. Back in the day when they were the start-up, they had incredible laser focus. They can't do that anymore. So this is your opportunity to be the new Indeed. Joel: The Titanic takes a long time to make that turn,- Chad: Yeah. Joel: ... versus the speedboat. Chad: Unless you have bots. Joel: Bots, bots continue to be in the news. I've never really thought about shipping- Chad: Yes. Joel: ... like on actual water, but this is a huge, huge industry. Chad: Yes. Joel: And there's a story thins week about, basically, robotic ships. So you have robots steer the ship, which probably isn't too tough. I'm sure pirates will love this idea, by the way. But you have robots just basically take the ship from one port to another, and you're eliminating the job of the captain, and whoever else has to be part of the ship, and I'm not a mariner by any means, But to me, this sounds like a potential real loss of jobs for a lot of communities that make their living off of shipping shit on the water-ways of the world. Chad: Yeah. Well, these robot freighters, there you go. Joel: They're trucks on water, basically. Chad: These big-ass freighters. Yeah. Well, and that's one of the things they don't have to worry about, right? We're worried aby the autonomous vehicles, because of all the people on the road, and so on and so forth, it's a little bit different on the seas. And if you arm them with Terminators, you don't have to worry about the fucking pirates, right? So I mean, you've got it taken care of, and yeah, it makes it so much easier to be able to get goods from point A to point B, without stupid human friction. Chad: What about college kids getting food? Joel: Yes. There's a company called Starship Technologies, great name,- Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Joel: ... basically, going to deploy these cooler-sized, like a beer cooler,- Chad: Yeah. Joel: ... self-driving robots to 100 US college campuses, and their goal to do this is by 2022. Some of the ones on the list are close to our heart, Purdue University here in Indiana, is going to be targeted for this. So basically, if you've seen the little Domino's Pizza little cooler-sized robot-wheeled things on the sidewalk, this is what this company's going to do. Now, I think, as cool as this is, I got to think the ultimate goal is to deliver pot to these kids, at 3:00 in the morning, or pizza at 4:00 in the morning, after they've been smoking the pot that was in the cooler at 2:00 in the morning. And I also think the number of videos that are going to come out of people beating the hell out of these robots,- Chad: Yes. Joel: ... is going to be unprecedented. The golf clubs, the bats, the wiffle ball bats- Chad: It's going to happen, and that's why this is a fucking bad idea. Joel: Dude, robotic pot delivery, that's a great idea. Chad: No, then you have drunk kids who are going to try to break into these fucking things. Joel: Oh, that's true too. They'll be on the look-out for coolers running down, and then trying to open them up- Chad: Yeah. Joel: ... and beat them down with, like, "Oh, there's pizza in there, and who knows what's in there." So yeah. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So Tengai, our friends in Sweden, and our creepy robot bust, got a really good review apparently, in Sweden, Stockholm's number one newspaper, the reviewer who is typically not very nice to technologies, was very complimentary to Tengai. Now, I don't speak Swedish, but what I garnered from the translation was, that it doesn't have a bad day, it doesn't wake up on the wrong side of the bed, it doesn't argue with its spouse before coming to work, it doesn't deal with kids that are being little shits in the morning. You're taking out all of these, not just biases, but human nature behavior, I've had a bad day, I'm in a bad mood, I'm out to get somebody. All of that is taken away from an interview process with a robot, and I think that those are really good points- Chad: Right. Joel: ... that this reviewer talked about. Regardless of whether Tengai becomes the next huge company or not, I think a lot of the things that it addresses, are really valid. Chad: In-person interviews are always going to be a thing of our industry. We're always going to have that happen. People are going to have to come in. And I know in doing interviews, who knows how many God-damn interviews, and building teams over my lifetime, I fucking hate interviews man. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So I mean, as a hiring manager, or as a recruiter, or to be able to make the process so much efficient, so much more unbiased if you did have a bad day, or you didn't get your pumpkin spiced late the way you like it, who the fuck knows, right, you're not going to have to worry about that with Tengai. So there are plenty of good reasons why this should work. The big question is, adoption. Joel: How many people go into a Walmart, how many people go into a Target, how many people go into an Appelbee’s and say, "Hey, I'd like to fill out an application?" Every business like that should have some sort of automated interview system, whether it be Tengai or whatever, where they can say, "Oh, great, if you've got 15 minutes, step in this room, or step over here, whatever, and we'll do a quick interview with you with our automated system." And that saves that person from doing those multitude of interviews, and actually gives them time to do stuff that they actually want to do, which is serve customers and make money, and whatever. So the bad mood today- Chad: Again. Joel: ... that goes by the wayside, and we're actually critiquing people, and judging them based on their skills, and not how you feel or what they look like. And that's probably a good thing. Chad: I think there's some great applications for some great companies who need it, and would rather not fucking interview people. Joel: Yeah, yeah. I think we'll see it in government first, and then we'll see some retailers and bigger companies that do a lot of interviewing, start getting on the robotic train, and it'll take off from there or it won't, but it will be a hell of a lot of fun talking about it here on the podcast. Sponsored by JobAdX, and we'll be right back with men telling women what to do, and firing employees through virtual reality. Big fun, stay tuned kids. JobAdX: 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 and 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 e-mailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. JobAdX: Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad: So this next one falls right into our What The Fuck Diversity category. The Christian Women Fall Lecture Series, where old white men lecture on subjects like... Here are the subjects, you've got to hear these subjects. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Chad: Okay. So these are old white men talking about subject number one- Joel: One African-American guy. Chad: Well, I said they're old men. Did I say white men? Sorry. Joel: Well, then you said white guys. Chad: Sorry, sorry. Joel: So old men. Chad: Old men- Joel: Some diversity there. Chad: Yes, a little diversity. Number one, as a faithful wife, that's a subject. Number two, as a loving mother. Number three, as a Bible class teacher. Number four, her response to the feminist movement. Number five, her role in the church. So again, let's step back here for a moment, and think of a bunch of old dudes telling women how to be a faithful wife, a loving mother, a Bible class teacher, how she should respond to the feminist movement, and what her role is in the church. If I had any of these discussions with my wife, she would smack me across the fucking face, and I would deserve it. SFX: That's it man. Game over, man. Game over. Chad: That's fucking crazy. Joel: Yeah. Someone shared that with you, and I thought it was a joke. I thought it was like, someone put it together,- Chad: Yeah, I know. Joel: ... and they were punking us. But it turns out, yes, there's a lecture series of men telling women how to be good women in the church. So I got nothing. Chad: I got nothing, other than, that is part of our What The Fuck Diversity category on this podcast. Joel: I don't have a soundbite for that, but- Chad: Jesus. Joel: ... I'm glad we didn't find one. All right, lastly on the show, we'll get out of here with this,- Chad: Your favorite. Joel: VR is the future. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let's just bow down to the VR gods. The story out last week, virtual reality is being used by companies to teach managers at companies, HR folks to fire people. And I think this is brilliant, right? So you put your VR headset on, you have animated Charlie come in the office, you tell him HR-ly, "We're moving in a new direction, thanks for your time," and virtual Charlie starts crying, gets violent, gets angry, begs you for his job, and this helps train people to deal with crazy Charlie who comes in and does all these crazy things to try to keep his job, or maybe bash your head in, or lay flames to the business. This is great training, and this is a great use of VR to help people better fire folks, as well as some other things that it's going to help you with. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can think of one guy, who I'm not going to name, who had to fire a lot of people, because he was probably one of the worst managers I'd ever worked beside, and he actually... He had an aluminum bat in his office, because of all the people who wanted fight his dumb ass, because of the way that he actually... he treated people, right? So this... And again, that's real life. This is kind of like a VR segment to be able to try to help with empathy, but it's also trying to numb down some of the responses, where you want to have some very inappropriate conversations with these individuals, right? But I think outside of firing people, this has a great application. Chad: So, Farmer's Insurance needed a new way to train claims adjusters for home inspections, so TailSpin, the startup who designed this, they designed a virtual house complete with cluttered closets, leaky sinks, and the trainees could scour for evidence of water damage, and whatever. And the simulation changed slightly each time. So this allowed new hires to rack up months worth of experience in just a few days. Another module had trainees practicing on intervening, when a coworker on a virtual hiring panel, starts showing bias against certain job candidates. Chad: So I mean, there are different applications that you can start to think of when you're talking about training, that just makes a hell of a lot of sense, and we did this when I was in the army for actual trainees. We had all this expensive gear- Joel: Yeah. Chad: ... the VR headsets, all that stuff, and it was good. Now, we did live training too obviously, but it's just another way to focus on getting more out of your time with your people. Joel: And I think this is a grand opportunity for the Grand Theft Auto video game folks, to create Grand Theft Auto HR Edition,- Chad: Ooh. Joel: ... where you're an employee and you just keep getting fired, and then you have different ways to kill or beat up the HR folks. I think that's some violent video game gold. So the makers of that game are FortNite or Call of Duty, should be thinking about an HR angle in some of their games. Chad: Yeah, you're sitting in front of your manager's desk, and you notice that he has an aluminum ball bat sitting behind him, right? Yeah. Joel: Or it could go the other way, Grand Theft Auto HR Professional, and they beat up employees. I don't know, there's... The opportunities are endless. The fun will never stop, because podcast is going to stop. Chad: Thank God. Joel: And we out. Chad: Because 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 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, Maschio, Pepper Jack, Swiss. So many cheeses, and not one word, so weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese, it's so weird. Walken: We out. #HireVue #video #recruiting #Google #HirebyGoogle #Workable #Recruiterbox #antitrust #Joblift #Indeed #Robots #VR #Diversity

Technology disruption. We hear it a lot, but what does it really mean in the world of work? Pontoon's Tim Meehan seems to have it all figured out, as he nicely lays out in the presentations he does around the globe. Enter Chad & Cheese who say, "We'll be the judge of that." All the buzzwords are here: AI, blockchain, automation ... and even (lord, help us) TikTok! If you like looking around corners, this one's for you. You can thank our friends at Sovren for delivering this lovely EXCLUSIVE! 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. 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. Announcer: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Welcome to the Most Nervous Guest We've Ever Had episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Welcoming special guest, Tim Meehan from Poon Tang solutions. I got that wrong, didn't I? Tim: Pontoon Solutions. Chad: I think that's a rap song, isn't it? Tim: You guys are a dangerous podcast. Chad: So Tim Meehan, VP Global Head Emerging Technologies at Pontoon Solutions. Tim: Thank you. Yeah. Chad: What does that mean? And for our listeners out there who don't know who Tim Meehan is, tell us a little bit about Tim Meehan, and what do you do there at Pontoon Solutions? Tim: Come on guys, get it right. Joel: Getting to know you... Tim: So I look after our stack of emerging technologies for Pontoon Worldwide, and for those who don't know, we're an outsourcing company that provides both full-time and contingent labor recruitment, outsourcing services. 2000 employees, we're in 110 countries, heck of a lot of clients, and my job is to bring the stack of tools that we spend a lot of time talking about into the client solution set. So basically, I don't touch our ATS or CRM or even VMS. My job is to bring the tools that make the experience working with those crappy platforms much better. Joel: And you're a Pisces who enjoys walks on the beach, but we won't get into that right now. Tim, so Chad threw me this, I don't know, infographic/visual representation of a speech you gave recently, and it's quite a mess. It's a regurgitation of, I don't know, Hanna-Barbera on crack. Wow, even Chad laughed at that one. So you focus a lot on generations in this imagery. So talk to me about that. Are the generations different? Are they the same? Does it matter? Is it all a bunch of bullshit? What's your take? Tim: That was an amazing session. We were in the room with half a dozen of our major banking clients from around the world. Joel: Wow, big room, half a dozen, wow. You're pretty influential, Tim. Tim: Yeah, there we go. Well, the rest of them didn't come when they heard I was coming. So I had a session where I talked about what might be coming in the future, and how it potentially could impact our ability to succeed. And I actually have four tenets of, I'll guess I'll call them either mega trends or disruptive trends. And certainly generational is one of them, but I'd like to start with the first one, which is the space we talk about, which is the stack we work in, and the fact that experience is the new driver. Tim: There is definitely the tool set today to bring a talent acquisition experience, be it contingent or full-time recruitment, that is very disruptive. Amazing. I think we're talking about that a little later. And if companies don't have their head on and don't realize that this is real, they won't even make it through the first of these critical disruptive steps, and the first is the stack. Tim: So, to our listeners out there, if you're not having serious discussion around updating your VMS platform, integrating in chat bots, talking about programmatic advertising, and looking at new career site technology, machine learning magic... If you're kind of like, "Well, we'll get to that," you're already late. So we've got that big factor, and there are some companies, and I'm blessed in Pontoon, we've got a lot of high-tech clients. These are real innovative organizations that we're able to explore that with them. Joel: So, just real quick, who are the bigger a-holes, Gen Z or millennials? Tim: Well, as a father of millennials, I wouldn't say it's them, and grandfather of Zs... I don't know guys. They're not. I'm sorry, you're not going to get me to bite on that one. Maybe I'll say I'm the a-hole. Chad: Xers are the assholes, there we go. Joel: Gen X. They are assholes. Tim: That's true, X is... Well, they're the missed generation. So, who knows? Joel: All right, on to the tenets. I'm sorry about that. Tim: Yeah. So the next one is generational. And you know, ad nauseam, we all know Zs are the new entrants to the marketplace. Joel: A-holes. Tim: But what we have to understand is, you could have a candidate that comes into the interview, 18, 19 years old, that's got three or four blogs running. Maybe they even do their own little side podcasting in some funky thing, and they have a million Twitter followers. And then they run smack dab into your crappy apply process that takes them a half an hour, asks them for stuff they don't have, and then they never hear back. Tim: And then it's on their Twitter feed, and it's being retweeted, and all of a sudden, there's like 15 million people you don't even know are aware of your process, and it's making it up to the C-suite. And by the way, maybe your applicant flow just crashed. So there's some scary stuff that's going to happen as this next generation of the millennials, we tend... Some people would describe them as the dependent generation. They're not tech savvy, they're just dependent on tech. The Zs, god forgive me, I call them the unable generation. They're unable to understand the tech that my generation built. Chad: Like wifi. They don't even understand how that wifi thing in the corner works. Tim: Yeah, I mean it's like 1.3 billion babies have been born since FaceTime came out. So you've got to, you've got 1.3 billion kids that don't understand that the idea of a video discussion is normal. It's innovative. Joel: It's a miracle. Tim: It's a miracle. So you get these Zs who are used to like placing an order on Pizza Hut and watching the "when will it come?" Instant feedback, and they've got huge followers. They're going to come crashing in. And the companies that are adapting the stacks are going to capture more of them than the companies that aren't. And I'll even say there are certain industries that are at greatest risk, and it's directly correlated to the companies that, they'll lock down their infrastructure, which I'll talk about in a minute. Chad: So on the talent acquisition side, though, they haven't given a shit about experience for 20 years. Why do they care now, and what makes you think that you can get them to adopt anything with regard to experience? Because they're so honed in on their routine for the past 20 years, which again sucks. Tim: You know, that's a great tee up because the story that I tell is not a Pontoon story. There's not a lick of Pontoon sales slick in there. It is all about the trends, and if I could do nothing but get us, as the voices of the tech, and some of our worthy competitors to start discussing these things as a group, then I think, ultimately, the challenge is getting to the C-suite. Because they don't even recognize how at risk they are. And I don't think many of our HR colleagues have the tools to be able to tell the story like we can. Chad: Where's the risk though? So you're talking about the risk at the C-suite. That is the big key. What is the risk, and what is the reward, which is what they're going to care about the most? Tim: Let me do the third, and then we'll talk about the fourth, and it all comes together, so if you don't mind... So the third- Joel: Slow your roll, Sowash. Chad: Damn it. Tim: Yeah. So the third disruptor is blockchain. And please don't ask me anything detailed about blockchain. I'm not an IT guy, but I can see... Yeah, that's not me. I can see disruption coming. Imagine a world where in the future, you and I, we all own our background check, our drug screen, and all our employment information, and we can manage it ourselves just like we do our banking account. I can't go in and change my bank balance, but I can sure go in and look at it, and there will be tech coming out that will enable us to control our data privacy and all of our information. And the providers of that certification of this service will be able to have contracts with large employers and small. And basically, if I'm an employer, I can say, "Oh, you're certified by ABC blockchain company. I can hire, you can start tomorrow." Tim: So start thinking about now I've got this tech that can have a great experience. I have Zs that are going to run to that tech because it's the experience they expect, and now I've got this blockchain thing coming in that can allow instant hiring, and you're going to see the early innovators in talent acquisition, both contingent and full-time, gravitate to these models where I can go out, I can identify, I can take you through my process in a day or two or five and onboard you. And I'm filling jobs in a day, when the old guys are still thinking about 60, 70-day cycle times. Tim: All those three things combined, and you're going to have that classic innovation roadmap where some company's at the front end, seeing this amazing experience where I'm bringing in people quickly, and I'm onboarding them quickly. Tim: And by the way, they may even be making decisions at the backend about the employment model, not the front. The total talent concept arrives. Maybe I'm going to be a contractor. Maybe I'm a statement of work provider. Maybe I'm a full-time employee. That actually could maybe be made at the end by the blockchain company. Tim: All of those things are happening. The losers are knowing they're losing. That's what's going to happen. "I don't understand why my applicant flow and all my ratios suck. What's going on?" And then the C suite is going, "I don't understand." And you know what HR is going to say? "I couldn't get data privacy and data security and our infrastructure group to approve me open up our ecosystem. So I wasn't able to introduce all this amazing tech, because you're too concerned about breaches and security, and you didn't hear the message that I wasn't able to connect to the talent when it mattered. And I couldn't get the funding that I needed to be able to change how we did business. And as a result, gradually, my system died, and now I've got a big problem, and what do we do?" Tim: And I fear that in some industries that are really locking down their infrastructure, for instance, say, big manufacturing companies that are running their ATS on the same system that they build their cars on, the same underlying... Locking that crap down, right? Chad: Yeah. Tim: Those guys won't realize until it's too late. Financial industries, potentially. So you got to... It could be... There was a saying about the war for talent, "Oh, talent won!" This is more like the war for attention. I don't want to wait until I'm showing you three or four or five years of trends or failure before I say, "Well, ultimately, the issue was something that we were aware of 10 years ago, and we just weren't quite able to articulate JavaScript and pixels and cookies and APIs and how they all interfeed, and I didn't have the people on my team to be able to explain that this isn't really a risk." Tim: So that's what I'm seeing. I think it's an interesting time in our industry, and that was my disruption story. Joel: Cats and dogs living together. Chad: You see a system collapse. That's what it sounds like. For things to change inside an organization, the system is going to have to collapse for the C-suite to actually take notice. Tim: I hope not. I think that's... So those of you who are listening in talent acquisition, or in procurement, if you're managing contingent labor programs, how closely aligned are you to the individuals in your data security, data privacy, and IFT infrastructure? Can you sit in the room with them and have a conversation about the core vendors you need, and what the APIs are required or what an XML feed might be, and how this would all integrate? Can you have that conversation? If you can't, that's the challenge, because some of the clients I'm talking to? Man, they get it big time, and it's really kind of cool, and there are- Joel: From my perspective, this seems ripe for the gig economy. Am I wrong here? It sounds like the world that you see unfolding is, "Companies suck. I'm going to get on this platform for work. I'm going to work when I want to work, for whom I want to work, get paid what I'm worth." And that's the future. Like are people even going to work full-time for companies? Tim: I have to believe that's always going to be the case. There's always going to be a freelance element to the marketplace. That's just classic economic theory. It makes sense to have flexibility and scalability and specialization and whatnot. But at the same time, companies need stability in their workforce. Joel: Okay, so let's take a thousand Gen Zs. Let's fast-forward 10 years. How many of them are giggers? How many of them are full-time employees? Tim: Well, you probably read the same stuff I do. If you believe it, they're saying what, 40% today is gig? I don't read as much on that trend. So that may be an older statistic, but it's probably going to go up. Joel: And you've also got the side hustle, right? Like you've got my full-time gig and my side hustle. Tim: Joel, the thing that's relevant here is if I'm a company and I have the ability to go out and recruit talent of any workforce category, be it full-time or gig or statement of work... And my tech can do that, and by the way, this thing we're talking about later, in one country, it's contractors, in another country, it's an employee. Identical tech. If I have the ability to do that, and I can onboard you instantly, the whole concept of gig might start to change. I don't know. It might be more fluid and less compartmentalized that... I mean, we're all in a gig, for gosh sake. Especially in America, right? There's no like- Joel: Working with Chad, I'm in hell. That's a different topic... Chad: That's a different kind of gig. That's fine. Back to the risk versus reward statement, what I'm hearing is... Hopefully, we don't get to a system collapse, although talent acquisition and HR really haven't been able to articulate a business reasoning on how it will impact the organization's bottom line, at the end of the day. Because that's what the C-suite's really caring about. Is that what I'm hearing? Tim: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, and just imagine. You don't want to be the CEO who wakes up in the morning and finds out you've had a breach of a half a billion people in your system, right? That's career-limiting type of stuff. It's bad. And so that stuff tend... And the people who are responsible for shutting the breaches down have the rear. The challenge is we need the rear too to say, "Yeah, but if you'll give me the investments, the resources, I won't increase risk, but I will better prepare us for the future." Chad: So what's the difference between experience and process? We're talking about whether it's RPO, RXO, whatever acronym we throw together. Experience is part of the process. So above and beyond the process, what does experience actually bring that's different to this conversation? Tim: Wow. Okay. So now you guys are going to really get me into one of my philosophicals here. I think experience is probably the world's oldest crowd-sourcing technology. Because if you think about it, you know, I make a case that technology does not disrupt, experience disrupts. I don't give a crap what your tool does. It's how it impacts me. Tim: So each one of us, every day, goes through our life experiencing things, and we make in our own individual decisions, at that moment of time, a decision about, "Was the time I invested" - because it's all fixed, for all of us - "worth the experience you returned?" And what's funny is when you have disruptors, they tend to, somehow or other... The hundreds of millions of us who have that experience individually decide this is good and we adopt. And if enough of us have that experience, it disrupts. Ultimately, experience is a feeling. It's emotive. I'm not trying to bring tech. I'm trying to connect with people. And each one of those little steps along the way make them say, "This time I've invested was worth it." 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, comes Sovren's 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 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 show time. Joel: Tim, I want to go back to blockchain for a second. Tim: Oh no. Joel: It looks like your contention is that privacy and the fear of that being stolen or shared without consent is going to be the driver of blockchain. Am I hearing that correctly? Tim: Well, no. I think what you're going to see is the portability of our private information. That... Right now, our PII is housed in all of these different places, like all the different doctors you go to, and every one of them got their own little thing, and each one of those companies then owns all the risk of protecting your PII. So I think if you start to see some companies coming out and saying, "Well, I can take all of that information, and it's part of the service we provide, and just give it to us," then that the provider doesn't have to own it. The blockchain company owns it. Joel: So I get protecting health. I get protecting money. But isn't your professional CV resume something that people want publicized? Do you think privacy in this space really matters? Especially to younger people? Tim: The PII I'm referring to is the stuff that relates to your banking information, your employment experience, your wages, background check, drug screens, all the stuff. I'm very focused on what is the onboarding experience for that person who I took X number of hours or days or weeks to find. How long does it take you to bring them through all those hurdles of, "Go to the background check company, now go to the drug screen, and I need three references, and I need to know what your work history was, and what your salary was. Well, if I have all of that in some system with probably a lot of other stuff that you can't see, then it's going to make that experience a lot quicker. And the companies that I'm seeing- Joel: Portability of that data. Tim: Yeah. And the companies that I'm hearing about, it's interesting. What they're doing is they're trying to approach the world's largest employers. And basically, if you could get the hundred biggest employers in the world to do this, and some of their models are, "Give me your data for free," then you could drive adoption that way. That could be something really interesting. Joel: So an example could be like, "Hey, I've already passed a background check, or here's my background check in the blockchain. I don't have to go through that process." Tim: Right. Joel: And it gets me hired more quickly. Tim: Yeah. Joel: One example. Tim: And I can tell you, like in the staffing industry, that if somebody's a temp working for Staffing Company A, and they go through the exact identical process, and then four months later they're working for another agency, that second agency is just covering a cost that they don't need to if they just had access to the information from the first agency. And then it could flip the next time. So it really is... On a grand scale, if you can drive the adoption across large employers, then you all start benefiting from the share-ability of that information. Chad: Validation in a ledger system. I'm going to get away from blockchain, back to experience real quick. And I know blockchain is a part of this experience because, again, if you have a validated profile and/or background in a ledger system, then everything just squeaks through because you have all the checks, the boxes checked. But when you start talking about experience and providing an exceptional experience, that means different things to different people. Some companies believe they have an exceptional experience right now, which is a 20-minute application on their website. How do you define exceptional experience, and how do you guys currently get people to that experience today? Chad: Because talking about it's one thing. Visionary bullshit is all something entirely different. The actual feet on the ground, the execution of that means something. What is that? What does that mean? Tim: Yeah. So, first, although we're all in the recruitment industry, talent acquisition industry, I would suggest that the experience would not be, should not be the same for all of the people and all of the companies that have a hiring need. But ultimately, it's measured by the value of the person who goes through it. So can we create an experience like our recruiterless RXO, that delivers the value to that candidate for the work that they're going to do? Tim: And maybe that's not the right model for a different kind of hiring environment that isn't 20,000 hires in five weeks and your job is going to last three months or something. If I'm going to hire high-end automotive design engineers, maybe I need a different kind of experience for that candidate. So it may be a little slower. I might put a human in the middle to create the human touch, and then drive automation around that human so that my recruiter, who is building the relationship with the hiring manager and with the candidate, is completely engaged with them and having discussions. Tim: It's very human-feeling. The candidate will be like, "This is great. I mean, I'm getting text messages from my recruiter, giving me status updates. It was so easy to do the interview. Oh, my God, my mom got sick. I had to reschedule. I just got in there and logged in and was able to reschedule the interview with the hiring manager, and they sent him a note, saying no problem," and "Hey, later on, just before they're going to offer me a job, they sent me this awesome video that told me all about the benefits of the company, and I didn't realize that it's not just salary. This company's amazing. I get this and this and this beyond. Oh, I didn't realize that." Tim: So, it's a two-way interface. Three-way, actually, if you think about the hiring manager in the equation. And you want to drive it, I think, based upon supply/demand of talent maybe as a big factor, and maybe hiring volume is a key driver for how you modify the experience. You have to do some trade-offs too. Everybody'd like to have maybe a super high-touch experience, but for some types of roles you've got to streamline them pretty high. Chad: We'll dig deeper into that, especially when it comes to experience. Because there's consistency, there's scalability, there are all those different pieces, and technology is supposed to be making things so much easier for us. But if you have to customize every stack, if you have to customize every interaction, none of that shit's scalable. Tim: I don't know if this is exactly what you're thinking, but one of the points I make in my disruption story is about the rise of talent acquisition as a service, and that it is infinitely impossible to build customized experiences for every possible company, and the integrations, and all crap. So I think what you're going to start to see is companies come into the marketplace saying, "Here's my stack, and you can..." As an outsourcer, I'll use this to deliver the experience to you, or if you just want to lease it and you do it yourself, yeah, that might work too. Chad: So here's the question. You guys and your RPO, you guys are all about efficiencies. You're all about ensuring that... Because this is a business, so that's the difference between talent acquisition. It's their job, but for RPO, for staffing, mainly, especially for RPO, it's a business. So you have to focus on efficiencies. That's the thing. Are you working with the current stacks or are you building a stack and saying, "Okay, this is what we're coming in with. This is what we're offering from an RXO/RPO standpoint." Is that going to be a standardized model that you see happening for the entire industry? Tim: Well, it certainly will start at the vendor level. I mean, obviously we're not collaborating between companies, but yeah, I think you're going to start to see these. I can tell you that the recruiterless RXO solution is, it'll be a product, and we've got another one that's in the queue that will be a product. And so we will give our clients the option of, "Sure, we can come in and consult or outsource what you have." That's a painful process sometimes, but necessary, given certain constraints, or in other cases, here you go. This is world-class, outside your ecosystem. Remove the data, privacy, security concerns. We manage it all. Joel: For a lot of people, including me, RXO is a fairly new thing. Tim: Yes. Joel: Can you define it for me? And are we ready for a world of recruiterlessness? I guess that's not a word, but I just made one up. Tim: Yeah. Chad: Nice. Tim: So recruitment experience outsourcing, coined by our SVP of marketing, Jonny Stokoe. And I think what we're trying to say is it's not just process. I've been in RPO for over 10 years now, and it was always, "your mess for less." Right? Chad: Yes. Yes. Tim: And ultimately what you find out is the whole... It was more than just the Visio of how this thing was supposed to flow that was the problem. And so what we have to focus on is who is interacting with this process, and how can we optimize it so their experience, if we ever really do define it, is better? Tim: And so I think we're putting our focus on, "Yeah, I understand. You want me to go out and find people and take it all the way through onboarding." That's the process, and you've given me my Visio. Now let me show you how I can bring in tools that will change the experience, maybe make it faster or friendlier or more engaging for the candidates so I can drive better metrics or ratios. And ultimately, that's what comes down to. There's ultimately a business case here for all of this. This is not just, "throw a new coat of paint on an old process." When you do it right, you're actually driving some very fundamental structural way of how you're recruiting talent in the marketplace. Very different. Joel: And is part of that the marketing side of it as well? Or is it just the hiring process, and then interviewing, and going through applying? What exactly does all that encompass? Tim: So stepping into the recruiterless world. No, I don't think we'll ever be a recruiterless world. My passion is around making the recruiting experience as a recruiter in that industry - and I was born on a desk - delightful. And the things that I hated were unanswered phone calls, people not returning me back, no show interviews, no feedback from the hiring manager, filling out forms, completing documents. Tim: And the things I loved was meeting somebody who I felt passionate about. Like, "Oh, my gosh, I would just love to see you go to work at this client of mine." And then almost doing the mini-marriage was so satisfying. I would go home at night and my kids didn't say I was a recruiter. They would say, "My daddy helps people find jobs." Tim: But it mattered. It was important work, and I think sometimes we've lost sight of the fact that we're trying to put people to work. And so the recruiterless piece, I think what we've delivered, designed is a better experience. Guys, I know it's not perfect, and we've already got a roadmap for amazing things going into next year, but we've designed a model that, really, the recruiters that are supporting this - they're actually coordinators - love it. Because they're basically optimizing the program, making sure they're completely engaged, and making sure candidates are moving through the process, behind the scenes. No holdup, followups, text messaging, all that kind of stuff. Chad: Right. Here's the hardest piece, and I think the hardest part of the question is adoption. How do you get an old stodgy crew who really hasn't really given a shit about experience for 20 years to adopt? How do you get them to adopt what you're selling right now? Because it is necessary, I agree. It does impact the bottom line. CEOs will care, but again, we haven't articulated that on the talent acquisition side of the house. How are you going to be able to drive adoption? Tim: First, I will say the thing that has been amazing since we launched that program - and we still haven't even told your audience about it, though, since we launched the program September 16 - the number of inquiries coming from across the world to our sales resources is phenomenal. And I've actually had to spend some time saying, "Look, this is not the right solution for everything. I know it sounds amazing, but it's..." Because everybody wants to hire somebody yesterday, and when we talk about the cycle times, they're like, "Oh, I want that, though." Come on, guys. This is... The use case is very specific. Tim: So I actually do think if you build something that catches the marketplace's attention and communicate it, you can kind of create use cases, and I'm probably lifting the boats of some of my competitors, who are probably getting phone calls going, "Hey, can you do that?" Tim: So I think if we all can just take some risk and, I will say, the great thing about working for this huge, mega $26 billion company - and I'm inside one of their brands in Pontoon - we've got a CEO, a lady named Corinne Van Ripoche, who is a disruptor. And when we ultimately sat down with that client and said, "This is what we want to design," there were risks. A lot of this stuff was all theory. And she just said, "We're going to do this. I'll take the risk. We need to be the first. We're going to go." And it wasn't like just "yes," but you've got to have leadership in our industry and our companies willing to take the risk. Joel: I'm going to let you out on this, Tim. One of the things you said early on intrigued me, in that the example of the youth who had a million followers and basically dissing you to that universe of a million followers... And you talk about, in your presentation, about youth culture influences. So we're talking... From TikTok, which Chad and I love to talk about, to Instagram, Snapchat, et cetera. And it struck me that we currently don't have any sort of ranking for commentary about companies. So, Glassdoor, for example... Every comment is created equal. You don't know who's leaving it or how credible any of that is. Take me into a world where that matters. What does that look like? Does blockchain somehow give us more credibility in what we say about things, in the world of the future? Tim: I'm not smart enough to know if there's that 360 loop that'll ever be out there. Would it be great if there was a Yelp for... That we all trusted and was real. I know we say it's Glassdoor, but we know they're a business model too, right? So they're a job board. Joel: Remember the site Klout, that took all your social stuff and your followers and who they were? And that obviously didn't work out, but it seems like that would be an interesting take on employment. Tim: So my reaction is this. It's always one or two incidences that disrupt. The first company that had the big data breach, the first company that had funds stolen. And everybody becomes aware. It's going to be that first company that has something really bad happen because their talent acquisition process isn't adapted, and a group of people actually start re-tweeting. And then there's a tension to it. I don't think it's going to take some fancy app or a benchmarking system. I think what's going to get people's attention is horrible press. Chad: So what are you guys building at Pontoon? So you've kind of teased about this. What are you guys building? We know why, because we just spent half an hour talking about it. Tim: Yeah. Well, the first thing we brought out was our recruiterless RXO solution. So what that is is that's a program supporting a high-tech client, hiring in two countries in Europe, UK and Germany, two languages, awful lot of hires in an extremely short period of time. Stack consisted of an Avature backbone with a hiring manager, portal, and CRM. Tim: We built a career site using TalentBrew technology, multi-lingual. We put job video on it. So most of the jobs that are going out, or many of the jobs that are going out have a video embedded in them to drive SEO and improve conversion. We're using one of the big programmatic vendors to distribute the jobs, and this is really important because you're talking about hundreds of cities with small hiring volumes, and so you have to have this machine learning logic that will know exactly where to promote your job and how much to spend. Tim: And in fact it so outperformed that at one point we turned it off. Which are like stop spend. We can't keep up with the applicant flow. We had a bot apply. A bot has its own logic in it, so it's doing the logic to say they meet the qualifications or not, integrated into a digital interview. So candidates complete their interview and yes, contrary to all the grief I got, it does work in Germany. Okay. All right. Tim: And the funny thing is, this kind of role... Lot of Europeans, not Germans, Eastern Europeans, but Europeans in Germany do this work. Not a problem. We've had some funny ones where we do look at him and go, "What is this dude thinking?" But for the most part, it works great. Awesome conversion rates. It goes back into Avature, where the hiring managers can make their decisions, and all driven by Power BI analytics. So real-time, literally real-time data on all of the metrics. Tim: And what's cool about it is there are no recruiters. There are coordinators and a program leader, but what they're doing is they're living primarily in the programmatic, and then in our BI to look at the ratios. And we know how many clicks does it take to get a view, how many views to get a visit, how many visits to get an apply, how many applies to get an interview, interview to... Every one of those ratios was benchmarked out in advance. We knew we needed for the model to make the math work for us and the client, and that's performing, actually outperforming. So it's got tweaks. I've still got glitchy stuff coming up all the time, but we've already started the roadmap out some... Maybe two more countries potentially coming into scope. Tim: So we've got that one. That was the use case for kind of high volume, high hiring, good supply of talent. All right, I'm boring you. Sorry, guys. And then the next one... There we go, crickets, fine. Tim: The next one is the opposite. So we're working right now on something I affectionately call Hannah. That's just the internal name, but it is a recruiter-centric model where we'll fully enable that recruiter to do their job while providing all the automation around them so that they can do it in an excellent sort of way. And that's the primary focus right now. Joel: Tim, thanks for joining us today. For those who want to know more about you and/or Pontoon, where would they go? Tim: Oh, you can find me, Tim Meehan on LinkedIn, or you can go to pontoonsolutions.com. 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. #RXO #RPO #TimMeehan #Pontoon #process #innovation #Experience #UX #Technology

Gobble! Gobble, fellow Americans! Queue the tryptophan, it's turkey time and you're hopefully enjoying The Chad & Cheese Podcast with a glass of your favorite beer, wine or mead. On this thankful episode, JZ lands a new gig, ClickIQ is hiding something (probably in their comfy pants) and Cielo enjoys a Visage. Whether your prefer pumpkin or pecan, you're gonna love this week's show. Clinch Acquisition Symphony Tech Group sells off First Advantage Cielo Invests in Sourcing Platform Visage ClickIQ is Hiding Something J.Z. and Birch Are On-The-Move This and lots more. Show our sponsors some love - Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. James Ellis: Hey, this is James Ellis from the talent cast, podcasting. You're listening to Chad and Cheese. Really, people listen to this. I thought it was like a joke. I thought it was just a t-shirt and a sweater. Really? They're a podcast? Huh, who knew? 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. Gobble, gobble fellow Americans. Que the trip to fan. It's Turkey time and your hopefully enjoying the Chad and Cheese Podcast with a glass of your favorite beer, wine or in Chad's case mead, on this thankful episode Jay-Z lands a new gig, ClickIQ is hiding something, probably in their comfy pants, and we call out this year's biggest Turkey. Whether you prefer pumpkin or pecan, you're going to love this week show. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Don't push fast forward Adam Gordon. 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: Oh Yeah. Joel: Oh yeah. How do we have this much news on a holiday week? Chad: I don't know, but I am fucking stoked. I am stoked. Joel: Let's get through the shout outs and, and get to the meat or the Turkey, if you will [crosstalk 00:02:30] of the podcast. Chad: You got it. Chad: So the first shout out goes to Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit for reminding us. Joel: What? Chad: with their song, "My generation", that Xers had to wade through the same bullshit Millennials and Zs had to face. It was funny cause I was listening to XM radio this week and that song popped up and I'm like, oh fuck yeah, it was like 20 years ago or something like that. Like, oh yeah, I forgot, they called us fucking slackers. They called us, you know, those guys who have no drive and shit like that. It's like this fucking cycle, right? So I don't like Fred Durst, never have, but shout out to Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit for reminding us all, that this is just a cycle of bullshit that everybody has to go through. Joel: Because we all do it for the nooky, everybody. Shout out to Mason Wong. Chad: Happy Birthday! Joel: A big time fan of the show. He's celebrating a birthday this week, so lots to be thankful for there. Mason, happy birthday buddy, shout out. Chad: Next time we see a lap dance on Joel. Okay. Joel: Oh God, does Mason do that? I don't see him as that type of guy but maybe? Chad: Well, if he's hanging out with us, it's going to have to happen. Joel: Is the Wong going to hang out with us? Sorry, I couldn't resist that one. Sorry. Chad: You've been Wonged. Shout out to Adam Gordon for dropping Clippy into the shareholder meeting webinar this week. I thought that was the funniest fucking thing ever. Remember Clippy? Microsoft's little animated kind of like help bot? Joel: Yeah, we're both old enough to remember Clippy. Although, I'm not sure all of his investors do. Chad: No. So we dropped that and Adam Godson, he actually shared on LinkedIn what Clippy actually is. For all of those who didn't have the pleasure of meeting Clippy before Microsoft killed that little bastard. Joel: Nice. So give us some context here. There was a shareholder meeting, I guess from this crowd sourced investment. So I wasn't there but you were. So what happened? Chad: Yeah, I was. I'm one of the guys, like I said, when it started happening I was like, fuck this, I'm in right. Joel: Yep. Chad: So I'm a shareholder. I was also one of the speakers, and Adam was talking about really being able to have a system that would nurture but to be able to do it in more of like an automated fashion. We were talking about how that would happen? Would there be recipes that would already be set up for these marketing campaigns and whatnot? He said, "well yes to an extent, but there were also going to have like this little Clippy Bot that's going to help people through." So that's where Clippy came in. Joel: You spoke at this meeting? SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Joel: I'm going to give a shout out to Chris Russell. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: His daughter was apparently in a big accident, but no one was hurt. [crosstalk 00:05:21]. Chad: Wow! Joel: He shared a picture of the carnage, quite a miracle that no one was hurt. But, I'm sure he has something extra to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. So Chris a shout out to you buddy. Glad everyone's okay. Chad: Yeah, love you man. Shout out to Tarquin Clark, our friend over at Google for flaming ERE on Twitter this week and their unsubscribe process. Dude. SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: That's exactly right. So here's Tarquin's Tweet. "Dear ERE, you're missing the point on what unsubscribe means." He actually showed a screenshot of an email that he received after he unsubscribed, to take a survey. Joel: Uh-huh (affirmative). Chad: ERE the early 2000 called. They want their unsubscribed policy back. Joel: Yeah. If you get called out by someone at a big company, who has like PR people, that hope you don't do stuff like that. Like that's kind of bad. So yeah. Tarquin man, big pair of balls on you buddy. Chad: Nice. Joel: I'm going to give an unashamed shout out to our sponsors. Since it is Thanksgiving. Uh, we don't exist without you. So I won't get into all the names, you can check them all out at Chad Cheese. But certainly here on the weekly podcast, Sovren, Canvas, JobAdX, We appreciate you and shout out to you. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone at those companies. Chad: That's right check them out at chadcheese.com. Joel: Dot com. Chad: Dot com. Joel: Got to work on that. .io, .ai. Chad: No. Shout out. Quick list here. Shout out to Jasmine Mijuskovic. Misjuskovic. Joel: Easy for you to say. Chad: Misjuskovic. There it is. Joel: Mi-Juice. Juicy. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The juice. Chad: She's in employment brand over at Public Supermarkets. Tom Kenyon at Allegis. Alastair Shirmer at Live Hire. Aaron Dragushaun at Happy Monday. If that's not his name, Dragon-Shaun. He should definitely change it to that. Yeah, I would change my name to that. Aaron. I would do that. Ben Gledhill at Yodel who gave us a shout out on the Pods that he listens to, we were obviously listed, and Ben, I'm sure you know, we're a sucker for lists. So thanks for the shout out man. Joel: That's right. You call me Dragon, I'll call you Nighthawk. Stepbrothers reference. My last shout out and I'm sure you agree, is to the Ohio State, Buckeyes. In addition to this being Thanks Giving, it's also a heavy American Football week and the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry kicking off Saturday at noon. Chad: Beat that team up North. Joel: Yeah, it's on bitches. Chad: Beat that team up North and beat them bad. My last shout out goes to one of our sponsors, we don't talk about that much and we should, Disability Solutions for supporting the transcription of the lion's share of our podcasts. It just blows my mind how many people say they are actually use the transcriptions in either reading through why they're listening, or just scanning through just the text itself, or because of SEO, go figure. They want to be able to find podcasts quickly so they just go to Google, put in Chad Cheese and then whatever the topic is or whatever product is or the actual vendor name and it zips them right to one of our podcasts. Thanks again to Disability Solutions for that. Joel: Yeah. Essentially they are our search marketing solution. Although they're our sponsor and, you're right, people will search Chad Cheese and then a company name to see what we've said about them. So it's a great resource to the community that those guys helped sponsor. So yeah, I echo that shout out. Joel: Topics. Chad: Topics. Joel: This one fresh off the boat, if you will. Hot off the presses. I don't even know what's going on. You talked to Shane. So you, you lay down the news and maybe I'll comment. Chad: clinchtalent.com, or as they were first known as clinch.io, acquired by ATS PageUp, So pageuppeople.com, people.us here in union in the United States. They are an applicant tracking system that is worldwide but emanating out of Australia. Yeah. But I believe this buy was definitely driven by Battery Ventures who owns a large portion of PageUp. So it's one of those things where your venture company says, "Hey look, we're buying some shit and this is how integrations are going to happen. Yeah, you just, make that happen." Joel: Yeah, no doubt. I don't know much about PageUp. I assume they have a major presence there Down Under. Chad: I wouldn't say just your basic ATS, but ATS that is trying to gain market share. Here's a quick quote from our friend Paddy Doyle, who was a CEO of Clinch. "Inclusion of the Clinch functionality within PageUps ATS will enable customers to source and attract the best talent at speed. Both solutions have been designed to deliver a great experience for candidates and recruiters, yada, yada, yada." A lot of this is happening around the acquisitions that we're seeing. Jobvite buys Telemetry. iCims buys Jibe. Symphony buys SmashFly. There are only so many. This feels very reminiscent to Programmatic. There are so many vendors in the space. So if you want to buy an RMP or more of like a Jibe or one of these types of vendors. You had better move fast because they're going quick. Joel: Congrats to Shane Gray. Obviously. Chad: Shane and Paddy. Yeah. Joel: Anyone who's in the industry, probably know Shane, Chad: Oh Gees. Joel: One of the nicest people, human beings, you'll ever meet. Chad: Yep. Joel: You've definitely seen him somewhere on social media if you're in the community. You talked to him sort of at length in terms of what his role will be now? Will he continued to skip around the globe? Will he be more landlocked? Any news on that? Chad: I would say you can't keep the hardest working man in Ireland, the UN hell across the entire globe. Shane Gray, you can't keep that man down. That's the thing is that Paddy Doyle, I don't know if there is a name out there that is more Irish than Paddy Doyle, but CEO, Paddy Doyle and Shane Gray, this is a bootstrap team who I guarantee you this was not a clearance rack item. Joel: Yep. Chad: Because of the moves that we talked about earlier. This is a validated market. Jobvite buys Telemetry. ICims buys Jibes. Symphony buys SmashFly. Joel: Yep. Chad: I mean from my standpoint, I don't see any changes in what Shane does, cause Shane does what Shane does, and that's why you have a guy like Shane Gray in your organization. I can't say that we love that guy to death just because he is such an awesome dude. Not to mention every time we see him, for God's sakes, he's handing us fresh Guinness that he just brought over from Ireland. Joel: Yeah, that's who this guy is. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let me bringing those idiots some beer from Dublin because they love it so much. That's who Shane is. Chad: Yeah. Joel: If you haven't partied with Shane and Paddy, my God, you have not lived. Chad: I have a picture, and this is funny now. I have a picture of us in a bar in Ireland with Shane and also Thom Kenney, the former CEO of SmashFly. So that might be one that we have to actually get framed. Joel: Could I get more Irish than Shane, Paddy and Thom with an H? My God. Chad: I don't think so. Joel: Jesus. Chad: But this makes you think once again we have to ask what is Phenom and Beam Ray's next move. Joel: Yeah, and how does our buddy at Candidate ID think about all this acquisition stuff? Chad: This has got to make him excited as hell because he hasn't taken as much money and he's not beholden to work day, like Beam Ray is, or female who's taken a bunch of money as well. So I mean overall the big question is when you're in this space, do you do what Shane, Paddy and Clinch did and really bootstrap the shit out of this and come up with a great product and look for an awesome exit, because you don't have all of this money that you have to pay back to investors, or do you take this shit tons of investment and try to see if you can build a bigger platform out of that? I mean there are many different types of ways to exit. I love what they did. Joel: Yeah, and by the way, January, 2014 was Clinch's launch date, so that's almost six years in the making, that this has happened. So that's a whole lot of bootstrapping that's been going on. So extra happy for those guys. Chad: Then we have another acquisition, which I think, on the surface level it doesn't seem that exciting, but I think it is, a PE firm Silver Lake buys First Advantage from Symphony Talent Group. Joel: For a projected that the numbers weren't released but the whisper number out there is for $1.5 Billion. Which is not chump change. I can tell you from my short period in the background check company, that First Advantages, one of the top three in terms of size, you've got them, you've got Hire Right, and you have Sterling. So you know from a background check company perspective or industry perspective, I think that's sort of certainly interesting. I think in terms of talent or I mean simply focusing resources on other things is interesting as well. Particularly in light of SmashFly coming into the fold. Chad: Yeah. Well, I think this is a really smart deal for Symphony Talent cause, you know, background screening, drug testing and the lot. Joel: Total commodity. Chad: Dude, it's a shit ton of cash. It's very profitable. Joel: It's a shit tone. It's profitable. Chad: But that's not their focus. And if you think back in the Findly days when they were trying to become the one platform to rule them all. First Advantage had, or maybe currently has, an ATS, the background checks and they were trying to meld all of that with the user experience in marketing. Findly then having Hodes sell it, seemed to be genius, the problem was execution obviously. Where the rubber hits the road and it just didn't work, and this is another marvelous, I think, decision from Symphony to be able to, and even though it does make a lot of money. Yeah, go get your $1.5 billion out of it. The question is what does Symphony get to do with that cash? What kind of shit do they get to buy now? Joel: Yeah, get your chat bot ready folks. Get your, you know, whatever else. Get your recruiting robot ready, their tin guy who knows there could be a box for that out there for you. That's probably a long shot. But yeah, I think the chat bot things probably a greater, a greater, a greater chance of happening. Chad: There are rumblings out there, this is total rumor. HireRight is looking to buy CareerBuilder's background check business so that might, this might actually spur that deal to happen faster. Who knows? Joel: Yeah. And if you start putting the puzzle pieces together there, we'll, we'll talk about this later, but you've got Paradox who was white labeling, Smashfly's chat bot and Symphony buying, you know SmashFly and if we're looking at predictions for next year, you know, Paradox and Symphony could, could be something to happen, Chad: could be a wonderful relationship. Joel: Speaking of level relationships, our relationship with job ad X is as lovely as it can be. Let's get a word from them and we'll talk about Cielo and click IQ. JobAdX: Nope, nah. 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 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, employ with jobAdX. Joel: RPO. This is your RP Cielo, Chad: But, I mean it's tech in. I thought it was interesting because Cielo invests, quote unquote invests in a platform called visage, which is a vis V I S a G E or for Sage and fuck, I don't know. Anyway, bison, this is a crowdsourced sourcing platform, which means it's like a Mike a marketplace, right? So you put in, you put your requisition in and you have all of these source sourcers from around the globe converge and they source for you. So it's on demand. And I thought, you know, is this really a thing? I mean seriously is, is this really a thing when we have bots that are out there, we have algorithms that are out there and what's like the hiring solved and whatnot that we'll do this in seconds, Joel: which, which by the way, it's probably what the humans that are in this service are actually using to find the people that they're providing for the service. Chad: Since HiringSolved isn't free anymore, I don't think so. Adam Godson who is like the chief stud tech dude over there. He, he's one of the guys that I always go to talk about tech in the industry, especially from a strategic standpoint because again, RPO recruiting is their business. It's not their job. It's how they make money, right? Chad: That's different than talent acquisition talent acquisition there. They're professionals, but they don't have to worry about bottom line when it actually comes to placing candidates, et cetera, et cetera. So you're going to go into an RPO and talking to them about tech because it's all about efficiency. It's all about margin, it's all about EBITDA. My question to him was, dude, this doesn't make sense to me. Why aren't you using tech to do this? Chad: And he that when you're looking at a people aggregator where there's more nuanced matching and better understanding of the actual job, they get better results. And that's what they've seen. They actually did a six month pilots before they started the, you know, the, the, the conversations around investments and they were blowing their numbers out of the water. So AI and the AI matching in some cases does, it is like magic. It's just, it's not there yet. Joel: So let me get this straight. These guys put visage vice age or whatever. We're calling it through the due diligence and found that people were able to provide greater results than what the automation tools were. Is that what I'm hearing? Chad: Yeah. Cause they could understand the actual jobs better. Cause if you think about it, one job description from one company is so much different than the other for the exact same type of position. But yet that's a nuance that in many cases an algorithm just can't understand yet. I think it'll get there just can't yet recruiters can, and they have a stable in many cases of candidates and that they can go ahead and start pushing toward these wrecks. And they have around 3,500 sourcers now that are in this community that now has Cielo sourcers in it as well. So I mean they're just really turbocharging what they've already been doing for years. Joel: One of the things that human beings are able to do is allow these recruiters know the people that they're actually trying to place. They're that good and they know the companies that they're trying to fit in with these people. So there's a culture combination that you don't get with just Hey, match these description words with these resume words and hope that we get it right. I think the nuance, like you said, of the human sort of middleman means a whole lot. And I think it's, I think it speaks quite, quite loudly that Cielo thought enough of a, a human, you know, manual old school technology to, to acquire the company. I think that says a lot about the company as well as maybe Hey humans aren't, aren't done after all. Chad: Well they haven't acquired it. They just invested money in it to help it grow. Right. To be, to be able to shore it up and support it. Joel: Soon to acquire. Chad: Yeah. Possibly. Possibly to have 20 plus clients that, that was a part of this, this pilot. And, and it was funny cause I was chatting back and forth with Adam and he, he likened this to Uber versus taxi and it comes to costs effectively sourcing to meet in the need of an on demand model. So instead of having recruiters that are there that don't have wrecks or sourcers who don't have wrecks to actually work on, it's kind of like turning on and off that spigot. Right? And this is more of a new model for them to be looking at. And again, perspectively for talent acquisition to start at least looking at maybe not in the adoption phase yet, but when an RPO starts to adopt, piloted the shit out of it, they've tested it on multiple clients in this case, 20 not just one. And, and that's an indication, I think a signal to talent acquisition to, to be able to look at these things. Joel: A mosquito, my libido, way to go. Cielo. Chad: Boom. Joel: Click IQ, our Turkey. If you want. What did click IQ do this week? Chad: What, what didn't they do? So hearing from many sources that click IQ, and this is one of the things that we feared in indeed buying any programmatic player click IQ has turned into an indeed buying house. We actually saw [crosstalk 00:00:24:33]. SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: that is one way we had screenshots that showed some of their new kind of like user experience, their UI where you go into the main screen and all it shows is indeed in glass door and you have to click out to another tab to get to the rest of your life. Quote unquote job board partners. And most of those quote unquote partners weren't fucking job boards. They're actually aggregators but they were Indeed competitors. Right. Joel: So you're, are you saying indeed bought someone to create a competitive advantage over everyone else? Chad: I am saying that. Joel: That's weird. Chad: The thing that I'm hearing though. And again, we're, we're, we're still to an extent, this is several sources, but again, just kind of like we haven't validated through Indeed or Click IQ cause they won't return our calls. Yep. Companies like NUGU ZipRecruiter have dropped out of being included in the click IQ platform because of this kind of shenanigan. Joel: Nice. Nice. So I do love the screenshot of like Glassdoor, Indeed, and then what does it more in or something that it likes to have in the dashboard and then you have to go deeper in into those air minds. Me of about six years ago, Google analytics used to hide some of your keywords and then SEO is freaked out and like there was a whole sort of thing about it. So indeed is historically apt to copy everything Google does. So the fact that they've sort of hidden data from their users does not surprise me because Google did that about six years ago or so. Wow. Chad: Here's the thing for all of the competing organizations that are out there, and I'm not just talking about the aggregators, I'm talking about the programmatic players that are out there who competed with perspectively, competed with click IQ. Man, this should be your Thanksgiving day. You should be feasting on all of these client and all of these partners that click IQ and indeed are putting into that second fuck you tab. Joel: I can hear the phone ringing at new BU's, Montreal headquarters right now. Is it a different rig in Canada? I'm not sure. Joel: I would say, yeah, I still think they have the rotary dials up there. Joel: Well, they all still have blackberries, I think. I think that's still I kid because I love the Canadians. Joel: You have to because you're married to one. Joel: All right, well way to go click IQ. This turkeys for you who's not a Turkey is Sovren. Let's hear from them and we'll, we'll talk about some folks on the move. Joel: Yeah. 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: On the move. Joel: On the move. We don't do this very much. So this is, this is a big deal. Listeners. Chad: Yeah. These are, these are, these are a couple of big moves. SmashFly CMO, Josh Zywien, a friend of the show. He's going to the bots, man, he's a Jay Z. It's match Y and we'll be coming to a chat bot company very, very soon. Joel: And if my prediction is right, going back to symphony talent very, very soon. Chad: Possibly. Yeah. Joel: Yes. Yeah. Like I said symphony SmashFly a paradox chat bot. Yeah. And connect the dots. Yeah. But JZ, a great guy, I'm obviously very close with the paradox folks, so can't speak more highly of either one of those. So that'll be a fun relationship to watch heading into next year. Chad: Well, and JZ, I mean the self, admittedly he is a builder. He loved the startup kind of like atmosphere of, of SmashFly. Not that that's going away with symphony, but you know, he was, he was lured away by another really compelling story. If you think about it, I mean, chatbots are hot right now, shit. And to be able to not really jump ship because they're still white labeled into SmashFly, but to be able to get into an organization you know a lot about because you did have such, you know, close partnership with developing Emerson, you know, it's, I think a good move. So good for him and definitely good for Aaron who needs a smart guy like a JZ to keep him straight. Joel: Yeah. And I think that it, I think it speaks highly of paradox who, let's face it, JZ probably could've gone just about anywhere. Yeah. And to pick paradox, I think, you know, speaks highly of them. Chad: Well and I think JZ, if he was there before the whole Madonna McDonald shit wouldn't have went down like it did. Just saying. Joel: You just had to bring that up then. Chad: Yeah. It's not my fault, dude. It's stupid. Anyway, now, now SmashFly is left in the very capable hands of Elise merrier, whom we've been working with and the Colt brand podcast and also got a pimp out to that. We're, we're going to be doing some stuff with SmashFly at The Cult Gathering in bang-up in February. Yeah, I mean we're, we're really stoked about that. And again, if you're in branding, employment, branding and marketing in our space and talent acquisition, HR, whatever, right? This is the time that you, I believe, need to start bridging over into the big branding conversation and big marketing conversation and go to Banff in February, the number one rated branding and marketing conference in the world by Forbes. If you hadn't got your tickets, go to CultGathering.com and get your damn tickets because we're excited to go. Joel: All due respect to SmashFly and symphony aren't going to miss a beat cause Elisa's bad ass. Chad: She has pretty bad ass. Yeah, there's no question. There's no question. And then our, our second movement here is you probably all know Birch Faber with your CMO texture crew. A little company that it was one of the, I think very first that really set the alarm bells off around texting chatbots and got everybody excited. I mean Dan got everybody excited, don't get me wrong, but that was 26 fucking billion dollars. We're talking about an organization like text recruit to get acquired by an organization like ice hymns. That was a big change in the market and Birch was one of the guys that actually made that happen. He is now the CMO over at our friends at XOR, Aida, Aida at XOR. Another chat bot, Joel: Another chat bot. Yeah. So a no surprise chatbots are priming themselves for a big 2020 and bringing in some heavy hitters on the marketing side isn't going to hurt any. Chad: No, I w and didn't they just receive like $9 million in investment? Joel: Yeah, they got money, I'm not sure. And they moved to San Francisco and yeah. Yeah. So Chad: yeah, I think, I think they, they've already received like two investment rounds, but anyway, good on JZ. Good Birch, great stuff to be able to see me like it. Organization like XOR, very small, starting to rev their engines. This again is an indicator a Birch has already been there, done that with an acquisition, with a witch, with a core platform. What do you think? What do you think XOR is trying to target with this type of acquisition? A guy who knows pretty much was on on the train while this was happening. Joel: Yeah, I mean if he can replicate what happened to TextRecruit, I'd say that'd be really good for zaur, but just specifically the kind of client base that TextRecruit had fits really, really nicely with chatbots. And so to the degree that Birch can replicate what he did at TextRecruit was XOR. I think that's a very good thing for XOR Chad: That it is congrats. Joel: well dude, I guess that's our show for today. Chad: I say, we out. Joel: We out. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Chad: Happy Thanksgiving. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast with Chad. The cheese. We 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 the 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. #Clinch #Acquisition #Cielo #ClickIQ #Indeed #Neuvoo #ZipRecruiter #Smashfly #SymphonyTalent #TextRecruit #XORai

This episode features Jason Roberts a guy who knows recruitment, process, and technology. This podcast is jam-packed with topics like: - It's a "Programmatic Fire Sale" - I Frankensteined a tech stack - Monster matching works? - Hatin' on Indeed's Be Seen - Everyone wants a chatbot! and much much more... Big thanks to Sovren for making this podcasting exclusive magic possible. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability 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 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. Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad & Cheese podcast. Chad: All right, guess where we're at? Joel: Oh yeah. Chad: Where are we at? Austin, dude. This is fucking awesome. Joel: This is the quintessential, like Texas- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Front porch- Chad: Out on a balcony- Joel: Really nice- Chad: TA tech- Joel: Weather- Chad: Oh, shit. Joel: Whatever kind of tree this is. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That's shading us. This is nice. Chad: That's a Bur Oak. Joel: Thank you. Jason: That's a Bur Oak. Yes. Chad: A Bur Oak. Joel: Yes. Now I just need some sweet tea, and some key lime pie, I think. Jason: Whoa. No. Pecan pie, thank you. Chad: Pecan. Joel: My bad. I had a Florida moment there. Jason: You did. Chad: That voice you hear is the voice of Jason Roberts. And, let me set this up real quick. So when we get an opportunity to actually get some of the cream of the crop on the show- Joel: Cream of the crop. I don't think he's ever given anyone that label before. Jason: I'll take it, 100 percent. Chad: Adam and Quincy, and I mean those guys, Jason's of that same level. Joel: He's on a one name basis. He's like Madonna and Prince of the industry. Chad: In RPO for how many years? Jason: Oh, gosh. Over a decade. Chad: Over a decade in RPS. So RPO again, for the listeners out there, recruitment process outsourcing. This is the business of recruiting. These guys focus on margins. They focus on efficiencies. They focus on technology that in most cases, talent acquisition, they just don't have time for it, because they're dealing with 401ks and- Joel: They're focused on the biz nasty, is what you're saying. Jason: It's true. Chad: So that being said, Jason, what do our listeners need to know about you other than all this wonderful setup? Jason: I think that was pretty good, man. You made me sound pretty good. Chad: What's your last name for those that aren't on a one name basis with you? Jason: That's probably good. I'm just one name. That's all I need. Chad: Cher, Madonna. Joel: Jason and the argonauts. Jason: Aren't there dudes? Chad: Prince. Jason: Prince. Yeah. I was going to say, there's got to be a guy. Joel: Just, Jason. Jason: So, I'm Jason Roberts, and that's right, I've worked in RPO for a long time. I don't work in RPO, right now. So, that's a new thing for me. Chad: Okay. It gives you a time to breathe at this point though, right? Jason: It does. You know what I've realized, I had to sort of do a little soul searching, and decide what my next chapter was going to be. Joel: You should start a podcast. Jason: I've got one. We just don't record very often. So, yeah. In fact, we've added that to our tagline. We've said, it's like the best in bots, and whatever he says. Then I just tack on, every once in a while, because we are not consistent at all. We just do it for fun. We don't do the business of podcasting like you boys. Joel: The biz nasty. Chad: The business. Jason: The business. Chad: So, give us some background when it comes to tech, because again, we talk about tech all the time, but behind the scenes we talk about stacks, and all that shit that's not used, and so on and so forth. Your whole focus was efficiencies, and making sure that you got everything out of the tech that you put together in RPO. Jason: Yeah. So there's a problem in technology in that there's a litany of different techs out there. There's modularization is what I call it, right? So if you want the best in breed, you have to have 10, 15 different pieces of tech. And if those are going to be useful for anyone, they have to be sort of woven together through an integration, a sort of string of integrations, really, to create a stack that makes sense. And we're in an age right now ... I've been thinking a lot about this. We're in this sort of age of acceleration, right now. So, we were talking about the second machine age. I talked about that for about three years, now, and now I'm pretty convinced that we're at this point where technology is accelerating so fast that people can't keep up with it. Chad: Oh, yeah. Moore's law, right? Jason: Thank you. That's exactly what it is. But see, people don't think about Moore's law and the fact that there's a downstream effect of that, right? The processing power is ... I used to think about Moore's law meaning, oh, processing power doubles every two years. The last doubling was 18 months. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Jason: So, I used to think about that, and I thought, oh, video games are going to be way better two years from now. Chad: Exactly. Jason: That was the whole purpose for me. Chad: Latency. That was awesome. Jason: That was my whole thought. And now if you think about it, the reason we're able to order a car on our phone is because the size of that processor has gotten so small that it just fits in your hand, right? So, technology has created new thing that we are having to adapt to, and that ... Uber is a good example of that, right? Jason: So if you have ride share that you can call up, government is trying to adjust for that today, right? They're trying to figure out how do we legislate around this? What are the rules we need to have on these app based ride share deals that are out there? And, here's the problem. Maybe three or four years from now, they're going to be done figuring out what those rules are, and three or four years, Moore's law has already kicked in a couple of times. Guess what's here? Self-driving cars are good to go. Whatever they just legislated is now completely obsolete, because we don't have drivers anymore. And, I think you guys did a story on the California law that they ... the resolution they passed for gig workers, specifically hitting Uber, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Will be obsolete, at some point. Jason: Yes. There's no point. By the time laws get enacted across the board, those people will just be replaced by self-driving cars. And, what do you do then? There's a whole new set of laws. Jason: So, technology's moving so fast that it's hard for our government systems, and in our world, in HR, it's hard for HR leaders to adapt quickly enough, and to understand what to do with it. Joel: I think the litmus test will be, is it killing people? So e-cigarettes, killing people, legislation follows. So if it's not killing anybody, let's just let it ride. Jason: Have you been looking at the watch, and the e-cigarette memes? Like, the- Joel: No, but I can only imagine. Jason: Oh, gosh. Joel: I don't mean to make light of people dying. Like, that's crazy shit. But the point is like- Chad: No, but that moves the needle. Joel: Governments at some point, what moves them to action that's relevant to our lives, people dying is one of them. Jason: That's one of those things. And, they can move faster when that happens. Joel: When public opinion says, holy shit. Jason: And with Uber, public opinion is, we freaking love this thing. Joel: Unless, it's guns. That's a whole other podcast. Chad: Yeah. And, people don't give a shit about that at all. Jason: That's the meme that's out there. Joel: Oh, really? Jason: They'll put out, three people died from e-cigarettes. We're going to ban them. And then, the gun control goes right next to it. And, that's a hard discussion to have. Joel: What of the founders would have thought about e-cigarettes wrote the constitution. Jason: Moore's law, man. It was before their time. Joel: So, what else in technology has you excited? I know that you just got back from SourceCon. Jason: I did. Joel: You talked about fully automated recruiting, which I think we've been talking about is the panacea of where this thing is going. Joel: So, talk about that presentation. What else has you geeked on tech? Jason: Yeah, I want to tell you about that. So, we built something at Randstad, right before I left, and it was ... I've got to say, I was pretty happy with the way that it came out. So, the idea is that we built a fully automated sourcer. So, we had a fully automated recruiter on the agency side, even if you're looking at that side. So the idea is, we have jobs come in. We match candidates in all of our databases, and there's a bunch of candidates in the databases, including Monster's, at the time, right? Chad: Yeah. Jason: So, we match all of those candidates. We send send matched candidates over to a bot. And, we used bot that ... I think it is sort of flying under the radar, but they've got a killer feature that makes the fully automated thing work. Jason: And, the bot was Wade and Wendy that we used. The killer feature is, when they got the new job in, that they'd never seen before, they have a knowledge graph, and they build their own chat. But what people don't know about the bots is that, with most of them they work in high volume sort of roles where you're hiring a lot of the same thing, and the reason they've gone to those roles first is that, you have to spend some time building that chat every time. So for each role, there's effort involved in building the chat. When the machine can write its own chat, it doesn't matter what sort of job you get. So for white collar roles, like if you have a big multinational conglomerate with 80 percent uniqueness, month over month, in their jobs, chatbots aren't a great solution, the traditional ones, I say traditional, they've been around for three years. Jason: Eli is a three year old company with what? 80 million in funding, at 300 million dollar evaluation. Chad: Yeah. Jason: That's crazy. Chad: That shit ton of cash. Jason: That's crazy. So I mean, and they're great at what they do. They automate their piece of the process really well. But, when Wendy is one that is really good at that sort of white collar worker, where you have lots of unique jobs all the time. So we pumped it through this thing, and we were able to submit candidates to jobs pretty quickly. The stats that came out of on the back end is that it was about a quarter of the cost of having a human sourcer do the work in order to have the machine do the work. Chad: So a quarter of the cost, and then also, are you taking out the actual head count cost of the person, or did you even take that out? Jason: Not yet. Not yet. So we were just doing ... We did a comparison. Chad: So, it was even less expensive? Jason: What we did is we measured what a sourcer's target metrics are. Was. So, a good sourcer handles this many wrecks. They do this many submits per week. So, we had the sourcer targets. So not all sources are hitting those, but enough of them are, and then we measured that against what the actuals were that the machine produced, and the machine produced about four times as much. It's blazing fast. And, we started it out, playing with this on the MSP side, just to see what we could figure out. And, it was great. It did a good job. Joel: So, let's break this down, real quick. So, you had an OpenRec, basically matched a database of resumes that included what Monster had in their database, and whatever private database you had. So, there was a matching component that matched whatever the job was to the candidates you had. Jason: We used Monster's matching, which is ... It's what used to be Trovix. We use their stuff, and it's still good, still good. Joel: While they pimp videos, Instagram for jobs, they have this awesome matching machine that they're not maybe leveraging as much as they could. But, that's maybe- Jason: I'm not involved in those decisions. That's a different thing. Joel: Yeah, let's stay on task here. So, you feed the resumes in the matching machine, the matches happen, an email goes out to all the matches saying, hey, we have this great opportunity. If you'd like to talk to us about it, click here. They click the link that takes them to a Wade and Wendy chat bot. They get chatted up. They basically apply through the chat. They get pre-screened. And if they fit, there's scheduling for an actual interview, from there? Jason: If they're fit, we've treated it ... The way we built it was, we built it to work just like a sourcer, as if it were a sourcer. Everything I'm telling you is something I just delivered in a presentation at SourceCon. So, we treated it as a sourcer, so it actually sent ... In order for adoption to work, recruiters, we like recruiters to sort of feel like they're in their normal process. We set it up so that it would send an email with a writeup on the candidate, and attachment of the resume, and an attachment of the chat transcript. And basically said, hey, this is so and so, we think they're qualified for this job. Here's their resume. Here's my conversation. They're ready to go. Joel: So it wasn't as granular as like, you fit what we need, let's schedule an interview. It went to a human, to then decide to whether, or not they should schedule something. But it certainly could get to a point, you think, where it does schedule, and- Jason: That's actually easy. That's an easy next step. A lot of these tools use the same sort of API call for that with Cronofy. So, that's an easy step. But, we put it at the human side, because we can submit candidates directly to a recruiter, or the next step is we can submit them directly to a hiring manager if we want it to. Chad: Yeah. Jason: What we found was that recruiters did the same thing they do with sourcers, right? So sourcers send you an email with a candidate, there's a certain percentage of recruiters that don't even actually open the email. The sourcer has to chase them down for it, so that adoption wasn't what we wanted it to be. Jason: So, we made pivots along the way, and figured out new things. But I think the bottom line is, the technology there is there for matching. It works like it's supposed to. And actually, that technology is a little ... It's been around for awhile. I was going to say it's dated, but it still works. So, it's not dated. It's still works. Chad: Oh, yeah. Over a decade. Jason: Yeah. It's been- Chad: It was bought by Monster. Jason: I'm sure they've done something with it. I'm sure they've updated it in some way. I don't have visibility of that. But, that's good. And the bot based stuff is getting really good. Wade and Wendy is a pretty understated bot in the market. You don't hear a ton about them, but I think it might be- Joel: Full disclosure. Randstad is an investor in Wade and Wendy, or they're part of their ... ? Jason: Randstad is an investor from their innovation fund. Yeah. And, that's how I was introduced. Chad: AllyO, as well. Jason: AllyO, too. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Jason: I like both of those. I think they're both good. Chad: Put some money on different horses. Joel: Place some bets. Chad: Yeah. Jason: Well, I think you need a different club for a different hole. Right? So, if you've got a ... What? I said, hole. Chad: He said, hole. Jason: So, for if you need like high volume, you want to automate deep into the process ... Chad: Right. Jason: Oh, man. I keep going. Joel: Keep going, Jason. Chad: He's taking the hole deep. Joel: I am. That just happened. AllyO's the is one for that. Chad: Okay. AllyO, taking the whole deep. That's the new slogan. Jason: I think they should go with that. They should absolutely do that. Joel: And the O at the end of their name fits perfectly for the visual on that, I think. Chad: Yes. AllyO. Jason: Man, I'm going to get a phone call from Ankit, when this is all said and done. He's going to ask what the hell's going on. Isn't Sahil here? Chad: I don't know if he is, or not. Jason: He's like on your Death Match. Chad: First and foremost, you're welcome for all of the marketing help. Jason: Thank you. Well actually you know what, say that to the AllyO guys. That's theirs. They can thank you. Chad: Yeah. Jason: So my pick for sort of the non high volume, the white collar stuff is Wade and Wendy. That's where I go for that. And so ... Joel: So, what else at SourceCon caught your eye? Jason: Jim Stroud just never ceases to amaze. Chad: I love that guy. Jason: And, he comes up with weird stuff. Chad: Yes. Jason: And, here's the bottom line. I thought people were going to freak out, because I was showing this automated sourcer, and so I've made a point to point out some of the stuff that's out there. Maybe, we don't need automated sources all the time. Right? The automated sourcer actually didn't fill all the roles, and it had the same struggles that that human sourcers had, but it can't do things like be Jim Stroud. And, Jim Stroud had this thing that just ... It's not a technology thing, but it blew my mind. So simple. He had the Christmas card method of finding emails and phone numbers. You want to know what that is? Joel: I do. Chad: I want to hear this. Announcer: 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 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. Chad: It's show time. Jason: If you're trying to do get phone numbers for an organization, you figure out what their email, sort of template is. You send emails to massive numbers of people in their organization on a major holiday. So, you send it on Christmas. And read all the auto responders back, where people put their phone number, and the who to contact, and all that stuff. Is that not genius? Chad: Yeah. Jason: It's super basic. It seems like it's a no brainer, but I didn't think of it. Jim Stroud. Chad: Super basic. That's why you need guys like ... I mean, guys like Jim Stroud- Joel: That's evil genius level. Jason: Right? Chad: -are not going away. It's the lazy asses who don't think like Jim Stroud, who are, not going to go away. I mean, this is process thing. Joel: Yeah. I was going to say, how much longer can SourceCon happen where sourcers just go and learn about how they're going to be out of a job. Chad: So, just be a bunch of robots talking, is that what you're saying? Joel: But, SourceCon continues to just get bigger and bigger because of crazy shit like the Jim Stroud stuff. Jason: Well, I think the people who go to SourceCon are the people who are going to survive that whole thing. Right? So, they're the ones that are doing the crazy stuff. They're not the ones who find every candidate on LinkedIn. They're the ones who are actually applying these crazy methodologies, and being creative. There was stuff like open source intelligence discussions. When I describe people at SourceCon, I use the analogy of the sort of the behind the scenes person on all the crazy TV shows like the nerd that's back there looking up the license plate of some crazy, some bad guy, or whatever. That's what an entire conference full of people SourceCon are. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Like a forensics kind of guy. Yeah. Joel: It's the forensics scientists. Jason: That's exactly what they're doing. They're doing like URL manipulation, and just insane things. Now, I hold on to all my identity stuff super tight. I don't love my Bluetooth roam. I don't do anything when there's a SourceCon guy around. Chad: Oh. Hell, no. Yeah, because those guys ... I mean, that is an invitation to break into your shit, that SourceCon. Jason: They are the hackiest bunch of people I've ever seen. Chad: Yeah. It's like going to a hackathon. If you have your shit open, you're going to get hacked. Jason: In fact, they have a hackathon at SourceCon. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Jason: So, it was impressive. I saw a couple of technologies I'd never seen. Have you seen Oleo? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Jason: How have I not seen Oleo? They were good. They're like a CRM for an event management type thing for campus. And there's another company I'd never seen before called, Resource. This was really clean. I loved what they did. So say you're on LinkedIn, you have a profile, and you want to get that profile into your ATS, you want to start a campaign. Chad: Yeah. Jason: They boil it down to one click. So, they're a Chrome extension. Chad: Yeah. Jason: You basically tell it, what's your sourcing for at the time You say, this is the campaign I'm going to send all my people to. You do that the first time you find somebody you want. As you're looking at people on whatever site you're on, if you see somebody you want, you click that button. It drops them in your ATS, and drops them into your campaign, sends them a message right away. Chad: So, that's like ZAP Info ish, isn't it? Jason: It is. I think it's the initial business case of the ZAP Info. ZAP Info evolved to be something really extraordinary. Chad: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Jason: I spent a bunch of time with Doug. He went to dinner with us one night, Doug Berg. And that guy- Chad: He's a genius, man. Jason: He is. He sees around the corners like nobody I've ever seen. And he has a way of distilling kind of what the actual problem is people are dealing with, that is shocking to me. So like his ... The current thing that ZAP is talking about, what they're working on is about two things, one, GDPR, and the other is OFCCP, so the regulation problems, right? So GDPR, what he's doing is, he's basically making it a single place to gather consent, and then to, once that consent is gathered, distribute that candidates information into the downstream system, so you're not gathering consent from multiple places. Chad: Right. Jason: That's a problem in GDPR, right? Chad: Yeah. Jason: So OCCP, this is brilliant. He's a Chrome extension. He's sitting on your ... The ZAP is sitting on your browser. It's tracking what you're doing, or it can track if you do that, what everyone's doing, why not use that for tracking internet applicant stuff. So, every search that you do, keeping a snapshot of the search string, all those things. Because- Chad: That's big brother shit, right there. Jason: Well, I guess- Chad: It's necessary for an employer. Jason: Right. In evil hands, I guess, it could be. But what that's doing is, you're supposed to be tracking every search that you do, everyone that that shows up in those searches, that's in order to be compliant with OFCCP internet applicant rules, I don't think I have to say full disclosure when Randstad invested everything, but they invested in ZAP. Jason: I liked Doug before then. Let's just assume that Randstad invested in all things, and we'll leave it at that. Joel: Okay. Chad: You pretty much do. Joel: So, who else can we jerk off this after? Jason: Oh, I don't know, man. Joel: Anyone at this show? (TAtech) Chad: What, no. I don't want to jerk anything. What sucks? What have you seen that ... You've heard, and you've got ... I mean you're talking about things that actually work. Joel: Here we go. Chad: What about this shit that does not work? Joel: Let's sling some a mud, man. Come on. Balanced reporting. Chad: It says AI, because they thought, or whatever, right? Just, what doesn't work? What is bullshit? What's smoke and mirrors? Jason: I'm a little grumpy Indeed Seen thing that they got going. Joel: Oh, Be Seen? Jason: Be Seen. Chad: Let's get into this. So, Indeed. This is the new Indeed Prime, by the way. Joel: It's not just the Be Known play that you sparked, right? Jason: No, no, it's not Be Known. It's a different thing. Though, I like being known as a URL. It's not bad. It's not a bad thing. Chad: Just a bad product. Jason: No. So, Indeed's got this deal that you can be, you can subscribe. It's- Joel: It's their prime product. Jason: It's Hired, isn't it, Hired? Joel: It's Prime. Hired is still a product. Jason: No, but isn't it the same thing as Hired? Are they pre-qualifying this talent? Joel: So, I read and chime in. I read Hired as straight up staffing. It's staffing done Indeed style, or whatever. I view Seen as a little bit of a hybrid of automation, and manual labor. Jason: Yeah. I would be super curious to see how much manual is behind the scenes on that. Joel: And, Seen is focused primarily on the tech stuff. Chad: Is that not like the major differentiator? I think what they're trying to do is, they're trying to do staffing, and they're trying to do it in a very scalable fashion, which is one of the things that we were just talking about. So building an internal stack that allows a company to come to you for a specific type of individual, and then, it's staffing, but it's staffing subscription, versus ... But, I think that that is the Hired model, is it not? Joel: To me, there's no doubt that it's a step into the staffing business. Chad: Oh God, yeah. Joel: I think there are some levels of automation, and they're not really transparent on the website, as far as what they're doing to get candidates, but I don't think it's straight up, we do the interviewing, and we do the ... Like, I don't think it's that deep of staffing. But, they definitely go through, comb through resumes, and profiles, and do I think a bit of the sourcing piece on that. Jason: So, we do ... There's no doubt that the digital agency is something that's coming. Right? My little thing was an experiment, right? It was a hack together. Let's get this piece of technology from here, this piece of technology from here. Let's see if the technology is mature enough to. Chad: Frankenstein this shit. Jason: Yeah, that's exactly what it was. Jason: It was a small band of bandits, no real budget. Literally, we didn't have a PNL, at all in this, which is abnormal in a staffing company. It was a total experiment. It worked, but it wasn't going to replace the business. In fact, we stood up that model as a competitor on some of, with some of our MSP accounts that allowed us to, to our own business. Right? And, it won some, but not much. And, we got a few offers, but not as much as I had hoped. I hoped it would make it rain, but it didn't do that. And, I think there's a series of pivots that have to happen. But, there are several of these digital agency models that are popping up. Jason: I think this Be Seen thing is one. I think that there's a company called Talentnet that does things. There's a ... Hired is a digital agency. There's a significant effort being made that's eating away at the edges of traditional staffing business. Chad: That's the future though, right? Because, it's scalable. Jason: Something's going to work. Chad: What's the biggest cost for any staffing organization, head count, right? Jason: It's the people. Chad: Yeah, head count. So, if you can take that big ass head count away, chop at the head count, and go more toward a digital platform focused type of an agency, then why the hell not? Jason: Yeah. I don't think that's a wrong way to look at it. I think that none of them seem like they're there yet. Like, my little thing was interesting. It was something that we tried. It was a really fun discussion at SourceCon. It's not going to be replacing the staffing business anytime soon. I think eventually somebody's going to get ... is going to pivot enough, and figure out the right things, and tune it, and make something that will work, and starts really cutting in. Chad: That doesn't happen overnight though, right? Jason: No. Chad: I mean, you can't expect that Seen, or Hired, or are any of these, even the product that you were having fun with for Frankenstein, right? You can't expect that to go ahead, and just take over. It has to be baby steps. And I think, I that's what we're seeing with Seen, with these different platforms. These are baby steps to actually starting to displace a lot of the head count that these staffing companies, and RPOs have. Jason: Somebody's going to make a play. Somebody's going to make a play. It's going to be there one day. Here's the thing though, HR is super slow to adopt, so your staffing company is not going away anytime soon. Jason: Now, your HR department is not going away anytime soon. Your sourcers aren't going to disappear. I think that were super slow. Though, what I'll say is, the bot based stuff, people love that stuff, man. That's taken off faster. Remember how long it took to get video interviewing off the ground, like for people... Chad: Yeah. Is it really off the ground? Jason: I don't know, man. I think it's got a value case. Chad: I think there's a value case, but what do you think the market penetration is right now? Joel: And, what's that opportunity worth? Jason: I'm not sure. I'm not sure what it's worth, but I think there are places that it's been valuable for me, and for my business to use it. Here's where the rubber hits the road with video interviewing, and why people want it to work is the ROI of it. Jason: If you look at the amount of money that you spend inside your process. So, what you said is right. The people are the most expensive piece of any staffing company's business. The place where the people spend the most time is actually in screening and interviewing. So if you want to make a case for ROI- Chad: Right there. Jason: The reason people chased video interviewing, and the reason why the chat bot stuff is so hot is because that's the biggest chunk of time that you could cut out of a recruiter's day, and go put them on something more useful, than doing that piece of work. So, I think there's a case for it. The ROI actually played out on the Montage side for us. We used Montage, and that played out really nicely, so much so that that we expanded our agreement really broadly past ... Jason: In fact, we used it. I don't know if ... You were there during this time, I think. Chad: I think so. Jason: We used Montage, had good success with it, and ended up all of Randstad is using it, now. And ... Chad: That's a big account. Jason: And then, the investment fund came in, and invested. So like, all those things happened because we got value out of it. So, the thing is a real. The thing is a real deal, and I like what they're doing, too. They're pivoting in an interesting way. So that combination with assessment, right? Chad: Right. Jason: The shaker, not your shaker, but a different shaker. Chad: International? Jason: Yeah. Shaker merged with Montage to create sort of a digital interview assessment place. So, if you want to do your interviews, you go to one place. If you want to do bot based screening, they have a chat-based interview. You want to do asynchronous audio, like recorded calls, scheduled face to face interviews, or your formal assessments, all of that one place, that's pretty interesting. Jason: I think that's a value case, and I think each of those guys is trying to pivot in a different way. So, Higher View was using AI in a way that I wasn't really thrilled with. I think the way that Montage is trying to look at it. And the beauty of buying a big, or merging with .. I guess it wasn't a straight purchase, it was a merger. The reason, the beauty of merging with an assessment company is, assessments have a ton of data science, and a ton of math in there, so what do you think a company like Montage, who's a tech driven company, is going to do with all that? They're going to come up with something interesting out of that. So, I like where that's going. Joel: So, if there was a cage match with chat bots versus video, who comes out of the cage? Jason: People want chat bots. Like, they're beating down the doors to get chat bots, right now. And- Chad: Oh, yeah. They're sexy. Jason: You see, look at where all the venture money is going, right now. It's all chat bots. Chad: Programmatic, and chat bots. Jason: Yeah. Programmatic just ... I don't know what happened to Programmatic, man. It died. Joel: Programmatic died? Jason: Man. So ... Joel: There were just four acquisitions in like six weeks. Jason: Look at the price point on those things. It was like a fricking fire sale on some of those deals. Joel: Was that market forces, or was that sort of, short-sightedness? Like, what I've heard is ... I've heard that Foreman could have gotten a lot more if he have held out, or- Jason: And, he set the market, and killed everybody else. Chad: Yeah. Joel: He was the A-Rod of the market. Right? He signed, and now, Ramirez is going to sign, and now, it's sort of trickled down. And my own feeling is that, the ones that are remaining are going to hold out for the price to sort of come back. And, I wouldn't be surprised if a Pando, or a JobAdX, or one of them actually sell for more in a few years from now, than Appcast sold. Jason: Well, I think they are holding out, actually. I know they're holding out. They said they are. You've also got things like Uncommon, which I liked. I thought on Uncommon was a pretty smart technology. Chad: Yeah. Jason: And, I liked the way ... I liked their approach of what they were doing, and the Programmatic was solid. They came from a marketing background, so they knew what they were doing in that space. And, they're in liquidation, right now. They couldn't sell at the fire sale prices. Jason: I talked to them at one point, and I would have bought them if I could have. But, hell. I would've opened my own wallet if I had that kind of cash, and bought them. But ... Joel: Well if you just wait around, who knows? Jason: They're in liquidation, man. Somebody's buying up. Joel: Somebody's buying that up? Okay. Jason: Yeah. Somebody buying those assets. Chad: If listeners want to find out more about you, they go to LinkedIn, look for Jason. Joel: Look for that really unique name, Jason Roberts. Chad: Jason Roberts. Jason: Yeah, I know, right? That's tough. Jason: So, there's a couple of places you can look. So, I have podcast recruiting.technology. You can go find it. That's the URL. recruiting.technology. Chad: That's one hell of a top level domain. That dot technology. Jason: Yeah. Whatever. It's easy to remember, though. You know how to find it. You can find me. And, you can find me there. And then, I'm spending my time now helping companies connect with technology, and technology connects with companies, that whole story I told about this being a market that sort of accelerated past understanding for a lot of people. I'm trying to help solve that problem. So, I have a little company there that ... where I'm helping with that called, Disruption Treehouse. So if you want to go to DisruptionTreehouse.com, you can see me there, you can email me, book times. Joel: That sounds very childlike, and whimsical. Jason: It's both whimsical, and super scary with the Disruption. It's a juxed position that you love. Joel: And on that note, and that word, we out. Chad: We out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad, and his goofy frenchies. 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. Tristen: (whispers) They made me say that. Tristen: The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I need new track spikes. You know, the expensive, shiny, gold pair that are extra, because ... Well, I'm extra. Tristen: For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Programmatic #Technology #TechStack #Monster #Indeed #IndeedPrime #Seen #BeSeen

It's like a damned variety show during this podcast, recorded LIVE from a posh Dallas Hotel lobby, where The Chad & Cheese talk: - Neuvoo's got Talent! - Craigslist joins us 2019 - Disney shows what real BRAND means - Pay Equity = Starbucks - and Is the job market really that good? All of this podcasting goodness couldn't be possible without the love, care, and affection of Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro: 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. Recording today from the Big D, that's Dallas in case you didn't know. It's a super hydrated episode of 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, Neuvoo embraces its inner sexual chocolate. That's boy's got talent. Chad: Talent. Joel: Some people will get that. Chipotle knows when employees have been over-served, and Craigslist finally realizes it's 2019. Grab a cup of Joe and get caffeinated. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Chad: It's new mark time. JobAdX: Nope. Nah. 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 my emails joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: And we're back. Chad: And we're back. Okay, so as we sit here in this posh Renaissance Hotel- Joel: Lovely weather yesterday when we got here in Dallas. Very lovely. Little cooler today. Chad: It is a little cooler. Still much nicer than it is back in home land of Indiana. Joel: We've kind of tripped out this year. This is our final leg of the Chad and Cheese tour. Chad: Yep. Joel: And I'm ready for a break. I don't know about you. Chad: I'm ready for a break. I'm definitely ready for a break. Joel: It's been a busy year, for sure. Chad: Yeah, Julie's ready for a break. Everybody's ready for a break. Joel: I know I look about eight years older than when we started this tour, and my liver looks about 50 years older than when we first started this tour. But god damn it, we're having fun. Chad: We're having a great time. Joel: Let's get to shout outs. Chad: Shout outs. First shout out goes to, you might know her, Julie Sowash. Joel: I've heard of her, yeah. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's my badass wife who just served on a panel presenting at the United Nations earlier this week. Joel: Little organization some people know. Chad: You might have known. You might have heard of it. Joel: Little startup. Chad: The focus was ongoing challenges and opportunities for employers and talented job seekers with disabilities. It was the international day of people with disabilities or something like that. Joel: Sure. Chad: And so the United Nations, they do this every year. Yeah, she had a blast. It was a good time. Joel: Now was she lobbying for a certain thing? Was it just an FYI for the governments of the world? What was the purpose? Chad: Listening to experts, right? Asking experts questions. So yeah. I mean, they were really focused on just trying to get as much information in short amount of time. I think they're on for an hour. It was really good. Joel: Now she was not wearing a Chad and Cheese t-shirt. Chad: I know. Joel: I know there was no chance that was going to happen. But was there some conversation about, "Hey, babe-" Chad: No. Joel: ... "Have you thought about-" Chad: No. Joel: No. Okay. Chad: The whole focus was her new Brooks' Brothers suit. Joel: Oh, did she go shopping? Chad: Oh yeah. She went shopping. Joel: And I know her hair, she had the curls rocking. Chad: Oh, dude- Joel: She had the whole look going. Chad: She had the new hair, new suit. All the way through. She was rocking the entire thing. Joel: Well, she did the Sowash family proud. Chad: She did. Joel: I know that was a big moment for everybody. Chad: It was. Joel: So that's very cool. Chad: It was. Joel: Well, I'm going to go to my first shout out in a totally different direction. KFC, purveyors of fine fried chicken meals, has brought back the Yule Log. Chad: The Yule Log. Joel: You may remember this from last year. You throw a log on the fire, you fire it up, and it smells like fried chicken all up in your house or your fire pit in the backyard. So I'm going to go from the UN to the KFC Yule Log in my shout outs. Chad: That is pretty nice. I'm going to go... I'm going to throw this in there. I almost forgot about this. Since Julie's looking so good, Hyde Closet. Kennedy actually works at this new startup called Hyde Closet. Joel: Is that H-I-D-E or H-Y. Chad: H-Y-D-E. Kind of like Jekyll and Hyde. So she's working for this startup called Hyde Closet where there are so many of these female box in the mail kind of get clothes things. Joel: Yeah, Birch Box. Chad: This is for a dude. So trying to make me look better than wearing t-shirts and hoodies all the time, which I enjoy, don't get me wrong. Yeah, so Hyde Closet is going to be fashioning me. Kennedy is actually doing it because she's one of the fashion people. Joel: Is she your fashion consultant through this company? Chad: I'm going to get a box so that when we're doing the Chad and Cheese holiday part, I'm going to be decked out in Hyde Closet stuff. Joel: Oh, damn. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Do you think she can help me, or am I a lost cause at this point? Chad: Yeah, we might be able to have that conversation. Joel: So little known fact about me, my wife got me Birch Box a couple years ago. So I get the monthly mail, feel good, look good, lotions, scented oils. Yeah, I get all lubed up once a month. Chad: Put the lotions in the basket. Joel: Yeah. The face cleanser. But yeah, so little known fact about me, this doesn't just happen as I'm pointing at my face overnight. It takes a lot of work to make this thing look all right. Joel: I'm going to shout out to chat bots. We talk a lot about them on the show. Facebook did them over the holidays in a whole new way. So story came out this week that Facebook created a chat bot for its employees to I guess deflect criticism or play damage control with the relatives during the holidays. So I guess if Aunt Suzie says, "What the hell's up at Facebook? You're tracking everything I do." You can go to the friendly Facebook chat bot- Chad: You can excuse yourself. Go to the bathroom, then come back. Joel: And then you have a direct statement. So it's sort of like a little PR consultant in your pocket for Facebook. So it's kind of a sad state of affairs that Facebook has to create a chat bot for its employees to deflect criticism during the holidays. But that deserves a shout out in my book. Chad: That does. That does. And I'm going to stick with the chat bots here for a second. Shout out to Max and Pia over at Talkpush it real good. Joel: Yeah. I'm still waiting for my t-shirt. Chad: They sent me some Talkpush gear, and one of the shirts, funny as hell. It says, "I like big bots," and you can finish the rest, "And I cannot lie." Joel: And I cannot lie. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: Everyone kind of leans on that Sir Mix-a-lot word of wisdom from the '90s. Chad: Yeah. It's good. Very good. Joel: I'm going to keep it with big companies here. Amazon in the news this week as well. So people know Amazon, small time employer or commerce. Companies can put products on Amazon and sell through Amazon. So I assume there's some quality control, right? You can't just sell anything, right? Chad: Apparently not. Joel: No, recently... I shouldn't laugh because it's horrible. But an Auschwitz Christmas ornament made its way onto the Amazon store. Chad: How the fuck does that happen? Joel: And it's basically a photograph of Auschwitz, the concentration camp, from World War II- Chad: How's that happen? Joel: ... on a Christmas ornament. Yeah. I'm not sure how that got through, but it did. So negative shout out to Amazon. For a company that does so many things so well, they do so many things poorly. Joel: Just to see you, right? Chad: Well and see Julie, do some stuff with Julie too. So had some listener time with Kyle, and I love it. Joel: Where'd you take him? Chad: Took him downtown to Henry Social Club, which is one of those high end dinner places. And then around the corner to a dive bar. So we went to the Columbus Bar. Joel: A little context, downtown Columbus, for those that don't know, is, what? Three blocks of buildings? Chad: Yeah. I'd say- Joel: Kind of. And I've never heard of this place. Is it a speakeasy secret knock on the door kind of thing? Chad: Kind of, sort of. It has that kind of feel. But it's like this really artsy, cool, great food. The chef is from Maine. I mean, it's really good stuff. Joel: So no 450 for Kyle? Chad: No, no. He didn't get it this time just because he was staying downtown, and it was an easy walk for him. So it made sense. Joel: Is he still in Chicago? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Okay. Well, that's nice. He could've come to see me, made a little pit stop in Indianapolis. But I guess not. Chad: He could've. Joel: Thanks, Kyle. Chad: That's because I can get his name right. Joel: Thanks, Kip. Joel: Shout out to Craig Fisher. Chad: Craig Fisher. Joel: Great guy overall. He's putting on the TalentNet Live conference here that we're doing today. He's celebrating his 10th year doing this conference. Chad: Crazy, man. Joel: Conferences aren't easy. I've never put on one for good reason. You used to sort of be intricate in conferences. So the fact that he's been able to pull this off is really nice, and according to his comment from last night's happy hour was he's oozing sponsors. So he's raking in the dough, and he's educating the masses here in Texas. So shout out to you Craig Fisher. Chad: That's all you can ask for. And the man has a full time job for god sakes, and he's still putting this thing on. Joel: Yes. Chad: Shout out to Recruitics who created a series of lists. So they understand that we're suckers for lists. Joel: Yeah. The year-end lists are going to come in hard and fast. Chad: So this one, we made the must listen to podcast list. So just a shout out to Recruitics. Yes, we took the bait, and- Joel: And we're talking about you. Yeah. Chad: Thanks for the love. Thanks for the love, Recruitics. Joel: Nice job, Recruitics. Chad: Thanks, Ryan, Mona, and all you wonderful people over there. Joel: KRT is having an impact. Chad: This the KRT influence. Joel: Yeah. Is Christoi in there somewhere? Did he do something this week? Chad: He just shares stuff. Joel: He's reeling this morning because... Well, his Bears beat the Cowboys. So he's not reeling, he's actually probably hungover. Chad: Yeah. He's probably still sleeping at this point. Joel: Good on you, Bears fans. Chad: My last shout out goes to Tim Meehan and Pontoon Solutions who created a little video bashing talent pool. And we're getting into this whole the funnel. We had Adam Gordon with the penis funnel. Now we've got the infinity loop. Now we've got bashing of the talent pools and promoting talent rivers. Let me set this video up. Joel: Yeah, paint this picture for our listeners because it's- Chad: In the video, there's this lady, and she's reporting close to a waterfall or some kind of water source. Joel: A storm of some sort. Chad: I think it's like water source. I have no clue whatsoever. But a fish jumps out and slaps her in the face. And then you see it repeatedly with the words over top of it, "When you're still using the term talent pool," followed by PontoonSolutions.com. "Find out what a talent river is." Now it's funny because watching anybody get slapped in the face with a fish, that's just funny. Joel: Yes. And if you're familiar with the new wave of '80s tunes, you'll know New Order's Blue Monday and sort of the beat to that. And it's overlaid with this fish hitting this woman repeatedly in the face on an infinite loop. So yeah, I guess is that on YouTube? Can our listeners check that out? Chad: I would go to LinkedIn, look on the Pontoon Solutions on LinkedIn. It's in that feed. Joel: Pontoon Solutions on LinkedIn. Chad: Yeah. Either one. But yeah, that shit was funny, and again, I hate all the fucking terms that were coming up with. It's like well, we don't need to funnels. We don't need this. But this is funny shit. Joel: Job branding, not employer branding. Chad: Yeah. Job brand. Joel: We'll get into that today I think. Chad: What the fuck? Joel: But if a fish is involved and it's hitting some woman in the face- Chad: I'm in. Joel: We're in. Chad: I'm in. Joel: We're in. All right. I'm done with shout outs I think. Chad: Topics. Joel: Let's get to the news. Chad: Topics. Joel: All right. Top of the news, you broke it. The Shred, if you're not subscribed, you need to be. Neuvoo is in the news. Chad: It's about damn time. Neuvoo, actually, they go to the bank. They go to the bank. They get $1.8 million Canadian. Joel: Yeah, they go to Beemo. Chad: And they get about $1.8 million Canadian. So it's about $1.3 in the US, right? Joel: They got paid, yeah. Chad: And they buy Talent.com. Now I didn't know that the domain was even available for god's sake, for sale. I guess everything's available for sale. Joel: Everything's for sale. Yeah. Chad: But $1.8 million. I asked Lucas Martinez over there if he'd give me a quote. He said, "We've been planting seeds all over the world for nearly 10 years, reaching 70 million monthly visits. It's now time for us to become more visible for starting branding activities," which I love. "Talent.com is the first step toward our goal to become the number one job board in the planet within two years." That's a big statement. Joel: So they revealed what they paid for the domain. $1.8 million. Chad: Yeah, Canadian. Joel: They're transparent on numbers. The first I had heard of Neuvoo or Talent, I guess that's what we'll call them now, was our buddy Michael O'Dell was at I want to say HR Tech. And he pulled me over aside and showed me something. It was a third party metrics tool. And at the time, Neuvoo had overtaken Career Builder in terms of traffic in North America. Chad: And O'Dell's an old career builder guy. So that's like a feather in the cap right there. Joel: Yeah. For sure. For sure. So that was sort of my first, "Okay. It's time to pay attention to these guys." And certainly getting O'Dell here in the North America and growing the company, the money that they got investment wise, the new brand. Obviously this is a company to beyond watch going into 2020. Chad: When you start to see companies bring in top notch talent like an O'Dell who has that kind of background, that's when you're like, "So now they're getting serious." Because you know that dude's not cheap, right? I mean, and he shouldn't be. Joel: He drinks cheap beer, but that's a different story. Chad: But I also have to say Sarah Holden over there. She's a listener out of Canada. She messaged us. She said, "This was great, guys. I made my whole family listen so that they could understand." I'm talking The Shred. The Shred that we put out. It's hilarious because you've got to get energized when you feel like you're getting that momentum, and then you make a move like this. It was like back in the day with the Monster board and OCC. When those combined to create and buy the Monster.com brand and all that stuff, there was something that was there and you knew something was happening. We'll see if it does. No predictions. But yeah, if you're working at Neuvoo now, Talent.com. I think they're transitioning. It's going to take about six months. Joel: Yeah. They've got a pretty aggressive growth strategy for sure. Chad: Yeah. I mean, that's amazing. Two years looking to have that kind of growth is amazing. Joel: Yeah. And we've talked about on the show quite a few times, Indeed not necessarily dropping the ball in some of those ways. But people being unhappy with their practices and their direction. And there's nothing wrong with alternatives. And Indeed has done a good job of gobbling up a lot of those alternatives. So Neuvoo/Talent is in a really good position to be that Pepsi to Indeed's Coke at the moment. Chad: Really there isn't that much competition for Indeed at all right now. There's a huge gap between one and two. So to be able to gobble that gap up, there's nothing but blue ocean for them. Joel: Sure. Chad: I mean, seriously, they got out and they win. Joel: Sure. Could they be a tenth of the size of Indeed? Sure. Could they be 20% of Indeed? Sure. That's a very healthy company. Chad: Yeah, it is. Joel: So good luck to them. I will say that one of my thoughts was to the average job seeker, do you think Talent... We live it every day. But if you're an average Joe, does Talent say to you job site? Chad: Well, just like Indeed. Does Indeed say job site? It all has to come back to- Joel: Zip Recruiter says nothing about searching for a job. Chad: It has to be something that it's easy to say and spell. Neuvoo is not. I mean, Indeed is, Monster is, Career Builder. I mean, two words that you can spell. Joel: That was my attempt at being critical about the move. But it's really hard to be critical. It's one of the best branding, re-branding campaigns that we've seen. Chad: As I've said, there are so many companies that are pissed off at Indeed right now. But they are sticking with them because they feel like they have to. They're looking for alternatives. They're looking to diversify. I mean, again, this is another great opportunity for now Talent.com to get out there and say, "Let's talk about... We don't want your entire Indeed spend, give us half of it." Joel: And Talent.com sounds like you've been around for 20 years. Neuvoo sounds like, "Oh, this crazy ass startup out in Canada." So over night, they have just become an established 20 year company. Chad: Dig it. I fucking dig it. Joel: Well, good for you. Guys, we'll be watching and hopefully reporting on many things you guys are doing in 2020. Chad: Yes. And there's another name that- Joel: Another old timey name. Chad: Is doing some really cool stuff if it was happening in 2008. But they're doing in 2019. Joel: Or in 1998. I guess, not '98. So the iPhone came out in '07. So they're only, what? 12 years late to the party? So Craigslist- Chad: Who makes a shit ton of cash. Joel: Let's be honest, we probably don't pay enough attention to Craigslist. They've done everything right. They're a billion dollar company according to Aim Group recent study. They've said you're not putting our jobs on Indeed. They've said you're not putting our jobs in Google for jobs. They've been steadfast on all that. In the course of that, they've made a billion dollar business. Now they've been- Chad: With like 50 people, right? Joel: Oh yeah. It's just a cash cow. But it's been amazing to see apps like Let Go or apps that tackle that people can hire folks to do what they already advertise on Craigslist. So this week, Craigslist finally launched a native IOS app. I've downloaded it. It's pretty much like the site Craigslist. Now it is a little bit more visual. The pictures that are on postings are a little bit more obvious than they would be on the site, which is very text heavy. You don't see any images until you click on the listings. They have a link to get the beta version in Android, and me being the IOS guy of the couple here, I think it's right that I should be talking about this. It became the second most popular shopping app on iPhone in the first week that it was launched. So Craigslist definitely not a first mover in any of these things. But it's probably not too late in the fact that they still have a brand that people will go and download it says a lot about them. And we probably don't give them enough props for what they've done over the last 20-some years. Chad: Yeah. Well, I mean, not to mention on Cyber Monday, $3 billion were spent via mobile phone. Right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: And just trying to be more mobile friendly, whether it's an app or your site, whatever it is. I mean, we've always talked about the shift from desktop to mobile. What we're doing now, podcast, that is more people listen on their mobile phone than they do on a desktop. Joel: Yes. Chad: I mean, we're making that move. We're being more mobile. And to have a company like Craigslist who really didn't have to because they're making shit tons of cash in this. Joel: Their site is mobile friendly. So it's not like they've had this pinch and squeeze site for the last 10-12 years. But they've had to see the growth of mobile traffic to Craigslist, and it just became undeniable that we have to be native on these platforms. So better late than never, Craig. Chad: Good job, Craig. Joel: That's right. It's hard like all the money, piles of money to sort of see what's going on. Chad: It's hard to see over it. Joel: All that cash flow that just comes in. Chad: It's hard to see over. Yeah. I think they're just doing it all on bear bonds right now. Joel: Life is tough. Life is tough. Chad: It is. Joel: All right. Let's take a break, pay some bills, try to get some Craigslist money if possible. Chad: Come back and do a little Disney magic. Joel: Yeah. We're going to get all warm and fuzzy when we come back. Chad: We can't wait. 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: And we're back. Joel: We are back, and you are still a little teary eyed over this Disney documentary employee branding video. What's going on with that? Chad: So we were turned onto this by a tweet from Adam Giffi. That's his name. G-I-F-F-I. So Giffi. So here's the tweet. "This week in recruitment, I paid Disney," and he means by Disney+, "To watch a one hour recruiting video and liked it. Meanwhile, in talent acquisition world of most every other company, it's hard to get people to click on a 30 second job ad." And he's fucking right. Joel: Now who is this Mr. Giffi? Is he a- Chad: First time I ever heard of him. But he's obviously legit. He's part of some Forbes group. He's like 12 years old. I mean, he's a young kid. But yeah, apparently he listens to the podcast. So Adam, thanks for the shout out. And also I never would have seen this or even paid attention to it- Joel: You have to have Disney+, right? Chad: Oh I do, yeah. I actually watched a portion of it this morning, the actual... It's an hour documentary. It is just like you would assume anything that Disney does, it is highly polished. Joel: It's sort of a day in the life of multiple employees across the company. It's built as a documentary and not a come work at Disney video, which I think is really smart and more companies should do that. I only watch the trailer. I'll watch the documentary when I get a chance. But I'm still watching the Mandalorian or whatever. Chad: Oh yeah. The Mandalorian. Oh, that's so awesome. Joel: Which is dope. Yeah, Baby Yoda's got me all transfixed. I don't know what is going on with that. But the trailer alone, about a minute and a half had me a little chocked up because it's like employees tearing up and bringing magic to little kids. It's a great video for sure. Chad: This is what a cult brand is. Through and through. We talk about employer brand. We talk about all these different fucking job brand or all these different... No. That is not what they're doing here. This is holistically who Disney is. This is not their employer brand. This is who they fucking are. Joel: And what greater recruiting tool is it than bring magic to the world? Chad: It is amazing, dude. And for any company to say, "Well, they're Disney," yes. No, they are Disney. The thing is you need to find your inner fucking Disney. That's all there is to it. You got to find it, and you make people passionate about what you do. If you're not passionate about it and you're in talent acquisition, you should probably find another job. Joel: Create an emotional response that's hopefully positive. Chad: So an hour, an hour documentary. Not a 30 second ad, an hour documentary. In their tweet, Disney's tweet says, "It's not just another day. It's one day at Disney. And then tomorrow, start streaming the original documentary to see what it's like to work at the most magical company." Again, they're not trying to say, "Hey, we're a great company. Come work for us." This resonates who works with anybody who is watching Disney+, buying Disney gear. I mean, this is a holistic brand. This is what a cult brand does. Joel: And I couldn't help but think about the recent sort of Amazon damage control employee ads that they're running right now, and not that those aren't real employees that really do like working at the company. But there was such a fabrication to that versus an organic feeling of these employees at Disney and their stories behind the company. Chad: It's kind of like Bloomberg right now spending $30 million to try to compete. It's the same kind of thing. Bezos knows that he has a fucking problem. So what's he's going to do? He's going to try to paint over it with a lot of money. Joel: Sure, and a lot of people will be moved to work for Amazon or think it's a great company. I'm sure it is to many people. Amazon does a lot of great things. A lot of people probably love working there. We hear about a lot of negative stories. But that video versus the Disney thing to me was very different from that perspective. And Amazon has the money to compete with sort of the quality and the touchy feely that Disney production does. Chad: They do, but they have to make sure that they have a magical place to work. And that's not what we're hearing. Haptic watches and pissing in garbage cans does not make anything magical. So they've got to fix those things before they can do anything like... It has to be real. It has to be authentic. Joel: Ultimately the robots will come in and there won't be any people employed at Amazon. Disney will never be able to do that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Disney will never be able to have robot Cinderellas create the same emotional connection. Chad: They have the animatronic presidents in there. So I don't know. Joel: They do, yes. But those are different than the women in princess outfits and Pluto in a whatever costume and all that good stuff. Chad: Do you think those companies... Do you think that that type of workforce, even like an Amazon... There's a story that you shared out about daily paychecks. Do you think that those are the types of individuals who would like to... At the end of the day, they clock out or what have you. They have that money in their account. This is something we've heard apps doing. We've heard marketplace apps and those types of things doing, right? Joel: Sure. As a benefit, do the job that day, get paid that day. And this is in the service industry, this is pretty common. Chad: But there's a survey that says- Joel: There's a survey. Chad: That says on the contrary. Joel: Yup. So this came out this week. So findings from a recent study indicate that 42% of employees do not want to receive a daily paycheck. Sandeep Rathore wrote in this article, "Despite many beliefs to the contrary, the results indicate there's a disparity between daily income and monthly expenses as most respondents, 'believe they would struggle financially if they were paid daily.'" Clearly people are not very disciplined in getting cash now. Chad: And they know they're not. Joel: And saving it for the mortgage or rent or car payment 30 days from now. Chad: And they know they're not. Yeah, 42% of employees know. I was blown away that 10% of employees still get paid once a month. Joel: Yeah. My wife is there. She gets paid once a month. Chad: That's on the other end. I mean, so you have the 10% of the population getting paid once a month, and then you have now this perspective shift. Something that was also said was pretty much people are afraid that they're going to spend it faster, which is not- Joel: Probably will. Chad: Which is not bad for the economy, but unfortunately the economy and the jobs numbers came out today. Big jobs numbers. Joel: Huge number. I mean, this was big news. The estimate for the jobs report created was blown out of the water from what the estimates were. I don't have them in front of me. But the good times continue to roll. Unemployment sticks at 3.5% I think. There's no recession in sight. Everything is good. Chad: Knock on wood. Joel: Now we have reports of all the jobs that are being created aren't necessarily great jobs. But they are jobs. So a lot of the gig economy, the do the job, get paid, I'm an Uber driver. I think they pay pretty quickly after you drive folks around. Chad: That is a problem. There are a lot of jobs being created. The problem is, and there's another report that actually just came out. It's called Understanding The US Economy Lots of Rotten Jobs. So when US unemployment is at a 50 year low, why do so many people have trouble finding work with a decent pay and adequate and predictable hours? So they came up with a new indicator called the Job Quality Index. And what this is pretty much saying is the jobs that are being created are shit jobs. And that what we've seen in the last three decades is that when we started losing manufacturing jobs, that's when the job quality started to decline. Chad: Now along with that, and this is kind of like a side bar, but it's important. Along with that, the unions also started to dwindle. As manufacturing did, so did... What were the unions there for? They were there to protect the workers. Now we have all these issues, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, so on and so forth with no representation. Joel: Yeah, and these companies are adamant about squashing unions or unionization. Chad: They want to be able to do what they want whether they believe it's equal and/or fair. They don't give a fuck about the worker to an extent. And I'm not saying everybody. But what I'm saying is from an Amazon standpoint, they don't want a union to come in because they don't want those people to have representation. Joel: No doubt. The whole Uber, Lyft contract versus full time employee debate kind of goes into this because if someone is a contractor, they're not an employee. They're not going to unionize. That becomes a non-headache for companies. Joel: Yeah, there are a lot of really interesting macro-economic trends that we're watching. And I don't think either one of us is smart enough to appreciate everything that's going on. So crappy jobs, automation, stock market all-time high, everyone's 401(k)s is great. There's no- Chad: Ones that have 401(k)s. Joel: Correct. Correct. Which is probably most of our listeners. Chad: Yeah. But that's the thing. We're looking at like us as the standard, and that's not the case. We're not the standard. We aren't. So we have 401(k)s. That's great. But there are a lot of people that are out there, the bulk of people that don't have 401(k)s number one, and number two, might be having to work a side hustle and/or more than one job to be able just to make ends meet. Joel: How many people work at Starbucks because they have health benefits? How many work at Chipotle because they have health benefits? I think clearly one of the top storylines of 2020 is going to be the election because there's going to be this opposing sides of growth economy, stocks, no recession. You're going to have the other side of that, which is tax the rich and equality and all that stuff. I'm really interested to see where our country falls with this debate because I think it's more desperate than ever, the lines between those sides. And Trump promised blue collar job growth in states that have had hard times. Many would say that those states have not benefited from Trump's economy. Chad: Carrier jobs that he... It was kind of like a splash- Joel: Sure, in Indiana. Chad: Right. So it was like, "Oh, look, vote for me. I'm going to create jobs." And then after he gets in office, where did those fucking jobs go? Joel: Sure. Sure. I mean- Chad: They're gone. Joel: The steel industry when he took office, expectations of value, stock price, et cetera went through the roof. Those valuations are back down because the steel industry did not benefit like they thought they would. I'm not sure farmers would say that they've benefited from the tariffs and things like they thought they would. So 2020's going to be fascinating on many, many levels. I'm pretty excited to watch what's going to happen. Chad: We just have to all be more... We really have to step outside and do a lot of research to understand a lot of this, which is one of the reasons why I love these types of reports because, I mean, we've been talking about it for a year. Yeah, "the economy's great", but what does that actually mean for the common person? Is it really great for them? Is it better today than it was let's say eight years ago or what have you? Fuck, I don't know. But what it's saying is no, Job Quality Index says it's... Joel: Little teaser, Robert Ruff CEO over at Sovren. We interviewed him extensively lately, which we'll release at some point. But he talks really passionately about the health of our middle class, and a healthy middle class being just integral to a healthy society and economy. And talks about the '50, '60s versus today. So yeah, this is a real interesting topic. We could talk about it for many days, but we don't have that kind of time. Chad: No, because we have to take a break. 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 success. Canvas: 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: And we're back. Joel: We're back. Chad: So we were just talking about one of the companies Starbucks, right? Joel: Yup. Chad: And it's funny because Starbucks providing health benefits, doing... I mean, hiring veterans, those things. One of the things I love about Starbucks is when they say they're going to do something, it's generally not warm and fuzzy. They actually do it. When they said they're going to hire veterans, so many companies say that and they don't do it, right? They did it. They did it. Joel: By the way, remember the arrest, the African American man that was in- Chad: Yes. Joel: I mean, after that happened, they apologized. They had training, sensitivity training. Chad: Took a whole day, yeah. Joel: So yeah. Starbucks, even when they screw up, do a really good job of trying to make it right. Chad: Well, in this case, they didn't screw up. Starbucks Corporation for the first time has disclosing how much less women at the coffee chain earn more than men in the US, and that's $0. There is no pay gap. That's in contrast in the nation's workforce overall, in which women make an average 19% less than men. Starbucks is also saying it has no racial pay gap. So this is a company that has nearly 300,000 people, and- Joel: Global company. Huge. Chad: As we talk to companies about this, it's a hard discussion because paid transparency, it doesn't exist. Right? Joel: Yup. Chad: Shit, when somebody's applying for a job, they don't even know what the salary is. It was funny because it was talking to an employer a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about Google for Jobs and ranking hiring Google for Jobs or looking at jobs as why don't we have salary on your job. And he kind of made every excuse he could. [crosstalk 00:38:22] It's like, "Dude, there is no fucking excuse." There is no fucking excuse. Period. Right? That's the problem. We have to stop making excuses, and we have to take a look at how we get to pay equity. It's not going to happen over night. It's not. We totally get that. But you have to be more transparent, and you have to start making those steps. Starbucks obviously, they did that. And it's not just their baristas. They don't have 300,000 baristas. They have corporate offices, regional directors, all that shit. Joel: Starbucks is such a great example of a big company that does so many things right for their employees treatment and recruiting. When you look at an Amazon, you can still be profitable and grow and give back- Chad: Take care of your people. Joel: Yeah, give back to your people and society and be a leader and a role model and not be an asshole. Chad: Yes. But Chipotle, which I think is awesome, they haven't talked about closing the pay gap yet. But what they are closing is the drunken employee gap. Joel: This was a crazy ass story. Chad: Yes. Joel: So let me get this straight. So if you call in sick at Chipotle, they send you to a nurse, which I assume is a phone call. And then you go through a checklist of questions, and the nurse determines whether you're really sick or if you're just hungover. Is that what's going on? Chad: So the CEO Brian Niccol actually said, "We have nurses on call," so that if you say, "Hey, I've been sick," you get a call in front a nurse. The nurse validates that it's not a hangover, and you're really sick. And then we pay you for the day off. So you can get healthy again. Now this also revolves around their health and wellness issues with the norovirus outbreak that they had, right? So they want to make sure that their employees are healthy. Joel: That's a good point because if something's going to outbreak in Chipotle, the employees would be the first- Chad: So he actually said this on an all hands call or something like that. It was pretty much, "Hey, look. We want to be able to ensure your health and wellness and then the health and wellness of our customers." And putting that paramount. And I think it's like a funny side note. If you're drunk, that's a little bit different. You know what I mean? Joel: I could never work at Chipotle, clearly at this point. Chad: Well, you couldn't because you would eat all the profits. Joel: Yes. I would. It's delicious. Chad: It's delicious. Joel: And they sell beer now, so I'd be a total slacker, more so than I already am. Joel: Now I hope where this is going is not biochip, we're going to tell if you're drunk or not and track your blood alcohol content from the chip that's in your body. But I fear some companies will take that to places where they know if you're drinking or if you're smoking pot in states that it's legal or countries where it's legal. The biotracking that is potential is a little bit scary. I don't see Chipotle going that direction, but I could definitely see some companies doing that and creating a benefit like, "Hey, if you let us track your blood alcohol content and are you smoking and are you blah, blah, blah, we'll give you more money." And then people doing that. Chad: We worry about the stupidest shit, and we create technology which we've seen... I think Slack we did a story about kind of the [crosstalk 00:41:54] Joel: Sentiment analysis. Chad: Yeah. Sentiment analysis on Slack. It's ridiculous. It really is. I just saw an article about Away.com, the luggage- Joel: The luggage company, yeah. Chad: They do everything on Slack because the CEO is engaged to Stewart Butterfield. So they do everything on Slack. The CEO of Slack. So everything is on Slack, but all that sentiment analysis, she has access to see everything that's... They don't use email, any of that shit. So, I mean, I think that is a place where some people will go, and they'll use it for evil as opposed to what everybody hoped and intended it to be used for. Joel: Sure. There's an email sentiment company. Obviously Slack, they do that. I've seen companies where they wear necklace... Not necklaces, but little lavalieres or whatever that record their voice and tracks sentiment and happiness and obviously transcribes what you're saying to other... I mean, pretty scary shit. I get why companies do it, but why people would want to work for those companies is beyond me. Maybe at some point it'll just be accepted. But for our generation, I think for sure, that seems very weird and intrusive. Chad: If companies are doing that, they're afraid that they're not getting the transparency from their employees, which means their employees are afraid to share with them. So they're trying to get it in other ways. That should tell you at the very base of your organization, there's a problem. And it's a culture problem. You don't fix a culture problem with technology that helps... That's the thing, we're trying to find the easy button to all this shit, and what it is just be more fucking human. Joel: Yeah, and there's something to be said for trusting people and not feeling like you live in 1984 when you step through the doors at work, right? Chad: Yes. And on that, 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 podcast 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. #Neuvoo #Craigslist #Disney #Brand #Branding #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #PayEquity #Starbucks #Chipotle #jobs

Everybody loves the thought, the idea, the possible application of a chatbot. But not all chatbots are created equal... In this DEMOpocalypse Eyal Grayevsky, CEO & Co-founder of Mya takes us behind the curtain for a demo of Mya. Enjoy! For BIG SCREEN use https://chadcheese.libsyn.com #Chatbot #Technology #Mya #DEMOpocalypse #video

Fiasco is a cool name, but what does it mean? Chaos. So what's in a name and does it really matter? How do customers and employees engage with the BRAND, not the name? James Boettcher joins The Chad & Cheese Podcast again to dive deeper into BRAND and also the RIGHTEOUS stuff that's just around the corner. Brought to you in close partnership with Smashfly. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit SmashFly.com today. 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 & 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. 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: Oh, yeah. What's up, Chadbots and Cheeseheads? We're back. The cult gathering series marches on. Today, we have quite the treat for everyone. We have, from Fiasco, James Boettcher, hopefully I'm saying that correctly- James: Yeah. Joel: ... with the right Canadian accent, probably not, but James, welcome to the podcast, love that you set aside some time- Chad: Welcome back. Joel: ... and wanted to chat with us for a second time, which makes me think you're either drunk or need some psychiatric help. But yeah, welcome to the show. We missed you. James: Yeah, probably a little bit of both. Joel: So for those that didn't hear the first episode or don't know about you guys- Chad: Shame on you. Joel: Which let's be honest, are most Americans have no clue who you guys are. So give us a little bit about you and a little bit about Fiasco. James: Yeah, sure, Fiasco is an artisan gelato company in Canada, which I acquired about 10 years ago. It used to be one shop and now we're available in all major grocery retailers across Canada, and for me, the question always is, why gelato? And the reality is, it kind of chose me, and we can get into that a bit later, so it's all kind of a happy accident. The thing I love about it is day in and day out I get to build a company that great people come to work and it's kind of on the premise that I build the company I'd want my dad to work for. So it's pretty cool stuff. You could also use some puns there, like it's sweet as well, sweet and cool. But yeah, we're only in Canada now. We're about to venture down south to visit some friendly Americans who like Canadians, so yeah, lots of amazing things happening. Chad: Yeah, it's pretty simple when you're bringing gelato south, you're going to have happy Americans is no question. Now you say that you wanted to build a company that your dad would be happy to work at, and that's actually the case, right? James: True story, yeah. It's been an amazing adventure. He'll celebrate six years with the team, worked for a company prior to us that was a pretty good company, but I think they didn't have a great focus on developing what we'll call senior talent in a weird way, because he is a senior. And he came to me one day and said, "I'd love to be your janitor," and at the time, we couldn't afford a janitor, so I asked him if he'd be our shipper/receiver, and came over, some days back then we'd yell and scream at each other, but I'll tell you one of the best worst decisions I made, but the cool thing is I get to work with my dad day in and day out and as you get older, I'm in my mid-30s, it's pretty special to get to connect with him as much as I do. Joel: So dude, I'm going to jump right into a conversation that we had started before we pushed record, because I was doing a little bit of research on you guys and turns out there's a Fiasco Gelato in Maine. James: Yeah. Joel: And apparently that's a big thing and you guys are making some big changes, so I wanted to just dive into what's going on there and how that can impact a company's brand. Chad: Well, it's actually Gelato Fiasco, isn't it? Didn't they just take your name and then they just bastardized it? I mean, isn't that what happened? James: Yeah, you know what? The timelines are a little bit spooky. Fiasco here in Canada, we were founded in '03. We did all the trademarks across Canada, the U.S., Mexico '06, and then about '07, these guys rolled out and I'm not sure if they have Google or Bing or Ask Jeeves, but I think your fiduciary duty when you start a company is Ask Jeeves, Jeeves, is there a Fiasco anywhere? And he would have told you yes, yet they decided to set sail and around 2012, we got a nice letter that basically said you can no longer hold the marks down here, and the reality is, and I don't think it's a bad thing in terms of law, but you can't hold a trademark in the U.S. unless you operate there and we just weren't ready. We were still getting Canada right and figuring things out, so... Joel: Do you think it was a blatant shoplifting of you guys and your business, or was this a weird accident? James: Well, I think the word is too weird for it to be a weird accident, to be honest, but I've spoken to the guys. There's not a lot of anger or animosity, there is frustration. The ironic part though is when I took over Fiasco in 2010, part of the deal was acquiring some of these marks and names and I wanted to change the name. I was sort of steadfast on this is a terrible name. It means imminent failure. It doesn't really align with growing.... Chad: Which doesn't go with gelato, because never have I had gelato and it's been a failure. Let's just put it that way, right? James: Totally. So it was a weird time, and I fought it for a while and then really the only reason I kept it then was because I had this illusion that I owned the marks for Canada, U.S., and Mexico, so then in 2012 when all this stuff happened and had to give it up, it put me in a tough spot, we're growing this really sort of prolific cult, employee-centric brand, and then we end up down the road where we're across Canada and a lot of requests for us in the U.S., not only for our great product but also for our purpose-driven mission that aligns with a lot of the mindset of folks that want to participate in the brand. James: So it's kind of a weird spot to be. They just went through a packaging change that I don't mean to talk shit, but it emulates another great brand in the U.S. that I think it's a little just too close to home I think, so I wish them well and hopefully the Fiasco name works out for them. I'll tell you, the last 10 years has literally been a fiasco for us. We've been through hell and back several times, and now in my mid-30s I want a name that maybe aligns with peace and sanity is maybe the new name for the brand, Peace and Sanity Gelato. Joel: So are you in a place to talk about the new name and how you came up with it, or is that going to be under wraps for a while? James: Well, you know what, I really admire what you guys do and I have a lot of respect and we can probably layer it in here a little bit, and I think it'd be kind of special for the listeners to hear it here first. Joel: Nice. James: So yeah, the ethos of the conversation of what the name could be really came back to first of all, a brand name really doesn't mean anything. You look at so many great brands and it started as nothing, right? Starbucks is a siren and this mystical tail, or Blue Ribbon Sports [crosstalk 00:07:38]- Joel: Google. James: Yeah, whatever. No one really cares what your name is, they just care what you stand for. And so that kind of gave us a lot of latitude to do some discovery. Where we came to was my dog, who's actually with me today, he's 17, and his name's Shaka, and I got him when I came back from Hawaii in 2002, I think it was, and he just had this chill attitude, sort of surfer, this righteous energy to him, and so then we were like, "Well, let's go with Shaka Gelato, and so we asked 100 people to pronounce five letters, and it was Shaka, it was Choka, it was Chaka Khan, it was... Chaka, Chaka, Chaka Khan. Chad: And one of the gelatos could be I fell for you. James: Yeah. Exactly right. Oh, that's good. That's good. So yeah, we kind of were like, fuck, this is not exactly the way we want, we don't want to spend time explaining how to say our name. We'd rather just tell people about what we do, you know? Chad: Right. James: So we've danced around it a bunch and ironically, whether it's surfer culture or the energy of the Hawaiian islands, there's a lot of cool words that come out of that, so that's where we're going with it. It's going to be a word that truly stands for building a company the right way, the company that you'd want your dad or mom to work for, doing things right, all of that good stuff. Joel: I'm going to predict Mahalo Gelato. I'm on record. James: Oh, that's pretty good. That's a good guess. Chad: Mahalo Gelato. James: But it's never the word you think it is. Chad: Huh. Joel: Of course. James: It's too obvious. That's like Aloha Gelato. We couldn't go wrong with either of those, but I think this one will stand the test of time, be highly identifiable with and the word play a little bit for us gets us a little bit more excitement, like brands like Kinder Method that we look up to that have a word that really explains what they do. Joel: Dig it. Chad: Nice. But so, you spent a good amount of money in branding Fiasco, and it is a brand that people feel. You are a cult brand because people love your brand, they love your product, and you've been building that brand for so many years, even though all the catastrophe, the floods and everything else that you guys, the rocks through the windows, those types of things. This still has to be a big move for you guys, right? Or was it really just one of those things where you know what, this is refreshing because I've wanted to do this for so long? James: Well, I think it's about 90% fear of the emotional attachment we personally have to things, right? Chad: Right. James: It's easy to say we're a big deal and we know the name, but you guys, before you got introduced through the fine folks at the Gathering and some other great brands there, you probably had no clue who we were and so it was a bit of discovery that ultimately led you to fall in love with Fiasco. And I think that's where we realized that six letters in front of the word Gelato don't define us, and the irony is is that we have people, it happened to me this week, we have people participate and love our brand. We are a beloved brand and not even know the name. So when I was at an event, I said, "Oh, yeah, I work with Fiasco," and then they were like, "Oh, never heard of it. What is it? Do you have some shops? What is it?" James: And then I showed them the package, I opened up our Instagram account, and they were like, "Oh my god, I have three of those in my freezer [crosstalk 00:11:15]." So they love what the brand stands for, they love the B Corp certification. They love the package. They love the flavor, they love the quality of the product, yet they don't know who we are, which is actually so magical. I'm so in love with this idea that we have done such a job of being pervasive with the quality and integrity of our company that it's gotten us license to literally not even have a name. That's pretty cool. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Well, yeah, and the first time that I think Joel or I have ever had Fiasco was when we were in Banff last year and it was magical, and I thought it was awesome. You brought it to Banff, to the Gathering for everybody to enjoy, and that was awesome. I actually went back for more just so that I had more [crosstalk 00:12:02]- James: Yeah, we were short a few. I was wondering where they ended up. Chad: But tell us about this rebranding journey though, because this has to be something that you guys have really thought about. You are seen in your country as a cult brand, whether it is the container, what's in the container, right, but it is still seen as a cult brand. Talk to us about this new journey that you're embarking on and where do you go? How do you do it? Joel: And how active are your employees in that journey? Chad: Oh yeah. James: Yeah, so it's no secret I lead the company holistically and like a tribe, so when we've got mini or mega decisions to be made, there's often gatherings and this continual improvement about thought leadership amongst the folks that I get to work with, and where it started was I said, "We have these viable opportunities to enrich people's lives in America, but we can't exist under the same name. So we either have to give up what I would call cult status, there's no great cult brand in the world that has one name in one country and another name in the other-" Chad: Right. James: It just doesn't lend itself to being a prolific cult brand. And I said, "We can do that, we can call it Shaka Gelato in the States and we'll call it Fiasco up here and try to work through it from a PR standpoint or a communication standpoint. Or we can just say it's been a slice for the last 10 with this word that has survived four fires, a flood, two recessions, and all the shit in between of bootstrapping a company." Chad: The fiasco. James: Yeah. It's literally been a fiasco. Or we can say, "Who are we really?" Because we kind of got this, when I acquired the company, we were told what our name was, you know? And I think this reinvention and new discovery of really at the core and the heart of our brand, the team has been so, so onboard, and I think the cool thing about employing young folks and having them in the room on these mega decisions is that what I sort of call this blissful ignorance. It's like, you don't really know how hard it is or what the consequences are. You just kind of get what you want to do, right? So I liken it to being a kid and you're like, "Man, I want to swim across this river," and it's like white water rafting river. And you just go for it, and yeah, sure, you might bang your head or do some stuff, but you ultimately just figure it out while you're in the water, and our team is the same way. James: We're looking at this not as oh, how much do we got to spend to tell people our new name and yada, yada, yada and so on and so forth. We really just got to a point where it was like, this gives us so much energy internally as people that this gets to be ours, wholly and fully, and we really get to share a deeper story about who we are and what we do. Chad: So being excited instead of afraid. James: Exactly. There's a great John Wayne quote, it's, "Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." And I have a quote on my office door- James: Yeah, I have a quote on my office door that says, "Tomorrow you'll be glad you did it today," and so I don't want to say we've procrastinated it, but we've been thinking about it for a while and I think where we kind of got to is celebrating 10 years of my leadership of the organization since acquiring it in 2009 and really sort of an understanding that the fans in the U.S. deserve to be a part of the brand and we really want to have a strong impact, whether it's on the employment side or on the community side in the United States. There's lots of problems to solve and lots of things for us to help put our fingerprints on to make the world a better place. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first a quick question for Chris Kneeland about the Gathering of Cult Brands. Joel: The vast majority of our listeners are in talent acquisition, human resources, recruiting. Many of them, if not all of them, have never heard of the Cult Gathering before maybe we started talking about it. For those who are now learning about and maybe asking, "Should I attend or should we send someone?" What message would you send them? Chris Kneeland: Yeah, that's why I'm so grateful to have met you guys, frankly, because for years we've been talking about this three-legged stool of customers, prospects, and staff, but we've been under-representing the staff portion in terms of our attendees, in terms of some of the subject matter experts that should be there. So even though the CEOs and the brand leaders will talk at length about the things they do to enhance their culture, we haven't had an equal number of people in the audience to be able to action that great advice. So yeah, I would say again, anybody who feels a responsibility to create a business that people will care about, and those people can be customers or employees, would have a ton to learn from the most notable brands in the world getting a sneak peek into what are their talent acquisition strategies? Chris Kneeland: One of the things that we even ask in the interview process is what percentage of your new hires come from employee referrals versus more traditional head hunting or recruiter fees? You talk to somebody like Zappos, they have 20,000 people on a waiting list in order for the privilege to go work inside that company. Unfortunately, they're the exception, not the rule, and that's because lots of brands have lots of room for improvement for that how they're going about nurturing their talent acquisition strategies. Chad: Register now at CultGathering.com. Joel: Although you're a brick and mortar company for the most part, your digital footprint is really intriguing to me. A few things to highlight, your website has an actual part of a main navigation is culture. Your link to jobs doesn't say jobs or careers, it literally says dream jobs. You're pretty much on every social media channel, which drives that culture and that brand. Talk about just I guess holistically how you look at your digital footprint and how are decisions like calling it dream jobs, which let's be honest, that's a pretty bold statement, right, as opposed to just jobs, how are these decisions made and how are they maintained? James: Well, I think there's two parts to that. The first one is I really challenge brands to own who they are, so if Nestle put dream job up, I don't know if that's the right move because I think that it's... They've sort of exhausted maybe their credit on being a great employer, and they might be for some folks but they're not for everyone in the organization. So the first is kind of right back to where we started, having my dad in the organization and the decisions we make every day, I was raised with old-town values and he gets to witness this every day and challenge whether or not that is in line with who he raised essentially. James: So it's easy to make decisions, like right now we're working through maternity and paternity leave, and the question is not how much will it cost us, it comes back to when is a kid fit to go into childcare? And really the answer is like, 12 to 18 months. So I know it's a bit different in the U.S., but in terms of this dream job and this culture we're creating, we're going to do a top up for employee salaries for 12 to 18 months while they raise children. James: So if that's not a dream job, then I don't know what is, because we really focus on a longterm strategy of changing that most people work for companies now two to three years and jump around, and yada, yada, yada, and us saying, "How can we be flexible, nimble, and care enough truly about our folks that we get to work with to do those types of things?" So I think that the reason we aren't afraid to see it online is because if you come into our building or you meet anyone on the team at any moment, it is palpable and people communicate that to us all the time. So we'd almost be lying if we didn't make it sound like that online. Chad: Well, that's awesome. And you just talked about B Corp. Everything that we've talked about thus far has been culture, right? James: Absolutely. Chad: So on the site, you talk about being a B Corp, Bullfrog Power, Hop Compost. If you're a person who cares about these things, it seems like this is the place you would want to work. How do you pinpoint those types of people or do they just find their way to you? James: Well, I would say we're fortunate enough that lots of the majority of them do now and we kind of joke that getting a job at Fiasco is maybe harder than getting into Harvard based on a different set of standards, and that's not meant to scare anybody, but the reality is when you apply for a job, we go through a few checks and balances, but then we have what we call the get-to-know-them call, and it's just like, "Hey, what are you up to? What's going on this weekend?" And what we're really looking for is, I hate this conversation about talent and I apologize if I offend anybody, but I don't think that the quest right now to build a cult brand or a really great company should come down to talent. James: Sure, there's some positions, like especially in tech, where you need really talented folks. I think the conversation really has to shift to quality people, and that's where I come back to in our process, it really, really starts to dig in on who you are, where you came from, what you stand for, and if you truly want to be a part of this. So when folks come to us and they discover us and then we get to discover them, there's this mutual understanding of both sides of these coins bring tremendous value to living an enriched life. Being with people that you want to spend your weekends with or make best friends with or show up when their kid's born or all of those crazy things, and that's really what it comes down to when we go through the process. James: So it is hard, this kid... I do what's called 30 day founder coffee, and so every employee, no matter where you are, I was just in Toronto for one, between your 30 and 90 day, you get to sit down with me and they're shocked that the CEO would take half an hour or an hour to meet them for coffee in wherever they live, and I'm like, that is the simplest thing I can do. You're about to embark on this journey of building something that is so important to me and so important to our community, and if the CEO can't meet you for coffee and hear who you are and answer your questions, that's a problem. James: And the cool thing is is I did one last week and this young guy, Bill, says to me, "I wanted to apply. I used to drive by all the time but I was too afraid." And then, I'm like, "Well, why were you afraid?" He's like, "I just knew that that place was so cool." And then I'm like, "Well, how do you feel now?" And he's like, "Like I am enough." And it's like, how cool is that that this guy was like, didn't think he could get a job at a gelato factory, like that crazy, because the brand stood for so much? Chad: Yeah. James: And then finally when we listened to him and he got to know us, he is a tremendous contributor, highly valued. How cool is that? Joel: I want to look at the flip side of this for a little bit, and you can't make everyone happy. Looking at your Glassdoor reviews, by and large, you guys are crushing it. I think you're a 4.3 out of five stars. I think your rating as a CEO is above 90%, which is really solid. But you do have some people that criticize the culture, just looking at some of the reviews, someone said, "Repeating the word culture does not create culture," etc. So I'm curious, how do you look at the folks that don't get it or don't connect to what you guys are doing? Do you ignore it? Do you learn from it? Do you try to change? Or do you just stay the course when you look at employees that aren't happy in the culture that you've created? James: Yeah, so a couple things there. I always share with our team there's something to learn, so you might get someone that just is upset or complaining or truly underperformed and this is their way of slighting the company when we ultimately had to say, "You can't stay here because we really do need everyone to do their jobs." And that's a collective mindset. But when you read between the lines a little bit, you're like okay, like one person I think in one of those, I'm trying to think back, but one of them says, "Long hours for events." And I'm like, okay, I appreciate that comment. However, I don't know if you've been to a festival where there's music and bands and a really good time is what I would really [crosstalk 00:25:25]. And then you get to, your job that you get paid good money to do is hand out gelato. There's a bit of a disconnect on yeah, it might've been a bit of a longer shift, but you're also in the coolest job in the world right now, so maybe there's a bit of a trade off. James: So what we learn from those things is communicating upfront, you're going to go to this festival. You like music? Yeah, cool. Well, cool, watch your favorite band when they come on and then hop back to the truck, the truck's there or the team, and then keep rolling. We really treat it with you got something fun you want to do, travel, see a band, whatever? That's not defined by the hours you work. And I think the other thing that comes back on this is we have a very, it sounds like a really fluffy and fun, we got this teal truck, there's a dog as a mascot, we make ice cream, gelato, whatever. But the reality is is the only way we've achieved what we have is we're like an A-team, and we don't really have an opportunity to have this what I would call a regular business, where there's this acceptance of not wanting to work with the person next to you who under contributes. James: So in the first 90 days, we have a ton of check-ins. We're very serious about that probation period. And our goal, I always say once I've signed off, because I literally sign off on their employment agreement, I say it's on us to help them win in the first 90, and sometimes unfortunately, as an employer, you cannot get people to get out of their own way, and so they're stuck on something that has jarred them from the past of an employer maybe taking advantage of them or not treating them right, and then they come to us and they think we're like that and we're absolutely not, but we still are garnered with whatever reputation their ex-employer did. So then when we say, "Hey, we need to move a bit quicker here or we need to improve this or this, you need to know this," kind of thing, and they sort of fight back. James: I'm at a loss at that point and I always say it's unfair for us to keep these people what I would call imprisoned in a company where they may not succeed. We need to set them free and they're going to find another company that they're going to be great at. Everyone's great, they just may not be great in our company. Joel: Well, it's refreshing, the simple fact that you look at those and you take them to heart and you try to improve yourself. Because I can tell you, a lot of companies put their face in the sand and ignore it. So the fact that you at least read those and act on them I think is a refreshing change from what a lot of companies do. James: Thank you, yeah. There's literally always something to learn, no matter how frustrated or angry or full of contempt people are. Somewhere in between these lines there's something to take away. Chad: As you grow, because obviously you have your sights on the south, right, the United States, so as you continue to grow, how are you going to have coffee with newbies? And then also as you continue to grow, one of the things that we heard from Douglas Atkin from Airbnb is they had to identify when their culture was getting wobbly, is what he called it. How do you guys do that? As you grow, how do you keep that delicate balance of a great culture and doing once again what we're just talking about, being able to identify when there are some individuals who might not fit the culture and you just have to make those hard decisions, or they make the hard decisions and leave themselves? How do you do that? How do you identify? How do you have that coffee? James: Well, I think as we continue to grow, I've been steadfast and committed with this, so I'll just go back to a very simple concept. If someone's going to join the journey to live out what effectively is my dream that I've enlisted the support and minds of others, that's on me. And so I think something as simple as for our part-time events team, there's a group of them, so I get together when they're doing orientation and so it's not exactly a founder coffee, but I'm like, "Do you guys have any questions?" And I literally put it out, we operate on Slack, and I'm like, "If you ever need me, just reach out." No joke kind of thing. So yeah, if we jump into the U.S. and all of a sudden we're building this amazing brand team, field marketing team that's going to go across and share the dream, I'll get on a video Skype with them and we'll have a chat. James: So in one way or another, it's important that they feel safe, that they have the opportunity to connect, maybe ask a question that they were curious about what the past looked like or what the future looks like. But more importantly, knowing that at any moment they can jump into Slack or even book five minutes with me or 10 minutes or an hour to go over things, because I'm here to serve them and I don't think that it would be crazy to think that at a company that maybe has two or three or maybe even 10,000 employees one day that that could not just be the most important part of the role that I do, because that's everything. They serve all of our fans, and that's the connection that they need to fully and wholeheartedly believe that they have that same connection with me. Joel: Well, James, we thank you for your time today, for our listeners out there who want to learn more about the company or you, where should they go? James: Yeah, FiascoGelato.com or .CA you'll find us, and if you keep your finger on the pulse right around the time of the Gathering, actually, you'll see it start rolling over to a new and exciting name and we hope that all our fans and friends will join us on that journey and fall in love with the new version of us. We're not going to change too much out of the gate, we want to keep visually the brand the same. There's a lot of strength with that, but we will be identifying with a new name that is pretty righteous, so... Joel: Now does that mean the free samples at the Gathering will be the new brand or the old brand? Because I don't think it really matters, but I'm just curious. Chad: I just want to make sure there's free samples. Joel: Yeah. Free samples is what we want. James: Yeah, they will be there, and either they'll be the clear out of the old name or the freshest new version of us. Joel: Nice. Chad: Either way, just make sure you bring a little extra this time please. Thanks. James: Hey, no problem, and I'll try to get some to Indiana for you guys. Chad: That'd be awesome. Joel: And with that... Chad: We out. Joel: We out. James: Peace. Walken: Testing one, two, three. 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 #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Marketing #jobs

Don't shoot your eye out, kids, The Chad & Cheese Podcast is back this week with top news from the world of recruiting. The boys are pulling zero punches on: - Adzuna's cofounder for throwing shade at newly minted Talent.com - Indeed may or may not finally be getting TV ads right - and LinkedIn gives 140,000 reasons to get your kids enrolled in some A.I. 101 classes ASAP. All this and much, much more, thanks to sponsors Sovren, JobAdx, and Canvas. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities.​ Tim Sackett: Hi, I'm Tim Sackett and you're listening to the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm not sure why you are, but hey, you do you. 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: Aw, yeah. Dude, a mall Santa called me a hoe, not once, but three times this week. That's so fucking rude. Hey, boys and girls, welcome to the Chad & Cheese Podcast, HR's merriest bunch of assholes you've ever seen. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad "Garland All Over My Tree" Sowash. Joel: We don't want to know what else is on your tree. On this week's show, neuvoo, or Talent.com, gets a little shade thrown at it. Indeed still doesn't know how to do TV ads. And well, what do you know? AI is still a thing. Chad: Imagine that. Joel: Sit down, relax, grab some eggnog, and don't shoot your eye out, kids. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. 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 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 over 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? JobAdx: Oh, I just signed up for self-serve with JobAdX. What were you talking about? JobAdx: That fast, huh? Jump start 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: Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man's hat. I almost took a nap during that ad. And speaking of naps- Chad: Yes. Joel: Our first shout out goes to Matt Adam and NAS for having the greatest webinar in the history of webinars. Chad: Killing me. Joel: Scheduled for this week or next week or sometime soon about the value of naps. Yes. It's about time. Chad: Well, first off, it's not a webinar. It was actually a DisruptHR presentation, so you must've fallen asleep before- Joel: See, I need to wake up for these things. Chad: Yeah, yeah. It was actually, it was a great pitch, and I buy it to an extent because he talks about guys like me who work like, 60 to 80 hours a week, how we need- Joel: Oh, god. Chad: ... to pull back, take naps, chill out, be reenergized. But I think this goes lost on about, I don't know, a quarter of the population who only works about 20 hours and thinks they need to take naps, and so yeah, that's not the case. Joel: The main point is, when you and I grew up, naps were for pussies, right? You'll sleep when you die. And we've fortunately come around to a place in human development where we say, "You know what? Your brain needs to recharge, you need to nap. It's not a wussy thing to do." And that's a positive thing. Chad: That's just like saying, "Water makes you weak." The Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans, right? Water makes you weak. Well, no, actually water doesn't make you weak, you need water. But back in those times, the old-timey kind of thought process was it makes you weak, and we know better through science that it does not. But yes, I agree. We need more time away from work. Joel: No doubt. So let's get these shout outs going so I can get back to my nap time. What do you got? Chad: Guest appearance on Candidate.ID's rendition of Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is Talent Pipeline Automation. It's funny, he kind of had all these pictures of different people, or they put Christmas hats and elf hats and all that other fun stuff on them while somebody actually did this rendition of Mariah Carey, which I thought was hilarious and go figure, I had to listen to the whole thing. Joel: Which is great, by the way. We forget how awesome Mariah was. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: And listening to that song during the season, just like holy hell, she had some pipes on her. And to have Whitney and Mariah at the same time, we are a blessed generation. Chad: I agree. Joel: And by the way, Adam in the Chad & Cheese T-shirt at his local Planet Fitness or whatever they have over there in Scotland. Looks pretty good, man, and the tight shorts are a nice touch, too. Chad: Yes, those are definitely '80s shorts. Joel: It's Scotland, dude, I mean, you know... Chad: We used to call them ball-huggers. Joel: Fashion. Chad: So big shout out to Oonaugh Clark, I actually had to look up how to say that first name, Oonaugh Clark over at CrossCountry Consulting in Ireland came to our defense on LinkedIn this week. Joel: [crosstalk 00:06:11] Chad: Somebody had actually posted a quote-unquote "solid podcast recruitment list," and we weren't included, so Oonaugh actually said, "It's not a solid recruitment list unless Matt Alder and Chad and Cheese are on the list. Boom." Joel: That's what I'm talking about. Hey, I think we should do a top 10 list of the worst lists in recruitment. Because every company, the lists are coming out at a maddening pace. Chad: Oh, yes. Joel: And it's getting a little ridiculous. Chad: So I saw one this week that had, it was like the top HR leaders or what have you. Joel: Sure. Chad: And it had people that you and I know, and then it also had Laszlo Bock, right? And I'm like, how do you... What do you... I don't get it. This makes no fucking sense. Joel: Who is Laszlo Bock? Chad: He had Google's talent in HR for a long time. Joel: Oh, yeah. Okay. Right. Chad: Wrote a book called Work Rules! Yeah, that guy. Joel: Well, he should probably be on the list. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The problem is, these sites go to other services that rate blogs and social media presences and stuff, and podcasters don't really get on those lists, I don't think. So we kind of get left out. Chad: Eh, I don't feel left out. Noura Dadzie, thanks for commenting and listening, and now go and make sure all your peers, your friends, and family are listening as well. We appreciate it. Joel: Nice, nice. Shout out to Joe Shaker. Chad: Joe. Joel: Joe and I, Joe's a Wisconsin graduate, and I being a Buckeye fan, we had a friendly bet last weekend for the Wisconsin-Ohio State game. I gave him the points that Vegas gave Wisconsin, which were 16 and a half. Ohio State ended up winning by 13, so in Vegas, the Badgers won and I had to make good on my bet. So what I did was I sang the Wisconsin fight song online, on social medias, to pay off the debt that I had for Joe for losing the bet. Chad: Yes. But still, that makes Joe feel a little bit better, but his Badgers lost horribly after a second half where they were crushed. Joel: 21-7 lead going into halftime. Chad: Crushed, crushed. Joel: That's got to hurt. Chad: Yeah, that's got to hurt. Joel: that's got to hurt. Chad: Big shout out to Jazmyn Mijuskovic. Joel: The names on this week's show, damn. Chad: Who once again, we've given her a shout out before, she's in employer brand over at Publix and shout out is for her writing a LinkedIn article called Dear EB Newbie, What I Learned My First Year in Employment Branding, and using us, believe it or not, as inspiration. Joel: What? Chad: As inspiration. Joel: Well, if we're anything but inspirational, we should just pack it in. Pack it in. Shout out to Facebook and Google. Chad: Oh yeah? Joel: Glassdoor put out their best places to work lists, and for the first time probably ever, I think it's ever, yeah, Facebook and Google were not in the top 10, which is yikes. Chad: They are not the new hotness, and with all the- Joel: Not hot. Chad: ... legal shit that they've been hit with over the past year, couple years or so- Joel: Yeah, angry employees. Chad: They're going to get slapped around. Joel: Firings. Yeah, nasty stuff. So shout out to you guys. Get your act together. Chad: Yep. So shout out to the boys over at Rectxt for Tweeting a story about “Jawn is Dead.” Joel: You got to explain this, because most of our listeners- Chad: Yeah, I'll get there. Joel: Jawn, who's Jawn? Chad: The story, and it's Jawn, J-A-W-N, Jawn is Dead, the Philly word's journey from quirky regionalism to overused cliché. Ed from Philly replied, "For the record, Chad used the word in the right context. Joel, not so much." So Jawn is a word that can be used, and it came out of Philly, born out of Philadelphia, and was used as a noun, as a verb, it could be used, which it's kind of hard to think that there's a context that it couldn't be used in, but apparently you know how to fuck things up. Overall, it had gone beyond Philly and at that point, that's when Philly people get pissed off and they stop using it because you can't have their shit. Joel: So Ed from Philly- Chad: Yes. Joel: It's the holiday season. The world is full of wonderful scents, right? Cinnamons, pumpkin, turkey. Get our nose out of Chad's ass for five minutes and like, take in the holiday season and the smells around you. That's all I'm saying. Chad: You don't have to hate on a guy who knows what he likes. And- Joel: I'm just passing along some valuable information to the kid. Chad: You're hating is what you're doing. And that's unfortunate. Joel: Well, you know who's not hating is St. John Properties, my shout out. Chad: Oh, god, yeah. Joel: And no one will know who these cats are, but talk about a retention tool and a holiday bonus, holy shit. They had $10 million and they spread it out around 100 or so employees, to put it in easy math terms, each employee at this company got around $50,000 each as a Christmas bonus. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: And I can't think of a better gift for a company to give some employees than 50K. Big shout out to St. John Properties. Chad: When we're talking about the economy being great, this is a great way to be able to show it, is to actually pay your fucking employees, even though increasing the wages or bonuses to be able to give back to the people who actually either create your shit, deliver your shit, service your shit. Those are the people that matter. You had a great idea, you had a concept, you started the company, but guess what? You're nothing without those people, and these guys get it. What do you think their retention rate's going to be moving forward? Not to mention, how do you think it's going to work for recruitment? Joel: Yeah, no shit, like do you think everyone told their friends and do you think- Chad: Fuck yeah. Joel: ... the local press talked about these guys? I mean, if we caught wind of it, for sure they are the talk of the town- Chad: That's right, that's right. Joel: ... in their local markets. Chad: Who else is the talk on the town is just watched a little video, music video, from OnRecruit, and it was hilarious because I started watching it and I'm like, man, this is horrible, but yet I feel nostalgic because it reminds me of the '80s MTV videos, the very first ones that came out, you remember those? Joel: Well, yeah. Chad: They weren't polished. They weren't great overall, from a music standpoint, but it's embedded in my soul. So I've watched it like, six times. Joel: Yes. Chad: I've laughed for the most part. Joel: Someone dug out an eight millimeter camera or an original Android phone or something to record this thing, but yeah, it's almost like an SNL parody of an SNL parody, and somehow it kind of works. So I guess if you want to, what, it's about a minute and a half or so, go to YouTube and search I guess OnRecruit recruiting video. Chad: Yep. Joel: It's probably the only video they have up, but yeah, it's interesting. A bunch of white people rapping is really fun for the holiday season. Chad: There is a woman of color in the actual video, okay? Joel: There is, there is. I'm just saying, there's a lot of... Anyway. Anyway. Chad: Yes. Joel: I don't want to get in trouble during the holidays, because Santa's watching us. Talk about big companies fucking up, but making us laugh. Last week we talked about horrifically, this one isn't in as bad taste as this, but we talked about Amazon selling- Chad: Oh, jeez. Joel: ... an Auschwitz Christmas ornament. Chad: Oh, my god. Joel: So to one up that, Walmart, this past week it was reported, was selling an ugly sweater of Santa in front of lines of cocaine- Chad: Yes. Joel: ... with the line basically saying, "Let it snow." I can't make this shit up. Chad: No, you can't. Joel: So the company apologized. It got through the cracks somehow, but it's so blatantly ridiculous that I just can't believe big companies do this shit. Chad: Big companies are working so hard, and I mean, these are the two companies that are working so hard against each other, so Amazon and Walmart, they're working so hard to steal from each other's market share that this shit gets through. Because they're just looking at pushing product, man. They're looking at pushing, in this case, cocaine. And it's just, it is ridiculous, but yet I say, my prediction, we'll see more of this. Joel: Yeah. And I'm surprised they're not blaming AI or something else, because don't blame the humans for this shit is the smart route. Also behaving badly in this holiday season, Monster has apparently discovered really bad spam tactics. Chad: Yes. Joel: Because our own ChadCheese.com website, which has a little contact form on it, has gotten contacted by a Monster rep, throwing in basic language saying, "Hey, if you're hiring this season, contact me, blah, blah, blah." But this is so blatantly bad for a historically reputable company- Chad: Yes. Joel: ... that it definitely makes the shout out list and definitely makes our naughty list for this holiday season. Chad: Monster's in trouble. Monster's definitely in trouble. When you start seeing things like this, this is more than just... SFX: That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over. Chad: This is more than just amateur hour at this point. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Not a good sign, at all. Chad: And topics. Joel: Topics, let's get to the news. Chad: Topics. Okay. Joel: We talked about neuvoo. I probably did not say that correctly, smartly changing its brand to Talent.com, paying a bunch of money to do that, and everyone sort of, to the person, appreciates the idea, thumbs up, likes it. Chad: Right. Joel: But the co-founder of Adzuna, not so much. Chad: Yeah. Doug Monro, co-founder of Adzuna, said on LinkedIn, and I quote, "Talent.com is a fab domain. Surely expensive. Can't get it in every GO, question mark? Sub-domains, question mark? Not that helpful of an SEO term. Hard to build a brand personality around a generic domain, for example, Job.com. I kind of like neuvoo, but maybe that's just familiarity, nostalgia, smiley face." So first off, before we just go into this shade, what do you think about his points there? You're talking about money, being able to possibly do sub-domains, SEO term, talent, it's a general term. How do you build a brand personality? What do you think about those things? Joel: So we could digest each one of these individually, but I want to say one word, Indeed.com. Indeed is the number one brand in our industry. There's no GO-specific thing about the word. It's generic. It kicks ass in SEO, aside from the fact that Google for Jobs kicks ass in SEO, so none of this makes sense. And I could throw in Amazon for buying shit, I could throw in eBay for options. The name of something, and we even talked about this briefly, is in today's world, it's the brand of the word and not so much the things that he talks about that are as beneficial. Chad: Right. Joel: So I don't get where he's coming from on this at all. And neuvoo, from a sales perspective, if I'm a sales person saying, "Hey, I'm Joel from neuvoo-" Chad: Yeah. Horrible. Joel: I'd much rather be saying, "Hey, I'm Joel from Talent.com." Chad: Yes. Joel: So yeah, I don't get where he's coming from on any of these. I don't think any of these are good criticisms. Chad: Yes. And as an SEO guy, I would've thought that you might've said, "Yeah, maybe from an SEO standpoint," because it is a generic term, but yet, I think from my standpoint, it all comes down to having something, especially from a marketing and a sales standpoint, that you can stand behind very easily and neuvoo isn't that. You got to spell the fucking thing every five minutes because people don't know what you're saying. Talent is very simple. It's a dot-com. They paid a lot of money for it, but I think it could and it should be worth it. That's the big key. Joel: Yeah, that might be the main criticism, is what they paid for it, and they were open with that, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: $1.8 million. Now, they could probably easily resell it if the world falls apart for them for a million dollars. So let's take a little bit of the price in, because there's value built in there forever. The other thing is I guess brand personality around a generic name, like I kind of agree with that monster Indeed in our industry, it was sort of easy to stand out because they didn't have anything to do with jobs, whereas talent will be tougher, like a job or careers or something else. But I don't think these are big criticisms and I don't think Talent.com should lose a wink of sleep because of it. Chad: They're not. I guarantee you, they're not. This to me, Doug, buddy, pal, is nothing but you throwing shade at them because now, something that is probably not easy for everybody to spell, Adzuna, was competing with neuvoo, which was harder to spell. Now your competitor just really is going to be blowing your brand out of the water very easily just from the very simple fact that it's easy to fucking say, to market to, and when somebody says, "Hey, where do you work?" "I work at Talent.com." "Oh." It's not, oh, can you spell that 50 fucking times? Chad: So I understand that what you're doing is you're trying to reflect back on pretty much some of the things that I'm sure you guys are dealing with, they're not going to have to deal with it anymore. So they're not a part of the stupid name club anymore. Joel: Look at you putting on your psychiatrist hat, calling out jealousy and envy. I love it. Chad: So Doug, dude, love Adzuna, love anybody who can actually push up the ladder, but my suggestion would be go find another URL. Go find another domain yourself, and make it easy. As a matter of fact, I saw on one of the Facebook groups this week that one of the IO domains was only going for about $10,000, and it was a common word. Joel: Hiring.io, I think. Chad: Yeah. It was something like that, Hiring-something.io. That's cheap and it's hiring, now, it's not a dot-com, totally get it, but you sound like you're cheap anyway because you didn't buy Talent.com, so go ahead and get that one. Joel: So let's all agree that this criticism is... SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: Exactly. Joel: And speaking of piles of shit, let's talk about Indeed's new commercial. Chad: So this one is... It was so bad, it was good for me, okay? Joel: Was it? Okay. Chad: Yes, it was pimping online skills test tools to help employers find the right candidates, and once you find the right candidate, it also comes with a groundhog, and it shows this groundhog who's making its way under the carpet or some shit like that. And it pops out by the hiring manager, and it is a creepy-fucking-looking groundhog, okay? Joel: Yep. Chad: But it was so funny because it was so bad, and I was like, okay. I remembered that. It's really hard for me to remember any of Indeed's other commercials because they were just forgettable. This was so bad, I thought it was good. Joel: So the message was basically if you're a hiring manager, not only does the pre-screening work but this groundhog shows up to let you know that this is the right candidate to hire, right? Chad: Yes. Joel: Okay. So I have a few comments about this. Number one initially was like, I thought of one, the CareerBuilder monkeys, which to Indeed's credit, this is a computerized groundhog. It's not a real groundhog. So no groundhogs were harmed in the filming of this commercial, so that's a good thing. And then the second thing that I thought of was the Caddyshack groundhog. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: And Bill Murray [crosstalk 00:23:22]- Chad: I'm all right. Joel: So to me, it would've been funny if they'd had a puppet groundhog, kind of like the Caddyshack groundhog, instead of the computer-generated groundhog. Okay, so that's my initial thoughts on the commercial. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The second thing was it goes very different from the theme of the commercials that they've had, right? Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: The trend of their commercials has been sort of thoughtful, trying to get emotional, real-world kind of stuff, right? So the kid that just graduated but isn't looking for a job and his parents are pissed, or the woman who's getting passed over for a promotion and then she gets a little hit on her mobile device saying, "Hey, you've got an interview with so and so." Those are sort of inspirational and I guess heartwarming. Chad: But forgettable. Joel: But forgettable, sure. We remember because we're in this industry. So hell, throw some animals, throw some babies at your ad and people will hopefully remember them. But yes, the Indeed groundhog is now apparently going to be a thing, so at conferences you're going to get stuffed groundhogs. On Groundhog Day, there'll be a special deal. This is apparently Indeed's new thing, so I'm just going to have to get used to it. Chad: Indeed, ride this groundhog. Ride this groundhog. Joel: It is at least an animal that companies haven't gotten on board with yet, so it was available. Chad: It is creepy as hell, but it is, again, just so bad it's good. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And I think if they stick with this kind of a theme, not really the groundhog, but so bad, so good, almost like the music video that we were talking about earlier, it's just so bad that I've watched it like six fucking times. Joel: God. Chad: Maybe this is a genre, right? I think it is. It's called B-movies. Joel: Oh, and clearly animals and kids work. Chad: Yeah. Joel: People remember that shit, whatever. We remember it. So hell, roll with it. And it's hopefully going to work for them because also on the news wire this week about Indeed is that they're growing in their hometown or one of their hometowns of Stanford, Connecticut, one of its two global headquarters, the other one being in Austin, so the new offices that they've leased have 24,000 square feet floor space and will serve about 200 staff, this is according to the Stanford Advocate. They're located only a few blocks from the company's original offices in downtown Stanford, the huge metropolitan area. Currently the company employs around 1,000 workers in Stanford, mostly in sales and customer service. The company said it plans to boost that number to 1,700 employees in the future. So for their sake, I hope this groundhog really takes off. Chad: But my advice going from what you just said, Joel- Joel: Yeah. Chad: I think you should definitely buy the rights to Kenny Loggins' I'm Alright, and do the whole groundhog thing. Ride the groundhog. Joel: Yes. And if Punxsutawney, that's how you say it, right? Chad: Punxsutawney Phil. Joel: If Punxsutawney has sponsorship opportunities on Groundhog Day, you should definitely jump on that. Chad: Hell, you should own that little town. Joel: Yep, yep. And speaking of fantastic sponsorships and smart marketing, let's hear from Canvas and we'll talk about some AI shit when we get back. Chad: 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. Canvas: 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: Ooh, texting at the speed of talent and I just saw this in my Facebook memories, you're going to love this, Joel Cheesman, two years ago, this is the post, "Pumped to welcome Jobs to Careers, now Talroo, as a Chad & Cheese Podcast sponsor, #suckers." Joel: Ooh. And you know who's still a sponsor? Talroo, yes. Chad: Knock on wood. Joel: Because we fucking have an ROI like a motherfucker on this show. Hell yeah. Knock on wood, yeah. 2020 budgets are being written out right now. It's a good thing we sent them a lot of Christmas cards, or holiday cards. Chad: So this AI is a thing apparently. Joel: There might be some legs on this AI stuff. Chad: So MarketWatch article on Tuesday, career and job site LinkedIn, you might have heard of this- Joel: Heard of them. Chad: ... released its annual emerging jobs list, which identifies the roles that we have seen the largest rate of hiring growth for from 2015 through this year. Number one on the list, artificial intelligence specialist. Typically an engineer, researcher, or other specialty that focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence. This again, does nothing... We continue to ask the question, is AI really a thing in our industry? Is AI a thing? People, it's a fucking thing. It really is. Joel: Yeah, and let's not forget how much the salary commands for this position. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Typically $140,000 a year or more. So I can tell you with three young children- Chad: Fuck yeah. Joel: ... I'm going to do my best to push them into this skillset, because that's apparently where the money is. Chad: And Indeed also has a list talking about Indeed, the 25 best jobs in 2019, named machine learning engineer as number one, citing a 344% increase in job postings in this year. So once again, people, this is a thing. Joel: No doubt. And we'll be happy to talk about it probably for as long as this show exists. Chad: Well, and going back to the LinkedIn top five real quick, number two was robotic engineers, robots, sucker, robotics is going to be everywhere. Joel: So until a robot with artificial intelligence replaces Chad and Cheese on the Chad & Cheese Podcast, we'll probably be talking about artificial intelligence. Chad: That's a fact, Jack. Joel: That's a fact. And you have another story in our AI shit category here on this week's show, a quote about human bias being much harder to repair than machine bias. Chad: Yeah, yeah. So this is out of the New York Times. In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their resumes were about similar as two resumes can be. One was named Jamal and the other was Brendan. In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care, both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white. Both studies documented racial injustice. In the first, the applicant was a black-sounding name. They got fewer interviews. In the second, the black patient received worst care. Chad: What's happening is they started taking a look at actual algorithms today in healthcare because they're pretty prominent on the healthcare side of the house, and they found these algorithms have a built-in racial bias, and this is how they got the data, and this is pretty interesting. These individuals had similar levels of sickness, but black patients were deemed to be lower risk than white patients. The big reason why is they were using the healthcare expenditures as one of the main pieces of the algorithm where white people were actually getting more dollars paid toward than the actual black patients, which again, they have the same sickness, just because one has more money than the other one or healthcare benefits than the other one doesn't mean that one is less sick, right? Chad: So that was a problem, and they could identify it and actually change it within the algorithm. But when it comes to people and how we do things, that's much harder. Joel: Yeah, on many of our stories that we cover on this show, many of them are really interesting to you and you read them and some I read some, and so we kind of bring this together and usually we both read the same stories. I did not read this one, and as you were telling me that patients of color got worse care, I sat there thinking, why the hell would that be? That's really strange. And the fact that it's because of the money is a sad state of affairs, but it makes sense now. I didn't know where you were going with that, but wow, that's sad. Chad: But that was an algorithm that they could identify and they could actually change. Changing people's hearts and minds is no simple matter, so implicit bias training that we always hear about, that has had modest impact from companies. But changing algorithms is obviously much easier if you're on top of it and you're auditing it, and you can identify exactly what's going wrong and change it. Joel: I think for me, when you tell me there's bias in hiring, I get that, right? People are people, and that's going to happen. But when you think about bias happening in healthcare and the repairing of people, that kind of blows my mind. I don't think I've ever thought about that, so yeah, that's kind of a sad state of affairs. Chad: It is, and one of the things that we continually do is, and we hear it, just about every conference we go to, we heard it last week in Dallas at TalentNet where people were talking about how pretty much the algorithm isn't perfect, and it's like, well, are you fucking kidding? Have you looked in the mirror? We're humans. We're not perfect. We're not going to be perfect, and even last week on stage, you said, "Well, self-driving cars are killing people." And it's like, yeah, but 1.25 million people die in road crashes every year because of other human beings, or themselves, right? We want automation to be perfect, but that's our expectation, but humans aren't perfect. We have to take a look at how we get better through automation without expecting perfect, because today we don't live in a perfect world. Joel: By the way, Chad is teasing our naughty or nice show that will be coming up on Christmas week, I guess. So that's good on you, Chad. Chad: Good ad. Joel: Yeah, that's good that you're still thinking about that. Well, speaking of self-driving cars killing people, you saw a story this week about a self-driving semi that made its first cross country trip without killing anybody, apparently, which is good news. Company called Plus.AI created this technology, yeah, zero disengagement. So we're getting closer to it being a reality for sure, and this story's just another example of man... You think about trucks being self-driving, to me those are the most difficult things to imagine not having a driver. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So the fact that this is happening kind of blows my mind. Chad: Well, and there are five levels of autonomous driving or vehicles, right? The fifth level is the highest level, that's where there's no driver involved at all. It is just a truck, there's no driver, period. This level was level four autonomy, which is pretty fucking amazing that we're there already. It drove from California to Pennsylvania and delivered Land O'Lakes butter. Joel: Yeah. Chad: 2,800 miles, and primarily in autonomous mode. The startup told Roadshow there was zero disengagements, as you had said from the autonomous system, and the only time the human driver took over was for federally mandated brakes and refueling. Joel: By the way, there's a picture of the truck on the story and it's the Plus.AI logo. Why the hell Land O'Lakes didn't get on this in some form or fashion, like, the whole bed should've been a stick of butter. Chad: You know why? Joel: Like Land O'Lakes AI. Chad: No, no, no. What if that truck killed somebody? That's why. Joel: Well, it's full of butter, so it would cushion and taste delicious if it did kill someone in the process. Chad: I think maybe the next round, or maybe a couple years from now, you'll be able to see, you'll see that. But this goes back to one of the movies that I love, Logan, and they're driving down the road and the only trucks that are on the road with them are autonomous trucks. It's the future. It's going to happen, and we're at level four a hell of a lot faster than I thought we would be. Joel: What was the really bad '80s Emilio Estevez truck movie? Chad: Oh, Maximum Overdrive. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Stephen King. Joel: All right, yeah, it is. Okay, I'm all AI'd and '80s'd out. Chad: Okay. Joel: Let's hear from Sovren and we'll talk about a big asshole CEO. 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: Oh yeah. Big shout out to Holland Dombeck, by the way, because I just saw that she responded or replied to something on social media. We haven't talked about her in a while. Holland, where you been? Joel: Love Holland. Chad: Yeah, she's great, she's great. Joel: And we love Robert Ruff, CEO there at Sovren, and he's getting some good content out from him. But one CEO that is not cool- Chad: Yes. Joel: ... is the Away luggage company, we talked about him briefly I guess last week- Chad: Her. Joel: But he's resigning. Oh, it's a her? Chad: Yeah, it's a her. Yeah. Joel: I must've been really hungover last week when we talked about it. Chad: Remember, she is engaged to Stewart Butterfield, who is the CEO of Slack. Joel: Oh, okay. Chad: So this organization only uses Slack, doesn't use messaging other than Slack, doesn't use email or anything like that, and she had access and could really... We were talking about sentiment analysis, but she really wasn't going that far. She was just getting into some of the private discussions that were happening and just having volcanic fucking outbursts. And you would think from a luggage company that there wouldn't be that much stress, right? You're making fucking luggage. Nobody's going to die. I mean, seriously, nobody's going to die, hopefully, because your luggage... They do have those lithium batteries, so you got to take those out when you go in. But- Joel: Hey, if you lose someone's tighty-whities, it ruins their whole day, okay? So let's not make light of this. But I loved her apology on Twitter. Apparently this is how people up top communicate with the world now. So she said, quote, "What you read in the article," which was by the Verge, right? The Verge wrote this article. So, "What you read in the article doesn't reflect the company we want to be. I want to be clear that the Away I am committed to is one where we set the highest standards for how we treat our people and help them grow." Playing a little damage control there. Chad: I want to reminisce a little bit. I remember the early days of DirectEmployers Association, and Bill Warren, who was the executive director, would actually come and talk to me constantly and ask me this one question, why don't they love this company as much as I do? Or we do, right? He'd always pull me into it. And I always gave him the same answer, he never liked it, but I said, "Dude, they love it. But they're never going to love it as much as you do because it's not theirs. You can't ask somebody to give 12 hours a day, right? You can't ask somebody not to take vacations." Chad: This lady was actually saying, she was fawning over the people who weren't taking vacations, weren't taking their kids' birthdays off, they weren't... Because they were working for the Away customer, and it's like no they're not. They're working for your dumb ass. That's who they're working for. Joel: Yeah. So when I saw this was going to be a story we were going to talk about, I went over to Glassdoor to see what's going on. Chad: Oh, god. Joel: And the company has pretty good ratings. I think it's above a three. Chad: Okay. Joel: But the CEO has a rating of 80% of favorability, which is pretty good. So I was like, well, what's going on with that? So I started reading some of the reviews and I didn't get too deep into it, but one review certainly stood out, and I'll quote here, "Also don't believe everything you read. The CEO asked a select group of people to write positive reviews. Requests were made in a private Slack channel," again, we're going to Slack. "Also the communications team responds to all of these messages, many employees are under NBA and aren't comfortable posting reviews." Joel: So as most things, there's two sides to every coin and every story, and it looks like there was a little bit of manipulation to make her and the company look a little better than the Verge article paints. Chad: Yeah. So if there's a lesson, and there are plenty of them out there for CEOs, co-founders, startups, to big companies, this is something to watch. Again, we talked about the company that gave out shit-tons of cash, profits to their people because they took care of their fucking people. If you don't take care of your people, this is the kind of shit that's going to happen. You become a megalomaniac and nobody fucking likes you. So give away those riches and love your life. And they'll probably love you for it. Joel: Otherwise they'll go online and talk shit about you. Chad: Yeah. Yeah sometimes that's not bad. We out. Joel: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast, with Chad, the Cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss, so many cheeses, and not one word. So weird. Any-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 grilled cheese. So weird. We out. #Indeed #Adzuna #Neuvoo #Talentcom #AI #Trucking #autonomous #Robots

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