When Stepstone acquired Appcast, the boys wondered why Indeed failed to snatch-up programmatic's most well-known and successful companies. Maybe Indeed wasn't even interested. Turns out, they were, as proven by the recent announcement that they acquired second-rate competitor, ClickIQ. In this episode, the guys bring in some special guests - Rob Prince from Talent Nexus and Julie Sowash from Crazy and The King - to get to the bottom of things, as well as cover a broad range of topics, including Facebook's issues, Recfest roundup, Hirevue's impending sale. Check it, and show our sponsors some love: Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdX are bloody brilliant, mate! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. 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 a human. Sovren. Software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast, Chad Sowash, and Joel Cheesman, are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Julie Sowash: All right, can we talk about something now? Chad: This is a wrap up. Joel: This is a wrap up, but we have some news. Chad: We do have news. Joel: Specifically, the ClickIQ acquisition by Indeed, who's getting sloppy seconds by not getting on the Appcast train. We have HireVue rumors of a sale. I guess it's official. They're selling HireVue. It's on the chopping block, and then some other fringe news. But primarily the RecFest roundup and our thoughts on that. If you love special guests from- Chad: This is it. Joel: ... exotic locations, this is the show for you. We're here in London, England. Chad: In a pub. What pub are we in? Rob Prince: We're in the Grove in Surbiton, just down the road from the office. Joel: We've pulled Rob in from pouring beers. We thought we'd throw him on the show. No, actually, Rob Prince, with Talent Nexus. Rob, what's your position there with the company? Rob Prince: Client Services Director. Joel: Client Services Director. We'll get to you in a second. We're also for the second time bringing in the better half of the Sowash bond. Chad: This is nepotism personified right now. Julie Sowash: Yeah. It is. I'll let you be on the podcast. Joel: Julie Sowash. Julie Sowash: Hello, hello. What's your current title besides care and handler and feeding of the Chad. Joel: Just super badass bitch. Julie Sowash: Super badass bitch. Joel: Senior consultant and cohost of the Crazy and the King podcast. Julie Sowash: Diversity oracle. Joel: Guru. Badass bitch. Chad: I think you said that earlier. Joel: All right. All right. Rob, let's get to you quick. Talent Nexus. Who are they, why should our audience care? Chad: And why did you make us look so Goddamn good? Rob Prince: Because it's so easy. Because it's so easy. [crosstalk 00:02:51]. Chad: The British. Julie Sowash: Don't lie. Rob Prince: Overly polite. Rob Prince: Talent Nexus, we're a marketing agency. We work exclusively within recruitment. Today we've got two sides of the business. We've got the programmatic side, which is all about just helping job boards and employers get their candidates for cheaper, and then we've got the employer branding and content side, which is the side that I deal with more than the other side. And it's the side that led us on to doing the video with you guys. Video's a big part of what we do at the moment. Joel: So you're going to have something really smart to say in regards to the ClickIQ Indeed acquisition. Correct? Chad: Wait. Before we get there, I have a rant. Joel: Before shoutouts you got a rant? Chad: Yes. Yeah. Joel: Go for it. Chad: I was talking to Richard yesterday from ClickIQ [crosstalk 00:03:36]- Joel: Dick. Julie Sowash: Oh. He called you out on LinkedIn. Chad: ... CEO of fucking ClickIQ. And we had a legitimate pointed conversation. I said, "Richard, right now we said it on the podcast and you heard it. Indeed is fucking stupid for not buying Appcast, and you guys, I mean pretty much ..." Joel: We're on record. Chad: Yeah. We're on record. And he just looked at me, he turned red and he breathed really deep and he's like, "Yeah, yeah." I was like, "Well, just so you know, you are validated because now you are the big player. Right?" And then guess what happens today? Joel: As he's waiting for the check to clear in his bank account. He's breathing heavily. Chad: He's like, "If Chad and Cheese say this shit onstage, I am fucked." Joel: Actually, the validation is in our show. Chad: That's good... yeaaaa. Joel: Because we criticized it and it happened, because somebody was smart enough to make it happen. Rob Prince: I'm 90% sure that that redness was actually sunburn. He was definitely a cagey about it. He's apologize to you on LinkedIn today. [crosstalk 00:04:43] straight up sunburn. Chad: Yeah, I've got to say, no, congratulations dude. That is fucking awesome. I mean in the short amount of time Appcast, now ClickIQ ... Rob Prince: Big week. Chad: Big week, so ... we'll get to shoutouts. We're going to do that after, whatever. This is big fucking news. You're in programmatic, Rob, you're in programmatic, you know this shit. What does this mean for the industry overall? Rob Prince: I think it is a potentially long overdue waking up. I think the industry's is speeding up, it's waking up. You talked about the Appcast acquisition earlier this week. It's funny that they've both happened at the same time. I'm sure it wasn't planned like that, but these things do tend to happen in twos, don't they? Chad: Indeed lost on the Appcast thing and they're like, "Fuck, we need to pull the trigger on this one. That had to be what happened. There was a bidding war- Joel: Was ClickIQ the consolation prize? Chad: I think they were going for both of them, myself. I think they're going for a clean sweep. What do you think? Rob Prince: Honestly, I have absolutely no idea. Joel: What do you think, though, Rob? This is an opinion show. Chad: Asked you for what you think, Rob. Joel: We don't take kindly to "I don't know." Rob Prince: My guess would be that it was planned purely because I can't see Indeed losing that bidding war and nobody knowing about it. Julie Sowash: Especially for the price that Appcast went at. Chad: Yeah, especially for the price. Joel: What was Appcast's market share here in the European market? Rob Prince: I couldn't tell you the numbers, but they're certainly the leading providers. Joel: So same as the US, Appcast was the leader. Rob Prince: I mean within the UK you're looking at Recruitics and Appcast would be the two versions that people know. Joel: Do we know the dollar figure? Rob Prince: No, I don't think Click's been released. The whole release, I thought, it was interestingly worded release, especially if you compare it to happened earlier in the week. I think the phrase is something they've, they've agreed signed to agree that they will acquire rather than the version earlier in the week, which was, "Hoorah, we got bought." ClickIQ's is a bit different to that. And I'd be interested to know whether that's slightly clumsy wording or whether that means that he's talking about something different. Joel: Knowing Indeed's PR as I do, it was probably strategic, all of it in terms of wording and PR. So my question is if the big dog, Appcast, the relationships with the agencies, okay, that's an advantage and a head start. But now you have click IQ with the full resources of an Indeed. A year from now, two years from now, is Appcast still the one the agencies rely on and use, or does ClickIQ make headway into that world and overtake Appcast in, say, three to five years? Chad: I think you have to take a look at StepStone's priorities. If they're looking to make sure that- Joel: World domination. Chad: Yeah, I mean if they look for literally making sure that they shore up what they have in the US, which is, I mean really dominating infrastructure for programmatic in the US, and then being able to also shore up now what they have in Europe, which is where they're at, if that's their focus, then I think they're still doing well. But the amount of money that Indeed spends or could spend on this could definitely overtake anything. Chad: The big question is do they have the focus of yesteryear? Back in the Paul Forster days, Paul Forster focused a fucking laser. Right? And that's why they overtook everybody- Joel: Focused beasts. Chad: Yeah. And now they have no focus whatsoever. I mean, they're all over the place. So the big question is can they become the Indeed of yesteryear and prioritize and focus in one area to evolve and become something bigger? Or are they just going to fuck this up? Joel: Rob, you know StepStone better than we do. What's your take on their reach into North America, there's rumors that they're looking into to eBay's properties in Canada. Do you have any particular insight into StepStone, a European company as they grow into North America? Rob Prince: StepStone have always been a growing ambitious professional, is probably the word I would use. Chad: They're German, so they're going to be uptight and professional. [crosstalk 00:09:16]. They're more uptight than the British, aren't they? Rob Prince: German? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Ze Germans. Rob Prince: You could ask anybody in the pub that question and you would get the same answer, which is of course. I can't see them being anything other than efficient and smart here. You called it earlier this week. The acquisition is a good one for them. It's a real sign of intent. It's the first proper acquisition of a programmatic business, which is a huge leap in the right direction for the industry. I think that's where that's going. Joel: My question as well as when you have job sites StepStone and Indeed buy up these programmatic solutions, don't you have to say that inevitably there's going to be a little bit of skewing in favor of their properties versus the network properties, and ultimately you're going to send more traffic to either StepStone or Indeed's properties than you are the competition? Rob Prince: It is vital for a platform like that that it is a agnostic. That's why the platform would be valuable and work. You're looking at me with cynical eyes, which I [crosstalk 00:10:33]. Joel: ... transparency around where the money's being spent. And right now there really is no transparency around where it's being spent. Rob Prince: And it's why there's the understandable nervousness and then it's ... you're talking to people at RecFest yesterday and everyone gets what the nervousness is. And it's why, Richard, in his LinkedIn post earlier, even called it out in, one of three paragraphs, one of them was about the platform remains agnostic, and it's all about spending money in the most efficient way. It's not about directly funneling money into whoever owns us. It has to be like that. Can you imagine a platform working in a way that wasn't that? That has to be the way that a platform like that works. Joel: Yeah. So they may be saying that out of one side of their mouth, but are they telling a different story internally on the other side of their mouth? Rob Prince: You'll have to get them on. Joel: Assuming they'll tell the truth. Well, Richard's British, right? You always tell the truth. Chad: Yeah. Okay, so moving on. Let's go ahead and get the shoutouts. Joel: It's commercial time. JobAdX: 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 half-heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. 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? 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@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ with Job AdX. Chad: It's show time. Joel: Well, I'm curious if you have an opinion on the transparency and where the money's going. Chad: I don't think Indeed has anything to actually win and / or prove through transparency. They're the big dog when it comes to traffic. They're going to do what they want to do, how they want to do it, when they want to do it, and they don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks. So, I wish and hope that we find out how to make actually a network that that is more targeted and it makes sense, but I don't have the confidence, at least on the Indeed side of the house that that's going to happen. Chad: Now, I think on the StepStone side, we have an entirely different conversation where they do, they need to be transparent. I think there's a yin and yang to this. They can be incredibly transparent, win the public support, love all that other happy or shit. But the question is when does Indeed pull out of Appcast, and they're like, "No, you're not pushing shit our way through Appcast. We're only going through ClipCast? When's that happen, and how does that actually damage that footprint and that infrastructure that's built in the US and the UK? Rob Prince: Well, I think one of the important parts of this conversation is that it'd be very easy in this situation to conflate business decisions, business strategy with transparency. For platforms those to work, I mean, and what we did, and we do loads of programmatic stuff in line one of that agenda is to be completely transparent and open with client budget, so everyone knows exactly where everything's going because that's the only way that we could operate. Rob Prince: That is different to the second part of that, which is what do Indeed do now knowing that Appcast is in one camp and they have ClickIQ in another. But they're different things. Being transparent with customers is just a vital component of what they do. If they transparently step out of that relationship with the other team, then fine, but they shouldn't be conflated, because that would be letting them off the hook, I think, just allowing them to not be transparent because it's strategically sensible for them to do so. That's bullshit. Joel: I think it's incredibly naïve to think that more money won't be flowing into Indeed and Glassdoor. And that's all I've got to say about that. Chad: So, thanks Jamie, Leonard and Bobby and especially Lois, because I think she does all the work. No, wait. Francesca, I think, does all the work, right? Chad: So RecFest was one of ... we've never been to- Joel: If we had a bomb sound effect, this would be where we would play it. Chad: And I will put it in there some, maybe, I don't know, but we've been to how many, just about every conference that's out there in this industry, this was not a conference. Joel: By the end of the year we will have launched up pretty much every ... Chad: This is not a conference. This is a fucking festival. I mean it was a festival, circus slash ... I mean, it was amazing because from my standpoint, I saw recruiters, recruiting teams, talent acquisition let down their guard, become more transparent, more authentic, and actually not just share, but engage in the community more than I have at any other conference. Joel: Yeah. Particularly with the English who are historically a very reserved people, they had no issue with letting go some sort of truth serum must've been in the air. Chad: Yeah. It was called a bar opening at noon. Joel: It might've been the pub that was onsite at every single stage. They got them talking. But yes, it was fantastic. They held nothing close to the vest. People were very open. And I think the speakers as well, it carried over to being very open and honest, feeding off the crowd and being real in terms of opinion and context. Chad: That list of speakers I've seen, not just because we are on it, I mean come on, but the best list of speakers- Joel: It might have had something to do with it. Chad: ... it was ridiculous. It was really, it was awesome. Joel: Yeah. And Jamie's a genius by having us be the closing speakers, by the way. Chad: Because he knew we would blow shit up. Joel: The smartest man in European recruiting. Chad: I think your favorite, Rob, your favorite presentation was Torin Ellis. Rob Prince: Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's been a long time since I've seen somebody control a room like that. And I think often the problem with talks about diversity as they're boring, is often what happens. It sounds like people just telling- Joel: Did you say boring? Rob Prince: Boring. Joel: Okay. Julie Sowash: Yeah. Joel knows that. Rob Prince: Right? It's getting told that you have loads more work to do and that everything's in a pretty bad state and it's your fault, which is all true ... Joel: You can't see Rob, but he's a white male in his late 20s. Would that be correct? I just want to make some context around this before we get to the female on the other side of the table. Julie Sowash: No, but it's good that Rob recognizes that it's all his fault. So yes, go ahead, Rob. Rob Prince: Importantly, it's not that the stuff isn't important. The delivery of the stuff tends to be dry in an HR context. And you're looking at a big top 10 full of what, three, 400 people, all of whom were leaning forward on the edge of their seat, just soaking up every single word. Joel: And it wasn't just fear that Torin would be calling them out during his speech, which I love. Julie Sowash: That was awesome. Chad: On the other side, I mean, Julie obviously not only knows Torin well because she's the- Joel: To say she has a unique perspective on this would be an understatement. Chad: She's on a podcast, Crazy and the King with Torin Ellis. But I actually turned and looked over to her many times and it was almost she was at church. Julie Sowash: You're never not in church with Torin. That's the only way it goes. Chad: So, talk about that. Talk about what that means to your community overall. Joel: Was this same old, same old to you or was this Torin in his element? Julie Sowash: This was definitely Torin in his element. I've seen him perfecting this presentation over the last few months, and it just gets stronger every time. And I think that in particular, this was very meaningful because Mama Ellis was there. So she was there and she got to see him present. Joel: That's his mother, by the way. Julie Sowash: Well, yeah. Mama Ellis. That's how it works. Joel: I thought you said Obama Ellis. Julie Sowash: Jesus Christ. Really? Mama Ellis. Thank God for editing. Joel: Carry on. Mind the gap. Julie Sowash: And I was interested to see honestly how his messaging would transfer over to a European audience, and if there would be that same engagement. And it was pretty powerful in the room. Everyone really, like Rob said, was on the edge of their seat- Joel: He had a few standing ovations. A few people stood up. Julie Sowash: No, I mean, it was pretty bad ass. And I think the difference between what Torin does and what a lot of us have done from a D&I perspective is a validation thing. Torin is a king. He knows his place and he knows he doesn't need to be quiet. And we spend a lot of time buying our seat at the table. "Here's the day to get my seat at the table." "Here's this to show that I have value." Torin already knows that he has value and he already knows that D&I has value and he's not apologetic about it. He's bold about it. And I think that's where we really need to go as a D&I conversation because we need to get people like you guys to be on board with what we're doing. Chad: White dudes. Julie Sowash: Yes. White dudes. Joel: And for our audience, D&I is ... Julie Sowash: Diversity and inclusion. Joel: Thank you. Julie Sowash: And that's the big thing, is that he's just not scared to just call it as it is. And that's the difference. And that's why he draws people in. It's not about the numbers or anything else. And he has backup. There's not fluff there, but that he really knows that he needs to pull us all into a movement and not a data conversation. Joel: Does Torin think that he's making a real difference, or does he feel he's fighting just such an uphill battle that it's going so slowly that it's disheartening? Julie Sowash: I had this conversation today myself, and there are 10 a lifetime's worth of work to do. And even even 55 years after the Civil Rights Act, we have so much progress to make, but I think it feels like a little bit less of an uphill battle right now, because we're starting to see cracks, or we're starting to move forward. And so a few podcasts ago, we talked about just diversity fatigue. Sometimes, as a person who fights this battle every day, it's exhausting and you're pissed and you just want to give up because people keep fucking it up. Chad: There's a lot of that. Julie Sowash: Yeah. And when that happens, I call Torin and I say, "Dude, I'm fucking exhausted today. How do I make this better?" And he was like, "You just got to keep fighting." And so I really do feel like he knows he's making a difference, and when he can inspire the rest of us to keep going, that's where his real impact is. He alone, I alone can't change it. But when we have partnerships that start to have that conversation, we start to move the needle. Joel: So you do feel like headway is being made, albeit maybe slower than you'd like? Julie Sowash: Sometimes it's- Joel: Just from an outsider's perspective, the examples that he gives, the Papa John's founder, the UPS driver, these are within the last few years, if not months. These are new stories. This isn't 1967 history lessons. Chad: Nooses in a fucking GM. Joel: Totally. And we've talked about that on the show. If I'm a champion of diversity, every story I see like that, I'm deflated. How do you keep going? Chad: What is the message to everybody out there who's really not directly impacted with this? What do you tell them? Especially from a disability standpoint, I don't have a disability? Why does this help me? Julie Sowash: So, your question first, right? Joel: My question first. Julie Sowash: Three steps forward, two steps back. Today is a scary time for us. As a person with a disability, as a woman, as a mother with women that are coming up in the world, as a mother with a young gay son, it is a scary time. And that makes the battle that much more worth fighting, because we can see, I think a lot of us got so ... Joel: Complacent? Julie Sowash: Complacent, appeased when Obama got elected. We were like, "Hey, look, we did it." Chad: "We made it." Julie Sowash: "We've made it. Things are going to be better. We got gay marriage, things are moving in the right direction." And through this and Brexit and all the things that are happening in Italy and all over the EU, we can see how fragile that balances in the world of equality. And so we have to ramp up the fight. Julie Sowash: Yeah, it's hard, but it's all fucking engines are go right now, because if not, we're going to lose. And if we don't get on board, it's fucking over for a long time. You know this, I'm looking at exit strategies for my kids and my husband and all of these things that we need to maybe do. That's hard. But then ... Joel: Meaning exit the country. Julie Sowash: Fuck, yeah. Joel: Okay. Julie Sowash: Yeah. Exit strategy. Joel: That's a whole different Brexit. Isn't it, Rob? Julie Sowash: How do I get these kids out of here if I have to get them outta here? Joel: That's a Checksit. Oh wait. Julie Sowash: A Chexit? Joel: That's a Chad exit. I don't know. Julie Sowash: No. It's a Cho- no way. I'm not going to say that. Joel: I don't want to say Sexist, like a Sowash exit, because that's [crosstalk 00:25:03]. Chad: Do you like that? Julie Sowash: No. No, no. Joel: Anyway. Keep going. His question next. Julie Sowash: Yes. So your question, what do you say ... Joel: It's commercial time. 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Joel: Three steps forward, two steps back, right? Julie Sowash: You did good three times yesterday. Three times. Yes. I recounted them to Chad last night. I did. Joel: He'll slide back. Don't worry about it. Julie Sowash: We're really on the fucking right track, finally. The biggest lesson that I've learned in the last 12 months is when to shut the fuck up. When should I as a white person stop talking and start listening more? And a lot of times I think that white people want to talk because we feel like talking is validating the point. I'm saying I stand by you with all of this information that I'm giving and all of this stuff that I'm doing, and I'm so busy validating who I am, I stopped listening to you. And so as white people, we need to listen better, we need to listen more, and we need to listen with an open mind. And sometimes that's going to be super fucking painful, because we have to accept our place in the world and our privilege, and we have to accept who we are and know that we're not responsible for the current situation, but we can't continue to be complicit in it. And that's the biggest thing, is you can't continue to take your place in the world without saying this isn't okay. Julie Sowash: And until white men stand up, and I mean, it is really, it's mostly white men and a lot of white women who have thought they're doing the right thing and really have been total bullshit about it. I mean, it's a facade, until we started to get super, super, super fucking angry and realize what we're going to lose, that's the thing. Joel: You can do that. Super angry? Julie Sowash: Oh, I'm super fucking angry. Super fucking angry. Joel: Rob, I'm curious as a Brit, do you listen to this and think, "Oh, that's some American bullshit?" Are you picking up what she's dropping? Rob Prince: Something I half realized yesterday, and it's just been crystallized listening to you talk now, is that I think, often the conversation around diversity gets watered down as a product of people being so desperate for people to do something that they don't want to put them off by asking for too much. So, it gets watered down to the point of absolute beige and it's just shit. It's just, "Oh, please do something, please update your cover photo so it looks a bit more inclusive." There are a couple of good shouts out yesterday at RecFest, don't use stock photos, you dicks, which was great. Julie Sowash: That was awesome. Rob Prince: That was nice. That was nice to see. But what I've realized is what Torin did so well and what you do so well is being unafraid to actually ask for what is required. Not watering it down to the point where it becomes meaningless, just because that'll mean you take a half a step forward. It's like no, we need fucking three steps and then another three. So I'm going to ask you for the three. And Torin did that really well. He insisted, if you're going to come up and speak to me later today, and if I see you around and you see, I saw you on stage, whatever, I'm going to ask, "What are you going to do? Are you going to stand up and actually do this stuff?" Rob Prince: And that is such an important part of this. Watering it down isn't going to get you anywhere. Joel: I did love, on the stock photographs, Torin said, "If you do use stock photographs of someone in a wheelchair or someone of color, the message should be: We need more of you. And I love that. That was super awesome. Chad: We don't have these. We need these, right? Joel: Yes, exactly. We want to see you at our company. Chad: How hard is that? Julie Sowash: Jesus, you know how fucking hard that is, are you kidding me? Joel: She's climbing that mountain, dude. Chad: Somebody with a master's degree in a wheelchair can't get a fucking job, entry level job, right? Joel: In today's economy, by the way. Julie Sowash: Well, and can you imagine anyone in talent acquisition or in marketing or an HR saying, "Yeah, put it on our website that it's okay that we need you people, we need you guys to come." Can you fucking imagine anyone getting approval to say that? There's no ability to be transparent in the brand. It's all this aspirational bullshit that James Ellis talks about. Chad: It's risk averse bullshit. Julie Sowash: It is risk averse bullshit. And it's right, because we should be saying "This is what we need, this is what we're lacking." There are some companies that really are a little bit better about that, sorry, a lot better about that, but for the most part there is literally just no clearance on the risk to the brand to say this is what we need. It's so scared and it's so fearful all the time. Rob Prince: And there's a huge dishonesty to it. If you're not prepared to say, "We need more of x, y and z, because by saying that you're acknowledging that you don't have enough of it in the first place. Joel: That's z for our American audience. Rob Prince: Thanks, Joel. I'll go with a, b and c. So if you're prepared to say we don't have enough of a, b and c, you've got to be quite honest as an employer brand to do that. And I'm sure part of what's happening at the moment is people would much rather just shy away from the issue and just hope that people assume they're a really diverse employer rather than be able to put their head above the parapet and say, "Right, actually what we need is more diversity. We're not diverse enough." Rob Prince: So when we're saying, whatever you do, don't start uploading pictures of people in wheelchairs if there aren't any just approved that you're cool with it. Julie Sowash: That we like people in a wheelchair. Rob Prince: It's like, oh no, we're cool with that. Of course you are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. By all means apply. Julie Sowash: So Facebook actually came out with some stats last week, and they released this on purpose and with pride their diversity numbers. They were 3% black and two.5% Hispanic or Latin X. And I'm just making those numbers up. They're like, "Yay, look at us. We're super diverse." No, you're fucking not. Come out and say, "Hey, this is the benchmark and we're not winning at the benchmark, not even certain utilization." Chad: Say, "We need to do better." Julie Sowash: Yeah. Chad: That's it. Say it. I mean, literally. Own it. Julie Sowash: Yeah. But don't try to sell us a line of bullshit. Chad: Own it. Rob Prince: On stats, there was an interesting bit in a presentation yesterday when, Peter at Schneider Electric who was talking about equality in hiring, and their target is 50:50 male:female hiring. And he says and he puts up the graph and it's right down the middle, 50:50, so, "Yeah, we did it." No. Let me show you the version of that where I actually re-include that typically an employer wouldn't show you. I'll put back in all the hard to fill roles. I'll put back in all the roles that make this number look really bad. So, yeah. And it's 37%, which is still good. I might be a couple of percent out, but it's around 37%. And that's okay, because I'm owning it, and we're trying to do better rather than just saying, "Yeah, problem solved. 50:50. See you later." Chad: Don't hide from me, for God's sake. Joel: Talking about Facebook, do you think Facebook uses Sheryl Sandberg as a crutch for the rest of their diverse ... you're nodding your head, yeah. Julie Sowash: Yeah. Joel: Talk about that. Chad: Are you not leaning in right now? Julie Sowash: I am not fucking leaning in. I'm sorry, but that bitch took me for [crosstalk 00:33:20] but she took me for a ride. Her values and her actions are completely separate. Joel: Tell me about that, because I don't know what you're referring to. Julie Sowash: Well, she has been actually one of the biggest- Chad: Hey, chief? Julie Sowash: I need more beer. She's been one of the biggest veils, the transparency veil and one of the biggest secret keepers in Facebook, whether it's coming to how they're using your data or what their employment numbers look like [crosstalk 00:33:55] or how they're tracking diversity. Every single time, honest to God. She's fucking waste smarter than Mark Zuckerberg, but that's also much more devious, because she knows what shouldn't come out and she is ready to fucking hide it. And she is not about transparency at all. At all. Facebook would be a much better company without Sheryl Sandberg in the seat. Joel: Yes. Did we get that on ... shots fired. Chad: You want to check the levels again. Yeah. Now I got that shit. Joel: That's [crosstalk 00:34:30]. We need that bomb soundbite again. Chad: We're going to come down off this high and we're going to close out. Joel: We have one shout out that we really need to do and that's the Talent Nexus team. Chad: That's what I wanted to do. Joel: Oh, that's what you're doing? Well, go with it. Go with it. Chad: Talent Nexus came to us and they said, "We want to do videos of you, Chad and Cheese, and we're like, I don't know, two white dudes with a podcast, but okay, we'll do that. Dude, it was awesome. Not to mention giving away a year of free beer and / or coffee. Joel: Mad, mad kudos, mate, for that one. Chad: Talent Nexus is definitely more than a friend at this point. Rob Prince: You've been very welcoming, and thanks for having us involved. To be honest, the worst bit about the whole thing has been putting up with two days of trash talk about beer, food, accents ... it's zed, by the way. Joel: It's hard to swallow how much better America is than England, right? Julie Sowash: Oh, for fuck's sake. Joel: So, what I want to know is obviously when you do this as a company, you're expecting some return on investment, you're expecting something. What did you internally say, "Let's do this because it helps in these ways?" Rob Prince: With you guys is purely for fun. Joel: With you guys, it was purely an excuse to drink some beer. Rob Prince: Ah, 100%, it was two solid days out of the office, drinking beer and having a great time. Chad: Here we go. Joel: Do we want to talk about HireVue? Chad: We should. Joel: We should. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So the news, I got it sparsely shared with me, but HireVue, which I would say is the, I don't know, the market leader in video interviewing, they have been for a long time ... Chad: Been around for a while, man. Joel: For a while. So, they've gotten quite a bit of investment money. My guess is there was no IPO in their future. There was no recruit backs up the Brink's truck or Microsoft or someone to buy it. So the word is that they are actively selling the company. What does this mean for video, and maybe this is a good one for you, Rob, as a employment brand person or that side of it, what does this mean for video and employment, employment interviewing or video interviewing, et cetera? Is it a trend that's going down? Is this a little hiccup and just something else that's going to happen? I guess I have some questions around it because you see a lot of video companies, VideoMyJob, for example, Vervoe, Video Interviewing and whatnot, just opinions overall on where video is going in light of this potential sale of HireVue. Rob Prince: I think, in a similar way to the programmatic sales recently, I think it's a pretty natural progression. There's an inevitability to video becoming more mainstream in recruiting. Joel: So why sell HireVue? I mean, video is growing, right? I mean every everything I see is, video is eating the internet, it's eating mobile traffic, it's all video. Why now sell the market leader in video interviewing? Chad: But wait a minute. Didn't Indeed by an interviewing platform like interview.com or some shit like that? Joel: Sorry. We're working out some billing issues here with the bar tab. Chad: Yeah. So here in the UK for some reason we can't get two beers poured together, for some reason. Joel: We have some real pouring issues with the British bartenders. Chad: That's okay. We're going to fix this up. Julie is gone [crosstalk 00:37:51]- Joel: Although Julie's an expert at turning a beer into a cocktail. Rob Prince: I've absolutely no doubt she's coming back with exactly what she wanted. Chad: She's the only one who's going to get exactly what she wants. Joel: Give me Guinness with a cider and some Tabasco sauce and throw some whiskey in there, yeah, it may be user error. Chad: So, the whole leader in interviewing, I mean just interviewing period, right? But then Indeed bought an interviewing platform. There was no signal for anybody else to buy HireVue, what the hell's going to happen to these guys? Joel: I don't remember Indeed buying a video interviewing platform. Chad: No, just an interviewing, interview.com. Joel: But that wasn't video. Chad: No. That's why I was saying that they actually bought an interviewing- Joel: Well, the question's about video. Chad: I know. But if video is so important, then why did Indeed, why- Joel: Well, my question is, is it? Chad: That was my ... yes. Okay. Rob Prince: Yes, it's definitely important. Without being behind the scenes, it's very difficult to make sense of ... Some sales and buys, they don't seem to make a huge amount of sense from the outside. But my guess would be they see a huge amount of growth potential but don't feel geared up to do that without some more support, and I would guess that the amount that they've been offered is enough to make that feel the right timing. Joel: When you say timing, it's interesting, because they're feeling a little bit of legislative crunch, particularly in the US with Illinois recently essentially saying, "Look, if you're using artificial intelligence in your interviewing process, you need to let the interviewee know that that's happening," and if HireVue flag in the in the ground was, "We're doing AI with video interviewing," then that's a huge oh shit. If the government comes in and fucks all of our shit up, we better sell now knowing that that's probably the future of video interviewing. Rob Prince: Yeah. And make no mistake, there is a huge hurdle coming up for the whole interview, which is these ... two conversations are happening in parallel at the moment. One is about the growth of video and that kind of engaging content, new ways of doing these things, whether it's interviews, screening, whatever. And the other one is about diversity and inclusion. And actually those two, in many respects, are in direct competition with each other. There's no such thing as anonymizing CVs on the one hand and making sure that people are taken purely on merit. And then on the other hand it's insisting that all of their interviews are video based and immediately exactly knows what gender they are, where they're from and whether they speak with an accent, whatever that stuff is. Those two things aren't compatible in the way they're currently portrayed. Rob Prince: So you've got this now and as you said, exactly the same thing is happening with AI, this realization that actually there's more work to do here than just say, "Oh, both these things are great, let's do both." No. Make them work together, otherwise one or the other will die. It'll have to. Chad: So HireVue is taking over $90 million according to Crunchbase. Joel: I believe it. Chad: Been around for a while. Joel: Been around a long time. Chad: This is not a bootstrap gig. Rob Prince: Well, that's why then. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. There's going to be a nice size payday that they're asking for by anyone ... Joel: Assuming they get it. Chad: Well, that's what I'm saying. Apparently they haven't gotten [crosstalk 00:41:08]- Joel: And two times they're looking for $1 billion. Chad: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Joel: They ain't getting that. Chad: Well, especially again with the new regulations. That signals anything to anybody that all of the science that you've put behind facial recognition is for fucking shit right now, because you can't use it moving forward. Joel: Look, every new state that follows Illinois potentially devalues HireVue exponentially. And instead of just waiting out the clock, hoping for the best, let's put it up for sale now and hope some sucker buys it up. Rob Prince: Oh, yeah. Exponentially, but temporarily. It actually might be a great opportunity to buy into something which is temporarily damaged by that kind of ruling. That won't last. It can't last. What normally happens is technology moves quicker than legislation can. And then you often get these moments where there's that juddering halt, where the legislation's like, "Oh, shit, actually we missed something. You can't do it that anymore." It will get updated in the future, whether that's in six months or six years. There's no way that AI gets just below now of recruitment because lawyers can't work out how to make that work. Joel: Clearly aren't very familiar with the US legal and / or legislative system. Believe me, if the government can fuck it up, they will. Chad: They'll fid ways. As a matter of fact, I think it was one of our listeners that actually said a third grader could have written the regulation much better in Illinois than these fuckers. Joel: And that's giving our public school system way more credit than it's due. Julie, I'm going to pull you in here real quickly. Julie Sowash: Okay. Joel: Video interviewing, what it means to diversity and inclusion. I would assume once you see someone that's a hurdle for D&I. Julie Sowash: That's right. Joel: Yeah. So HireVue video interviewing tool, up for sale. We see Illinois saying, "Hey, if you're using AI ..." it's not a diversity issue in Illinois, it's an AI issue. Just any opinion on video interviewing and what it means to inclusion, pro, con ... Julie Sowash: So you're interviewing, right? The premise or the thought about an interview is you're going to see the person, so you have a phone screen and then you have a video interview, potentially. Chad: Unless you're using Tengai. Julie Sowash: Yeah. But Tengai has things where, and HireVue, really, the big issue I have with HireVue is when they're taking all of these data points from my face that are telling me if I'm lying, if I'm engaged, if I'm happy, if I'm all these things, if you're a person- Joel: Which could be wrong. Julie Sowash: They could be absolutely wrong, because let's say I just happen to be super anxious. Joel: All you really need to do is take some botox to totally fool the algorithm. Julie Sowash: Oh, well I need botox anyway. However, I happen to be super anxious, so I'm making scared faces the whole time, interviews are really hard for me. Or let's say I have Asperger's or autism and I have a flat affect, or I'm super literal and I don't know how to engage in these questions, those are some of the biggest barriers to employment. And when you're reading my facial expressions, my biometrics, I don't know what the right word is, that's a barrier to employment. And so to try to say, oh yeah, this AI or this whatever bullshit is that we're using now, technology is going to fix any bias, it's not true. And that's the biggest thing with diversity is that, I talked to someone from Monster a few months ago, I've talked to so many people, they're like, "Oh yeah, we'll write an algorithm and we'll fix that bullshit." Julie Sowash: No you won't. You will make it worse. And if you think that you can fix what's wrong with diversity with an algorithm, you're a fucking idiot. It's not true. Sorry. It's not true. There has to be an element of technology and there has to be an element of humanity in the way that we attract and hire diverse people. And if we think that we can just fix it through technology, we're fooling ourselves. Joel: Do you think the boys at Vervoe are a little nervous? Chad: I don't think they are. I think they're happy at this point because they're not doing any of that stuff? Joel: Party on, dude. Rob Prince: Hit it. Chad: Hit it. I think, at that point, we out. Joel: We out. Julie Sowash: We out. Rob Prince: We out. Tristen: Hi. I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad and his goofy buddy Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. Tristen: The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I need new tracks bikes, you know, the expensive, shiny gold pair that are extra because ... well, I'm extra. Tristen: For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Indeed #ClickIQ #Appcast #StepStone #Programmatic #Facebook #HireVue #RecFest #TalentNexus #Event #video

Gerry Tales with industry icon Gerry Crispin was off-the-chain, and this is Part III of our interview all-things-recruiting. Enjoy, get smarter and show exclusive sponsor Nexxt some love. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities.​ Chad: Welcome to volume three of Gerry Tales. Gerry Crispin is a living legend and Joel and I sat down for over an hour and a half to talk history, now and future state of the recruitment industry. Enjoy after a word from our sponsor. Chad: Okay, so you need candidates fast and you're sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed to death. I totally get it. You should check out FlexxPlan from Nexxt. It's perfect for employers and staffing firms who are busy. They need candidates and a flexible pricing now. FlexxPlan is also perfect for recruitment ad agencies who need a targeted distribution and tools to help demonstrate client ROI. Chad: If you're sick and tired of all the BS, hassle and just want candidates now, check out Nexxt and FlexxPlan with over 70 million members. Nexxt takes all of your jobs and puts each one in front of the best candidates and cross their entire ecosystem. No muss, no fuss. Nexxt does all the work and FlexxPlan makes it cost effective. Check out everything Nexxt has to offer at hiring.nexxt.com. That's, hiring. N-E-X-X-T.com and if you'd like to save even more cash, just go to chadcheese.com, scroll down and click on the Nexxt logo, discounts aplenty. Remember Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X. 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 modes of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Are you buying into the hype of all the new stuff? You know, chat bots, AI, programmatic? I mean, are you buying into all of it? Some of it? What's your sense? Gerry: I buy into all of it as an experiment. I obviously have been always a fan of the fact that no matter how radical the technology is, there's always an opportunity to play with it, experiment with it. Obviously if you don't do that, it takes so much longer to improve and we know that, especially when you're looking at machine learning tools, you need to collect data and it continues to improve on collected data. Gerry: The problem is that there's no standard that helps us better understand how one algorithm might be better than another, or how to build algorithms in a that that truly impacts the fairness of the outcome and minimizes the institutionalization of unconscious bias. Chad: So question about that is ... I mean there are some systems out there, not many, but there are some systems that are more transparent what we call white box so that you can go in and you can see how you actually got to this flow of candidates, versus black box, where you're just not going to know. It's like, well why did we come up with this result set? Gerry: But even in the white box, so called white box, often is proprietary and therefore is not going to be shared with the company that is buying it. It's a white box to the science within the vendor and that continues to be a problem. To me, it should be discoverable and maybe I have to write an NDA or something else if I buy the product but fundamentally I need to satisfy myself. The advantage, I think, is that many of the larger companies now have scientists who work within talent acquisition. So analysts who are really, really good at what they do. Those companies should be able to truly audit the technologies that they're buying into and there's only a couple of companies right now that really insist on it. Chad: Shouldn't companies really focus? I mean, when you're trying to actually gain leverage over a perspective vendor that's saying, "No, this is black box." If I'm a federal contractor, I have to be able to defend what I do and how I do it. If I don't even know how I'm doing it and how this algorithm could prospectively be biasing our decisions, right? Our slate- Gerry: Right. Chad: ... our candidate slates. I can't defend it. I can't. That could prospectively put my company in risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts or perspectively billions of dollars in federal contracts. Gerry: Well, I agree and while it is a concern, it's another reason for piloting rather than going wholeheartedly into some of the technology at this point, until you've satisfied yourself that you can defend it, or that or that your vendor can defend it with their capability to disclose what they're doing and that they're willing to be a co-op, to be partners with you, which means that they're willing to be responsible for defending that. Chad: They have to take on the risk. Gerry: I've talked to a number of vendors who are heavily engaged in all of, who by and large say, "No, I'm just building a platform. What they do with it is their problem and I have no responsibility and so therefore our lawyers are telling us that if our clients get sued for bias, we're not going to be responsible." I'm going, "You may think that's so, but I don't believe that when push comes to shove that's going to happen." Chad: No. Gerry: And if you don't have enough insurance to cover that year, you're at risk as well. It's an attitude by the way, that I just don't accept. The fact is if you have tools and capability for me to be able to improve my recruitment process and you want me to invest heavily in using that, then I want a partner, I don't want a vendor. So fundamentally a partner to me is somebody who accepts part of this risk. Joel: Gerry, you have a unique vision on the global market. You do a lot of traveling. You see a lot of people around the world and give us a sense of what you're seeing globally, whether it's from vendors and technology or economies or just general employment around the world. Gerry: I have some points of view because I do, you know, go out there on a regular basis. I will tell you though, that I'm not as knowledgeable as some of the folks like Kevin Wheeler and others who really spend a great deal of time consulting literally all over the world. I try to tap into all of the people that I know in terms of trying to confirm some of the observations that I make when I go out there. Gerry: For those who don't know, once a year I take a delegation to a different country. China Gorman and I've been doing that for a number of years. We've been to China and Japan and Cuba and a variety of other places over the last few years, Eastern Europe this past year. The reason why I mentioned that is because we get to talk not only with employers in those locations, but we spend time with the government to better understand how incentives work to keep people at work, as well as as engage them to want to come to work. Gerry: We talked to professors who are teaching MBAs and business leaders, as well as spending time with students coming out of school in terms of what their aspirations are. We see differences all over the world that that fundamentally would require different models of recruiting, in my opinion, different ... and to some degree, differences in terms of how we look at at work. Gerry: Some countries culturally are not ready for the kind of work that we take for granted. We take for granted that you have a diverse workforce. I mean, we work really hard to make that happen. We know all the problems in trying to do that well but in other countries, in many cases, laws actually fully discriminate in a variety of different ways. Everything from age, to gender, to race, to ethnicity, to whatever. They are embedded in the culture and in how the government operates to incent work and not a lot of multinationals really spend enough time thinking through those issues and how they're going to address them differently in each of the countries that they operate. Gerry: So I find it kind of fascinating. So, just take something that we probably know a lot about, in Germany they have accepted a million and a half people in the last 18 months who were not from EMEA, many obviously from Syria and other countries and struggle to engage them and incorporate them into their society, help them adjust to a new world if you will, but have plenty of incentives for corporations and work to be able to put them to work. Gerry: As a result, they end up even with all of the problems, a very robust growing economy, in which they have extraordinary access to workers right across the border in Czechoslovakia. We spoke with the American embassy and the woman who was involved in the embassy had just come from Germany and she mentioned the 1.8, 1.6 million I think, something like that. She said, "So in the last 18 months, how many people do you think the Czech Republic has taken in from outside of EMEA?" The answer was 12. So she says ... and the unemployment rate in Prague is like zero. There is no employment. I mean there's no one who's not employed, who wants to be employed, but they are all, they are all from Czechoslovakia, or some guest workers from the Ukraine. Gerry: As a result, their economy may in fact devolve about 3% this year because they don't have enough people, because they don't allow enough people to work. Therein in lies some really interesting differences that to some degree we need to think about in our own country, where we have such poor discussions about immigration and guest workers and the extent to which we would acquire and welcome people with skills and capabilities from all over the world to help us grow our economy. As opposed to the fear that somehow they're going to take our jobs, as if jobs are finite. Where they're based upon our ability to move forward, not move backwards. Joel: And you spent a lot of time in Japan, they have a pretty unique set of problems don't they? Gerry: Well Japan is a whole different set of issues and we were very fortunate to be able to dig pretty deep in that. The Japanese are not necessarily known for wanting to share a lot of information about who they are. They love studying everybody else. Chad: Oh yeah. Gerry: But we were able to have some very open and honest discussions with them and their population is actually being reduced on average about 500,000 people a year, in part because no one gets to come in, they're probably one of the most closed societies in the world being on an island for the last umpteen thousand years. So their culture is very singular and as a result, they have, I think currently about 50% of their entire population, which again is getting smaller, is already over 65 and in the next few years may get to the point where it's over 60% of their population is over 65. Now that means that 35% are supporting in some way, shape or form those 65%. Chad: Big imbalance. Gerry: And that's not a good thing. Joel: Well thank God the robots are coming to save everyone. Gerry: They believe ... There's two things. One, that the robots will come and they believe that the percentage of women will increase significantly working in the workforce but there's also kind of an embedded approach to how women are viewed in terms of their ability to handle certain kinds of jobs, that I don't know if that's going to change, and their approach to work is such that the average person working in Japan right now is doing something north of 80 hours a week. Joel: Jeez. Chad: Not sustainable. Joel: Well they've been sustaining it for awhile, but... Chad: 80 hours a week? Gerry: Yeah but imagine ... Well, I'll share one of the things that happened there was a compensation because last year, a woman who was working 80 hours a week and then went home and had to deal with all of the issues from her family, killed herself. They have a very high- Chad: Suicide rate? Gerry: Suicide rates in developed countries. Gerry: And this became a national shame issue. The government told us they struggled with what do we do about this? They came up with a solution and the solution that they came up with was passing a law that stated that every corporation must make their employees go home after eight o'clock at night. We looked at each other, there's like 15 of us in the room, from the US listening to this. Obviously we're guests and we don't want to joke about stuff like this, but we're going, "That's not a solution." Chad: No, that's, that's not even a Bandaid for God's sake. Gerry: I don't even get that as a solution. But listen, it's different cultures. They have to address stuff. I love the fact that people are struggling to figure stuff out and the results of doing something will be seen hopefully and measured and people can adjust. I think we have to do the same kinds of things. I think corporations in this country have to do a hell of a lot more AB testing of tools and technologies, et cetera and then measuring the outcomes so that they can say, "Oh, I am getting more value from doing this." Chad: What about ... We just actually just talked about on the last podcast, a Australia giving 12 weeks of pretty much vacation. So you're seeing kind of like this ... Joel: Life leave. Chad: Life leave, yeah. And we here in the US struggle to be, not really as bad as as the Japanese with regard to our work is our life but that's been our culture. Our work is our life and that's not conducive to having a great life. So how do we, here, kind of push away from the Japanese way and go more toward the Australian way to be able to focus on our people. Do you think we're moving that way? Is it mainly just optics and bullshit that we're hearing or do you truly think that we're going to start getting it right here in the US? Gerry: I think if you look at normal distributions of populations, I think the critical issue and the critical difference between us and Australia and other countries is they've made choices that allow for a much greater part of the population to experience the same level of quality of life. Most of them have more socialistic, let's ... Socialism is obviously a bad word in the United States these days, but I submit that there are aspects of socialism that fundamentally a civilized country needs to address and that is things like health care, education, pension, et cetera. Most of those countries have done that and so when they talk about extending leave, they're talking about extending leave and paying people and giving them health care benefits and other kinds of things, not just for you and me who are making some decent bucks, but for everybody. Gerry: Our country, that's what we need to solve, is what kind of a society do we want. We keep arguing over conceptual issues between whatever somebody wants to call Conservative, or Republican, or Democrat, or Socialist. We have these weird conceptual fears about almost all of it. We have to come together and find that we've got a society that is going to treat everybody well in certain things and then allow for a level of individualism, if you will, in other things. Then we could start talking about stuff that Australia does, or stuff that Denmark does, or what have you. We'll never get to that if we can't decide what we will spend money on and otherwise, here's the problem. You and I might be able to work for a company that gives us a year's paid leave that's subsidized by the government in some way, shape, or form because of incentives. While somebody else is still homeless with their kids in the streets because they can't get a minimum wage beyond $7 an hour. Chad: Yeah, they're the working poor. Gerry: We need to take care of the working poor. We need to be able to help folks who by and large cannot work for legitimate reasons. We need to come to agreements about that and we need to look at in the mirror and, and say, "Well, these rules only apply to people who are a little bit more privileged." If you're a guest worker and you're under 13, you still can work in the fields five hours a day. Gerry: Fuck that. Chad: Keep an eye out for more Jerry Tales coming soon. Sowash 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. #Workforce #Wages #AI #chatbots #Recruitment #Branding #Global #GerryCrispin #GerryTales

The week of July 4th is usually pretty slow, but there were plenty of fireworks this year. -- StepStone uses Appcast acquisition to slap the US market in the face -- Facebook does job search, nobody cares -- AT&T, Comcast, The Home Depot's rainbow ain't foolin' nobody and more! Try not to choke on all the hot dogs, PBR and freedom. And show our sponsors some Yankee Doodle appreciation. Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx are our Red, White and Blue. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast Joel: Ah, yeah, still trying to shake off the smell of hotdogs, pops, blue ribbon, and freedom. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous, flying in on the wings of a bald eagle, baby. I'm Joel Cheeseman. Chad: And I'm Chad. I can't wait until the U.S. women's soccer team win another one! No jinx. Joel: On this week's episode, StepStone goes fishing for Appcast. Some corporate rainbow flags don't fly quite as high as you think they do, and VR, yes, Chad, VR gets some air time. Grab your Oculus Rift and see how many hotdogs you can down while you listen to this word from JobAdX. JobAdX: "Nope. Neh, not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next." This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past our 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 why 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 be emailing, "Join us at jobadx.com," that's, "Join us at jobadx.com." Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: How was your Fourth of July, my man? Chad: It was relaxing. Didn't have any kids. Just all we had was beautiful weather and beer out on the deck out at Upland Brewing. It was amazing, then went to Swan's Eggs. They had a special beer release yesterday. So, I mean, it was amazing for us. Joel: Any fireworks? Chad: Yeah, we had fireworks the night before. So we stank of freedom the entire day. Joel: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It spells like freedom. Let's get to an abbreviated show, shall we? Chad: Okay. Do it. Joel: Shout out. We made the top podcasts lists from two companies this past week. Chad: We're such suckers. Joel: Our buddies at Candidate.ID, or Candidate ID, or whatever we're calling them today, had us on their top five list. Well deserved, if I do say so myself. VideoMyJob, our buddies over in Australia, put us on their top podcasts list for recruiting. Always appreciate that. If you haven't seen our DEMOpocalypse with them, I highly encourage it for both of those companies, actually. Chad: Yeah, now, we're suckers for lists. Let's just put that out there, guys. Kind of like we're suckers for swag, we're suckers for lists. So Newvoe, Michael O'Dell ... Neuvoo. I'm sorry. Is it Neuvoo? I think it's Neuvoo. Joel: Yeah, and you forgot booze as part of our sucker's list. Chad: Yeah, booze is always a part of it as well. So we got the T-shirts and can koozies, which I displayed on Twitter and Facebook from the peeps at Neuvoo, mainly or with Odell. Joel: Anything in that box for me? Chad: Oh yeah. I got a XXL. And- Joel: You had to throw a fat-boy joke in there, didn't you? Chad: No, I didn't. Chad: It's what you wear. It's not my fault, and a couple of koozies for you, so yeah, they're good to go. Joel: So you already shouted out to the U.S. soccer team. I'm a tad bit concerned because when they beat the Brits, they did a little pinkie T gesture. And he country of England is freaking out about it. Chad: Yeah, I heard. Joel: So if they're freaking out about that, we're going to really fuck shit up because were going way beyond T gestures. Chad: No, England's just pissed off because they're supposed to be good at football, and they just got their asses handed to them. And it's one of those things. And it's okay. Just don't cry so loud. Okay? Just find a corner. Get in the fetal position, and do it like you're supposed to, okay? Joel: But you already shout-out to the soccer team, but I want to give a shout-out to Joey Chestnut, who is the Michael Jordan of competitive eating, winning his 11th, I think, competition yesterday by downing 71 hotdogs in, I don't know, 10 minutes or whatever it is. The dude is insane. I met him at a Target in Fisher's I think last year. Nice guy. So yeah, shout-out to Joey Chestnut, man. Keep eating. Chad: You're the only guy I know who watches competitive eating online. Joel: That's bullshit. There are totally listeners out there that watched the eating competition yesterday. Chad: If you watched the eating competition yesterday, please fire off. Give us some feedback, and tell me that I'm full of shit or Joel's just weird, which I'm going to go with the latter. Ed: Yo, that jawn is so lame. Chad: Thanks to Louise Triance for once again having a Chad and Louise segment. We had Nathan Perrott on from AIA, who we're going to see in London here in less than a week. And also, our buddy Nick Livingston from Honeit, he survived the Firing Squad. He was like one of the first guys, I believe, to actually come on the Firing Squad as a startup, and he survived, did a great job. So it was great to be on with them during a Chad and Louise. If you haven't seen it, go out there on the socials and check out the recording. Joel: Did you make a bone-it joke while you were on the webinar? Chad: I did not. I thought we were out of those since we did it so many times. Joel: We have beat that dead horse quite badly, really violently. Chad: We have. Yes. Joel: Sorry, Nick. Chad: We're pretty good at that. Next I wanted to give a big shout-out to our buddies at Talent Nexus, where anybody who's going to see us in London and then afterwards, these guys have gone above and beyond. They've teamed up with us to be able to put together some promotions. And one of the promotions that everybody's going to love when you're in attendance at Rec Fest is the opportunity to win free beer or coffee for a year. Joel: Yeah. That's my kind of competition right there. Chad: That's right. So I'm going to let the cat out of the bag. So we've got these little Chad and Cheese cardboard faces, like the big heads. All you have to do is take a selfie with it #ChadCheese. The next day after our fucking crazy hangovers, we'll pick a winner as we also do the podcast live, hopefully from Talent Nexus HQ. Joel: Yeah, big head in your case. I'm going to go fat head in my case. I think you're fine with that, right? Chad: Yeah. Not to mention these guys do amazing like employer videos and whatnot. They have a crew that is going to follow us around. They're picking us up at the airport. They're following us around all the way through the day after Rec Fest. And they're slamming together a Chad and Cheese video brought to you by Talent Nexus. That's going to be fun as hell. So we get our very first hype video, Joel. Joel: Dude, I feel like I'm playing for the Buckeye's or something. It's pretty surreal this whole thing is happening. In addition to that, shout-out to Jamie Leonard, who interviewed for our Rec Fest and Joe Slavin, the masterminds of that conference. If you haven't listened to that, it's a quick 15 minutes of a lot of cussing, a lot of laughing, a little bit of sneak previewing of the conference. So check that out. Chad: And don't forget we're going to be headlining at Rec Fest. We're the last ones to take the stage, one stage only. And we're going to have 50 Chad and Cheese limited edition Rec Fest T-shirts that Jamie, Francesca, and the gang actually came up with. So these guys are all in, man. Joel: Get them and flip them on eBay for $1,000,000% profit, obviously. Are you ready to get to the show? Chad: Let's do this. Joel: The biggest news from a holiday week happened on the 1st. Appcast, the market leader for programmatic recruitment marketing was acquired or at least an 85% stake in the company was acquired by StepStone, which is an Axel Springer company, which Axel Springer's a huge like $7 billion publishing company with a few job boards, like a job site, total jobs, and obviously StepStone there in Germany. So great news on the programmatic news front. Chad: This is a German company pretty much bitch-slapping all the US companies right in the face, because this is the smartest, I believe, acquisition to happen ... It would've been the smartest to happen if a US company would've actually bought these guys. I mean, Appcast right now really provides much of the infrastructure of how a programmatic is done today. And I would think that most people probably agree with me on that, especially when it comes to advertise ... or recruitment ad agencies, being able to be connected with all these job sites. Chad: So this, to me, from StepStone's standpoint, is looking at, "How do we evolve ourselves? We see what's happening in the US. They're not pulling the trigger. We're going to pull the trigger. How do we evolve? And how do we start to move the ball forward in the UK or in Europe overall from duration-based ads to performance ads?" So there, this, to me, is big stand. It's really a big move that one of our companies over here in the US should've made, but they're too slow, and they got beat to the punch. Joel: Yeah. We both certainly agree on that. I think what we said to each other was, "Would you rather have Glassdoor for $1.7 billion or Appcast for $70 million?" Chad: Appcast all fucking day. Joel: For the money, it was a total steal for StepStone and Axel Springer. I also think it's a nice little step for a European company with a nice, strongholded brand overseas to make strides in the US. In fact, I think it was the StepStone CEO who said, "We've wanted to get in the US classified's market for quite some time, and this is a way to do that." I know that they've also been looking at some of the eBay classified stuff, which doesn't mean a whole lot here in the U.S., but I know like in Canada, Kijiji, which some people will know as I think one of the top classified sites up north. So, yeah, Axel Springer, StepStone, those guys in Europe looking to make a big splash in the US, and grabbing Appcast was a nice little step to do that. Chad: Yeah, and I don't see this as a little step, I see this as a big evolutionary step for those guys. And it could've been a big step for any of the job sites. I mean, Indeed, I can't believe that a company like Indeed didn't gobble them up. If Monster or CareerBuilder really wanted to make a difference and evolve into something different than what they are today, they could've made this move. There are just a ton of different opportunities that could've happened here domestically. Big, big props to our German friends over there at StepStone. Awesome. Joel: Chris Forman, who founded the company back in 2014 will remain with the company, so I don't see any major challenges or changes, excuse me, coming up- Chad: Yeah, I know. Joel: ... in the near term. But I think some potential winners in this might be the PANDOLOGICs of the world, who are doing also programmatic. If StepStone sort of stupidly launches stuff here and gives their stuff extra weight or more weight the what Appcast is ... They're able to be Switzerland a little bit in their algorithm. I think that could push more people into PANDOLOGIC, or Recruitology, or JobAdX, or some of the other programmatic options that are out there. Chad: Yeah, they're just kind of like, "We've watched chat bots get gobbled up left and right. Is this going to be a switch?" I think it is incredibly smart of any organization that's looking to try to move and evolve to be looking at these types of organizations. Joel: Do you know if Appcast took any money off hand? If they did, it wasn't a lot. And assuming it wasn't a lot, Chris Forman, man, congratulations. In five years, turn that thing into a nice little retirement nest egg, if you will. Chad: $8.7 million. Joel: Okay. That's all right. People got 10x on that investment. That's nice. Good for them. Chad: Yeah, big ups to Chris Forman and the crew. I mean, those guys just have to be as happy as anybody in our industry right now. And this is more, I think, more that validation for what they've done, the hard work that they've put in. And, again, they smartly took this technology and became really the backbone in many cases for programmatic distribution in the actual infrastructure in our industry. So, great job, guys. Joel: Moving on to that little company called Facebook announcement this week that they'll be make advertisements for jobs, loans, and credit cards, I'm not sure if there's a connection there or not, searchable for the US workers, excuse me, in the wake of a legal settlement that they recently buttoned up. This is from ABC News. Ads had only been delivered selectively to Facebook users based on data. Before this, the lawsuit had been over housing ads, actually. The searchable jobs database should be ready within the next year. Joel: So we've obviously talked about jobs being on Facebook and accessible; although making them searchable across from an advertisement's perspective hasn't been something that they've apparently done. And it's apparently something that they will be doing. I don't think it's as much strategic as it is just being free to do it because of this lawsuit being wrapped up. But it is also worth noting because its jobs, and it's a short holiday week, and we don't have a whole lot of news any [crosstalk 00:16:05]. Chad: Yeah, and meh. I mean, to me, the way that Facebook or any of these big data organizations actually make this work is being able to deliver relevant content. And since they've stripped out some of the targeting pieces that they've had for jobs, to be able to help organizations, really, look, to hire a more diverse workforce, all of this just seems very bland and milk toast to me right now because they had the targeting, and they had exactly what they needed to be able to help employers do what they needed to do. Then they just did a knee-jerk reaction, and then they stripped it all out. Chad: They have so many people are saying, "Well, what they use this to only include white males in the Midwest?" If that's the case, then guess what? That's why we have enforcement agencies like the EEOC and the OFCCP, right? So should be able to check these things. That data should be actually available to them from a targeting standpoint. It just makes sense. But we don't think about the other way around. Again, Julie works for Disability Solutions, and they help major brands target the right types of individuals, individuals with disabilities, for specific positions in their organizations. And they hire thousands of individuals with disabilities into those brands. One of the things that they did is they actually used Facebook to help target those types of individuals to help guide them into new careers. Now, that going away, it makes it a hell of a lot harder. It just makes no sense. Joel: Yeah, I think it's largely up to Facebook in terms of how successful or big a deal this is. And if they start sort of integrating job information in searches that are done on the site, I mean, people undervalue Facebook's search engine, but when you're searching for people, it's by far the number one search that people do within the world. So you mentioned Julie. If somebody did a search on Julie, not that they would, but if it knew her company and part of the search results were like, "Hey, Julie's company's hiring, and here are some jobs that they're currently hiring for," I mean, that could be kind of interesting. I don't think that Facebook will do that, but if they make jobs a core of the actual search, overall search, then it could mean something. Chad: I think a lot of it just has to do with delivery within the actual platform itself. Just relevant delivery makes just so much more sense. Joel: Yeah, and relevant ads are nicer if you can actually target for specific things, which they can't really do anymore. Chad: Yep. Joel: Anyway, technology that does make sense, a quick word from our sponsor at Canvas, and we'll talk about rainbows and VR, I know two of your favorite topics. 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. Canvas: 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 can't wait to see those guys in London. Chad: You know it. I can see we're going to have to have a shot with a Aman before we take the stage. Joel: Does Aman drink? I don't know if I've ever ... We've had lunch a couple ... Well, I guess at dinner and lunch. I guess he probably had a drink at dinner, if I remember correctly. Chad: When he's not on the mic, which is, I mean, that he's a smart guy, right? So when he doesn't have a mic in front of his face, he might be in a bar, but he's not drinking. But when we turn the mic's off, then, I mean, that's just smart business right there. Joel: Yeah, and by the way, he's likely to be the funniest guy at the conference based on past performance. Chad: Easily, yeah. Joel: Although he's a big-time CEO of Jobvite now, so he might have to tone down the humor. Who knows. Chad: That's why people love him. He's authentic. He's genuine guy. He's a funny guy. I don't expect him to tone that down at all. Joel: All right. Fair enough. So corporate rainbows, this is kind of your lane. Chad: Yeah. I was listening as Julie and Torin were recording their Crazy and The King last week. And they started talking about, and, I mean, this is something that is actually near and dear to our hearts, talked about the LGBTQ community. So they were talking about the story, and after they were done, I went, and I was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Chad: So she pointed me to this Forbes article that showed that all of these big brands that scored really high in this index card called the corporate equity index, how they really are like speaking out of both sides of their mouths. They are doing everything they can from a "policy standpoint" to look good on the LGBTQ community side, but behind closed doors, they're also donating money to anti-gay politicians. So when you see the logos, like the AT&T logo, or the UPS, or Comcast, or Home Depot, where they do the whole rainbow logo thing, I mean, that's to be able to say, "Oh, yeah, look, we're all inclusive." But AT&T donated over $2 million, closer to $3 million to anti-gay politicians. UPS donated $2.3 million: Comcast, $2.1, Home Depot, nearly $2 million; General Electric, $1.3. Chad: So, I mean, they have all these companies that are saying, "We are inclusive." But yet the question is, are they really? It came up in the conversation, "Well, isn't this just good business?" And my answer is no. You can't have two messages. You either believe in equity and inclusion or you don't. And a great example I think is like with Chick-fil-A or Hobby Lobby, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: That's what they believe in. They're not doing this rainbow logo thing because they don't believe in it. But yet these companies, AT&T, UPS, Comcast, Home ... UBS, Verizon, they're all doing this stuff, but they're trying to play to both sides of the tracks here. And I think it's total bullshit. Joel: Now, first of all, Chick-fil-A chicken is amazing regardless of where you sit on the political landscape. Chad: Never had it. Joel: Really? Oh man. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Anyway, and a lot of world hasn't because it's still fairly regionalized. But anyway, do you think it's a concerted effort to say, "Hey, we're going to be inclusive and our marketing is going to be sort of as such supporting that," like they're literally putting one face on and then putting money towards anti-gay candidates because they're anti-gay, or do you think that they do believe in inclusion and they do support candidates, and sometimes candidates that are supportive of other things also unfortunately are anti-gay on other levels? Joel: In other words, is it so black and white that corporations should say, "Look, if you have any anti-gay legislation on the books or votes," that, "we're not giving you any money no matter what, even if your policies are supportive of tax, whatever, or us moving places, or hiring people, or minimum wage, or things like that"? Should it be that black and white? Chad: I think ... because I don't know what they're actually thinking behind closed doors, but I do know that we are in a much more transparent community world today than we ever have been. And I know throughout the years, those backdoor kind of donations and deals and those types of things just kind of like slipped under the radar because it wasn't as public, right? And there wasn't as much transparency that's out there. Chad: So, I mean, this is my message to all those companies that are out there, and I'm sure they're obviously listening, is that you've got to get your shit together, and you've got to figure out who you are. And what you said, I think makes a hell of a lot of sense. You've got to know who you're giving money to. And if they actually resonate with your brand, if they embrace the things that your brand embraces. If they do, then you should obviously support them. But if you don't, then you don't. But you have to remember, though, we're in more of a transparent society today, and these things will be brought up. So a rainbow-colored logo is not going to get your ass off of the shit list just because it looks nice and you say wonderful things, right? Joel: Sure. And I think in terms of mobilizing a movement, so to speak, a million dollars for a big corporation like Pfizer is not a ton of money. And if they know that they're losing x amount of customers and dollars because of that decision that they've made, I mean, that's ultimately going to sway them one way or the other. I think transparency goes both ways. So I think it's much easier to sort of mobilize and tell Home Depot that we're going to Lowe's because you've donated money to anti-gay politicians. That's what's going to get their attention. Joel: And I think all that transparency is great and probably brings to their attention something they didn't even think about because that stuff is out there. They could've been just giving candidates money because, I don't know, they're in a certain state or wherever they're doing business and like, "Oh shit, they're anti-gay. Maybe we should think harder about who we're giving money to." Chad: Well, and these are not huge denominations. I mean, we got like close to $3 million to 193 anti-gay politicians, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: So it's not like one or two are giving like a million dollars. But the thing is, again, you have to, you really have to do your due diligence to ensure that you are supporting individuals, regulations, things of that nature that really ... that could prospectively negatively impact your brand. And, I mean, from my standpoint, my stepson Tristen is gay. And I've never had Chick-fil-A, and I won't because I vote with my dollar in this case, and I'm not giving them anything. I don't care how good their chicken is. I heard its wonderful. That's great. Fuck you. You're not getting my money. Joel: Fair enough, man. Don't turn this on me and my love for chicken. Chad: It's freedom. You eat what you want how you want. I'm not judging you. I'm just saying how I vote. That's all I'm saying. Joel: And speaking of other things that I love, this virtual reality story out of Walmart just warms the cockles of my heart knowing how much you love virtual reality as well. By the way, have I brought up the story of the virtual reality arcade that's in my neighborhood now? Chad: You haven't, but we should go check it out. Joel: We should. So you and I, what we remember is an arcade is games side by side of each other, and you put in a quarter, whatever, and you play the game and like- Chad: Pac-Man, Galaga- Joel: ... whatever [crosstalk 00:28:20] thinks about an arcade. So- Chad: Defender. Joel: ... we're having lunch, I'm having lunch with my kids, and I have a 12- and nine-year-old. Cole is my 12-year-old, and he's totally video game-obsessed. So we see this thing that says VR Arcade. So I say, "We got to go check it out." So we walk in, and it's almost like a cube farm, where you have, I don't know, maybe a 10x10 area walled off. They have cameras in the corners that look at your movements and stuff. And they have basically a laptop computer that shows what the person is seeing with virtual reality. Joel: And so it's just like a cube farm. And you see kids with these headsets, and they're like shooting stuff and playing Star Wars with a lightsaber and whatnot. So it was pretty surreal. But anyway, so Cole does it, and he's playing like shoot zombies and whatever. And he starts ... He's looking like Wyatt Earp with these hand guns and whatnot. So anyway, he loved it. He's probably going to want some VR Arcade for Christmas. But anyway, VR is coming. And I've been talking about it forever. Joel: But Walmart has embraced it in terms of training managers, which, to me, makes ... Training workers no matter what they do with VR makes a lot of sense to me. I think at some point you'll be able to walk into Walmart, put on a VR headset, and interview for the job or whatever. You may be able to talk to your managers and go through training with VR. I think this is the future and this is just another step into the future that I foresee. Chad: Yeah. No, this is interesting. This is very interesting. I mean, it's from the standpoint of if you actually don't have a trainer there with those people, and then it's just like a recording, and you put the headset on, and they're like walking through a Walmart, and they're like, "Oh, look over here. This needs stocked, or this needs to happen, or this is wrong." Okay, I get it, because it kind of takes you through the different steps. For me, it's almost like do you not have enough Walmarts to walk these fucking perspective managers through to show them what ... Chad: It's like why do I need VR when I could just go to ... I live in a town that has in the county 40,000 people. We have two Walmarts. I mean, you can't tell me that you can't just walk through the Walmart and go through this training. I mean, again, it's just really kind of interesting. Joel: Come on, man, you might be able to see Sam Walton like actually there. Who knows. Chad: We do that with augmented reality. So you put on these glasses, and you actually walk through the store. And there's Sam, and he's like, "Don't forget, whippersnapper." Joel: He drives down in his old F-150, or whatever it is, guy with his two hunting dogs. That was great. By the way, breaking in, we have another live view from The Ladders R&D department. (crickets). Sorry, I just couldn't resist that. All right, moving on to Candidate.ID, we gave them a shout-out earlier, but they are currently crowdfunding specifically for HR folks in their recruiting universe to take stock in the company. Joel: It's not real clear what is going on. You have to kind of contact them, and they kind of take it from there, because there are regulations around this, and they are a Scottish company, so I'm not sure exactly what goes on there. So if you want to go, you can go to candidateid.cnddtid.com, which I guess is a shortened version of candidateid.com, and learn more. Joel: But they're only making this opportunity available to people in talent acquisition and the "related HR world." This is an opportunity, quote for them, "to come together, to collaborate, and create shared value. We're doing this as a gesture of friendship and good will," like good Scotsmen, Scotspeople, whatever, "because tech investing, from as little as 100 pounds," that's $132 for us in the US, "is fun. And if you own a part of our business, we know you're more likely to share with us your good ideas and feedback." So interesting. Chad: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just smart and fun from a promotional standpoint. One of the things that Adam and team I think have been really good at is getting on stage, getting in front of cameras. He's always doing these videos of walking down the street as he's talking into his mobile phone kind of video type of a thing. So he's always out there, and he's looking for different ways to be able to really just continue to push the Candidate.ID brand, not to mention kind of like the feeling of community within itself. I think it's smart. And I don't see really many other organizations, especially in our industry, doing these types of things. Joel: Yeah, there was sort of a crypto trend there early. Remember Moonlighting, you could buy shares, or they were going to do that. I don't think they ended up doing it, but I know that a few years ago, the funding rules were eased up here in the States and probably elsewhere, so I think you might see more and more companies sort of do this crowdfunding by investing in the company, not just getting shirts and swag, which is kind of what Crowdfunding the site does for the most part. Good for him. Hope he raised some money. Speaking of a company that I'd be open to invest in, 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's so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: This is probably the perfect ending any podcast. I love this story. So go ahead, talk about this resignation. Joel: This is out of the UK, who historically have some of the best senses of humor, Monty Python, Benny Hill, good stuff. So anyway, someone resigned recently with a, "Sorry for your loss" card. 22-year-old Sam Baines gave this card to his boss with the words, "My last day at work is the 28th of July." Yeah, forget the email resignation. Forget the print-out, "I, such-and-such, have ... such-and-such's last day." Why not do it with Hallmark, do it with American Greetings, give your boss a card, and say, "Fuck off. I'm out of here"? Chad: So awesome. And, again, it's one of those condolences cards, and the verbiage inside is, "Thinking of you at this difficult time." Joel: And by the way, we hear so much about ghosting. Ghosting is so lazy, when you can be much more creative, and funny, and humorous. Do it with a card. The next time that you want to ghost an employer, go to Hallmark. Say it with love. Chad: I love it. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. 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. #Facebook #ATT #LGBTQ #StepStone #Appcast #VR #CandidateID #TalentNexus #RecFest #Programmatic #jobboards

With Recfest 2019 a little over a week away in London, what better way for Chad & Cheese to pregame than to get the show's masterminds, Jamie Leonard and Joe Slavin? The boys breakdown the show and give listeners a sneak-peek into the havoc that is about to invade English shores. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Tengai: Hi this is Tengai the unbiased interview robot. You're listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I love these guys. Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Bad food, worse weather, Mary fucking Poppins. We got some Brits on the show today. Chad: That's right. Joel: And what better day to have them than when the USA is about to kick the English women's ass in the World Cup. Chad: Well today, on the Chad and Cheese special edition podcast we have Jamie Leonard, and Joe Snaven, from- Joel: Slavin. Chad: Recruitment events company a.k.a. big fucking RecFest. All the way from London, let me hear it guys. Chad: So guy's you're going to have to be a little gentle on Joel because yesterday was Canada Day, and he's drunk on Canadian beer. I didn't even know Canada had a day. I mean Canada- is Canada big enough population wise? Joel: Ruin the towel on me today. Jamie: Is that like the 4th of July for Canadians? Joel: It's, yeah it's a colony like America, to Jamie. Jamie: Thank you for that. Chad: Today as Joel is recovering from a hangover, we're going to be incredibly loud and we're going to talk about RecFest. So, Jamie, Joel and I have been talking about Wreck Fest for fucking months now, because we're really excited because we've never been before. Tell us what we're going to expect. Joel: Who the fuck are you guys? Jamie: What the fuck are we guys? So it's a full on festival. So, we've been running RecFest for this will be year 6. To date it kind of started off as pretty much a conference room day drinking, and its slowly progressed into what it is now. So we've hired a big field, we've put down five marquee big tops a hold, 600 people each, we've had to lay wifi cable in, we've got 3000 recruiters, a bunch of sponsors, a hell a lot of alcohol, food, music afterwards, and it's- the tagline is it's the largest independent event for TA on the planet. We're not bigger than the Anaheim guys on LinkedIn yet, but you know we're on the march. Joel: It's basically Glastonbury for recruiters, or Coachella for our American listeners. Jamie: Yeah so one of our clients, and I won't do the LA accent because I'll just offend a lot of people, but she said "I hear it's like Cher meets Coachella", and I just couldn't think of- couldn't shake that. For weeks. Me in Coachella, and what that would look like. Joel: Embrace that man. Chad: That's good shit. That's good shit. So, how many speakers- you have five fucking stages for god sakes- how many- this is all one day, how many speakers? Jamie: So we've got just over a hundred speakers in total. Chad: Holy shit. And you chose to close the entire day, bars open at noon, this thing starts like around nine, or something like that? Jamie: Yeah, it starts at nine, so you know a good three hours, four hours, before the bar opens. Chad: You guys chose to bring us in to close this motherfucker out, so why choose a couple of dumb yanks to come on stage and break shit? Jamie: Because if you know the RecFest audience, by that time in the day they're slightly, what's the word I'm looking for... pissed. Usually. By that point and you know, maybe talking about- Joel: Belligerent. Jamie: Some one to come on and talk about the intricacies of DNI profiling probably isn't the best thing these guys want, that they want solid banter. They want piss taking, so I've been a fan of the podcast for many years and thought that this would be a great way to close the show up, because anywhere I've heard you guys talk, there's usually beers anyway, so it's like these guys are used to dealing with a rowdy crowd. Joe: And as the American representative here on the ground in the UK, when Jamie means pissed, it means drunk. Jamie: Yep. Sorry Joe's translating for me. Joe: And when he's asking you guys to piss take, that means make fun of people. Jamie: Yeah. Joe's here as the official English American translator. Joel: Yeah this thing is a who's who of celebrities in our industry. From Charney, to Levy, Aman Brar, the newly minted CEO of JobVia. I mean you guys have done a kick ass job. I know I speak for both Chad and I in saying that we're honored to be on the main stage closing this show. Jamie: Thank you. Joel: Torin's going to be so jealous. Chad: Torin's going to be jealous, the Hung Lees of the world, the Bill Boormans of the world, I mean again, from across the pond from here in the US, it's really, if you didn't get a ticket, well it's too fucking bad because they're sold out. But, from what I'm hearing, and this year's not over yet, so I'm not going to keep you to this, you're looking to make this thing even fucking bigger next year? Jamie: Yeah, so you know we looked at different options, do we take it to the states? Which I don't think is the right idea. I spoke a lot to Lars yesterday about this, and I'm not sure it would work right now. Or do we try and make it a destination spot for people to come in from outside the UK? And if you're going to do that you need to give people more than a day, so we're looking at plans at the moment to potentially expand this out to a two day conference, two day festival. And then work with other event organizers around that to make London a bit of a destination spot that week, for people in the TA space that want to fly over. Not just from Europe, from the US, and around the UK. They want to come experience all the UK has to offer when it comes to TA resource and recruiting, so that's the plan. Jamie: We've got the venue for next year, that's good. It's now just working out the intricacies of going two days, because one day is difficult, with this many people, two days starts to get quite complicated. But I'm sure the team will figure it out. I won't, because I don't get involved in that shit, I'll turn up on the fucking day and I'll drink, that's fine. Chad: See that's a great leader right there. You know you have the vision, you can- you guys are doing four day work weeks, which I think is just fucking amazing. You're going to have to tell us a little bit about that. And at the end of this, you're like "you know what? I trust you guys to make sure that this shit happens. Go do it", that is a fucking leader. Jamie: Yeah, you know I'm at a place now where I know when it's time for me to step in and time for me to just get out of the way. And we have a fantastic team. They've managed to pull this off with working a four day week, which is impressive. They've rose to the challenge every time. We've double RecFest every year since we started. It went a hundred, to 200, to 400, to 800, 1500, now 3000. So this team of superheros, they can do anything. I'm sure they'll rise to the task. Joel: Jamie there aren't very many, if at all, vendors associated with the show. There's no expo hall, there's no gold and silver sponsors. Jamie: No. Joel: Is that going to change? Is that by design? What was the thinking around that? Jamie: I don't want to knock any of the exhibitor companies, like they will do their shit really well, but I used to work at Monster, and I can't remember a worse time than being hungover on an exhibition floor. Jamie: I can't remember anything worse than- it just, it's a very unnatural process. The whole idea of grabbing people, scanning them, qualifying them, demoing them. It just is very unnatural, and I don't think it's the right way to do business. Jamie: So we've got vendors here, but they're doing things like... one of the vendors is bringing a litter of puppies for people to play with. Joel: Oh yeah! Jamie: One of the vendors is bringing Tengai. Tengai, you guys know Tengai. Tengai is here right, so that's the sort of shit that people bring to RecFest. It's more interactive, a bit more immersive, not just "hey let me come and demo you, and scan you", I've never been a big fan of that format. There's a lot of networking to be done as well. There's a lot of opportunities to have decent conversations at the bar, or elsewhere. RecFest is a bit more chilled out. Yeah, look there's vendors here, we have sponsorship money, we got some great partners, but it's not as in your face as it is with the big conferences, and it's not as forced down your throat as some of the others. Joel: I hear that robot can drink everyone under the table. Chad: Yeah and anybody who doesn't get pictures with puppies, and pictures with Tengai, you're just not fucking human. I mean, I'm sorry, those are the two coolest things. We had a chance to meet Tengai in Portugal, and we all thought- I mean Joel and I thought it was pretty fucking creepy, but, we got in front of Tengai, and actually interacted, and it was like one of those "I got to take a selfie, I've got to have five or six different people take pictures of me", it is like one of the coolest things. Jamie: Yeah. From our point of view, I'm a fan. We like it when people push the envelope with this sort of thing. I think it's going to be interesting watching the recruiters interact with it, and see if this is potentially a threat. I'm not one of these fear mongers that preach that robots are going to take over our industry one day, but it's an interesting concept. They're definitely pushing the envelope, and it's very, very early on at the moment. So I don't think anyone should judge it, I certainly think they should be applauded for trying something like this. Chad: Yeah. Jamie: Let's see if they can then turn it into a commercial model afterwards. Chad: Who's bringing the puppies? That's what I want to know. Jamie: Tribepad, so a big ATS in the UK are bringing- I think they went to another event and one of them took their own dog and it got overrun with everyone's hanging around. And I was just like, just amplify that by 10. Just bring 20 puppies and see what happens. And they did. Joel: Assuming Chad's wife is going, they're going to fly home about five puppies. Chad: No. Not happening. I don't even want to get into that story. Not to mention the last one, we haven't even talked about. We have put together a promotion, or actually Talent Nexus, has put together a promotion where on the day of, we're going to give away a free year of beer or coffee to some lucky RecFest goer. When you get in there you'll see the promotion will be there, I'm not going to tell you about it, we're going to let it be a surprise, but we're really excited about that! And the thing that I'm really excited about, Joel knows this, I love fucking t-shirts. RecFest created their own Chad and Cheese t-shirt, limited 50. Only 50 of these things, and if you're at the main stage, during our headlining gig, where there's going to be no other stages open, only our stage, we're going to be throwing 50 of these bitches off the stage. Jamie: You're potentially going to cause some sort of riot, you do know that don't you? [crosstalk 00:11:43] My public liability is only 5 million on this one, so if people start getting crushed and shit, I'm holding you guys accountable. Chad: Can't promise anything. Joel: What are you talking about? I think we might be able to fix Brexit during our session. Jamie: Good one. Because your politics are so good at the moment as well. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Joe: Yo that John is so lame. Jamie: Yeah, we can have a who's got the worst politics off if you want. Chad: I don't even want to have that conversation, I'm having too much fun right now. Chad: Well guys, so we've got next week RecFest. Anything else you want to talk about before we dump this thing? Joel: I say we get predictions for today's match. US versus England. [crosstalk 00:12:25] Joe: I grew up in New York, I spent about 40 years in New York so I'm quite torn. Being an American I prefer underdogs. The England team is the underdog, and I've lived here for 18 years now, so I've got strong pull there. But I also love the American team and I've supported them ever since I saw them whoop China many many- in the early 90's I think. So I don't think I really know who I want until the first goal goes in. Jamie: Fair enough. You're on the fence, you're on the fence. Chad: All right, yeah I think it's fairly simple, it's going to be three one, USA, we're going to on to win this bitch. Germany's out, right, so I think Germany was really the biggest threat that we had other than England, but once we take care of England today we'll be on stage next week and Joel's going to be in his red white and blue speedo. Joel: I'm going to go two nil. I'm going to go shut up today. Jamie: I really appreciate you guys call it football as well, I just really appreciate that. I know how much that must hurt, to not call it soccer, so I do appreciate that, thank you. That is a big deal to us. Chad: It's not American football, but it is football, so we dig it. Not to mention when the US is kicking so much ass. Joel: Did I hear a Jamie prediction? Chad: No, Jamie didn't give a prediction. Jamie: I'm going to go two one England. Joe: Hey! Jamie: Two one England. Joel: Oh. Chad: Well that being said I think this is going to close out the RecFest edition of the show. Once again guys, if you don't get a chance to go, you're going to hear a lot of reporting and shit from us on it, but make sure you earmark next year, because this is going to be a fucking- not only are you going to see a bunch of really cool people on stage, talking about what you care about, but you're going to have an opportunity to relax, and chill out and then who knows? Maybe hit the mosh pit at the end. Joel: Guys, this was fun man. Jamie: Thank you for all the support. I know you guys have mentioned this at times, so we really do owe you one, thank you very much. Joel: Our pleasure. Chad? 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. #RecFest #Event #Diversity #AI #Tengai #Puppies

Gerry Tales with industry icon Gerry Crispin was off-the-chain, and this is Part II of our interview all-things-recruiting. Enjoy, get smarter and show exclusive sponsor Uncommon some love. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Chad: Welcome to volume two of Gerry Tales. Gerry Crispin is a living, breathing, recruiting history podcast. Joel and I had an opportunity to sit down with Gerry for over an hour-and-a-half to talk history, now and future state of the recruitment industry. This is the second in our Gerry Crispin series. Enjoy, after a word from our sponsor. Chad: Dude, we're always talking about cool new tech, but it's hard for hiring companies to change. I mean, adoption's a bitch. Joel: Yup. Chad: New tech can get them to qualified candidates so much faster. Joel: I don't know, man. But recruiters already have their routine in place and nobody wants to jump into another platform. Especially when it's expensive and also requires hours, maybe days, of training. Chad: Exactly, but that's where Uncommon's new service comes into play. Uncommon pairs expert recruiters with in-house, kick-ass technology. Joel: All right, interesting, interesting. It sounds like Uncommon understands the problem of change. Chad: That's why they hand-select veteran recruiters, train them on this kick-ass technology, that has access to over 100 million active profiles. Joel: Yeah, yeah. But I bet they're expensive and I bet it require some kind of annual commitment or contract, right? Chad: No, man. Uncommon is not an agency, they don't require a contract, any contingencies. All they do, they charge one flat fee, per project. Saving, I don't know, anywhere from 50 to 80% on each hire. Versus the average agency cut. Joel: Oh, snap. Companies could save big stacks of paper. Especially if they're rapidly scaling and need hires today. Chad: Yep. And all you have to do is reach out to TAG and the Uncommon Crew at uncommon.co. That's uncommon.co. Joel: Change doesn't have to be a pain, if you're using Uncommon. 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 and Cheese Funcast. Joel: What do you remember from that first Superbowl with the HotJobs and Monster? Do you remember anything about that period, that stuck out? Gerry: Oh, sure. I mean, the Monster ad was probably the most extraordinary thing we've ever seen, in our space of recruiting. No one had ever spent that kind of money to get visibility. And what it created was a recognition that there was going to be a major shift from the $10 billion that was being spent on print-recruitment advertising, to basically shifting all of that. All that money was going to move, and it had. In 2000, it hit 10 billion. In 2001, it moved from 10 billion to five and today it's no more than a billion. Chad: Here's the funny part, Gerry. There was another job site, that actually ran ads, that nobody remembers. Gerry: Which one are your- Chad: HotJobs. Gerry: Oh, HotJobs, yeah. So, HotJobs was going to be bought by Monster, if you recall. Chad: Yeah, but not just then. Coming out of the gate, so this was January of '99, when monster.com launched. In late January, early February, I can't remember exactly when it was, that's when we did the ad. But HotJobs also did an ad, and so did Victoria's Secrets. They had all these online properties that were finally doing ads and all of them, all of them went... I mean, they couldn't handle the traffic. The only one that could handle the traffic was Monster. So nobody remembers that HotJobs ran ads, or Victoria's Secrets or what have you. All their shit couldn't even take the traffic. So yeah, I mean it was... Now their ads [crosstalk 00:04:30]. Gerry: Well Monster was out there, significantly, before. So they had, obviously, a heads up, in terms of visibility. And then, obviously, the HotJobs managed for awhile. I don't know if you remember, but it wasn't long after when HotJobs originally sold... Right. But originally sold to Monster. And the US government sued Monster as a monopoly, to prevent them from buying HotJobs. I don't know if you realize that. Joel: I don't remember that. Chad: Yeah, I don't remember that at all. [crosstalk 00:05:08] what year? Gerry: Well that was... I'd have to go back and look, to be honest with you. But it was in the early 2000's. Joel: Okay. Gerry: So 2000, 2001, something like that. I wrote a screed post, that this is the stupidest thing I'd ever heard in my life. I was then called by Monster's lawyer defending their ability to buy HotJobs. Joel: Yeah. Gerry: And as a result of that, the lawyer said, "We want you," Mark and I, "to go to DC and be our expert witness, when we meet to defend that we should be able to buy HotJobs." And I said, "Okay." And they said, "How much would you want?" And I said, "Well, 3000 an hour." I just pulled that out of the ceiling. Chad: The ether. Gerry: The ether, and he laughed and he said, "I don't make 3000 an hour." Chad: That's your fault. Gerry: I said, "How much do you make?" He said, "300 an hour." And I said, "Okay, I'll take 300 an hour from the time I leave my home, till the time I return. And Mark will do the same." And he agreed to that. Gerry: Now when I said 3000 an hour, I meant for the two hours that we might be in the meeting in DC. Joel: Yup. Gerry: So they paid us for three freaking days, 600 an hour. It was the best deal I had ever made. And we spent a total of two hours in DC, in a big conference room with a board room where you could put 50 people around a table. There were like 10 people from Monster, and Mark and I, and there were like 30 people on the other side who represented the government. And Mark and I spoke for maybe 15 minutes, and that was it. And they won. Joel: Was it just like, "Here's our book of 3000 Job Boards."? Gerry: Yeah. And they won- Joel: "See you later." Gerry: ... and so, Monster won. But then Yahoo! bought HotJobs. Joel: Yeah. Gerry: Actually, you know who was part of that was Dan Finnigan, who just left- Chad: Jobvite, yup. Gerry: ... Jobvite. Joel: You know, you could argue that HotJobs' Superbowl ad was way better investment than Monster's. Because HotJobs spend almost all their money on that Superbowl ad, but it put them immediately [crosstalk 00:08:06] into the same... But about from a brand awareness- Chad: That's an interesting argument. Joel: ... from a brand awareness standpoint, they immediately became the number two job board. Gerry: Agreed. Chad: Yeah, but here's What happened from HotJobs' standpoint. HotJobs didn't take money from staffing companies, they only took money from direct employers. Gerry: Yup. Chad: 75% of Monster's revenues, when we launched in January of '99, were what? Staffing companies. So I had friends that worked at HotJobs and I used to give them shit all the time. Because we were raking in the fucking cash from staffing companies and HotJobs were turning them away. Where do you think they went? To me. Joel: I'm not arguing the revenue question, I'm just arguing... Like the first time I heard about HotJobs was at the the Sherman Minneapolis in 1998. They had a 10x10 booth and they were a punchline. And by '99 they had a Superbowl ad and they were the number two player in the job [crosstalk 00:09:05] space. Chad: And they crashed. Joel: No. And then they got bought. Chad: And then they crashed. Joel: And then they went public and made a ton. They made a... It's Dick Johnson, right, was the founder? Chad: Yeah, it was Dick. Gerry: Yeah. Joel: He's a rich man. I mean, you can argue all you want, but the dice they rolled, he scored on that one. In my opinion. Gerry: That's a good point. It's a very good point. Interesting. If you think about how far back that is, and still, we're talking about- Joel: 20 years ago. Gerry: ... it's 20 years ago. And you come forward and I'm shocked, not shocked, I am amazed at how much money has been spent in the first four months or five months in 2019, investing in job boards. [crosstalk 00:09:58] it's amazing how much money is being put into job boards today. Chad: But they're not spending that on tech though, Gerry, what are they spending that on? They're spending it on the database of people that are... They're spending it on the data. It's kind of like LinkedIn, right? What do you spend that much money on? You spend it on the fucking data that they have, the people. I mean, all that data, what can you do- Joel: Over the opportunity. Chad: Yeah. What can you do, from a technology standpoint, to be able to take this old, crusty job board shit and actually create something that can leverage that data. Right? And make it into something that's worth a shit in 2019, right? Or 2020, or what have you. But I mean, it's all about data right now. I believe, it's not about the technology. Because shit, Google's the one who has the technology that's powering stuff. Gerry: Yup. Joel: And Gerry's a big proponent of privacy. And if the data is so valuable and the privacy issue comes to light, which we think it all will, how much is the data worth if it's not voluntarily given by- Gerry: Right. Joel: ... the private citizen. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Gerry: I think we have the technology now to be able to, literally, ask permission over every data point. Chad: Yeah. Gerry: But no one's holding anyone accountable to do that. Except, I mean the closest obviously is GDPR. But we have not, in many countries, gotten to the level where we would accept that the data about me that exists anywhere is owned by me. Chad: Well, in California, that's going to happen next year because the stricter laws, stricter than GDPR, is going into effect in California. And then you have CEOs like Colin Day who are saying, "Look, we're switching the whole entire 'paradigm' to more of a focus on the actual candidate. It's their data." And they're talking about creating these profiles. Joel: Passport. Chad: Yeah. The passport, that is controlled by the candidate. So, I believe the only way that we can actually move this industry is to have leaders, like a Colin Day, say, "This is what we're doing because it's the right thing to do." And then, for all those other assholes who aren't going to change, have the Federal Government do the right thing for the people and actually regulate it. So, it's going to happen. Not to mention, we're talking about a pod that dropped today, about 13.7 million individuals who had their data in Ladders, had all their shit free-and-open on a fricking AWS Cloud system. Gerry: Wow. Chad: I mean, it's like, "What the fuck is going on here?" I mean, Cenedella is not new to this shit. Right? Gerry: Cenedella was at HotJobs. Chad: Yeah, he's not new to this shit. Right? How do you fuck that up? Gerry: Well, a lot of easy ways. He- Chad: Apparently. Gerry: He's not the only one out there. The fact of the matter is, it's just how we treat the other side. And fundamentally, until it's recognized that candidates have significantly more power and they need to recognize it themselves. So it's not just employers, it's candidates need to step up to make better decisions or want to make better decisions about their own careers. And I think that's coming as well. The recognition that there's a lot more questions that they might want to ask, before they start making good, solid job and career decisions. Chad: Right. Gerry: And I do think, again, that that's coming. When that starts to converge, then I think we're going to see a lot more quality choices between employers and candidates. Because you'll have both sides making quality decisions, as opposed to trying to figure out how to get one side to make that decision. To me, that's always been a serious problem. Is that the transparency is always been on the side of the candidate. I, as the candidate, have to share every relationship I've ever had, professionally. Chad: Yup, souring- Gerry: Why it went well or bad. Chad: Yeah. Gerry: And on the other side I can't ask you, the hiring manager, "Tell me about everybody who's ever worked for you, in this job, and where they are now. Before I decide whether I want to work for you. And tell me about the quality of the team that you've got and where they're going, these are the folks that I've got to work with." So until we start getting more transparent about that, and most companies are not willing to do that. I mean, we struggle with figuring out how to ask the damn salary question. Why would that be a problem? You don't ask the salary question. You tell people what your compensation approach is and that your, for example, here is the band- Chad: Right. Gerry: ... and 85% of all the people we hire come within this range. And that's kind of what you've got to negotiate with. Chad: Well to get to pay transparency in the first place, you're going to have to go there. And again, this is one of the, which pisses me off, some companies have actually taken the step to be more transparent in pay. Most of them, they're covering their eyes and they're covering their ears, and just hoping that it goes away. It's not going to go away. Federal Government's going to step in. Gerry: But we now have data. Joel: Not just our government, but you've got Glassdoor, PayScale. I mean, all kinds of sites ask for salary. Gerry: Well, and increasingly, they're algorithms will put ahead those who do share that information. Clearly Google has been leading, in terms of that. But Talent Board, last year, asked the question of candidates. How they were or if they were asked salary, and if so, how were they asked? And we could correlate their ratings to pieces of that question. So for example, companies that shared information about salary before asking anything, were rated higher by those candidates. Joel: Sure. Chad: Yeah. Gerry: Companies that asked the salary question and refused to answer the question about salary were rated lowest. Joel: So you mean transparency was a positive? Gerry: This was a duh. Joel: Yeah. Gerry: But the point is, if candidate experience is going to impact you and we can demonstrate that it does, then obviously this is an issue that should be a no-brainer. In terms of, at least, at the worst, you should be asking for salary expectations. But that didn't give you much of an advantage, to be honest, over asking salary. Chad: Keep an eye and ear out for more Gerry Tales, coming soon. So watch out. Kristin: 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. Kristin: 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. For more visit chadcheese.com. #Workforce #Monster #SuperBowl #HotJobs #jobboards #Yahoo #GDPR #transparency #Wages #GerryCrispin #GerryTales

If you missed the news breakdown from last week, you're in for a treat this week. The boys breakdown a bevy of news, including - iCIMS buying Jibe - AMS buying a chatbot - Where you at SHRM? Do you job! - Rumors out of CareerBuilder, and Entelo, and new headwinds for Slack. Enjoy the tsunami of news and opinion from HR's most dangerous podcast. Remember, Sovren, Canvas and JobAdx make it all possible. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. Don't call it a comeback. Back with our regularly scheduled weekly roundup, this is the Chad & Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous Mfers. Chad: Yes. Joel: I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am tired as fucking hell dude. This travel is some shit. Joel: You crazy, mofo man. On this week's show iCIMS ain't no Jibe turkey, Karen finds... You like that one? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Karen finds a mate and Slack gets a stiff arm. And we have more rumors than an episode of TMZ. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after this word from Sovren. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Sovren: 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: Va-va-voom. Chad: I always do, every single time I hear that commercial. Joel: So I posted on Facebook this week that Spaceballs was released however 30 years ago or whatever it was, and my favorite line is when they're combing the desert, "We didn't even found shit." Chad: While they were combing the desert, the white dudes have a comb, and the black dudes have a pick. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It was awesome. Joel: Yeah, it's funny shit. I see your fort is as big as mine. Chad: Love it. Joel: Yeah, dude. You've been a traveling man. I was smart enough to take a little time off. But you had to go out to Denver last week. Chad: Yeah. No, I had a great time. Louise Grant from Jobg8. Julie was actually on stage. She fucking killed it. I was her roadie, let's put it that way, which was awesome. Joel: She is number one, were you like standing ovation, go baby go. Chad: It was awesome. We go to a lot of these industry conferences. Joel: We do. Chad: And it's really cool because you see at lunch with the guys from TalkPush and so on, Bill Fanning and Jonathan Duarte, just all these guys that you see. Chad: The things that stick out about a conference is what matters, right? As soon as you come in, you know how they give you the bag full of like, I say in most cases junk. It's got all these cheap tchotchkes and shit, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: So Louise and group, they give you a bag, and it had beers in it. Joel: What? Chad: Yes. Joel: Were they in a cooler or something? Just warm beer? Chad: They were warm, yeah. So you had to get your own ice, not a ... I can do that for goodness sakes. Joel: Yeah. Chad: But giving of the beer was pretty awesome. So, that's a big applause. Joel: Okay. So was this Denver, Colorado based beer? Chad: Yes, yeah. Joel: Okay. Chad: It was all local brews. Joel: How many? Chad: I think there was just one per, but Louise gave me a special bag because she knows we like beer, that had six Senators or something like that. Joel: I feel like this whole beer thing is a little bit like thanks to us. A little bit, just a little bit. Chad: It could be. It could be. Joel: Yeah. Chad: But I have to say that was pretty awesome. Joel: This whole ... Yeah, the spread of alcoholism, you know God bless the Chad & Cheese Show. Chad: That's like TAtech. You go to TAtech, whenever we're on stage they open the bar. I mean Pete and Peter at TAtech. It's like no they get it. Then obviously SmashFly. We were on stage at SmashFly just a- Joel: Bucket of beer. Chad: Yeah, a bucket of beer was brought to us. So pretty much wherever we go they understand that it's kind of written in our silent contract, I guess you could say. Joel: In Belgium, I presented at a bar. Chad: See. Joel: That's I can die a happy man now at a bar. Chad: At Tyrone everybody was faced forward but the bar was at the back and they brought the bar in for us. So all we did was go to the back of the room and we sat at the bar and pretty much did our talk during that. But we turned the entire room around because the bar was at the back of the room. That's good shit dude. Joel: Yeah, and we've been really good at our server skills lately. Chad: Yes. Joel: Honing those. Chad: We're trying. Joel: Delivering the goods to people. But yeah, Louise that's a big thumbs up. Chad: Got to love it. Got to love it. Joel: Dear conferences, take note conferences out there. Chad: Take note. Joel: Goodie bags of beer. I'm surprised with Colorado there wasn't something green in the bag too. Chad: Yeah, I know. That sit was going around all over the place. So whether it was gummies or just the traditional, that was happening. Joel: I guess we're starting shout outs, I guess that's the first one technically. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. So you mentioned SmashFly. But huge shout out to Josh Zywien. Chad: Julia Levy from Fiserv. Joel: And Holland McCord, right? Chad: No, Holland McCue. Joel: McCue. Chad: Dombeck McCue yeah, from Delta Airlines, yes. Joel: Yeah. She's had eight names since I've heard of her. Chad: Yeah, I know. Joel: But yeah, they were brave enough to come on stage with us, talk shop, and big shout out to those folks. Chad: Yeah, and Holland actually brought us beer from Atlanta. So again, people are just getting us. So here's a couple of things from SmashFly that I loved. Chad: So, Alan and Tyler from Intel I loved that they're on stage telling everyone that their bat shit bad recruitment funnels suck. Get rid of them. Chad: I want to bring these guys on because again, they're Intel, they have a lot of money they're pushing into recruiting and what not, which I think is just awesome especially from a tech systems' analytics standpoint, a data standpoint. Chad: But I want to get these guys on the show to talk about their recruitment infinity loop. It's really good shit and we saw a lot of that where everybody is kind of moving from this old funnel to more of an infinity loop. Chad: That is more predicated on not just the recruitment process but also engagement. So trying to kind of blend engagement into the recruiting piece. Go fucking figure, right? Joel: Engagement, a common theme on the show that we love so very much. Chad: Yes, yeah. And Holland also said in her presentation of Delta Airlines that they actually have gained, they're given 80 hours back to their recruitment team through their use of Chatbots. So, I thought that was pretty cool. Chad: So hearing these practitioners on the stage talk about yeah, this is really cool. But also to be able to talk about the data and the really practical ways that they're using it and the impact on their teams. Joel: Chatbots clearly work. Like a year or so later they're clearly ... Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's one of our new stories we'll feature, a little tease there. They're going to start falling like dominoes to acquirers. But anyway, we'll get to that in a second. Chad: Too easy, yeah. Joel: Shout out to iHeartRadio. Chad: Yes. Joel: Apparently you can now listen to the Chad & Cheese podcast at iHeart. Chad: Yeah, iHeartRadio and also the new platform Luminary. We're on Luminary, iHeartRadio, and we just continued to add platform. Joel: Luminary is an interesting one. They have paid podcasts like exclusives on there. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: So let's see if that works very well for them. You had a couple of new listeners, Kevin Kirkpatrick and Stormin Norman. You know anything about these cats? Chad: Kevin Kirkpatrick, first and foremost, I just wanted to say that you're saying John wrong, okay? So he's a new Philly listener. Or maybe he's not a new Philly listener, but he's a Philly listener. Ed: Yo, that John is so lame. Chad: That's exactly right. Thanks Ed. Stormin Norman is a guy that I've known forever. He's been in this industry forever and he has 1500 domains that he's trying to get rid of just because they're sitting around doing nothing. So he's like, "Chad can you say something about it on the pod?" I'm like, "Yeah, not a problem." Chad: So if you're looking for ... These are trusted domains that he really just can't do anything with. Go ahead, hit us up on chadcheese.com. Joel: Are they really good? Chad: Yeah, some of them are actually pretty good. But I didn't go through all of them because it's like over 1,000 domains. Joel: We need to give him Jason Davis' number because he's got about 1,000 domains too. Maybe they could be like a bundle package deal. Chad: But anyway, so shout out to another, I believe, new listener, a Jose Watson. It's hilarious. He actually was listening to the Chad & Cheese podcast without headphones at work and he was asked to please put the headphones on because there's some language. So sorry not sorry Jose. You should have known better. Joel: He had a moment there, didn't he? Oops. Chad: Oops. Then Sarah Stamp who logged into and listened to our live stream on SmashFly's Transform. She's a listener but she obviously wanted to watch the show too. So, big shout out to Sarah. Joel: And that's when she discovered those guys have a face for podcasting. Chad: Especially you, yes. Joel: I'm sorry George Clooney. Have we shout out to SmashFly Transform yet? Chad: Yeah, those guys really killed it in Boston. The venue was pretty awesome. Having practitioners, again, not just talk about fluff about stuff on stage, I hate that shit. Chad: I get up and leave when I hear practitioners just talk about fluffy bullshit on stage. I was in my seat listening to things that actually mattered. So big props to Jay Z, to Tom, to Brandy and the gang over there for putting that together. Joel: Yeah. I was sad that I had to jet out early for you know personal reasons. But I was glad to see that the QR Code is making a comeback with Sprint Recruiting, I believe. Chad: Don't call it a comeback, it's been here for years. Last but not least, we've got to finish this shout right with RecFest. Guys we've been talking about RecFest for a while. I know it's like Chad shut up it's already sold out. You can still get on the wait list. Joel: You lead the way. Chad: Yeah, you can still get on the wait list. But here's the thing guys, 3,000 attendees, five stages. They're actually shutting down four of the stages and we're going to be the headliners. Chad: So we're the last ones that are actually on and through our friends at Talent Nexus, we're going to be doing some really cool stuff with them. I'm just teasing you about it now. Chad: But one thing that we will tell you about is if you're going to be at RecFest, we've actually teamed up with Talent Nexus and we're going to be giving some lucky listener/twitter follower, whatever, a free year of beer or coffee depending on what they like. If they like coffee we'll probably give it to the person who's going to take the beer. But anyway, free year of beer. Promotion should be a blast. War Games: Shall we play. Chad: God damn straight. I'm stoked. We have some other surprises with the guys from RecFest. We're putting some things together. You've got to be at the stage because we're going to be giving a lot of shit away and a lot of surprises are going to happen. So, it should be a blast. Joel: Be there or be square baby and you'll miss my red, white, and blue speed dial if you don't show up. Chad: Correct. I sure hope you don't have one of those. Joel: Boom. Tengai: Hi. This is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot. You're listening to the Chad & Cheese podcast. I love these guys. Joel: And we love you too Tengai. Chad: How could you not. Joel: Almost as much as iCIMS love Jibe this past week or two weeks ago. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: Our buddies at iCIMS who have gotten the acquisition bug here lately acquired Jibe, which I guess you would call sort of a talent platform. Chad: More of an engagement. Joel: Yeah, making career sites, being knee deep in Google stuff really early on. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah branding stuff. Sort of an attraction ... See how I did that, we'll lead into that. Sort of an attraction platform that iCIMS is building here. You'll remember they acquired TextRecruit a year or so ago as well. So they're building a nice little platform for marketing to candidates. Chad: Yeah, and I think TextRecruit has probably been like close to two years now, right? Man, it's been a little while. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So I mean once again people, I'm going to say this again and you've heard it before but too fucking bad. Let me make this very clear, this is an arms race. It's what it is. You either pick who you're going to partner with as a core tech or you try to survive on the island by yourself. That's what's happening here. Chad: So, Canvas obviously, Jobvite, TextRecruit, iCIMS, Jobvite also with Telemetry, which is kind of like a Jibe like platform, I guess you could say. Joel: RolePoint. Chad: Yeah, RolePoint. I mean there's all this that's actually happening, and this is an arm's race. Make no doubt about it. The big question is if you're a start up out there or if you're a company that has been a point solution for a very long time, are you going to join in this kind of arm's race? Are you going to try to duck and cover and hope this shit passes? Joel: So we have a whisper number for what iCIMS paid for Jibe, unsubstantiated rumors, but we like our sources pretty well. The number that I heard was 60 million. Chad: Yeah. So the amount of cash that they actually were able to put together was like over 40 million, right? Joel: Yeah. Jibe raised around 39 million, I think. Chad: Okay, okay. So you take a look at the sale on that, that's not a bad buy for iCIMS, right? Joel: No. Jibe investors didn't get quite the 10X that they were probably hoping for. It was more like the one and a half X. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah, and acquisition on the West. I had heard over the years, sort of negative rumors about Jibe and sort of they're running out of money. Joel: So I'm not going to say that it was a clearance sale, but it probably was a little bit of a bummer for Jibe investors who forked over 40 million. Chad: Yeah. Well Joe very early on became very fast friends with Google, right? With Bogomil and then now Tarquin to be able to infuse their tech, the Jibe tech with Google and use Google search, which we thought was very smart, right out of the gate. Chad: And while that was happening, guess who else was a part of that whole kind of collab that was happening? iCIMS. iCIMS is doing the exact same things. So the big question was were they pretty much in the room together, did this all kind of come about through those types of relationships? That's a good question. Joel: Well we know iCIMS is a huge fun of Google and sort of taken up the middle man of job search. Chad: Right. Joel: So, yeah, definitely a match made in heaven from a Google affection standpoint. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Joe will be joining iCIMS as a VP, I believe, or a general manager of the new Attract product. Chad: Which means Jibe's going away. Joel: Probably, probably. It's a good name though. Chad: Well last year ... No, it's a great name. Last year when we were at iCIMS HQ and we were going through the iCIMS' Influence Analyst Conference they were talking about these different components. Chad: The big question that I had for Al was dude, you can't build all this shit. You can but it makes no sense. He was like, "No, no, you're right. You're right." Which is one of the reasons why we bought TextRecruit. Chad: So I see this as something where some very smart people, the Colin Day's of the world, the Al Smith's of the world, they know their shit. He's a due diligence kind of guy, so he saw something I'm sure in Jibe that they wanted to pull in because it's kind of like cheating, right? Joel: A little bit. Susan Vitale at iCIMS will probably hate me to say this. But I like Jibe better than I do iCIMS as a brand. Chad: Yeah. I mean that's the hard part, right? Not to mention it has the name in the market. Not to mention if you pull Jibe, and this is kind of the argument that you and I have had for a little while is if you pull Jibe into iCIMS as a part of iCIMS you could have perspectively lost money from clients because clients actually have a bundle of money for a "talent attraction", talent engagement type of platform, and they have obviously a bigger pile of cash for their applicant tracking system. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Here's the thing, if they're both together, I guarantee you that pile of cash for the engagement piece is going to be much, much smaller. But if it's a different platform, a different product but just owned by iCIMS, I think they can actually keep and gain more money that way. Chad: Again, that's just my opinion but knowing how the actual market thinks and selling into this market for 20 years, that's what going to happen. Joel: I know you're a big fan of house of brands. But to me, and I could go either way, I'm a huge fan of either depending on the product. But I think with the announcement of Attract, iCIMS Attract or whatever they're calling it, I would not be surprised to see Jibe and TextRecruit sort of melt into this new Attract tool. Joel: You will probably say that's a bad decision. I would say it's probably just something that's going to have to happen regardless. But we'll see those guys in a few months. We'll have to nail them down for an interview and see what's really going on with those brands. Chad: Well literally if you have a company like ... And this has a lot to do with culture too. Let's not try to throw this out and just think it's a brand thing because it's not. The people who work for TextRecruit right now, okay, they might be getting paid through obviously the iCIMS funnel. Totally get that, right? Chad: They believe that brand. They are a part of that brand, that TextRecruit brand. If you get rid of a brand like that, something that has had a purpose and something that ... I mean Eric has obviously sold these people on for years because he believes in the purpose. He embodies that purpose. That's going to be an issue from a resource standpoint because people will leave because that purpose means so much to them. Chad: So, if they are looking to make this transition, they're going to have to do it in an incredibly delicate manner. Joel: Slowly. It will be iCIMS Attract messaging powered by TextRecruit for the next two years and then it will slowly just fade away. Chad: Again, it's a delicate conversation. Joel: It's just delicate. Delicate like the name Karen, which leads us to our next story. Chad: Karen. Joel: A love story between Alexander and Karen. Chad: Alexander Mann Solutions acquires Karen.ai. This to me is big fucking news. It's a Chatbot, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: So we've got all of these messaging solutions that are being acquired. Now, again, this isn't just an arm's race for the "tech vendors." RPO and staffing see the writing on the wall as well and they know they have a better chance of building the tech and it will be adopted if it's going through their services. Chad: So if you're a staffing company and you're using these products or if you're an RPO and you're actually embedding these products and clients are paying for these products and you're embedding it into their process methodology, holy shit, it just makes sense from an adoption standpoint. Joel: Yeah, yeah. I mean if you're a shareholder in a Chatbot right now you might want to go yacht shopping because the dollars are coming. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Investment dollars we've been talking about for a long time. But these suckers are going to get snapped up in the next 12 months post taste. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We know they work. You've mentioned Holland talking about the time saved, the money saved with Chatbots. We know that job seekers like them. There's no more black hole like. Chatbots work and ultimately people are going to write checks to gobble these guys up. Chad: I'd like to dive deeper with Holland too and find out exactly what they did with the Chatbot that saved them that 80 hours because there might be ... I would guarantee there's even more that can be done. But do you know who actually works over at Alexander Mann Solutions? Do you remember? Joel: That's our girl, right? Chad: Yeah, the queen of Chatbots. Joel: Quincy. Chad: Yeah, the queen of Chatbots. She was on the pod last November. Joel: Yes. Chad: If you haven't listened to go chadcheese.com, click on podcast and just look through the November podcast. It's there, listen to it. It's damn good. Chad: So, when I heard the whole Karen thing happening I automatically thought about her. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Because she knows, I mean, she knows her shit just not from an RPO solution design kind of a thing, because that's what she spent a good amount of her time in. But also from a tech standpoint, she really knows her shit. Joel: Yeah, and she knows the players. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So for Karen to be the one that they targeted and went to acquire, and the terms of the deal were not disclosed. But our girl knows her Chatbots. Joel: So if you're a Chatbot and not using Karen as a blueprint, you might want to start doing that because someone who knows Chatbots and someone who has the money to buy them pick this one so you might want to follow suit. Chad: We'll have to look at early stage too, right, because you can't allow a Chatbot in some cases, depending on what you want to do with it, to get too big. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Because of the price tag, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Not to mention the ability to really change the road map of where that perspective Chatbot is going. So, I think we really haven't heard a lot about Karen, to be quite frank. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And I think this is probably smart because they were out there. There's no question they were shopping and they were checking out all these Chatbots. This Chatbot was probably in the right stage for them, for exactly what they were looking for. It's probably not as mature as a TalkPush, well I guarantee you it's not as mature as a TalkPush or an Olivia or something like that. Chad: But the price tag goes up dramatically when you start talking about them. Joel: Yeah, and she knows all the teams as well. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: So, I'm sure whatever talent they had had some part in writing a check to get those guys. Chad: Yeah, good point. Yeah. Joel: So yeah, modulation is all around. But this is to me going to start a domino effect. We're going to start seeing these Chatbots get gobbled up. Chad: Watch this space kids. Joel: Another space to keep an eye on is the one that JobAdX is currently residing. Let's get a word from them and we'll talk about another new CEO for one of our favorite hourly sites. Chad: Yeah. 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Ready to ramp up your job advertising campaigns with the best in ad tech? Visit our new website at www.jobadx.com. That's J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Joel: So I feel like Snagajob is one of these dying stories that doesn't get enough attention. But Snagajob not too long ago was a major, major force in the job world. And they've fallen off the map really quickly. Chad: So do you feel like they're a dying brand because they did a brand refreshed, there's a Snag.co or something like that. Joel: Yeah, I feel like that was a major fuck up because when they were Snagajob, you can post your jobs and part time work and hourly folks. They were a force in that space and they decided to go platform, marketplace based Uber for workers. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And we both agreed that's a good place to go. But they have not faired well in terms of that new world. They went to Snag.co. They became more sort of native at based. Their original CEO, the one they had when we first interviewed them about this is gone. Chad: Right. Joel: The guy who took over is gone. And now they have a new CEO. So shit's fucked up over Snag. Chad: I have an entirely different kind of vantage point on this. I think that- Joel: That's why we have a show. Chad: Yeah. I think Fabio Rosati. I love the name by the way, Fabio. He stepped into the CEO position. It might not have been announced this way because he's the fucking executive board chairman, right? But I think it was always short term. Chad: And Mathieu Stevenson who's the new CEO, he was the CMO. But he joined the team in January, right? So the guy hasn't even been there a year yet. I believe that Fabio was looking to groom Mathieu to be able to take over the position so he could step back. That's what Fabio has done, he's stepping back into the executive board chair position. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So I think this was something that was kind of calculated behind the scenes. I could be totally wrong, it could be fucked up. But to me it feels like it was calculated behind the scenes and that they were looking for the right person to take over as CEO and that person is going to have to be focused on on-demand platform for hourly workers. Chad: And that is going to be a very competitive space with Uber, is now in that space. Obviously the Upworks of the world. There are just so many of those companies and I guess from my standpoint and we're obviously a little bit closer to this brand, but do you think Jobcase is going to go in that direction too as kind of an on-demand kind of a system? Joel: I think that's going to inevitably have to be part of their offering. I know they're built so much around community. But it would be an interesting part of what they're doing. Chad: Play, yeah. Joel: You know actually play because they already have sort of ingrained reviews and communication engagement amongst job seekers, which really plays well into who hiring is good with contract workers or gig workers. So I definitely think so. Joel: I just think with Snag whenever you lose a CEO and sort of the visionary, the person that you know was ... It's just really hard for organizations to deal with volatility in the CEO ranks. Joel: So, I mean maybe Snag will get it together. We'll certainly report on it either way. But I just think you never ever hear about Snag in the news, from release. I mean they have just sort of disappeared and I'm sure they still have happy customers and people using them. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But I just don't. I don't feel the same kind of energy around the company that I did just a few years ago. Chad: They still have close to 100 million registered workers and nearly half a million employers using this system. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So, again, I think they've got a long runway, right? And I think just from my standpoint, this change was always something that they kind of calculated behind the scenes thinking that ... Chad: Fabio is still going to be from Upwork fame, right? He's still going to be there overlooking everything. But they were looking for the right person, I believe, to take this over. Joel: Yeah. Chad: The reason I asked about the Jobcase, your ideas on Jobcase is because they just hired Jeff Chow to be their SVP of product management. And that dude led product and design teams over at Google and TripAdvisor. Chad: So, the $100 million that they received just months back they're looking to make some very aggressive moves on their side as well. But again, you're right, they're more of that social community piece, how do you perspectively flip a social community kind of a piece into an on-demand work platform? Chad: It seems interesting because they're both in the same segment going at the market differently. Joel: Yeah. I think we should make a note to reach out to Mathieu Stevenson, new CEO, and get him on the show and dig in to what the vision is and what they're doing and what we can expect from them in the future. Chad: I'm already on that. Tease alert. Transitioning over into something we never talk about, Slack. Joel: Slack. Chad: It's interesting that people think it's a big deal that Microsoft is banning the use of Slack. Joel: They're sort of blaming it on security issues with AWS. But it's a competitive play. Microsoft has a competitor for Slack, as such they don't want their employees or their company using Slack when they have a competing product like that. Chad: Right. Joel: It just doesn't make any sense. Chad: No. Joel: Now what is interesting and this wasn't in the story, I don't think, is I understand that LinkedIn uses Slack internally. So it would be interesting. I don't know if they ... I'm sure they banned it across all Microsoft companies but I'm pretty sure that LinkedIn has been a Slack user for a long time. So that could be a nice little headache for employees to switch over to Microsoft products. Chad: Yeah. And I haven't used Teams but I've actually talked to people who do and they love it. I've used Slack, and I don't like it. I just don't like it. It's information overload especially when you get five or six people on a team and they're collaborating on something, it is a bitch to try to keep up with in some cases. Chad: It really ... It's like information overload. It's better than email, don't get me wrong. But I just ... Slack is a "finished product" it doesn't to me feel like a finished product. Joel: Aside from being a very competitive landscape, I think we've been reporting on open source products or services and Matter most. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I think it was the one recently that got 50 million. Did I hear that correctly? Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel: So whenever we see a space like this where there is a main player and then it's basically commodity and people do it for free or do it really expensively, it gets in trouble. When you have big players like Facebook and Microsoft getting into this. Joel: But as you listen to ... When Slack went public, their CEO was doing the rounds on CNBC and Bloomberg and everything. They asked him that same question, you know, "Hey, you're getting competition from really big players." He wasn't super concerned. I think his comment was, "We're competitor aware, but we are customer focused." Joel: Which is I think a good way to be. In fact, he mentioned that apparently Google has a competing product. But cool for him is no one knows about it. So it is true that these big companies, the bigger companies will throw resources at creating a competitor. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But if Slack continues to iterate and I do think at some point they're going to be an office competitor, which is a big reason why I think Microsoft wants to kill them now. Chad: We'll see. I just ... Again, the whole Microsoft kicking Slack out to me just doesn't seem surprising at all. Joel: I mean the real challenge for Slack is once all the companies that are using Microsoft, when the IT departments say oh well we don't want to use this AWS service, da, da, da, we're going to go with Microsoft, that's when Slack really hits a brick wall, I think. Chad: I haven't heard of many companies switching from AWS to Azure, but it could happen. Joel: Well if the IT department says look Slack is a threat, a cyber threat or a risk. Chad: That's what this is. This is more, I think, kind of like corporate propaganda. But you know who is really good at this messaging thing? 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: 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 with emoji. We make compliance easy and are razor 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. War Games: Shall we play again? Joel: Let's talk rumors. Tons of rumors. Which one do you want to start with first? Chad: So the Entelo one is ... I mean we're going to talk about Entelo and hearing that they're just not getting traction. But you actually found something even more beyond that. There's kind of some different angles that they're trying run right now. Joel: Yeah. So we've been talking about Entelo trying to sell discount stuff, looking for anybody to buy their shit. Chad: Something, yeah. Joel: They have just been coming up empty. So, a rumor that I got was that Entelo were currently trying to get some private equity funding to merge with ConveyIQ. ConveyIQ you'll remember used to be take the interview video, sort of higher review competitor. And then they became sort of an all-encompassing platform. Joel: So yeah, there's a rumor that's emerged there. The source also tells me that Entelo was running out of options. Recent departures of VPs, of engineering products sales and marketing, which are kind of the main departments for those who don't know. Plus most of the sales team are out. Joel: So, shit's bad in Entelo. It looks like they're trying to find an exit. We've heard everyone from iCIMS, to Workday, to all kinds of other companies that are looking to buy these guys. But it looks like the clock is ticking big time. Chad: Yeah. I think for many of these startups that are starting to see their runaway kind of run out. The most important thing that companies have to understand is cool tech definitely is awesome to talk about. But if you don't have a solid revenue strategy in place you're fucked because you can talk about, you can try to build cool new tech, but if you don't have money to fuel it then you're screwed, right? Chad: That's one of the things that I think you get mesmerized into all these numbers that are thrown out from a funding standpoint, but you've got to remember profitability is the key and if you're not building toward that, and you're just building toward the new next cool feature in the next sprint, then you're really losing sight of a long term objective. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Whether that's acquisition or actually building to become your own platform. That's what I'm seeing from a lot of startups is they're not focusing on the fuel, right? You have the engine but you got to fuel that fucker somehow. Joel: Yeah. And Entelo has been around for quite a while. I want to say that they launched in '11 or '12. We talk a lot about when you build your product on someone else's stuff, that you run a huge risk of getting screwed. Chad: Right. Joel: We saw this with Facebook folks like BranchOut and BeKnown and others when Facebook changes their rules you're screwed. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Entelo's original business was hey we're going to scan LinkedIn and when someone changes their profile or they're more active, we're going to pick up these little cues on LinkedIn to tell you like hey, this person may be ... We're looking for a job, we'll have to be open to a new job than others. Joel: When LinkedIn changed their rules and they couldn't do that anymore and said no one is going to spot our shit, Entelo was like okay now what do we do? And they became a sourcing tool essentially. Chad: Right. Joel: Then that became commoditized. From what I hear, they don't even scrape their own data anymore. They either buy it or they rent it or whatever from someone else. Chad: Right. Joel: It's that whole pool of 150 candidates that everyone uses. So they've become a commodity when they used to have a pretty cool business. Joel: But I think LinkedIn pulled the rug out from under them and they've been scrambling trying to figure out what we do or what we do next ever since that happened, if memory serves correctly. Chad: Yeah. You can run an organization for a good amount of time especially if you're focused on burn rate if you have $41 million. I mean they had close to $41 million. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So they've been around for a while but still, again, it's all about that strategy and how you're going to attack the market. Are you going to attack to be able to partner and deeply integrate with these core systems? Are you going to try to build something that will stand the test of time, which is going to be hard as fuck, let's just say that. Chad: At that point, your strategy is entirely different and you're more of ... You have more of a focus on agencies and direct to clients, right? But the strategy is entirely different and I see a lot of these companies they don't even know who to reach out to. They have no clue where the cash is in the first place. Chad: They see Fortune 500 brands and they think it's going to be easy to walk in and actually sell that shit. Number one, it's not. Number two, they probably don't have as much money as you think they do. Number three, they probably have no clue what talent rediscovery actually fucking means, right? So, you're fighting all of that. It blows my mind, it really does. Joel: Mind blown. Let's go to CareerBuilder, speaking of blown minds. Chad: It's interesting because we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago and you would ask me, "Who's head do you think is going to roll?" I said Irina. I think Irina, the current CEO, her head is going to roll just because she's in charge, she's the one making the decision. It's her, right? Chad: She sets the tone for the entire organization. Well the tone has been a mass exodus of executives and very pivotal types of individuals from CareerBuilder, right? Chad: So we were talking about that and I had a bunch of people texting me and calling and all that other fun stuff saying you're right, right? So I'm not saying she's gone or, but I believe because of the whole ... Joel: Yeah, the stove is getting hotter and stuff. Chad: Yeah, the board meeting, all that stuff, I don't see it lasting very long guys. The big question is who's going to step up and who are they going to put into that CEO position? Joel: It will be another pencil pusher, which I think is what I called her when we talked about this. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: For those that didn't listen or don't remember, they had their second sort of executive leave within a year of the company and the board meeting when she mentioned, yeah, heads are going to roll. They're still trying to sell this thing. They're trying to scrap it, sell the pieces of it, and it's just not working. Joel: Irina, the nature of the beast, is most likely going to be replaced. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. I don't know how else this is going to end but it's not going to be pretty for a lot of people. Chad: I'll tell you when you can really see this thing is over, look at the bonus cycles for sales people and when those bonus cycles are actually paid out, when you start to see the mass exodus, it's fucking done. Done. That's all there is to it. Chad: That's like the last piece because there are so many great sales people already at CareerBuilder, they can see it happening internally when they see it happening internally and you see that happen after the bonus cycle, done. Joel: By the way, CareerBuilder sales people, there are a lot of Chatbots looking to hire good sales folks. Get on the phone there with AllyO and Mya and Olivia and everybody else because they're paying well and higher. Chad: Yeah, yeah. So in Denver this week and you and I are always pretty high on Google and what they're doing and it was interesting because this guy got on stage from Google, I can't remember his name. But he was talking about how Google is pretty much going to stop all the third party cookies, right? Joel: Yeah, yeah. Chad: He's talking to a room of tech vendors who rely on third party cookies for retargeting. It's like why did you just say that in this room? Was that kind of a nice little hey we're going to smack you upside the head? But he had a- Joel: Remember when they launched Facebook jobs at TAtech? Chad: Yeah, TAtech, yeah. Joel: Job boards, yeah that was good. Chad: Like are you fucking kidding me? It was a really short presentation. It wasn't really great. I guess he had to go to Morocco or some shit like that. Then he was trying to get off the stage and it was like no, you have time for questions. Chad: So I was lucky enough to get the first question and I asked him about the WaPo story this week in Washington Post that actually ... that researchers had actually called Google Chrome spyware because of the amount of cookies that it pulls in, right? Chad: So my question to him was okay, so if you already have Google Chrome which is collecting all these cookies and actually being seen and called spyware, why are you telling everybody in this room that you're doing away with third party cookies? Chad: He looked at me like I can't believe you just asked me that fucking question. Joel: Of course. Chad: Then said, "Google is doing away with cookies, next question." I'm like what the fuck is this? Joel: All right. I think that concludes our rumors segment of the show. Let's talk about Wayfair employee's uprising and call it a day. Chad: Yeah, let's close this bitch out. Joel: You know the story better than I do because it's more of your lane. But basically Wayfair furniture maker was selling furniture to, I guess what, border? Chad: No, it's the current. So the current situation that we've been hearing all over the news is kids in cages, kids sleeping on concrete, that kind of thing, all right. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So apparently the Federal Government said well let's go ahead and spend $200,000 on furniture from Wayfair for an immigration detention facility. For a immigration detention facility and employees got wind of this and they were like no, this is not right. Chad: Now, it's not that they don't think it's right that kids sleep on something other than concrete, number one, okay? So it's not that they want to take beds away from the kids. They have a fundamental problem with obviously these kids being in cages and sleeping anywhere away from their parents. Joel: Principle, the principle of the whole thing, right? Chad: It's the principle. So this impacts our industry. Everybody is like why the fucks are these guys talking about this? It's pretty simple because this country was built and will continue to be built on immigration, right? And we've been asking as our professionals and professional associations and really the largest professional association that's out there today, SHRM. Chad: Where are you? We're still waiting to hear from our standpoint, to have an interview with somebody at SHRM to be able to talk about the responses to their support of the current administration immigration laws. Joel: Yeah. Chad: We know that they're focused in and what they're trying to say is they're focused on just the workforce stuff. But as we all know, this country is blended and we can't find people to fucking fill jobs as it is right now period, right? Chad: So, the fuel of immigrants from the start of this country has never stopped. It has always helped us to diversify and to innovate and to be able to think that we can just change that overnight and stop it makes no sense whatsoever. Chad: We need a professional organization like SHRM to be able to address this and to be able to answer questions and find out why they aren't moving the dial on this conversation. Chad: They should be on the show. We should have a conversation about this because this matters. Joel: I think for me historically speaking, the way that workers uprise and sort of let their voice be heard is really unique to this time and period. Back in the day it was there was a labor union and a labor boss and they would express the views of the workers. Chad: Right. Joel: And now workers are just saying we're just going to mobilize ourselves and have a view point. What's amazing to me about the Wayfair story is these workers went to management and said we don't want you to do this. And management said fuck you, we're doing it. And the workers said, oh is that the way it's going to be? Then retaliated. Joel: That's a really interesting dynamic in the world. The way that workers are saying screw the company and we're going to mobilize and let our voices be heard. And that companies because of low unemployment have to take it, is just really an interesting dynamic to me historically. Joel: And from labor unions to sort of now, it's just a really intriguing evolution to how workers are sticking it to the man. Chad: Yeah. I'm not a big De Blasio fan. But he said something on stage last night that really kind of resonated with me. He said, "People of America don't look at these immigrants as the reason why you aren't progressing in life the way that you want to. Look at your employers. Look at the companies who aren't paying you the wages to be able to actually get you there." Joel: Yeah. Chad: That's where the focus should be and we need to get our heads on straight and we need an organization like SHRM to step the fuck up and actually start addressing these things because if they're going to get on Twitter and they're going to say they appreciate certain aspects of what this administration is doing, great. Let's go ahead and open up this conversation. Let's have a real conversation that's not all warm and fuzzy. Joel: All this excitement has really worn me out and I think I'm ready for a nap. Chad: I'm going to go drink one of those Denver beers. We out. Joel: We out. Announcer: This has been the Chad & Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #Slack #Jibe #iCIMS #Entelo #Careerbuilder #AMS #Karenai #Snag #Microsoft #Mattermost #SHRM

An old URL with a lot of new ideas - including blockchain, paying job seekers and a credit card (yes, credit card) - but we'll see how the company does against 40 years of industry experience. Chad & Cheese run Job.com CEO Arran Stewart through the firing squad ... gotta listen to see how he does. Firing Squad is made possible by those pillaging pirates over at Talroo. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community.​ Jordan: I be loving Talroo. They be staffing me for years now with crew of the highest caliber, and I mean crew that be ready to set sail, not some landlubber who be uploading his resume years ago. Talroo, data-driven job ads that deliver. Argh! Jordan: You be poo without Talroo. You be walking the plank if you not be using Talroo for your recruiting needs. Don't be a bilge-sucking scallywag. Avast! Use Talroo to hire better. Chad: Now, that is impressive. Not just Jordan's dialect, but Talroo's commitment to ensuring that companies looking for hard-to-find talent not only find the talent, they find a partner in Talroo who works hard to join and engage their community. Way to go, Talroo. This rum is for you. Jordan: Don't be a bilge-sucking scallywag. Avast! Use Talroo to hire better. Chad: Check them out at Talroo.com. That's T-A-L-R-O-O dot com. 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 fox hole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Oh yeah. It's been a while now. Firing Squad is back. We have one of the most elusive company's startups in the space- Chad: Stealthy. Joel: -job.com is with us today. Arran Stewart, who is the chief visionary officer. Puke. He must be a millennial. Arran, welcome to the show. Arran: Hello, gents. Thank you so much for having me on the show and you are correct. I am a millennial. Yes. Joel: I knew it. I knew it. Chad: God damn it. Joel: Oh, God. I know. That's just not a good thing. Arran, no one knows you that's listening. Give us a quick elevator pitch on you and then we'll get to the company. Arran: Sure. So, my name's Arran Stewart. I'm originally from a town called Luton just north of London, but I live in Austin, Texas now. I've worked in recruiting and staffing my whole career. Previously prior to job.com, I was actually the owner of a business that was part of Hamilton Bradshaw in the United Kingdom, which is owned by quite a famous person there called James Caan, a king of recruitment especially in the United Kingdom. Yeah, I'm kind of obsessed and love recruitment technology and, outside of that, I'm married with four beautiful children. Joel: Nice job. Chad. Chad: Did he say James Caan like the Hollywood actor? Arran: Yeah, the actor. Yeah. And do you know what's so funny? The name and spelling is the same too. Yeah. Same spelling, but if you Google James Caan, there's two. There's Caan, the actor, and Caan- Joel: KAHN! Arran: -the businessman, he founded Alexander Mann. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I do know them, Arran: Yeah, he founded that and sold it for an inordinate sum of money. Joel: So you love recruiting and you have four kids. Have you had a therapy session in the last 24 hours? Arran: No, not yet. Chad: This is going to be it. Arran: I need it. Joel: You might need your head checked. Yeah. Well, Chad's going to run down the rules for you. Arran: Okay. Chad: All right, Arran. You are going to have one minute to pitch job.com. Now, generally on the show startups come on, companies come on, they need the full two minutes. But when we got on the phone with Arran he said, "Fuck that. We are going to take one minute for the pitch." And at the end of the bell you know your minute is up, right. So the bell's going to start you and then obviously you have a minute to hit it. After that minute, Joel and I are going to hit you with rapid-fire Q and A. If your answers aren't concise and you start bumbling and stumbling around we're going to hit you with the crickets and tell you to tighten your shit up. At the end of Q and A we have a rating scheme here at the Chad and Cheese podcast. Big applause means you killed it, you nailed it, can't wait, we want to buy stuff. Joel: Boats n Hoes Chad: Yeah. Golf clap means you might be on your way, you need to tighten it up a bit. But the firing squad, that means you'd better take your boat- Joel: Bye bye. Chad: -and drive off shore as far as you possibly can and dump this business model into the fucking ocean. Joel: Go back to that shitty town you're from in Scotland. Chad: That is Firing Squad. Are you ready? Arran: I'm ready, gents. Chad: Excellent. Joel, hit it, man. Joel: One minute, starting- Arran: So, job.com is a automated permanent-staffing platform utilizing artificial intelligence and blockchain to deliver a permanent placement candidate for only 7% of the base salary. So we're 65% cheaper than the statistical average in the United States. The fee is the most exciting part. We split it into two. We take 2% of the fee and the other 5% is given to the job-seeker as a salary signing bonus to incentivize them and congratulate them on taking their hiring into their own hands. Arran: Because of the use of blockchain technology we're trying to create a fully autonomous platform and by using rewards and incentives we allow users to take control of their own recruitment because they're the ones with the skills, the experience, and the education. They apply for the job, they ace the interview, why on earth aren't they the person earning the lion's share of the fee? And because of that we believe we have such a unique model which will drive and change the $150-billion-dollar-a-year recruitment industry of which $26 billion is being spent on permanent staffing. Chad: There it is. Joel: Wow, very nice. Chad: Very nice. One thing we didn't get though, if people want to find out more about this wonderful service, where do they go, Arran? Arran: Very easy: it's called job.com. Chad: That is very simple. Joel: Which is where my first question comes in. What is the history of job.com? Because you weren't the first to own it. What's the history of it, how did you guys come upon it? What kind of check did you have to write to get the name? Talk about that. Arran: Okay, so job.com was founded in 2001. It was founded by a guy called [Brian Algin 00:06:27], who still works with us in the business today. It was originally a job board and had quite immense success, actually, towards around 2009, 2010. And then as time's gone on there's been increased competitiveness with Indeed's Hit Recruiter, Glassdoor, and so when we were on our acquisition trail coming here to the US we kind of heard on the grapevine through mutual connections that Brian was looking to exit the business. He'd reached the point in his career where he's been very successful and he's been one of the founding fathers of job boards in the United States. He already had offers from another major job board that we all know, but he was kind of interested in what we were looking to do for the future of recruitment. We went to see him, pitched our vision, what we're trying to achieve, and the changes we were going to make and so he agreed to exit the assets of the business to us and that completed in September 2017. Now sadly, gents, I cannot tell you- Chad: Damn it! Arran: -the size of the cheque that we wrote. But I can tell you [crosstalk 00:07:35] but I can tell you this, let's do some, let's do some head maths. Job.com had $60 million double opt-in registered job seekers listed on the platform. They had thousands of clients and also had a domain name called job.com which arguably could be the most expensive domain name in the world, easily, because of obviously, talking about an industry that's pegged to be worth a trillion dollars globally by 2021- Chad: Plus it's three letters, it's on the dot com domain. Arran: Three letters on the dot com, at, yeah, top domain. And also it has a very high Moz ranking and domain reputation ranking because it's such a legacy domain. So there's many different factors that kick in and tick, more money, tick, more money, tick, more money. Joel: I don't think anyone's dropped D Moz in a Firing Squad, ever. So, good for you, to bring that up. Yeah, this is. Every URL is dot I-O and dot I-I and we've sort of forgotten the whole arms race of dot coms. So this is sort of an interesting story. Chad: Where did job.net come from, though? It sounds like this was also a part of the deal. Job.com and job.net. I mean those are both, dot net obviously not worth as much as dot com but- Arran: Still expensive. Chad: Job.net's been around for a very long time and it has a hell of lot of trust as well. Arran: Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. And what we've done is we've kind of split them into two because my background has always been recruitment and staffing, but specifically job boards, so we were like, "Right. Let's introduce an automated permanent staffing solution with job.com." So job.com is not a job board. We're a staffing agency. We operate as a staffing agency. We only get paid if you get successfully hired. All the typical things that a staffing agency does. But then job.net is our typical job board. It's what I would call an aggregator. So we aggregate content. Jobs can be posted on us, there's resume database search, because we also own Zillion Resumes, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but we own that, too. And so all of that's kind of packaged together to offer just a traditional job board solution, aggregated solution, and then the other tier is job.com. Chad: So, that leads me to my next question. Job.com, different model than job.net, different model than ActiveHire, different than Zillion Resumes, different than MyJobMatcher. I mean, you have so many companies that are going right now. How are you not spreading yourself too thin? Arran: It's funny you should say that. Look at it this way: it's like they're all shop windows to one central database. You know? So they're all parts of the supply chain. So when you think, and you guys know this, I mean, everything starts in life as a click through Google, typically, looking for a job, then it turns to an aggregator, then it turns to a job board, then it might go to a staffing agency, then it ends up going to the hirer. What we've tried to do is create channels and windows that take a bite out of the cherry at every possible journey of the job-seeker's process. So, MyJobMatcher and job.net are pretty much the same. MyJobMatcher's very much legacy, it was the business we started, but job.net operates in exactly the same way but with a much better domain name. So we kind of shifted everything to that. ActiveHire, again, very similar. It's still there, still attracts traffic, still attracts users, but the effort's into job.net. Zillion Resumes, which is just a database resume service has then just powered the resume database servicing job.net, and then you've got job.com, which is staffing. Arran: So really, we actually only have two businesses running. You've got a job board, and you've got a recruiting staffing agency. Chad: That job board has matching in it though, too, right? I mean, the MyJobMatcher, is that another piece of technology that's different, or not? Arran: Yeah, no. No, so it's the matching technology that powers all of the platforms. All of the platforms use the same artificial intelligence and again, they all have opportunities for machine learning points, different touch points. We like to kind of say, and I'm happy to kind of talk through this, "We're a technology business that happens to work in recruitment." And we very much are. I mean, I'm a big tech evangelist and geek and that's the key to what we believe is our innovation and success, is our technology. Joel: Arran, I'm curious about you embracing blockchain and early on that was a big differentiator for you, and maybe it was the height of bitcoin doing what it was doing a while back. Do people still care about this in terms of the employment space? What is the reason for the passion around it and why is it important? Arran: Yeah, that's such a, I'm so glad you've asked that question. So, blockchain in the beginning, when we started using it, was in its crudest and simplest sense. We were using it to create what's called a private hyperledger fabric smart contract between job-seeker, candidate, and us, automatically, as it, almost like agreed terms, like recruitment terms, automatically, on auto-pilot, on a blockchain for just trust and transparency. But really there was this huge buzz, this huge hype, and it was great for us because we, not lying, we rode with that buzz, but we really are blockchain evangelists of what it can do for the future. Arran: So we actually are utilizing blockchain in three ways. The first one is the private hyperledger fabric that I told you. The second one is a public blockchain, which is where we keep the record of when people are successfully hired, the signing bonuses, salaries, et cetera. But the third, which is our most prized possession, which is what we're working on, is Equifax for resumes. We are creating a trustocracy, a meritocracy credit scoring for resumes. And how that works is people have been giving recommendations to each other on LinkedIn for over a decade, but how can I trust the recommendation given by the person on LinkedIn? Or even the person in your reference? Statistically 30% of profiles lie on LinkedIn. 85% of candidates lie during the hiring process. How can I give context to the hirer behind the trust of this resume? Arran: So it requires to create a meritocracy and trustocracy score for both the person with the resume and the person who gave the recommendation. Then they get what's called a TM score. I can't go into the exact details of how it's going to work, because I can't give it all away yet, but what I can tell you is our goal, utilizing all of the users we have and everyone that comes onto the platform, when they request references there will be a score given to both of those users that are involved in that process, and when they get hired, if they successfully remain in place, their scoring will go up and that will be recorded on the public blockchain which we will then make available to the entire online recruitment market. Doesn't matter if you're a job board, staffing agency, you'll be able to query and reference. Just like you do, like banks do to Equifax to know whether or not this resume's true. Arran: Why would I give you a bank loan and give you money if I don't know who you are? Why would I give you a job, and put all my trust, training, education, and money behind you if I don't know if you're the real thing? You know? It's time to move recruitment on and utilizing blockchain, the transparency ledger, is a way of doing that and that's what we're working on: to create this massive central database of trusted resumes. Chad: So when you have companies like [ICEMS 00:14:36] that are talking about building a passport system, which is obviously the same kind of scenario, are there going to be all these different systems that are going to share data or are they just going to be different systems that you have to actually join into, kind of like databases today? I might be in one site's database or, hell, I might be in twenty different sites' database, but it's different information. Will this all be shared so it's the same information, whether I'm using the ICIMS passport system or the job.com system? How does that work? Joel: Yeah, who's going to standardize all this stuff? Arran: Yeah, I mean, so when you say, "standardized model," think about how many credit referencing agencies there are and different data points in order to reference people on their financial situation. Joel: There's two. Arran: I think, well, there's not because you've got multiple datasets that obviously pulled against that in order to kind of reference people. The feedback that comes into that. You know? Like I might have X amount of different people that I've got credit with and all of those data points going into that as well. So I would say that, for example, [ICEMS 00:15:42] and their passport, by their concepts, and what they're doing is fantastic and what we would look to achieve with that is, let's compliment it. This isn't actually a competition for us. This is actually about improving and bringing forward recruitment for the benefit of hirers and job-seekers. Arran: So with the passport system, because we're all from the same space, we all know that there's pretty much very similar criteria we're all looking for. We've all worked in staffing, we know what hirers need, we know what we need to tick off. So I would imagine without having oversight of exactly the data points they're using to create that standardized passport, there'd be huge amounts of overlap. So why wouldn't you cross-reference databases with each other? Why wouldn't you have that cohesion between two platforms? [ICEMS 00:16:25] is an accurate tracking system, jobs.com is a talent and sourcing platform, both of our platforms generate data that allows us to verify who people are, you share that data together to create a much more accurate blueprint of what people are doing and the fact that they're doing it honestly. So I think it's great. Joel: So this'll be almost a score in terms of how trustworthy someone is? Arran: Yeah, well, trustworthy and meritocracy. So, it's trust and merit. It's like, how trustworthy are you giving a reference, and how do we know that those merits that you gave that reference for are legitimate? Because they're the two things that matter: can the person do it? And is the person that said they could do it trustworthy? Joel: And how transparent will that be? So, with a credit, obviously with credit check I know, well, if I'm late payments, if I default, if I go bankrupt, all that has a negative impact. Will job seekers understand and know, "Hey, here's what your score is based on and here's how you can improve it or why it's not high?" Arran: So actually it's based on, sorry, my wife's just walked through the door [crosstalk 00:17:29] so it's based on, so we can't ever do anything that negatively impacts your score, legally, because potentially there's the opportunity that if we were to prevent your or inhibit your opportunity of getting a job because we'd given a negative reflection on you, that in itself... We could be liable. But what we can do with it is it shows you the opportunity to pick the skills that you are particularly good at, your experience, and various other many components as we know that make up a person's employment make-up. You can then have all of those bits verified. You don't get a perfect score just on one successful placement. This is about building longevity. Statistically people in the IT space, for Amazon and Google, I read, there's a 12-month turnaround. They come and go within one year. Which means over the course of the next five years, if people are using platforms like this, like [ICEMS 00:18:23] platform, they will begin to build a very accurate blueprint on whether or not they've been a good work person or someone that maybe needs some improvement. Arran: The only thing that you can give the hiring manager [crosstalk 00:18:34]- Joel: All right everybody [crosstalk 00:18:39]. Let's move on to the next point. I'm curious about your revenue share with job-seekers and the 5% reward, I guess. Talk about that. How much have you paid out? How much of importance is that to a job-seeker? I mean, don't they just want a job? They're not looking around just for the bonus, right? Arran: Yeah, so they are just looking for a job. I think, realistically, we appeal to a particular audience set at the moment, specifically IT, but also legal and finance. I can't divulge at the moment how much we've paid out [crosstalk 00:19:11] sadly. There's reasons and logic behind that, as you gents probably know. But what I can say is job-seekers that do come to our platform are typically, are quite often passive as well. They're people who are currently employed but if they're shown an opportunity where they could earn a 5% salary signing bonus by going and moving, it's something very appealing to them, especially in IT and technology. Chad: So you can't share aggregate numbers? Joel: Or what percentage that get the reward? Arran: Oh, so percentage that get the reward, roughly, so of the jobs that actually get posted, rather than actually people that are with the database, of jobs actually get posted, we're around about a 20% fill rate. So, 1 in 5 jobs are getting filled at the moment. And I think, more than anything, it's because we want it to be higher, we know it'll be higher, it's still relatively new. It's a relatively new platform. Joel: And is it like, I have to be on the job for 90 days, do I have to [crosstalk 00:20:11] paperwork- Arran: Yeah, you have to be on the job for 90 days, feedback has to come from the client. So, there's a chance where people can drop off, there's many things that, which is good for the hirer. Because we wanted to build it, as well, to avoid any bad actors from job-seekers because you know they exist, too. People who are just like, "I'm going to go there, get my signing bonus, move again, move again, move again." We didn't want to create a kind of burden for the employer. We wanted to create an incentive that maximized their talent attraction, got someone that was definitely wanting the job who would stay for at least 90 days, and that allows for the maximum immersion process within moving to a new job. Which is sometimes one of the biggest reasons why people fail. They join a new environment, they feel a little bit out of place, and they leave. Whereas if you know there's a 5% salary signing bonus three months away, you'll probably see it out and during that time you might learn to get to know people and like the place. Sadly we don't have any stats on that actual thing now but I'm dying to get them because I genuinely think that's a real thing. That's a real reason why people will be more highly retained, because they've given themselves the opportunity to get used to somewhere. Chad: Don't you feel like this system, right out of the gate, would be perfect for the gig economy? Because when you have- Arran: That's what it's for, yeah. Chad: So, mainly for the gig economy. How much money is actually in the gig economy on the staffing side of the house? Because what you're really doing, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're pinpointing staffing and saying, "We can do it better, faster, and much cheaper with benefits on the backend." How big is that nut that you're trying to crack? Arran: Well, the nut is probably an undetermined number, nut, should I say, because I don't think it's actually been quite done per se so much. But let's look at just quick stats for just staffing and recruiting. There's over 20,000 staffing agencies in the US, it's worth over $150 billion dollars a year, and one thing I just want to throw out there is we're not actually against the recruitment staffing agencies that it might apparently seem like. Like we're just undercutting them and we're going to beat them. We're actually a support tool as well. We work with staffing agencies. So, you might have a relationship with your client who wants the white-glove hand-holding, but at the same time, why not utilize an autopilot system like job.com which will bring you the candidate you need to place, gives a signing bonus out of our fee to them? And yeah, we split the fee, but it also allows anyone who might want to become a at-home remote-working recruiter all the tools they need, with no risk, using us. Because you pay us nothing unless someone is successfully hired and we work to staffing agencies, you know, small recruitment, big recruitment, whoever's turn. Chad: Yeah, but that percentage is going to be a lot less for them, right? Arran: Yeah, but if you're making 13%... Let's say you're charging 20%, you give us 7%, you make 13%, and I didn't have to pay anything up front, I didn't have to find any job boards to post on, I didn't have to pay for any AI or technology, I had everything done for me, all I had to do was focus on BD, which as a recruitment consultant is what I really want to be doing. So it's kind of broad strokes. It's [crosstalk 00:23:23] courses. Some people are happy with that, some people won't be happy with that. Arran: But I think that the uptake from staffing agencies has been huge. To give you an example, we are now about to announce and I can say it, we're working with Talent Fusion and pairing with Talent Fusion's RPO with Monster. So Monster will be powering their jobs through Talent Fusion through job.com. And also, we will be upselling Talent Fusion which is their 15% RPO through job.com, too, because there are, as you guys know, there will always be a company that wants a white glove. That want some hand-holding. A person. Someone to talk to. Or roles that need that. So we've got this corporation with Monster now and its partnership, which will be in the press, of how we've got this deal working. Chad: From the payment standpoint, where we start talking about flipping it over and that 5% going back to the new employee, the bonus, right, is that paid in Bitcoin? Or are we getting hard American cash on that? Arran: So we were originally going to do tokenized economy, as they call it, which would have been paid against ether and we were going to do that. It was, being brutally honest, a fad. It just didn't work out and we couldn't make that work. So it's going to be cold, hard American cash and it's paid to- Joel: USA! USA! Arran: USA! Oh, I love the USA. It's paid to the job-seeker on a preloaded Visa card. Job.com Visa cards. So if you go onto job.com you'll see the picture of what the card looks like and it's with Visa. We are doing a press release as well to announce that that will be powered now by Visa. So we're delighted with that. Arran: And so they get their cash on this preloaded card and also with that card, we want them to keep it because it's a branding exercise. Cause you imagine, I just got a signing bonus. Fantastic. I'm at the dinner table with my husband or wife and I'm like, "Darling, I got the signing bonus." Brilliant. And you tell your mother, your father, your cousin, but also, every time you go to use those, because statistically the average signing bonus will be around about $2600, every time you go to use that you'll pull it out and you'll be reminded of job.com because it's on the card. We feel that that, even as a branding and marketing exercise, is so much stronger than the traditional, I go to a job board, I find what I'm looking for, I'm gone. Or I go to Robert Half, I get a job, I'm gone. Arran: We want to build a long-lasting, recurring relationship and take people on a journey throughout their career which is why we want to do the Equifax resumes and why we've got this entire what's called autonomous ecosystem powered by blockchain that we're building. Again, I won't bore you and get the crickets with that one. Joel: I do love that the credit card on the website is not a metaphorical credit card. You literally have a credit card- Arran: We literally have a credit card. Joel: -which you'll be giving people. That's very interesting. Arran: Yeah, yeah, literally have it. Joel: You maybe broke a little bit of news, particularly news for most of our audience, that you guys will be filing for an IPO here soon. Arran: Yes. Joel: Give us the lowdown on that. Arran: Yeah, so we just completed our pre-IPO funding. We are going through our audit process now. It's nearly complete and we'll be filing [RS1 00:26:39]. We will be listing on the NASDAQ. It's not public knowledge as in we haven't PR-ed it out but to be honest we've had so many conversations now in the market that it wouldn't take long for you to find out that news. Other things that we are doing at the moment: we are rolling up staffing agencies. So we have had a number of conversations and deals that are going forward now where we are buying out and rolling up staffing agencies. As a plug, if any of you out there have a decent staffing agency with good EBITA and revenue, message me. Please do. Joel: We want 15% of all those deals, by the way. Arran: Sure. Chad: Hashtag- [crosstalk 00:27:15] Arran: Gents, if you bring- Chad: Chad, Cheese. Arran: Chad, Cheese, bring me any deals, trust me there'll be a kickback. But, truthfully, but nonetheless that's what we're doing. And honestly I'm going to call it how it is. We believe that we are what Uber was to cabs, we are to jobs. We have every intention, and that's why we're filing to go public, we have every intention of becoming that big. That's why we have 380 shareholders. We have a name like job.com, and we have technology, proprietary technology, a differentiator. Because the market's so huge we feel that we can definitely cut our niche, notice how I said niche there, not niche like we do in England, but niche, we can carve our niche out of the market most certainly. Joel: All right, so, these are some pretty chesty statements that you're making and Chad and I talk extensively about the 800-pound gorillas that are now in our space: Google, LinkedIn/Microsoft, Facebook sort of putting their toe in this thing, we already have established players like Indeed, Glassdoor, et cetera. You have some pretty lofty dreams. Are you really going to be able to compete with the names that I just mentioned as well as the big staffing firms that I didn't even touch on? Arran: Yes, so I actually don't think we are competing with them. I actually just think we've carved out our own market. Indeed is all about aggregation. It's volume. It's churn, it's SEO perfection and we couldn't beat them at that even if we tried. Arran: But we have our own part of the market. 60 million people move work every year and based on our model if we placed 1 million of them we'd do $3.12 billion dollars in revenue. Can we capture that part of the market? I think we can. I think we can because we're a candidate's advocate. We're offering a 5% salary signing bonus. We're offering cheaper staffing in a $150 billion dollar a year industry. We're looking at an industry that's hugely fragmented with over 20,000 staffing agencies. Can we carve out our own part of it? I think we can. Arran: It all comes down to partnerships. One of our major partnerships is Office Depot. We're working with company.com and Office Depot on Workonomy, it's been on CNN, it's been on TechCrunch, we've been advertising everywhere this week. The Office Depot's moving to business services and they are selling it to their 12.7 business customers. They are announcing a multi-million-dollar budget towards marketing that to customers and one of those services is recruitment and we power that, it's our service. They're reselling our service for three years to 12.7 million business customers in the United States. We have this partnership with Monster which is massive and you know they're run by Randstad. We've just announced our partnership with SmartRecruiters, it was in Yahoo! Finance yesterday, in the press. SmartRecruiters. We are working with the leading staff-providers of technology and they love our model because they see the value in it. They understand where we fit in the market. Arran: I won't take business from Indeed. I will take business that decides it needs to operate in the silo that I am in and because of that, I think, as you probably appreciate, the market's so big, there's room for all of us [crosstalk 00:30:28]. Chad: There it is. Joel: Aright, Arran. Our time here has come to an end. It's time for you to face the firing squad. Are you ready? Arran: Oh, I'm ready. Joel: He just got really calm, just then, went from this, anyway, vivacious chief visionary officer to very quiet- Arran: Humble. Joel: -scared guy. All right, I'm going to go first, Chad, if that's okay. Chad: Sure, hit it. Joel: All right, so, Arran, dude, I love your passion. I love the domain. I mean, people kind of poo-poo domains these days and it is very diluted from what it was ten years ago but I still think there's a lot of value in having a domain like job.com and the other domains that you have. I think going public is very audacious, I think the revenue share with job-seekers is, same thing. I think blockchain, the verdict is still out on blockchain in terms of searching for a job, how important it is, do people care, and I think that's the same with blockchain on just about everything that's going on right now. Joel: That being said, I think that you have an incredible mountain to climb. The competitive landscape... I think you have a lot of pieces moving in your business, to sort of make it all work, I think, to see a day where people are carrying around your credit cards and getting a piece of the pie from when they get hired, that's a very big dream and as an American I can respect that a lot, but I still think, are you too big for your britches? I think that maybe you might be. I think that at some point you might have to scale the vision back, simplify, make it easier for job seekers and employers to understand what you guys are doing. I'm by no means poo-pooing the business. But I'm also by no means saying that this is a slam dunk and it's gonna take off regardless of what happens. Joel: For me, I'm going to love watching this story unfold, I'm going to love you guys ringing the bell at NASDAQ if that's something that you'll be able to do and see what the stock does over the years and if this credit card thing takes hold. But for me, I'm just very cautious about what's going to happen, so... I got a golf clap. Good for you man, I like the vision, what you guys are doing, but I think you have a long road to go and a high mountain to climb. Chad: My turn. Prepare. All right, first and foremost, adoption is the biggest bitch. I mean, you can have amazing tech, amazing partners, but if you don't have a scheme to be able to ensure that you can bleed into the everyday routine and life of candidates and obviously employers, then you're fucked. It doesn't matter, right? Back in the days, going beyond adoption, also thinking about evolution, back in the day the newspaper should have embraced job boards and evolved their model. They didn't. They lost tons of cash. But I believe staffing is smarter than that and I believe from the pitch that I've heard today and some of the Q and A that we've gone through that you're positioned to help them evolve, which means their partnerships are incredibly vital. Chad: When I was at Monster back in the day staffing was 75% of our revenue. I don't know if that's the same key today for them but I do know that that is a huge market to be able to partner with, not to compete with, so your pitch made a hell of a lot of sense with regard to partnership versus competition. And I also believe in saying, "Look, look at all these different pieces of tech, look at all these domains" and so on and so forth. Also a great answer because the tech is behind the scenes and the key is to make sure that the candidates and the employers don't have to worry about blockchain. They don't have to worry about ledgers. They don't have to worry about smart contracts or an Equifax kind of a thing. They don't have to do anything different. The system does it for you. And last but not least, you're paying in cold, hard cash. So from my standpoint, that's a big fucking applause. Arran: Yay! Joel: Congratulations Arran. How do you feel? Arran: Yay! Oh, I feel great. And listen, do you know, both of you gents, your feedback is fantastic from both of you. Because obviously you're super experienced in our space and I actually take everything on board because being honest, Chad, thank you so much for the major applause, but Joel, in all honesty as well, your feedback is very correct because we are very much on a journey that we're very confident on but like any journey there will be fluidity. Change. Might have to go back on things. May need to be dynamic. But what I can say is we have a firm commitment to innovation, improving staffing, because you know what I care about the most, and I mean this, I'm a father of four, married man, and I understand how important it is to feed your family and pay your bills. And that is what my mission is, is to make that better for people that are looking to do that. Chad: Beautiful. Joel: And with that if you guys want to know more, check out job.com at job.com. Chad? 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 chadcheese.com today. That's W-W-W dot C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E dot com. Tengai: Hi. This is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I love these guys. #Jobcom #FiringSquad #Talroo #Blockchain

Gerry Crispin is an industry treasure and a virtual encyclopedia for anyone who wants to take a look back at how things used to be, as well as getting an historical perspective on the present and the future. Chad & Cheese chatted with Gerry and it turned into a conversation that lasted well over an hour (too much for our listeners to digest in one sitting). We've chopped it up, and this is the first in a series of what we're calling Gerry Tales ... like Fairy Tales ... get it? Enjoy this Nexxt exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities.​ Chad: Gerry Crispin is a literal walking volume of recruiting history. Joel and I had an opportunity to sit down with Gerry for over an hour and a half to talk history, now, and future state. This is only the first in our Gerry Crispin series. Welcome to Gerry Tales. Enjoy, after a word from our sponsor. Chad: Okay, so you need candidates fast and you're sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed to death. I totally get it. You should check out Flexx Plan from Nexxt. It's perfect for employers and staffing firms who are busy. They need candidates and flexible pricing now. Flexx Plan is also perfect for recruitment ad agencies who need targeted distribution and tools to help demonstrate client ROI. If you're sick and tired of all the BS, hassle, and just want candidates now, check out Nexxt and Flex Plan, with over 70 million members. Nexxt takes all of your jobs and puts each one in front of the best candidates across their entire ecosystem. No muss, no fuss. Nexxt does all the work and Flex Plan makes it cost effective. Check out everything Nexxt has to offer at hiring.nexxt.com. That's hiring.N-E-X-X-T.com. Chad: And if you like to save even more cash, just go to chadcheese.com, scroll down and click on the Nexxt logo, discounts aplenty. Remember, Nexxt, with a double X, not the triple X. 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 Gerry motherfucking Crispin. Joel: Friday afternoon with Gerry. Chad: Come on now. Gerry, what's up? Gerry: I like that intro. I think that's a fabulous one. Joel: He's probably never heard it before. This is his first podcast. Gerry: It is. It's close to my first podcast. Chad: Gerry, I think you should actually make it. You're a standard in the industry, so therefore, from now on, you should ensure that whenever you are going to present or anything like that, and they're introducing you, it has to be "Give it up for Gerry motherfucking Crispin." Gerry: I love that. I would like that, actually. Joel: I agree. Gerry: That would be kinda neat. Joel: That's perfect for HR, because they don't like to play it safe at all. Gerry: This is not a podcast who plays it safe for any ... Joel: No, no. That's why you're on, Gerry, because you don't play by the rules. Gerry: I don't care about the rules anymore, I'm beyond them. Joel: I'm getting to that, too. Jumping out of planes and shit. Chad: Going to Birmingham. Joel: So, a lot of our listeners, believe it or not, don't know you, the name, whatever, so I know you've done this a million times, but give us sort of the elevator pitch on you and then we'll get to the good stuff. Gerry: And the fact is, most people don't know most people. Just ... It's just the reality of it all. I will tell you that, next month, I will have graduated from college 50 years. So that will be the kind of cool thing about that. And I will you that every single year, from the time I graduated, I was in some form of recruiting. I was in career services, as a way of getting through graduate school. And most recently, in my last 20, 23 years with CareerXroads, we've kind of pivoted a couple times, but the reality is I support a community of talent acquisition leaders who hire probably between two and three million people a year. And really focus in on my passion, which is what is community? How do you really help each other succeed? Not only for yourself, but making commitments to other people as well. Joel: When did you send your first email, and when did you buy your first domain name? Gerry: Oh, cool. That is cool. My first domain name that I bought was SHRM. Joel: Noo. Gerry: Dot org. Yes. Joel: Wow. Gerry: Which I then turned over to them. My second, and my first dot com, was shaker.com, which I then turned over to Shaker. Chad: Our travel sponsors, by the way. Joel: Yes. Let's hear it for Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Gerry: I had an epiphany in about '93, something in that order, '93, '94. Things were just beginning to heat up, in effect, and I went to my college, Stevens Institute of Technology, and had acquired them, if you will, as a client. I was very proud of the fact that my alma mater was now a client. And one of my friends who still was there was the head of the library. And I went over to the library to tell him that, "I'm now a client ... You're now a client, da da da." And he was in his office, and he was turned away from his desk, and he was pounding on this little old-fashioned Pentium 286, or something like that. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Gerry: And he goes, "Just a second, Gerry." And then he turns around and I said, "Well, what were you up to?" He says, "I need a new research librarian, so I'm hiring a research librarian." I said, "Oh, cool!" I said, "That fits my news. You are now my client. I will be able to get the req from your HR department, and I'll help put together an ad, and get it into the newspaper." And he goes, "Oh. I don't think so." I said, "What? What do you mean? Why not?" He says, "Well, I just put that ... I just was typing into a Usenet group, and I sent it into this one that research librarians use." I said, "I don't even know what a Usenet group is." And just then, his six minute fax machine began clacking, and after a few lines, you could see that it was a resume being sent in. Chad: What year was this? What year was this? Gerry: This was 1993. Joel: And a fax machine, boys and girls, is ... Gerry: Yes. And a light bulb went on in my head, and I - Joel: That's about right. Gerry: Said, "Oh, shit." I said, "That's a loss to the New York Times this Sunday." Chad: Yeah? Gerry: And my commissions are gone from that, you know? And I'm going, "Holy shit. What would happen if everybody did stuff like that?" Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Gerry: So that was my first epiphany, and then you know Ward Crispin, right? Chad: Yeah. Gerry: Well, Ward Crispin was a bulletin board guy, back in that day. And somebody gave me his name, and I called him up and said, "How do I get on this thing called the internet?" And he was actually helpful in finding the two addresses in New Jersey where I could, publicly, connect to the internet with my ... Joel: You just had a local ISP. Gerry: Yeah, local ISP. You had to have these rubber cups that you stuck on the edge, end of a phone, and it screeds back and forth in order to be able to do anything, and obviously that was the beginning of that shit. Joel: So you weren't surprised by '97ish, when the job board revolution started. What do you remember about that time? Gerry: I was writing books by then. Joel: Yeah. Yeah, for those who don't know. Gerry wrote books. These things with paper and a binding and - Gerry: I made a living selling paper books about the internet, for God's sake. Joel: Chad and I both remember those books, because at least at my company, they bought them for all the employees and passed it around. Gerry: I know. Joel: And we sent the ... E-span and Job Options, yeah we sent those with the ... When you ... You rated us as a top job site. And Michael Forest, you know - Gerry: Nation job, if I recall. Joel: Well, Job Options. Gerry: Oh, Job Options. Right. Joel: Michael Forest, who I know he loved you. And we put a sticker on it and sent it out to prospects and clients. Chad: Oh, yeah. So did OCC. I mean, we were sending that shit out all over the place. Gerry: Yep. I used to call them up and review them, and the first book, which was written in 1996, had 300 websites and a few job boards, rank ordered, in a variety of different ways. And we sold ... I gave a talk at SHRM National Conference in 1996, on HR and the internet. And in an hour after that ... Yes, true. It was the first time SHRM had ever done that. It was my first national conference speaking, and actually the projector was like a ton. It was a huge, monstrous thing that you had to play with. Chad: Oh, yeah. Gerry: And I showed slides of different ways that HR might change, given what was existing on the internet, and of course the most advanced pieces were some of the job boards that were developing. And literally, two hours after my talk, we had sold 5,000 books. Joel: Holy shit. Gerry: And Mark Miller, this was 1996 - Joel: This wasn't an overhead projector, was it? Gerry: Oh, no, no, no, no. This was on a big, huge, monstrous table, in the middle of the place. And we kind of darkened the entire room. It was really dark in order to get some kind of visibility on the screen. So it was really awful, and obviously the very primitive-looking screens. I remember asking people, and this is June 1996, "How many of you have an email address?" 25%. Joel: Higher than I would have thought. Gerry: And I asked, "How many of you have seen a page on the internet?" About 10%. Joel: Uh-huh (affirmative). Gerry: And my comment after that was, "When I'm done, if you're not ready to embrace this technology, you need to go find a different kind of profession." Joel: Or find another planet to live on, because this thing's going to consume everything you fucking do. Gerry: Yeah, but there were a lot of naysayers in those days, and from '96 to about 2000, you could have an argument, a strong argument, with folks who basically said, "This will never catch on in the short run," that "This will take decades to accomplish." And as a result, many of those who were caught when 2000 turned to 2001 and all hell broke loose. Fundamentally, it really did cause a huge disruption, right around the turn of the century. Joel: There were a lot of people saying, "We were right," when the 2001 recession hit, and all these dot coms bellied up. Gerry: Oh, yeah. I had left everything for CareerXroads by then. But I remember spending every week, every two weeks, or something like that ... Computer world would come out, and when computer world came out, I looked at the ads, and calculated the percentage of companies whose ads said, "Send us your resume via some internet approach." And the percentage was rapidly growing over the course of '98, '99 from 10% to probably 60 or 70%. So obviously people were doing something that ... Changing the game, in terms of that input. And you knew that the output was then going to shift heavily towards the net as a result. People were now engaged. Joel: If only we had bought Amazon at $4 a share. Chad: Or Google, maybe. I don't know. Gerry: Well, no. Google wasn't around. Chad: No, not then. Gerry: The reason why I could sell so many damn books was because the search engines were the biggest choke point. You couldn't find stuff easily. And you did have to understand how to use boolean. Chad: Yep, yep. Hitting AltaVista, or whatever the fuck. Gerry: Well, even Yahoo. Joel: That's when Super Bowl ads made sense. Gerry: Oh, yeah. Oh, without a doubt. Chad: Keep an eye, and ear, out for more Gerry Tales, coming soon. Sowash, 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 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. #GerryCrispin #SHRM #Shaker #internet #Monster #History #Yahoo #Google #AltaVista #Newpaper #GerryTales

The boys cover just about everything with Smashfly's Josh Zywien, Delta Airlines' Holland McCue and Fiserv's Julia Levy. Enjoy this live show from Boston and throw our sponsors - Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas - lots of love. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level.​ Chad: I'm going to do you a favor. Instead of forcing you to envision Joel and me playing shirtless volleyball, Top Gun style, to the tune of Kenny Loggins "Danger Zone", or even hearing Tim Sackett scamper on and off the stage serving water and cookies like a good little emcee. We're just going to jump right into the conversational fray from Smash Fly's Transform 2019 conference, where we were lucky enough to score some time on stage with Julia Levy, director of talent acquisition and recruiting ops from Fiserv, Holland Dombeck McCue, head of employer brand and recruitment marketing from Delta Airlines, and last but never least, Josh Zywien, a.k.a. Jay-Z, CMO and all around branding and marketing stud from Smash Fly. Enjoy the banter, after these words from our sponsor. Sovren: Sovern is known for proving the world's best and most accurate parson products, and now based on that technology, comes Sovereign's artifactual 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. Sovern, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: 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: ...So, there's an argument, and we some video vendors in the audience. There's a debate between really expensive, professionally made, video versus just getting out the smartphone and sticking it in front of a recruiting or hiring manager and putting that online. Do you have and sense, or anyone on the panel have sort of, guerrilla, amateur style videos versus professional ones? Josh: You say that as they have a professional videographer right here. Julia: There's a time and place for both, and I think we've got a lot of that professionally produced video and photo content and when candidates come to the site, sometimes they think our career site has stock imagery because our associate photos look so good. That's, I think, a challenge, and I would prefer having a blended approach, and being able to use some of the user generated video content, besides what people might post on their own personal Instagrams and things like that, which will capture in a tent stream similar to what you were seeing on the break here, but also being able to be able to get some of that. Julia: If I'm a candidate, I would want to see the hiring manager in a thirty second clip of what they have to say, or see what a colleague, someone else on the team would have to say. I think that candidates want to see that. I think that as a consumer that's what I would want to see. Joel: Where are you putting it? So, you can put video in all kinds of places and James talked about YouTube in terms of the next generation. Where would you recommend putting videos? Where's it a waste of time? Social media, what's effective and what isn't for video? Chad: Are you putting videos on Tik-Tok? Julia: Not yet. Josh: That's like, transforming two years. We'll have a Tic-Tok session. Chad: We'll have a Tic-Tok session, remember that. Joel: We've all seen your account, Josh. Chad: So, how are you using video, and then, how are you guys video? I know you are. Julia: Right now, we just have the produced video and I want to experiment and use video in our talent network forums, and I would love to use video against our job postings and in e-mails, a recruiter saying "hey, Julia." It could be a little creepy I guess. "Hey, Julia I saw that you did a, b, c, and d and I'm really interested in learning more. I'm a reciter at Fiserv. Let's talk." Joel: So, you're not leveraging Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat? Julia: We do, but some of it is in conjunction with our corporate account. Then, there's a lot of partnership with the global brand team, and brand... I don't want to say regulations, but standards that user generated video content wouldn't align with. Chad: That's the big question. I was listening earlier IBM talk about how they have all this content. It's like, how to you QC that shit? I mean, seriously. You want to be able to use this, so you have all this content coming in, but you have to somebody put actual eyes on it. Holland: One, if you're doing highly produced video, to answer your earlier question, I think where that come into play and why a lot of vendors in that space are successful is they really help you with the story arch. If you have a particular message that you are trying to get out, working with a producer who knows how to extract that from your people it's beautiful. Chad: You have a purpose for that video, it's not just a video it's [crosstalk 00:05:43] Holland: You have a purpose, you have a storyline that you're trying to hit. We used to work with this awesome vendor that used to talk about the spark line. The peaks and valleys and the message that you're trying to hit. In terms of that quality control piece, a lot of vendors are backing in to the back end. You send a message out to employee, they record video, and then you have someone who's physically screening that on the back end before you put information out. Chad: Can that not be, like crazy overwhelming? Holland: It can be pretty time consuming overwhelming. I think the crux of that is, only creating content with purpose. Don't just do a mass blast to your employee like "hey, we just bought AllTrue, and we're going to put an article on our intranet so that all eighty thousand people create a video." That's not smart use of that technology. It's about being really intentional with the stories that we want to tell, sending prompts to individuals, having them record them, and then screening that on the back end and only pushing the ones that are true, and hit the storyline that we're trying to hit live. Josh: I think that though is the point though. Right? There's this debate of highly produced video versus user generated video, and I actually don't think it matters, because user generated video can still suck. Everybody thinks that it's automatically authentic and it isn't always. If there's a good story and the person who's on the video has something to say, and you've thought through what the message is, then it's going to come across very well. If you're forcing somebody to read a script, it's going to come across scripted even if it's quick and dirty, authentic, user generated video. I don't think it's either or, I think there's a place for both, and it can be highly produced and very authentic, or it can be highly produced and feel like it [crosstalk 00:07:26] Joel: From where you sit distribution wise, where do you typically send customers with distribution of video? Where should the definitely be and where might they be wasting time? Josh: From a marketers prospective or from what would we advise our customers? Joel: From a marketers prospective. If I'm an employer and we have this great video, where should we put it? What's your answer? Josh: It's obviously multi-channel and that's kind of a cop-out answer. Holland: It depends on what the essence of the video is. If you have videos that drive, tap a funnel but maybe talk about brand promise, culture promise, and then you have videos that kind of come into play that more are like realistic job previews. So someone gets attracted to you brand with video A, then they come, they look at the job opportunities you have, you want to serve up another video related to more of the intricacies of that role, and then as you go deeper down the funnel, maybe that's when you introduce the hiring manager, and some of these more off-the-cuff videos. Joel: How involved is marketing, if at all, with the videos that you're making? Or any of the branding that you're doing? Holland: Very Holland: Yeah, I would say very. At Delta, our people at our product. What sets us apart in the consumer space is our level of service, so our marketing and our cons team does a really fantastic job of curating stories, and then producing content but bringing people like HR and talent into the fold so that we all make sure that we massage the storyline and we're hitting it from each angle of our perspective departments. It's not a one sided story. But then, content that we own, like Day in the Life, realistic job preview content, that's fully produced by HR and talent. Joel: Was that your experience as well, Julia? Julia: Pretty similar, but I would say I've been at companies that didn't have a strong global brand team and I've had to be really scrappy on my own, and kind of own it. Then, maybe talk to and reach out to people in marketing to get their feedback even though I was doing it off the side of my desk, which I'm sure, many of you here feel that way when it comes to recruitment marketing practices that you might not have the budget to do a sixty thousand dollar video and you need to be scrappy on your cellphone. There's products out there that can help you do it for a more reasonable cost, or you can do it on your own with a lot of research. Some of it's trail-and-error, and piloting in smaller places. Josh: I hear you guys talk a lot about this, and I agree with you. We've talked a lot about how employer brand and TH should leverage corporate brand more. But, there's always this assumption that corporate brand has this big pile of cash that they're sitting on. My wife works for General Motors, everything's outsourced. They work with agencies that handle everything, and you might have a marketer that owns agency relationships. They kind of feed and protect and act as a filter there, but they don't control much of the budget. The agency actually controls the budget, so employer brand isn't going to get much of the attention from the marketing agency managing that corporate brand. At least, it's going to be more difficult than if you have a strong corporate branding team or corporate branding team that owns the budget and owns the execution of everything. Again, it's not a clean, easy way to divide things. Chad: Nothing ever is in corporate America. It seems like you guys have direct lines into to marketing, do you have a regular cadence with conversations with marketing on staying on brand, purpose, all of those things. Do you find that is entirely different than most of your peers out there? Like they're disconnected. Or, do you feel like HR and TA, they're starting to come together with marketing more? Holland: I think we're seeing, and particularly consumer brands are really leading this, Chad: It's money Holland: ...it's money and a lot of consumer brands are using their people to differentiate their product. So, we're a commodity, you can fly Southwest, you can fly United, you can fly American, but you fly Delta because of the interiors of our cabin, because of our people, and so, marketing really leverages our people's stories as a means to attract people to our organization. What that requires is them to stay really in close alignment with TA and with HR to make sure that they're one, showcasing employees that are in good standing with the business, who are representative of the brand that we're putting out in the market, but two, that they're speaking to our values and our truths. They're not steering away too much from what we're training them in onboarding and our respective divisions. Joel: It's commercial time. 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 work flow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology, and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of 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: It's showtime. Chad: I didn't hear you talk about actual your candidates, no question, are your customers. Holland: Oh one hundred percent. Chad: And if you treat them badly, then you're negatively impacting the bottom line. Is there a line to, to... big corporate? Holland: To marketing? Chad: Yeah Holland: So, there is now, and I'm that line. That line did not exist before so, you were giving me some shit earlier in the lobby, like "what is your job?" Chad: What do you do? Holland: So, if you applied for job at Delta fifteen months ago before I joined, you were going to what, more or less, looked like a spam site. Corporate marketing had no idea. They weren't paying attention They had their own... Chad: How do they not see this? The career site is the second to the homepage on the amount of traffic that a company gets. Their marketing, how do they not know this shit? They have analytics on the site. They have analytics on the site. Holland: They have analytics on the site but I think what happens quite a bit of the time is, Smashfly is a product for this, TNP has product for this, is the career site is built separate of the consumer brand site. Ours is built on our dot com site, it's just a simple splash page, we have plans to blow it out a little further, but if your career site is dispersate from your consumer site, a lot of times corporates not picking up those metrics. They're not getting into their Google dashboards or their Adobe dashboards, whatever analytics platform that they have. Chad: So, ar Fiserv that's not the case, really? Are your candidates your customers or not really? Julia: Not entirely, our customers are a lot of the banks and credit unions, [crosstalk 00:14:44] so we're more business to business. I have to kind of show the value in partnership with the global brand team around the career site. They actually put us, when we were just a little careers blip on the header or the footer, when you go to our corporate site now, we have a huge hero image around careers, which has been fantastic and if you can get your employer to put careers front and center, it is one of the most highly clicked links on the main dot com site. Then, we outsource the career site from there. Julia: We have regular cadence with them, but there still is some education both ways, because I'm very strong minded in my opinion around what the candidate experience should be and what the career site should be and I want us to do to really push the limits and be innovative, but then they want to protect the brand image. The disconnect is where the brand image is to our clients and what would a client think if they saw user generated video, and if it wasn't the same quality and polish of the content that we give to our banks and credit unions and business clients, and candidates don't want to see that heavily produced and polished because then they just think it's just corporate speak and someones just going over a script instead of what authentically Julia thinks of working at Fiserv. Chad: So, how do you message that to them, and say that just doesn't work for us? And, do they care? Julia: It is and ongoing dialogue. Chad: So they don't care? That's what I'm getting. Josh: So they don't want it in the front end of the career side? The reason I ask that is back to your question about how you use a video, I don't think that user generated video always has to be front and center on the career site. It can be used, I know Colin's talking about recruiter enablement tomorrow. There's a tool we use in sales and marketing called Vidyard and we can record personalized videos that will go anywhere publicly, but we can send them and say "hey, John nice to meet you. Can't wait to get on the demo call, really looking forward to it and here's what we're going to talk about." Follow up after the demo, "hey it was really great meeting you." That use case can be applied to recruiting. It's the exact same thing to where it's not publicly visible, it's not part of the brand, you're not exposing anything. You don't have to worry about the polish, but it still has utility. Julia: I had, kind of, the big slash but it on the career site approach, but now I'm pivoting a little bit and just haven't had those conversations yet, so I'm building out that plan to understand how could we use this a little differently than our initial use case and still get a lot of value out of it. It is in other creative way, so I'm still figuring that out. Joel: We heard a lot earlier about shiny object syndrome. We hear a lot about AI automation programmatic video, social media, etcetera. What are the shiny objects that you guys are testing do you think have promise? We might be talking about things five years from now. Chad: Tik-Tok. Holland: So, not necessarily testing it, we use Hirevue, they're pretty embedded in our process. We get a ton of volume. We're a volume shop, and so we really need partners who help us do down selection. We have an IO psychologist and a PhD who helps with assessment strategy and selection strategy, which really refines our pipeline, and Hirevues been a really integral part of that story. We've actually seen more inclusive pipelines since we've implemented their AI solution, which has been fantastic. Chad: Can you write that up for the state of Illinois? Holland: I know, I listened to your show the other day. I think that's one that we're closely monitoring. Chad: Who knows about the new AI regulations? Sentiments? Facial recognitions? I told you all this was a podcast, you need to listen to the show. Holland: I have a bigger beef with the government on that front. The fact that we have to push jobs in the first place really... Chad: Being a federal contractor Holland: Being a federal contractor, but it really impacts the ability to do some of this next level marketing. When you post a job you have an apply cycle coming in, which really requires us to get more refined with assessments and selections versus, I prefer someone to go to a landing page and opt-in so I can more manage a pipeline, but we just don't live in that world. Chad: Right, I mean that's the thing is that with all of this new technology, you know it scares the shit out of obviously not just the government but the people, so therefore, we start to see these regulations pop up out of no where and if you haven't checked it our, all you should have to do is Google "state of Illinois interviewing AI," or listen to the podcast. Chad: These are the things GDPR, not to mention next year 2020, California's coming out with their own GDPR so I mean, these are things that are going to happen and these questions that you have to dig down deep, I'm sure Josh hears this a lot. Are you dealing with this at all Julia? Holland: Yeah. Talking about tools, and I'll it back to the GDPR and the clients.[crosstalk 00:20:08] Josh: I mean there's nothing sexier than GDPR compliance. Julia: I've had to deal with GDPR and we use Hiring Solved, so talent rediscovery is and are we've been involved in and that's been evolving. There is several players that can help. Joel: Explain what that means. Julia: Talent rediscovery, so you're spending thousands or hundreds of thousands, or millions or dollars investing in attracting talent to join your talent communities and your ATS. I recruited for a number of years and as a recruiter, it was very hard to see all the candidates that are in the ATS, so you can't fish in your own pond. Being able to view that nice talent pool of people that have already clicked apply, know your brand, were excited about your brand at some point, and if you have a good positive candidate experience may be excited to reapply or re-engage. So, how do you pull all of those people out of your ATS or CRN and get them reengaged in your brand and your opportunities and continue that dialogue. Joel: Let me underscore, people you have already paid for. You've probably paid for them six time over by the way. Julia: So, with GDPR we set up processes within our ATS so that we can remove people from the process after certain time periods, and that also has downstream implications into, so a report gets run and we review it and then say "okay, delete these records." But, then we have downstream into Smash Fly around who we have to delete in all those European countries, and then also, I have to then look into Hiring Solved, and that's all manual on myself or a colleague. There's definitely a lot of work to be done around that. Julia: When you think of AI or talent rediscovery, machine learning, I wish I had that little sparkly disco ball that could tell what the future is around the best tools. Joel: Josh sees, you see all these tools, so what are you ghoulish on? Chad: Really quick those, you guys have a partnership with Hiring Solved now, what are you seeing? Are you seeing a lot of what Julia's talking about? They understand we have an asset that we have allowed, just to atrophy, spent hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars in our candidate database, are companies starting to see that and realize that we need to go back into this database and try to harvest it? Josh: Yeah, and I think it's a lot of times it's easy to blame practitioners and be like, "gosh this is so obvious, why haven't you done this?" And in reality... Chad: It's not? No seriously is it not that obvious? Josh: Well it is obvious, but the technology limits that. So, if you've ever searched in an ATS, stab your eyes out. It's horrible. To a certain extent, I don't blame recruiters or users of the ATS for not wanting to do that. It requires a lot of time to find, I think our head of sales has separated our wheat from the shaft, which I don't know if that's a great analogy. To find those top tier people that you want to follow up with, an ATS is not a great tool for that. This whole category of technology that was born out of that need is absolutely relevant. Josh: I think this is where, to me, this whole debate of AI is kind of, you just talk in circles. It's more about does it solve a problem that exists, and if it does than it's valuable. I know it's helped you guys quite a bit. There are a lot of tools out there that do the same thing. I think it's one of those problems that is an obvious problem, there are some companies that are very clueless about it and are happy to keep spending money on job boards, and keep paying to re attract people but, I do think it's a limitation of the technology that's been around. It was just never designed for that. Holland: I think it's a limitation of the technology but it's also and what other pieces of tech you've enabled. If you are not hovering good lead qualification going into your ATS, if you're not building in basic qualifiers or pre-qualifier questions that help refine that pipeline, you're just going to be reengaging or resurfacing up garbage anyway. So, do you really wan tot engage something, granted you've paid for those individuals getting into your pipeline. Chad: Yeah, so garbage from your standpoint is actually customers. That's what you have to look at. Holland: I rescind the comment of garbage. What I'm saying is that we need to be a little more stringent on the front end. We're at a marketing conference, if you're really thinking about being a marketer, when was last time you went and shopped technology? I went and I shopped an ATS last year, I filled out a white paper, I learned more about that tech. They sent me a lead qualification form, I filled out that form, I told them about when I was looking to buy parallel to when I'm looking to leave my job. What attributes do I have as a buyer? What attributes do you have as a candidate? And that qualified me, and what I from them was a rejection. We didn't fit their buyer set, but we need to be more stringent on our side as marketers to think that way. To qualify leads that are coming into our database so that we don't have disappointed customers to candidates. Josh: There's, I think a lot of times, candidates, even if they sometimes, are aware that they're not qualified, and they just want very clear communication. Outside of the spammers. There are spammers too that will just like, often called the serial appliers, that will just apply to jobs. I think Tom had a slide on that earlier. Joel: It's commercial time. JobAdX: Finding the right fit is important when you're deciding on shoes for a long day at the trade show, when you're picking the right podcast for your commute, and most importantly, when you're looking for the right candidate. 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Julia: It's like the dating apps, and you're saying the jobs really don't like and you're like "ugh," you're right away saying no to that, but everything else you're saying yes to, and then the reciters have to weed through this huge in flux of people. Josh: To your point there, the quote unquote garbage, it's not that, right? It's not that you mean that, it's just that they're not a good fit, but there's a way to disposition those people elegantly, and I think that's one of the biggest problems. Joel: Speaking of influxes of huge amounts of candidates, listeners of the show will know that chat bots are getting a ton of money currently. Anybody using those, testing those, general opinion around chat bots, and [crosstalk 00:28:08] Josh: Plug for Emerson. Joel: No sales pitch up here. Holland: I'm going to save my good chat bot story for tomorrow but we're using chat pods in another instance. We're actually using a chat bot out of an accelerator that Delta sponsors, so keeping in the family, and really investing back into these tech communities that we believe in. What we're found is that, we don't have a formal employer referral process, it is on our roadmap. We do get referrals, but in terms of recognition or rewards, that's just not built in right now. Holland: What we also have a lot of is, "I met this person at this dinner," or "my friend's son looking for an opportunity. He just graduated from X University." We're getting all these messages kicked to our recruiters, and what it was creating for them was extra administrative work to screen these individuals and learn more about them. So, we actually stood up a chat bot service, we call is "referrals concierge," where we can reply, "thank you so much, please have them go here if they've not sat in on our training." Where people can go, they can type in the candidate's information, they can type in how they met them, why they think they would be good for Delta. And then, that's actually going to a coordinator to screen and even further qualify, and only send those that are a fit and ready to engage the recruiter, over to our recruiter. Julia: I've been watching it for a while, but I've not dipped my toe in. I think that if you're in a high volume area, like the first time I saw a Paragon or Emerson, I was like "Oh my God." At my last job, we did a lot of high volume I was like, "this could have been perfect" because these candidates could text in a couple of things, go right into ATS, and then we can get them into our process, or into a serum and then have a work flow for a talent network forum. I thought, that's perfect. They've evolved with interview scheduling and stuff like that, but for highly technical professional roles, I get annoyed at Alexa and Siri all of the time. And look how good they are, right? Although they have a lot more of information to go through. I see the value in interview scheduling. If they do it well, that could be something, at least for basic interviews, but the complexities of our business, I don't think it's there yet. Joel: The SVP doesn't want to talk to a chat bot one on one. Josh: Here's a use case though. So, I was at a conference, it was a talent board workshop I think. I think it was Andy, was her first name but she worked at a company called ProCore. ProCore's a technology company. I was talking to an analyst that worked at United that just built their own stuff. So they built their own chat bot but their use case was around this concierge service for booking travel for interviews. They had a landing page for candidates, so it had a map to where they need to park, and the office they were going to, some answers to some frequently asked questions, and then this chat bot that was on there where they could book travel through the chat bots. They didn't have to go to a travel booking site, they would just say "hey, I'm traveling on Tuesday." Okay, well here are four flights that are within the budget for you, timeframe, suggest that you pick one, went ahead and booked a flight for you. All in the back end for the candidate. Josh: So, those little touches I think for an SVP or something like that, that's super elegant. To where it feels like you have your personal assistant, and it's adding value, versus certain use cases where you try to fit it in there, and it just doesn't work, and it actually creates a worse experience in some cases. So, I think sometimes understanding how you want to use the technology and what you'rr actually solving for, versus just being like "oh my God, chat bot, let's just do it." And then it's like [crosstalk 00:31:47] Chad: It's the bright and shiny one. That's totally the bright and shiny case. You're not focused on the problem, you're not focused on trying to get process. Most of this technology we're talking about should be able to take out some tasks. Some of the mundane tasks that recruiters have, or even hiring managers have in some cases. If you're not trying to solve for something, then you're just fucking wasting time, right? Julia: When I first got to Fiserv video interviewing, everyone's "oh, candidate experience, video interviewing," and they wanted to apply it to our Java developers, like our technology fields, and I was like, "A. What problem are you trying to solve? Just candidate experience. And then, I was like, "do you really think a software developers going to go through this video interview before they've even spoken to someone." So, we never went down that path. I feel it has a good place in a lot of specific role, but again, you need to know what problem you're trying to solve and what results you want to get from them. Joel: But like messaging, text recruiting, things like that, you guys still utilizing those? Josh: I was just going to say, for hiring too, my wife at General Motors uses CodeView, so do you know their product? I don't know if you guys have used it, but she said the developers actually enjoy using because they feel like they've gotten a fair shot, to a certain degree. Holland: Do you guys know what that is? Joel: It's for when you're coding a lot of [crosstalk 00:33:12] Holland: We demoed it, it's on our roadmap. Same response. Even our hiring managers were big fans. It eliminates the need for the candidate to come down. Joel: And talk. I'm curious, we talk a lot on the show about, sort of the platform wars, and when we talked IBM, like all the shiny things and there's so much out there. There seems to be a battle between big guys like LinkedIn, Microsoft, Google, Facebook to some degree. We heard recently that sales force is going to sort of get into the work force. Slack went public today. ISIMS and Jobvite are buying everyone they can to create one platform system. Are you guys a buyers of the one platform, or do you think that's a dead end strategy? Josh: I'm not answering that. Julia: We did a big RFP last year, it had been several years since we looked at our tech stack. We had put some add-ons on and we did an RFP last year, and after coming through it, I decided to stay the course, so we've got Smashfly as job distribution, CRM recruitment marketing and e-mail marketing. We've got TMP as the front end of our career site. We've got add-ons like HiringSolved and Textio, and we use LinkedIn Elevate for social advocacy. There's no one who does all of that, or at least does all of it well. Some people say they can do a lot of it, but then when you look under the covers there's big things that are missing that are critical components to what we need to be successful. Julia: The challenge sometimes is around data, and reporting and seeing the full picture, apples to apples or oranges to pears, and so that's where I struggle with that approach, but it for the most part works. Although recruiters have a little bit of fatigue sometimes, so we could have gone with a different social advocacy tool, but we chose Elevate because people know LinkedIn. But, how many different systems do they need to know and learn and log into? So, that is one of the bad sides of doing that approach. Chad: That's a big question, is how many platforms are they logging into? Because, that's not efficient at all, right? How many browsers do they have open? Having to go from one page to the next. If that's not something that you can integrate, is that really worth your time? Holland: I would say no. I think that we in the marketing space, we're in an interesting position in our field. We do a little bit of brand, a lot of marketing, and then we're tech as well. We're rolling up our sleeves, we're sometimes programming on our own, we're building and I think we talk a lot about the relationships that we need to foster with marketing and communications, but for me, my best friend right now is my HR TS teams and making sure that we have those integrations so that our point solutions talk to each other, and then making sure we have single sign-on enabled, and share dashboards, so that if you are using point solutions you can access them all through a single interface. So, I think you can get around some of what you're talking about, but you have to... Chad: That's internal development though. Holland: It's totally internal development. Chad: How many people have that many internal resources for that? Two, I see. Yeah. Two. I mean that shit just doesn't exist. You're in the utopia of all this. They're all looking at you going... Holland: I think there's two sides to the coin of that. I'm not in a position to use a tool like it's a greenhouse for example. Where it's a simple ATS, it's a simple serum, it's all integrated, you could build landing pages. I think it was the woman at IBM who said that she looks at these small companies and they're able to rewrite every job description and that she doesn't have that luxury. I would love to walk in someones shoes where I could use a single, all encompassing solution that allows me to that and not to have to have these deep relationships with IT, so I think there's trade-offs on both sides of the house. Chad: But you've had to do that with Textio, and you're on the journey right now in actually rewriting all of those for... so talk about that a little bit. Julia: It's been an evolution in the very beginning of Textus. If you don't know Textio, it's a natural language processing tool where you can take your horrible job description and put it into their tool and they analyze it against millions of other job descriptions out there, and they give a score of zero to one hundred, and tell you how good or bad your job is. Then, they give you suggestions on how you can make it better, and it's fabulous. Julia: The challenge is, some people feel comfortable writing and others say, "I'm a horrible writer," and recruiters are trying to fill the req, and when you have a really poorly written job description, and you put it in and you have to spend, next Textio will tell you ten minutes, but when you're spending thirty to forty-five minutes of your time rewriting your job description to make it engaging as a job posting, and attractive to candidates, it's frustrating, because you want to just get in and get out. Julia: Now, what I will say to some of the recruiters is if you're spending, we have a team of people that feel comfortable that can help, so we put that together, but we have seen the evolution. We now have hundreds of jobs descriptions, job posts that are already in there, so the largest hurdles and pain are a little bit behind us. I can go in, if I'm a recruiter working on a software developer role and see probably fifteen other jobs that are scoring well, and go and pull that to start from, so it's almost like a job library now. But, what they also added was recruiting e-mails, so that first e-mail as a recruiter that you send to someone to try to get them interested and get their attention, they now are giving you score son that. We've seen from our recruiting and sourcing team that they've gotten higher response rates after using Textio than they did using before, and they're integrated now with Outlook and with LinkedIn, so that's where you're going to be creating those first e-mails. Julia: We analyzed our data from the year before we used Textio to the first year in, and then they've taken a lot of key learnings and put them back in too, so your candidates respond better when you use this kind of language, and this kind of language responds, men appreciate these wordings, women appreciate these words and phrases. Chad: If you're looking for more gender specific. Joel: Women like bullet points, something like that. Julia: It's really helped us remove some gender bias, and it helps us know what words and language speed up the process, and what words and language slows down the process. [crosstalk 00:40:06] The word "collaborate," which I would think we're a really collaborative environment, that word slows down the process by three days. Julia: Who knew? Chad: That's interesting. Joel: Speaking of job postings, there's been a lot of disruption in that space in the last couple years. So, Google for Jobs launched a couple years ago, Indeed, of course, has decided not to participate in Google for Jobs. We have Programmatic rising in popularity. Where do you guys sit on the job posting spectrum and what do you see in the future? Josh: Like Google as becoming a search engine destination for people to start their search? Joel: So, I want to post a job, what recommendation would you give to somebody to get, like is Programmatic the best solution? Is Indeed only okay for most companies? Chad: I feel like we're going to get a multi-channel answer. Joel: Probably. [crosstalk 00:41:07] Josh: No, I think it's, you guys can probably speak, but I think it depends on what you're hiring for. Holland: Yeah, it depends on what you're hiring for, and I said in a Tweet the other day that I know you were like, "oh we'll talk about it." Programmatic is becoming Post and Pray 2.0. Joel: Explain that. [crosstalk 00:41:28] Holland: It got some traction, but I think Programmatic is a fantastic solution. So, historically people have been married to these big contracts. Back in the day you were married to Monster and CareerBuilder, as Indeed came on board you got away form the contract model, but you were an insertion orders and you kind of got hooked on the value that they were bringing to the top of your funnel, and now we're seeing this paradigm shift where Programmatic is coming in and it's disrupting all of that, in tandem to Google, so it allows you to have freedom and flexibility. Over time, Programmatic vendors, ones that have correctly learned what performs for you based on the different profiles you're sending out. It also let's you a b test different... Chad: So why is it Post and Pray? It sounds great. Holland: So, what I'm saying is, what I'm seeing happen though is in a lot of these conversations around Programmatic is you invest in Programmatic, you're able to reduce costs by this, you're able to cut your contract spend by this, but they're not talking about the full circle. Yes, you're able to get more refined in terms of bringing people to your brand, but you shouldn't preach that to your leadership in that way. You should position taking those dollars and using them on storytelling, or re engagement, or rediscovery technology, so what I'm saying is that people are only hanging their hat on Programmatic because it's delivering results, but it's only one piece of the earned, owned, paid puzzle. Holland: We started doing Programmatic and moved away from, a lot of the... we're still posting jobs on LinkedIn, but Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster sponsor, like all that kind of stuff. We've moved towards Programmatic and have a bucket, and we meet with the vendor pretty regularly to review and make sure that it's... Joel: Do either of you have job board contracts currently? No? Holland: I have a LinkedIn contract. Holland: Yeah, how do you want to frame LinkedIn? Josh: We have like a minute and forty-five because this things yelling at us, but I want to ask question just to wrap up but like, what happens when Google turns on, within the Google for Jobs when you can advertise there, how does that blow up everything? And what happens when job seeker behavior changes to where like, Indeed wants to be a destination, and they're spending a ton of branding and marketing dollars on being a destination, but I don't know that you're going to change user behavior [crosstalk 00:44:00] Joel: By the way, Google just launched tracking for your jobs on Google for Jobs, so it's a hop, skip, and a jump between that and "Okay, give us your credit card and boost these certain jobs, for a lot more views." Holland: And a lot of the Programmatic success is still on Indeed, it's still in Glassdoor, because of what you just described. They're pumping lots of dollars into the market place to tell candidates to look on their site, and we should reap the reward of that still. Programmatic is still capitalizing on that. You shared outcast report, their data is showing it, it's still Indeed and Glassdoor. So, we're not moving away in full, I just think we're seeing this evolution. Chad: Do you feel like it's sustainable though? Because, how much of Indeed's traffic was on the Google side of the house? Joel: Ten years ago, you could have replaced that with Monster and CareerBuilder, right? So, ten years from now, will it still be Indeed and Glassdoor? Chad: Five, I'd say five. [crosstalk 00:44:56] Joel: So, I don't think that it's any accident that Indeed is getting into a lot of different things to put certain bets on the platform for gig workers and staffing and a lot of other things, because they're aware of that. Chad: I think we just ended right on time. Joel: You got a broom man? Sackett: I got one last question. Joel: Okay. Sackett: How fast can you get your asses off the stage? Joel: Depends on how long it takes me to get that beer. Sackett: Chad and Cheese, Holland, Julia, JZ, give them a hand, awesome sauce. Chad: Thank you 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. #Smashfly #ATS #CRM #Marketing #jobs #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Brand

It's a damned free-for-all! Matt Alder comes to a CENSORSHIP FREE environment in this crossover edition of Chad & Cheese and The Recruitment Future Podcast. If the language is too much for you just head your whimpy ass over to Matt's bleeped out version at RFpodcast.com. Everyone else can enjoy the ADULT VERSION all due to our friends over at Uncommon.co. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level.​ Chad: Dude, we're always talking about cool new tech, but it's hard for hiring companies to change. I mean adoption's a bitch. New Tech can get them to qualified candidates so much faster. Joel: I don't know man. But recruiters already have their routine in place and nobody wants to jump into another platform, especially when it's expensive and also requires hours, maybe days of training. Chad: Exactly, but that's where Uncommon's new service comes into play Uncommon pairs expert recruiters with in-house kick-ass technology. Joel: All right, interesting. Interesting. It sounds like Uncommon understands the problem of change... Chad: That's why they hand select veteran recruiters, train them on this kick-ass technology that has access to over 100 million active profiles. Joel: Yeah, but I bet they're expensive and I bet it requires some kind of annual commitment or contract, right? Chad: No Man, Uncommon is not an agency. They don't require a contract, any contingencies, all they do, they charge one flat fee per project, saving, I don't know, anywhere from 50 to 80% on each hire versus the average agency cut. Joel: Oh, snap! Companies could save big stacks of paper, especially if they're rapidly scaling and need hires today. Chad: Yep, and all you have to do is reach out to Tag and the Uncommon crew at uncommon.co, that's uncommon.co. Joel: Change doesn't have to be a pain, if you're using Uncommon. 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: Well, we should record already. Jesus. Matt: Yeah, let's just get started. Come on. Joel: I'm so confused right now. Matt: I'm sitting, who's show am I on? Who's show is this? Chad: This is our collective show, so for everybody that's out there, so we finally got a chance to meet Matt in Portugal and I had this crazy idea of, hey, let's just sit down and do a crossover podcast where we're going to be on Matt's Pod. He's going to be on our pod and we're going to just have a fucking free for all. So how's that sound? Joel: All your ideas are crazy by the way. You don't have to like put crazy idea. Just say idea and people know it's crazy. Chad: That's right, redundant is what you're saying. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. So nevermind the bullocks, we have Britain's, Edinburg's, Matt Alder on. I guess because he's pushing this it out as his show and we're pushing it out as our show. We should probably all do quick introductions because his audience doesn't know us possibly, and our audience doesn't know him possibly. So should we get that out of the way? Chad: Yeah. Let's let Matt go first. Matt: Yeah, let's do it. So I'm Matt Alder and I run the Recruiting Future Podcast, which some of you will be listening to you. Thank you. Chad: You're welcome. Matt: Which some of you will be listening to right now in this kind of weird crossover thing that we're doing. The show has been going for years and every week, well, most weeks I interview thought leaders and practitioners, about the changing nature of talent acquisition and the future of recruiting. Joel: So you're primarily practitioners? Matt: I'm primarily practitioners. Yeah, absolutely. So tell us about your show, for my audience. Joel: We are, I guess a weekly roundup of news from the industry. Primarily what vendors are doing, who's buying whom and who's doing what and how shitty Monster commercials are and how Indeed's gone down the tubes. That's kind of the stuff that we talk about. We have a show called Firing Squad that is sort of like Shark Tank for startups. Usually at least two times a month we do a deep dive into something like automation, AI, chat bots, whatever sort of is interesting and in the now. And then we sorta do a bunch of side shit. I don't know. What else would you add, Chad? Matt: Yeah, the Shred, I mean [crosstalk 00:04:24] Our focus is to be able to help all those individuals that are out there, whether they're talent acquisition or they're vendors, to better understand what the hell is going on in the landscape. There's so much noise out there right now. We'll do the research, we'll put it out, obviously with our fucked up opinion, but you get a lot of content about a lot of shit that's happening in our industry and people seem to dig it. Feffer: Such an asshole. Joel: Exactly. Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what? I've just realized I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to bleep the swearing out. Joel: Oh fuck that. Matt: Do you know what? You know the ridiculous reason why? Apple. So, basically, there are a number of countries that if you have a podcast with swearing in, Apple will not distribute your Podcast to. Chad: Even if you tag it as explicit? Matt: Even if you mark it as explicit. Chad: Oh well, fuck those countries. Matt: Yeah, absolutely. But I have an audience in those countries so I'm going to find some kind of bleeping device. So apologies to the listeners of my show... Joel: What about albums that have explicit lyrics? Matt: I don't know. I don't know. I just know the podcasting bit. Joel: That's bullshit, Matt. Matt: Oh, it's not me. It's not my fault. It's not me. Blame Apple. Joel: That stifles your creativity. Matt: Yeah, it does. Joel: I mean you can't say shite or bullocks or... Matt: Now he's just going to turn this into a swearing episode. Chad: Once you get Joel going down one of these rabbit holes, it's fucking hard and get him out. Chad: In talking with, obviously talent acquisition professionals, staffing professionals, what have you...What are you seeing, today, as one of their biggest issues that you're trying to help them through or they're listening to your podcast to be able to try to get some hints and/or shortcuts through? Matt: Interesting question because I think the answer to it comes back to something that you guys just said. I think the biggest challenge I'm finding lots of talent acquisition professionals have, is the sheer amount of noise in the marketplace. So people are really struggling to get their head round the technology that's available and how it might actually help solve their problems and add some value to them. There's this great sense that people are missing out on some a silver bullet technology and just a lot of confusion about what's out there and how it could work and... Joel: And how are they dealing with learning about the new stuff? Are they putting their head in the sand? Are they actively trying to figure it all out? Matt: I think what I find is that a lot of the people who are really getting on top of this are talking to their peers about it. So going to events, finding out who's using what and how it's working for them. And really that's kind of one of the objectives of my podcast is to get people on to talk about how they are sort of facing their talent acquisition challenges, the methods they're using, the technology they're using. You know, what's working, what's not working and what's never gonna work. Joel: I have this theory that like all the emails that go out, the content marketing, like the typical sort of interruption marketing is all wasted dollars in many aspects. Because a lot of this is just social media. "Hey, who do you guys use as an ATS?" Like, "Hey, who does everybody use for their Chatbot?" Are you saying that that's primarily how people make buying decisions today? Matt: I think it's part of it. I do have sometimes a bit of an issue with those sort of social media requests. Because I think that if you're just asking randomly on Facebook, "Hey, what's a good ATS?" I think it's difficult to get a good answer because people will not appreciate your unique challenges or your objectives or the type of company you are. So I think that's kind of, that's what end of it. But I do think that the events, the peer to peer conversations, the networking that goes on, it's driving a lot of this stuff because I think that a lot of the marketing that comes out to this space, it's really about the vendor's own objectives. So it's like they've kind of got together and say, "Hey, what problems do we solve? These are great problems. We'll solve them." And a lot of the time, I don't think they actually talk to their potential customers or think about what issues they actually have. So I think sometimes technology will solve a problem very effectively, but that problem might be number 50 on the list of problems that someone working in talent acquisition actually has. So I think that's kind of my take on the market and that's what I'm trying to do with my Podcast. Chad: Well, and don't you find that most of these companies really don't truly understand what their problems are? They're hearing so much noise out there and then Jenny from across the street said her ATS was the best... Joel: Jenny form the block. Chad: I feel like, the thing that companies need to really focus on today is their process. They have like a 1990s process methodology that they try to jam into their technology which just doesn't work. And then they try to layer more technology on it, before they really truly find out what their process should be and will that process actually alleviate some of those problems and then prioritization of those problems. And then at that point, after you've gone through all of that, then start talking about technology, but not until then. Matt: Absolutely. I couldn't, I couldn't agree with that more. I think some of the best guests I've had on my show, the people who've gone all the way back to understanding what their objectives are and then building from there it's like, "Well, what actually are our problems? Do these problems actually properly aligned to where our business is going? Are they the right problems to be solving?" And then, "How do we do that? What's the best way to solve it?" And then technology is the kind of the final piece of that puzzle basically. Joel: Do you find it's hard to get corporate folks to open up to you? Matt: Ah, good question. I'm kind of working off a bit of a fake sample, I think, because I was going to say, "No, I have some great guests and they always sort of talk about what they're doing." But, I think my guests are a subset of the whole population, of that kind of corporate population, if you like. Because I think there are people who are open and really happy about talking about what they're doing, they've got a story to share, they've done something good. So, the guests that I have on are no problem at all. They're very open to share and share their learnings. Whether that's the same for everyone who kind of works in talent acquisition, probably not. Joel: So we know you're British and you're polite, but what do you got for us? Any questions? Matt: Yeah, so I've got a few questions. So you claim to be HR's most dangerous podcast... Joel: Claim? Matt: And I was talking to someone who isn't in HR or recruiting about your show actually the other day. And they asked me why was it so dangerous? So you know why are you so dangerous? Joel: Well, I think that the fact that you're bleeping out the first 30 seconds of the show helps us establish that. Matt: Yup, very true. I have something to add to that, if anyone listening to my show wants to hear what we were really saying, if I do managed to bleep it out then, they should listen to this show on your show. Chad: Just go to chadcheese.com and then you'll get the straight shot on that one. Matt: Yeah and likewise, if anyone who listens to your show and doesn't like swearing, then come and listen to my show. Yeah, I never fucking swear on my show, so it's absolutely fine. Joel: If you like your podcasts with some crumpets and tea, listen to Matt's show. No, I think, my answer is, Chad and I are at a point in our careers, we kind of work for ourselves, we don't have really any corporate interests, we can be blunt, both of our personalities are sort of no nonsense. I think a lot of the podcasts out there, someone's got an association, they've got to think about, someone's got an employer, they have to think about... There's always something that sort of gets in the way of honest, open, sort of brutal honesty and talk and I think we're able to cut through that just because of our situations. Chad: And it's easy to be, HR's most dangerous podcast because nothing in HR is fucking dangerous in the first place. So just ratcheting it up, just a couple of levels and putting some snark in it, it makes us dangerous. So it's pretty simple to be dangerous in HR. Matt: Well, that's a really good point. Absolutely. Do you get any complaints? Joel: Millennials hate us, sometimes. Chad: Millennials love us. Shut the fuck up. The advice to anybody who is complaining is: don't fucking listen. I mean, that's what it comes down to, it's your choice to either plug in and listen to us or not. This isn't Russia. We're not doing state sponsored fucking podcasts or anything like that. Just don't listen. Joel: And we're okay with criticism, just bring facts, bring what you got. The social media grenades that, they don't want to come on the show or they don't want to back up, whatever it is. Like I'll give you an example. We had somebody make the claim that we only have advertisers because they feel threatened that we're gonna like F bomb them to hell if they don't give us money for the show. And that's just simply ridiculous. We don't threaten anybody to give us money for sponsoring the show. All of our sponsors love us. So to make a claim like that is either you better come on the show and defend your position or on social media, you better come with some facts that backs up that statement because that's a big claim to make if you don't have any facts to back it up. Chad: And we're going to come straight at you on the podcast, to tell you how it is and ask for you to come on the show to voice your opinion so we can land baste your ass there. Matt: And I think that's the great thing about podcasting is, there's no keyboard warriors here, everyone is having to back up their opinion and talk about it, justify it and not hide behind a keyboard. Matt: Another question for you. So, my podcast is about the future of recruiting. What's the future of recruiting? Chad: So, from our standpoint... Joel: Unemployment lines... for recruiters... Chad: From our standpoint, we talk a lot about technology and that's what we feel the future of recruiting is. It's not total robots, technology, so on and so forth. But, especially now as we talk about process and problems, there are many pieces of technology that could get rid of the mundane bullshit, problematic tasks that we face today. And I feel like the switch of just having people powered recruiting, will have more of a automatic, automated, enabled people recruiting, where candidates don't go into the black hole anymore. That's the problem when you have only people doing this shit, when you have automation support humans, then we can get into more of a humanistic type of recruiting culture. But we haven't been there for years. So I think from our standpoint, we talk about recruiting so much on the technology side because that's where we see the future of it going. Chad: It's like Tengai, right? And Jacob, on Facebook, was giving us so much shit because this Tengai robot is an interviewing robot and it's not human and Blah Blah Blah, and it's like, "Dude, look, you've got to realize these guys are pushing the next frontier of what we're doing." Candidates are already having a shitty experience as it is right now. They're having biased experience right now. Whatever we can do to try to push that boundary, to see if we can do better. That's not the problem, that's the fucking answer. It might not work, but guess what? Unless we try, we'll never know. And those are the things that we like to push on our show. Joel: I think that point of, everyone's sort of confused with the noise out there, really underscores what the future recruiter needs to look like. They have to have a really good, broad or basic understanding of the technology that's going on and being developed and what's coming down the pike because if they don't keep up, they're going to be eliminated. The old days of like, "Hey, I'm a tool in the tool chest and I can live like that." Are, I think, going away and you have to have a very broad toolkit to know everything that's going on and know what a Chatbot is, know what AI is, know what these vendors are, and know what messaging is and the different platforms for that and how to use it and what's advertising. And now there's podcasts, there's going to be video down the pike and how do we best use that stuff. And there's Snapchat and there's Instagram, and there's TickTok and you have to be really smart and keep up with this shit ,if you're going to be successful. The ones that don't are going to be left behind. I think that the line between what's marketing and recruiting is really blurring more and more each day. And for the recruiters that aren't marketers, or think of themselves in that way, are going to be left behind. Chad: So back to your question, what do you feel the future of recruitment is? And I mean you being, more across the pond on the UK side of the house, it's much different than over here in the US, how do you feel that differs from our vantage point? Matt: I would say it's very similar actually. I think that from a big picture perspective, we are pretty much aligned. There are lots of differences between recruiting in North America, recruiting in Europe or recruiting else around the world. But I think the overall direction is very much the same. I kind of already agree with what you just said and I think the key to this is actually critical thinking because I think, understanding what's going on, being able to spot what's a useful tool from what's just a load of hype. But at the same time I think it's having this real sense of being open minded. Matt: And I think Tengai is a really interesting example of that, because, like you, I had Tengai on the podcast because we were all sort of in Portugal and recording. And I kind of got similar feedback and I think when you actually sort of sit down and analyze that, the robot is only a small part of that story. There's a whole sort of bigger story about trying to solve the problem of bias. Also, that is a very, very early stage product, there's no uses data. There's nothing but conjecture and I think until something gets out onto the field and people actually come back and say, "I hate this." I think it's just too early. Joel: Were you surprised at the divisiveness of the opinion and to quote your great statesman William Shakespeare, "Doth thou protest too much?" I think it's very telling about a product when so many recruiters hate it. Matt: Yeah. I mean, I don't even think I was surprised because I've seen that around, almost every time there's some kind of leap forward in recruiting, whether it was the internet to start with or with social media or than robots or whatever it is, there's always this kind of massive emotional reaction. I think where it just gets confusing, is that there also a number of products that have come out that have proved to be useless or before their time or not delivering the hype they promised and it just all gets kind of mixed up together. Matt: But, I think that if you take a step back and look at this and say, you know what, as it stands at the moment, no one will argue with you, when you say, you know what? Talent acquisition is not as efficient as it could be, it has these elements of bias, the candidates are being given a really bad experience, and there seems to be no sort of quick fix or easy way of doing that, whatever people say. Then you'd know that the industry is going to change and things are going to come along and move that forward and I just think it's important to kind of have an open mind and look at things and say, "Well, this could be it or it might not be, but let's at least see what happens." Matt: And on Chatbots, there was a huge kind of backlash, certainly in the UK, when Chatbots first appeared. You know, Candidates wouldn't like them and all this sort of stuff. And actually, a lot of the research that I've seen and a couple of the companies that I've spoken you are using them, have come back and said, "Oh actually, they've been successful and the candidates did like them." So, that's kind of wrong to a certain extent. But at the same time, and this is where I think is all about critical thinking, that doesn't mean every candidate is going to like every iteration of every Chatbot. There will be companies who use them appallingly and candidates will hate them. So it comes back to that, work out what your problems are and the way to solve them and use technology to help you, don't use technologies just for the sake of it or don't use it just so you can say, "Hey, that technology was rubbish and I was right all along." Joel: Remember when QR codes we're going to rule the world? Matt: Ah, yeah, absolutely. There was a brilliant advert. A recruitment company in London put a QR code on a poster on the London Underground. And the whole point was you scan this QR code to go onto a website and this is like years before there was any internet access or any kind of coverage on the London Underground. And it was just astonishing example of using technology because someone told us it was cool without actually thinking about any of the user experience or anything that could sort of happen around that. Chad: We have to think very keenly about adoption and how these individuals are going to adopt. I mean scalability, all that other fun stuff. Just like podcasts. When Joel and I did our first podcast, like in 2008 or something like that, the only way you could listen is on your PC, on your desk. But anyway, the adoption rate was going to be very low and it was just, we were just having a fun time. It wasn't till like 10 years later, like in 2017, where yes, Smartphones changed at all and it was all about the ability to adopt. Those are the things that we need to look at from a technology standpoint. And that being said, looking at the future of recruiting, what is your favorite type of technology right now that you think will take us into that, that next segment of the future of recruiting? Matt: Oh, I was going to ask you that question. Right, well it's a good question because I thought of the same question. Matt: My favorite type of technology? I think I like technology that actually solves a problem. So I suppose there's two answers to this. I think some of the kind of new breed ATS solutions, that are coming onto the market that are actually built with talent acquisition in mind, not built to just kind of automate a recruitment process, but built with candidates and built with a recruiters in mind. I think there's some great stuff there. But sometimes I like the really sort of simple things that make a difference. Matt: I've sort of said this a few times, but my favorite thing that I've actually seen this year is a piece of software called VideoMyJob. And obviously, to disclaimer to say that other providers of the same software are available. And what I like about it is, we all talk about video being so important when it comes to recruitment, marketing and content, and that's all that software does, is it just makes it really easy for you to film a video. It puts subtitles up, it tells you where to put your head in the frame and it does a few simple things to make what you're doing really good and really effective. So, it's not kind of a massive groundbreaking thing, it's just something that really helps people, to get good at doing video and to actually put content out there that looks as good as it can be. So I think it's simple technology like that, that's my sort of current favorite stuff in a world of complexity. Joel: You know what I think, to piggyback on VideoMyJob, I think part of the reason, and this also goes back to the Podcasting, is that those things are effective partly because they leverage a platform of distribution that is now, I guess, evolved enough to where those things work. Like VideoMyJob would not have worked 10 years ago as well as it does today, because you didn't have YouTube, you didn't have social media, you didn't have the channels to sort of easily distribute it. Just like Podcasting [crosstalk 00:26:16] 10 years ago or yeah, mobile. So, a lot of those little technologies are great because they leveraged platforms that exist today, that didn't exist tomorrow. So what exactly is going to exist tomorrow platform wise, that will sort of give birth to these new companies? I don't know. Joel: Now to your question of the future of recruiting, the automation piece seems really disparate right now. You have things living alone or in you know, silos. And I think the holy grail is to be able to pull all of these things together. Where you basically, you post a job and it, it programmatically distributes everywhere. Everyone comes in through a prescreening process with a Chatbot that's automated. The scheduling goes through an automation process that goes right into Google calendar or your Microsoft programs, or 365 and then the actual interviewing is when the actual process starts. So you actually, I think recruiting will be not talking to someone until they actually come through the door because they've been scheduled on your calendar automatically and they've been pre-screened and sourced and everything. And then that sort of a face to face relationship is where recruiting and people who are good at that in recruiting, that will really excel. Joel: So I think right now all those systems are sort of separate. Someone will bring it together and Chad and I sort of disagree on this sort of one platform to rule them all. But it's pretty evident to me that people like Google or companies like Google, Linkedin, Slash Microsoft, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and others are trying to solve that sort of one process problem and we'll see if they can figure it out. Number two, if that really is the holy grail or not, but I do believe that's probably the future of where recruitment is going. Chad: My favorite right now though are the companies, the startups who are focused on being able to help hiring companies, staffing companies, leverage that resume database that they've spent millions of dollars building, in their applicant tracking system or their system of record, that they're just not using. It's ridiculous that every single day companies, recruiters are posting jobs out and they're buying candidates that they already have in their database, so big shout out to a Candidate ID and Opening.io, they were on the death match stage in Portugal. They both do this in different ways. Candidate ID focuses on that nurturing piece and being able to nurture the individuals that you've already purchased, that are in your applicant tracking system. And then Opening.io's more on the matching scheme piece. So obviously you have a job, it's open, the recs open, it goes into your system and it pulls those candidates forward before you go to pay more money. Chad: And that's the thing is that from a talent acquisition standpoint, we need to do a much better job on positively impacting business, and that means bottom line and using our dollars much better. This is more of a practical way to actually dive in and be more process-oriented and focused on what we've already bought. So those are my favorite right now. All the video stuff and that's all cool, but I think being able to really leverage your data that you've already bought is the key. Matt: Absolutely. Joel: That's challenging because you have, Chad mentioned two companies that are successfully doing that, but we also have companies that did somewhat of the same thing and have clearly failed or are failing. So you have like Restless Bandit that just basically sold for pennies on the dollar, allegedly, you have Crowded, which sort of imploded internally and didn't get it done. All those four companies are doing, trying to solve the same problem but half of them are succeeding and the other half are going by the wayside. Which brings you to that whole confusion thing of like, "I know we need to be doing this, but exactly who should be doing it?" And I think that's why you have a lot of people relying on friends and colleagues for word of mouth and recommendations on who they use. Chad: So if companies have startups coming in, they should already know how they want to use that technology. They should know the process, they should know what their objectives are for using said technology. That's the biggest issue that we have right now. Companies are looking to startups. Many of these startups have never been in our fucking industry before and these individuals are not integrating, these startups are not integrating, they're not focused on the points of execution of how to make it work because they don't understand how it should work. Joel: And don't forget about pivots, right? Like, "The product I bought last month is the same company but they've pivoted and now there are a different product. So like my head is totally spinning around that." Chad: So are you seeing that in the UK as much with more focus into the objectives they've started out with? Or are they just pivot machines like we're seeing over here in the US? Matt: It's very similar. It's kind of very similar across Europe. Lots of startups looking to solve, sometimes just one problem which could be a niche problem, they might pick up a few clients, they don't get the traction they need, they then start to solve another problem and things just get very confusing basically. Matt: And I think one of the problems is that there's so much money coming into the sector, there are so many investors sort of looking at this and thinking well recruitment's broken and if we could back the people who are going to fix it, then we're gonna make a lot of money. So lots of money coming into the sector, lots of it is being spent on marketing and branding and advertising. Which kind of ups the amount of noise and kind of reduces the overall traction because there are lots of people competing to solve the same problem and it makes for quite confusing landscape. Matt: Things are changing and it's really important that people go back to that same thing, just understand what are the problems they need to solve and how best to solve them. Joel: For those listening on Matt's show. You can find out more about us at chadcheese.com and for anyone listening on our show, Matt, where can they find out more about you? Matt: You can go to rfpodcast.com or just search for Recruiting Future in any Podcasting app or on Spotify or wherever you access your podcasts. Chad: And you'll be able to see us both on stage at REC fast in London. Right? You're going to be on the R-100 stage in London. That's July 11th and we're going to be closing out the show. Joel: Can we come crash your presentation? Matt: Yeah, you can. I'm doing kind of a panel debate about automation and recruitment. And my session is before the bar's open. And your session is kind of right at the end of the day. So you know, the audience reaction might be slightly different. Well it should be an interesting event definitely. Chad: What we should do is, we should do that panel before the bar's open and then do the exact same panel on the main stage after and everybody has to be drunk when we're doing that. So I think that's a balance between the two. Matt: I think that's a great idea. I think that's a great idea. And knowing most of people on my panel, I think they'd be well up for that. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thanks Matt. 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. #MattAlder #Future #Recruitment #Technology #Tengai #Uncommon #Openingio #VideoMyJob #video #Crossover #chatbots

What do you get when you bring 65 years of industry experience under one podcast? Press play and find out, as the boys chat with Nexxt’s 25-year veteran Andy Katz. There will be beer on this Nexxt exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark, buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Today on the Chad and Cheese Podcast, we have Andy Katz. Joel: Lovely day. Chad: Andrew Katz now, we're sitting on the porch here at ... Joel: Indianapolis icon- Chad: The Veranda- Joel: ... Harry & Izzy's. Chad: Harry & Izzy's. Joel: On the north side. Chad: I have a bourbon on the rocks. What do you have, Andy? Andy: I have some Ketel One and seven. Chad: Ketel One and seven, is it ... Andy: It's noon somewhere. It's 5:00 in London. Chad: It's just about noon. It's almost noon here. Joel: A pint of zombie dust over here. Chad: Yeah, zombie ... I had my fill of zombie dust last night, man. That shit is awesome. Joel: You look a little zombie-esque. Chad: I love it. Joel: After a night of zombie dust. Andy: You cleaned out the bar of the zombie dust. Chad: Yeah, I love it, dude. So we have Andy Katz here- Joel: It's a good thing this isn't on video. Chad: And I've known Andy for a few years. How long have we known each other? Andy: Probably about 20. Chad: Yeah, probably about 20 years. Andy: Just a few. Joel: Did he have hair back then? Chad: No. Andy: No, Chad did not have hair, but he definitely looked younger. Joel: Oh, ouch. Chad: That hurt, wow. Joel: That does hurt. Andy: Sorry about that. Chad: So for all these new to the industry people, Andy, tell us a little bit about you. Andy: Sure. I've been in the human capital space for about 25 years. I started my career at Bernard Hodes group, also known as Symphony Talent- Joel: Were you selling newspaper ads? Andy: I was selling newspaper ads. Joel: Nice. Andy: I was that dinosaur that woke up on a Sunday when I lived in the city and went to a ... There was a newspaper store that got papers from all over the country. I'd go there every Sunday, buy about 40 newspapers, and make sure they didn't fuck up my ad lines and made sure my display ads weren't upside down. Joel: So for the kids out there, what would have been the most you would have made on a display ad in a newspaper back then? Andy: Oof, you talk about full-time- Joel: That was big money, right? Andy: ... full-page ads in the New York Times, they were 100 grand a pop. Chad: Holy shit. Andy: And they were ordering them for three weeks in a row because they got a 50% discount on the third week. So I mean, those were the days where- Joel: Cash money, boy. Andy: ... the agencies were printing money. Chad: Dude. Andy: At newspaper, printing money. Chad: They were printing fucking money. Andy: Yeah. Boston Globe, I remember the days they had 150 full-page ads to start out their classified. Chad: So talk about how that whole trend, and you seeing it, how that came to be with the Internet, all these crazy job boards? Because I mean, that just turned everything on its fucking ear, right? Andy: It did, it did. And it didn't happen overnight. I could, not to keep promoting Hodes or Symphony, but we were one of the first with the job board too, Career Mosaic. That and Monster Board were the first two job boards out there, OCC. Chad: Yes, OCC. Joel: eSPAN, don't forget eSPAN. Chad: Nobody remembers eSPAN, Joel. Andy: No, Joel, sorry. Yeah, that's in the morgue. Joel: NAS remembers eSPAN. They're still around, dammit. Andy: So yeah, it wasn't a change overnight. Some newspapers made the change sooner than later, others- Joel: And most did both, right? I mean, very few would just say, "Let's just go online." Andy: Right. Joel: It was doing both. So probably for a while- Andy: Absolutely. Joel: You were making a lot more money, 'cause they were doing split ads- Andy: We were, there were ad-ons. It was go take out a full page ad and we'll put this job up on this website called Monster Board or Career Mosaic that no one ever heard of back in 1994, '95- Chad: Oh, fuck yeah. Andy: For an ad-on for 300 bucks onto your $100,000 ad, it made sense. Joel: Nice. Andy: It made sense. Chad: That was too easy. Andy: Yeah, it was an easy sell. And you know, between Monster and Career Builder at the beginning of time, they just took off and everything started moving over there. They both made good relationships with the newspapers and had more of an ecosystem behind them. So it was buy a newspaper ad, get an online posting for free or vice versa, and- Joel: When did you see the writing on the wall? When did you say like, "Okay, this newspaper thing probably won't last." Andy: Yeah. Chad: When were newspaper reps saying, "Oh, fuck"? Joel: When did you start seeing the gravy train drive away? Andy: I would say, I'm going to go with early, early 2000. I think we made it through Y2K- Joel: So the first recession, maybe? Andy: Yeah, 2002, 2003, probably right around there. Joel: Okay. Andy: I think after the world actually continued to move forward when it should have blown up 'cause of Y2K, I think everybody was pretty much status quo the '98 to 2001 and make sure it all lived, and then starting in 2002, that's when job boards really propelled us into the future. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So that being said, that was an exciting moment. And Joel always, we always talk about how that was exciting as hell. Andy: It was. Chad: We were there, we were watching- Joel: Superbowl ads. Chad: And it's like, "Holy shit, dude," blimps, Superbowl ads- Andy: I want to be a yes man. Chad: Yeah, I want to be a yes man, that's right. Chimps, all that other shit. Joel: I want to brown nose. Chad: But is it not more exciting now? I mean, there's so much shit that's going on- Andy: It is, it is. Chad: So much money pouring into this goddamn industry. Andy: Well, I think that's what people got scared of. They saw how do you take, and I'm being a little facetious with the 100,000 ads, they were there, but they weren't the norm. Chad: Right. Andy: But a $5,000 ad was extremely common, even if you were running a secretary ad. So ... And that's in major markets obviously where prices were high, so you know, we saw that, it was exciting, we were printing money, people didn't want to say, "How do I go from a $5,000 print ad to a $1,500 posting package?" And at the end of the day, if you look at it and you own the job board, you got 85% of the 1,500. If you were using a newspaper, you got 15% of that. Chad: Right. Andy: So if people really would have thought forward, they would have seen it all equals out, and the Internet is here to stay and it's going nowhere. So embrace it versus try to go around it. I mean, I think the same thing now is with programmatic. People think that's the next end all, be all, and it's extremely big piece of any puzzle, but, and we have to embrace it, it's not exactly the way job boards or agencies want to work, but it is one piece of the overall strategy. Andy: So I think everything keeps morphing. Chad: Why wouldn't agencies want that, though? Because I mean, from a complexity standpoint ... Andy: Right. Chad: The hiring companies are going to come to agencies when they don't understand shit. Joel: It seems like agencies are more valuable now than ever. Andy: the agencies, they're a wealth of information and extremely valuable, and I don't think it's agencies that are saying programmatic is the end all, be all also. It's the easy button right now. You could put all your jobs in one feed, distribute them to 10, 15, 20 places and let it be. But there's a lot more, and I'm not just speaking about at next, it's throughout the industry, you have text messaging, you have re-targeting, you have branding, you have all these other pieces of the puzzle that make up the whole hiring ecosystem, and to say that just one thing, I don't care if you say change my word from programmatic to a job posting or job posting to sending out text messages. One size doesn't fit all. You're not going to reach every audience with one medium. Joel: And I think from where we're coming from, companies know they have to do these things. They know they have to be in programmatic. They know they need a chat bot. Andy: Absolutely. Joel: They know they need AI. But they don't really know what that means. Chad: Yeah, or how. Joel: And agencies seem to fill the void of like, let us help you understand- Chad: They do. Joel: And guide you through that. Are you seeing that as well? Andy: Yeah, and they are valuable partners of ours. Without them, we wouldn't exist. So the agencies are ... They're our middleman between us and the customers or the client for lack of better words, and we're finding that even on the agency side, they're learning more and more every day 'cause again, it might be five, 10 years old, but in relation to the overall hiring ecosystem, it's relatively new. So we keep learning. I manage a huge part of Nexxt, I keep learning every day, I keep making us better, more efficient, offering better services to our job seekers and to our clients, and I think all the job boards out there are doing the same and all the agencies are embracing it and it's really about just having a whole arsenal of tools instead of just saying, "Here's one thing that works for everybody." Chad: Are you seeing a big movement from duration-based ads to performance ads, or is that just kind of like trickling right now? Andy: It's trickling. You still have some of the major players out there doing duration postings, and they're businesses. Sure, it's not where it was in 2007 or '8, but who's is, right? So they're still surviving, they're doing well off of them. I think it's slowly morphing from duration to performance. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're a client and you have $500, would you rather put it towards something that you don't know what the return you're going to get or would you rather say, "Okay, for $5,000, I'm pretty much guaranteed 100 apps"? Chad: So why isn't it moving faster that way though? I would think- Joel: Fear. Chad: ... from the standpoint from an agency- Joel: Don't like change. Chad: From an agency though, from an agency- Joel: True. Chad: An agency can say, "Look," and that's why you have the agency there, is to be able to usher you into these new lands, even though we're still 10 years behind the marketing industry. Why aren't we seeing more of that? Because you would think that that push would happen on the agency side. Andy: Well, I don't think you're seeing any new players come into this space making a duration posting, right? Chad: Right, okay. Andy: So everybody new is performance. You have a few legacies that are doing duration, and it works for them, and- Chad: So it's withering is what you're saying. Andy: It might be, and they're also morphing their businesses and other services to either compensate or move- Joel: Acquisitions. Andy: ... to performance, but it's one of those things I said earlier where not one size fits all, and duration postings still have a place. Sure, they're not where they were, again, 10 years ago, but they're still there now. Chad: Well, and there's still newspaper ads, right? Andy: And there's still newspaper ads. Chad: So, you know, to say that duration posting- Joel: What's a newspaper again? Andy: That's that black-and-white thing you open up on Sundays. Chad: Yeah, exactly, that- Joel: What's your read on the consolidation that we're seeing in the agency business? So you have Shaker buying up Arland Group, you have Monster buying KRT, right? Andy: CKR. Joel: Or CKR, sorry. Andy: Close. Joel: Is that a healthy thing? What's your take on what's going on there? Andy: Yeah, everybody loves competition. Competition validates you and you need different players for different ... Not everybody can handle a behemoth of a fortune 10 company, right? The smaller agencies might not be equipped, so they're going to handle maybe an SMB market. I'll say the same thing about job boards, I'll say the same thing about any of the CRM providers out there, talent community providers. There's a market for everybody. Now when you over saturate that market with too many players, that's when you spread yourselves too thin and nobody makes money except for the top three. Andy: Where if you consolidate on making a number up from 20 down to 12, that's healthy. And consolidation is the crux of this entire country and economy forever, people always acquire and build and grow from there, same thing will happen with the smaller players. Chad: So what about the UX side of the house? So candidate experience has always been a bitch. It's always sucked. But there's a lot of money that could prospectively be there to ensure that you're obviously getting the right talent, they're not ejecting before getting into that 20 minute application process into your ATS. So do you see a movement door down that path, or where does it go from a money standpoint? Where is the money moving? Andy: I think you're right, the UX still sucks, but I'm going to keep going back to not the number of years, but in relative, it's still a newish technology and way of recruiting. When someone figures out truly how to make a mobile apply mobile, that's going to be one of the winners of this whole endgame, and they don't have to do it themselves. They can license out that technology to 20 other players. The biggest- Chad: Didn't Indeed buy a mobile apply company? Andy: I think they might have. Chad: And they still haven't figured this shit out? Andy: Because the difference is, you might be able to get it in on the front end, but getting it in through the back end of the ATS when you have 50 different ATSs that gather information differently and APIs are different, it's impossible to bring it all down to one common denominator to make you be able to apply to all of them. So you might be able to solve for the top three or four at one time, but the long tail's huge still now too. Chad: Well, that's customized work though and that's money to be able to implement for like, somebody who has a Taleo and to be able to get it right. And I understand there's a shit ton of maintenance that has to happen on those APIs and so on and so forth- Andy: Oh, yeah. Chad: But still. Andy: Every client's ATS is sort of configured differently, right? Chad: Yeah. Andy: If every Taleo client had the exact same Taleo set-up, you can build an API, you can build a functionality, you can get everything through a mobile. That's not the case. Chad: No. Andy: Once you have one client do any customization to it, you're kind of fucked. So I think that's what people need to solve for and I mean, there's a lot of smart ... Much smarter people out there than me, and they haven't figured it out yet, so. Joel: So Nexxt offers a lot of services and solutions being in the industry for a long time, so you've seen things come and go. Five years from now of the new stuff, what are we still talking about? What are the big success stories in the future? Andy: Sure, I think it is going to come down to performance marketing. Everything is going to be performance. People want to pay for what the value they're getting. You know, text messaging, again, that's going to keep growing. Chad: I want to talk more about that. Andy: Okay. Chad: So let's put a pin in that, but keep going. Andy: Yeah, so I will say the text messaging's huge. I think retargeting's huge. The bounce rates on client's websites from job seekers is huge. Chad: Oh yeah. Andy: And we don't know every single step of the way why. There are actually companies out there right now that are working on that to show you where the gaps are and why people are bouncing where they are and how to recapture them, but retargeting's huge. If you can drop a cookie on your user and you can know where in the process they dropped off, you can then retarget them at the right time with the right messaging. Chad: But a lot of those cookies and the targeting and all that other fun stuff with GDPR and all these new regulations, new regulation was just put out yesterday- Joel: Chrome. Chad: About ... Andy: What? Joel: Chrome security on Google, they'll tell you how you're being followed, 'cause it's following you. Chad: Yeah, all the stuff, new legislation just pushed in Illinois yesterday. Do we feel like we're going to be able to collect enough data to continue to do those things? 'Cause right now, it's still the Wild West. Andy: Well, I think you have two ... Well, that was going to be my support to you, where GDPR is ... It's standardized across the European nations, right? Where in the U.S. we're not standardized, I mean, California has one set of rules, Indiana has one set of rules- Chad: But don't you have to like, develop a program for like the hardest set of rules? Andy: That's the way it should be, right. And then you have to have people opt in, double opt in, and then if you do that and you're in compliance, then you can drop your cookies. Every time you go onto a website, it's going to say, "We collect cookies. Are you okay with this?" If you accept it, then you know, and we can re-target it. So you know, you've got to go back- Joel: Will employers be comfortable with that message when people go to their site? That'll be an interesting dilemma, right? Andy: Well, let me ask you, have you ever left a site because it said it was collecting your cookies, or do you just go and clear your cookies out afterwards if you didn't like it? Joel: No, but I'm not an HR person who doesn't want phone calls or messages from job seekers saying, "Why are you following me?" Or "How are you following me?" Andy: Right, well- Joel: That may not be the most comfortable conversation. Andy: There's a stalking way of following somebody and then there's the way of re-targeting subtly. Joel: But if I'm an HR person, do I want to explain that? I don't know. Andy: I don't know. You know, you're talking about five years from now, right? Today, I'm agreeing with you. Five years from now- Joel: Okay, keep going. Andy: Again, the landscape changes. Right? So how do you reach the passive job seeker or the active one that maybe have interest but just didn't want to go through your 20 page application? But you have enough data on them from whatever pages you did collect, and say, "Damn, this person's a great candidate. How do I go back after them?" Chad: So okay, I'm going to pivot back to texting, because you guys have how many- Joel: You forgot virtual reality, by the way. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Andy: Augmented reality, [crosstalk 00:15:47] Joel: Virtual reality. Chad: He's still hanging on to Second Life like you wouldn't believe. Joel: I'll- Chad: So he's ... Joel: I will be redeemed one day, trust me. Andy: I heard MySpace is coming back, too. Chad: And friends, sir, if you ever go to Second Life and you see a fairy unicorn, it's Joel. Joel: Shh, don't give away my identity. Chad: So back to texting. Joel: I'm the only one there. Chad: Back to the texting side of the house. You guys have how many to date? You have like a database of like- Andy: Almost 8 million. Chad: 8 million? Okay. Andy: 8 million opted in text messaging job seekers. Chad: So text messaging is to me- Joel: They were brilliant early on. Chad: Fucking crazy. Joel: By the way. Very early on, they had an opt in for resume postings to get text messages. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And that's been a very profitable business for you 10 years later. Chad: Well, when you see the returns on text- Andy: Right. Chad: ... responses, and that hasn't changed- Andy: No, it's actually getting better. Chad: Yeah, why- Joel: Damn. Chad: Why isn't every company doing texting? We nail this all the time. Andy: Right. Chad: It's like, if you're not texting when you're recruiting, you're fucking dumb. I just don't get it. Andy: So I got to go back to slow to adopt, right? Five years from now, everybody's going to have some type of text messaging. Chad: But everybody needs top talent now. Andy: Everybody needs it now and you know, not everybody's going to survive. For whatever reason, and that might be one of the reasons- Chad: Well, that even means you, HR director or TA director. You might not survive because you can't get the talent fast enough because you're not using texting or some of these other programmatic tools or what have you. Andy: They are, and I think anybody would be remiss to say, "Let's not try everything and see what we get from it," because there's enough providers out there to say what works and what doesn't work. My best analogy when I'm talking to clients is, "If you had a million dollars to invest in a stock portfolio, are you going to put it all in one company?" Chad: No. Andy: And granted, yeah, in foresight I could have put it all on Amazon, Apple, Google, any of the fang stocks, right? Chad: Yeah. Andy: But my crystal ball's broken today. So my answer is, you're going to take your million dollar recruiting budget and spread it across 10 partners and move money around based on who performs best. And quite frankly, if Nexxt wasn't one of the ones that were performing for some crazy reason, 'cause we always perform ... That was a little plug. Joel: Obvi. Andy: You know, then they should move money out of our stock. Chad: Well, and that's where we were talking earlier about the agencies. They're like the consultants to be able to- Andy: They're your financial advisor. Chad: To help you make the right decision for those 10. Not for one- Andy: Right. Chad: But for the 10. Andy: And not for 40. Chad: Yes, exactly. Andy: Because you also don't want to be spread too thin. You have to have the right number of sources for your budget and for your recruiting needs and to make, again, I mean, I truly say this when ultimately we all really are looking out for the job seeker and we want them to have the best user experience, but we want to make money doing it. Joel: Aw. Andy: We do, we do. I know. Chad: He's so sweet. Andy: That was sweet. Chad: I'm going to give him a hug, give me a second. Joel: He's a tough guy, but he's really sensitive. Andy: Aw. Joel: Yeah, isn't he? Andy: Okay, I'd better order another drink. Joel: Are you sensing that companies are moving more toward a marketing competency? Are they moving too slowly? What's your sense on that? Andy: I think, especially the major companies and the top fortune 500, are moving ... I mean, most HR departments have an HR marketing department associated with it, right? Joel: Really? Andy: I think corporate marketing and HR marketing are becoming more and more prevalent working together, because they go hand in hand. Chad: Isn't that just splintered out though? Should marketing understand how they're touching all of these types of people, not a bad touch by the way, a good touch. Andy: Right. Chad: How they're ... Seriously- Andy: A touch- Chad: Yeah, there's a bad touch. There's such ... Joel: Chad knows. Chad: And that's what we're saying from like, employer branding and the HR marketing side of the house- Andy: Sure. Chad: It's like, they are a symptom of a fucked up brand or a fucked up marketing department, and that's not saying bad, anything bad about employment branding, because we need those people because all those brands, probably 99.9% of the brands, suck. Right? I guess my question is, how does this become an opportunity for us to be able to ensure that the candidate does have a great experience? Andy: Right. Well- Chad: Even with the fucked up marketing department? Andy: Well, and I think why marketing is such a huge component of this going forward, especially, not to sound trite from, you know, that we're so old, but in the digital age, everything touches each other, right? So you might be a job seeker, but you're most likely a consumer of that company's product of some sort, right? Chad: Yeah. Andy: So if you have a- Joel: Because everyone gets that. Andy: Right. Joel: Not. Andy: Exactly. Chad: They don't. They fucking don't. Andy: I sense the sarcasm there, Cheese. Joel: Yeah, sarcasm. Tongue in cheek. Andy: So they don't get that, and I think if you have a bad user experience and you're a retail or an eCommerce company and you have a job seeker that's coming to you and you have a horrible experience for them, they're not going to want to buy your product. They're not going to want to walk in your story. And I think marketing- Chad: The Virgin media business case has been out there for years. Andy: There you go. Chad: They lost $6 million because they treated candidates like shit, and then they had an opportunity to prospectively on the Delta go like 13, but I mean it's like, dude, this has been out there, and I just- Andy: And it's common sense. That's the crazy thing. Chad: Oh fuck, yeah. Andy: I don't even need your case studies or your data to support what I'm saying. Chad: I know, right? It's like, oh, well there's a case study now, it's like but that made sense before. Andy: Right. Joel: Are you seeing more marketing departments embrace recruiting or are you seeing more HR recruiting companies saying, "We need to embrace marketing"? Andy: I think I'm seeing more ... So marketing always had the cloud. HR was always the ugly redheaded step child, right? Joel: [crosstalk 00:21:27] Andy: Because they were a cost center. Chad: It's the money, yeah. Andy: When marketing is ... It's a cost center, but it's also the first thing that any of your consumers see whatever you put out there, right? Chad: And they drive leads for sales, which drives revenue, which the CEO likes. Andy: Exactly. Chad: That's the big fucking key. Andy: But I think, I mean- Joel: So more marketing is coming over to recruiting and how do we ... Andy: They're embracing them, 'cause I think HR would have always embraced marketing to some extent, because sure, I want to tap into your dollars. I want to co-mingle with you and do some branding on both the consumer and recruitment side at the same time. Chad: Co-mingle kind of seems like a bad touch though. Joel: I like that, though. Andy: But bad touch isn't always bad. Chad: Bad touch isn't always bad. That's what the name of this podcast is going to be. Click bait. Chad: So back to texting, give us more about what you're seeing on that side of the house, just because, I mean, I am- Joel: Yeah, how can it get better? Chad: Yeah. Joel: It was already pretty perfect to begin with. Andy: Yeah, how do you get better at 160 characters? It is what it is, right? Joel: Yeah. Andy: So, and that's- Joel: 95% open rates, 90% red rates. Andy: Exactly. But it's about also hitting the right audience, okay? I don't know that I want to be text messaging doctors, okay? But I might want to be text messaging nurses because they're on their shifts and they're on their phone and they're going to open up, you might want to ... Text messaging for retail workers or E-commerce warehouses. That's huge, because these people aren't going home and spending time on their computer. They're not going to, going home searching on Google for jobs. They want them in your face. How do you hit them? Andy: So I say this all the time, again, shameless plug for Nexxt, is the way we present ourselves is we have all the tools for recruiters to hit job seekers where they need to, and we have all the tools for job seekers hit them where they want to be reached. So if you want to be reached in text, you want to be reached in email, you want to be reached in the re-targeting, we will hit them everywhere versus a lot of job boards, and I like to think we're more of a recruitment media company, but job boards usually have one or two tricks up their sleeve, we have eight that we could fit into. Joel: Where do you put chat bots in the texting, messaging realm? Andy: Yeah, I mean, they're big. They're big, but that's not really to me a recruitment strategy, that's a supporting technology for whatever you have, right? So I don't think that's part of the overall I'm going to go text, I'm going to go email, I'm going to go do an employer branded email. This goes for each one of them. Chad: It's a user experience more. Andy: Right. So it's more like video or I'll put a chat bot in there where it's a supporting role to whatever your strategy is, it's not a strategy. But I think they're becoming key, especially ... It's like text messaging. If you're on a chat bot and someone asks you a question, you got your first 50 canned responses. But text messaging and chat bots are only as good as the user on the other side that's going to be able to customize that answer to that person if they ask an out-of-the-box question. Chad: So what about video? We've heard about video for 15 years- Joel: It killed the Radio Star, is what I heard. Andy: It did, I heard that, too. Chad: [crosstalk 00:24:33] I love the Buggles. So- Joel: Here's hoping it doesn't kill the podcasting star. Chad: Just so we know, this is all going to get cut out. So anyway, back to video, what happens with video? Everybody's so excited about it, but the adoption rate is incredibly low. We see Monster create Monster Studios through Video My Job. Joel: Instagram for Jobs. Chad: I still think that's going to be very low adopting just because there's steps that need to be taken. It's easier than it's ever been, don't get me wrong ... Andy: Right, but there's also a lot of privacy concerns. Like if I opened up a video interview of you, just as ugly as you are, I couldn't hire you. So is that discrimination? Joel: That's what I'm talking about. Andy: Where do you draw the line? Chad: I am sexy, goddammit. Andy: You are, you are. Joel: So it's probably more viable as an employer to present themselves in a video format- Andy: Exactly. Joel: ... than it is a job seeker to present themselves. Andy: I do believe you're talking right now- Joel: Of a higher view solution. Andy: Of a higher, right. Now, they've been talking ... I mean, there's obviously top video companies out there for years in our space, and they do well, and I believe an employer presenting themselves in the best light in a video is the best way to do it, 'cause let's face it, people don't want to read. They don't want to read shit anymore, right? If I can watch a 30 second clip or read an article for five minutes, I'm watching the 30 second clip. Chad: Okay, so let's jump to Shark here and go directly to Tengai. Joel: Easy, Fonzie. Chad: Have you seen the Tengai robot interview? Joel: Have you had nightmares, is a better question. Chad: What do you think about that? Because it was interesting, we thought right out of the gate, "Oh my god, this is fucking creepy." And then we met Tengai in Portugal, and I'm like, "That's pretty fucking cool." I want to take selfies with this goddamn thing. I want to tell my buddies about this. Andy: But are you doing it as a novelty or are you doing it as it really is a viable business model? Chad: I don't know that it would matter at this point. Joel: I believe governments will be the first to embrace this thing, because if they can talk about a totally unbiased recruiting process, to me that's where this will, where Tengai will take off. Andy: Yeah. Joel: So what do you think? Andy: Yeah, I don't know enough about it to say. It's relatively new. Joel: Yeah, oh no, super new. Andy: I mean, I saw it like a couple weeks ago. Chad: Super new. Joel: Super new. Whatever super in Sweden is, that's what it is. It's Abba new. Andy: I would say ... Chad: It's Abba. Andy: In a relative term, I'm going to use it lightly, I've been successful because I've always embraced new things until they've proven me otherwise versus not embracing them until everybody else adopted to them. So I find it interesting. I think that there's a place for it. I don't know what the adoption rate will be, but I would absolutely be supportive of it. I'm supportive of anything new that's going to connect people quicker. Joel: Good for you. Another "aw" [crosstalk 00:27:15] Chad: This is where a big applause line comes in. Andy: Boy, I sound like a sappy ass right now, but either way, I say what I got to say. Joel: Such a softie. Chad: Okay, so you're not in the agency business now, but you still work with agencies. Andy: Sure. Chad: Many agencies are becoming, which you well know, technology providers. What are your thoughts about that? Because technology providers versus unbiased [crosstalk 00:27:43] Joel: It feels like they're less so than they were 10 years ago. Andy: Break down technology. Are you saying reseller or are you saying builder? Chad: Builder. Andy: That's a great question. And here's where my answer is and I've not necessarily been asked this question in this same context, but if you can't be the best at something and you're not going to put all the resources behind it to compete with the people that are taking in 50, $100 million of equity to compete with it, stay the hell out of it and go partner with them, okay? I don't believe I truly have that mentality of buy versus build, and I buy what I can't- Chad: Or partner versus build, right? Andy: Well, yeah, that's buy to me, but yeah sure. Chad: Oh, okay, gotcha. Andy: Partner, buy, or resell, whatever you want to call it. If you can't be in the Top Echelon of what you want you're going to do, stay the fuck out of it, because someone's going to eat you alive and you are just burning resources in cycles on a team that could be doing something that's more core to your business. So you know, it's one of those things where everybody's going to make their own bed and we're going to see where they lie, but I think there's some great technology providers out there that I would partner with in a second. Chad: I love that. Don't burn resources in cycles, because that is happening all over the fucking place right now, and not just- Andy: Absolutely. Chad: ... startups everywhere are burning like you wouldn't believe. Burn rates are crazy. Joel: We talk a lot about the arms race particularly between Microsoft and LinkedIn versus Google. Where are you putting your bets on those two Goliaths? Andy: Well, if you look at share numbers, and I don't have them in front of me, I think Google has like, 60-something percent of the search results and Bing is behind that with like 20 or something. I might be off whatever my numbers is, but it's like a three to one- Chad: Yeah, I think Google's higher, yeah. Andy: It's higher than 60-something percent? Okay. I'm a little outdated. But anyway, I think there's a place for everybody, right? I don't think that it's winner takes all. Chad: No, I'm good. Andy: So I think LinkedIn and Microsoft, I mean, Bing's a great search engine, LinkedIn has a great product. Google's a great search engine, Google for Jobs is a great product, right? Does that mean they're the only two to survive? More importantly, does that mean those two are the only ones that survive and kill out every job board underneath them? Absolutely not. I think there's going to be consolidation in that market in the next three to five years that we probably haven't seen in the last 30 years for the better. But I don't say is it Google or is it Microsoft, I say it's both. Joel: Is there a giant in waiting that maybe you see that others don't? Andy: Ooh. Joel: I like to talk about Slack, for example. Chad: Amazon. Only if Slack is bought by Amazon. Joel: Which I've been predicting for years and is bound to happen eventually. Andy: Did you predict Tableau was going to be bought by Salesforce? Joel: I did not, I did not. Chad: And Google acquires Looker? Andy: Did you know Amazon was going to acquire Whole Foods? All right, then getting off topic. Joel: No, but the food industry ... Although food is my business, the food industry is not so much. Chad: Eating it is your business is what you're saying. Joel: Eating, yes, I'm very good at that. Chad: Eating portions. Andy: Okay, do I see any sleepers? No, I can see where you're going with Slack, I think data is key, Chad, you brought up Amazon. I don't put it past Amazon to own everything, and that's not a good or bad thing. It is what it is. But considering they're probably if not the largest employer or hirer right now, it would make sense for them to do something in this space. It would streamline the process for them, but I'm not on that side of the world. I'm ... Jeff Bezos I think is a little smarter and probably has a little bit more money than me. He'll figure it out before I do. Chad: A tad. Andy: Just a tad. Chad: A tad. Joel: What's on Nexxt's road map that you might be giving us a sneak peek into? Andy: One of the things I want to do, which again, it's a sneak peek and I'm not going to go into too many details, I really want to partner with talent communities and drive leads into talent communities, because I believe they have great technology but like any other database, unless it's filled with something useful such as job seekers, they're kind of only as good as they are. So I think there's ... I think talent communities' CRMs in general are going to be, if they not already have replaced them, the first iteration of an ATS, ATSs are the endgame. Talent community's in the middle ground, and getting people in there. Chad: They're the cosmetic layer, right? The user experience and hopefully- Andy: One's a compliance thing, one's a sourcing. Chad: Yeah, exactly. Andy: Right? Maybe that's a better way of saying it. Joel: Dude, all this talk about Whole Foods and food is making me really hungry. Andy: So you want to order food, right? Chad: I need a shrimp cocktail. Joel: I agree. Andy: Wow. Joel: I agree. Andy, dude, thanks for this. This was fun. Andy: Thanks for having me, thanks for not beating me up. Joel: For people who want to know more about Nexxt or you, where would you send them? Andy: I would send them to either Nexxt.com or feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and I will always respond. Joel: And that's Nexxt with two Xs. Chad: Not the triple X. Andy: No, definitely don't go triple X. You're going to get a surprise on your computer. Joel: No, that's the one on my private browser at home. Andy: Yes. Joel: We out. Chad: We out, later. 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. #Nexxt #ATS #Google #Amazon #jobs #partnership #CRM #Engagement

Another week of breaking news highlights this week's show. - C-suite ejections at CareerBuilder, - Job.com readies for an IPO and a Monster partnership, - Government muddies AI interviewing - Rapid Fire w/ -- Google for jobs France, Love Mondays to Glass Door, Nymeria launches Reach & RecTxt launches and last but never least - Whining male managers Enjoy and show Sovren, JobAdx and Canvas lots of love, because they make hearts skip beats. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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 load of snarks. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Oh yeah, suckers. Joel: I'm ready to floss like a boss. Welcome to the Breaking News edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast: HR's Most Dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm just happy that the Saint Louis Blues and Toronto Raptors fucking won. Joel: My Canadian wife is very happy with the latter of those. On this week's show, more bleeding at CareerBuilder. Good lord. Job.com dropped some mad news on us, and government could derail this whole AI recruiting thing. If you can't listen with the one you love, just love the one you're with, baby. We'll be right back after a word from Sovren. Chad: That's true. 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. Sovren: 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 S-O-V-R-E-N dot come. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren: Sovren. Software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: Nah. Chad: So, let's make this clear, okay? I am not a St Louis blues fan, but what I am a fan of is seeing an organization that has never won a championship beat any fucking Boston organization, because those guys have so many championships as it is. Anybody from the Boston area that are still tearing up because they lost, fuck you guys. I mean, seriously. Look how many championships you guys won. Chad: And then we take a look at the Toronto Raptors. Again, this is an underdog type of season, which makes me feel ... And I know Joel's going to bring this up, that his Browns possibly have a chance. And I'm going to say- Joel: Why would you jinx some shit like that, dude? Don't bring that up. Chad: Dude, there is no jinxing the Browns. Pretty much the Browns equal jinx. They're synonymous with jinx. Joel: I'm just hoping for a not embarrassing season this year. I mean, the pressure is such that they're bound to totally implode and end up 0 and 16 or something. I'm not expecting the best, but I'm also probably expecting the worst. Chad: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and let's hit this shoutout, because we've got a shit ton of these. Joel: Yeah, yeah. No tears for Boston, for sure. I'm so sick of Boston teams. All right, who I'm not sick of are the Rothbergs, Steven and Faith, two of our most loyal listeners. Apparently they listen to multiple shows on their deck as they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. In my opinion, the married couple that Chad and Cheeses together stays together. So feel the love, the Rothbergs set the example. I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy. Chad: I have to say the same about companies. The companies that Chad and Cheese together stay together. And one company, KRT, who listens to the podcast, Mona, Olivia, and fanboy Chris. Wait a minute. No, his name's Ryan. Yeah, Ryan. I always forget his name. They sent me a Talk Nerdy To Me starter kit, and you know the whole reason for this thing is that Ryan loves trolling Joel over at Shaker. Joel: Next up on shoutouts, Andy from Nexxt, who will be publishing that interview I think soon. We had some good lunch and drinks last week, and it was really fun to visit with him. Anyone from Jersey is always fun to hang out with for a little bit. Chad: Yeah. For small amounts of time, Andy understands this. Short amounts of time. But no, great interview, should pop out ... It'll come out soon, but when you see the interview with Andy Katz, definitely check it out. Katz been in the industry for 25 fucking years. He knows some shit. Joel: Yeah. We're talking 65 years total, between the three of us, of industry experience. It was good stuff. And the amount of money that he made on newspaper ads back in the day is really ridiculous. Chad: Oh, God yeah. Joel: For the youngsters out there, it's a great history lesson for the way things used to be. Shoutout to the gang in Belgium, E-recruiting Congress, House of HR put that on. I had a lovely time in Belgium, the medieval town of [Git 00:05:19]. Things move at a different speed over there in Europe, and it was nice to take a breath and have a beer, and breathe all the second hand smoke. Chad: And I bet you take a look at ... Even though they do have much more smoking over there, they probably ... There's less dying of heart disease. I'm going to have to check that out, just because they're chilled. There's no stress, little to no stress. And they're drinking all the time. Joel: It's just ride a bike around, smoke cigarettes, drink beer, sit by the river, look at the architecture. Life moves at a much different speed there in Belgium. Chad: Exactly. Who else you got? Joel: Is it too early to bring up Tim Sackett and the- Chad: No. Tim Sackett needs to get those elevator shoes ready, because his short ass is going to be on stage next week at SmashFly Transform in Boston. Joel: Do you think he's getting his bow ties dry cleaned this week? Chad: That's a good question, and I wonder if he ties them himself, or if he does the strap-on. Because he looks like a strap-on kind of guy. Joel: You know he's only a pair of suspenders and a rolled up pair of jeans away from Urkle town. So Tim, we're waiting for the day, man. We know it's coming. Chad: Oh, yeah. So we're going to be onstage ... Believe it or not, they're actually bringer us onstage with Delta Airlines. We're doing one of those no bullshit kind of employer brand marketing, and whatever the hell we want to talk about panels. But Holland McCue ... Or is it Dombeck? Holland, you need to figure out what your last name is. Joel: It's his whole first name. Chad: Holland's awesome. Anyway, she's the head of employer brand, marketing, and all the cool shit that happens at Delta Airlines. Fiserv's Julia Levy, global talent acquisition's going to be onstage, and JZ. He personally told me he just put himself on the panel because he wanted to piss Sackett off. Joel: Keep in mind for the newbies out there, this is not the rapper Jay-Z, this is the head of marketing at SmashFly JZ. Chad: Josh Zywien. Joel: Zywien. Zywien's World. Party time. Chad: Then I'll be in Jobg8 in Denver later this month, watching my beautiful wife Julie do her presentation, her thing, onstage. Can't wait to see that. And then ... Here it comes man. RecFest, bitches. RecFest. 3,000 attendees, they're already sold out, guys, sorry. There might be a wait list, so check it out, but anyway. 3000 attendees, five stages, and we are fucking headlining. This is going to be ridiculous. Joel: The stars and stripes are coming across the pond to break shit at RecFest. Get ready. Chad: So, do you have your red, white, and blue speedo? Joel: It was originally a thong, but I thought the audience is a little too conservative. So I'm going to pull it back to speedo-ville. But yeah, the red, white, and blues will be in full force in terms of my attire, I don't know about you. Chad: Excellent. Yeah, no, I'm not going to go that way. I'm going to allow you to be the center of attention. Joel: I appreciate that. I appreciate that. All the love. Chad: I'm here for you. So again, if you're going to be in London, you're going to be at RecFest, look us up. We're also having the guys from Talent Nexus, we're doing some really cool video stuff with them, so look for that. It's just fucking crazy, but we're excited. And that being said, I think it's time to talk about shit. What do you think? Tengai: Hi. This is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I love these guys. Joel: All right. Chad: I just got a text, I shit you not, right before we started recording, from one of my buddies. He's been in the industry for 15, 20 years. He said, "Someday, you're going to have to explain this Tengai shit to me." Joel: And we'll put it in a podcast, so everyone else that's asking, "You'll have to explain this thing to me," can know that too. Chad: Yeah. Pretty simple. Yeah. Joel: CMO. CB. Ejection. Dude, this is crazy. Is anyone left at CareerBuilder? Chad: I don't think so. Joel: Everyone new lasts about a year. Chad: Yeah, no shit. So Amy Heidersbach, I think it is- Joel: Heidersbach. Chad: Heidersbach. She was there for a year and four months, and this lady has amazing cred and background. She was SVP at Visa, she was head of marketing at PayPal, she was VP slash head of marketing at Capital One, and those are just some of the places she's been. This is the kind of talent that you want to be able to launch your brand, your market, your name, all that stuff ... But I guess she saw the writing on the wall, and said, "You know what? I should probably get the fuck out of here, because this brand in itself is for shit." Not to mention, as we've heard from multiple contacts, that it really feels like they're trying to prep everything to chop up and sell. And that's to me, it doesn't seem like it's too far from that. Where are they going to go from here? They're definitely not going to go up, that's for sure. Joel: Yeah. I'm just amazed that Amy failed to look at Glassdoor reviews before accepting a job at CareerBuilder. Anyone with her clout and expertise that would read through their Glassdoor reviews would want to jump on the CareerBuilder train ... Clearly she didn't listen to our show, ever, although she should have. That would've probably saved her a lot of pain and suffering as it was. But yeah, this marks I think the second good executive that they've had jump ship after about a year from coming onto the company. So clear as day, man, shit's not good over there, and the executives are proof positive after just a year, getting the hell out of Dodge. Chad: And if I were the Textkernals or the Broadbeans of the world, I would be asking myself, "When are we going to be carved up and sold off?" Because really, those businesses, I think, my personal opinion, are the easiest to compartmentalize, and hell, they just bought Textkernal for goodness sakes. But anyway, if you think about it, that might not be a bad thing for those brands. Joel: No, I just don't know who the buyers are. There used to be a day where job boards would buy up these companies, trade them like baseball cards. But those days are over, I mean the companies that people are buying, they're not buying these kinds of companies, and they're not really buying what CareerBuilder's going to be chopping up and selling off. So I don't know. We'll see what happens. Chad: So you remember when Sal took over Monster, and then everything just went to fucking shit? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: Not going to say that it wasn't going that way in the first place, before Matt got kicked to the curb, but you can see that kind of happening with Irena in place. Can you not? Is it just me? Joel: Well, yeah. We've been talking about her for a long time, not being a forward thinking executive. She's a pencil pusher from back in the day, so there's no surprise that there's no vision there, no excitement, no energy around these executives that are joining the company to stay on. I've heard rumors that her clock is ticking, and that her time at the company will probably be short lived, unless some real shit gets turned around, and the executives that are departing the company say that shit isn't getting better. So I'm going to be surprised if she still has a job at CareerBuilder come January 2020. Chad: Big meeting, I believe, is actually next week with board. So yeah, I think that's going to be a defining moment. You're either going to see more big name heads roll, or you're going to see her head roll. Joel: Predictions? Chad: Her head roll. Joel: Yeah. I believe there's going to be some punching bag work going on on her at this meeting. Good luck, Irena. It was nice knowing you. Unfortunately, if she just would've come on the show, maybe it would save her job. But she didn't. Joel: Speaking of more news ... By the way, that's sort of breaking news. That hasn't ... You got on that super early, so most people are hearing about Amy leaving CareerBuilder here on this show. More news, probably, for a lot of people, job.com was a guest on our firing squad show this past week. Chad: Aaron Stewart. Joel: Yep, and we'll be ... I'm sure you'll be publishing that in due time here. But we rarely get breaking news from those kinds of interviews, but we got at least two news stories from it which are worth talking about. Number one is it looks like job.com will be partnering with Monster.com's Talent Fusion product, which is basically their staffing solution. Chad, you know more about it than I do. Apparently not a done deal, but according to Aaron, it is pretty much a done deal. So you heard it here first, Monster partnering with job.com on their talent fusion product. Chad: Pretty big. Because as we've talked about with Indeed and Sift last week, I really see the evolution of staffing becoming more of a technical piece, an app to an extent. And it depends on obviously whether it's high volume or what have you, but we start to see that pushing forward as also, I think Aaron said, he's going IPO, right? Joel: Yeah, so the other news that we got from that is that job.com will be filing for an IPO this summer, I believe. So I would say by fall of this year, we could have a new IPO participant in the job boards space, which we really haven't had a major one in the job board staffing in a while. We've had ... We'll move on to Upwork and Fiverr, who are in IPO news, particularly Fiverr. But yeah, we don't get a lot of them, so it'll be interesting to see how job.com lands with Wall Street. Chad: Yeah, so moving to Fiverr, again, this is ... You start to see kind of like these two worlds meld, so you have job.com, which is really focusing on making staffing easier and more cost effective. But that's what you see with Fiverr, too. It's more low cost. People don't see it as staffing, but it really is staffing. I mean, you're really trying to focus on human capital, and filling holes in projects, and those types of things. So I think we're really starting to see this melding of what staffing slash human capital and technology means, and Fiverr goes IPO and you start to see their stock go through the roof. Joel: Yeah, Fiverr had a really good day. The stock is ... As we're recording this on Friday, went public on Thursday, today it's pulling back, but Upwork is benefiting from the attention that they're getting. And keep in mind, Lyft and Uber are also gig economy stocks, we don't necessarily think of them in that way, but the whole gig economy with Upwork, Fiverr, Lyft, and Uber are all seeing a lot of attention on Wall Street. Uber and Lyft had some rough rides there on the early going, but they're stabilizing and coming back from some of the lows that they've had in the last month or so. Joel: So yeah, we've been keeping an eye on this. I think it'll be interesting as valuations become clearer, do these public companies get snatched up by bigger entities like the Microsofts, the Googles, the Facebooks. Slack, as we know, will be going public soon as well. It's an interesting time to be in this space, and the platform seems to be what's really hot now at the public markets. Chad: Yeah. I mean, these types of platforms are good for what everybody likes to call the side hustle, but that's morphing into more of the full-time hustle, which is really, really cool, and some great numbers. According to Upwork's 2019 future workforce report, nearly 74% of millennials and Gen Z managers have remote workers, and 50% of managers increased their use of freelancers in 2016. So that was a few years ago, right? This makes it so much easier. As we take a look at the demographics of our changing workforce, boomers are leaving, we have millennials and Z's coming up. How do they want to interact, and how do they want to work? They want to work remotely, right? They don't have to hit a freaking time clock, so this is something that I find pretty awesome for companies to be able to try to look at to embrace these types of models as they become more readily used by regular Fortune 500 companies. Joel: Yeah, keyword there is millennials. God bless them. The businesses that are coming online that kind of cater to millennials are really hot. So Beyond Meat, which I know you're a fan of. The plant based protein that tastes like animals meat. Those companies are hot, the Etsys of the world, the Chewys, which is pet stuff. All these businesses that cater to millennials are super hot, and the workforce stuff is no exception. We're seeing a lot of heat around that as well. Chad: Yep. Yep. Joel: All right dude, let's get a quick word from our buddies at JobAdX, and we'll talk about government fucking up with fucking shit up on the recruitment AI side of things. Chad: Imagine that. JobAdX: Finding the right fit is important. When you're deciding on shoes for a long day at the trade show, when you're picking the right podcast for your commute, and most importantly, when you're looking for the right candidate. JobAdX: With JobAdX, you can attract more relevant, engaged candidates to your jobs by harnessing the best in ad tech targeting. JobAdX: From predictive industry analysis and keyword click data, to premium first page placement and reducing redundant applications, our candidate targeting technology ensures that you're reaching talent that's as interested in working with you as you are with them. JobAdX: Now with in-ad video and multimedia, you can share your employer brand story and company culture with Job Seekers, so they can visualize themselves in your office, all hands meeting, or ax throwing team building adventure, all without navigating away from your job posting. JobAdX: Increased engagement makes for fewer steps between job seeker and new team member. Ready to ramp up your job advertising campaigns with the best in ad tech? Visit our new website, at www.jobadx.com. That's J-O-B-A-D-X .com. JobAdX: Attract, engage, employ, with JobAdX. Joel: So this news was kind of an oh shit moment for me, Chad. Illinois, the great state of Illinois, introduced House Bill 25-57, the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act. And I don't think I'd ever thought about government really messing up the whole AI recruitment stuff, but yeah, government could really mess it up. So the bill out of Illinois would require employers to seek consent when they use AI platforms in the hiring process. It's passed the state's House and Senate, and is headed to the governor's desk. This is a really advanced bill that is probably going to happen. It really impacts sights like HireVue in particular. AutoVue, Gecko, and Mia were also mentioned. But basically anything that analyzes a respondent's facial expressions to judge if they're a good fit for a job, employees or candidates need to be made aware that this kind of rating system is being used in the interview process. Chad: I don't know how you didn't think government wouldn't fuck this up. Joel: I knew they could, I just didn't think they would. Chad: GDPR and the California regulations that are coming out, this is merely the start. But I want to read a comment from on of our listeners, and somebody who's been on the show. Comment from Quincy Valencia, AKA the queen of chat bots on social media post that I put out there. This is what she had to say, and I love it because she's so smart about this shit. Chad: She said, and I quote, "They would have been better off if they'd allow a third grader to write it. Define how AI works? Really? Delete it after 30 days. Cool. But then what happens when they're audited by the OFCCP and no longer have the video and analysis used to inform the hiring decision," end quote. Chad: So very easily encapsulated there. First and foremost, it is written really shabbily. And they're not thinking about how all of these other organizations actually have to record and report off of the decision that they're actually making. So government's not thinking about government. Go fucking figure, right? So this is ... Here are some of the things that you have to do. You have to notify each applicant in writing before the interview that AI may be used to analyze the applicants facial expression, and consider the applicant's fitness for the position. Number one. Chad: Number 2. Provide each applicant with an information sheet before the interview, explaining how the AI works and what characteristics it uses to evaluate applicants. Number 3. Obtain written consent from the applicant to be evaluated by the artificial intelligence programs. So here's the thing. This is only happening in Illinois, but this is going to have to happen for anybody who applies anywhere, because you know stupid shit like this is going to be rolled out in all these different states. Joel: Yep, yep. And not only that, but companies that are headquartered elsewhere do hiring in Illinois. So now they have to make special ... Ultimately, this is awful news for vendors that provide these services. Because ultimately companies are going to be like, "Ah, fuck it, it's too much to worry about or deal with. We're just going to be paralyzed by the government and not do these things, and let's just go back to fucking newspaper ads." Joel: Yeah. The whole privacy thing, we talked about California introducing stuff, now we're looking at Illinois introducing laws against AI recruiting solutions. So at the end of the day, companies are just going to throw up their hands and say, "Screw it," and start ups that may have started up won't start up, because they're too worried about government derailing their business. And that's, at the end of the day, a bad thing. Chad: One thing I didn't foresee here is them wanting platforms to dump the data after 30 days, or any type of timeframe. Because once again, you can't defend your position of why you hired an individual. So this is good and bad for companies, because this will be data that the OFCCP wouldn't be able to get their hands on in the first place, because it doesn't exist anymore. So for federal contractors that are like, "Oh, thanks state of Illinois. Now that's another piece of data that I don't have to provide to the OFCCP that they can scrutinize on this hiring decision." But on the other side, that information might've also been one of the big reasons why they made that hire. So if they actually said, "Well, yeah, we had the data from our HireVue system, but unfortunately we had to dump it after 30 days." Joel: In your mind, is this a continuous reaction to the whole Facebook privacy stuff? Chad: This, to me, just demonstrates once again that government can't keep up with technology. If you watch any of these Congressional hearings, and some of the actual questions that are asked of these CEOs, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or whomever it is, right? It is idiotic, some of the actual questions that are being asked. It's like, did you ... I mean, you really, literally, did no research whatsoever. Joel: And I'd love to know how this even got brought up. Were there people that found out they were being analyzed, just anything AI? I'd love to know the catalyst for this law being introduced in the first place. Chad: Yeah. I think what they'd like to do is just get rid of it entirely, so the whole sentiment analysis and those types of thing, especially from AI. And this is just kind of like the first domino in being able to push some of that over. Joel: Because the thing is, AI's going to come into play with everything that we do, not just facial expression, but our voice, do we sound stressed? Do we sound like we're lying? Those tools are online, people can get your sentiment through written word. AI is going to be part of everything communication wise that we do, which is all interview based. So when do you stop, if you start at visual face, do you go to voice? And then do you go to written word? I just think this is a pretty slippery slope of government to really get into this, and really screw up innovation in our space in a big way. Chad: Yeah. The big question is what was the problem they were trying to solve, because I don't know ... If we knew what the problem was, it might be easier to understand why they went down this road, and more than likely they went down the wrong road no matter what. But it's all about what's the problem they're trying to solve, other than a knee jerk reaction to the public saying, "Oh my God, AI." Joel: Yeah. I think it's reaction to the whole ... I think privacy is first and foremost in a lot of governments, and I think a lot of Congress folks, state Houses et cetera, are trying to find sexy ways to get into press, and going after technology and protecting privacy are good ways to get headlines these days. Chad: Well, with some of the stupid shit that these tech companies are doing, they're easy fucking targets. Joel: Yeah. So let's talk about that. So the stupid things that the technology companies like HireVue's doing? Chad: Not HireVue overall. It makes it easier when Facebook, and Google, and all these organizations are talking about AI, and then tracking, and then the Cambridge Analytica. So you think of it from an extrapolated kind of a view, Facebook is collecting data, right? And that data is being misused. This is entirely different ... I would say levels up of data that once again could easily be misused. So that's the big problem. When you have assholes like Mark Zuckerberg, they don't understand how their tool can actually be used, what happens? You've got to go those next steps. Oh, wait a minute, now we have facial recognition. Oh fuck, enemy of the state. That's how this shit happens, so yes, I don't see this as, "Oh, oh my God, HireVue, the big bad ..." That's not the case. It's the Facebooks of the world that are fucking this up for everybody else. Joel: I do think there are larger global macro issues that are coming into play here as well, with China and Huawei and businesses not doing business with them anymore. Seeing videos of Obama and past presidents that look real, that are totally fabricated- Chad: The deep fakes? Joel: Yeah, this is kind of scary shit. And I think that politicians and their constituents are asking, "Okay, where do we draw the line? What is fair and proper, and what isn't?" A lot of this stuff is reactionary to fear of what's going on on a global scare as well, maybe locally with companies that we know and love, like Google, Facebook, et cetera. It's no accident that Apple is launching log in with Apple that totally anonymizes you as a registrant of a certain site, or doing whatever. That's a reaction of the whole connect with Facebook, or log in with Google. What exactly am I being tracked for, how am I being targeted with advertising? People are kind of scared, and government is a reaction to people's fears. Joel: Let's talk about some other stuff. Let's talk about some startups in things in the news. This is sort of a rapid fire session, I guess. So Rectxt, we rarely walk into new startups, but we were in Nashville a while back at the staffing tech conference, and sort of met two dudes over a bourbon tasting from Canada, and they mentioned, "Yeah, we're launching, tonight, a new text recruiting platform that's build on Google Chrome. It's kind of cool, you should check it out." So anyway, we've kept in touch with them, and they officially launched Rectxt, that's R-E-C-T-X-T, this past week officially. It is a Google Chrome extension that you can text candidates. So you can check that out. I think we had quite a few hot Nashville chicken sandwiches and wings with them while we were out there. Chad: At Hattie B's. If you want to get a point where we give a shit about this new product that's coming out, these guys are incredibly smart. They took us out for barbecue at Hattie B's, for craft beer. It was just incredibly smart. So let's put that out there, because more than likely, if it weren't for Hattie B's and these guys being so goddamn brilliant, then we probably wouldn't be talking about it. Joel: Yeah, the quickest way to our heart is hot food and cold beer, I guess. So kudos to those guys, good luck to them. Joel: So next up, we have Nymeria, who you might remember is a sourcing tool, where you can pull out emails and all kinds of stuff. So they're pivoting to ... Have launched TheReach.io, because I guess Reach.io was taken. Chad: I bet it was. Joel: But this is a ... Well, they pimp themselves as get any email, get any corporate email on planet Earth kind of thing. So interesting to me as this week we continue to go down the GDPR and privacy route is doing all these sourcing tools, sort of pivot into marketing tools, just grab stuff that won't get us into trouble, such as emails, which are usually public anyway. I don't know, we'll see the trends, see if hiring's solved, and hire tool, and seek out all those guys pivot over to more marketing stuff. Chad: Yeah, I don't know that sourcing versus marketing matters with GDPR, but I don't know. This is just a really interesting space. Let me just give you a shit ton of emails. I don't know. This, to me, is not exciting at all. I know it is for them, good for you, TheReach.io. The only better URL that was out there that's not available is gocanvas.io, but yeah. It just doesn't do it for me. I couldn't give two fucks about this whole thing. Joel: Yeah, they should've just named themselves gothereachgo.io something. All right, so also in the news, the brand that changed game. Love Mondays, a popular software- Chad: Mondays, Mondays. Joel: Anonymous employer review site- Chad: Oh, that sounds familiar. Joel: Which was acquired by Glassdoor a couple years ago, I believe, is now going to change it's name to Glassdoor. So Glassdoor will be the omnipotent brand there in South America for online employee anonymous reviews. Chad: So the big question is, do you still believe that Indeed is going to suck up Glassdoor and become the overall brand of this recruit holdings internet play? Joel: Well, I do believe that is the smart choice. I'm starting to believe it's not going to be the choice. In fact, I'd be more apt to say Indeed's review section will soon be powered by Glassdoor, because Glassdoor is sort of the monolithic brand now for employer reviews. Maybe Indeed will be powered by Glassdoor on their review section. Who knows? Chad: It should be, but I don't see, again, the whole hubris thing. Indeed's ego giving anything to anybody. Joel: Yeah, I agree with that. They'll just ... They'll aggregate Glassdoor reviews with their own reviews, and just call them their own reviews or something. Tag them, GD, or a little Glassdoor on them or something. I don't know. Joel: All right, continuing with rapid fire news, Google For Jobs ... Wow, it took us this long to talk about them, is now available in our favorite country, vive la France. Chad: Oui oui. Joel: Monsieur. Which is ironic, because I just presented in Belgium about Google For Jobs optimization when they don't even have Google For Jobs there yet. But I did comfort everyone in the audience, saying that, "Just wait, it'll be here eventually," and on cue, they launched in France, which obviously neighbors Belgium. So Belgium, it's coming soon, don't worry. All those optimization tips I gave you are very relevant. Chad: Well, and it's going to be interesting to see how Google For Jobs plays in all these different countries, because we're seeing in Germany, and France, and Japan that they're dealing with the market much different than they are in the US. So they're not just trying to roll this out the same exact way everywhere, so yeah. In Belgium, they might actually have jobs rank higher for the ability to smoke and drink. Joel: Yeah, I'm not sure anyone in Belgium works. I think they just ride bikes around, and sit on the water and contemplate the universe, and inhale secondhand smoke if it's not firsthand, and drink a lot of beer, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Chad: Yeah, except the secondhand smoke part, yeah. I think it sounds good to me. Joel: Yeah, I think the lack of stress balances the amount of smoke that you inhale while you're visiting there. But anyway, something that's not bad for your health, let's get a quick note from Canvas, and we'll talk about male managers who are threatened by females. Chad: Well hello. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen, and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center, while Canvas Spot is at your side, adding automation to your work flow. Canvas: 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 cool culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. Canvas: 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 Ed: This is Ed from Philly, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Very nice. Joel: You know, with all this Me Too, women empowerment lean in stuff, you'd think we'd have made some progress in the workplace with men's interaction with women. Chad: Yes. Joel: But you'd be wrong. According to CNBC story, talking about a survey done by Survey Monkey, who is a interview alumn at the Chad and Cheese Podcast. We encourage everyone to go check that out. And leanin.org, which is Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg's organization. We've taken a step back. The Me Too and Time's Up movements have brought huge attention to the challenges women face at work, but a new survey finds that 60%, that's six zero, of male managers say they're uncomfortable participating in regular work activities with women, including mentoring, working one on one, or God forbid, socializing. What's wrong with men? Chad: Right out of the gate, boo fucking hoo, you whiny little dudes. I mean, give me a break. So these men, 60% of men are feeling uncomfortable. Okay, so now everything's flipped because women used to feel uncomfortable around your dumb asses, and if that's how you feel, you were probably doing shit wrong in the first place. I can't say ... I mean, I've managed men and women throughout my life, I can't say that I've been the perfect manager. I can't say that. But one of the things I can say is that if i do feel uncomfortable in a situation, especially like this, I was probably doing shit wrong in the first place. Get over yourself, understand that, much like in the '60s, the power balance is now back moving towards the women's side. And it should, since they're only getting like 75 cents on the dollar, not to mention we don't have enough women in leadership positions. Chad: So we have a bunch of men who are used to being on top, on the leadership rung, getting paid more, and now they're not, and they feel uncomfortable, and they pit it on this stupid shit of, "Well, I don't feel comfortable around being a woman," it's like, well then stop doing the stupid shit that you're doing, and it won't be a fucking problem, asshole. Joel: And I love that they use the word uncomfortable, like it's a wedgie. Chad: Yeah. So uncomfortable. Joel: It's a little chilly in here. Little uncomfortable. Chad: Yeah. You know what's been uncomfortable? Women not getting paid as much as men- Joel: Harassment. Chad: ... Women having the exact same skillset as men, and still not getting into the leadership position, and yes, the harassment piece, which pretty much encompasses all of this. When we focus on the equity inclusion, and in this case the appropriateness, if it makes you uncomfortable, that's because you're fucked up. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. So digging into this story, senior level men say they are 12 times more likely to be hesitant about the one on one meetings with a junior women than they would a junior man, nine times more likely to be hesitant to travel with a junior woman for work than a junior man, and six times more likely to be hesitant to have a work dinner with a junior woman than a junior man. Joel: Let's grow up, people. Let's just be human beings. Chad: Just slap these fuckers in the face. Joel: Of course, this inevitably effects the hiring process, right? If there's this comfort at the top, they're going to hire people that don't make them uncomfortable, which means more white dudes in the workplace. Chad: See, this is where I think it's incredibly smart, because this uncomfortableness means that change is happening, and that's exactly what needs to happen. So as change continues to happen, hopefully, then we will get more females in those positions they've deserved for years. They will be getting paid what they should be getting paid. So I think this whole uncomfortableness is because we have a bunch of men who are used to something, and change is happening. And I say boo fucking hoo. Joel: You know the change we really need? Chad: Tengai. Joel: An unbiased recruiting robot. Chad: Yes! Tengai: Hi. This is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I love these guys. Chad: We out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad, and his goofy friend Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that'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. #Careerbuilder #FIVERR #Monster #Jobcom #AI #HireVue #Interview #regulation #Upwork #Smashfly #RecFest

If you thought you'd heard everything from the Chad & Cheese European Tour in Lisbon for TAtech, well, think again. Here's their session on A.I. from RECex. Enjoy this Uncommon exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Chad: Enjoy this special RECex edition of the Chad & Cheese from TAtech Europe after a quick word from our sponsor. Chad: Dude, we're always talking about cool new tech, but it's hard for hiring companies to change. I mean adoption's a bitch. Joel: Yup. Chad: New tech can get them to qualify candidates so much faster. Joel: I know man, but recruiters already have their routine in place. And nobody wants to jump into another platform, especially when it's expensive and also requires hours, maybe days of training. Chad: Exactly, but that's where Uncommon's new service comes into play. Uncommon pairs expert recruiters with inhouse kickass technology. Joel: All right. Interesting. Interesting. It sounds like Uncommon understands the problem of change. Chad: That's why they hand select veteran recruiters, train them on this kickass technology that has access to over 100 million active profiles. Joel: Yeah, yeah. But I bet they're expensive and I bet it requires some kind of annual commitment or contract, right? Chad: No, man. Uncommon is not an agency. They don't require a contract, any contingencies. All they do, they charge one flat fee per project, saving, I don't know, anywhere from 50 to 80% on each hire versus the average agency cut. Joel: Oh, snap. Companies could save big stacks of paper, especially if they're rapidly scaling and need hires today. Chad: Yup. And all you have to do is reach out to Teg and the Uncommon crew at uncommon.co. That's uncommon.co. Joel: Change doesn't have to be a pain if you're using Uncommon. 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. Joel: Wake up all you Euro trash fuckers. Joel: Chad, we're screwed dude. The presentation before us said they'd make up their minds in three seconds. Chad: They've already made up their minds. Joel: Totally. Who's a listener? A few of you. Excellent, excellent. If you don't, something's wrong with you and you should tune in. Joel: So we're here to talk about what? AI, automation, the end of the world as we know it, basically. Chad: Jobs. Yeah, yeah. So, first and foremost, who is sick and tired of hearing AI all the goddamn time? Joel: I'm sick of seeing at every booth in every trade show that you see. Chad: Yeah. It's interesting because when we sat down with a bunch of individuals from SHRM who are on the Talent Acquisition and HR side, their hands went up quickly, but yet they didn't feel like they would even be engaging or using AI. And, in most cases- Joel: But they've got to buy it because everyone says I need AI, even though I'm not really sure what AI is and I don't know what your AI is versus the other vendors' AI. Chad: But the big question is, why is it so hard to understand what AI is? Joel: There's many different types of AI, Chad, and I think you've been to Wikipedia recently and you know if you have the different variations of a- Chad: I'll get my phone out. Okay, so we hear the ... just breaking it down easy because we're dumb guys and we like to make it easy. Narrow AI, also known as weak AI, if you remember Garry Kasparov getting beat by IBM, the chess master getting beat by IBM, that is what you would call narrow AI. That means that algorithm was smarter than that man, that grand champion wizard master, whatever the hell he was. Joel: It's a bit more decision tree and machine learning kind of AI versus the actual self aware stuff that Google and Microsoft are working on. Chad: Yeah, but, see, and that's the problem. See, that's where people get hung up is they think AI, every aspect of AI, is self aware, but it's not. It's baby steps to be able to get to the super- Joel: We've got a while before the Terminator shows up. Chad: So yeah. Joel: And the sex robots, unfortunately. Chad: And fortunately for China. So narrow AI, do we have that today in our industry? Yes, we do have narrow AI in our industry. You take a look at some of the technologies that are out there today, just one quick example. Three years ago, a little company called Brilent 4:44] went to SourceCon, came in third and that algorithm did in six seconds what the winner did in, I think it took 24 hours. Joel: So it took on three other humans sources, I believe. Experts. Chad: It took on more than that. So being able to actually outpace humans in a much faster, quicker, more efficient way is, obviously, part of that definition, so narrow AI. Just like, again, IBM computer, Big Blue beating, or Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov, right? What did that computer do well? Chess. Could it make tea? No. Could it do anything else? No. Could it even tell the difference between a dog and a cat? No. It could do chess. Joel: Shallow, I get it. I get it, I'm with you. Chad: Narrow or weak. So the next level would be general or strong AI, which we're not even close to approaching yet. That would allow that narrow band to actually broaden up and do much more of those different tasks. Not separate algorithms, but an algorithm to be able to actually do more of those tasks just as well as, obviously, human beings and then "Super" is pretty much Terminator, life's over. Joel: So June 13th, 2016, does anyone know what happened on that day? On that day, Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn. And I would argue that that was the start of the arms race in our industry for AI automation in employment. So 26 billion dollars was the acquisition cost, actually 26.2 billion. At that point, Google said, "Holy shit." Facebook said, "Holy shit." Up until then, classified was like a one billion dollar a year business, Monster's valuation was around there at the time. So that wasn't really enough to get their heart racing, but 26 billion for a little 500 million people in a directory got their attention. Joel: So, when we look at who's on the cutting edge of the AI that you're talking about beyond the shallow stuff, you've got to look at Microsoft, Google and Facebook in our industry. Those guys are doing real AI stuff. In fact, I would argue that many of the vendors in our space are leveraging their APIs to say that they have AI, even though they're really leveraging Watson, Microsoft or Google. Chad: Right. And asking CEO Scott Gutz of Monster who, they need some fucking product, their answer was, "Yeah, we should take a look at products like that and build around them. I mean, that's strong, those are strong products, we should built around those products." So does it make sense that these big companies should be driving our industry, or they have been. Joel: Yeah, and it's a double-edged sword because you're using Google Search to power all your job search activities, but, guess what? Google's learning a lot by having you plug their Search capabilities into your job board or corporate website. So, in a way, you're sort of sticking the knife into your own back by letting Google into the house, a Trojan horse, if you will, to learn more about how people search for jobs and what they're looking for. Although you're getting a good search technology and you're able to lay off a lot of tech people and save a lot of money in the process. Chad: Save a lot of money, not to mention, you just get better results overall, better candidate engagements, getting your candidates to stick around longer to be able to actually apply to jobs. Companies are actually saying more performance-based [crosstalk 00:08:16]- Joel: There are tons of stories on saving money on customer service. Apparently, there are a lot fewer calls coming in about, "How do I search for a job," doing a Google search, yeah because of your search sites. Chad: And then moving beyond that, the applicant tracking system, which is also embedded with AI and automation. One of the big pieces that, and they just went, believe it or not, enterprise, "enterprise", with Hire, by Google. The thing that I love seeing within it, and something that Opening.io does as well, is the candidate matchup piece, being able to utilize the data you already have in your database, or your client already has in their database, and they've already spent money on those candidates to be able to surface them and get that hopefully in the pipeline much quicker. That's already embedded in Hire, by Google. Chad: The big question is, when's that going to be popped out as an enterprise API? Because it will be popped out as an Enterprise API, which means everybody else is going to have the same type of technology, AI, embedded into their- Joel: And, by the way, how does that impact job postings? If I can just search for candidates already in my database or this whole thing called LinkedIn which is 650 and growing, million user profiles around the world, how important is actually posting a job which impacts a lot of you who may be at job boards? I would contend that job boards are becoming less important and commoditized, which I believe, Google for jobs is also doing as well. Chad: Yeah, see, and I don't believe that because I believe job boards are still strong from one standpoint, and that's data. That's one of the reasons why they're getting so much traffic, not from traffic from the standpoint of actual dollars, so much of investment dollars is because of the data. If they can use that AI, if they can use that matching to be able to ensure that they can get to the candidate much quicker, that's one of the things that job boards can do to pivot into this new age of tech. Joel: Well, if you'd rather have Monster's data than LinkedIn's data, then you have at it. But I'd rather have LinkedIn's data and Google's data. Chad: Well, Google buys Monster's data. I don't think that works. Joel: No one's buying Monster, let's get that out of the way. Chad: So from a sourcing standpoint, you take a look at it ... when we were talking to, and actually had a sourcer get pissed off at me on Facebook this week because we were talking about- Joel: You pissed somebody off? Chad: Yeah, that's what happens. So Johnny Campbell, you might know Johnny Campbell, he's on the podcast. He popped it off this weekend, he said that 98%, he believes, just throwing out a number, 98% of sourcing should be automated, should be automated today. Not tomorrow, not in five years, today should be automated with the technology that's available. Now, we're actually seeing that. We're seeing RPOs actually go after high volume with programmatic, first and foremost, for active matching from the sourcing standpoint going into different databases, whether it's their database or clients' database, whatever it is. So going after those candidates from active and a passive standpoint, pulling them in at that point, going for engagement so automatically starting either with text messaging, email and then also offering that chat bot, which we haven't talked about yet, capability. Chad: So after you're going through that process, some cases, some of these processes within 10 minutes of actually having an engagement with a candidate within under 10 minutes, they'll be scheduled for an interview. Joel: What I think is cool about, you know, you if think of LinkedIn and Microsoft as an asteroid and maybe Google a secondary asteroid, there have been some natural examples today. When you have the asteroid hit, you have the mammals come up and smaller animals take over. So, in a similar way, you're seeing these smaller companies, the chat bots, the text messaging, the programmatic players be smaller, but come up in the world and you're seeing ATSs realizing that, "Hey, job boards have suffered through this new reality, now we have to prepare for what's coming. Hire by Google, you mention, going enterprise, that should get the attention of a lot of ATSs. Joel: So now they're trying to be the one stop shop platform, so you look at Jobvite recently in the States backing up the Brinks truck and buying Talemetry, RolePoint and Canvas. That was because the asteroid came, now we have to prepare for the survival of our tracking system going into the future. So you're seeing a lot of these smaller players, consolidations are happening and consolidation will continue to happen, I think, because of this new reality with automation and AI. Chad: So I'm going to call it audible because I took a picture of a slide, imagine that. And a company was talking about automation and how it has helped them thus far. So 57% of online applications an ad, or 57% of applications per month through their system because they had a shitty process in the first place. They started using chat bots to be able to engage and they started to see more applications. Joel: It's as big a deal in Europe as it is in the States. God, we talked about it in every conference. Chad: It seems that chat bots, automation, some type of at least form of connection and/or not sending them to a black hole, I don't know. Joel: Anti-ghosting magic. Chad: Is magic. And in this case, 66% less from the ghosting side of the house, which means 6% more individuals showed up for interviews and, obviously in this case, high volume day one. And then, 73% decrease in cost per hire, 73% decrease in cost per hire. This is their numbers- Joel: That's a lot of money. Chad: ... coming from the actual company. So once again, we talk about AI, automation, all the glitter and that other fun stuff. The thing that we need to really be focusing on first is process over technology and then problems over technology. That's what this company did. They focused on blowing up their process because this technology was going to provide them with more efficiencies. They didn't just try to layer over more technologies and they also focused on the problem, as they understood the problem. Not, "I need a chat bot," or, "I need to do programmatic, everybody's doing programmatic." Yeah, you probably do, but first and foremost, what the hell's your problem? What's your process methodology? How can we make this much easier for you, more targeted, performance driven and then you start to seeing numbers out of this. Chad: This is one of the reasons why the sourcer was pissed at me this week, because there's actual proof out there that, to be quite frank, if you're doing it right, you could push those sourcers into more of a brand ambassador position, if you'd like. There's many more things that they can do much better within the organization. Joel: So much of this reminds me of our conversation with Colin Day of iCIMS who said, "You know, my competition isn't the new ATS or the new CRM or the new Talent Management system. It's all the clutter and noise in the industry to try to get a customer or prospect to actually talk to me and understand what I'm doing versus all the noise that's out there." So, I think that when we talk to you guys, if this is overwhelming, I think imagine what your customers and prospects feel when they're getting calls from chat bots, programmatic advertising solutions, text recruiting, job boards, ATSs, CRM. Chad: We had a room full of HR professionals, TA professionals, we asked who is using, or knows about, Google For Jobs. Two people raised their hand. Joel: There they are. Chad: Two people in that group. And everybody- Joel: And me. Now there's three. Okay. Chad: Everybody else looked at us, everybody else looked at us like they had deer in the headlights, they had no clue what the hell we were talking about. Had no clue because there's so much coming after these guys. Talent acquisition has so much that's being thrown at them every single day which is one of the reasons why I'm going to go find an agency to put in between so that they can take all this shit. They don't know what's going on. They don't understand. They don't understand the process. They don't understand their problem. They are getting bombarded by everything. So when it comes down to it, we have to focus on process. We have to focus on problem. As soon as we get those two pieces figured out, it makes so much more sense from an ROI standpoint, and you start getting the numbers that I shared with you earlier. Joel: Companies are looking for a consultant, whether that's an agency or a trusted vendor, it's too much. I know I need AI. I know I need programmatic. I know I need this chat bot thing, but I'll know who to go to and what to do exactly. So if you could do that for them- Chad: Those numbers not only lead to a happy client, but a retained client. Yes, it's great to do programmatic, even though they can't even spell the goddamn word. Joel: They can't even spell SEO. Chad: If they know why they're doing it ... yeah, if they know why they're it, how they're doing it, it's so much different, not to mention, it's not just about getting the active candidates in. What do you do with them afterward? You might have the best active solution in the world, what happens afterward? 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. #RECex #AI #Google #Microsoft #Recruitment #TAtech

Who just raised $100m, has 100m million members in their social employment network and is targeting 70% of the market? Jobcase, that's who... When we traveled to Boston we knew we have to get Fred Goff, Jobcase CEO on the mic. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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: What's up everybody, welcome to the Beantown addition of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: Today we are lucky enough to be visiting the Headquarters of Jobcase, with CEO Fred Goff. Fred welcome to the podcast, hopefully it won't be the worst decision you've ever made. Fred: Hopefully not, great to be on The Chad & Cheese Show. Thanks for having me. Joel: So give us ... Lot of our listeners do not know you, do not know Jobcase, give us the elevator pitch on sort of you and your background as well as the company's. Fred: Let's do the fun one first, which is the company's. Jobcase is the only social media platform that's just dedicated to empowering people in their work life. We've grown to about 106 million registered members, but probably what's more relevant is 25 million monthly activate uniques. We have about 70 million arrivals a month I think with regard to talent acquisition in Jobcase, so I think Comscore's got us ranked fourth largest in the nation at this point. Fred: So we're pretty active in that ecosystem, but what this company's about, as you've seen today, is really about empowerment. It's about how we can give people one place to keep all their stuff that they own and control and decide where is goes and how we can connect them with a network of other people, that forms a community and that's really the difference about us and how we position. I think the press like to call us LinkedIn for everyone else and we're not necessarily crazy about that. I have a lot of respect for LinkedIn, but it's different. This is about a community, this is about getting you in touch with people that you might not know and how they support you with empathy and how that can empower you to figure out ... If you lean in and take the reins of control, that all these aspects of future of work that might be daunting, could actually work for you. And that comes from a place of empathy, not just a lot of career pathing. Fred: And then the last part of us is we talk about tools to make it easy, we talk about community that empowers you. Then what's our responsibility given that we have that community and all these networked people, then it turns to advocacy. And we think that the turn of us is to advocate for workers in this nation and try to have boardrooms pay a little bit more attention to workers and a little less to shareholders. Joel: And for our international listeners, you are only US based, North American, like give us a idea of your footprint. Fred: Where are we? As of May 29th, 2019, yes but at the point you might be listening to this podcast, no we might be right around the corner. Joel: Ah, so you heard it here first. What geographical location will you be opening up first? Fred: Well that would be premature, but I think that- Joel: I have to ask the questions. Fred: Well, you know, Joel, if we look at what we're trying to achieve, we want to get to a billion members globally. And one of the reasons we want to do that is the power of the network effects allows us to advocate for workers more and we've seen that. I'll give quick example, it's a very micro one, we had 400 people that drive for Uber in Houston, as an example, and this was a while ago. They had one person who started complaining, he got kicked off the Uber platform. And this is a fellow who had now made it his full-time job basically and he was kicked off for an old picture, something ridiculous like that. And in these complaints, we took that conversation and we surfaced it to [Solis 00:03:47], City Manager in Houston, and we said, "[Solis 00:03:49], just so you know, 400 of your drivers are watching this conversation." Joel: Wow. Fred: And within a day, that person was reinstated, his average daily earnings, gave him eight times that, make him whole and that's the first time we realized, the way we think of ourselves, is it's almost a union, right? It's almost like if we could advocate for people, it's got a very positive effect, but from a place of positivity, right? It's a very positive community, it's not one that's out to rabble-rouse, it's the one that's out here to support people. Chad: It feels like the very first time social media really works on the employment side of the house. I mean, we're seeing all the social kind of happen and then they're getting into, you know, quote unquote work. Where did you come from, first, to be able to get to where you are today, because that's a very positive story. Most of the stories that we're hearing are incredibly negative on the social media side of the house. Fred: Yeah, I have a very probably rare story to end up in this space, but I'm thrilled for where I'm at, I mean John Lennon has this saying, "Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans." And I'm thrilled the way life turned out. I actually think I'm fixing my karma for the next life maybe. I was a hedge fund guy. I was a portfolio manager, I managed a billion bucks for BankBoston Robbie Stephens, I got the vision there, the view, that technology should evole asset management as much as other industries. I went back to MIT and tech'd up, got a Masters in the Management of Technology. I studied with my thesis with Clay Christensen, so I'm a big believer in Clay's whole disruptive theory. Fred: And I came out and started a machine learning based hedge fund. And that worked really well until it didn't, so we didn't really see the Lehman bust, we went the cash a few weeks before and so people that were invested in that fund were very happy because we weren't a blow up scenario. But on the other side of that, it was pretty clear that the future was not going to rhyme with the past when you're at the end of 2008. And so we had an existential question with regard to the asset management. Do we do R&D and hunker down for a year until this mother of all black swans blows over, do we split the cash and go home? Fred: And what we did was a third road, we forked the technology, and we took the team and technology that was proficient in high dimension optimization, and in predictive modeling, and machine learning, and we brought it over into the online media space. Instead of constructing portfolios of securities we constructed portfolios of Google, Yahoo, Bing keywords and set up predicting markets, predicting certain behavior and I probably would have thought, if the Chad & Cheese Show could invent podcast first and then be around in 2008, or maybe they were around then, I was ignorant of them, I think back then I probably would've thought I'd do that for a few years. Fred: When we first came out, our first iteration was a little bit more of an Ad Tech play because we were very focused on paying the bills and we moved forward and then we got successful enough that in around 2014, we were able to pause and we were able to say, "Okay, what do we want to do when we grow up?" We had had enough success as a self-funded firm, we had never had a lot of capital raise, it was just what's left in the coffers in 2009, and we grew completely organically, and that's when we really focused in on what today is surfaced as the future of work issues. That wasn't really talked about back in 2014 but that's what we built Jobcase for. Fred: And then we went through a transition of moving from a, what John Doerr might call, a mercenary culture to a missionary culture. Before it was very math-based what we were doing, and in 2014 all the [knock walls 00:07:29] came down of charts and numbers and they all went up about the people that we were serving and we really focused in on how we could help evolve the ecosystem to help individual people. And hopefully that's what you're hearing and seeing today because that's certainly what motivates me and I think our whole team coming into work everyday. Joel: You've been labeled LinkedIn for everyone else, which I think is a little bit short sighted. To me what's interesting about your platform is, you've almost given the keys to the inmates. In other words, your users have this self growing, user generated community where content is put out there for users to help each other with all things job related, right? Like getting work, how to deal with certain issues in the work place, was that on purpose or was that kind of a happy accident as you were building the company? Fred: No, it's very on purpose to have a platform where people help people. At the end of the day, if there's one thing you know about us, it's not what the press wants to call us, we're building a platform where people help people, that's what we're doing. You're going to talk to my CTO after this chat, he's trying to leverage machine learning to help people. Everything is about helping people, right? That's the core north star and from the regard, I think we've always had some humility. When we first were launching Jobcase, even before that, if you were to say, right downstairs, the paradox is what we're building is, in order to build a platform that serves up to a billion people, and really empowers them and then advocates for them, the skillset that requires is extremely advanced. We hire machine learning scientists out of MIT, software engineers, Carnegie Mellon, extreme quantitative skillsets from places that have backgrounds like Princeton and Cornell and all this stuff and we're serving people that have a different level of skillset, 67% of the country with high school degrees and all of that. Fred: And so we have to have the humility that does my team know how to get a job at Walmart? No, you know who the expert in the whole fricking country is at getting a job at Walmart? The lady who got a job there this morning. She knows how, she just did it. So if we could take a digital marketing platform and instead of worry about what ad to serve somebody, worry how can I surface a conversation to the right relevant subgroup of my 25 million active members this month, when someone says, "How do I get a job at Walmart?" If I can surface that on the right channel, to the right person, who's the expert, the one who just got that job, that's how we help. Fred: And that conversation transcends to an acquisition. How do I deal with ageism? How do I ask for a promotion? Am I getting paid enough as a nurse in Cincinnati? There's all sorts of questions on the arc of your work life that we shouldn't presume that I have a blog or I'm going to tell you what to do, I don't know the answer. What I'm going to try to do is hire really brilliant people to write code and put in algorithms to help you get in touch with whoever it is in the country that's the best. And then what's really cool that happens, is communities are forming around this and they don't just get the answer but you get the follow on emotional support and "You can do it," and "I believe in you," and "Don't give up." And that's really the killer app. Chad: What do you do ... That is the killer app, but what do you do to harness that so it doesn't turn into this Facebook thing that you're seeing nothing but Trump stories- Joel: It's anarchy. Chad: I mean, it just yeah, I mean there's so much ... So many of my friends are taking social kind of vacations because it's just too much for them, and it might just be Facebook or who knows what it is, but how do you build this to be able to keep it positive? There's this AI slash human-blend behind it, which is really cool, but how does the policing happen? Fred: That's a great question. I use the metaphor of that Indiana Jones movie, where in the very beginning, you got the big boulder running, he's just barely in front of it, he falls on his knees and he gets up, and he runs through the spiderweb, and he gets ... I think that's kind of where we're at. So we've got a complete control based on the kind of volume that we have and if we slip up, if the vine gets ahead of us, it'd be a problem. One of the first deployments of specific machine learning, that's pretty advanced that we did, had to go to the spammers and scammers. We've got a lot of volume. The first people who figure out where volume is on the internet is not the likely consumer, right? It's not people looking to hire people, it's not that, it's somebody who's trying to trick people. And so we had to do a lot of investment to get those tricksters off and that's a continual battle. Chad: Are you watching Facebook and these other like bigger platforms to see where they're tripping over themselves and say, "Okay, early warning system?" Fred: Yeah, we are, with great humility and appreciation for the difficulty of what they're trying to do. And I think that we have so far succeeded. There's no bullying on our platform, and there's no adjudication. If we see it, we're going to pull it off. And who's deciding that? We have algorithms or we have people that are making judgment calls and right now that's keeping pace. We run a risk that as we break out more and more, we fall behind, but so far, I mean, I think we've got some plans for that, but I don't know I guess all of this is to say, Chad, it's a great question. It's a huge concern, I think we're on top of it for the volume we have today and that we anticipate for the next quarter, it's probably not on top of it for the volume we expect one year from now, so that's what we have to [crosstalk 00:12:53]- Chad: All about scaling. Fred: Yeah. Joel: I want to talk about the war for talent for a second in your own organization. You mentioned your CTO, you mentioned machine learning professionals. We're sitting here at sort of the epicenter of brainiac, you know, east coast, right? Chad: I can see MIT, what is that computer lab- Joel: [crosstalk 00:13:11] MIT, cancer [crosstalk 00:13:12]- Fred: Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab, so we're an affiliate of the, it's called CSAIL, but this is where their ... I'll tell you, they'll ask, you know, so there's ... Like two years ago, they have this new thing that came out of one of our, the lady that runs it is Daniela Rus, just brilliant and a friend of ours and she's in the news and you read this and they have like you swallow a pill and this little robot opens up origami style in your stomach and repair a rip in the lining and then of course you excrete out the rest of that little when it folds back up. Joel: The robot, yeah. Fred: So now, you don't have to have any incision at all, you're just swallowing, you got a robot in your belly, I mean the amazing things that are coming out of there is just unreal. And we do collaborative projects with their big data area on things with regard to talent and things with regard to employment and it's also a great place to hire from. So yeah, that's right outside the door. Joel: So the question is, how do you get someone with the opportunity of building robots, nano robots that go into people's stomachs and curing cancer and creating invisible fish and everything else that we've talked about going on here? Fred: Well, Facebook and Google's here too- Joel: And get them to come work for this itty bitty job board company? Fred: Itty bitty job board, you're killing me- Joel: I'm simplifying it. Fred: So allow me to correct. One, we are absolutely not a job board company and with no disrespect to job board companies who offer a great value or social media platform, but- Joel: Forget that part of the question, I was being sarcastic, we do that really well on this show. My point is, they can work on some really interesting problems, how do you get them to take on the problems that are going on here? Fred: Yeah, this is what they care about. I think that we have a very compelling opportunity here. Yes, we pay competitive wages, yes they work with smart people, yes we have a creative environment that has a pretty cool culture I think, but at the end of the day, when you go home as a software engineer or a machine learning person or some version of a quant for lack of better word, data scientist, data analyst, when you leave Jobcase, you know you help people in their normal daily lives. You don't have to guess. They're telling us on the platform. And so I have this little mechanism I do to build empathy when I speak at MIT in front of crowds that I haven't talked to before. There's a lot that know us, and we'll in crowds that don't. And I'll say, "Okay, can you raise your hand if you've gotten a Starbucks," and we're in Boston so the Dunkin', yeah, it's really Dunkin' here, "in the last week? And of course everyone's hand goes up. And say, "Now keep your hand up if you know how that barista or cashier got their job or what they're doing next," and of course all the hands go down and we say, "Well, that's why you don't know us." Fred: And what I see happening in this room, guys, is it's a really interesting thing, it's never failed. After I say this, I lose about a third of the audience and you see their head tilt about 30 degrees and you realize in that moment they're pondering. They haven't ever thought about that question. Everyone's really busy. It's not that everyone's jerks. Everyone's busy. Everyone's got their own problems, their own economic issues, their own career paths, their own personal issues. They're just busy and they don't stop to consider the majority of people in this country, the majority of households that don't have enough savings to cover an unexpected $500 expense, that are sitting across from them, handing them their cup that says Linda on it or whatever at Starbucks. And you realize in that moment they're like, "Holy crap, what is the rest of this?" Fred: And it's not the rest, it's not niche, it's like 70% of this country, right? And so it's- Chad: The engine of this company, or this [crosstalk 00:16:37]- Fred: Yeah, company engine, right? And so when you say, "Now I've got an opportunity for you to actually help these people," and all of these things, AI automation, 1099 instead of W-2, free agency problem, and the follow on issues, wage stagnation, and all of these issues on the future of work, that can be daunting, that people are concerned about. When we say, "Look, if you come here," we're not only addressing that problem, we're harnessing it and if we can kind of democratize big data ... There's one version of our story where we're a complement not to LinkedIn, to Workday, right? I think Aneel Bhursi is changing the face and really accelerating how HR and corporate America is evolving, but he is finding really cool, actionable insights in big data and giving them to Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of American, so Brian can make better decisions for his shareholders and his employees about their talent road maps. Fred: And we're saying, "What if we took those actionable insights and gave them to each individual teller," because in today's world, his teller is going to go to Citizens Bank, maybe Wells Fargo, and they might come back to Bank of America, so they have to take that with them. So talent acquisition, when I go across the street to MIT or others, and we give them the opportunity to empowering the majority people in this country, it's incredibly rewarding, it kind of closes itself. Chad: So what you just talked about was, being able to provide candidates their data, because it's their data in a system instead of it being in some disparate system of a company that they worked for 10 years ago, right? So they have information that is carried forward with them. Does that happen in Jobcase today, is that future kind of forward, what is the system doing? Fred: It's Jobcase today and our whole thesis is, you need a place to keep your information, right? So it's not just a profile, which of course is open access, anybody listening to this right now, feel free to go on Jobcase and you can reach out and contact anybody, we're not going to stand in the way of that, we're here to support that and facilitate that. You want to work with my data scientists to do it a more volume way, sure give us a call, but you can do it on your own. And so when we think about that, that's just like a resume or profile. What's important is the notion that our grandfathers used to have or maybe our fathers if we're a certain age, which is an employee folder that goes with you. Fred: And so the issue today is, if we know that the average 25 year old has had seven jobs and if we know further that a whole bunch of people are stitching together jobs during the same week, let alone year to year, we need a place for them to aggregate all the feedback. That's going to start to fix away it's stagnation problem. One of the attributes about wage stagnation is, in the past if you moved from one job to another within an organization, you have an employee folder to go with you that says you proved yourself, you're growing skills, you're being ushered in. But if you're going to go from Dunkin', to Starbucks, to Marriott, and job to job without a folder with you, you've got to reprove yourself again and again and again. Fred: So if we can surface that, through Jobcase Praises, if we can surface that through reviews where we can hold and you bring with you, and then expose that as you determine, for other employers to find, we think we can help accelerate career paths that way. And so yes, we do that today. What we need to do more of is bridge partnerships with others so they can capture this more easily and so that's what we got to get on top of. Chad: So we've talked about this in the like Uber style for work landscape moving forward where, I mean, once again I mean you can rate your Uber driver but your Uber driver can rate you. The same thing, flipping over into somebody who's cooking a steak or working at a hotel or even doing product development for an organization, right? So I mean it doesn't have to be just a barista, it can be a software developer for goodness sake, so to me it sounds like you guys are building and correct me if I'm wrong, more of an Uberization, bad verbiage sorry, or Jobcase -zation whatever, of the journey of somebody's career overall. Fred: In giving it to that individual person to curate and take care of, right? So that's the real key. Chad: But making it easy because humans don't do that very well. Fred: Yeah, so we have to make it easy for people to praise you, we have to make it easy for you to bring with you, have to make it easy for you to hit a button and say, "I want someone else to have it." If we have a Jobcaser that wants to have their information given to somebody that others might perceive as our competitors, I don't think of companies in the talent acquisition space as competitors. Anybody who's going to help our members on a career path is a partner, right? But other people seem to. So if they want to give it to Ian at ZipRecruiter and make sure they have the information, they want to give it to Indeed, they want to give it to LinkedIn, power to them. Let's make sure we can make that easy to happen. That's a view of where we are. That's not where we get our economics, that's our responsibility to the individual person in our community and I think which will help the ecosystem as we move forward and like it or not, you have to take the reigns of control in your own hands. Fred: At the end of the day, Jobcase was built for a person who believes in these things. They care about others, they know they got to drive their own career, and they believe workers should be treated as well as shareholders. If you believe in those three things, you're a Jobcaser. Okay. If you're a PHD, a mad software engineer, enterprise salesperson, or a front line at McDonald's, you're a Jobcaser if you believe in those three things. Chad: Fred, last question. I'm lucky enough to get it. Can you give us an example of a client success story? How are they using Jobcase today to fill their ranks within their organization because they could be high volume, they could possibly not be a high volume type of client. What's the success story? How do they use Jobcase? Fred: So there's a large e-tailer who's name I probably should check before I say, but let's say there's a large e-tailer that we're pretty close with and- Chad: (cough) Amazon! (cough) Fred: ... large e-tailer and they have a hiring need of different periods and one of our products is event promotion or event management and this is not about ... When you try to get into events, for if a company that is hiring at scale, so it could be a local pizza shop that wants to open up a new shop and they're hiring 30 people at once, right? We see that at Wegmans, a local grocery chain in the east coast or it can be a Home Depot opening up a new one, you know, events are a wonderful way to get a whole bunch of talent at one time to show up. But if you're going to do it very effectively, it's not just about the active job seeker, you can't just post it as a job post. What we're able to do in solving this problem, there was a hard to fill place, they were having an issue staffing it, and said, "We would like to do a promotion, we need to hire like dozens of people at once." Chad: Right. Fred: What we're able to do is just about community, right? It's about our members. So it's not about who's on the site searching, and it's about our knowledge of our members. So we're able to say, "Okay, how many of our members live within five or 10 miles?" And let's say that's about 20,000 in the case I'm thinking of. And how many of our members that live within five or 10 miles of this location also have searched for a similar job in the past at any point of their registration with Jobcase? We'll let's say that's down to about like 7,000. And of those, how many have searched for a job anytime in the last two to four months so they have little bit of an itch, doesn't mean they're active today, but I know that they're open to a new opportunity? And so that might be about half of them, so you got about 3,000. Fred: No they are our members. We know which ones prefer messaging through SMS, or through Facebook, or through Google retargeting, or through email, and so we get the message on the channel they'd like about the opportunity of working at this company. Not the job, that's not what I think is important to people. I think now, I think that's overplayed, job descriptions. It's about who am I going to work for? What's the local culture of where I'm at? And it really is about local culture, right? So we've indexed 27 million locations people work, like Bank of America has 5,300 locations, Home Depot has 2,300 locations. And anybody who's been to a Bank of America in midtown Manhattan versus Bank of America in Weston, Massachusetts, knows they are very different cultures, right? So it's not better or worse, it's just different. Fred: So an individual person might want to assess that. So we surfaced the local culture, we get that information to them about the event and say it's around the corner, we have some very clever ways of making sure we reach and schedule, and then we get lines out the door and we get the hiring done. Now, there's one other aspect to that. So in that case, Chad, we have a very happy, successful client, they had an event, we promoted to people that they didn't have to wait to search to look for this, we prompted the attention, we moved people from being inactive to active with something that was relevant to them. But here's what's important and different I think about us. In addition to going members, not clicks, it's also about how we follow up on the data side. Fred: When my team goes back on data, we want to know that very difficult question everybody probably listening to you wants which is attribution, all this, but our view is kind of different where we're coming from. I have now contacted all of my members in this area that we went through that funnel. I'm member first, right, and when I say I'm, it's not Fred Goff it's Jobcase. Jobcase is member first so we want to know, now that these people showed up, did you process those applications? Did you hire them? If you did in this process, that's great. If there was something that broke down, we have to fix this. We're advocates for our members. Did we talk to the wrong people? Were they not a fit for you? If so, I don't want to bug people that aren't a fit for you. We need to learn about that. Fred: Did you not follow through on them? Well hold on here, these are my members we introduced you. And I think the trick that we should all do when we think about talent acquisition is go through the mental exercise, even if it's a high volume play, of this is my neighbor I introduced to you. How were they treated and how do you feel about that? Because if you know somebody that was hiring and you said, "Oh, my neighbor Joe's going to call you," and if Joe calls back and said, "He said he would never hire me," or if he said, "I still waiting to hear from him, he hasn't done anything," you'd be a little miffed. Chad: Yeah. Fred: Okay, that's the Jobcase view, we want to find the data, not to prove any attribution about pay me more, whatever, that's not our focus. Our focus is members and in fact when we hire sales people, if you were to go down and talk to my sales people and say, "Who do you work for?" They would say, "We work for our members, we're here to get our members good opportunities." That's what we're doing. Chad: It's all about experience. Fred: Yeah, and to follow through. And so, by the way, then we have this large e-tailer extremely satisfied with the level of talent they had coming out the door because we accessed a pool that wasn't readily available through other sources. Joel: I think I heard him say, "Job descriptions are dead," in that process. Chad: Yeah, well I mean they suck and I think everybody knows they suck so I mean this is more of an opportunity and culture where people are ... It sounds like aligning and focused more on that, like more purpose driven. Fred: I think where we're heading is, for the most part, and there's exceptions, for the most part, if you don't know what the job is that you're applying to by the title and a couple lines, then you're probably not right for that job, right? Do we really have to go through a paragraph explaining what a cashier is, do we really have to say, "I really want somebody who works hard," and all this stuff. I mean it's just noise. Fred: Now there are occasions we need to clarify, especially as we have multiple organizations and people don't align job titles and et cetera, but these long paragraphs, we all know it's not getting read. What would get read is not what's it like to be whatever, an accounting person at a pizza chain in western Massachusetts versus an accounting person at a burger chain in say Needham, right? What we want to know is what's it like to work for your company versus another? I get what accounting is, I get what this is, what's it like there, how do you treat me? Fred: So we think it's about that local talent brand that we want to surface and that's what members are going to care about. Now, obviously, there's exceptions, but for the most part, you want to focus on what's it like to work for your company, what are you offering more than 24 bullets on the different tasks you want on some job title, right? Joel: Well, Fred, thanks for sitting down with us today, we know you're a busy guy, we appreciate it. For our listeners who want to know more about Jobcase, where would you send them? Fred: Come to jobcase.com, be part of the community, this is a free, open access social media site. It's about empowering people and it's for everybody. 15% of our members have college degrees and either you have a question about work, how to get a promotion, how to deal with a issue, discrimination, how to get a new job, or you are somebody who can provide answers. If you want to come to a place of empathy that's trying to do positivity, social media right, and if you know that the fruits of that labor are going to be us advocating for the workers in boardrooms, not just shareholders, come be a part of our community. Joel: Always be closing and we out. Chad: We out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen, thanks for listening to my stepdad The Chad and his goofy friend, Cheese. You've been listening to The Chad & 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. #Jobcase #CEO #social #bluecollar #SkilledWorkers #jobs #LIVE

Woah! Another BIG week with BIG news. - Zip launches a new product - Indeed buys an Uber for Jobs (Syft) - AllyO receives mad stacks - LinkedIn doubles down on tracking with Drawbridge - Make Dice Techie Again? and we find time to dog Generation Z while we're at it. Enjoy and show Sovren, JobAdx and Canvas some love! (Static imported from Belgium) PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: It's on baby. Welcome to the Cross Atlantic edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman coming at you from Ghent Belgium, a city I didn't even know existed. Joining me is Chad straight out of Columbus, Indiana. Sowash. Chad: That's right. Joel: This week we got breaking news out of ZipRecruiter. Indeed continues to slide into their future. Chatbot continue to make it rain and much more meat on that bone. It's a fat free episode. I can feel the weight coming off right now. We'll be right back after this word from our friends at 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 spot 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. Chad: So dude, you are like in the place where beer reigns supreme? Joel: Yes, I am in beer heaven. I got walks outside my room making beer. Chad: I am so envious right now/ Joel: And I'm already jet lag drunk, so I'm going to be in bad shape in about five hours. But I have to do a keynote tomorrow so I can't get too messed up, which I guess should lead to our first shout out. Shout out to the E-recruitment Congress. I'm over here in Europe, congress is at Ghent this year. I'm going to be talking Google for jobs and SCO and- Chad: Man, you really pull the wool over their eyes. Keynoting. Are you shitting me? Oh my God. Joel: There are like 10 keynotes, so let's not point that a lot. I think that's how they do it here in Belgium. Everybody feels special. Chad: Nice. Well, that's not a bad thing, to make sure that your people feel special. A big shout out to Fred Goff Garrett, Jen and the rest of the Jobcase over in Cambridge/ Boston, Massachusetts. Our interview with Fred will be coming out soon, but we had a blast. Baseball, Bourbon and a bunch of fun industry conversation. Joel: Yeah. And I'm still trying to get the tootsie rolls and weed out of my nose from walking the streets of Cambridge. How does that combination... there's a tootsie roll factory right in Cambridge and everybody's getting high, awesome. Okay. Chad: Yeah. And people are smoking weed and... yeah. Okay. Shout out to Josef and the gang at Comeet. Give us some love over the pod that we had with Nathan from AIA where we asked the question, who is making the recruitment process so goddamn hard. They liked that question so much, they actually gave us props and they wrote an entire article around it, so thanks guys. Appreciate it. Joel: Can I throw out an odd shutout. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I know we have rules for shout outs now, but we don't have that many. I want to shout out to the eight Spelling Bee winners from the American Spelling Bee. Millennials have gone awry and I don't know what generation, I guess generations Z , they're even having eight winners for the fricking Spelling Bee. The world is over. Chad: Yeah. Like they couldn't have pulled out another fucking dictionary and then just went to pages and wherever their finger landed, that was the next word, right? Come on. They ran out of words. Are you kidding me? Joel: Yeah. If your test is so lame that you have eight winners, go to another language or something. Chad: Yeah, it's a little bit much. A little shout out to Jim Stroud for pitching in and doing some shreds for us. He said, "Hey man, do you care if I do some shreds, some breaking news." Bring it on man. Everybody loves a little Jim Stroud in their day. Joel: Yeah. It's like we're a band and he wanted to come over and play some guitar with us. Chad: I love it. Joel: We're going to be able to shred. Chad: Jim Loves it. Job more doctor, he enjoyed my shum rant and it seems that Tengai is still trolling us. So you gotta love it. New Product. Everybody's either going fucking crazy because, oh my god, it's a robot doing recruiting or some are saying, oh hey, it's cool, but there's really no middle ground right now. And while all that's happening, Tengai, the robot is trolling us. Joel: Such an asshole. Chad: It's hilarious. It's good stuff. Joel: And by the way, the Tengai folks, when you have a product that is one side or the other, you're probably onto something good. So keep hacking at it, don't listen to the haters. Keep doing what you're doing. Chad: Yeah. Fuck them, do your thing. Jumping into events, we talked about Boston a little bit. We're going to talk Boston again because we're coming back to Boston for Transform. This Nash Quash show, we're going to have a totally dope panel discussion, and believe it or not, Holland Dombeck, who's a listener, and also works over at Delta Airlines and in the employer branding... I think she's like one of the big brand heads over there. She's going to be joining us on the panel, so it should be a blast. Joel: Pretty sure our panels will never be described as dope by anyone. Chad: Yeah. I stole that word from Elena over at Skill Scout. I thought it sounded dope, so why not use it, right? Joel: Dope was dope before Elena was born, so I don't want to hear that bullshit. Chad: There'll be a Job Gate in Denver lurking in the shadows while Julie Presents. So in June, if you're going to be at Job Gate, look for me. Joel: By the way, Chad will be the one in the Chad and Cheese T-shirt. So look for him there. Chad: RecFest is sold out. 3000 attendees strong, sold out, and we're also doing something incredibly cool. We've cooked up something with the team over at Talent Nexus. Joel: We're not talking about it yet, are we? Chad: We're just teasing it. We've got some really cool shit that's happening, doing some videos and whatnot. But man, I can't wait. It is going to be amazing. Five fucking stages, and we're headlining actually, we're the last show to go on. Everybody's going to have a few beers in them by then, which is going to be perfect for our show. Joel: We're way more entertaining when everyone's drunk- Chad: Goddamn straight. Joel: Wow, sold out. So we can't even tell people, get that ticket now, because tickets are gone. Chad: Tickets are gone, man. And while we're there, hopefully we'll still have some crazy awesome T-shirts available. So if we are at an event and you're there, come ask us for a T-shirt, who knows, we might have one. And then while you're at it, hop over to emissary.ai because if you're not using a texting platform to recruit, you just don't. Emissary.ai. On to the topics. Joel: Let's do this. AllyO, making it rain. Chad: Yes. The end to end recruiter 45 million in series B, they're up to $64 million overall. Joel: Yeah. I think that's now officially more than Maya. Chad: Yeah, it is. Joel: They're the most funded Chatbot... although they will tell you they're an end to end recruiting solution. Chatbots are exceeding my wildest expectations for valuations. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I was thinking maybe 10 million for some of these Chatbots, but they're going to be pushing a hundred, 200 million, acquisition. [crosstalk 00:08:38] Chad: With that kind of money, the valuation on it. So Sapphire Ventures actually put out on their blog that they believe AllyO is the perfect example of what the value of real AI is and their whole focus... and this is pretty much what the rest of the industry should be talking about too, is getting rid of all these boring repetitive tasks that recruiters don't need to do. And this is what we talked about at Jobcase, we had a great question in our Q and A, this actually makes the process more human and it sounds weird, but using technology to do all these bullshit tasks gives human beings more time to actually do a better job in connecting with the humans. So I think not only investors are starting to understand this, I also believe that the talent acquisition side and obviously staffing and RPO, they get it. Joel: Yeah. Everything that we hear is that job seekers like these things, recruiters, and companies like these things. With the money that's being spent on these businesses, it's going to be a little war, it's going to be a little race for Chatbot. Chad: Supremacy. Joel: Someone high up at Chatbot texted me soon after this announcement was out with just money, money, money was the text message that I got. And it's true, there's going to be money flowing, people are going to get in this game that haven't before, companies, ATS, they're going to be building these things. It's going to be a war for chatbot's supremacy. Chad: Yeah. And don't forget they were on our death match stage in New Orleans. We talked to Sir Hill, we've been talking to these guys for a while and he expects that the company's candidate matching suite will be used by 15% of Americans in 2020. And this got to me because it was like, okay, so they're actually now starting to say candidate matching, which I think is odd because the AllyO that we know is more of like a screen to match than actual like AI matching. Like the Opening.ios or the Uncommons or the HiringSolved. It sounds like they're starting to pull some of the other vernacular, the candidate matching in, but I don't really believe that they have an algorithm that does it like in Opening.io, who obviously just one death match in Europe, by the way. Joel: Yup. Well, with $45 million in the bank now, maybe they can. Chad: I think that would be a bad decision, but who knows. I think at this point that hasn't changed. And we'll get somebody, we'll actually get a little bit of a conversation going with those guys to see what they mean by that, but I'm interpreting it as the process methodology that they have in place from a screening standpoint gives better matches. It's not a matching technology, it's a screening to match technology. So that's what I'm going to go with right out of the gate, but we should definitely follow up with the guys on that one. Joel: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they were a firing squad interview too, weren't they? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. You're putting yourself out there when you're on the firing squad. I remember these two guys, I guess that was two years ago. They were just these two geeky dudes from Google launching this little company with a, let's be honest, not a great name- Chad: Right. Joel: AllyO. And look at them now. So congrats to those guys. It's always fun to watch these little companies grow and become something significant. Chad: Yeah. And they've got a great team too, so congratulations everybody and keep kicking ass. Stay focused and let's see what happens. Joel: Yeah. And by the way, if you're looking for a job, all these Chatbots are hiring like crazy. So if you're unhappy with your job in the vendor space, fresh up that resume and send it to all the Chatbot providers because they're all hiring- Chad: Another company that's been hiring is one that we've known for a while, and they're usually on the podcast waves, is ZipRecruiter. They have a new product that they've put out. Joel: Nice transition. I like that. By the way, this is going to be pretty much breaking news by the time you listen to this for the show. I don't know exactly how to feel about this, but basically they've announced the quote unquote first of its kind solution that lets job seekers opt in to get recruited by employers across every industry in experienced level. So basically companies see talent that they like, they say, I want to talk to you, and then the job seeker decides, okay, I'm going to flip the switch as well and we're going to have a conversation. It almost sounds like a dating app. I won't call it Tinder for jobs because I hate that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I don't know if it's that significant or how cool it is, maybe I need to actually see it to be that impressed by it. Chad: It's a resume database. That's what it is. Because really the only way that you could get to candidates before was to be able to post a job, and then their magic algorithm actually did the outreach to see if individuals were interested. And then those interested individuals would obviously apply for those jobs. You couldn't go into a candidate database. So this is really a resume database on steroids to an extent, and talking about matching steroids, right? But here's the thing, it's a smart resume database, totally get it, but it's hire by Google's candidate surfacing tool. That's what it is. It's Opening.io, t's Uncommon, it's HiringSolved, it's all of those matching algorithms. Joel: Right. And according to COE and Siegel, it's the best algorithm in the world. Screw you Google. Chad: And it could be, but the thing is, in talent acquisition, staffing, RPO, the entire industry needs to understand that this tech is already available and you should be using it against your resume database today. And if you want to go further, which most should, you should also look at a candidate ID for Nurturing, who was also on death match by the way. But there's so many pieces of technology that are out there that can help you leverage the money you've already spent, the candidates you've already pulled together, the silver medalists who are probably now gold medalists that you need to connect with. This from my standpoint, I think is brilliant from Zip. Zip, great job. It's amazing. But what this should do to the rest of the industry is validate, you should be doing matching within your applicant tracking systems today. And if these other companies don't have, if the zips or the Monsters or the career voters don't have this type of matching algorithm, they're not fucking worth your time. Joel: I won't go as far as to say brilliant, but I think it's a solid move by them. I think the AI component that we've been hearing about is coming to fruition. The head of product said this was three years in the making, so there clearly focused and working on this diligently. And I also think it's significant because it is a definite maturation from the part-time hourly folks to a more enterprise full-time employee solution. So to me those are the two significant things that I got out of the new product announcement. Chad: Yeah. I totally dig it, good job guys. This again should signal to the rest of the industry that... take a look at some of the verbiage that they're using. They're not talking about this as a resume database, a better matching algorithm, but that's what it is. That's all available to us today. You should be looking for these and all the different types of tools that you're trying to leverage. Joel: While we anxiously await the IPO announcement from ZipRecruiter, let's hear a word from a JobAdX and we'll talk about Indeed and LinkedIn. JobAdX: Finding the right fit is important when you're deciding on shoes for a long day at the trade show, when you're picking the right podcast for your commute, and most importantly, when you're looking for the right candidate. With JobAdX, you can attract more relevant, engaged candidates to your jobs by harnessing the best in ad tech targeting. From predictive industry analysis and keyword, click data to premium first page placement and reducing redundant applications. JobAdX: Our candidate targeting technology ensures that you're reaching talent that is interested in working with you as you are with them. Now within ad video and multimedia, you can share your employer brand story and company culture with job seekers so they can visualize themselves in your office. All hands meeting or ax throwing team building adventure, all without navigating away from your job posting. Increased engagement makes for fewer steps between job seeker and new team member. Ready to ramp up your job advertising campaigns with the best in ad tech, visit our new website at www.jobadx.com. That's J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: Oh, I hate it when we're right. Indeed getting closer and closer to that staffing business that we've been predicting. Chad: Yeah, I don't see this as a staffing play. It's a total tech play, dude. Joel: Enlighten me, please. Chad: It's a total tech play. So what we're looking at here, which I think is pretty awesome and very smart from Indeed standpoint, it's an Uber for jobs. It's a UK play right now, but what they can do with it is pretty amazing because this is what we've been talking about for, shit, probably 18 months, maybe two years now, is can we take technology and use it instead of, in place of, a staffing agency. So I think what we're seeing is possibly the evolution in some markets of some of these smaller high volume types of jobs going away from the prospect of staffing and into an Uber like platform like this. Now this is just in the UK, and to be able to cross that pond in the US to make this work over here, it's going to take a lot of fucking work. I don't care how much data Indeed has, it's going to take a lot of work. Joel: You may have convinced me. So they're definitely a temporary agency. The PR out of this was quote, Syft is one of the best temp agencies and is making waves in the world of work. And now they go on to talk about connecting employers and job seekers across the UK with a staffing app temporary. So they're definitely at its core staffing agency, which I guess all UK employment sites or companies are. So okay, I can be convinced that this is a tech play. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Indeed has a pretty high opinion of itself technologically, so to buy someone for technology reasons is interesting. The foothold in the UK I do think is significant from these guys, but Indeed doesn't make a lot of acquisitions, at least not ones that they promote. And this was one that they really got out in front of it and promoted, so they think that it's pretty serious and important. So I guess let's continue to watch and see what comes out of it. Chad: Yeah. I think one of the reasons why you see this pitched as a temp staffing kind of play is because that's what people know, so it's easier to parallel up against that. But now people are starting to understand that Uber is really just a temp agency for drivers. I need a driver, I need it now, it's on demand, the same kind of thing. You're looking for somebody who needs to fill some shifts for next week or maybe later today. I don't want to screw with payroll and admin on this, I'll just go to Syft and if these individuals do incredibly well, I give them great reviews and I can add them to my team. I'm assuming that'll happen on the other side too, because if the talent didn't like the experience that they had, they could say fuck you and give you a one star, and that would just pretty much disengaged from any further activity. Joel: So it is basically a staffing platform. You said Uber for work, and we've seen other platforms like this, so- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Indeed will eventually, they'll grow this brand as an Uber for placements and temporary workers or grow it into the Indeed products, big picture wise. I'm trying to think through this, but yeah. Okay. I wasn't super interested in this, but you've gotten me sort of interested. Chad: Yeah, it's a total tech play dude. And we've been talking about it. I think that if staffing, especially on the high volume side evolves, this is where it's going to evolve, and I think it's very smart for Indeed to be able to pick up in an area that already has a foothold, Syft, in the UK, at least that's the way it sounds, that they have somewhat of a foothold, to be able to grow that. The hard part is being able to get that to translate over to the US. That'll be interesting to watch, when they do it and if they do it. Joel: We need to see if Syft representatives are going to be at RecFest this year. Maybe we can corner them and get an interview with them. That would be- Chad: Yeah. I'm making a note right now to see if we can hone them in. Joel: Yeah, right. If you can combine tech and staffing business in this way, that's interesting. Chad: Yeah. And something else that's interesting, LinkedIn acquires Drawbridge, which is a mobile marketing cross acquisition technology. This is interesting from my standpoint because, wow, Google and Facebook dial down their tracking on candidates and people, it looks like LinkedIn is dialing it up a notch or maybe 10. Joel: Yeah. So this is being able to track people essentially across multiple platforms- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Your iPad, your phone, your desktop, who knows what other devices they can track you across, and then target advertising based on your behavior and what you do. Obviously that's interesting on many levels, and I think the founder was Mob-ad. The founder of Mob-ad, which 10 years ago was a super hot mobile advertising platform, which then grew into other devices. What I did find interesting though is they, essentially it looks like shutdown their whole European operation because of GDPR. So I'm not sure if you believe GDPR is coming to the world, how impactful this technology is, but if you believe that it's not necessarily going to come to places like America or Asia, then this kind of technology helps boost your ad platform significantly. And let's be honest, anyone who advertises on Facebook, Google and LinkedIn knows that LinkedIn is way too expensive and also a little bit not quite up to par with those other players. Chad: Right. So from LinkedIn standpoint, I agree the GDPR piece, not to mention next year coming to California, coming to a state near you, is GDPR like types of compliance measures that you're going to have to focus on. And I think LinkedIn is already doing that. They are way too big and they are way too widespread not to already be doing that. So to be able to bring in Drawbridge and say, okay, we already have a plan in place to be able to check these boxes, I think that's where they're at. So I don't think that's an issue for LinkedIn. To be able to get the cross device attribution is an issue for LinkedIn, and you're right, if they can't provide cross device attribution now and they're charging so much, it's like you can't deliver or even start to understand what the ROI looks like, right. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So I think it's a good move. We'll see how it plays out. Joel: Yeah. And don't forget recently we talked about Chrome having a function that tells you how you're being tracked and who's tracking you. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So that could be a real negative for businesses like this. Who knows, maybe Drawbridge saw the writing on the wall and discounted the price to the point where it was a no brainer for LinkedIn. Maybe they got some good talent out of the deal as well. Chad: Oh, they saw the writing. They pulled out of the UK because of the GDPR. They had an oh fuck moment and LinkedIn's like, hey, come here. No, don't worry. We've got that figured out, here's pennies on the dollar big guy. Give me that shit and let's go. Joel: Here's a cheque, you write a number on it and we'll see if it matches ours. Chad: Nice. Joel: Someone who's not worried about such issues, let's hear from sponsor Sovren, and we'll end the show on Dice of all people. Chad: A laughable note. Sovren: Sovren AI Matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market because it acts just like a human. You decide exactly how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank and sort the best matches according to your criteria. Not only does it deliver the best matches, it tells you how and why it produce them, and offers tips to improve the results. Our engine thinks like you, so you don't have to learn how to think like the engine. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com Chad: Let's hope that Dice has actually hooked up with Sovren for this new product. Joel: Because quote from our Zeal CEO and president, it's another step demonstrating Dice's commitment to developing best in class matching algorithms to make recruiting top candidates easier. Yes, the trendsetters of Dice continue to pull out all the stops and have given us it's big style matching from 2008. We're very excited. Chad: This again I believe is going to become table stakes. We just saw the new product from Zip, which is matching, and that's what Zip's whole platform is predicated on that matching algorithm. Being able to know what good looks like, what that qualified individual looks like. The big question is, does Dice, are they developing this themselves? If they are, that's probably a mistake because there are many other matching algorithms that are out there that I'm sure are light years ahead of what these guys can do. Is it a Sovren, did they partner with a company like Opening.io or HiringSolved or Uncommon. Chad: We're talking about matching a lot this episode, but it's getting to be incredibly important that companies understand and these vendors understand that they become the brains behind the brands that are out there. They don't have to have that big brand that everybody says, hey, I want that matching software. They have to be the brains and the algorithms behind it, which I think Sovren, from my standpoint, has done an amazing job doing because nobody really knows who Sovren is. Unless you're obviously a listener of this podcast then you obviously know who they are, but they're incredibly stealthy and they're not focused really on their brand unless they can provide the brains or the parsing that your technology needs. Joel: Yeah. The press release on this pulls out all the buzz words, automation, intelligent automation, unconscious bias, which is becoming a very hot product, I guess. Chad: Yes. Joel: So that didn't surprise me at all. A quick review of what this thing does according to the release, it goes beyond traditional keyword matching by looking at job in the candidate data whereby the best match allows recruiters to sort applicants by match within five classification levels. I'm not sure if that's good or not. While many competitive services offer only one or two levels of classification. Well, there you go. There's the clarification. Chad: Wow. Joel: Learns by leveraging the input and expertise of tech recruiters, HR professionals, tech professionals and tech hiring managers, they got to include everyone there, to continuously improve the outcomes of its match machine learning algorithm. This comes straight out of Monster's acquisition of talent bed. You could have basically put a lot of those same features. Chad: Yes. And that's the problem, it's learning from people, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: And if it's learning from people the intelligent automation results in better matches and removes unconscious bias, how the fuck is it removing unconscious bias if it's actually learning biased from people? That's the big question that most of these companies are going to have to answer and defend right out of the gate. Okay, if you're learning from my people who we already know our bias because we're humans, how are you going to take the bias out? Because from what I'm reading here, all you're doing is putting bias in to the algorithm. Joel: Yup. Everyone who's doing this is grappling with this issue of, if humans are making the hiring decisions, the algorithms are going to act accordingly and there's going to be bias over time. There may not be that much initially, but over time... and Amazon I think learned this through their mistake is that bias is going to creep in as long as humans are involved, it's going to be a very challenging problem to solve. Chad: And here's an important announcement to the recruitment industry. This is becoming an arms race. Let's just get this straight, you're looking at Chatbots matching algorithms and you need these things in your core products, whether their applicant tracking systems are CRMs or RMPs, whatever they are, you need these things to be able to have that differentiator. You can see this from Dice trying to do this as a job board, Zip is trying to do this as a job board. You also need to have this in your core systems. These need to be table stakes. So if you're in town acquisition, these are the things you should be asking for. Chad: If you are a vendor and you think you can develop these things, number one, you're probably stupid. You should look at partnering with many of these different organizations that are out there to make it faster, quicker, cheaper, and then take a look at what iCIMS and Jobvite did. They said, "Hey, look, this does work. We're going to go ahead and acquire that organization." It seems like the recipe is out there and most companies don't understand, even the startups in some cases, this is an arms race. Who are you going to team up with to be able to enter this arms race? Joel: What I think is cool is the consumers in our space. The employers for the most part are becoming smarter than they used to be, if that makes sense. They're pushing vendors quicker, they're asking tougher questions, they're making them tackle these issues and challenges. And I think that's a great thing because our industry changes when customers raise their voice and ask for these things. Chad: They're listening to Chad and Cheese. That's what's happening. Joel: That's exactly right. And I have a message for recruiters as well. I think that was what your message was. Chad: Yeah. Pirate: Yee bee poo without Talroo. Chad: We're out. Joel: We're 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 checkout our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com. #Linkedn #ZipRecruiter #Indeed #AllyO #Dice #chatbots #Matching

What do you do after raising $100 million? Bring Chad & Cheese in for a lunch-and-learn with your employees, of course. What could go wrong? Enjoy this, um, Jobcase exclusive. CHIRP CHIRP?!? PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities. Chad: While visiting Jobcase HQ in Cambridge, Mass, Fred Goff, Jobcase CEO and all around smart guy, lured Joel and I into a lunch and learn session about, well about us, but mainly about the Chad and Cheese entrepreneurial story, complete with some Q&A at the end. Enjoy, after this word from Jobcase. Joel: Yo Chad, got a question for you. Chad: Okay. Joel: Say I'm looking to hire hourly workers for hard to fill jobs, where should I go? Chad: Easy, Jobcase. Joel: Okay. All right. Now let's say I've tried the job boards and all I'm getting is clicks, and what I really want are qualified candidates, actual people, where should I go? Chad: Dude, Jobcase. Joel: Now, what if I want the team who is helping me with all this sourcing to be really, really, really smart? Before you answer, keep in mind I'm talking MENSA smart, like MIT affiliated data scientists and people who are at the forefront of machine learning. Who you got? Chad: Oh my god dude, it's Jobcase. Jobcase. Look, with 100 million members in their community active and passive job seekers, a huge team of data scientists who are experts at targeting and connecting employers with the right candidates, the answer is always going to be Jobcase. Joel: I dig it. I'm picking up what you're putting down, but what if- Chad: Hard stop. Jobcase. See for yourself why the answer always comes back to Jobcase for all your hiring needs. Learn more at Jobcase.com/hire. That's Jobcase.com/hire. Joel: Jobcase. 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. Fred: Guys, why don't you start by helping me fill in your biographies, your professional biographies better than I did? Then after we hear about each of you, if you could talk about the journey on building the Chad and Cheese Show. Chad: You first. Joel: I don't know how far you want me to go back. Fred: Kindergarten. Joel: Kindergarten. Yeah, my first entrepreneurial story is I was a big Star Wars geek as a kid, and my parents wouldn't buy me the figurines. I know we're all old enough to remember these figurines. There was a golf course near our house, so I went and gathered aluminum cans in these big garbage bags, and I would recycle them to the point where I would get enough money to buy Star Wars figures. Joel: Later on in high school, during lunch breaks I would go buy gum at like a penny a piece, and I would go sell them at school for 25 cents a piece. I got in the job board space in '97, '98, around the time this guy did. We were at opposing job boards. Did that till around 2005, and I'd always been entrepreneurial, and I knew that I was at an age where it was time to kind of shit or get off the pot, if you will. Sorry, we have some high schoolers in the audience, so I'll try to keep it to shit and damn and stuff. Fred: They might have heard it before. Joel: Yeah, you're their dad. Fred: Yeah. Not all of them. Joel: Not all of them, yes. Not all the kids. SEO was big at the time. I was a marketer and I had learned that in the process, and so I started an SEO business for HR, it was called HR SEO. The goal was to help companies leverage, if I'm a company in Milwaukee, I would rank for Milwaukee jobs, et cetera. It sort of morphed into helping vendors market themselves and getting background check companies to rank for background checks, and job boards to rank. Joel: Started a blog at the time called Cheezhead, and I learned that the more I blogged, the more business I got. This was sort of my first content marketing education, where you create good content, you get people to look at it and trust you and know that you know what you're talking about, and then businesses come. Joel: Fast forward, sort of sold that business and a couple others. New Chad at the time, he was at Direct Employers. As I was blogging, he had a blog that sucked, but he had a blog, and he was like- Chad: Some of us have real jobs. Joel: We were buddies and like, let's just throw some, you know, the shit we talk about over beers, why don't we put a mic in front of us and push it out there? This was before smartphones. People listened to podcasts on the inter webs at the time. Mobile wasn't a thing. There were iPods, but it just wasn't quite a thing. They really sucked, but then I moved back to Indiana where he is, and he kept bugging me like, "Dude, we need to revive the whole podcast thing." Chad: Get off the fucking couch dude, yeah. Joel: Yeah. Put down the cheeseburgers and pick up a mic. I said, "Okay dude. Let's put a landing page out. If we get 100 people to say, 'Yes, you should do this.' And we get at least one company to write us a check, I'll commit to a year." You agree, and I was hoping to god that we wouldn't get 100 people to sign up, or that we wouldn't get someone to write us a check. Chad: That's how much he loves me. Joel: We did, we fulfilled both those goals and we launched the thing two years ago in March, and we just celebrated in March our second year anniversary of the podcast. Chad: Woo. Fred: Great. Woo. Joel: Look at us now. Chad: Yeah, who all listens? Okay, I've got like five, are you kidding me? Fred: Ask tomorrow. Chad: Yeah. Hopefully you'll all come aboard. Podcasts obviously are incredibly, I should say they're on the growth side. Joel: They're hot. Chad: Take a look at the actual hockey stick with podcasts. We started when the only way you could actually listen to them was on your computer. Joel: It was awful. Chad: Yeah, it was horrible. Joel: Yeah, a little piece of embed code from this site that produced audio. Chad: My story real quick. I was in the military for 20 years, active and then also on the civilian soldier side of the house on the reserves. Deployed a couple of times as an infantry drill sergeant down in Fort Benning, Georgia. During that time frame, in '98, I was with Monster before it was Monster. Online career center in Indianapolis, Indiana, along with eSpan, which was also in Indianapolis, Indiana. A couple of the hot job boards at the time. TMP had bought the Monster board and Online Career Center, smushed them together in January of '99. Did Superbowl ads, blimps, all that other happy horseshit, and there you go. Chad: I was actually a part of that growth, and it was fun, and it was just totally incredible to be a part of that. I left, and I went to a organization called Direct Employer's Association. I was there for 10 years as a VP. Actually that's where I met and had the first conversation with Fred, back probably like around 2009, 2010. While I was there, we built the National Labor Exchange. Joel: Did he have hair back then? By the way. Fred: Did he have hair? Big Afro. Joel: Big Afro. Chad: Yeah. It was all teased out and everything. Built the National Labor Exchange. I mean, there were a ton of things that we were doing that was really focused on workforce and economic development, which is why I love listening to the Jobcase story. Chad: From there I went to recruit military, was the CXO there during transition. Was at Randstad RPO, built their veteran hiring program. Then popped out on my own and got ahold of him and said, "Hey, you know, it'd be really cool if we could start doing something to get our name back out and start talking about just shit, and do it the way that we do." Which is a couple of guys on a bar stool talking about the 20 years of experience, and the technology, and all the bullshit that we hear but nobody talks about. Nobody talks about. Chad: If you've ever listened to an HR or TA kind of podcast, or even blog in most cases, everybody just kind of softballs, or it's all warm and fuzzy. Let's shoot it straight, and that's what we did. Within I would say six months we started to see our numbers skyrocket. Today we have a handful of listeners and sponsors. Joel: I think there are three keys to the success of our podcast. Number one is our wealth of knowledge. Yes, we're idiots, but we've been in this space for 20 years, so we actually do have some perspective and context. That's actually really tough to find. Joel: I think the second thing is that we really focused. So many blogs, podcasts, shows, it's like, I want to do a marketing blog, or a marketing podcast. It's like, to who and to what degree? There's so many like really expansive podcasts that I think part of our success was that we really focused on what we knew best, and we just did that stuff because we knew it when we talked about it. Joel: Then I think the third thing was frequency. We committed to it. We committed to a weekly show, and then opportunities came and like, well we need to feature startups, so we launched Firing Squad, which was like Shark Tank for startups. Then we said, well instead of like the weekly stuff, the news is cool, but let's dive in AI, or chatbots, or automation, or programmatic with people who really know those topics. Now we're doing like live shows and talking to companies that way. Because we churn out content, people know they're always going to get fresh stuff, they're always going to know when they go check out the page, or on iTunes or whatever, that there's going to be new stuff. Joel: I think those three things, and you can chime in on any other things that you can think of, but yeah, that has been kind of the key to the success of our podcast. Chad: Yeah, piggy backing on that. It is so hard to keep up with what's going on in our industry. You have to do a ton of research, or listen to our podcast. I mean, that's pretty much what we want. We want to be able to be the straight shooters, do a ton of research, talk to incredibly smart people, and give our opinions on what we've seen throughout the years and what's happening now. Chad: I think also my background's sales and partnership development and whatnot. It was really incredibly important not just to put a podcast out there and step away. We started partnering with organizations like TAtech, which is a conference, and then other conferences wanted to be a part of it, so we started doing live shows. We took a look at other podcasts that were out there that had similar types of formats, but what were they doing different to be successful? Could we adopt some of those and run parallel? We did that as well. We continually do that. Chad: As we build, the way that I see it is I'm a product guy too, is we build new products that the people want. We have listeners, which I pretty much see as our customers. I don't see our sponsors as our customers, it's our listeners, because if they're not there, the sponsors aren't there. What do they want? What do they want us to build? What do they want us to talk about? That's where we look at our analytics, we connect with our listeners, and we try to give the people what they want, because that's what it all comes down to. Fred: One, that's an awesome success story in two years. What sticks out to me from what you just said is we're pretty active in the entrepreneurial community. Joel: We didn't even raise $100 million. Fred: You didn't raise $100 million. Chad: Who do we get in touch with for that? Fred: I can introduce you to a guy. Chad: Yeah, I'd like that. Can we do that? Fred: I know a guy. Chad: That'd be awesome. Fred: It resonates, what you just said about building your podcast. I heard committed. I heard you were focused. I heard you're expert in your own area and content. Then you started talking about iterating and analytics. These are the exact same way so many entrepreneurs talk in, successful entrepreneurs around Kendall Square, so it really resonates with me. Fred: I'm ignorant of the space, I'm guessing I'm not the only one. I'd be curious if we stay on the business of the podcast, what's success look like for you guys with this podcast, say three, five years down the road? What's the end? Then also, what is the business model around it? Is it advertising and call outs? How's that part work? Chad: Yeah, advertising is definitely our ... Again, if we're creating content that obviously continues to grow our listenership, we're doing things right. If that happens, then companies are going to come to us. At that point, and this is really how we grew, so we had one podcast, it was a weekly podcast, that was full of sponsors. We had a bunch of other companies coming to us saying, "Take our money." It was because they wanted to be associated with something that was authentic, something that was real, something that pulled the covers back and actually talked about what the landscape looks like. We actually hit a nerve obviously. Chad: At that point we started creating all these new podcasts that Joel was talking about. We had these concepts ready to go, but we weren't going to just start throwing them out there without the prospect of funding too. Because I have a consulting company, he has a product called Ratedly that's out there, so we have to take a look at the time that we spend, where do we spend it? Joel: I think that, assuming everyone, if you haven't heard a podcast, you've heard a radio station before, so our ads are very similar to radio spots. I think part of our success was the novelty of an audio advertisement. Because most of the companies in our space, they know what Google pay per click ads are, they know what Facebook newsfeed ads are, but there's not a lot of opportunity, unless you're Casper Mattresses or ZipRecruiter- Chad: Peloton. Joel: To like think, oh this podcasting medium is a really cool place to like market our stuff. Because of the audience that we pull is so targeted, a lot of companies I think the novelty of like, oh cool, we could do a little script and record it, and put it out there as like almost a radio spot on your show. I think that was part of the appeal, that it wasn't just put a banner ad on the site, or do something you've already done. It was really unique to a lot of the companies out there. Chad: Well, and we have fun with our sponsors too, because they'll come out with new ads and then we'll make fun of the ads, or we'll make fun of their URL, you know, gocanvas.io, what the fuck is that? It's one of those things. We have fun with it. Joel: Was gocanvas.com taken? Anyway. Chad: Yeah, but they were acquired by Jobvite, so apparently that didn't hurt. Yeah, it's all about trying to, again, be real, and that's what, when you set that expectation every advertiser or sponsor that we talk to, there's one conversation I have right up front, from an expectation standpoint. We are who we are. We own the content. We say what gets on the air, how it gets on the air. You have no say over any of it, period. If you can get behind that, we want you to be a sponsor of ours. Chad: There has not been a company yet to say no, because they want to be a part of that genuineness that, to be quite frank our industry does not have. It's all softballs and fluffy bullshit, right? That's where I think we struck a nerve. Joel: I think from a job case standpoint, and he mentioned community, it's very strange to me, and I'm a marketing person as well, almost pretty much none of our advertisers are laser focused on, what are we getting from marketing on your podcast? None of them have like gocanvas.io/cheese, or something to get this white paper, or to find out more about us. There's no coupon codes that they're pimping to like how many people buy that use this code that we can track what we're getting. Joel: It almost feels like they're supporting the arts. Like we want to be on this ... Well, art can be many things to many people. Chad: Apparently. Joel: Do you agree? Chad: Finger painting. Joel: It feels like they're less concerned about, what's my ROI? More interested in, how do we partake in the community and support what these guys are doing? I think that's kind of an intriguing part of what we do. Chad: Yeah, I think that's a part of it. I think they definitely want to support something that they believe in. I mean, that's I think how we all feel when we give money to charitable organizations or what have you, or even our time. Yeah, I think the ROI in what we do is seen in many different ways for our different sponsors. Joel: Sure, and we get sponsors who say like, "Half our inbound leads are the show, like they mention the show." Maybe it's just like they don't need to do that sort of tracking because they get it sort of anecdotally internally from their sales efforts and lead funnels and all that good stuff. Fred: Let me ask you one more question on the podcast, and then we'll speculate. Joel: You also asked where we wanted to see it going, which we strategically avoided that. Fred: You strategically avoided. This stuff's going to keep getting bigger. Joel: We avoided that topic, because I don't think, we probably don't even agree on it. I don't think we've even talked about it. Chad: We have. Fred: Well I did hear that if there's a stroke URL strategy, it's Stroke Cheese, not Stroke Chad, so that's going to be another issue I guess to resolve. Joel: Yeah. Do you want to talk about that? Chad: Yeah, I mean, I'm a big growth guy, and Joel's a it ain't broke- Joel: I'm a big growth guy. Chad: He's like, it ain't broke, don't fix it, kind of guy. I mean, and the beautiful part is it's a 50/50 kind of relationship. I mean, we have to sell each other on stuff, because one vote doesn't mean that shit happens. It has to be unanimous. Joel: If we disagree, we don't do it, on either side. Chad: Yeah. I mean, we really have to make the case. From our standpoint, the word that I'm always kind of going back to is kind of legacy. What do people see us as? What do people see our podcast as? It's not just our podcast. How do we also help others really springboard them up because they have great voices as well? What is our responsibility in this space? Not to be just truth tellers, but also boost other truth tellers up. How do we do that? We argue about that stuff. We don't agree in some cases. I mean that I think we're both in genuine agreement that that's why we have people on the show, or that's why we want to be able to promote other, or maybe even create other podcasts. Joel: There is the realization, like for the young people in the audience, and there are quite a few, the bottom will fall out one day. Recessions happen, it will happen again. Chad and I have seen at least two in our lifetimes. When that happens, our industry gets hit significantly harder because when people don't hire, we can't make money, unless you have a different model. I think we're probably more conservative with what we're going toward, knowing that, okay, when the bottom falls out and the sponsorship dollars dry up, what happens to the show? We have to think about that as well when we think about growth. Agree? Chad: Yeah, I totally agree, but I also think that in a recession there's also a great conversation around keeping your brand alive, you know what I mean? Joel: Yeah. It's a little bit like everyone in Boston that was born after 2000 just thinks like championships happen all the time. Chad: Hands up. Joel: They really don't. There are dry spells where things suck, and that's the important insight as well. Chad: Just not in your lifetime. Joel: Yeah. Fred: What is one of the, if you look back at the two years, what is a podcast that's very memorable either because a guest goes horribly wrong, or because it went very viral afterwards on sharing? Can be good or bad, but what comes to mind in the last two years of podcasts? Chad: Career Builders dumpster fire that's turning into like this dumpster inferno thing, has been incredibly helpful. I mean, there's no question. The stupid shit that we hear out of Career Builder, that everybody knows is real, that has really propelled us. Not to mention Indeed making just stupid, I mean maybe it's not stupid short term monetarily for them, or revenue standpoint, but I think long term we see it as stupid to be able to make those types of decisions. People want to hear about that. When we can kind of glom onto it and give our opinion on top of it, it's been big. It's been very big. Joel: Two things that stand out for me is, so I have a journalism degree from Ball State, Muncie's in the house. Speaker 5: Woo. Chirp, chirp. Joel: Chirp, chirp motherfuckers. Chad: That is the weakest shit I think I have ever heard. Joel: Although we're- Chad: Chirp, chirp motherfuckers. Really. That's going to be the name of this pod, by the way. Joel: That's better than the Chad and Cheese Show. Although we're generally sort of idiotic, I mean we present our stuff in an idiotic way, and we drink beer, and we're just like two dudes. I've been really proud of some of the more journalistic stuff that we've done. Like if you go back, we interviewed Monster CEO Scott Gutz, and to me that was a really great interview. We interviewed Dan Finnigan, former Jobvite CEO. Chad: Colin Day. Joel: Colin Day, iCIMS. To me it's those little journalistic moments that I'm really, really proud of. I would also say that secondarily Chad and I are, we're underdogs in a way, and we're big fans of startups. People want to hear about Indeed, they want to hear about Google, they want to hear about LinkedIn. We give that to them because that's what they want, but we're really proud I think of Firing Squad, in that we bring in startups that most people have never heard of, ideas that they've never heard of before, and we give them a platform. Granted, we kill a lot of them, but we're proud that we give them a stage that they generally would not have at a trade show, or putting my ad on Facebook. Chad: Yeah. They have a chance. Put it that way. Joel: Yeah. Lifting up the underdog I think is a proud part of the show for me. Chad: Yeah. Fred: Love that. Let's jump off on that. Let's just softball down the middle. We'll do the softball fluff questions here. Let's talk about what you see happening in the talent acquisition industry. The moment we're in, or the new technology you think is really catching your eye, or what's being overplayed. Kind of just curious to see, have you kind of ruminate on that. Joel: June 13th, 2016, do you know what happened on that day? Chad: A meteor. Fred: I don't, do you? Joel: Anyone? On that day Microsoft announced the acquisition of LinkedIn, for $26.2 billion. Chad: A little bit of cash. Joel: That day really created a huge ripple or wave in our industry. It got Google's attention. It got Facebook's attention. It got Salesforce. Like everyone who didn't consider employment because it's a little bitty billion dollar industry like classifieds. Job classifieds are considered like a billion dollar industry. All started taking note of that investment and saying, "Okay, what does Microsoft know that we don't? Or what do we also know but lost an opportunity to get LinkedIn?" Joel: Shortly thereafter you had Google say, "We're going to get in this thing." In a course of a year Google launches a search API to help job boards and company career sites better search for jobs. You got Google for Jobs, which was essentially Indeed on Google, where Google actually has the job listings or descriptions. Chad: Indeed used to say they were the Google for jobs. Now Google is the Google for jobs. Joel: Yeah, now Google is the Google for jobs. Then also launch an ATS, like manage candidates, have your own career site. We saw Facebook launch a Slack competitor, we saw them launch job postings on their sort of online marketplace. To me, when you ask, where is it going? You have sort of this monolithic, we want to be a everything platform. Joel: You have Microsoft, which already owns Office 365, Teams, now LinkedIn's going to come into this thing. Google as well with G Suite. Now they're plugging in hiring tools and recruiting tools in there. I think Facebook has a lot of issues with privacy that they sort of dropped the ball on it. A world in which those two companies become like Coke and Dr. Pepper for sort of workforce management I think is where we're going. I think eventually HR is going to lose the decision to buy LinkedIn or Google. It will be IT that will decide we're a Microsoft house so we're using Microsoft employee tools, or we're a G Suite house, so we're using Google for our employment stuff. That's the world we're living in. Joel: As a reaction to that, the meteor hits, certain animals die. I think we're seeing sort of the slow death or dilution of job boards, sites that we think about historically as like Monster, Career Builder, Dice. We're also seeing, when asteroids hit, we're seeing little mammals that sort of grow up and evolve. We're seeing sort of on that end AI, automation, programmatic, companies that are small and growing into sort of evolved solutions. We're seeing companies like Jobvite and iCIMS try to be a second layer for an all-encompassing platform. They're buying companies like Canvas for Messaging and Talemetry and RolePoint, and TextRecruit for iCIMS. Joel: I guess long story short, I mean there's huge amounts of change. It's an incredibly great time to be a podcast, because you have these big companies getting in, these little companies sprouting up. Where that all shakes out no one knows, but it's a hell of a good time to talk about it. Chad: Yeah, and I think, so I'm not a big believer in that there's going to be one system for all. I just don't believe that. Whether it's Google, whether it's Microsoft, or what have you. I believe there's always going to be the different players that will be a part of the prospective layers, which is what we're seeing today. Which is crazy, because there are so many different layers that talent acquisition, they don't even use their first layer, being their applicant tracking system, let alone all these other things that they're trying to layer on. Chad: From my standpoint is we talked about our history and being there really when the big job boards, when this industry, I mean really was born, which was really cool, and it's so exciting. It's more exciting now I think than ever before because of the startups and the other players that are really focused on different areas. Chad: Like talk about empowerment. How can you actually get a site? You hear companies talk about empowerment, it's generally just bullshit, because they don't know how to make it work. When you get into a platform and you can see, and not just trying to play to the audience here, but when you can start to see the actual community, the empowerment within the actual platform itself, we're seeing that to some degree in social media, but we're also seeing a lot of the bad shit too. How can you balance that, or how can you get rid of what's happening on the bad side, versus the actual empowerment that needs to happen? Chad: Because people aren't just taking jobs for dollars, they're taking jobs for purpose, and obviously to feed their family. Don't get me wrong, but purpose has a lot to do with it, and nobody's really talk, they're talking about purpose, but they're not demonstrating purpose. Joel: I think we're sort of seeing almost the third wave of sort of the online process. The first was like, just get online. Just take your help wanted sign that's on your window and put it on the internet. Then the second phase, probably in the mid 2000s you had social media. You had MySpace, Friendster, which we remember and we're still on, and Facebook, Twitter. You had like let's just get online. Now you have people online. Joel: Now I think the third wave is sort of like we have technology that can help bring people into the technology and help them do their jobs better, find work more easily. I think where you guys are really valuable is that you've taken sort of the first wave of, there are opportunities, there are people, now how do we bring those together and help them build a community within that? Which is different than a lot of other companies kind of play that dynamic, but I think the way that you're doing it is pretty fascinating. Chad: Right. Well I'll give you a great example. There's a company that's not too far away from here, it's called RallyPoint. I'm in the military, it's a military kind of like Facebook, to an extent. There is some empowerment that's happening there, because when I go in, I'm actually going in, in most cases, to be able to help some of the individuals in the platform who are veterans answer questions around jobs. That to me is incredibly important. I don't think they have as tight a knit or control over it as they possibly could, but I think they're trying to go in the right direction. Fred: Yeah, we know them. Harvard Innovation Lab, right? Chad: Yup. Fred: It's a good team. You touched a little bit on the labor markets as well. Why don't you talk about where you see, and it might be a conversation about platforms, like Wonolo or BlueCrew or Shiftgig, or it might be a conversation about labor market development. Are we going to 1099 instead of W-2? How do you see that labor market playing out, either before or after the recession you mentioned? Joel: Yeah, I'm a pretty simple guy. I graduated from Ball State. I didn't go to MIT or Harvard or any of those schools. Fred: No chirp, chirp on that one? Joel: Chirp, chirp. I like things that make a lot of sense to me. Like when Indeed came out, that made a lot of sense. Take all these disparate systems, all these jobs that are everywhere, bring them into one system and let people easily search and go to those sites. Joel: When I look at platforms that you talk about, the PARE, the Snags, the ones you mentioned, to me it makes a lot of sense. Like if I was getting ready to graduate, or if I was in school, it just makes sense like I want to be this certain thing, let's say I want to be a cook. I want to work at Ruth's Chris, I want to work at Morton's, I want to work at whatever steakhouse. I want to cook steaks for a living, and I can be on this platform where a company can basically bid for my services based on my rating, based on my years experience, whatever. Then when I want to work, I can log in and pick and choose what steakhouse I want to work at that day. Joel: To me it just makes sense that the user is empowered to work when they want, make as much as they want. Then the employer is empowered because if I need an extra cook that night, or an extra whatever because there's a conference in town, that I can easily access this talent pool to bring them in and not have to go through like, post a job, interview them for a full time employee, get the benefits. Joel: By the way, we haven't said the word ghosting yet since we've been here, but ghosting is a huge problem with companies, where people get a job and just don't show up, or they come for a week and then like I'm kind of done with it. To me, platforms make a ton of sense. I think that's why we're seeing so much money go into that space, that people see that as well. Chad: Yeah, I think it's hard to have the conversation without talking about platforms and infrastructure, and being able to once again empower people to find those jobs, and really be in control. That's where we're going. I mean I'm sure, it's not here, it will be next year in a form in California, but who's heard of GDPR? That's all about what? Giving control of pretty much a candidate control of their own data. It's their data. It's not the employer's data. That's a huge shift, and we're seeing that shift happen. Joel: That's coming to America, by the way. Chad: That's coming next year, just starting in California. I mean, being able to do much of what we're doing today outside of platforms, platforms are just going to seep in. Technology is, it's Moore's Law. Fred: That's good. Thanks. Let me hit some questions people asked in advance, just a couple quick ones. Let's see if there's any more out here. Joel: Will we know who asked the question? Fred: I will tell you. Joel: Is this all anonymous? Fred: I will tell you their first names, and I think because everyone pings my members to hire them all the time, or my employees- Joel: Everyone point to whoever first name this is. Fred: Uri, Uri in the room? He's here. Joel: There we go. There's the balls. Yeah, this is my question. Fred: Our man Uri is on our information retrieval team, expert in machine learning and does a lot of applications of that for us. One of Uri's questions says, It seems that recruiting's become less and less humane with automated resume parsing, application filtering, automated screening, et cetera. Where does it get us? What is the affect on teams and overall company culture that we're choosing AI for recruiting?" Chad: Fred has a great slide that you need to take a look at Uri. Just from the base of this question, literally, and I use this in some of the podcasts and presentations that we do, where he's taking a look at like O*NET jobs, and then he's showing that this whole job can't be automated. That there are just aspects, tasks in this job that can be automated. Chad: I think what we should be focusing on is, oh my god, are our jobs going to go to robots? This prospect, but just not yet. Right now we can be more human because we're getting more time back. Recruiters are not doing all this stupid shit and being able to go through and make the calls, and schedule the appointments for the interviews, and just all the mundane things that keep them busy and keep bad recruiters in the system. Good recruiters want to be able to actually provide the human touch. Chad: I believe that the technology will allow us, at least this first phase will allow us to get rid of all these mundane tasks and just focus on process. That's one of my big keys, is that we are always focused on technology, technology, technology, and that's bullshit. We need to focus on process and the problem, and then start looking at technology. At that point we become more human because of technology. Joel: I'd also add that I think ironically the job search process is becoming more human thanks to technology. Now what I mean by that is 10, 15, 20 years ago, even less than that, when you submit a resume to a company online it was what's called the resume black hole. You'd submit a resume to a company, you'd never hear back from them, maybe an automated thank you for applying. It was really a cold and corporate process. Joel: Thanks to chatbots, thanks to messaging, sort of automated conversations that are happening right now, even though job seekers know, because they're told that this is a chatbot, they still like it a lot more than just giving up a resume and then never hearing from a company. Like they would much rather have some sort of communication. I think in a weird way the automation has created a more human touch to the job search process as well, which has been a good thing for companies. Chad: Yeah. Fred: Thanks. This might follow on part of that. Dylan runs our commercial sales team. Chad: Where's Dylan? Fred: Dylan [crosstalk 00:36:07]. Joel: Sales guy question. Fred: Yeah, so here's the thing about Dylan, he is an early indicator of success. He was an early employee over at Indeed. He was an early part of our sales efforts here, so I'm a little concerned he might be looking for the next thing too early on this question. Because he says, "What's the one thing employers want or need that no vendor is adequately serving today? Chad: Okay. Fred: I think that's interesting. I asked you what you see in the current marketplace, and what holes do you see that no one's really filled? Chad: That is a big key. There are so many different types of platforms that can do what we were just talking, being able to take care of those mundane pieces. The problem is they're outside of the applicant tracking system in many cases. You're sending a recruiter from here to this platform, to this platform. I think a lot of the tech is actually out there. The big issue is the integrations, and making sure that the system of record, whether that's your CRM, if that's what you want to call it, or your ATS, that they are integrating into these different platforms to ensure that you have all these efficiencies in place. Chad: That's the big key, because talent acquisition, they can't spell programmatic. They don't know how, hell Joel says they can't spell SEO. They don't know what AI is, and who gives a shit what AI is, right? Just as long as you understand the process and the problem, you can take care of that, but there has to be an integrated system that does that. I think that, Fred, it's not really something that's new. It's how we take what we already have and use it in more of an appropriate manner. Joel: I want to see a day, and I think a day will come at some point where a business owner says, "Hey Alexa, schedule me up to 10 ..." Not even that, "Alexa, find me a PHP developer nearby." The bots go in and they go source candidates that are PHP developers within 10 miles or whatever of where you are. They set up an automated process to prescreen and interview the person, that's also unbiased, by the way. There's not sort of, it's really actual skills, and we haven't talked about that. Chad: Oh, you're talking about the robots. Joel: They do the interview without the person ever doing anything. They schedule it through the process. The scheduling syncs up with the business owner's own Google Calendar or whatever. It'll get scheduled, he goes in the next week, 10 candidates come in that have already been pre-screened, sourced. All he has to do is like sort of make sure the chemistry's right, or interview them, a quick interview, and then hire them in that process. Joel: To me, I think there's a future where we just say, "I need a PHP developer by next month." The bots go do it for you, and people show up, and you hire them if they're fits or not. Chad: There are some companies that are already doing this. I think you take a look at, if you want to see who's- Joel: Well trying to do it. Chad: No, they are. Joel: No one does the full bore, "Hey Alexa." Chad: Cielo does. Joel: Who? Chad: Well not that, they don't do the, "Hey Alexa." Thing, for god sakes. Joel: All right, then you're wrong. Chad: Oh god. Anyway, if you take a look at the RPO side of the house, recruitment process outsourcing companies, one of the things that we have to understand is talent acquisition, it's their job to hire people. In RPO and staffing, it's their business, so they're really focused on efficiencies and the best ways to get from A to Z, or whatever that is. Chad: You take a look at some of those companies and some of the tech that they're putting in place, which is one of the reasons why I love to have conversations with those individuals like Adam Godson or Quincy Valencia, or what have you, at those different RPOs, because they are constantly looking at chatbots, and sourcing tech, programmatic tech, and bleeding that all together so that you do have ... Chad: I'll give you a great example. Right now Cielo has a high volume product that within 10 minutes after they do a posted job, programmatic outreach, as soon as individuals start engaging, within 10 minutes, under 10 minutes, they're already scheduled for an interview. It's boom, right? That's exactly where we need to be, and we can be today. We just have to be able to build those bridges on a more scalable platform, like an applicant tracking system. Fred: Last question from Karen on our biz dev team, account manager. Are you in the room Karen? Chad: Karen? Karen? There she is. Fred: She had asked about gigs, which you already addressed, but she also says, "How do you think the Uber and Lyft IPOs play out in the long run?" Feel free, I'll tack onto the end of that, feel free to address also how the path to public companies can impact or affect how you think companies are serving either their clients or their job seekers. Joel: I think Google is a good example. I mean, Google for 10 years was riding the pay per click train. Growth was through the roof. Everyone was doing it. It was trending incredibly well. Then people started to get more choices in how they advertised. Social media, there are all kinds of ways. Google's last quarterly report they dropped 10% because clicks are going down, the growth isn't there, the amount that they get per click is going down. Google has to figure out, where's the low hanging fruit for more money? To me they're looking at, how do we verticalize our search? How do we do apartments, and cars, and all these different things? Employment is one of those verticals that to me they're targeting to help increase revenue. Joel: Why that's relevant is I think Uber and Lyft eventually the ride sharing train is going to slow at some point. At that point they have to say, where does growth come? Where does more money come? They're looking at driverless cars, and creating those systems. I think Uber in particular is looking at, how do we create, we already have these people that are in the Uber platform that we pay for driving, how can we pay them for doing other things? Uber Eats is I think an extension of that. How do we pay them to go pick up food and deliver it? Joel: I think work is going to be another thing that they probably get into. Like, how do we just use our platform so someone who drives a car also can sign up to work at a dry cleaner, or work at a convenience store? Then we'll manage that whole process because we already have the platform to do it. I think inevitably Lyft will probably look at that space as well, because if it's successful for Uber they'll look at that. I guess that's the answer to the question as I know it. Chad: Yeah. I think it's going to be hard for those companies coming from the direction that they did. I think companies in the employment space can actually take a look at that because they already have clients, they have companies to be able to build on, and they have revenue streams that are already built in for new products that they could build much like an Uber or a Lyft. Joel: Ghosting will go down a lot when a driverless car goes to pick your worker up and bring them right to work. It's like, a car's going to be there in an hour. You get in it and come to work. I'm also really excited about Slack's IPO. I'm really intrigued about how they're going to get into the workforce. If you don't think they're interested, their ticker symbol is work, so they're coming in the space. Chad: Yeah, they're a messaging app. Not to mention, does everybody know how Slack actually came to be? Stewart Butterfield, again, he's trying to build this software company, has to create Flickr to sell it to be able to gain more money to be able to fuel the engine. That didn't work. They found some more money, started the whole thing again, and Slack came out of it. Chad: Whenever I hear Slack talk about vision, all I hear is bullshit, because that was, it was a product that they used internally. There was no vision there. Their vision was to create like this VR second life thing that Joel would be in like 24/7. From my standpoint to me it just seems incredibly overblown. I think they are a company that, much like Uber and Lyft, can demonstrate to the rest of the market where opportunity is, but I just don't see them long term, unless somebody acquires them, which won't happen because they're going to be IPO here in about two weeks. Joel: Agree with either one of us. Slack should be interesting to watch. Chad: It will be interesting to watch. Fred: It'll be interesting with that, yeah. Chad: Yeah, crash and burn. Fred: All right. Right when we're getting the good stuff, we're kind of wrapping up, we're at one o'clock. Listen, I learned a lot and I thank you. I applaud what you guys have done and the success you're having. It's fricking awesome to watch. Appreciate the nice things you said about Jobcase along the way. Anything you want to wrap up with before we call it an hour? Joel: Well every time we have a CEO come on the show and pitch their product, at the end of their pitch they never tell the audience where they can learn more about their product, so I guess I would leave it as simply, if you liked what you heard today and you want to hear more, check out ChadCheese.com, or just search the Chad and Cheese podcast on whatever podcast platform you prefer. Chad: Hit the blue subscribe button and have at it. Fred: I think you added a lot of listeners today. Thank you Chad. Thank you Joel. Joel: Thanks Fred. Chad: Thanks guys. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit ChadCheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #Jobcase #History #Boston #recruiting #Interview #LIVE #Careerbuilder #Indeed #podcasting #LinkedIn #Microsoft #Google

If you thought Google was going to be content offering its Hire product to small businesses, well, you're in for a surprise. Big G recently announced it would be supporting Enterprise customers as well. Look out LinkedIn ... and, um, every popular ATS on the planet. The boys have a chat with one of Google's early enterprise customers and the results are ear-worthy to say the least. Enjoy this Uncommon 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. Chad: Dude, we're always talking about cool new tech but it's hard for hiring companies to change. Adoptions a bitch. Joel: Yep. Chad: New tech can get them to qualified candidates so much faster. Joel: I know man, but recruiters already have the routine in place and nobody wants to jump into another platform, especially when it's expensive and also requires hours, maybe, days of training. Chad: Exactly, but that's where Uncommon's new service comes into play. Uncommon pairs expert recruiters with in-house, kick-ass technology. Joel: All right. Interesting, interesting. It sounds like Uncommon understands the problem of change. Chad: That's why they hand select veteran recruiters, train them on this kick-ass technology that has access to over 100 million active profiles. Joel: Yeah, yeah. But I bet they're expensive and I bet it requires some kind of annual commitment or contract, right? Chad: No, man. Uncommon is not an agency. They don't require a contract, any contingencies. All they do, they charge one flat fee per projects, saving, I don't know, anywhere from 50-80% on each hire versus the average agency cut. Joel: Oh, snap! Companies could save big stacks of paper. Especially if they're rapidly scaling and need hires today. Chad: Yep. All you have to do is reach out to Teg and the Uncommon crew at Uncommon.co. That's Uncommon.co. Joel: Change doesn't have to be a pain if you're using Uncommon. 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: Oh yeah. Joel: All right, all right, all right. What's up gang? We have a special treat today. We talk about Google more than most human beings on the planet, particularly hire Google for jobs and their job search API. Today we actually have a big ass company who's using Hire by Google to talk about it and tell us about her experience. Amy Smith, head of talent at Framestore out of London, England. She thinks she's too British for the show. I don't think so. Amy, how are you? Amy: Good, thank you. Joel: Thanks for joining us. Give us just a quick snapshot of you and your job and what Framestore does because Chad and I had no idea but the company is badass. So, tell us a little about Framestore. Amy: Sure. So, as you said earlier, I am the head of talent. Chad: There it is. Amy: Yeah, have to give it that emphasis. Which means that I oversee all of our recruitment, but also look at retention. So, great, we get the talented people here but how do we keep them here once we've done that? Then, in terms of Framestore, so, Framestore is a digital content studio. Which basically means, we make computer generated images for any screen you can think of. So, film screen, TV screen, mobile screen, installation VR headset, you name it. Some of the stuff we've worked on lately, which I think you're referring to, we worked on Avengers: Endgame. Chad: Oh my god. Amy: Yeah. Yeah. We made smart Hulk, amongst other things. Joel: Who cares about Endgame. She just said VR- Chad: Oh geeze. Joel: On our podcast. Chad: See one of the biggest box office hits and then Joel goes down the fucking VR rabbit hole again. Joel: Hey. Amy is super bullish on VR, I can tell. I can tell in her voice. Chad: Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, the new Spiderman movie that's coming out. I actually told you before we got on, Amy, took my daughter to see Alita: Battle Angel twice and there's so much cool graphics in that movie. I mean, when I say what you guys did, I was like, I was so stoked. I was happy that we actually didn't have Tarquin on the show and we got to talk to you instead. Amy: Good. Joel: Yeah, just wait until she creates a VR headset experience for getting a job at Framestore. Then maybe you'll pay attention to VR. Chad: Yeah. So, what's the possibility of that happening any time soon, Amy? Amy: Well. You know, we've made a VR experience where we can have you walk on the moon. Chad: Walk on the moon? Joel: That's cool. Amy: Yeah. It was something we did in collaboration with Samsung. Yeah. We put you in a rig, basically, that secretly weights you and then it simulates for you the weight you would be on the moon. Then we put you in a VR headset that shows you the moon and you bounce up and down as if you were actually walking on the moon. Chad: So, you have to do all this and then we're on a podcast to talk to you about your applicant tracking system. Jesus. Amy: Yep. I know. Joel: I feel like I'm doing everybody a disservice with this first question. Chad: So that's the big thing. Right? And it's cool because working with the Tarquin and the team over there, they were like, "Look, don't talk to us. Talk to our clients." And we were lucky enough to actually get you on the show. Chad: You are one of the very first enterprise customers for Hire by Google, and they just announced that they went from SMB and they're moving toward enterprise. How does that feel to be on the leading edge? Amy: Actually it's been awesome because Google are obviously really keen to make it work, so they've been amazingly helpful, and they've made it incredibly smooth to make the transition as a result. We sort of get the opportunity to beta to test things for them and that's really great going from our previous solution which was a long-standing solution where, getting any kind of change which was almost impossible, to now dealing with Google who is so keen to hear feedback is just brilliant. Chad: Okay, so who was that? Who did you move from? Amy: Dun dun dun, the dreaded Taleo. Chad: Awhhh. Chad: See, the interesting thing Amy, is that Taleo, back in the day, first it was called "RecruitSoft", it was known as almost the same as Google now because it really was focused on just ease of use and it's turned into this crazy piece of shit that you just can't use. Amy: Because Oracle bought it, basically it was fine until Oracle bought it. Joel: Bam. Amy pulls no punches, I love it. Chad: So there are plenty of other brands in the industry, why choose an unproven product like Hire? Cause they're still proving it, it hasn't been out that long and it's only been SMB. You guys are a relatively large company, why go with an unproven product? Joel: Trailblazers. Amy: The one thing that we did like about Taleo was that if you're familiar with it you can customize it a lot yourself. We had customized it very heavily and I was a Super User, so we could make it do most things that we wanted. So, there didn't really seem any point moving to anything else on the market at the time because where we would make wins in some aspects, we would lose in others. Amy: And the difference with Hire was that we're using at Framestore the rest of G Suite for business. So for us, it was about the fact that it synced up all of our work tools, because the big thing Taleo couldn't do for us was sync up with our meeting room calendars, so we were doing things like booking interviews twice. Once in our actual calendars and once in Taleo. Amy: All these things, and that ability to sync all our work tools together was the big sell for us. Joel: I'm curious because there are listeners out there, companies that say, "I wish I could be Google's guinea pig. Why did Google pick you? Was it because you're already using G Suite and the relationship with the IT department, do they have a special relationship with you? Why did you guys get picked?" Amy: Honestly I actually don't know. I reached out to them when Hire was first announced and said, "Look I know you're only interested in SME (SMB in the US) and you're only interested in the US at the moment, but we would be very interested in having a conversation with you when you are thinking about going larger." And then when they were, they reached back out to us. So I don't know what the decision making at Google was about that, but I guess we'd shown interest. Joel: It sounds like you just took some initiative. What a novel concept. Good for you, Amy. Good for you. Good. Joel: You're very outgoing for British people. Amy: Not the norm. Chad: So, the case study that Google's put out is entitled fifty percent uplift in hiring manager engagement, which is one of the hardest things to do. One of the reasons why many companies lose great candidates, great talent, is because the hiring managers don't move fast enough because they're not engaged in the process and or the system. So this is big, so can you explain what that actually means fifty percent uplift in hiring manager engagement? Chad: Where was the uplift? Why was the uplift? How did this all happen just by using Hire? Amy: Yeah, sure. So, essentially I could probably count on one hand, the number of hiring managers who actually looked at candidates in Taleo, and I think there are a few reasons why that changed. Amy: One was a single login. So obviously with Taleo they had to login to a separate system, with Hire they don't. But also, I just think it's that familiar interface thing because we're using the rest of the G Suite tools. Amy: When we sent out the email saying, "Here's the link." And they clicked on it, it looked like something they were familiar with and it was easy to navigate and it was straight-forward and what the fifty percent uplift looks like is without any training, we fully anticipated we were gonna have to training and without any training all of a sudden, hiring managers were pinging us about candidates that we weren't even aware they'd seen. Amy: Because they just gone in there and started looking at stuff. What is happening right now? Chad: We're just talking about something that just looks and feels familiar to them, right? So they're used to G Suite? It looks and feels familiar, so they just jumped right in without any training?- Is that what you're saying? Amy: Yep. That's what I'm saying. Amy: Worldwide as well, not just in one location. [crosstalk 00:10:49] Joel: Wow, wow, wow. How big is your team, Amy? Amy: There's about eleven of us world-wide. Chad: How many hiring managers do you serve? Amy: Oh, lots. I actually haven't counted them. Joel: The, "Uh" really tells me a lot. There's a shit ton of them, yeah. Chad: Lots. Joel: So, Amy, whether you know you're using it or not, you're instantly going up to Google for jobs and you're also using the Google Search capability, so you've talked a little bit about how you're recruiting team is benefited by the switch to Google. Joel: Can you talk at all about the candidates or quality of candidates, or even the user experience, as part of using hire? Amy: One thing I've noticed is that our jobs definitely have more visibility now. One of the problems we had with Taleo was actually the way that our instance of Taleo was set up. Our jobs were effectively hidden from Google Search, which was massively helpful to us. Amy: Fortunately with Framestore we work on Endgame, so a lot of people knew to find us. But yeah, it wasn't ideal. So, already just the fact that if you search, "Framestore jobs", they actually come up or, "visual effects jobs", they come up. Amy: That's really helpful. Then I think the other thing is that the application forum is so much easier to fill in and there's no sign-in for candidates so that whole thing of having to sign-in to your account and update your details and all of that stuff was gone. Amy: You literally just fill in some basic details and hit submit. You can do that as many or as few times as you like. I think that's hugely beneficial to candidates and then, let's not forget, with our hiring managers being all over it you're now also getting a response from us much, much more quickly than you ever were before. Chad: Gotcha. Joel: Any anecdotal evidence by candidates that user experience is so much better? Do they come in interviews and say, "Wow it was so easy to apply and use the system.", and they really enjoyed it, or not so much? Amy: Honestly we've only been using it since January so we haven't actually surveyed that and we don't have any anecdotal evidence. No one's said anything as such, but certainly no one's complained. Amy: One of the things we had with Taleo was candidates who would write to our general email address and say, "I've had problems applying.", for one reason or another. We haven't had any of that with Hire. Chad: It really doesn't make much sense that doing everything else on the web, you can buy things, you can do whatever you want, without having to quote unquote, "create an account", never really understood why we still have to create an account an applicant tracking system. Chad: But, on the integration kinda like transition, moving from Taleo to Hire by Google, how was integration? I'm sure you had a ton of candidate records, did you migrate those over into Google? Or how did that actually work? Amy: Yeah, so we did. We migrated all of our data which was seventy-seven thousand candidate profiles, and I have to confess and I hope Google don't mind me saying this, that we did have a bit of problem with our data migration because we were one of the first of this size to do it. Amy: And they learned some things along the way, but actually the good thing is that we fed back and everything that was a problem has been fixed and its now fine. So, although there were some teeny problems, they were things that could be resolved, so it wasn't a complete disaster and like I said, people have learned from the experience and they know what to do next time they have a customer as large or larger than we are. Amy: I didn't mind that so much particularly as they were so keen to get it right and so fast to respond to anything that went wrong, and our account manager Jessica is just awesome and she's been brilliant. Amy: We've had at least a weekly conversation with Jessica since we started this process so, I can't complain about it. Given that I didn't even know who my account manager at Taleo was, having a weekly call is something of a turn-up for the books. Chad: So this is a message to Taleo, get your shit together. So, as you have seventy plus thousand candidate records in your database, one of the things is that Hire has been pressing and I thought was really cool is that there is this automatic candidate surfacing piece that is in, so that when you post a job, it automatically serves up candidates in your database that could perspectively be qualified for that job. Chad: Are you seeing that? Is it working? If so, is it working pretty well, or does the algorithm need help? Amy: It's working now. When we first started the algorithm wasn't working. It was a thing between brilliant search and not brilliant search and which one it was doing and it was being weird. But it's resolved now and it works really well now. Amy: It's definitely turning up the right profiles of people. Now, whether they're people with previously dismissed rather reasons or not is a different thing, but, there's not necessarily a way the algorithm could know that. Amy: It's definitely turning up the right profiles of people for sure. Joel: Amy, you mentioned some problems with the data migration, so let's dig into some other problems or things that maybe Google Hire doesn't do yet that's on your wish-list. What would that look like? Amy: When we first rolled out, offer approvals wasn't in Hire, that's recently gone in in the last month. That's now been resolved, but that was definitely something to start with, and obviously we've now got a bit more data migration to do cause we've got to migrate in all the offers that we were doing externally for a couple of months. Joel: Amy, would you dare say that you love your current ATS? Amy: Oooh. Joel: Cause you may be the first person in history. Amy: Well, that's a lot of pressure now to say that. Amy: Can I say I like my current ATS, with a view that may be a longer relationship I might love it? Chad: I like that. Joel: You can say that, sure. Joel: I like it a lot. [crosstalk 00:16:57] Chad: I like it a lot.[crosstalk 00:16:58] Amy: Oh no, I knew that was gonna happen; mocking the accent. Reports, that's the other thing that I think still needs some work is reporting. Amy: There are reports in there and the reports that are there are great, but if you want to do something fairly custom, that involves basically downloading all of your data into an Excel spreadsheet and then interrogating it from there which is obviously not ideal when you have seventy-seven thousand candidate records. Amy: Cause that takes a while to download, but for example, one of the things we used to do in Taleo was a weekly scheduled report for certain departments that needed to know certain information about who was joining the business or- that kind of thing. Amy: And you can't do any of that kind of reporting at the moment in Hire, so, that's definitely one of the things that I think we're looking for improvements on but I know its on their road map. Chad: So, in the case study it also refers to increased candidate response time to "almost instant". Now, okay almost instant is pretty damn good. Why do you believe it has gone to almost instant? What is Google doing to be able to help you get candidates their response time is so fast? Amy: What happens is when someone applies, the hiring managers gets a notification, if they've chosen to have those on and a lot of our hiring managers have been trustingly. If I have the choice to define that for them, I probably would have switched that off for them, but actually a lot of them have chosen personally to keep that on. Amy: So they get that notification and they're like, "Oh I'm gonna click on that." And they look at their candidate and they look interesting and within about five minutes after the candidate applying, the recruiter has a notification from the hiring manager saying, "I like this person, let's meet them.". Amy: And if the recruiter says they do, then there's an email that's gone back to the candidate after no more than ten minutes saying, "Hey, just saw you apply to come in and meet us.". I mean that's phenomenal. Chad: So, the experience itself, and companies are always talking about candidate experience, makes sense because again, candidates could be customers. Many of those companies have very verbose kind of cosmetic experiences on their site. Tons of content, all that stuff. You guys don't, and Hire really doesn't. Chad: Hire is very "keep it simple" stupid and it's very bare-bones. Do you believe that's one of the reasons why candidates get through the process so quickly and do you think that, maybe, you might need to have something that has more content-rich information or do you think the "keep it simple" stupid process is really perfect for you guys? Amy: So for our experienced artists, the "keep it simple" stupid process really, really works and I just have to explain a little bit more about how the industry works. So, most people in this industry are on what we call, fixed term contracts which basically means they have a start-date and an end-date of them rather than being permanent. Amy: And the reason for that is obviously this industry is project-driven, and so it may be that for example, we run out of work for a particular kind of skill set at the end of a project, but it might also be that an individual wants to move around from project to project. We've got this show, but the studio down the road might have Superman or might have Star Wars, or might have something that they particularly really want to go and work on and so they just work on a project for us, and then they go down the road and work on a project somewhere else. Amy: It means that we have artists who move around a lot between studios, and so when they apply back to us they don't need the job description. They don't need to know what the job is, they don't even need to know how many frames there are; they know who we are, they know what the job is cause its the same job they've done at fifteen studios before us. Amy: All they want to do is get us their details quickly. For those people, Hire is perfect. I would say though at the more junior end, at our entry-level and internships and all of that stuff, I do think having more content available would be valuable to help them really understand cause I think if you're a new grad or you're at a school; you worry about what the work environment looks like and who you might be working with and- how much is gonna be expected of me and my first job and that kind of thing. Amy: I think having content that could help reassure people at that level would be hugely valuable. Joel: Add it to the wishlist, I guess for Google. Joel: Amy, so you know Google makes a lot of money when people click ads on their main search and we've speculated for a while on this show that eventually you'll be able to post on Google for jobs and have those jobs boosted in some fashion, where you as the advertiser pay for those clicks, for that added exposure. Is that something that they've talked about with you to test? Is that something that you'd like to see in the future? Amy: They haven't mentioned that as being on their road map. Although we're getting hopefully a road map update in the next couple of weeks, so it might be. Amy: But they haven't spoken about it yet, but I think definitely its something that would be of interest for particular roles. I don't think we'd do it for all of our jobs, but for certain hard-to-fill roles I think it would be really helpful to have that as something you could bolt onto a job. Joel: I'm sure they would agree with you. I'm curious, what are you using in term of job boards now? Because as you know, on Google for jobs, they'll show your listings but also people could still apply through other job sites. So, talk a little bit about what you're doing externally and how that interacts with your Google Hire experience. Amy: So here's what's interesting about our industry. People in the majority of jobs in our industry don't go on job boards. There are only really a finite number, I would say certainly less than fifty, major visual effects studios in the world, and so if you want to work in this industry you generally learn who they all are and you just go to them direct. You certainly don't go on to Monster or any of the sort of, bigger job boards out there because that's just not where these jobs are. Amy: So in that sense, we don't really post. Obviously that's different if you're talking about some of our support departments. Like every company, we have marketing and finance and HR, and all those departments and obviously those will go up on the traditional job boards. Amy: But through Hire, we already have integration with Monster, with Glassdoor, with Indeed, so you're already hitting some of the larger ones anyway in terms of profile. Amy: And obviously LinkedIn, offer you job wrapping if you've got company page, so that's happening as well. We generally find, I'm gonna touch wood now, that we don't need to post on other boards as well; that it's kind of working for us as it is. Joel: Can you see a day where you don't post on job boards at all for any positions? Amy: Maybe, although I still think for those that have support departments, like you guys said before we started, you had no idea who Framestore was, why would you? Amy: You know, if you don't work in this industry, you wouldn't necessarily. I think probably for support departments, there's still value in posting more widely than just on our own website and on Google search. Joel: But you are saying there's a chance. Amy: I think there is a chance cause I'll develop that VR experience and then everyone in the world will just try it out [crosstalk 00:24:29] Chad: I think Joel was messaging you on Facebook Messenger or something like that, that was a coordinated effort, I could feel it. Chad: So, as you were talking about before, many of the applicant tracking systems that are out there, one of the biggest issues companies have is service. They don't even know who to call, when they're having issues, for what issues, there's so many different departments; it seems very kind of fractured out there, with Google. Chad: And I know it's very early, especially with Hire and you're one of the first enterprise customers, what is your experience been? And, what would you say to pretty much any startup out there also, Hire, really being a startup at this point, to be able to focus on customer service in scalability? Amy: Our experience of Hire and their customer service has been phenomenal. As I said, Jessica, our customer account manager is available all the time. She's really fast to respond to things. Amy: We've had a weekly call with her since we started this process and she's happy to continue that for as long as we want. It's driven by us, not by her. I know that she has other clients as well, we are by no means her only customers, but she makes us feel like we are almost. She's also really good at, where she has a client who has solved a problem that we're coming up against, she might put us in touch directly with another customer which I also think is interesting. Amy: So you could actually directly share customer experience which I think, why not? That's hugely valuable and I think in terms of talking to other startups, I think that piece is a huge difference and no question has been too silly and I think that's the other thing. Amy: I think sometimes when you buy a piece of software you get your implementation team and they've been through this a million times before and they give you a timeline that's a calendar and they go, "Okay. This is it, this is what we're gonna do when, this is what we need from you when. Great let's go.". Amy: And you kind of feel like, "Oh, I've got some really dumb questions, but they seem so confident they know what they're doing, I don't wanna ask.", whereas with Jessica she was like, "Ask me anything. Doesn't matter, there's no stupid questions. We're new, you're new to us. Ask." And she's been true to that word, we've asked her some very dumb questions and she's made us feel really stupid sometimes, but that's okay. That's absolutely fine. Amy: It's been really good and like you said, I have a very good anecdote about Taleo. It was the day of our Christmas party, and Taleo went down and it said it was because we hadn't paid and I checked with our finance team and we had paid. So, I tried calling the last person who told me they were our account manager in the U.S, and couldn't get through to them. Amy: Got bounced to India, by this point I'm in the taxi on the way to our Christmas party. The person in India couldn't help me and bounced me to Ireland, where I got through to a lady who was packing up for her Christmas holidays and said, "I don't have anything to do with account services whatsoever, I have no idea why you got through to me but I feel for you and I'm gonna try and sort this out for you.". Amy: And so she helped me, and I only missed about the first hour of our Christmas party, but that's just typical of a lot of people's experiences I think. Chad: Not only are they screwing up every day in the office because they had this kind of system that is not workable, they're screwing up your Christmas party, Amy and that [crosstalk 00:28:02] Joel: Such an asshole! Chad: That's gone too far. Amy: Exactly. Too far. Joel: Way too far. Amy: So, yeah. Joel: Well Amy, I expected this to be a stamp of approval from you for Hire, but I didn't expect it to be such a stamp of approval. You're a really big fan and I'm happy that you have an ATS that you like a lot and are on the road to loving, hopefully in the near future. Chad: We'll probably reach out to you, hear in about a year or so, to see if you're still in the like/love scenario, because obviously we want to say abreast to this. Amy: Yeah, whether we've had some terrible breakup, you know? Joel: I feel good about this one, Amy. I feel good about this one. Joel: We'll be in touch again for a progress report. Until then though Amy, thanks for joining us, we know you're busy, and Chad 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. #Framestore #HirebyGoogle #Google #CloudTalentSolution #ATS #Uncommon #Adoption #Recruitment

LIVE from sunny Arizona... Ummm wait., no that's rain-soaked Arizona for the iCIMS iNFLUENCE conference. We're talking: - Google for Jobs LIVES - Indeed goes gig - Slack takes it in the nuts - again - LinkedIn has its sights on the Supreme Court against hiQ and we do an iCIMS tech and strategy round-up. You can't beat this with a Talking Stick (get it?)... Thanks to Canvas, Sovren, and JobAdX! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. James Ellis: Employer Brand isn't something you sprinkle on your recruiting like magic fairy pixie dust, to kind of make it better. It is both a craft and a calling. If that's the kind of work you want to do with your employer brand, come join me, James Ellis, at The Talent Cast. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, Boys and Girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Yeah. Chad: When's it going to rain? Joel: From the rain-soaked desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, you're listening to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast, a.k.a. The Chad and Cheese Podcast, a.k.a. Right Said Fred and Seth Rogen. I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Right Said Fred? Joel: I'm too sexy for my shirt. On this week's show, is Indeed going full gig? Slack continues to take it in the nuts, and, "Hello, Supreme Court. It's us, LinkedIn." Yep, I just dropped a Judy Bloom reference. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. 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 spa is at your side, adding automation to your work flow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine-learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off 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: And we're back. Joel: And we're back here. Recording at the iCIMS yearly analysts/VIP/ Chad: Influence. Joel: Customer event. Chad: That thing. Joel: And it just wanted to rain in Scottsdale, Arizona. One of the 30 days a year that it rains here, we get two of them. Whatever. Chad: Not good for my golf game, not to be able to get out there. Joel: But my massage game is rocking with this indoor activities. Got to give a shoutout to the masseuse that worked my tight- Chad: Jerome? Joel: Areas. Chad: His name was Jerome, right? Joel: Jerome and Bubba worked me over. Man, it's been a long couple days. Chad: It has. Joel: So, shoutouts. Chad: Yes. Joel: Big shoutout to iCIMS, obviously. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Class organization, class people, class product, always have a good time with them. You get the Jersey attitude with- Chad: Yeah. Joel: The soft touch of tech. Chad: In literally opening the kimono. Susan just said that on stage. This is where we open up the kimono- Joel: It's kind of a naughty thing. I'm surprised in the Me too era that we can say "open the kimono so freely." Chad: Susie Vitale can say whatever she wants. Joel: That's true, she can. Chad: She can do that. Big shoutout today to Matt Charney, it's his birthday. So he's turning 70. Joel: Stay young and live forever, Matt. We love you, Man. Chad: Stay young, Matt. This next one is kind of weird. Robert Half, big shoutout to the number one job board on Robert Half's new list? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Big shout, guess who it was? Joel: Was it Robert? Chad: It was Robert Half. Joel: I didn't even know you could look for jobs on Robert Half's website. Chad: All of the different, there's a huge staffing company, so they have to use all these platforms. Joel: Great. Chad: And then, to be able to rank themselves number one, on a list, I thought was fucking outstanding- Joel: Usually, you try to be a little more incognito when you do these lists and want to promote yourself, but- Chad: Yeah, you're in staffing, you just do what the fuck you want. That's just how shit works. Joel: I mean, yeah, pity the fool that reads that and doesn't make the connection that it's self-serving. Man, who else was on the list? Chad: I don't know, I just, I had to stop right there because that just blew the whole list for me. Joel: Yeah, I think somebody commented, "Hello, 2012 called. They want their job board list back," or something. Chad: As if Robert Half's job board was even on a list in 2012. Joel: No doubt. Shoutout to Colin Day. Chad: Colin, yes. Joel: iCIMS CO was kind enough to have dinner with us yesterday at the event. Always nice to see him. Success couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, so Colin, shoutout to you. Chad: Colin's a great guy. I mean, he is one of the industry leaders who, he was a recruiter, and all the way up through the ranks, I mean, they just stuck to their guns, on the applicant tracking system and what they do, and they will say that, "Hey, we haven't done it right all of these years, but we feel like we're getting it right now." That's really cool for somebody to just be, again, that transparent and talk about where they feel like they were off the rails for a minutes. Joel: Yep. I love that, this may bleed into iCIMS round-up, but I might forget, I love that his sort of opinion of new tech and where things are going is sort of a wait and see approach. He's very calculated in terms of what they do technologically, and it's really easy to get sort of caught up in AI and ML, and the automated, and programmatic and everything and just start launching stuff willy-nilly and they don't do that. His comment, I think, in the presentation was, "Look, when the clients are bringing out the pitch forks, that's usually about the time that we should building and launching products." I appreciate that approach. Chad: I don't... 100% agree on that one. Long list of quick shoutouts, just so that you guys know, you feel free on LinkedIn or Twitter to follow us or connect with us. Will Capper over at Direct Apply, Karyn Lurie at Live Hired, James Anderson at Peachy Mondays, yes, that's a company. Mike Ferlaino, I think it is, over at Zip, and a bunch of people this week, actually connected. That happens all the time. I don't give enough shoutouts to that, so I wanted to be able to say, "Feel free, we love the engagement." Joel: Absolutely. Shoutout to the Job Board Doctor. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Who's been quiet for a while. Chad: He was napping. Joel: He came out of the woodwork and enjoyed last week's commentary on Paul Forrester and some other things, so Doctor, good to have you back, shoutout to you, Brother. Chad: Shoutout to Kristi Robinson. So she is the head of TA from Esurance. Joel: Well, hello, Mrs. Robinson. Chad: Hello, Mrs. Robinson. Yeah, so she actually did a pod with us. We're going to be launching that who knows, maybe in the next month or so but really appreciate her coming on and after listening, it was hilarious, because she agreed to come on the show, and then I asked her, "Have you ever heard the show?" She just kind of looks at me. I'm like, "Okay, go listen to a show before you get on." Joel: Did you pick the show that she listened to? Chad: Yeah, I did. Joel: Oh you did, okay. Chad: Yeah, it was one of the more- Joel: It was the CareerBuilder, WWE segment that got her giggling. Chad: And so that set the bar pretty high. [crosstalk 00:07:56] So anyway, we had a blast with that. Joel: Adam at Applichat, Chad, that guy just cracks me up. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: His firing squad drop this week. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Needless to say, we have opposing opinions on his business and what he's doing, but that kid just cracks me up every time I see his picture. So, Adam, here's to you, Buddy, shoutout. Chad: Yeah. Not about what he's doing. I love what he's doing, and I love that he's a 22 year old kid, starting a company. Oh my god, it's amazing. Joel: Yeah, we just love that he's a 22 Irish kid and living in Mexico City. Chad: But I felt it was my obligation to be able to- Joel: Sure. Chad: You'll hear it on the firing squad. Joel: Father figure in full effect with Chad Sowash. Chad: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Topics, you think we're ready for topics? Joel: Let's do the show, Man. Chad: Okay. So we're going to jump into the iCIMS round-up. Joel: Sure. Chad: And as, pretty much when we got to Scottsdale, obviously it's an entirely different feel than going to New Jersey. Joel: A little bit, you think? You think? Chad: So iCIMS making that big change and they've got beautiful headquarters, right? Making that big change and then also really melding their clients with us, the quote, unquote analysts. Joel: Yep. Chad: I thought that was really cool because we had an opportunity at lunch and breakfast and at drinks to talk to their clients and not just about what they're doing, but also about the content that was happening on stage. It was more of an immersive type of experience, as opposed to how it was in last year's. Joel: Sure. Analysts get tired of hearing each other talk. It's good to have a second opinion on some of this stuff. Chad: Yep. Joel: Obviously, they survey the attendees and we'll see if they cross the stream again next year. But I would be surprised if the employers don't prefer an intimate meeting with just them as opposed to loud mouth analysts and opinionated bloggers and podcasters. Chad: Yeah, I don't know. Okay, we'll figure it out, we'll see. Joel: We'll figure it out. Chad: We'll see how it turns out next year. Joel: Yes, if we're invited back, we'll see, which his very much in limbo at the moment. Chad: Yeah, I think Susan's already said, "You're not allowed." Joel: Yeah, I'm pretty much blackballed from iCIMS events. Chad: One of the cool stats that they shared with us, and we're going to have to get deeper into this, is that it's $680 per day, per job that is open for a company. That's an average that they've been able to pull together with their clients. I thought that was awesome because when we're talking about talent acquisition, and we're talking about the actual company's bottom line, we don't talk enough about numbers. And the bottom line. This is actually a figure that, let's figure out how they came up with it, but it's a figure we can start taking to the C-suite and saying, "Hey, this is what you're losing because you're not doing X, Y, and Z." Joel: Yeah. It reminded me of the UNLEASH panel where Sainsbury, I forget his name, mentioned- Chad: Chris Wray. Joel: You're numbers guy's your best friend and if you want to get a seat at the table, bring them along. To me, this is iCIMS giving you some ammunition to go to the C-suite and get a voice in terms of dollars and cents for getting HR at the table. Chad: I think that was $147 million dollars that Chris Wray, over at Sainsbury's actually had calculated that their candidate experience could cost them that amount of money in consumer goods because they are a grocery store. Joel: Your memory is better than mine, we'll just go with that. We'll go with that. Chad: That is amazing. But again, those are the conversations we need to have. Those are business conversations. Joel: Yep. Chad: Not the cost-per-hire bullshit that a CEO doesn't know about or even care about. They need to know how much money they're losing on a daily basis from a production standpoint, what have you, and also from a consumer goods and services standpoint, from experience. Joel: Yep. Another standout highlight for me during this event was, I had talked about Bullhorn's new marketplace in last week's show and I have a strong opinion on making people pay to be on the platform. iCIMS was very quick to respond to say that theirs is free, which it hasn't always been. I think that's somewhat of a new thing but when you get someone like iCIMS, which is big, it's a huge ATS, say, "We're going to allow people in free," the only hurdle they have to clear is, they actually have to have an iCIMS client using their product. Which I think is a fair hurdle that people should have to clear. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But, to me, this says to every other ATS out there like, "Hey, we appreciate the fact that start ups can make apps on our platform. You should take some of the barriers out of your, whether it's pricing, whatever it is, to get people, enable people to put products and services on their platform is a fantastic thing." I also think, you know you and I talk about the one platform to rule them all and it's hard to think, "Oh, Google's going to be the one platform, or LinkedIn and Microsoft." But when you start talking about an ATS platform where every third party service that you use and enjoy is on that one platform, maybe changing your mind that there can be a one-stop shop, as long as the platform is robust and everyone's welcome. Chad: Yeah, I think their unified platform, so this marketplace is pretty awesome because like you'd said, they have made the only barrier to entry is that you're working with one of their clients. At that point, this becomes a awesome strategic play for M&A. You have all of these companies, whether they're start ups, not start ups, to be able to get into the iCIMS platform in a standard integration, or a prime integration. I would definitely say if you can get to the prime integration, get there because you're sharing much more data, and they can see. Especially if you're looking to get acquired but yeah, overall, I just think it's incredibly smart. Chad: From the start ups we've talked about, or we've talked to, over the years, we've always said, "Get these integrations. Get them in deep." This is an awesome example of exactly what we've been saying. They're monitoring how you are doing. Joel: Yep. Going back to my comment about Colin being very prudent in terms of what they launch, the app store enables them to see what's growing, what's successful, what clients want, and enables iCIMS, in this case, to make an acquisition as opposed to building it themselves. To me, that's a sound strategy. We saw that with TextRecurit, we saw that with Jibe, this past year. That's, to me, a smart idea and it makes allowing people to put apps on your site or on your platform for free that much smarter because it's insight into your next acquisition and your next growth strategy. Chad: Right, right. I think around the programmatic, companies don't really understand it. Which is why they go to their agencies to do this. They're not going to come out with the pitchforks like you were saying. I think this is an entirely different kind of an anomaly to their current strategy, where hey, the people will vote on it and what not. Well, they don't even know what it is and it's out there. But it can save them a shit ton of cash. I think this could be a great opportunity for them to standardize programmatic in a core platform. I think, I really think that their strategy is sound, no question. But you have to take a look at some of those anomalies that are big out there. Joel: Yeah, plus no one loves data like you do. It's one thing to hear people like us say, "This is the future." It's another thing to say, "Hey, based on our marketplace, here is the future and here's what we should get involved in." Chad: Yeah. Yeah. I do love that. Joel: I will also mention that if you're ever at the Four Seasons in Scottsdale, make sure you have the carne asada because it's amazing. Chad: It is freaking amazing. Joel: I've had some beef in my life and this stuff was very nice. Chad: The Ignite UX is another, well, UI for their user experience, is another big change. Some of the analysts weren't really big on it. I can understand from the standpoint of usability, just as long as they aren't adding clicks, just to make it more pretty. That makes more sense. I don't think they're doing that. I could be 100% wrong, but I do... back in my quote, unquote, short applicant tracking system life, when Wow employers, one of the worst names ever, came out as an ASP, one of the very first ASP applicant tracking systems, I went to a client. Thing was set up to look like Microsoft, Outlook, kind of like Microsoft products, which really were ugly as fuck. Joel: Sure. Chad: I went to a big perspective client that we're going to hopefully drop a big contract on, and they said the usability was great, the thing that really sucked was, it was hard on the eyes. To be able to have a system that you're looking at eight hours a day, or maybe even more? Joel: Sure. Chad: That actually comes into, that comes to impact the decision. I, until that point, never thought about really being in a system that long, and I think this is a great decision for them. What do you think? Joel: Yeah, I agree, updating. Let's agree, iCIMS has been around for a long time. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: I mean, they've never been trailblazers in design, to say the least. But in addition to the recruiter side of it, I think rethinking what the job seeker's experience is is even that much more important because as consumers, good design is the lowest bar that you need to clear. If the representation of companies' career sites is shit, then people's opinion of the company site, as well as your platform, is going to be shit. The redesign was welcome but I also think a necessity in this world that we live in, of everything has to be fucking Uber, everything has to be Airbnb, everything has to be cutesy and easy and linear, as Colin, I think, mentioned. Everything is, "You can only do this, and you can only do this," and then go to another page and you can only do this. But it has to look good and they've made strides to do that, which is great. Chad: Yeah, I think Ron asked a good question. The current president and interim CEO, he asked, "Who has a great experience out there that we should look at?" I mean, we all just kind of thought, "Yeah, what does look good?" Uber was one of those, Lyft was one of those, because it is fairly simple, but thinking about the actual user experience that you do have, and enjoying that experience, what platforms do you use? I'd like to hear from our listeners on that one. Joel: Yeah, and particularly mobile. I mean, more and more job search and interaction and engagement is mobile, so making sure that experience is kick ass is really important. Chad: Indeed. Joel: Indeed goes gig, maybe. Chad: Indeed goes... so we've talked about this a little bit. We kind of saw this happening with SYFT. Joel: Yep. And we've seen Indeed throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall in the past year. Which- Chad: They have to. Joel: To their credit, good. Chad: They have to and good for them. Joel: Their forefathers did not do similarly when Indeed was kicking their ass, so good for them. But yeah, spotted by our buddy Chris Russell, since June of this year, Indeed quietly launched Gigs.Indeed.com. No announcement, we assume, it's just sort of a test thing. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I don't know how he got wind of it, although he's always sticking his nose in places he shouldn't. It's by no means an Upwork, Fiverr sort of platform, or what you think of a gig site would be. It really sort of a job board with jobs that are sort of historically thought of as gig jobs. Dishwashers, real estate agents, things like that. Also, there are very few jobs on it. Literally, less than 1000. So this is either somebody throwing shit, or as Chris speculates in his post, that with the acquisition of SYFT, maybe this is part of a bigger thing that Indeed will launch at some point in terms of taking on the gig economy. We'll have to watch that, but they've definitely launched it. It's not on a weird URL or anything. I mean, it's on Indeed, so this is something to watch into the next year. Chad: We will be watching. Joel: Do you think it's a smart move? Chad: Yeah, I think it's always a smart move to take a look at the different ways people are working. Joel: Yep. Chad: Whether its helping somebody find a side hustle, or whatever it is, I think it's a good idea, especially if you're in the world of work. They have been really focused on FTE, your traditional types of jobs. I think it's smart for them to do that, especially, again, if you have a platform like SYFT, this is going to be, this is really going to be how I would assume you start to transform Indeed into something entirely different, which would be really cool. Joel: Yeah. To me, it'll be interesting. I think this is definitely somewhere that they're going to go, whether or not it's a full-on, "We make, we pay them, and you put money in to leverage workers," whether or not they go full bore into like Upwork competition, or Snag, which we've talked about before. Chad: Right. Joel: I think it's to be, will be interesting, and I think secondarily, do they keep the SYFT brand and grow it out to this new platform? Or do they just take the tech from SYFT and put it on this new gigs.indeed.com URL? Chad: Which is... it looks like it's in Beta. It has the basic search, kind of like browse functionality for specific types of like home healthcare and that kind of thing. Joel: It's bare bone shit. Chad: Yeah, it is. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It's the very start of something that might never see really the light of day. Joel: Yes, it may never be promoted but, to me, this is a place they probably should go. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's a place where, if you're looking at, "Where is Google for jobs not going to go?" It's probably competing with Upwork and Uber and things like that. From that perspective, it's probably a good strategic move to get into the gig economy. Chad: Excellent. Who do we need to hear from? Joel: Who do we need to hear from? Chad: I think we'd need to hear from Sovren. Joel: I love Sovren. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. 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: We're back. Joel: We're back. Chad: Last week on the weekly show, I actually asked, because of the whole Google coming into the space- Joel: I feel like not having beers for this show is a bad thing, but I guess it's too late at this point. Chad: They came into this space like mad men. I mean, they had three products and they were slamming them down. Joel: Triple threat. Chad: Yeah, and then, now, they pull Hire off the table, even though we hear that it was a good, if not great product. Joel: Sure, go back and listen to our interview. With- Chad: Yeah. Framestore. Joel: Yeah, Framestore loved it. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Loved it. Chad: It was a product they were really excited to be in. Joel: Yep. Chad: That won't exist next year at this time. Joel: Correct. Chad: My question was, I'm not really feeling that much from Google for jobs or anything like that. I might have spurred Chris on, I don't know, but Chris Russell then wrote a post, and he was speaking with some staffing companies and some marketing companies and what not. Joel: And Chris has his own sites, as well that he monitors. Chad: Yeah. So he had this one quote from Matt [Lozar 00:24:59], friend of the show from Haley Marketing. He said, "He can confirm that our clients for Google for Jobs, peaked in July but has decreased the past few months." Could just be cyclical at the end of the year. Joel: Or cyclical. Chad: Yeah, cyclical, cyclical. It's about three percent for traffic source. Kind of getting some inputs from organizations who have multiple clients I thought was pretty interesting. Joel: Yeah. All the job boards that pay attention to Chris and love Chris love hearing these kinds of posts. Chad: Oh yeah, I'm sure they do. Joel: For sure. However- Chad: They're not going to enjoy hearing this. Joel: Colin Day here at iCIMS gave a keynote or presentation yesterday and one of my questions to him was, "Look, last year you were super bullish on Google for Jobs. What's your opinion today? Are you still bullish on what they're doing?" His comment was, "Absolutely." Basically, what he's seeing is a slow march, Google for Jobs keeps getting bigger and bigger and more important, in terms of traffic driven. He said they'll go in, look at the top sites, and a year ago, they were number six. Then, a few months later, like, they population up to number five, and so forth. Susan Vitale, CMO, mentioned after he spoke that Google for Jobs is now the number three referral for jobs on their clients' websites. This is real data, this isn't speculative. Followed by LinkedIn and then followed by number one Indeed. Joel: But, rest assured, from the ATS perspective, an iCIMS perspective, Google is marching on this steady growth for Google for Jobs. My personal theory is that job seekers are learning to go directly to the company site because more times than not if they go to a job site, they have to go back to the company site, anyway. So the behavior of Google for Jobs users is, "I'm going to find out what the direct link to the employer is, and I'm going to click on that to apply, which wold lead to less traffic to the job boards, which is primarily, I'm guessing, who Chris Russell is talking to. Chad: Well, he did talk to a staffing company and one thing you have to remember is that early on, not a whole lot of companies got into Google for Jobs. Whether they were vendors, or staffing companies, or what have you. If there's a small pool of actual jobs, you're going to get a greater share of the traffic. Fairly simple. What's happening is, all the mark-ups and everything like that, iCIMS gets involved, they throw thousands of customers into that. I mean, if you're seeing a drop, that drop could be, that's organic. I mean, because you have more in the system. Just makes sense. Not to mention, I really believe that too many companies are looking for that silver bullet where they don't have to buy Indeed anymore. That's just not going to happen. Especially right out of the gate. Chad: Is Google for Jobs something that you should be involved in? Of course. But you also need to take a look at these other programmatic platforms and look at different ways to diversify your traffic because if you're not doing that, and you're just waiting for that one big site to come up, all you're doing is continuing the cycle of dependency where, before it was Monster, and that was the number one. It was like, "Oh, no, no, no." Then CareerBuilder, and then, "No, no, no." It's like, stop doing this to yourself. Joel: Yeah. I believe the decrease in traffic to job boards is part of Google's master plan of like no click search. Chad: Tarquin's here, we'll ask him. He won't answer. Joel: He won't answer us. The writing on the wall, in terms of if you're a job site, to say, "How do I get traffic in more, different unique ways?" You should have been doing that long before this, but that is really important now and underscored because what happens if Google starts aligning themselves with all the ATSes and saying, "How do we build one click apply right directly to the ATS?" So then I'm a job seeker, I'm on Google for Jobs, I'm looking at the entire job, and then there's like a one click button right into the ATS that I can start. I can have a Google account profile and then that sends my stuff directly to the ATS, directly to the company. At that point, the job boards are severely screwed because you're not going to the job board site, you're not applying through the job board site, you're just staying on Google, and applying directly from them. Joel: I think that's probably something that they've thought about. Chad: I don't think they have. I don't. I think that it all comes down to the best experience overall, and they're tracking the experience. So if the experience is better on a job site, then that job site's going to rank better because it's all about the experience, no matter what. The content is the content, but the experience is entirely different. I believe what job boards, job sites, whatever the fuck you want to call them, what they should be doing right now, is focusing on their experience. Not having candidates go through hoop after hoop after hoop, but making it a great experience for them, and that's how you win. Chad: I don't personally believe that theory. Joel: Just build an awesome virtual reality solution and people will flock to your job site. I also think there's going to be a lot of anti-trust issues. Chad: That's what Chris said. Joel: Google's moving beyond... this is a bigger Google story than Jobs. Chad: But this is search. Joel: Yes. Google's anti-trust headaches have mostly been pay-per-click. But it's moving into... they're screwing over Yelp, they're screwing over any weather site, rental site, reservations. No one's going to these sites anymore because Google has all the content on Google. If there's anti-trust that comes out and the courts decide that Google can't just take site's contents, and just make it available on Google without having attribution or sending people to the sites of origin, then that's not going to happen on Google for Jobs. But if they don't get anti-trust cases, yeah, we'll see what happens. But in a perfect world, I don't think Google wants you to leave Google ever. Chad: No, but I also think that their big play for defeating anti-trust in this space, was killing Google Hire. Not being that full system, that one system that rules them all, because that is a monopoly at that point. Right now they can go back and say, "You know what? We could've gone there, as a matter of fact we were, so we stopped, and we're just focusing on what we do, and what we do is search." Joel: "We're just making publicly available content-" Chad: All we're doing. Joel: "Available on our platform." Chad: That's exactly right. Joel: Yep. Chad: Talking about anti-trust is... one company that I don't think comes up enough, they're smartly, I think, dodging a lot of this, maybe because of- Joel: They have experience. Chad: They do. They do have experience. Joel: In anti-trust. Chad: Microsoft is eating Slack- Joel: Yeah. Chad: Like a fucking boa constrictor, Man. Just slowly and just choking them to death, and then they're just going to eat them whole. That's it. Joel: Yep. So, a little context here, we talked a little while ago about Microsoft teams surpassing the traffic in terms of daily users of Slack. Slack has about 12 million users, at the time when we reported it, Microsoft had surpassed them and gotten 13 million. It just came out recently that they're at the 20 million users mark- Chad: 13 million wasn't that long ago. Joel: Yeah, it wasn't that long ago, so, yeah. If I'm Slack, it's going to be really challenging. But Microsoft, anti-trust issues, I don't know. Facebook has a competing product, as well. It's not as if people don't have options in terms of messaging at work. But in terms of Slack, Man, that's a tough battle to fight because Microsoft product is integrated into companies already- Chad: Yes. Joel: It's flip a switch, now we have a Slack-like product. Certainly there'll be a good group of rebellious companies that say, "We're never going Microsoft." But in terms of growth, good God, Slack has got its work cut out for it. If the stock continues to dive, like it did this week, somebody's going to come in and grab them up at clearance prices. That could happen next year. Chad: Sit back and wait. Watch the fricking Microsoft train roll and just watch that fricking stock tank, and then wait for the clearance items, Man. Joel: That's right. My prediction of Amazon buying Slack could still happen, Folks. Chad: Could still happen. Joel: Could still happen. Chad: Excellent. So I think what we're going to do, is we're going to take a little time for JobAdX, and then we'll be right back, and we're going to talk about LinkedIn, and what is LinkedIn doing, or asking of the Supreme Court? Joel: Yikes. Chad: What the? 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 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? JobAdX: Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad: And we're back. Joel: We're back. Chad: LinkedIn asks the Supreme Courts of United States, a.k.a. SCOTUS, to look at the hiQ ruling. Joel: Yep. Chad: LinkedIn plans to ask the United States' Supreme Court to review a ruling that requires the company to allow its site to be scraped by analytics company hiQ Labs and, just for everybody else that's out there, probably about 10,000 other small companies who do the same damn thing. Not the same thing, but scraping-wise. Back to this, the Microsoft-owned social networking service disclosed its plans, in court papers filed Thursday with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who they haven't had a good track record with- Joel: Nope. Chad: LinkedIn is also asking the Ninth Circuit to pause the lawsuit until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case because they know they're going to get smacked down like a bitch by the Ninth. The battle between the two companies began in May 2017 when LinkedIn demanded that hiQ stop scraping data, and hiQ is the David in this David and Goliath. I mean, they literally... I can't imagine how many funds they've had to put out to be able to try to fight this over two years. Joel: Two questions. One is, "Does the Supreme Court take this on?" I'm not enough of a legislative nerd to know if they will. Obviously, in this country we know that the Supreme Court takes on really big issues, really big questions, and tries to answer those questions based on the Constitution. That's the first question. I tend to think that this, if it's framed as, "This is online data. What happens to it? Who has access to it?" It is a big enough question that the Supreme Court would listen to this case. The second thing is, "Will they win?" If it does go to the Supreme Court. You have to look at the make-up of the court. Very conservative, siding with Big Business. I think you could probably make that argument and in that world, I think LinkedIn probably has a pretty good chance to win the case. Joel: I do think that whatever ruling, if they take this on, is going to have widespread, very widespread implications to sites and scraping and who owns data and server traffic and how all that stuff is organized. If they take it on, it's going to be a super interesting thing to watch heading into next year. I'm kind of hoping that it does go to Supreme Court. Chad: I kind of do, too. I think it'll go the other way, and here's why. Small business. This is how small businesses actually... they're not using LinkedIn's data because that's not LinkedIn's data. That is the candidate's data. Therefore, they're actually using that data to be able to, again, whether in hiQ's standpoint predict certain things or what have you, this could perspectively negatively impact thousands of small businesses. Chad: If you go into the Supreme Court with, again, more of a conservative panel of judges, then you can really say, "Hey, look, we're talking about a Microsoft-backed company." We're talking about a huge, big corporation that is trying to stamp out not just one little guy, thousands of little guys. Joel: Yeah, I think that'll be a big question for the Supreme Court, is how does this stifle innovation? Chad: Yeah. Joel: We're looking at a world- Chad: Very much. Joel: Where a handful of tech companies are prime to basically own everything that innovation dies in that world. Chad: Take guys like SeekOut who just won our Death Match. Joel: Correct. Chad: Right? Joel: Correct. Impacts a lot of companies. Chad: Yeah. Joel: All over the place. I do hope this goes to the Supreme Court. I'll be watching it closely and then hats off to hiQ for, again, taking on this battle. Chad: Yes. Joel: I'm not sure how they're bankrolling the legal bills, but good for them for fighting this good fight. They may go down in history as a serious David to the Goliath of Microsoft and LinkedIn. Chad: If you're one of those small companies that is scraping data from LinkedIn, and you are not giving money to hiQ for this law, this court battle? Then, that's what you do right now. You give them a call, you write them a check because they are fighting for you, and your business livelihood. Joel: That's right. When you're making out the holiday cards to your VIPs and close friends this year, make sure you send hiQ a little love this holiday season in their fight against LinkedIn and Microsoft if you're in support of what they're doing. Chad: That being said, we out. Joel: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to what's it called? 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 shoutouts to people you don't even know, and yet, you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar. Blue. Nacho. Pepper jack. Swiss. 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. #LinkedIn #Microsoft #iCIMS #Indeed #GigEconomy #GoogleforJobs #Google #Slack #SCOTUS

Is it a chatbot? Is it a Facebook advertising platform? Is it bound for global domination? Well, let's not get carried away here, but Applichat brings its goods to the Firing Squad. To say Chad & Cheese are split on this one would be an understatement. Opinions clash on this episode for sure. Brought to you by Talroo. 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 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. Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put their recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Oh yeah. Firing squad is back. Mark Cuban ain't got shit on us. Chad: That's right, bitches. Joel: What's up, Chad? Chad: What's up, Cheese? Joel: I feel like it's been a while. My gun's a little rusty. Chad: It sounds like a personal problem. Joel: I did have my vasectomy recently. Chad: My shit's all oiled up and ready to go. Joel: You're all lubricated. Nice. Nice. I've got to get that going. All right, on today's Firing Squad, please welcome everybody, Apple iChat, or I mean Applichat, or I mean apply chat. We'll get to that later, but Adam Chamber from startup Applichat, I'll go with that, is here straight out of Belfast, calling in from Mexico. Adam, welcome to the show. Adam: Hola, chicos. Good to be here. Thank you. Joel: What the fuck did you just say? Adam: You don't want to know. Joel: You fecker. Adam: Fecker. Joel: I was going to ask Adam what his favorite Irish whiskey was, but from his LinkedIn profile he looks about 13 so I won't ask. Chad: Which means he's been drinking for about 10 years. Joel: That's why he's in Mexico. Adam: Daintily poised on 10 emoji cushions right now. Joel: Yeah, that's right. Baby bottle. That's what he had growing up in Belfast. No. Welcome to the show, Adam. Adam: Thank you very much. It's good to be here. I've been listening profusely. Perhaps too much. Joel: Long time listener, first time start up on the show. So Adam, give us a little bit about you, which I'm guessing is about two years of professionalism. And then Chad will describe the rules to you. And then we'll get into it. Adam: Sweet. Okay. So, hi, my name's Adam. I'm 22 years old. I left university with thinning hair and big ambitions, but I couldn't find a girlfriend and I didn't really fit in back at home. So I decided to start a business and move to Mexico. So I'm here, single, bilingual, ready to mingle with some HR podcasters. Yeah, marketing's always interested me for about 10 years since I was selling virtual football card in school. Now I'm applying the skills I've learned over that time to make recruitment less stressful, because life's too short for wasting time on boring hiring processes. Joel: You are living the gen Z dream basically. I'm a little bit jealous, got to know. All right. Adam: What gen are you? Joel: I'm a gen X-er as this chat. A little known fact about us is we are a day apart. He is one day older than me officially. Adam: Okay. Older and wiser. Joel: Yeah, so you would have been born in what year? My math is not good. Adam: 1997. Joel: '97 very nice. All right, Chad. Well for being on the firing squad, tell him what he's about to win. Chad: All right, Adam, you will have two minutes to pitch Applichat. At the end of those two minutes, you will hear the bell. Then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start to suck or they ramble or they've just taken too long Joel's going to hit here with the crickets. This is your signal to tighten up your game. At the end of Q and A you will receive one of these three. Either a big applause, get that bank account ready. Golf clap, you're getting there, but you can do much better. Or, this is what you don't want, the firing squad, hit the bricks, close up shop, pull out the drawing board because that shit needs to go home. That's the firing squad. Joel: Grab a Corona, get a siesta and reevaluate things. Chad: That's right. Are you ready? Joel: Any questions? Adam: Yeah. What sort of guns are you using? Chad: Those are M240s. Adam: I see you brought it. Okay. Joel: Do you know your guns? What, were you in the IRA or something? What? Adam: No, I was a bomb maker. Anyway, let's go. All right. Joel: You guys are so quick. All right. Are you ready to pitch your product? Adam: Absolutely. Joel: All right. In three, two... Adam: Okay, I'm on Instagram every day, know the job boards and LinkedIn combined, but finding and hiring them has been historically difficult for recruiters. Successful odds require experience and budget per targeting leads to hoards of unqualified applicants. And crucially, many recruiters aren't aware that 98% of Facebook's ad revenue comes from mobile clicks. Making people leave the platform. If you're a normal mobile optimized career site turns otherwise interested talent away to the next cut picture. This raises cost per application and it loses you revenue and opportunity on the world's largest pool of passive candidates. Adam: That's where Applichat comes in. We help high volume recruiters source automatically pre-screen and allocate candidates directly to their ATS. Our solution uses Facebook ads and Messenger to provide a seamless conversational application without disrupting your charge workflow. So I'm going to talk about the process now. Number one, we set up six creative ads which provoke the engagement, which Facebook's algorithm favors. Rather than saying we're hiring, all ads must focus on the audience's peons and tell their own story. Number two, all the clickers are introduced to the role of Messenger while simultaneously being pre-screened by the talking job ad. Adam: The chat bot messaging and follow ups makes it impossible for basically unqualified people to waste time on applying. And it sends automated follow ups to the 90% who usually don't apply immediately. If they are qualified, they can then make an application through Messenger. They can book an interview straight into recruiters' calendars or be sent to a prefilled application form. It all takes place on the same interface where people are used to informal emotional interactions such as love, joy, longing, desire, the reasons people change jobs. Adam: So our best results have seen 70 HR staff free to do more productive work, 50% drop in cost per hire, and a decrease in interview no show by 40%. And since launching six months ago I've learned a lot, and we've been working really hard for handle full of clients based in the Philippines. Joel: Thank you, Adam. Chad: Thank you, Adam. Joel: For our listeners, where can they find out more? Adam: So if you want to find out more, go to appli.chat/cheese and you could get a 1,000 phones, $1 referral bonus. Joel: And spell that for our listeners. Adam: A-P-P-L-I dot C-H-A-T forward slash cheese. Joel: Right on, Chad. Get him. Chad: Giving them the cheese. So I heard something in there around anti ghosting magic. Tell me a little bit about your anti ghosting magic. We've heard it from other chat platforms, but what makes yours different and why? Was it 40% that you were cutting on the no show rate? Tell us a little bit about that. Adam: Yeah, so because we're using Facebook Messenger, people are always in the inbox. And compared to email, it's about four times the open rate. So to decrease that interview no show we just sent every couple of days or so updates, help, and advice about the interview. So instead of kind of forgetting about it or disregarding it, people are constantly being checked in with, being made to feel that they were valued and that they should actually go to the interview. So yeah, it's quite make people happy and what actually do- Chad: So the platform is predicated on Facebook Messenger only, is that correct? Adam: Yeah. So right now it's focusing just on Facebook Messenger, just to keep things kind of hyper focused, kind of use that as a springboard in the future to expand into text. Chad: Okay. So what differentiates you from the other bigger players that do Facebook already, but they also branch out and they do SMS, they do WhatsApp, they do all these other social messaging mediums? What differentiates you and why should a company come to you over them? Adam: So the major differentiator is we run the ads for recruiters. Recruitment job ads on Facebook have the lowest click through rate of any category and 50% less than real estate. And the problem is just recruiters don't know how to do it. They don't know what the algorithm favors and they post stuff which doesn't get promoted by Facebook ahead of more engaging advertisements. So where other platforms simply make the chat bot, we take a bit of the sourcing burden on Facebook and actually manage your ad campaign for you. Chad: So I feel weird that a gen Z is relying so much on Facebook for their business. I feel like I'm talking to an old gen X-er like us. Do you feel like you're putting too much into Facebook? Don't you fear that from a demographic standpoint younger people aren't using Facebook? And is that a major threat to what you're doing? Adam: So I think younger people still definitely are using Facebook, especially Facebook Messenger. A while back at university, everyone was deleting it to focus on their studies, then they went and redownloaded it a week later. But they still have Messenger because they want to talk to their friends and they're not going to delete their friends from their lives. I'm kind of focusing in a lot on the Philippines especially, and there about 90% of internet users have Facebook. Their largest is the 25 year olds generation Z demographic. So I mean it is definitely a risk using Facebook as the center of the business and I've been told that by other people, but for now I'm kind of happy to use that as a launch pad because it's such a big opportunity and no one's really focusing on providing sourcing solutions on it either. Chad: You mentioned a lot of countries, are you targeting a certain geographical area? Is it something for everyone? Marketing wise, what's sort of the focus for you? Adam: Yeah, so the focus at the moment is the Philippines. It's kind of the candidate reason and the market reason. So Philippines, we spend more time online than any other nationality. As I said, they've got a national average age of 25 compared to 30 in the USA. Because more than 90% of the internet users are on Facebook it's a big opportunity to start streamlining the recruitment process of all the outsourcing companies in the Philippines. So the outsourcing industry is like call centers, customer service, and they're expected to need to hire a million people in the next five years. And they have a massive problem of pre-screening. So everyone wants to apply to these jobs because they're so well paying and above the national average. So I kind of see myself as coming in and raising the amount of people who are actually successful from applying there. Chad: And what percent speak Gaelic? Adam: Well I don't even speak Gaelic, so I couldn't tell you. Chad: So are you focusing on staffing companies as your core client? I mean, who is your target in the Philippines? If you're looking to go after companies, are they companies? Are they recruiters? Who's the product actually for? Who are you trying to sell to? Adam: So the industry is called BPO, which stands for business process sourcing. Essentially Americans are paying the Philippines to do some of their kind of less skilled jobs, unskilled jobs, but they just want cheaper labor. So the industry is worth several billion dollars and it's kind of on top by companies like mine which provides chat bot solutions. So it's really those BPOs. And the good thing is they're not so risk averse as I find staffing companies in the UK to be. So they've been founded by American - Australian entrepreneurs here just going into a new market and they're kind of more open to taking advantages to stuff like this. Chad: Instead of going straight to the middleman, which is the BPO, why not start hitting the RPOs in the US who aren't as risk averse as they are in the UK or the EU? Why don't you start going after the big pile of money? Because this is where the money's at. Obviously you can go to the Philippines, and obviously they've got a great penetration rate for Facebook, but is that where the money is? And is that where the longterm strategy should be for you to be able to help an already outprocessing type of strategy versus going straight to where the money is in the first place? Adam: Yeah. That's a really good point, actually. The way I saw it was it was so well received whenever I went to Philippine and companies and the EP was in the Philippines that this would be a really good kind of testing ground because there's going to be so many applicants going for these roles. So it's more of a low hanging fruit for me, the American RPO market. That is on the roadmap when the company grows a little bit. But yeah, it was just sort of a matter of low hanging fruit to be honest with you. Chad: So what about this building of ads? Obviously recruiters can't do ads. They're, not marketing professionals to try to train them up to do this. It's just not what they're built to do. And in most cases it's not why they got into the job in the first place. So from my understanding, it sounds like you actually build ads. How many ads do you build per job and how is that facilitated in Facebook? Adam: So as I said, we start out with six ads, and the point of that is to find which one works the best. So the three different combinations of images and text and then three different audiences. We would go onto their Facebook ads manager, create those, connect them to the chat bot, and then after a few days or so we'd cut the two worst performers. After another few days we cut the two worst four performers, until we have the best performing ads. And this is where it's really different from programmatic where you've maybe only just put one ad up. On Facebook you really want to be testing to find out what your audience is and what your message is. That's what we focus on. So we take off the testing burden. Joel: So these aren't job descriptions, these are actual advertisements? Adam: No, these are like stories. These are life stories. Because I mean when people are on Facebook, you need to catch their eye. I mean, people scroll on average 73 feet a day. If I see a job description saying money, location, I'm less likely to click on it. If I see you can change your life by doing X, Y, Z- Joel: So these are stories. You're not doing the traditional feed ads on Facebook, correct? Adam: Yeah, absolutely. Because they're too boring. They're very boring. Joel: And then do the ads direct people who slide up to automatically start chatting with a company? Or is it a landing page? What's the process? Adam: So it's an automated chat bot, because if you click on just apply now that's going to take you to the career site. And a little many of them are mobile optimized, especially with the big fortune 500s. And my target market with Philippines, they're disgusting. It's just a massive but it's horrible. Joel: It keeps the user in Facebook. It doesn't take them to the company website or something, which I think is traditionally what our audience thinks about when they think about advertising. This is simply like let's start a conversation now and then there's automated chat and then that person becomes an applicant at some point. Adam: Yeah. So it's like a congruency between them seeing the ad and them talking through the Messenger. It's a much more seamless experience, and before they know it they started a tentative application. Joel: Do you think you're more of an ad agency than you are a chat bot? Because it seems to me like the most important thing you do is help people advertise on Facebook and then you're just using the chat bot or the Messenger solution to then create applicants for companies. Am I off base there, or am I right? Adam: Yeah, well it's a bit of both. So we have some people who they can get leads in using the ads, especially the ones in the Philippines where everyone wants to do the job. And how many have ones who can't source it all and these help with that. The thing, it's not a traditional ad agency because we use a lot of templates. So we kind of have a monster chat bot, which is then white labeled. And then we know what sort of messages work for the ads, so they're all sort of copied and pasted and then altered a little bit. So it's scalable. I'd say it's a scalable ad agency. Joel: And what kind of results are you getting on the ads, click through rates and whatnot? Adam: Okay, so I'll give you... Pardon? Joel: Yeah, go ahead. I'm looking for numbers or what kind of click through rates and engagement you get on these ads. Adam: Okay. So one company and 152 click the ad in one month and 88% percent of them were basically qualified. So 12% of people clicked, within 30 seconds they were told you're not suitable for this role. And that'll save them a lot of time of time. Of the 152, 13% of them applied, and we actually needed four hires. So from 152 there was four hires, and the span was about $200 on ads. Joel: Excellent. Thanks. Chad: So on your website it says your ATS is filled with dead leads. Is that really the case? Adam: Well, I would say that especially in the Philippines most companies they've had applicants who they forget about because they're not right at the time. And the thing with using the Messenger chat bot is we can actually communicate with the ATS so we can tag someone in the chat bot as being not suitable right now and then give them the offer to be looked into, like an automated sequence where they can receive free stuff basically. And the rule of that is just to keep them sort of active, so to speak. Chad: So the chat bot actually allows companies to prospectively... Companies have spent hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on building a resume database that they never touch. And those leads in that database are pretty much a gold mine, probably a bigger gold mine than anywhere else because they've already paid for them. How can your platform... Or can your platform help them turn that atrophy database into a lead generation database? Adam: So today I've just been focusing on the people that I source, making them an active database. So the people from the ads continuing them on. What kind of put me off reactivating the database was there's a lot of people doing it. And also it starts that email. I'm kind of trying to focus on the chat aspect of this. I just want to be hyper focused, guys. Chad: Does it have to focus on email though? Adam: Well how else can you get them from... I mean you could.... Joel: And I'm curious sort of in light of that, retargeting, right? So you could certainly take all the emails and an ATS upload it to Facebook and then show the ad to those people. Is that something that you're doing? And then secondarily, are you putting any retargeting code on the career site so that people then see the ad when they go to Facebook after visiting and looking for jobs at a company? Adam: Yeah. So the first one, it's a little bit sketchy because they haven't opted in for that to happen. If the company has in their user agreement that they can use that for marketing, then it's okay. But I mean I didn't want to kind of break the rules so to speak without... Because the thing about using Facebook is you have to toe the line. If you don't you'll be kicked off. I kind of pride Applichat on being the most compliant agency in the space. And the second question, could you remind me what that was? Joel: So retargeting, so putting in a retargeting code on a career side and then seeing ads. Adam: Yeah, absolutely. So we put it on the application page of the form, which we are indeed linking to a form. And then they can see the ad. But usually we do it through Messenger so if they've got to a certain stage in Messenger we remind them through Messenger. Joel: So you're not putting retargeting code on the ATS or the career site, but you could do that in the future? Adam: Yeah. So we've done it with one client, so yeah, it's certainly possible. Joel: Okay. And then so keeping with Facebook, so your website says you capture a phone number and an email. Is that captured from the chat or are they asked to submit that information to you? In other words, are you capturing it sort of without them knowing just because they're connecting on Facebook or is that part of the chat process? Adam: Oh no. So it's all part of the candidate. Rather than scraping databases or reaching out to them cold on LinkedIn we give them the chance to submit that info. So what I ask is consent to our privacy policy by sending your email. And then the email address pops up as a quick reply. So that's just a little pop up. All they need to do is click a button and then they've given the email address and opted in at the same time. About 98% of people go past that step. Joel: All right. All right. I want to get in to some of the business perspective on this. You're promising a weekly video call with your customers. Is that scalable? Is that realistic? How does that work and will you keep doing it when you're super huge and famous? Adam: I'm famous now, mate. No, it's definitely not scalable. It's not scalable at all. Joel: So that will be eliminated from the website at some point? Adam: Yes, at some point. So the thing is at the start treating the clients really well so we have a good reputation. I mean there's still a lot of close contact because we're all about chatting, but I mean that will be taken out in the future. Joel: Do they like the video calls, or is that sort of bothersome for them? Adam: No. Well, the thing is not all of them take the weekly call. It's just on the table if they want to be kept up to date we do it. Because I'm just starting out I love it because it's talking to other business people in the same space and helping them. Joel: Yeah. Well, you're 22. The education is probably invaluable to you. Old people like us don't want to talk to anybody. So I'm curious, have you raised money? Are you looking to raise money? I mean, your contact us email on the website is your direct email address. So is this going to stay small? Do you want it to be big? Talk about that. Adam: Yeah. So in the next couple of years I don't plan to raise money. I want to keep it a kind of small agency where I work with contractors. We basically provide a really focused service to say 20, 30 clients. That's kind of just a personal choice for me where I want to see how the business starts to grow. And if it's something which is appealing then I'm going to take it to the next level and maybe seek a bit of funding. However, I'm thinking in two year blocks at the moment. Chad: A lifestyle game is not a bad game to play. On the website it actually says, "What you need is automation to do the heavy lifting." So what heavy lifting are you actually taking off the recruiter's shoulders? And how much time are you giving back to a recruiter in about a week? I mean, so if you take a look at just a week's time frame, how much time are you giving them back and where is it at? Adam: So for our clients, the main problem is prescreening on qualified candidates. So they would maybe get hundreds of people in each week and only 30% to 40% of them will be useful. What we do is automatically take those people out at the very early stages within one minute. So if it takes about a minute to chuck someone away and if they're doing say 100 of those a week, then that's 90 minutes a week. We have a client, they're a Chinese company, but they have an office in the Philippines and they move seven staff in the more human facing kind of different HR rules. So I guess with them we save several hours a week. The big part of it is taking automatable tasks out of recruiters' hands and letting them do stuff that they're trained to do and enjoy doing. Chad: Okay. So what's your end goal here? Are you looking at making just this a lifestyle business? You have 20 or 30 companies and maybe grow that to 50 over the next five years and just be happy with that? Or are you looking for more grander acquisition or growing into a platform? What are you looking for as a digital nomad? Adam: Okay. Yep. Well, personally for me, I would like to grow it to the point where I don't need to worry about money and I have an income that kind of makes anything possible for my lifestyle. So as you said, the nice point would be 30 to 40 clients and to be five or six contractors managing those accounts with me. Looking longterm, I would like to sell the business once it's got to that stage. So I mean I'm not thinking of put it on the stock market or trying to create a multimillion pound empire. For me, this is a lifestyle business, which I think can help a lot of people remove the stress from recruitment. Joel: So Adam, I'm going to let you out on this. Talk about pricing because one, I'm sure there's pricing for the service, but then you've got pricing for the advertisement and how much is the company spending? And I'm sure you have to go through a recommendation for how much they should spend. Is it pretty customizable per deal? Can you standardize pricing? Talk about that. Adam: Yeah, so it's a bit of both. It's $1,000 a month and then there's performance based add on. So that could range from $5 to $25 per application depending on what they're actually paying recruiters. So, for example, if a company wants to make 20 hires, maybe they need 200, 250 applicants. If we charge them $5 per applicant on top of our $1,000, and if they pay $1,000 for ads, that's $3,000 they've spent on 20 hires, which I think is a pretty good deal considering they're pan about 500 to 600. Joel: So they're paying for application, so they're not worrying about how much the advertising costs. You're just making sure that you're paying less for an applicant than they are. And Facebook is getting the difference, I guess. Adam: Yeah, pretty much. So the benchmark is what they're paying recruiters for the candidates. Joel: Okay. Adam: Yeah. Joel: So 1,000 and then 25 for every applicant that they want? Adam: I mean, it depends on the audience. So if they're targeting IT specialists, then that's going to be a higher cost per lead in terms of Facebook's charge. So then we'd raise the $5. Joel: So nurses would be more than, I don't know, servers or something? Adam: Yeah, more or less. Joel: Okay. All right. There it is. All right, Adam. We have come to the end of our Q and A and it's time for you to face the firing squad. Chad: Here it is. Adam: Yeah, that's good. Kill me. Joel: Irregardless of what kind of guns we're using, I'm going to go first. So I think that when we grade a company or give feedback or become critical, it's easy to get into the everyone should want to be super rich and famous and go IPO or be bought for $100 million. But I think that sometimes you should judge a company based on what they want to be. And the fact that you want to be this nomad going from country to country and doing what you do, not having staff, not raising money, a 30 40 company business is very doable, I would think. So I tend to come at this at critiquing you based on what you want to do. Joel: I think we're going to see a lot more businesses like this in the future, sort of these solopreneurs that get a niche. I think the fact that you're just the Philippines, I'm guessing there's not a lot of competition from there. I think Facebook is a little bit risky, but yet has more people on it than Christianity. So if you can help people figure out how to advertise on Facebook, which by the way is also Instagram and anything else Facebook owns, and then drive them into a chat experience, which becomes an application. They don't have to figure out the advertising, they don't have to post jobs. You take that process out for them. I think that's a pretty cool business. Joel: I think you probably will be acquired at some point. I think this is a really nice play for an agency to provide ads in a different way than maybe what they're doing today. I think that Facebook isn't going anywhere. I think your pricing is very competitive. You're a super young guy. My guess is this'll be something you do for five years and then you go off and do something else. But for me, are you going to be a $100 million dollar acquisition and stay in Mexico and retire? Probably not, but that's not what you're looking for. I think what you're doing is pretty cool. I think you're a pretty smart guy. I think for what you want the business to be, you're on the right track and from me you're going to get a rousing applause, man. I'm a little jealous. Adam: Come to Mexico. Joel: Let's see if Chad feels the same. Chad: Well Adam, I'd like to say we love chat bots. You listen to this show and you know we love chat bots because there are so many applications. I love the lifestyle business aspect. I love that. I also love that you understand the demos. You're in the Philippines because you know the penetration rate in the Philippines, and you also know the target of the BPOs. That to me is awesome. Here's the thing, it's kind of like a turn. It's either a lifestyle business or it's not, okay, because it's hard, not impossible, but very improbable to be both. To be able to focus and understand all the different markets, much like you do the Philippines right now, I think it's essential. Not just obviously UK staffing is pretty rigid and they're not going to pick this up, but who is and where's the money? Chad: So I think you've got a great incubator going on in the Philippines. Here's the big problem that I see. This is an easy model for companies like TMP or AIA who just bought Car, a company who does this very sort of thing and they can scale. Or Symphony, who just bought SmashFly who also has a chat bot. Or maybe even Talk Push who pretty much owns the APAC area when it comes to the chat bot slash CRM side. So I think overall, I love the idea. I love the digital nomad. The problem from my standpoint, it is too easy to replicate, which is why I'm hitting you with the guns. Joel: Ouch. Chad: I love it, man. I say you live it up as long as you can. Joel: Dude, there aren't many arousing applauses and big guns. So however you feel about that, I don't know, but it's a unique situation. How do you feel? Adam: Yeah, I feel really good. I didn't come just for positive feedback. So thank you to both of you for your input. Joel: Fair enough. Well, again, Adam, for those who want to learn more, where do they go? Adam: So go to appli.chat/cheese, A-P-P-L-I dot chat forward slash cheese. Joel: Thanks, man. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Chad. Chad: We 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.C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E.com. SFX: That is one big pile of shit. #FiringSquad #chatbots #Facebook #Advertising #Agency #Applichat

Hell hath no fury like a bunch of salespeople screwed over by a greedy company, which is why CareerBuilder's back in court. Oh, CareerBuilder, you're the gift that just keeps on giving. In addition to this news, the boys cover: - Bullhorn's new bullshit - McDonald's & Olivia's catfish move - LinkedIn's hashtag fetish - and Facebook's aversion to innovation and how it totally screws up their recruiting efforts. The upcoming holiday season obviously has Chad & Cheese feeling all warm and fuzzy. Enjoy and show Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx - those are our sponsors - lots of love. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. James Ellis: Hey, this is James Ellis from The Talent Cast podcasting. You're 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'smost 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 Joel: AWE YEAH, it's a rare, very rare late night episode of the chat. Okay. Joel: Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm feeling kind of squirrely. So break out the smoking jackets and pour yourself a cognac. I'm your cohost Joel, Don Draper, Cheeseman and I'm Chad. Let's hurry the fuck up. There's football on. So wash on this week. Show LinkedIn hashes out at companies. At least one part of bullhorns new market place is bullshit and CareerBuilder is back in court while the fire is warm and the Browns are on tonight. Kids, we'll be right back after this 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. 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: Shout out to the Browns who are bound to kick the Steelers ass tonight. I probably just jinxed it. Other shout outs, a shout out to Recruitcon. Just got back from Nashville earlier today. Spoke on SEO for Google for jobs. I was a good time. Nashville's always fun. Nash, Vegas and the house. Shout out to Recruitcon. Recruitcon that Julie's still down there. Yes, she's on. She's got a double billing on that bitch. Good for now. You warmed them up. That's awesome. A big, big shout out that you're not, you're talking about the crowd. Obviously. Chad: We're close, but not that close. Tengai wins a Nora, which is a national online recruitment recruiting board. Yeah. Anyway, way to go. Tengai. Joel: Yeah. If they can't win an innovative award, they can't win anything. Cause that fucking thing is at least innovative. Yeah. Chad: The only one in the world, a Skill Scout, big props to Skill Scout. So we, we've been looking for an opportunity to do video for a while now and just have had too much other shit going on. Joel has been able to double up on his naps, which has been awesome. But we finally found a company skill scout who we could do DIY stuff and it wouldn't look like all "Blair Witchy" and shit. It looks good. So we're happy about that. Joel: It took a company led by another Cheesman to get us on, on video. We appreciate that. And a Valentine. Chad: And a Valentine... The one who actually sent the shit to you. Joel: A Cheesman and a Valentine. Shout out to Jim Stroud, the latest entrant to our network empire podcast empire joined evergreen this week. The announcement went out. We're glad to have Jim on board and it's going to be a fun ride. Shout out to him. Chad: It is. And next up I'm going to say I'm going to give it up. It's going to happen... For all you branding fans out there. Employer Brand fans, James Ellis and The Talent Cast will be official very, very so in the Evergreen Podcast network. If you're looking for more knowledge to feed your brain subscribed to the Jim' Stroud's podcast and The Talent Cast. Joel: Saw James today. Actually I'm sure this will be something he, he needs to cover this on the podcast and I'm going to, I'm going to tease the audience. He was recently interviewed for a job at CareerBuilder. I won't give away any more than that, but he's got a nice little story to tell. Yes, very recently they're pimping that. They got a bunch of money somehow, which I don't think has been publicized, but we'll, we'll have to get on that if anyone knows anything about that. Let us know. Chad: This class action suit we're going to talk about might have something to do with that. A big shout out to Micole Garate I think it is. She tweeted listening to the Chad and cheese podcast for the first time. "This Is definitely the big mouths of HR podcast". Two things first, Nicole. Really this is your first time. Welcome. But wow, it took you so long. Second, the big mouths. I think that's good. I'm just not sure. Joel: You make her name sound like the latest McDonald's dessert. I think it's Micole and not Mc-Hole or whatever that all you'd said. And why can't we get fans with normal names? For God's sakes, man, we can't pronounce anybody's on this show. I'll take them off. Yeah. However, Michael O'Dell I can pronounce, he lives in Nashville works for Neuvoo. Apparently they have about 10 different pronunciations of the, of the word and within the company. So the fact that we mispronounced it I think is okay. But Michael took us, took me, to his favorite barbecue spot. Took me to some cool sort of historic bars in Nashville. Fed me PBR. It was a good time, Michael. Much appreciated you're a good cat. Chad: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Julie doesn't give get any props it all for buying you drinks. Are you kidding me? Joel: She didn't buy me any drinks. Chad: Okay, we'll, we'll put that one out there. Wait til she gets home. Shout out to your favorite porn star. Hung Lee for giving us some love. He gave us some lot of on Sundays, recruiting brain food. I've never seen one of his porn his porn movies, but you know, that's, you say he's good, so I'm going to go with you on that. Joel: He's hung like a, you know what? That's all I'm saying. Who else got a, that's all my shout outs. We can talk about travel unless she got more people to suck up too. Chad: Jobiak. You forgot job yak gets $2.3 million. Joel: I'm going with Joby. You like Jobiak better? Chad: Yeah, it's definitely Jobiak. They're pushing jobs to Google for jobs. I'm going to say it's Jobiak, Joel: Joby yak. Kodiak job yak. Yeah, they got 2.3 mill, right? Chad: Yeah, 2.3 mill. It's, it's, it's interesting now for what I'm hearing. They're having issues with conversions. Joel: Oh shit. Chad: Conversions can be a bitch and hopefully that 2.3 million can help you get there. My big question is we really haven't heard much from any of the programmatic players around Google for jobs and what I would like to hear from them and we'll reach out, but you guys reach out to us is Google for jobs dying? Are we seeing still the type of traffic that we did six months ago, a year ago? I want to hear about that because we're not seeing much happening from the platform itself. Joel: Yeah, I don't think it's dying. There's an SEO presentation, PowerPoint being passed around and it, it's, it's not about the jobs component, but it's about Google's entire no click search like strategy to compete with everybody and jobs is just a piece of that. But right from the tool, the SEO tools that have been sort of highlighted in this presentation the jobs component is growing quite nicely. So although we may not hear stuff anecdotally or from providers for that at least one tool in the SEO community is showing that there's a, there's a good amount of growth in the jobs vertical for Google. So I don't think it's going anywhere. I know, you know, we've talked to Sovren Robert Ruff about how much easier it is to sort of handle jobs, parse jobs and serve them up much more so than profiles, which was part of the (Google) Hire issues and closing that down. Joel: But yeah, I don't, I don't think hires going anywhere. I think they're going to monetize it next year. They're going to start paper click shit. Like I don't, I don't think it's going anywhere at all. Chad: So you don't feel like jobs is going anywhere. Okay. I don't. Okay. Okay. We definitely like again to hear from some of our programmatic friends out there to give us some, some data on some of that. Just the, the peaks and valleys of what's going on. And imagine that a programmatic friend, Julie Ho from JobAdX your limited edition Chad and Cheese t-shirt is in the mail. Just want to make sure you knew that.. Joel: Big fan of the show. Julie Ho. Man, awesome... Events. We're almost done with the year. Thank God. Are we going to have a moratorium on talking about 2020 until 2020? Chad: Possibly. Joel: Okay, so ICIMS this next week. Chad: Going to Arizona for ICIMs... GOLF... Goat Yoga! And then we'll learn more about in players. You know, one of our big players in our space, you know, you might've heard of them ICIMS. So it's going to be a two day affair. Learning what's going on with them against the market and why we're there. We can actually ask them about Google for jobs as well. Joel: We, we totally can. And they enjoy talking about that. Colin's a big fan of what Google's doing. And by the way, that reminded me of another shoutout, a Symphony Talent care package came from me. You got that or not? But yeah. Yet another Yeti that I can add to the collection and a pair of AirPods, which is fucking fat. Joel: So ICIMS better up the game when we go down there with the swag because symphony talent just upped the game big time. Chad: Airpods and they matched ICIMS Yeti, Yeti for Yeti. So Symphony Talent now, not just spending money on things like I don't know SmashFly. They're spending things on a The Chad and Cheese. Joel: Pretty sure they didn't just get that for us. Pretty sure everyone that's important, you know, and we are important got a Yeti and a pair of AirPods so we're not that special, but it's still really nice swag. Yeah, I'll take it from stuff that you can't drink. This is a pretty good you know, second second act. At least you can put drinks in the Yeti to keep cold for your football watching pleasure. Chad: Yes, it needs to have that walking drink. Going to Dallas for TalentNet and what are we gonna be doing in Dallas? I shit, I don't even know what, what's, where are we at? What's, what's going on in Dallas? Joel: Big D. Yup. We're doing a talent net live Craig Fisher's 10th year putting this shit on. It's a Dallas and really Texas staple. We're gonna be doing our show. We're going to be doing our naughty or our world famous naughty or nice list. And we're trying to, we're working on a guest a to come up with us. That's, that's been a challenge so far, but I'm pretty confident that we can get a, a competent female, hopefully counter voice to balance our naughty to her. Nice. Chad: That would be nice. So if you're in Dallas area and you'd like to get on the chat and cheese podcast and feel free to go ahead and hit us on the website or tweet us or something like that, Joel: We could probably get you into the conference. I don't want to speak for Craig, but if you're willing to come on the show and you don't have tickets to the event we could probably pull some strings. Chad: I'm going to say we can probably do that. Chad: Topics! Chad: Topics! It's time for the NEWS... Joel: Careerbuilder. The long arm of the law coming down on Careerbuilder once again in the news. Chad: Yes. So from the Cook County Record, a, a new class accident action lawsuit has accused CareerBuilder for underpaying its sales representatives, allegedly stripping those workers of commissions they had earned. And one of the things you won't don't want to do to your school staff is you don't want to fuck with their commissions. But that is one big pile of shit. Benjamin D foggers filed suit and potentially hundreds if not thousands of additional plaintiffs who worked at Careerbuilder may join in that suit. So if you were in Careerbuilder during the timeframe in which the fucking occurred, guess what kids? Join the class action suit. Joel: You gettin' paid, you don't get paid yet. I had heard rumors of this a while ago about commissions being screwed up. I think this was during the whole whatever, poncho Vila or whoever the hell it was. Chad: El Chapo. Joel: Yeah. I think this was during the whole Chapo thing that commissions are being cut and slashed. I had at least one ex career builder messaged me and said everything in this is entirely true and it's why so many of us left when it happened. So yeah, I think, I think CareerBuilder's probably gonna have to write a check for this one. And if it's thousands it's going to be a pretty big check. Chad: Yeah. So according to the complaint, CareerBuilder instituted a new compensation plan. This is, this is classic. Under the new comp plan, the compensation was allegedly ratcheted down then commissions were removed entirely. Joel: Ouch. I love also that they're adding interest and attorney fees to the lawsuit just to add a little salt to the the wound there that they're about Chad: What do pissed off sales people do? Joel: File lawsuits apparently. Chad: ...Or They don't sell and, or they leave. And I've had a handful of 'em as individuals actually reach out and say exactly. It is a matter of fact, one of them sent me this this story. I didn't even know it. I got this story and then had a handful of others actually ping me and say, boom, here's the link. It's true. So it's, man, this is not a good thing. You don't, you don't screw your people. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. There's also some, some good stuff out there on Glassdoor and indeed and other places where, you know, reviews are put. So it hurts your recruiting and retention for future employees that you might recruit. Chad: Well, so you were talking about some of that money that they might've had that there were talking about with James a will, if you scrape this much money off the backs of your salespeople, you can come up with cash. But I mean right now CareerBuilder's kind of like that Titanic, it's going down while the executives find the lifeboats and everybody else just, you know, they just stay on and fucking drown. It's, it's horrible. Joel: Yeah. I think they're, I think they're just playing with house money at this point. I mean, obviously a little bumps in the road where they have to pay out stuff sucks for them, but I think they've made their money. And then some, and now they're just milking it. Don't you think? Chad: Now they're just making people's lives horrible. Sure. I mean that's what it is. I mean, people around have no idea what's going on. No, not putting money back into the product and looking to sell. And from my understanding, some of my sources say that the background screening company is very close to being sold. So there is even more money. So it's, you know, again, it's like the Titanic and my, my question to the people that are still on the Titanic, the fuck are you doing on the Titanic? Joel: They're counting, they're shuffling the chairs because it's busy work. At least they have Text Kernel to fall back Chad: Yeah. And Broadbean. Right, right. But I mean, so just a couple of years ago were they have like 25,000 clients and I mean that's dwindled down to like a 2-3000 or something like that. I mean, it's just, it's, I don't understand where this ends and how they can get guys like James Ellis in for an actual interview. Why? Why do they even need it and why are they doing WWE sponsors? I don't get it... Joel: But at least you like their new ads though. So they have that. Chad: No, I liked, I liked them better than any of their other ads they've done in the last couple of years. That's what I said. Joel: We can talking about McDonald's then for God's sakes, we can beat that dead. Chad: Yeah. I don't think the horse is dead. If the horse was dead, people wouldn't be publishing more, more news about them. Joel: No, you're probably right. Chad: Yeah. That's the thing that's getting me, and one of the reasons why I personally wanted to talk about this is because this feels like Second Life back in the day where everybody was so excited about it. But then remember TMP did a job fair and that shit just didn't work. Joel: All right. Let's unwrap this a little bit. Are you comparing the fate of Second Life to the future fate of voice, search? Chad: No wait a minute, I thought you, I thought you were still bolstering second life. Joel: I'm on it right now. You believe voice assistants are a thing, right? Like that's not gonna. That's not gonna be Second Life part two, right? Chad: Yeah. Well I think Second Life is still a thing though too. The problem was back when they did it, the bandwidth was horrible. The processing was horrible. It was too early for its time. It might be good for job fairs one day, right? But it's just not, it's not ready. The problem I have with this product, which we've talked about before, the experience for the job seeker sucks. And if that job seeker go figure is a customer of McDonald's and they have a shitty experience, it's just another black hole that they end up in. So I just don't get it. Why does McDonald's rush to market with something that sucks from an experience standpoint? Joel: But I think there's one valid thing here is to note that bloggers and journalists are historically lazy and they see a story, right? McDonald's, Alexa apply for a job and it's like, I'm gonna write about that. And they just look at the press release, they copy and paste the quotes that are from the press release. And they don't actually like go to Alexa. Yeah, they don't do it. I have an Alexa if I don't have Alexa, I get that. But like they don't actually test it. It's just like something to drive traffic and clicks to their blog or website. So there is a, there's a level of laziness with this story to say like, Oh, it's cool, let's write about it, but actually not do journalism or reporting and see if it actually works. I wish some more of that would happen, but yeah, that's part of the reason why this thing is still in the news and it will continue to be someone else, some other company will do it and they'll do a press release around that restaurant or whatever has done it and more press will come out. But ultimately if the shit doesn't work, it'll just, it'll just die out. This is obviously going to be a topic in our Naughty and Nice podcast. I'm going to guess this is on your naughty list with a bullet. Chad: And ONLY because I was so excited to be able to actually have something that was voice activated that was a good experience. Right? Or at least a good shot of an experience. This is total shit. Joel: You feel torched by this. You're your it feel. Chad: Yea, I feel, I feel bait and switched. So you know, if you're McDonald's, this is bullshit. If you're Paradox and Olivia, this is total utter bullshit. They both knew better. Mel. McDonald's probably didn't know as much better they should have, but the vendor paradox, they should have known better. Joel: You feel like you've got catfish, don't you? You feel like you were lured in and then you know, she wasn't what you expected when you saw the Tinder post. Chad: That's exactly right. It was a very, was a great look in maybe a little air brushing that was happening, but still, yeah. Got catfish on this one. Joel: Well, let's take a break. I'm going to check the score on the Browns game and we'll come back and talk about indeed and bullhorns. New marketplace. Sovren: SOVREN parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting SOVREN.com. That's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human Sovren software. So human. You'll want to take it to dinner. Joel: We've got a seven Oh score Browns in the lead, Baker Mayfield one yard rush, rushing, touchdown. Just an update. It's early. Totally jinxing yourself at this point. Yeah, I can't wait when this airs in the finals like 49 to seven, there'll be good. It'll be fine. So a tweet from cofounder of indeed Paul Forrester. Got you all been out of shape this week. What happened? Chad: Yeah. Well let's set this up real quick. So Paul Forrester really is the guy, him and Ronny who made Indeed, you know, what it is today. I mean, the culture of indeed is very, very much that of what Paul wanted it to be. And this tweet really it exemplifies. Joel: You think it symbolizes the DNA of the company. Chad: And who Paul Forrester is. So anyway, Paul puts out a tweet talking about 15 years ago, the indeed space and now the new indeed space in Austin apparently outdoes Facebook in Google. So he's all excited about it and one of the people that's not excited and I, I know many companies that are not excited because they feel like they were taken for a ride with the trojan horse. One of the, one of the people actually said, it's really too bad you're focusing more on your offices and not on the customers that got you there. Chad: That's what we talk about all the time. Indeed. Really bait and switch where they give away that that free heroin drip of organic search traffic and then they just yank right out from underneath you that they did that with job boards. They did that with staffing companies. This is a great opportunity I think for Paul to say, you know, that's really interesting and Paul hasn't been with the company for a very long time. I think it's easy for Paul to say "That's very interesting. I'm not involved with ops, so you know, I, why don't we bring those guys in. I'm sure customer service can help you out" but Paul doesn't do that. Paul says, interesting point. Although in fact job-seekers are more important in that journey. Pretty much telling the company that paid to lift them up to create what they created today. Fuck you. That that symbolizes Paul Forrester. He's always been an asshole. And the culture of this organization is, guess what too fucking bad. You don't like it? Go somewhere else. Joel: You know Paul's in Bora Bora with a fruity drink with an umbrella and could care less about your opinion. Okay. Chad: It's a different story. This is another reason, another reason why he should, he should be nice to people for God's sake. Joel: That's true. He has no other reason, you know? Right. It's, it's the two he has maybe. Chad: He can at least after the billion dollars that they made while he's drinking fruity drinks on the beach, be a nice guy instead of an asshole anymore. Joel: At least he's not cat fishing people from what we understand. That's a good thing by the way. Ronnie is a beautiful human being. We can agree on that. Chad: Yes, we can definitely. We can definitely. He, they, they definitely have the, the yin and yang gone but also from a source and this continues to kind of build up. Here's a quote from one of one of the vendors who is dealing directly with hiring companies. "Indeed Told one of our bigger customers that to get their jobs sponsored, it would be 10K per month", which means in this context that they're actually starting to pull organic traffic away from hiring companies now and they're starting to make them pay exactly what they did with job boards, exactly what they did with staffing companies. Guess what? If you're a hiring company and you don't have an exit plan, sorry about ya. Joel: I think it's fair to say that indeed is quickly not a job search engine anymore. It's just a pay to play job site. I stopped short of saying job board, but basically that's what they've become. Chad: No, it's a job board with performance ads. I mean seriously, because all of the jobs are on with this, this two pane kind of thing that they have going on. They went from being a job search engine that drove much like Google drove traffic to your site and to keeping all the traffic on their site. Joel: I'm just saying that the general spirit of a job of a search engine is not to like make people pay to be in the search engine. Yeah, exactly. And they're getting there. They're so, they're getting so far away from that that I'm just, they're just a job board at this point to me. Nope, they are. They are a job board. A Bullhorn is in the news. We haven't talked about them for a while. So I got an email from Doug Haslam their senior manager of media relations. Bullhorn has today launched the new Bullhorn marketplace. You can learn more at bullhorn.com/marketplace. The marketplace is an ecosystem of a hundred plus pre-integrated partners to help customers, blah, blah, blah, choose solutions, yada, yada, yada. You love marketplaces. I love, I love marketplaces. With one exception. I emailed Doug back and said, Hey dude, can you, can you send me some like pricing info on the marketplace and do you, do you care to take a guess at what his comment was? Joel: Or his answer was? Chad: I don't want to give you that answer because you'll publish it. Joel: Pretty well. Maybe that's what he, what he said internally, but the, his official answer was quote just spoke with the alliances team to confirm we are keeping fee structures confidential at this time, so I'm afraid I can't disclose any of that. And my reply was, "Boo", I don't understand why that can't be transparent. I don't know why. Just the whole fee structure needs to die. I mean S I don't know who needs to do it, but they're charging so much like to be in the, to be in the marketplace. Oh, okay. I just think the spirit of the began with the spirit spirit of marketplaces should be like, you know, put in, put your app in the marketplace. The marketplace will decide which solutions in the marketplace are best for the market and users will be able to use services in the marketplace based on sort of a, a meritocracy, you know, Apple to be in the Apple app store. Joel: You know, it's a $99 fee for the year and it's free to put in an app. I mean they obviously review it and they have terms of service and things you have to sorta jump through, but there's no real costs. Android is free, you know, Slack is free. I don't know why, you know, our business has this sort of hurdle. I understand ATS is have after make money and these places have to make money, but it just seems intricate and it just seems a, it just seems bad that we make companies and startups that could be in marketplaces like this basically not be able to do it because of the fee structure and I, and the fact that the fact that you have fee structure sucks and then the fact that it's not transparent I think is doubly, doubly shitty. Chad: Yeah, I agree with the transparency, but I don't agree with as the whole app piece because the, the apps are not as complex as what's going on in the actual marketplace for the applicant tracking systems. So if you're building an app for Android or iOS, right, that it's not easy, don't get me wrong, but it is, it is much, much less complex than trying to get your platform integrated into something like a core system, like an applicant tracking system. Not to mention it's not a one way road where only the developer of the app is going to have to do the updates, right? You have to have somebody in the core system also doing that, in managing that. So therefore there are resources and costs that go along with it. So, I mean, I think it's the big difference is scale of what you're talking about. I love the idea of having a marketplace where you can do that, but what you're talking about scale wise is entirely different. I mean, maybe, Joel: Maybe it sounds like a topic for ICIMS next week. Yeah. Help us understand why the F the fee structure exists as it does in our world and in others? Chad: I think they'll probably say read Chad's transcript and that's it. Joel: I doubt they'll say that. I just think it's because we love startups and we firing squad and you know, we love them. And I think too many of the ones that I talk to, it's like we can't afford to be on multiple marketplaces, let alone, you know, one or two. And I just think it, it, it hinders innovation. It stifles, you know, startups and I just think that sucks. Chad: Either way I totally get we what you're saying. I'd love to see it easier for startups to be able to engage and not have to pay. But yeah, I mean it's the, I think it's the resource piece really. Joel: Ah, let's take another break and check scores. And we'll talk about two fun topics. Tiktok and LinkedIn. Tiktok. 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 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, employ with JobAdX. Joel: It seems like yesterday we were talking about TikTok at 500 million users. Yes. Will they just surpassed a billion users, they're the fastest to, to get to a billion ever. Yeah. The average time spent by user per day is like 56 minutes. The, the 16 to 24 age group. It's like by far the most pop, not by far, but it's the most popular app among, that age group. So obviously when that happens, what does Facebook do? Chad: They want to try to mimic exactly what's happening to and or steal. So they tried with lasso first and that fucking bombed. Joel: Well, yeah, so the Lasso bombed but putting stories within Instagram has worked basically, and they've, they've effectively stifled Snapchat's growth because of that. So they're essentially doing the same with TikTok, Techcrunch and variety caught wind of a new tool called reels, like a movie reel. Joel: And I think this was in South America somewhere like it wouldn't get sort of discovered. Right. so these are 15 second videos. You're gonna just feed, set them to music borrow audio, do duets with other, it's take two users. Chad: It's tick tock, Joel: It's tick tock. So I was trying to figure out an angle from employment on this and I got to think if I'm a, if I'm a shit hot developer and all I see coming out of Facebook is copycat stuff that's mimicking successful technologies and services, why the fuck would I go to Facebook, right? Like if the innovation there is dead, I'm going to go somewhere where it lives and breathes and that for the last five, 10 years has not been Facebook. Chad: Yes. And I want to make a point real quick. I remember for many months every time I brought TikTok up, you laughed at me, but you love tick-tock. I find that fascinating. It is fascinating. Yeah. Not to mention if you're on it, like Gary V is like everywhere, but he is like all over TikTok. Every time I turn on a TikTok, I just turned it on. He was on TikTok. I think it's a great marketing machine to be quite Frank for individuals even like us. I mean we should we get a TikTok, we should possibly talk to skill scout about that. But yeah, I think if you're looking to try to work at an organization that doesn't feel like the corporate or the man, it's not going to be Facebook today. It's definitely not with all the shit that's going on with Zuckerberg and, and, and Cheryl tell him bullshit lies and Congress. I mean, it's just like, that's not where you want to be. I'm not sure that Google is where you want to be either right there. They're just so corporate these smaller types of startups that I think that's the ticket right now. Joel: Yeah. you know, I think Twitter's trying to balance the line of not falling into Facebook land. Yes. And I think part of the whole, we're not going to take political ads as part of that because I think that's gotta be a minefield for Facebook recruiting when they get questions about why do you allow political ads that aren't totally true? And in fact, sometimes absolute lies to be on the platform. So Twitter, I think Twitter is trying to stay cool, but they're balancing out that fact that Trump's presidency is based on his tweets. Yeah. But then also staying away from the political minefield that is advertising. But yeah, it's a weird, it's gotta be a weird world for recruiting for these big companies because I think hot shit developers are running as far away from them as possible. Chad: Yeah, there are many people that are running away from them as far as possible. Yeah. I'll just go with that. Joel: But where they're certainly running to is LinkedIn cause it's so cool. So LinkedIn, this is my list. This is my little pet story for the week. So LinkedIn launched hashtags for companies or basically the company pages, right? So if you're a company, you know, whatever for if you're an ATS, you can put hashtag ATS hashtag recruiting software, whatever, whatever hashtags you want to associate with your business which is all, which is all fine and good. Right. So what's happening, and I did this for, for Ratedly. I added hashtags to it. So any, any posts by an individual that has hashtags, that are, that are the same as the ones you associate with your business, you get an alert from LinkedIn saying, Hey, Joe Schmo just posted something about employment branding or whatever it might be. Right? And then, and then it says you might want to go comment. Joel: So I'm like, okay, well that's kind of clever. So I go, I go to the post that they told me to look at and comment and sure enough if the, if there were 20 comments, 15 of them were companies, right. So, so now, so now all your posts are going to be inundated with companies that are like minded to the content that you just posted with commentary, which I got to think is going to get really old, really fast with people. So yeah, I just wanted to point that out as something new at LinkedIn that they're doing, but I can't imagine that they're going to, that users are going to be real happy with like 10 comments and nine of them are from companies. Chad: That's horrible. Joel: Yeah, it's pretty bad. Go Browns Chad: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast The Chad, The Cheese . BRILLIANT! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, 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, GooglePlay, or wherever you listen to 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 is so weird. We out! #LinkedIn #Bullhorn #McDonalds #Facebook #Olivia #Paradox #Careerbuilder

Quincy Valencia (aka Queen of the Chatbots) joins the menz to talk chatbots, programmatic and industry whitespace. Whitespace? WTF is WHITESPACE? Gotta listen to find out... And while you're listening school yourself on hiring.nexxt.com. Text, email, programmatic+ with out friends from NEXXT 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 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: Now, on today's Chad and Cheese, we have, once again, we've actually ran into Quincy Valencia. And you will remember, she is also known as queen of the Chatbots. Hello, Quincy. Quincy Valencia: You mean, hello, your highness. Chad: I mean, yes. Quincy Valencia: Hello. Chad: Sorry. Quincy Valencia: Nice to be back. Chad: Good to have. Quincy Valencia: Good to be here. Joel: Great interview that we did with Quincy not too long ago. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's been a while. It's a must listen for anyone who cares about Chatbots in our space. Quincy Valencia: Well, I appreciate that. It was good. It was a lot of fun. Joel: Was it? Quincy Valencia: There's so much new and exciting- Joel: So much fun. Quincy Valencia: So many new and exciting things and the field. Chad: It's hilarious because I've known Quincy for over 15 years and I haven't seen her smile this much. Joel: And she is still talking to you, oddly enough. Chad: Yeah, I know, right? That's because I keep sneaking back in. Joel: Have you had a psychological evaluation at any point in the last- Quincy Valencia: I refuse to disclose. Joel: Okay. Good enough. Enough said. Chad: So, let's go right into it. So, there was this little Chatbot in Canada. Quincy Valencia: There was. Chad: The porridge was kind of warm. So, you guys went for it? Quincy Valencia: Yeah, we did. Chad: Karen. Quincy Valencia: Karen HR, Karen.AI out of Toronto was a great company. It was at the right space at the right time. As we at Alexander Mann are looking to expand upon the services and products that we offer in the industry, it was a perfect time. We were working with the Karen folks and some of our existing clients. And we thought, you know what? Now is a really good time to explore what else they have to offer that will help us augment and propel us into the next phase as an organization with Alexander Mann. So, really, really lucky to be working with those guys. Incredibly smart people. The co-founders, David Vradenberg, and Noel Webb, and a few of their other people came over and we couldn't be happier. It's a perfect fit. I'm really excited to see what we're doing with them now and what's going to be coming up soon. Joel: So, Canadian means it's also French compatible. Quincy Valencia: Sure. Joel: Oui? Chad: Oui. French Canadian, which is entirely different. Joel: What is your title now? Quincy Valencia: VP of product innovation. Chad: VP of product- Quincy Valencia: So, we're the cool kids. Everybody at AMS is cool. Joel: That's why you have the ripped jeans on. Quincy Valencia: That's right. I've ripped jeans, and boots, and tattoos showing right now. Joel: Yep. Yep. Quincy Valencia: That's the cool kid division. It's the prerequisite for working there. Joel: You have the uniform. Quincy Valencia: That's right. I do. It's true. Chad: Okay, so the Chatbot thing, you dove deep into Chatbots for a while. Quincy Valencia: Yep. Chad: You were looking at every Chatbot you can find out there. But that's not your only jam. Quincy Valencia: It's not. Chad: Right? So, what is that jam? I know you love technology and you've loved technology forever. Right now, this is a very exciting time in our industry. What excites you more than a Chatbot? Quincy Valencia: The white space, frankly. So, we're seeing it here. Chad: What? Quincy Valencia: All the white space. Joel: That sounds racist. Quincy Valencia: That's out there. Chad: The white space. Why does it got to be white? Quincy Valencia: Come on, man. No, there's so much space out there. There's so much innovation right now in our industry at large. Chad: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: And great point solutions out there. If you want a point solution for automated sourcing, you can find it. Chad: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: If you want a great solution for a programmatic, you can find it. Joel: So, the white label space. Quincy Valencia: Nope. Joel: Oops. Quincy Valencia: There are gaps. So, you have... point A to point B, there's a line between those two and there's nothing filling that line. And point B to point C, there are solutions for B and C but there's nothing filling that gap. Joel: I was largely being sarcastic, but thanks for filling that in. Quincy Valencia: I'm here for you. Chad: So, you have stack technology, right? And then, you have gaps in the stacks. Quincy Valencia: Right. Chad: That's what you're saying. Quincy Valencia: Yeah, that's it. Chad: So, what do you do? And why do you buy all of this technology if there are all these God damn gaps? Quincy Valencia: Well, you know what? That's a really good question. And part of that is I think there's a few things that we're seeing. So, our time working really from the operator side, and the recruitment side, and all the years that we've seen there, and then partnering with such great technologists out there and falling into the same trap, frankly. Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Quincy Valencia: As what everyone else falls into, which is, that looks really cool and can solve a problem, and that looks really cool and can solve a problem, and that looks really cool and can solve a problem, and there are markets for those things out there. But what's really missing in a lot of cases is that one cohesive engine that will take you from point A to point Z, which is the hire in our industry- Chad: Okay. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Quincy Valencia: Without those gaps and without those breaks. Because some of the challenge... look, I'm a big proponent of everyone who's here today, and of what we do, and I buy these products, and we partner with these. So, it's not to denigrate them at all. There are places for that. But what we don't see is that one cohesive end to end solution. And, when you start Frankensteining pieces together, and one of those providers changes one piece of code, now you have a single point of failure. And often it looks very disjointed. So, if you look at a candidate experience, and you know from when we talked before, for me, candidate experience is everything, stakeholder experience in general is everything. And that's the lens you need to build everything through. Quincy Valencia: And so, when you start jumping from one solution, to another solution, to another solution, if not done properly, and it's hard to do that properly, it becomes a poor experience where really all you're trying to do is make it better. And so, the white spaces and how do you fill in the spots in between each point solution. So, that's what's really exciting me these days. Chad: So, aren't the ICIMs and the Jobvites of the world trying to get rid of those by buying Jibe, and Canvas, and then Telemetry? And I mean, aren't they trying to do that? Aren't they trying to be one system? Quincy Valencia: Everyone is trying to do that one platform? Joel: Are they going to achieve it though? Quincy Valencia: Well, I don't know. I mean, I guess it's yet to be seen. But, when you look at all the different pieces, growth, and expansion, and penetration through acquisition is smart, in a lot of cases and really will acquire them more business. And they're really moving toward what it is that we're talking about today. But those platforms are still built on different code. And so, basically they're still kind of... it remains to be seen how successful they are in integrating that from an experience standpoint. I don't know. Joel: Who do you give the best chance to be that one platform? Quincy Valencia: Oh, this is such a loaded question. I don't know. Chad: Is it an ATS? Quincy Valencia: Well- Chad: Is it an ERP? I mean, what's the company that's going to be the core that they can build around that, this makes the most sense? Quincy Valencia: I can't name which company it is. But I will tell you this, it has to be a company that will, whether they're building it themselves or whether they're building it through acquisition, has depth and breadth of knowledge and experience in the business of recruitment in people and in that, as opposed to only being technologists on the other end that may have seen a gap out there. Chad: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: And an opportunity and they try and plug that in. I think that's one of the biggest things that's missing is that experience in recruitment in general and hearing and having access to and living day to day the frustrations that are out there in the marketplace. So, not just knowing it because everyone knows the data points, but really understanding it sort of viscerally. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Are we not giving the app marketplace enough credit here? Because shouldn't an ATS have a robust enough application or app store to where other solutions can build on top of theirs to create this one platform? So, whether it's Canvas or Text Recruit, whatever you choose, you just plug it into your ATS. Like I feel like we spend too much time on, they got to buy it, they got to build it. Like can't they just provide an environment where third parties can build these tools on their platform? Quincy Valencia: The people who have the problems, the people who have the challenges in their recruitment programs are not necessarily the people who understand the vast technology marketplace that exists today. And so, if you just create a tech marketplace like ICIMs has, which I love ICIMs by the way. I think a company I used to work for was I think the 12th company to purchase and implement them. Joel: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: So, again, props to them. But, if you're only having a marketplace for them and you're saying, well we've added them, but you've got 20 of them and there's no consultation behind that about what are you trying to accomplish as a business, as an organization? Joel: Right. Quincy Valencia: What are you missing today? What are you trying to accomplish with TA holistically, as opposed to you can plug in these point solutions, I don't know how successful that's going to be. Joel: And I think there could be a marketplace rating system where people who use those apps say, this is fantastic. And you say, okay. Well, this one has a better review than the other one. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Joel: So, I don't know if you have to know every single text recruiting platform to just go in and say, okay, these two have five stars. Chad: It's very Apple store-ish, right? Joel: Yes. Quincy Valencia: Yep. Totally agree with that. So, I love the idea of that pre-vetting. Joel: Let the market decide. Or let the market... I mean- Quincy Valencia: It's no different than buying something on Amazon. You're not going to buy something without a five star rating. Right? So, I totally get that. Joel: Correct. And a thoughtful review and things like that. Quincy Valencia: The problem with that approach is that you have operators, which is what you need to make these business decisions. And they can identify what they think the issues are in their market. And sometimes you have two issues, and this is why they hire consultants to help them with this. The marketplace is vast and the terminology is sometimes foreign. So, do I need a Chatbot? Do I need Programmatic? It's still, we go into clients it's, I need an AI. They don't exactly even know what that means. Quincy Valencia: And so, it's not enough, in my opinion, to have a marketplace that has the best of the best, even if it's the cream of the crop, fully bedded of 50 different types of point solutions without any context around that to help guide those decisions of what those opportunities really are in their marketplace. Time and again you'll see somebody who says, we need sourcing. We need sourcing, sourcing, sourcing, sourcing. What can we do for sourcing? And you can add people, or you can do it programmatically, or you can do whatever you want. But, if the real problem is you don't have enough people downstream to do anything with those candidates that now you have a great pipeline for, you're actually creating a worse experience than what existed before. So, you really need to take a holistic view instead of just buying piece after piece. Joel: The market needs to be forced. Quincy Valencia: Really. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's true. I think there needs to be some consultation that goes along with that, rather than just looking at piece, after piece, after piece and not understanding how it's all going to fit together. Joel: I'd still like to see an environment that I sort of just outlined. I think ATS has put up way too many barriers for companies and technologies to integrate into their systems. Quincy Valencia: I agree. Joel: Whether it's by write a check, or we'll get to you when we get to you, I think there's a hindrance to that one platform happening. And, if I were saying where would my money go, when we talk to startups, the one ATS that everyone is like, oh they're great to integrate with is Greenhouse. Quincy Valencia: Yeah, it is. Joel: So, if we're saying, who has the best chance of building an app store, platform environment? To me, like Greenhouse has as good a shot of anyone just for the fact that they actually do integrate easily. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute, but first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Andy, if a company wants to actually come to Next and utilize your database and target texting candidates, I mean how does that actually work? Andy Katz: Right, so we have the software to provide it two different ways. If an employer has their own database of opted in text messages, whether it's through their ATS, we can text on their behalf. Or we have over eight and a half million users that have opted into our text messaging at this point. So, we can use our own database. We could dissect it by, obviously, by geography, by function, any which way. And sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. So, we really can dive really deep if they want to hone in on just give me the best hundred candidates that I want to text message with and have a conversation back and forth with, versus going and saying, I need 30,000 retail people across the country. And that's more of a, yes, no text messaging back and apply. 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: I don't think that answers the white space problem. The white space is still going to be there. But then, I go to Salesforce who has this huge app marketplace thing, right? Quincy Valencia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: And, I mean, they've actually created an entire industry of Salesforce consultants to be able to get those tied together. And I see where you're going and I like it. But I can see that also, with Salesforce, they still have a lot of white space. And they still need more people to come in to try to cover those gaps. So, I don't think that would be the answer to actually covering any of the gaps. Quincy Valencia: Well, agreed. And so, that brings me back to the point that I said before. I mean, to your point, Joel, I think having that sort of market place is invaluable if you have a company that you trust, whether it be an ATS provider that you know and trust, whether it be an RPO provider. We have something called the Hive that's exactly what you're talking about. Joel: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: Because of our experience there. And I think that can serve a great service. As an operator, if you don't truly have that guidance and consultation behind, you may think you need a Chatbot, but do you? What is it you think you're missing? What are you solving for? And, if you're only relying on individual vendors to provide that information to you, they know their product really, really well. They're going to pitch their product to you, and as they should. Joel: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: It's what they should do. But I think you need to take a bird's eye view and see how, not just they're going to integrate technologically, but from an experience standpoint and what that end product will be for your candidates and for your recruiters and for your hiring managers. You have to look at it every stakeholder, not only candidate. Chad: The experience itself, so the the candidate experience, the internal experience for a recruiter, or a hiring manager, or whatever, there's white space all over the place with that. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Chad: And I think there isn't going to be an easy answer to just plug in these apps or just pick these vendors. Right? Quincy Valencia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: I think we try to go that whole easy route and it has never worked. The problem is we need to understand that. We need to blow up our processes. And we need to start from the ground up and start building pretty much a new system overall, as opposed to trying to layer all these old systems on top. Quincy Valencia: That's exactly what it is. So, you and I have talked about this before, Chad, where you come back to process, process, process all the time. And I actually agree with you on that because a lot of the problem that you have today- Chad: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did you say you, you agree? Quincy Valencia: I did. You should ring a bell or something when you edit this, because this may be the only time. Mark this time in history. But I actually agree with you on that where a lot of the issue from plugging in a lot of the tools that we're talking about now is that they're really trying to replicate their existing experience and existing process just in an automated way. And you're really not improving anything really materially. Quincy Valencia: And so, I would take it one step further from you. And I'd say experience, experience, experience because it incorporates more. You're looking, not just... typically when you're talking about a process, you're looking at it from the company point of view, and you want to add efficiency. And you can do that lots of ways, but you certainly want efficiency, your candidates want efficiency, your hiring managers want efficiency, but they want to feel good. They don't want to feel like crap and like they're being ditched and lost forever when they're going through a process. Chad: Right. Quincy Valencia: They want it to be engaging. They don't want to have to take two shots of whiskey before they start a process. Chad: It does help. Quincy Valencia: Yeah, I know. I've done it so. So, you really need to look at it all around in a- Chad: In a prior job, of course. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Of course. Yeah. But you need to really look at, how are they going to fail when they go through. And that, to me, that's your primary lens always. And don't try and replicate your existing crappy processes that were built in 1902 because that's what your ATS... you built your process around an ATS that didn't fit your needs. And so, it's not going to work if you just try and recreate the thing. You're wasting your money. You're throwing money at a bad problem if you think that technology is going to fix that for you. Joel: What other technologies are you currently bullish on? Quincy Valencia: RPA, actually. Joel: Oh. Chad: Oh. Quincy Valencia: I think a lot of people are... I know. The more I see and the more I've seen it actually applied in situations, I think it does... there are places where it can do exactly what it is the companies are setting out to do, which is efficiency, accuracy. It helps normally if you hired somebody to manually transfer 70,000 files from one system to another. Certainly opportunity for error is there, human error. It's not very fun. Chances of turnover are great. And you can actually do that in an automated way with a greater degree of accuracy without somebody wanting to kill themselves at the end of the day. Quincy Valencia: And I think there's broader application than what we're even looking at it here. I think you're going to see an upturn there, I think, I expect too, and maybe unexpectedly. Because people are so focused on... it may not seem as sexy. It's like an automated process. It's the assembly line, but I think that could have some real implications in our industry. Chad: Yeah, but, in some cases, we look at Chatbots and everybody wants to say AI, right? Quincy Valencia: Yeah. They don't know what it means. Chad: But overall you're using these Chatbots, in some cases, really in an RPA manner. I mean, robot process automation. You are looking to really automate a process. If you're having a conversation with somebody about getting their data to build a profile in your system to make it more conversational, to make it just a better experience. It's not really AI as much as it is RPA. I understand AI can be behind the scenes. I understand that they can work together. There's no question. But it's like I don't think we talk enough about being able to do something that is sexy. I think process can be ugly as shit, but it can be sexy too. Quincy Valencia: Well, that's the goal. I mean, that's what the goal should be. I think those of us who work in this industry have an obligation, frankly, to make sure that whatever it is that we're building, whatever it is that we're putting in place does have some sexy and sizzle to it. And not only that, not just the shiny squirrel, but... oh, I just mixed metaphors. Not just the shiny new thing, but really in a way that's meaningful. Joel: There may be some shiny squirrels out there. Quincy Valencia: And that's going to be- Joel: Who knows. Quincy Valencia: Probably. But, no. I think it's important that we are looking at it from that way. Otherwise we're all reinventing the same thing. Joel: Are there any vendors that you see are standouts from the RPA side? When we talked to Max from Talkpush recently, he's- Quincy Valencia: I love Max and I love Talkpush. So, that's actually it's a really good product. Joel: Okay. So, we'll add them to the list. Quincy Valencia: I think... yeah. I think that's definitely one to look at. It's hard to narrow. Here's what I've actually seen. There are some really good ones out there and everybody is good at something. I mean, I think I can say that almost universally. Chad: Hence point solution. Right? Quincy Valencia: Right. Hence point solution. But there's not a one size fits all. There's some exciting things going out there. We're seeing... this is not news, but we just saw a Paradox and Amazon partnering for a McDonald's solution. That's pretty exciting. I'm interested to see it in action and see how it works. But- Joel: Well, they partnered with Amazon to the degree that they built an app. Quincy Valencia: Right? Joel: On Alexa. Quincy Valencia: Exactly. But so, but I'm excited to see how that actually works. Chad: That's a step. Quincy Valencia: It is a step. Chad: Yeah. Joel can't wait. Joel: Find me a PHP job in Chicago. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Like I've been- Chad: And get me a cheeseburger while you're at it. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. I've been having... so, yeah. Like if you look at data on search queries that are like Alexa, Google Home, Siri, et cetera, like the numbers of those are skyrocketing. Quincy Valencia: They are. Joel: So, when I look at where the puck is going, like are we in for a world of audio? Because, to me, if you own the time that someone brushes their teeth, and I'm being sort of silly here. Quincy Valencia: It's true. Joel: But, if you can own the time where I'm getting ready for work and I get my news from you, I get my weather report, like whatever I get, whatever content I want, if you can say it to me in audio fashion, do you win? Right? Because, if I go, Alexa, I need more Tide. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Joel: Right. In the old days, and I put that in quotes, in the old days. Quincy Valencia: Three months ago. Joel: In the really old days, I'd have to get in my car, go to the grocery store, the drug store, buy it, bring it home. Quincy Valencia: Nobody wants to do that. Joel: But now, in the old days, right, I'd have to go to the internet. Quincy Valencia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel: Or I'd have to go to my phone, do a search for Tide, log in, whatever, and then click whatever. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Joel: If it gets to the point where I just go, Hey Alexa, I need more Tide, and it knows how much, and what kind, and it just ships it to me, is that the world we're going toward? And, if that is the world we're going toward, then having something that, hey, can you get me a job at McDonald's. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Joel: And it walks you through that. Quincy Valencia: Yep. I think that's actually absolutely where we're going. And, if you look at the data on that type of solution, the artificially intelligent assistance or whatever you want to call them, I think it's the queries there are skyrocketing. Here's the caution, and again, I think it's really cool what they're doing now. But there's another provider, a well-known provider in the marketplace. And I won't say who it is because it's not important. But I was going through a process with one of their clients the other day just for market research and it took all of two questions for me to break their logic in their chat. And I wasn't trying to fool it. I wasn't trying to break it. I wasn't doing anything. Chad: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: But it literally took two questions to break it. And I think that's some of what I'm talking about, Chad, when I mentioned I think we have an obligation to look, if we're going to provide these things, to make sure that we're not selling vaporware, to make sure that we're really vetting enough intents in the back end so that, if somebody is asking something, you know what it means. Chad: Yes. Quincy Valencia: The training data, you bring that from the right place and that you're programming it the right way. Because, otherwise, you can win every award in the industry, but, if it only takes the average Joe two questions to break your logic and all of a sudden it's broken, then what happens to that candidate? We're creating another black hole. Joel: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: It's just a new kind of black hole. Chad: That's a horrible experience. So vaporware, that is one of the things that we talked about all the time in the late '90s, early 2000's, because everybody was promising the fucking moon. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Chad: And it was really vaporware. I'm seeing the same things happening today. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Chad: Which many are. What's pissing you off the most? You don't have to say product. It'd be great if you did. Quincy Valencia: Yeah, no. Nice try. Chad: But what kind of product is actually pissing you off the most right now because really it's mainly just smoke and mirrors? Quincy Valencia: I've got two. Chad: Okay. Quincy Valencia: And I'm not going to say they're pissing me, and I'm not going to name an individual product. I'm going to say a product type. Chad: Okay, yeah. Quincy Valencia: And I'm going to name these because... and I have to caveat all this. Chad: Yes. Quincy Valencia: There are things that, to me, have the biggest potential. Chad: Yes. Quincy Valencia: And that I'm personally interested in and that we're really on the precipice of doing something great with these products. Chad: You're excited about it, but they're fucking it up. Quincy Valencia: Well, yeah. One being Chatbots. Chad: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: And one being Programmatic. Chad: Oh. Joel: Explain. Quincy Valencia: Well, so let's look at Programmatic. If you dig into it really, and all of the programmatic advertisers are buying traffic from the same exact places. And, if you don't really understand how it works and you're not really educated on where to go, and how to do, and how to adjust your campaigns, and all of those things, you're spending potentially more money than you were if you're just posting and praying of the old days. And I think that there's, in a lot of cases, not enough consultation with people who are spending money to buy it. It's being sold as a cure all. And it isn't. It's great when it works. But, if you don't know how to do it properly, you're wasting money. And I'm all about eliminating waste in the process. So, that's the first one, I think. Quincy Valencia: The second is Chatbots. And it's for the exact reason that I said. You've got to do better than. You cannot launch a product and put it into the market if two questions are going to break your logic. You do. Joel: To me, it reminds me a lot of say search back in '99 or 2000, right? You would do searches on AltaVista or Excite. Quincy Valencia: Right. Joel: Five out of the ten results were pretty stupid. Quincy Valencia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel: But you knew eventually this is going to be a thing. Like they're going to figure this out. Quincy Valencia: Yep. Joel: They're going to do it right. Of course, it took Google to sort of show up to do it right. But I never thought that search was not going to eventually be a thing. So, I think what I'm hearing from you is today it's disappointing. There are mistakes being made and things that they miss. But I'm not hearing that Chatbots don't have a long term future and that they're going to figure some of this stuff out. Right? Quincy Valencia: Oh, without a doubt. I mean, I think that's where, when you've dubbed me queen of Chatbots, I take that as quite the honor because I've had so many conversations over the years of people saying, oh, it's a point solution. It's not a product. And that's true. I think that's true now. I think that we're seeing it go more and more toward something that can be a full service solution. And that really excites me. It's just got to be better. Quincy Valencia: And look, to give credit where credit is due, thank God for the pioneers and people who have gone out and taken the risks and had a great deal of success there. I just think there's a lot of room. Because, in order to get that full service solution that we're talking about, you have to have more elegance and eloquence in what you're delivering, as opposed to just your simple FAQ up front or let's ask some pre-screen questions and then take you into the ATS ask. Chad: It's the expectations of the day. It's the expectations of the day that, back in the day, Joel was talking about AltaVista and whatnot. Quincy Valencia: And so many of your listeners right now are going, what? Because they're only 25. Joel: I'm old. Quincy Valencia: Me too. Chad: So, back then it was kind of like, oh, this is new. Oh, yeah. It's kind of broken. Yeah. You kind of expect that. Right. Today the expectation is the shit is going to work. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Chad: So, it's- Joel: I don't know if that's true if it's a new technology though. Chad: No, I think a user coming to your- Joel: Go shopping, like we should have figured out shopping online by now. But I don't know if they look at Chatbots and think, oh this should be out of the box work. Quincy Valencia: No. I think that's untrue. I think, if I'm a candidate and I'm applying for a job, and if the mechanism I have to communicate with the company is a bot. Joel: The expectation is, this shit should work. Quincy Valencia: This shit should work. Joel: 100%. Quincy Valencia: Oh, I just went off brand. I'm sorry. I'm going to get yelled at for that. Joel: We do it to people all the time. Quincy Valencia: I know. Man. Joel: Don't be mad. Chad: Oh, we sucker them out of it every time. Joel: I'm just more forgiving than you guys. Chad: Yeah, no. You are. You're a sweetheart. Joel: I'm a loving human being. Chad: Everybody says it. No, I agree though. I think the experience that the expectation with technology the way it is today that shit isn't broken. You expect a better experience. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. No, and then I say that and I'll back off a little bit. Things aren't, from this side, sitting in this chair. Chad: Yeah. Quincy Valencia: I think we get it. Chad: You've got a great chair to sit in. Quincy Valencia: We understand. It is comfy here. Things are, you're going to have issues and you're going to have problems. And honestly, that's how your system learns. It's how you make it better. But you better learn quick. Joel: Yeah, I mean, so the mantra at Facebook always used to be, move fast and break things. Quincy Valencia: Yeah. Joel: So, it was like, get it out there. See if it works or not. What can we fix, iterate, iterate, iterate. Quincy Valencia: Well, that's the whole Agile methodology. Joel: And this was before the whole privacy stuff that they have dealt with. Quincy Valencia: They choose not to talk about that. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Chad: It's also a free product. Joel: But I don't personally... yeah. Maybe my consumer behavior is different, but I don't necessarily think when I look at new technology that it should just work instantly. Quincy Valencia: I do. Joel: I'm okay with a few fuck-ups with a Chatbot. Quincy Valencia: Okay, that's fair. Joel: Versus my resume in a black hole. Would we agree with that? Quincy Valencia: All right, yes. That's fair. I'll give you that. Chad: That doesn't mean your resume still isn't going into a black hole, by the way. Quincy Valencia: That's my point. If it's all of a sudden you're in a chat conversation and you're having this conversation and you're two questions in. And you're getting excited and you ask a really simple question and you're stuck in the, I'm sorry, I don't understand loop. Or it answers a question that you didn't ask and, when you rephrase it three times, it's not answering it, you're back in a new black... it's the same black hole. It's just a different black hole. Joel: Is it a blacker whole than we've been used to? Or is it sort of a dark gray? Quincy Valencia: Nope. It's still a black hole. It's just a different hole. Joel: Is it as deep as the black hole that we've always known? Quincy Valencia: I don't think we can measure a black holes, can we? Chad: Get out of the God damn hole. I don't think we can today. Density, I think it's density. Quincy Valencia: I don't know. Joel: All right. The paradox people are here. Quincy Valencia: I'm just saying we have to continue to strive to get better. And, no. The whole concept of Agile development and Agile methodology is you put it out there, you move quick, you fix quick. And I think that's the right way to go. But you better make sure the first thing you're putting out there is at least decent. Joel: I'm out of nuts. Quincy Valencia: That's what I read on the bathroom wall. Joel: Right. Chad: Well, Quincy, thanks again for joining us. I'm sorry- Joel: Always a pleasure, Quincy. Chad: Queen of the Chatbot. Quincy Valencia: I prefer your highness. Chad: Your Highness. Quincy Valencia: Thank you. Always a pleasure to join you. Thanks for the opportunity. Joel: Let's do it again soon. Chad: Let's do it again. Quincy Valencia: Let's do it maybe tomorrow morning. I think that'll be great. Joel: Yeah. I like it. Chad: We'll do it tomorrow morning. Joel: Let's do that, tomorrow morning. Chad: Death match. Joel: Death match. Quincy Valencia: All right. Thanks guys. I'm excited. Joel: Thanks, Quincy. Chad: We're 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. #chatbots #AMS #BadAss #gaps #Startup #Programmatic

This segment was originally scheduled to air with last Friday's show, but we felt it was important enough all by itself. Taking a single day for veterans just isn't enough. Take a listen and let us know what you think. #Veterans #Hiring #vendor #LinkedIn #Google #GoogleforJobs

You've heard it... Now see it! ThisWayGlobal CEO, Angela Hood treats Chad and Cheese to beer and industry conversation. Enjoy! #BrewReview #video #AI #Jobs #beer #TAtech

Okay Boomer, we're back for another week of news and commentary. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast HR's Most Dangerous and most Gen Xiest. On this episode: - Symphony Talent gets SMASHED! - HireVue gets into an EPIC fight - 4-day work weeks could be our future - and Careerbuilder jumps into the ring with a new sponsorship. Can you smell what they're cookin'? This "wrastling" match is sponsored by the good people at Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. 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 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 and Cheese podcast. Joel: Okay, boomer, we're back for another week of news and commentary. Chad: That's right. Joel: Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, HR's most dangerous and most Gen X-iest. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: On this episode, Symphony Talent gets smashed, four-day work weeks could be our future, and career builder jumps into the ring with a new sponsorship. Can you smell what they're cooking? We'll be right back after this word from JobAdX. 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@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel: We're back for another week. Chad: We are back. Joel: I was worried, this close to the holidays, that the content would be a little light, but it's pretty meaty. Joel: We've got a good show in store for everyone. Chad: Oh yeah, this is a good one. And kicking off, I've got to say, Adam Gordon from candidate.ID wins- Joel: No, no, dude. Chad: What? What? What? I've got- Joel: I didn't know if you're going to save it till the end, or just come out swinging. Chad: No, we're coming out swinging. Joel: So we're coming out swinging. All right. Chad: Yeah, we're going to come out swinging. So, Adam Gordon from candidate ID wins the video of the week, if not the month, if not the fucking year. So on LinkedIn... Adam Gordon, if you know Adam Gordon, awesome guy, amazing marketer, and he probably did this on purpose, probably not, but maybe. He just did a video where he was really combating the whole idea that the talent pipeline funnels are dead, and people are talking about infinity loops, and so on and so forth. So he crafts, it looks like out of cardboard, two things. This one funnel, I guess it was, that looks like a penis, and this person out of cardboard that goes up and down the penis. So I guess it's time for the talent pipeline penis... Joel: Dude, the head of the penis is the job. He acquires the job. Oh man. Chad: That's a win. Dude- Joel: If that doesn't bring out your inner 14-year-old, nothing will. Chad: We were getting ready for the show, it popped up in my feed, I'm like, "What the fuck is this?" I start watching it, and I just could not stop laughing. It is fucking hilarious. Here's, what I'm saying. If you are listening, go directly to LinkedIn right now, look up Adam Gordon. Go to his video. Watch it without- Joel: Recent activity. Chad: ...any audio. Yeah, no audio. Just watch it. It is fucking hilarious, dude. And yes, our inner 12 to 14-year-olds came out. Joel: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You and I sounded like Beavis and Butthead on the other end of the microphones, laughing at this video, because it was just so obviously meat headed. Chad: Yeah. So anybody who actually saw- Joel: Yeah? Chad: ...Adam pulling this together, and watching him do a dry run, and not look at that as a phallic symbol, as a penis, you, my friend, you weren't looking hard enough. Joel: I just can't imagine with the sense of humors that Scottish folks have that that wasn't some subliminal joke that he knew you and I would see and talk about it. Like, it's that genius of marketing that he knew we'd talk about it if he posted it. Chad: Yes, I agree. And another video... Going to jump into this while we're talking about 12-year-olds, because we just, pretty much, interviewed a 12-year-old yesterday on Firing Squad. His name is Adam Chambers. Firing Squad's going to come out probably next week, week after. It'll be sometime this month. But from a company called Applichat, and it was hilarious because he has been getting ready for Firing Squad on Chad and Cheese for a while now, and he jumps on, his mic sounds like shit. You can tell he's in like a little boxy office, where it's just echoing like hell, and then, for probably about two to three minutes, you hear him kind of like, running around looking for another place. And then what does he do, Joel? Joel: He lays down in a bunch of pillows to do the interview, and then he videotapes the whole thing, and then posts it everywhere, so good on him, man. Like, the dude can't be a day over 16. I'm convinced. Like, there's just no... And you learn this in the Firing Squad, he does video streams with his customers, like they have to look at him and think, "Can you even drink legally? I don't understand. I actually bought something from you." Chad: "Are you an intern?" Joel: Yeah, like... "Is this a joke? Am I being Punk'd? I don't get it." Chad: So Adam Chambers, congrats buddy. That was awesome. Joel: Good on you, man. Shout out. Chad: Yes, you deserve big time shout-out for getting couch cushions, laying on the ground, and sounding awesome during Firing Squad. Joel: No doubt, no doubt. Shout-out to Job.com and AssesFirst. We posted their death-match presentations on the feed this week. Always entertaining and always nice, and also thanks to Alexander Mann Solutions for sponsoring Death Match. Chad: That's right, that's right. Shout out to the US Postal Service for eating their own dog food and using direct mail to recruit. Now, did you actually get that in the mail? Joel: I actually got that in the mail. It was for jobs at the post office. They show the hourly rate, hourly pay for those. Most of them were rural jobs, so I assume that they're having trouble filling some of those rural positions. But yeah, I'm sure that's a pretty cost-effective way for the post office to promote its jobs. It's sort of like when Google promotes its job openings on Google. Chad: Very nice. Joel: Shout out to Recruitology. Chad: Oh. Joel: We have a new Shred sponsor. Chad: Hello. Joel: They were lucky enough to get in on our first story, the SmashFly Symphony Talent acquisition, so they couldn't have gotten it on a better time to get their message out. So go check out Recruitology and learn more. Chad: Yes. Shout out to so-called job search experts/life coaches/whatever the fuck they want to call themselves. I would really love for these people to stop peddling stupid shit to job-seekers. I was on Twitter earlier this week, and Liz Ryan, her handle is @humanworkplace, and she's also the author of the book Re-invention Roadmap. There's more to that, you can figure that out if you want to. I saw somebody reply to one of her tweets, and she had a question. The question on her tweet was, "Even if a company recruiter reaches out to you, you still have to fill out an application." Yeah- SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Chad: How would you get into their system otherwise, right? And then she goes on to answer the question. Answer, "Everyday people have casual conversations about jobs, even more casual conversations about pain and solutions, and blah, blah, blah, blah. They do all of this without filling out forms." And it's like, wait a minute. People can't even see you in their system to be able to talk to you about a job, to push you through the process, from a compliance standpoint, unless you're in the fucking system. Now we all know, don't get me wrong, the application process, for the most part, sucks. But you still have to go through that process if you're looking to get the job. And what she's saying is, "Yeah, just go have drinks with a recruiter. That's the way that you get the job." And possibly fined by the EEOC or OFCCP, right? There's that option, too. Joel: Just be on the internet, that's all you need. Shout out to Kenzie Academy. No one else would know this story. This is a local company in Indianapolis. They got 100 million fricking dollars to help lower-income, urban kids learn engineering skills, so good for them. We talk a lot about going outside of the traditional education road, and these guys are making waves in that industry. So Kenzie Academy, good on you. We need more engineers, and you just got $100 million to train some more. Chad: Yeah, so, I would love for companies to start picking up the ball on this, instead of having to do grants. I mean, $100 million is awesome. This whole story is awesome, but the biggest problem here is this isn't a part of the actual fabric of what an organization is doing to be able to drive the types of talent that they want into their company, long-term. Chad: And again, we look at the military, and what the military has done over the years to be able to subsidize individuals' college, whether it's on the front end with ROTC, or the back end with the actual military college funds that they have. These are the ways that we get the types of individuals into our positions, not just today, but next month, next year, and the next five years, and this is how we get the skills that we need to get it done. I love this from the standpoint of... We do have areas, segments... Whether it's around Indianapolis or any major metro anywhere in the United States that is underserved. We need to do a better job there. And this is a great story about how we here in Indiana are at least making that happen. Joel: Go Hoosiers. Chad: Good shit. Joel: Shout out to the gig economy that had a pretty tough week this week. Uber released Q3 earnings. They're losing over a billion dollars a quarter. Ouch. They're telling everyone that 2021 is going to be the year of profitability. Wag, which as a dog owner you probably know about, is a company that will pay people, sort of gig-wise, to walk your dog. There's an app, and they tell you when your dog pooped, and how many times he peed, and all that good stuff. So they're trying to sell the hell out of this company. They got $300 million in investment. Word is they're trying to sell it for about a third of that cost. And then Airbnb, we had some fun Halloween murders at one of the Airbnb rentals- Chad: Never good. Joel: ...So it was a tough week for the gig economy. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I don't know if it's a canary in the coal mine kind of stuff, but 2020 should be an interesting time for the gig economy. Chad: I agree. And we'll be watching. Go figure. Joel: Obviously. Chad: Big shout-out to all veterans. Veterans day's coming on Monday here in the United States. And instead of just doing the regular, thanking a veteran for their service, say something, or better yet, do something that's meaningful for that veteran, right? Buy them a coffee or something like that. Doesn't have to be charity. Just do something meaningful that's more than, "Hey, thanks for your service." Joel: Go hug a vet, everybody. Chad: Give them a big hug. Joel: Just keep them the hell away from Adam Gordon, because that dude's got issues. All right, you're ready to get to the news? Chad: SmashFly acquired by Symphony Talent. Joel: Symphony Talent. Chad: Wow. Joel: Formerly known as Hodes. Chad: Yeah. Findly- Joel: Hodes. Chad: ...Hodes. Joel: Kind of... Chad: Yeah, there is a lot out there. You know what really interested me, before we get into the guts of this? The press release didn't mention Thom Kenney at all. Joel: Well, he's gone, right? Basically. Chad: Yeah, but he's the CEO who took the reins over a little bit of a year ago. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And in, I mean, this is his third acquisition. So, I mean, personally, I don't think this acquisition happens without having a leader like that, and then also the team that's under him, to be able to really inspire them to do what they did. And they've been around since 2007, right? He takes the reins... First he was the CTO, that's when we first interviewed him, he was the CTO. Took over as CEO. Pretty pivotal player in this, but void of the press release. Joel: Yeah, and a very vocal CEO. He's been on our show, at least once or twice, and if nothing else, the blueprint for this is usually, Thom will be joining the advisory board, or he'll be part of whatever for the transition period, and then Tom puts a quote in there like, "This is a great marriage, the future's bright, blah blah blah." So yeah, I agree that not having him in the release, especially for a company, two companies that know marketing pretty well, is an interesting take, for sure. Chad: Either way, great exit. He's on the beach sipping fruity drinks. Margaritas, May Tais, some shit like that. Good for him. Great for the staff at SmashFly, and congrats Symphony. Joel: Yeah. Now, you're closer to this a little bit than I am. I mean, any insight on what brand are they going to go with? Who's going to come over to what? Are people getting different positions? Do you have any insight in terms of that aspect of things? Chad: Yeah, there haven't been huge shifts. Financial terms were not disclosed. Roopesh Nair is the president and CEO of Symphony Talent, is going to lead the new SmashFly organization. I have to say that, give some props to Roopesh, because you might remember, there was a lot of mess to clean up, because First Advantage was acquired by... God, what were they called at the time? There was just STG, so the actual STG, the PE firm, bought First Advantage in 2011, then they acquired Findly in 2012, who acquired Bernard Hodes in 2013, and there was a train wreck. I mean, there were all these different brands, all these different technologies, people running around, cats and dogs living together. Then Symphony Talents group, the actual private equity group, stepped up from the background and said, "This shit's going to stop." So in 2016 created Symphony Talent and I believe that's when Roopesh actually came into to start leading the organization. So I think it's important to understand all the pieces, parts in the history of how these two organizations are coming together. Joel: Yep. I had totally forgot about Findly. Thanks for bringing them up. Blast from the past. So you did the Shred on this, and it was a great Shred, so talk about what the companies do and what sort of... Your insight on competitive advantage against... Obviously, TMP is in the picture here as well. And then you talk a little bit about some of the other competitors to SmashFly, and what they might be looking at doing, such as Beamery. Chad: Yeah, so you have two organizations that are coming together that are going to have a portfolio of over 600 companies, big logos that they're actually servicing. One of the things that we've noticed with Symphony Talent is that there was nothing to notice, really. I mean, from a marketing standpoint, from a PR standpoint, what have you, they've been very stealthy in what they've been doing. But I believe, and what we're hearing, the rumblings-wise, is that is going to change with this acquisition. Being able to pull in a big brand, a very vocal brand, like SmashFly, that, to me, is really the exciting part to see how those two brands come together. Joel: Now from my standpoint, to me, SmashFly is the far better brand of these two, and if I were making recommendations, I would say, "Get rid of the Symphony brand and put it all under SmashFly." What are your thoughts? Chad: Yeah, that won't happen, because you've got to remember who the private equity group is. Symphony Talent Group, right? They created Symphony Talent because of all the disparate brands and services and technology that they had before to be able to consolidate. I think they'll pull SmashFly in and the SmashFly brand will eventually go away. It is a strong brand, it's an awesome brand, but I think it will eventually go away. And overall I think it does make sense from a strategic standpoint. But the question is how do they pivot all of this momentum into the Symphony brand? Joel: It's not easy. It never is. Chad: No. Joel: And we talk a lot about these acquisitions like they're going to snap their fingers and it's going to be hunky dory, and everyone's going to get along, and it's going to be great. And acquisitions are hard. Like, tech is different, people are different, locations or different, cultures are different. This, by no means, although it's been touted as a great move, is a slam-dunk success, just like any other acquisition out there. But I do think that when we look at combining forces and the CRM piece with the ATS, and the branding, and all that, it's a great move. And you think it's a direct sort of strike against what TMP's doing, particularly on maybe the programmatic side, and one-ups them, I guess, on the CRM piece? Chad: Yeah. I mean, TMP has four acquisitions this year so far, but I believe this one is actually bigger than the sum of those four. Joel: Yeah. Chad: I think that it makes a hell of a lot of sense for Symphony, for TMP... And then you have, like, you think about even smaller firms like RecruitX buying KRT, starting to really understand that the services piece, you can't do this tech without the services anymore. The experience is everything, right? So you can't do one without the other, which makes me wonder what's going happen with Beamery and Phenom. I know Workday has some money, I believe, into Beamery, but Workday doesn't have the services that a company's going to need from an experience and a creative standpoint. Phenom is trying to be that for everybody, but there's going to be a limit for them to be able to do that. So it'll be interesting to watch all of that, all of that come together if it does. Joel: Yeah, I agree. I guess within the chat bot world, although we don't talk a lot about Emerson, it is one of their product offerings at SmashFly, and it'll be interesting to see how Emerson evolves. Chad: That's a Paradox product. That's a partnered product. So, that's not an asset. I mean, Emerson is really just a new face on Paradox. Joel: So, does this put Paradox in the catbird seat to be acquired by Symphony? Chad: It's a good possibility. Joel: Possible. Chad: And to be that integrated into a system where you didn't even know it was white-labeled into a system? That says something for that kind of a partnership. That's what they wanted. Joel: Any other commentary on this acquisition? Chad: It's just exciting. Watching all of these players move, acquire, shift, is pretty exciting. From my standpoint, wanting to get on the horn with Joe Shaker, this has got to be exciting for him and Shaker Recruitment Marketing, as well, because, again, this just brings more validation that creative means more than anything when it comes to this. You can have any tech that you want, but if you have a shitty experience, you don't have creative build around it, you don't have great messaging, all of it fucking sucks. So I think right now is definitely the age of the ad agency. Joel: And the ATS, maybe? Chad: Maybe the ATS. Joel: Agency and ATS? Chad: Possibly. Joel: It's definitely like, who can collect the most toys? It's sort of like, who can buy the most job sites in 2005? Chad: Yeah, that's not the case, though, because Monster collected a shit-ton of toys, threw them in the closet, and didn't do anything with them. So it's all about who can exact, right, who can actually execute on those toys? Monster is sucking right now, because they were acquiring... Who knows why they were acquiring, other than for trophies. But yeah, I mean, they're going to have to execute on these acquisitions. Joel: All right, let's take a break. Let's listen from a word from Sovren and we'll talk about HireVue under fire. 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: HireVue AI under fire. Chad: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. This is in the Washington Post. A prominent rights group is urging the Federal Trade Commission, that's the FTC for all of you out there, to take on the recruiting technology company HireVue, arguing that the firm has turned to unfair and deceptive trade practices in its use of face-scanning technologies to assess job candidates. Chad: This is pretty big man. I mean this really is for a company like HireVue, who is really focused heavily on AI and tech, and then they start talking about the face-scanning ability. Bias is going to hit them very hard. I don't know how they back out of this. Joel: Yeah, we've talked about the Illinois law that came out to make them... Make more transparency in terms of job-seekers knowing that they're being analyzed by artificial intelligence. This group, EPIC, which is what they're called, officially, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC sounds a lot more intimidating. But they've come out and said, they've made an argument... Now, the FTC has not done anything to date, which is important to note. The FTC declined to comment, as well as did HireVue, but to me that the statement from the release that the post talked about was, EPIC said that HireVue's, quote, "Intrusive collection and secret analysis of biometric data causes substantial privacy and financial harms." They added, "Because these algorithms are secret, it is impossible for job candidates to know how their personal data is being used, or to consent to such uses." Joel: Yeah, this is some real shit. It goes back to privacy stuff, the individual, how are they being impacted, and I think it's even a bigger potential strike against AI in general. And we talk about white box and black box, and transparency, and how is this stuff being used? Like, companies are going to have to publish how this stuff is being used, how it's being diced and sliced, and how companies and people are affected by it. Chad: Yes, yeah. No, so in the New York Times, sometime last year, they actually did a piece on facial recognition and whether it was accurate or not, and it is very accurate if you're a white guy. When the person in the photo is a white guy, the software is right about 99% of the time, but the darker the skin, the more errors arise, up to nearly 35% for our images of darker-skinned women. And again, this is all about bias, and we're just talking about skin color right now. What about an individual who has a disability, and they don't react the way that quote, unquote, the AI has been trained to see how a reaction happens, right? What if you're nervous, what's the difference between being nervous or well-rehearsed? I mean, because that person was nervous, does that mean that they can't do the job? This has nothing to do with qualifications, and it has everything to do with bias. Joel: Yeah. And let's not forget Amazon originally tried this and scrapped the whole system because of the bias that was basically built in to the system. Chad: Yep. Didn't want them women. Got to get them women out of here, right? I mean this is, again, it's just another way for us to be able to impact a segment of the population who has already been negatively impacted. It makes no fucking sense. So, if you are HireVue, and you are listening, we know you are, you need to back the fuck out of this, man. This makes no sense whatsoever. If you're doing this behind the scenes, and you're not selling it as a product because you're trying to learn things, okay, great. This is something that you've got to get away from. Joel: And EPIC added that robots compare you against existing success stories, they don't look for out-of-the-box candidates, interestingly. Chad: Not all humans are the same. Not everybody reacts the same. And again, it's too biased. We've got to get away from this. Joel: Yeah. What is a model employee, right? That's very subjective. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Well, moving on from HireVue and privacy, we go to Indeed's privacy policy, which has been updated. I received an email, which I'm sure many others did, that Indeed was basically putting its privacy policy under all of its sister companies, which include Glassdoor, and quite a few other companies, and it's under the... Interestingly, under the URL hrtechprivacy.com, some of the other sites in addition to Glassdoor... You'll remember SimplyHired, you'll remember Sift, a recent acquisition, Resume.com. Canadians will know Workopolis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Joel: So they're basically coming out and putting all your data, potentially, under all these sites, is basically how I read it. They'll all be under the same brand. Interestingly, on this page, they have the benefits of data sharing. The last point of the benefits... "Data sharing facilitates better security for users." I'm not sure in what world sharing data is more secure. But anyway, quote, "Such data-sharing allows our sites to better protect their users. In particular, it allows the sites to improve user security and internal operations to troubleshoot and detect and prevent fraud and spam." So if you're on Indeed, suspect that your data is on all of their sister sites very soon, if not already. Chad: Yeah. This, to me, seemed more CYA than anything else. They've got to cover their asses for GDPR, and the big question is how a job-seeker can go into their system and do all of these things. How can I change my data? How can I delete my data? Those types of things. That's the big key. They own the data. Not Indeed, but again, I think we see more companies doing this just to be able to do a CYA dance around GDPR, and the regulations that will come to the US. Joel: Yep. Also, interesting how it could affect employers. I have heard rumblings that although Indeed isn't on Google For Jobs in most parts of the world, that jobs are being crossed-posted to Glassdoor, and then those jobs are being listed on Google For Jobs, which is a way for Indeed to kind of get around that whole public stance. So yeah, this whole trading of data and sharing of data, Indeed took another step into doing that. It affects employees and job-seekers for sure, but it probably extends over to all their users. Chad: Agreed. Joel: Let's get a quick word from Canvas, and we'll talk about four-day weeks, and CareerBuilder's new sponsorship. 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: Canvas leverages the latest in machine-learning technology, and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video, or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy, and are laser-focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io. Get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: Let's talk four-day work weeks. Who doesn't love four-day work weeks? All right. Chad: I do! Joel: So Microsoft Japan trialed a four-day work week over the summer, and found productivity actually increased by 39.9% and absences decrease by more than 25%. The company also found that 92.1% of workers who participated in the trial said they enjoyed the four day workweek. Why that wasn't 100%, I'm not quite sure, but it still is a good number of folks. Chad: I think, or at least some of the studies that I've seen, is that after a while, some individuals really enjoy their space, their workspace. They love being around people, and then when they're not that one day, they feel like they're missing something. So yeah, I think those people are weird, but they exist. Chad: And again, this is what makes us human. They were different, we are different. So that 8% or whatever it was... Probably just people who they are driven off of... They get energy off of being in their office and being around other people. The rest of them love to be able to get a little silence from that fucker who won't leave you alone, and actually get some work done. Joel: Yeah, that guy who clips his toenails next to you is a real pain in the ass. But to me, if four day work-weeks became the norm, we'd have the same issues as we do on a five-day work week. In other words, because it was special, people probably felt like, "Oh, I'm getting, I'm getting a reward. I'm getting something, a benefit, so I'm going to work harder. I'm not going to miss days because I'm missing that extra day." If work weeks were just four days long, we'd have the same problems that we do with a five-day work week. So when it becomes not special, then it's not a big deal, sort of like casual Fridays, right? That used to be a big deal, now pretty much everyday is casual Friday in every office, so it's not a thing anymore. Chad: And one of the reasons cited for the increase in productivity is that people realize they had less time to do their work, so they ended up spending less time in meetings. So this started changing their behavior. So I think what's happening is that that extra day has pretty much padded everything with meetings, and we needed to get our shit done, so we had to compress time to get our shit done, and boom, it got done. That all comes down to, I really think it depends on the load that an individual has to get done, and how fast they work it. I mean, there are some individuals who can really get shit done, great product, great service, or what have you, in a very short amount of time, and some others it takes a little bit longer. So I think that's what you're going to see. Joel: I also don't think that with the virtuality of jobs now that you never really get a day off, aside from maybe Sunday. So it'd be interesting to know if these people were still working on Friday, although it was at home, that maybe if they were more productive at home, that that made up for the total productivity throughout the week. Either way, the story is sort of generalized, and we aren't digging into this extensively, but there are a lot of variables here that could be coming into play that we're not thinking about, or know. Chad: I think it's pretty simple. It doesn't matter where you work, you have a specific amount of work that has to be done. It'll be done or you don't have a job. Joel: Yeah, basically. Chad: Yeah, that's fairly simple. So it doesn't matter if I'm sitting... And this is what I always... I had an issue with a boss of mine who was stuck in the 19-fucking-50s, "Be there at 8:00! Don't leave before 5:00! And if you leave at 5:01 that's still bad." That kind of a thing. And it's like, yeah, but my team is getting their shit done. As a matter of fact, they're killing it. That is the metric in which we should be looking at, as opposed to 9:00 to 5:00. Whether it's four days a week or five days a week, it's what you give them, the actual mission. And again, this is more of kind of like my military bearing, I think is more focused on the mission and objectives. Did we hit it? Did we knock it out of the park then? Then yes, then you can do that wherever you want. I don't care where you work, just get it on. Joel: Yeah. We have some good information from our buddy Jamie Leonard at RecFest, who tried this four-day work week and really liked it, I guess. Chad: Yeah, he did, and as a matter of fact we're going to be talking to him tomorrow, so look for a podcast. So we'll come out talking a little bit more deeply into what they did at the recruitment events company, how it worked, and there were pros and cons, and we're looking forward to talking to him about that. Joel: All right. CareerBuilder has a new sponsorship, which is odd. They're sponsoring the WWE, that's the World Wrestling- Chad: Entertainment Company, or something. Joel: Entertainment Company, yeah. They've left their sponsorship with the PGA, which I guess they had for three-some years, and they've come over to wrestling, or wrasslin' as we call it here in Indiana. And it seems like a very odd target market business. Aside from the demographics, the business is tanking, it's a public company, so we know that viewership over the last five years is basically cut in half. Younger people don't give a shit anymore. They'd rather play Xbox and, whatever, Fortnite. Joel: So this is a challenge business, although you could certainly say CareerBuilder is also a challenge business, so maybe they just got this sponsorship off the clearance rack. Although sponsorships with wrestling typically doesn't strike me as an inexpensive opportunity. Chad: Right. Joel: So they're trying to get people to download the mobile app at these things. Now, they're not pushing Pokemon Go for jobs. I think it'd be funny if you could, like, point your phone at certain wrestlers and maybe they could sponsor jobs for each wrestler, and companies could, like, NASCAR each wrestler. But anyway, I think this is sort of a funny sponsorship. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Usually companies with jobs try to sponsor technology or diversity, which I guess WWE does. What are your thoughts? Chad: I think... Hello, CareerBuilder, 2010 called, and they want their marketing campaign back. I mean, this is everybody trying to download apps and all that shit when it was really hot, and it's ridiculous. I don't know why you're trying to get somebody to jump through all these fucking hoops. Chad: It's interesting that they went from one demographic, being the PGA, to an entirely different demographic, being the WWE. That's more of a marketing demographic target than anything else, but it is a big swing. Last year they had Pokemon for jobs. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on HR tech space. It's just none of this makes sense what they're doing. None of it makes sense. Joel: Yeah. Let's have a 10 by 10 booth at HR Tech, and sponsor WWE. Now, I would get behind it if they brought the CareerBuilder monkeys back, and the monkeys could wrestle in the ring. Now that would be something I could get behind. Chad: Yes, and I'm not behind any of this by the way, just so... 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, Pepperjack, Swiss! So many cheeses, and not one word. 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. Is so weird. We out. #SymphonyTalent #Smashfly #CRM #HireVue #bias #Careerbuilder #Microsoft #TMP #Recruitics #KRT #Shaker

How does an old stodgy bank start-up a new cool brand? Is a bank even allowed to build a cool brand? Is that a thing? It certainly is and Alexandra Nuth aka "The Nuth-inator" talks to the guys about how spinning the new Challenger Brand - Brightside - out of ATB happened. All of this cult branding goodness brought to you by Smashfly recruiting technology built for the talent life cycle. And big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. 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. 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: Are you ready for the Nuth-inator? Chad, what's up man? We're talking to another Canadian. This is becoming a really bad habit of ours. Welcome to the show everyone. This is the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I am Joel Cheesman accompanied by my cohost. Chad: Chad Sowash. Joel: And today, we are blessed to have Alexandra, Alex, the Nuth-inator, Nuth. Alex, I think I can call you that because we're friends now. Welcome to the show. Alex: Thank you. Joel: No one in our audience probably knows who you are, give them the elevator pitch, an intro on you as well as your organization. Alex: For sure. My name is Alex Nuth, I'm a born and raised Canadian, but I'm actually a dual citizen so I'm also American, so I'm happy when everyone wins at the Olympics, especially in hockey. Joel: Very nice. Very nice. My wife is shooting for that dual citizenship. Alex: It's pretty awesome. But yeah, I'm in the Canadian Rockies in Calgary, which isn't much of a tech hub, too many people that don't know much about it. But we actually have some pretty cool things happening in our city, and a little bit of under the radar place for some really cool HR and great companies and some great technology that's coming out. I work for ATB Financial, which is a regional financial institution in Canada. In the Canadian landscape we're pretty small. We've got about 6,000 employees and about a million customers. But when we look at the North American landscape, we're actually quite large. We'd be about like the 20th largest bank in North America. We're pretty much about the right size to do some really cool tech investments and really great innovations and really invest in our people, but we're not so big that we get bogged down in a lot of bureaucracy and aren't afraid to take risks. Alex: It's a pretty cool organization, and I've been on a journey for about the last two years now to build a challenger brand from scratch. It's a bit of a skunkworks project for ATB Financial where we got pushed out of the organization, a whole new tech stack, got to hire people completely differently than ATB does it, and we were able to really kind of reinvent things from the ground up. We have a new brand called Brightside, which is the challenger brand, and we're hoping to actually go to public launch within about a month. So it's a pretty exciting time for us right now. Joel: Do you have time to talk to us? Jeez- Alex: I have a great team. Joel: I feel so special right about now. Chad: Stop asking those questions, she's going to leave. So building a challenger brand, but yet you still have this ATB old stodgy brand, how do you build a challenger brand in the financial space? Because I mean, is it really hip? Is it cool? How do you make it cool and hip? Alex: We're actually pretty lucky, ATB is actually a great place to work. We're typically in number two or number three place of the best places to work in Canada, and we've got a great culture that comes along with that top class store rating. So we're really lucky that we actually had a pretty good foundation to grow from, but at the same time, it was pretty hard to try to beat that as well and try to make that even better and cooler than what ATB is doing. ATB is like the first one to do blockchain, cross border. We've done some great investments into agile, trying to be a tech company, and we're really ahead of a lot of our competitors. So that made it a little bit easier for us to really try to push the boundaries even more because we have a lot of appetite for that at the company. Alex: But in terms of trying to make it cool, I think one of the things that was really interesting when we first started up the team, and we only had about six when we first started the team two years ago and we're over a hundred now, we really tried to find people that weren't bankers. That was kind of the number one thing we were looking for, people that really wanted to change things and break things. And so we hired a very different DNA, a very different type of person, and I think a lot of times people think that means younger, and that's not necessarily true. We just really hired people that don't really fit into molds very well, and really had some big aspirations for what they wanted to achieve. It was really the purpose over the work. We have people coming in every day because they really want to do something different and really break banking from the ground up. Chad: So that's the big question is purpose, right? So what is the purpose that actually draws all those individuals to want to come and break things in the financial industry? Alex: That was really hard because we found really early on, nobody really cares about their bank. Banking's pretty commoditized. People are pretty apathetic, and banks aren't really cool. It's not one of those things where people are talking about it at a barbecue, "My bank was so cool, they did this thing for me." It's usually when they're complaining about their banks. So we were really trying to figure out, what does that look like? We started first with our customer, and really looked at where our customers not being served well currently. One of the things we found is that banks typically try to put people into nice, clean life stages or boxes or kind of tell you that the successful end state is that you're going to retire on a sailboat with gray hair. Alex: We don't think people are really following that prescription of success anymore, so our purpose is really around helping people save and do what's right in the future without sacrificing for today, and serving people as they are, not as they should be. So we're never stepping in to say, "You should have this much in your retirement account," or, "You shouldn't be spending money on that coffee every day even though it makes you happy." It's about saying, "That's who you are, and we're all flawed and that's okay, so how do we just help you do that, and be yourself without trying to make you feel bad about it." Joel: I'm curious from an employment perspective, it sounds like you guys almost started from the ground up in terms of the talent that came to work for the new company. Was that a bit of a minefield? Did you have a lot of good people at ATB saying, "Well, I want to work with this cool, digital bank site. Why do I have to stay here at ATB?"? Or was that a problem? How did you handle the people that were maybe jealous or wanted to come over to the new company? Alex: We actually have a very funny story for the first kind of founding six that we hired. So it was with our old CEO, he's quite the visionary and he was one of the guys that really took us from really low engagement scores up to about 90% and really changed the culture at ATB. And so he had this kind of idea to do a bit of an experiment and almost like a secret interview for the first set of people. And so what we actually did is we identified about 35 high performers from across the company, and then we created this facilitated kind of two day workshop where we put people into purposeful conflict and lots of really hard situations. We gave them a problem to solve over the workshop that was pretty much unsolvable. We knew that we weren't going to come out with an answer, and we watched them and we had some facilitators and ourselves walk around and watch them and see what happened. Chad: That's just mean. You put them in a cage with some boxing gloves. Joel: That's why she's the Nuth-inator, dude. Chad: Sorry. Keep going. Alex: It was fascinating though, because there's a lot of people that were high performing in ATB, and then through that process you start to learn that maybe they're not comfortable killing their ideas, or maybe they can't step out of their comfort zone or they're not as collaborative as you might think they are, maybe they're trying to showboat a little bit. And so through that process, we were able to kind of whittle it down and say, for the DNA that we needed at this venture, which was around people that are just going to work really hard and aren't going to be swayed by the highest paid person's opinion, the hippos in the room. And aren't going to get stuck on an idea, not give it up, and are comfortable stepping outside of their areas of expertise and just helping out a team. Alex: We were able to create this initial team that had so much chemistry and was totally the right DNA for us to really go try to break banking in a meaningful way. And then from that, they were able to hire people beneath them that were able to still have that part of the DNA. So we definitely had a lot of people across ATB putting up their hands, but we've been very, very strict on the types of people that we want to bring in, and the fact that they all have to fit into that very teamwork oriented, very fast, not holding onto those ideas and being able to really think differently about things. Chad: Curious from sort of a longer term perspective, to piggyback on that point, will the new company, Brightside, have its own HR department? Will they have their own recruiters looking for unique people to that organization? Or do you believe that the cultures will sort of bleed together and have sort of the same DNA, if you will, or same vision? Or will they remain separate in the longterm vision? Alex: We haven't really figured out the answer, to be perfectly honest. It's a little hard as we've evolved. Early on, we definitely did things more separately, and I think now we're starting to learn that there's some areas that we can definitely collaborate. I'd say some of the things like just HR administration, recruiting, some of those pieces, it makes sense for us to work with ATB, because they're recruiting many of the same roles, and so we can find great talent all at once and not compete with each other. But in other areas, rewards and recognition, we're doing a lot around rituals and how do we get rituals across the team that get people excited and motivated towards our goals and towards celebrating our wins. Alex: Those things are more custom for us, and those are things that we're running with, and that we've got dedicated people within our teams working on. So we're trying to figure out what the secret sauce is, and really invest in that within our four walls. And then anything that's not really the differentiators or really substantially influencing the employee value prop, we're using the parent for. Chad: So you're starting with Brightside, this kind of cult brand journey, right? First question is how did you even find out about this? We just did last year, right? And we totally got immersed into it. How did you find out about it? And what's the starting point of actually getting Brightside on that journey? Alex: We worked with Cult Marketing who kind of specialize in the cult brand arena. And again, it comes back to that purpose and trying to make sure that you're doing things, not just for profits, not just for the kind of extrinsic values that drive a lot of companies and drive a lot of people, but what's the intrinsic motivation for everybody to show up and to be doing the right things for customers? So the inside out brand is something that we've talked a lot about. So how do we make sure that the brand that we have within the four walls and how our employees are thinking about our customers, and how do we bring the customer into everything that we're doing, from rewards and recognition to training, to time that they have to spend talking to customers every month, or actually working in our sales and service functions? Alex: How do we bring the customer into our employees? And then how does that then translate out into what the brand shows up for? Because we believe that if there's a disconnect between how people work and what they prioritize at work, and what we're doing externally in the market, that that disconnect will show up in our product. It'll show up in our services. It'll show up in everything. So it's really been this journey about how do we really kind of bring what we want to be outside and first start to live it inside. Joel: Alex, you did a interview with a Calgary magazine, Avenue Magazine, fairly recently, and the article is titled, Four Ways to Optimize Customer Experience in the Digital Age. If you would humor me, there are four pieces that you highlight, could we talk about each of those four separately, just real quickly. I think our listeners would love to know what are the four ways that you recommend optimizing in digital environments. So number one is put customers before tech. Alex: Yeah. I think one of the things I found a lot ... And I try to avoid banking conferences as much as I can, because I- Joel: Oh, I can't imagine why. Chad: They're so exciting. They're probably just as exciting as HR conferences by the way. Alex: I find that they're all saying the same thing. And bankers, yeah, they're always like, "Oh, everyone loves math and everyone loves analytics and wants to do tons of spreadsheets for their finances." That's not true. But I think that's a big thing is that a lot of times when organizations are trying to innovate or work on customer experience, they start with the tech and then try to backwards engineer into the problem that's solving for customers. So when you think about organizations looking at trends, you hear the typical ones of analytics, AI, blockchain, wearables, voice, all these kind of technologies, but that's really separated from what the customer actually wants. Alex: And so where we've kind of oriented is if those things help solve a customer problem, great, but we're not going to start there and then try to say, "Hey customers, how do you want to use voice banking?" We had a lot of customers that even said, "My bank allows me to do Siri Pay, but I can't even get my card reissued in two days, and then I'm without money for two days," or, "My card gets frozen when I'm traveling and I have no access to cash." Those are the things that matter to them a lot more than whether or not they can do Siri Pay. And so sometimes the investments into customer experience try to go towards, it has to be frictionless, or it has to look a certain way from a technology standpoint, but it's missing the mark substantially for what customers actually want and need in their experiences. So we're going more on that side. Alex: And again, a lot of the places where we're focusing on is customer rationality. People don't like math, people don't really like to look at their money, it doesn't always make them feel good. And even though they might know what they should do, it doesn't necessarily mean that more technology that highlights where they're not doing something well is the answer. I relate a lot back into fitness industry. I know if I ate that donut, I'm going to gain weight. I don't really want someone to tell me not to eat the doughnut, I just want to eat the donut. Joel: Which is a great segue into maybe your second point of don't try to boil the ocean. Alex: Yeah. And I think that's exactly part of it. I think a lot of times, everyone's trying to catch up with competitors, lots of table stakes, trying to add feature sets, wanting to have a deep product shelf. And we're just trying to figure out, again, to that tech kind of startup way, what's the MVP? What's the real focus that we can do for one customer segment really well to build that customer love and then expand from there? We're not trying to be things ... Everything to all people or trying to make everyone happy, because we don't believe we'll win or get that real kind of cult brand or that love if we're just kind of vanilla to everybody. 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. Well, it'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 on 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 headhunting 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 a lots of room for improvement about how they're going about nurturing their talent acquisition strategies. Chad: Register now at cultgathering.com. Joel: Yeah. And then you close it up with remember the emotional experience and make it fun. Alex: Yeah. And that kind of comes back to the rationality piece. We believe money is emotional, it's almost like relationships, and people have huge emotions towards it, and a lot of it’s learned behavior. It's not something people talk about a whole lot. And so again, it's easy to say that everybody should just be able to read some PDFs and understand where to put their money and that it's super easy math. But at the end of it all, there's social pressures to spend pieces of money or spend a certain way or look a certain way. And so trying to help people not change some of those emotional parts of themselves, but still be successful to kind of the 10,000 steps in fitness. What are those kind of ways that you can just get people doing the right thing without having them to really overhaul their lives or feel bad about themselves? And I think that's a really important piece. Chad: What are those things to make banking fun? Alex: It's not so much fun as much as it's just not painful. Chad: Okay. Alex: We think a lot of it too when we were doing a lot of our work. We don't think banks have much of a voice, and we don't think banks have much of a brand, and so we really want to be our persona that we talk about that we are with our customers is the wise wing woman. We want to show up in that way with every communication that we have with customers that we're there to kind of give them a little bit of advice like your best friend would, but not tell you that we don't love you or that you're stupid or make you feel really bad about it, or just give you facts because nobody just wants facts thrown at them. And so how do you build that into the experience, into the voice, into the way that you're communicating with customers? And those are nuances that are harder to quantify, they're not, "Here's a savings feature, here's a specific product." It's more about how everything's delivered. And I think that's something that banks haven't really thought about a whole lot yet. Chad: One thing that we always hear, especially when we're starting to talk about purpose, when we're starting to talk about cult brand, is people over profits or over boardrooms, right? Now that's easy to say, but from your seat, how do those conversations actually go with bankers and the actual business people when you say, "Hey, don't worry about the profits, we have to worry about the people and then the profits will come around."? What kind of conversations do you get in? And how hard was it to start those conversations? Alex: And again, I'll give a lot of credit to ATB for being quite on the forefront of that. We had a very progressive board that really focused on people first and believed that if you focus on people, everything else will follow. And so it was an easy one for us to continue on with, but we always overinvest in the processes about how people are working, and trying to invest in people's learning and development and getting the right people in our offices and setting them up for success. We also have something at ATB and we use it at Brightside as well, that people deserve great leaders, not perfect leaders. And so it's all around just really trying to pull all the value out of everything and get the costs down, but also not trying to be perfect on the people front either. Alex: It's all around, how do we just really give people a great place to work, where they're going to be their most productive and best selves? So honestly, for us the conversation was quite easy and we're very lucky on that. I think other companies definitely struggle with it a lot more because it is, how many customer service people do you have per call? Not, how did the call make people feel? And are your customer service people exhausted? And so we're focusing more on those other metrics and try to bake those into how we're measuring our success. Joel: We cover diversity and inclusion quite a bit here on the show, and I think it's fair to say that when you think of banking, you think of middle age and old white men in pinstripe suits. Alex: Yeah. Joel: What was it about ATB that appealed to you as a woman? And maybe speaking to young women out there who do want to get into the banking world, but are maybe a little bit intimidated by the aura of what banking is, what advice would you give them coming into the business? Alex: For sure, and that's an interesting one. I think, again, it's kind of the top down leadership. So one of the things when I made the switch to ATB, it was definitely looking at what the leadership team looked like. And again, we've got a board that's 50/50 women and men, so it's all the way down from our board, and we've got those targets and those goals around that. There's a lot of activity that ATB does. Our 11th value for all of our corporate values is around being able to be yourself at work and accepting people's all around diversity and inclusion. It was actually a gift from our departing CEO to us was an 11 value focused on diversity and inclusion. I think when you look at how the organization's investing in those things, actions, what the leadership team makeup looks like, you'll see whether or not they're just talking the talk on diversity inclusion or whether they're actually walking it. And that was something that I looked for. Alex: And definitely joining ATB, I'd say there's other topics like ageism or LGBTQ or women, and those things are just non issues at ATB in many ways. Where there are issues, they work really hard to create policies or help fix those things, whether we're looking and exploring, do we do gender pay corrections if they exist. We're at least figuring out, Do they exist? Do we invest more sponsorship for women with very formal succession planning and making sure that we've got women considered in those places? I would say looking at those investments and asking questions on those investments to find a company that is going to support you is really important, because I think too many ... And I read an article where just putting a rainbow flag on your logo during pride month isn't DNI. Joel: Oh, now you're speaking Chad's language now. Alex: You need to show up every day. Chad: Right. Alex: Yeah. You need to show up every day that way, and you need to have the policies and the processes and the investments to match that kind of talk. Chad: How does that help from a culture standpoint, when you can bring your whole self to work? How does that help you get on track faster to be a cult brand? Does it help or do you think it's just one of the ingredients, but it's not one of the main ingredients? Alex: The thing that I think that it gives is ... My team, we're even more diverse than ATB in terms of makeup. Most of our senior developers are actually women, which is really cool. My head of technology co lead is a woman, I'm a woman, so we've got a lot of women in leadership roles. I think the thing that you get when you're giving people that opportunity to bring, in LGBTQ, their partner to Chris's party and it's a nonissue, you're getting these huge advocates. People really appreciate the fact that they can be themselves, and they're there to fight for you, and you get everything out of them. They are so invested in your success because you're invested in their success and who they are. So you just get these real, passionate hard workers. Alex: I think also, it's kind of that thing where you get access to people that other people have overlooked, and you're just like, "Oh my God, this person is amazing." Thank goodness you came to me. It's a great opportunity to be able to snatch up all this high potential that maybe other companies or other organizations wouldn't support, and be able to just kind of create these superstar teams of people that were overlooked for stupid reasons. Chad: Yeah. Did you hear that everybody? Listen to that. So last from me, what advice would you give a company who want to have a cult brand, but they just don't know where to start? Where do they start? Alex: I think again, it has to be championed by somebody that really believes it. Where I've seen it fall down or where I've seen organizations, and I've talked with a lot of organizations that say, "I want a challenger brand," or, "We're going to create this cult brand that's going to be really cool," but then you start to here, "But I'm scared about the risk or the reporting," or, "I'm scared about what the board's going to think," or those things. You really need to find somebody that's going to say, "We're going to reinvent this," and have someone that's really passionate and believes in it and is going to champion it and really fight for it. And I think that's the biggest thing. You need to fight for that space, because when it's uncomfortable or when your board or your customers are a little bit uncomfortable, you have to stick with it, and I believe that wholeheartedly. Alex: Again, there's a story about our old CEO. I remember a call where one of our customers was quite upset that we were supporting LGBTQ and he just said, "Well then don't be a customer of ours." And I think having that strength to live your purpose every day- Joel: Ballsy. Alex: ... is something we need to be really honest about, to say, can you actually do that? And are you willing to actually do that? So that'd be step one, and step two is just setting up the structures and the processes to do it right. Again, a challenger brand instead of ATB is really easy because ATB is a great culture. And other organizations, I'd say, set it up as a subsidiary, so the parent organization can't influence it. Give it the structures and the processes to make sure it can be successful and it won't get eroded. Joel: All right Alex, I'm going to let you go on this one. I realized that we've been calling you the Nuth-inator this entire podcast, and no one knows exactly why because they weren't in on the pre-recording. Enlighten our audience as to why you have that nickname, and then just go ahead and close it out. Let us know where we can find out more about you and your organization. Alex: Perfect. This nickname has nothing to do with my personality whatsoever. Joel: Obviously not. Chad: Sure. Alex: My fiance is an avid gamer and has been trying to get me into Call of Duty and various other games and needed to create a scary screen name for me on my profile, so he nicknamed me the Nuth-inator for when we were playing together. So it has nothing to do with how I am at work in any way Chad: So if you're on Call of Duty and you get waxed by the Nuth-inator, you know exactly who it was. Joel: Alex, we appreciate your time. For those who want to know more about you or the new company, where should they go? Alex: Our website is hibrightside.ca, and we also have an Instagram channel @hibrightsider that you can follow as well. And then for myself, I'm just on LinkedIn under Alex Nuth. Joel: Outstanding. Thanks for your time today. Chad: Thanks Alex. Alex: Thank you. Joel: We out. Chad: 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 #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Branding

The Money Shot with George Larocque for Q3 2019 Would you believe the amount of money going into HR tech decreased last quarter? Well, it did. But money man George Larocque ain't scared. In fact, he's as bullish as ever on investment flowing into the space, and he lays it all out for Chad & Cheese in the Sovren exclusive. For more on who got money and who wants more money, tune in now. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities. Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now based on that technology come sovereigns, artificial intelligence, matching and scoring software in fractions of a second, receive mattress faults 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 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, 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 and Cheese Podcast. Joel: All. Yeah, Chad: It's the money shot baby. Joel: Back, back again. And guess who's back? Tell a friend... George Larocque. Chad: George Larocque is back. Joel: Larocque rock out with your…. Uhhh… Chad: Yeah, eh. Well you're, you're in Larocque out. Yeah. So I just thought this is going to be a new segment that we do every quarter called The Money Shot. What do you think? Joel: Are you asking me or George? Chad: I'm asking you. This is our show dip shit. Joel: Oh, well, I don't care what we do. It's George's name gets to be attached to The Money Shot. Chad: George Loves it. It's the money shot with George Larocque. Hello everybody. Joel: I think he left. Is he still there? Chad: Are you there? George George: Can I speak now? You guys need, I got the riot act on the way in about being muted and introductions and stuff. Joel: I'm about your crappy survey. We're talking about what you actually know about your your money. Money, time, money, report, money time. Chad: Before we get to the money shot, tell, tell us about George, the rock. For all those listeners out there who don't know who George is, they've, they've, unfortunately, I don't know who wouldn't, but who is George Larocque and what does this HR Win's thing? George: George Larocque. I'm going to, I know, I don't want to speak in the third person, but I am George Larocque and I'm a market analyst. I've been in the industry for 30 years. I've been in recruiting and in HR, spent 10 years there, 10 years on the vendor side, a couple of good runs with a couple of bigger brands taking Bullhorn and BrassRring to market and a couple and one or two others. And then for the last 10 years I've been a market analyst. So I cover the market, I with employers to help them understand the tech trends and the technology that's out there. Right, a lot of reports about it, work one on one with them. I also work with vendors and do advisory on helping them understand the customer. One of the things I do is track all of the investment the VC and the private equity and the mergers and acquisitions in the space. George: And I put out a quarterly, I cover every deal day in day out at HR winds.com. But I also put out the quarterly, a quarterly update report on everything that's happened and an annual look back. And today we're going to talk about the quarterly report, but everything's at HRWins.com and we're breaking news today, soon to be released. HrLoses. I do own the URL thanks to Chad and Cheese. I thought I better own it so that the, you know, something responsible happens when you guys get ahold of it. Chad: Dude, I'm really hoping that we get a version of fuckedcompany that is just on the HR side. I'm hoping that's what we get. But today, today, this is what we're going to get kids so dangerous today that this is what we're going to get. It's, it's HR Wins Q3 2019 global HR tech investment update, AKA The Money Shot. George, where can they find this? So if our listeners aren't driving but they are listening and they can go to their mobile or they can go to their desktop, how can they follow along? George: A real simple, just go to HR wins.com. Scroll down to the feet. You'll see featured reports and it is the big featured report right now, a big purple picture of like a report cover with the title on it. You can't miss it. Chad: Big purple monster looking money shot. Okay. George: You're not going to get me to say it. I'm not going to say, I'm just not going to say you can say it all you want. I'm not going to say it. Chad: Oh, everybody's going to take it. Everybody has to take a shot when I say money shot. Okay. So let's go ahead and dive into this. So we have close to a billion dollars that was actually spent in Q3. Tell us, tell us a little bit about this and what we're seeing on the trend lines. Joel: Yeah. What's the executive summary of this thing for everyone? George: The executive summary is, I mean, it was another, you know, big quarter. I've tracked details for the last three years and this is the, a, this is quarter number five, right as fifth largest. It's an incredible amount of VC coming into the space. The talent acquisition. And HCM categories are the big categories as usual. And you know, the, the subcategories talent in talent acquisition, job boards and assessments scored big this quarter job boards is every quarter and month. You know, across all categories. The leader this quarter assessments, you know, edged it out. So that's a, that's the high, the high level. There's, you know, we can go deeper into analysis if you want. Joel: Oh, we're going to go deep with The Money Shot George, don't you worry. Chad: Top of the report, a bit close to a billion dollars, $964.3 million spent. So how does that compare? Is that looking good? How are we trending? George: Yeah, well, when you look at the, you look at the chart it, you know, the, your first reaction it, it's, well, it's the fifth largest in the last three years. It's a drop from the last couple of quarters. But the thing to remember about the last two quarters is we had something like eight mega rounds, right? Deals worth over 100 million and half of those were worth over 300 million. So we didn't have any mega rounds in this, in in Q3. So that's that, that's the impact right now, Chad: Q3, are we taking a breath? Is that what's happening? George: I don't know if you can say $1 billion is taking a breath. It's, it's, it's a lot lower than two, three last year though. Okay. Yeah. I, but we did have mega rounds last year. We had, we consistently have some really large routes now in Q4 already started and we've already had a Mega round in Q4. We had a $300 million round go to rig up. So maybe but I, I really don't think quarterly. I, I do this quarterly because everybody wants a quarterly. And I think over time it's good to see the trend, but I don't think quarterly is the way to look at VC and private equity coming into the space to take, to take the to take the temperature. Right. I, I don't think that's the way to look at it Joel: Or this year is not a Canary in the coal mine, if you will. And if you were in their prediction game, you wouldn't sort of name this the death knell of the investment money coming in. You expect to see greater numbers going forward. George: We had a, a high, a good deal volume D D the number of deals didn't go down. The average deal size when you take out the, the outliers and comparatively the last quarters is, you know, right on track. I, I, I'm not a financial analyst, so you know, something happens in the economy. And that's going to cause all investors to tap their brakes, get more conservative. But what I do see, I, you know, I got I got I see a lot of new funds being created, not, not just for HR tech, but across the board. The, the venture capitalists are raising a lot of money. They're, they've, they're bringing a lot of money into their funds that they need to find homes for. And I'd have had a call in you know, in the last 48 hours of someone creating a new fund for just for HR tech. George: So, you know, as we sit today with the economy not, nothing seems to be slowing down. You know, that's, that's my, that's my take now. I, but I, I again, if anything happened, of course, if anything happens in the economy, things will, will slow. And I, I don't know if this is the new normal or if this 2000, 18, 2019 level of investment was like our peak. Yeah, it's, it's, it, it really is. I, I, yeah, you look at the number of of startups. You look at the number ILA cow you know, anybody can, you know, really at low cost, create an app. And we see a lot of apps coming into the market. So you know, all of these things, you know, play into this, there's going to be no shortage of folks starting up companies. And when the economy does go soft, that's sort of the best time to start. If you, if you have the capacity to do it, if you have the resources to do it. So, Joel: So you mentioned, you mentioned mobile. Can you look at sort of other trends that may have sparked this? Like I know for me you know, Microsoft dropping 26 billion for LinkedIn kinda started this, this gold rush, but what's your take George: Yeah, that those sizeable investments have a lot to do with it. I think a lot of investors see Workday and I'm not talking about the, the product that they're providing to the market, but looking at look, they look at Workday and they see how it's trading. They see it's multiples, they see and it's a big shiny object and it's in the HR technology category. I think that's another thing that that draws a lot of investors, you know, in, into the space. Chad: Do you think they liken it to Salesforce and Salesforce is obviously exploded? I mean, it's almost like it's a different segment, different industry. And this could prospectively be the sales force of the HR tech industry. George: I think there's something to that. I think it's they liken it to a lot of things. Most investors don't know much of anything about this space. Chad: Neither do most of the startups that get in this space. George: Yeah. So you hear just like from the startups, I, you still here, I'm still hearing like, you know, we're, we're going to be the Match.com of recruiting. We're going to be the Uber of recruiting. We're going to be this. Yeah. Yeah. The Tinder of recruiting. We're going to be all of this stuff and have HR and have employee engagement, whatever the category is. And you hear it from the investors to you here. And I, I think there has been a trend with vendors and marketplaces sort of emulating Salesforce. I think the, the challenge with the Workday is a different kind of topic, but the challenge with the legacy vendors in Workday is now a legacy vendor. They've been around a long time. They've got really limited, they don't have workplaces like Salesforce. Salesforce is, is just open, right? George: They don't care, you can replace any of their features with your own apps coming through their marketplace. You can't show me an HR vendor like that. Some of the newer vendors that came up after 2010, 2015 ha, culturally they're more aligned with that. But, but most of the, you know, do, none of the HR platforms are are open like that. They should be. But, but they're not. So I think that that confounds the vendors and the investors over time because to this, to this point, buyers don't act like people that buy or, or, or companies that buy Salesforce or marketing platforms or other financial systems or things like that. Joel: You, you mentioned Uber and I'm curious because we've, we've had a lot of, I guess, work platforms or, or companies in our space go public this past year and frankly be pretty challenged. You know, Upwork, Lyft, Uber, Fiverr. I'd even maybe throw Slack in there. As someone in the public market that has been challenged, do you think that will affect the, the amount of money coming into this space negatively? Or will it not matter? George: You know, if you look at you look at some of these mega rounds you know rig up this quarter Q for 300 million I think it brought their total to 450 million. You know, the, the pressure on the back side of that level of investment. You know, that's, you look, you look at a lot of those vendors that you mentioned, they raised huge amounts of capital and then you know, the, the results that are expected as a startup, but then as they look to go public, you know, what their market cap needs to be. It's, it's kinda hard for me to see where we aren't going to have, you know, the only examples we had are like, you know, we've had linked LinkedIn go to Microsoft. That was acquisition, right? We, we don't have a lot of, we don't have a lot of experience with massive investment, you know, sort of going public. And we do have, we've had unicorns like Zenefits imploded. They're, they're still like, they're chugging along out there, but there are different Zenefits now. So I, I just, I, I expect have we'll have some, some brands to put on HR loses.com. I think we'll have some, some brands to put over there at some point. Yeah. Chad: So a 2019 surpassed 2018 yep. In three quarters. Right. Versus, so we still have a quarter to go. I mean, we're, we're in the, in the gravy set right now as we, as we take a look at the investment map. Obviously, the money is still, it's in the US. 29 deals in the U S and then there's just sporadic onesy, twosy is all over the rest of the world. Right. George: Yeah. It's, it's good to see deals coming in from other places. You know, France has a, a healthy ecosystem. The UK is always sort of number two Canada can pop up onto the list with a few deals, but we're, we're talking about, you know, the most I've seen from any other country in any quarter of the last three years has been like seven deals. And that's been like, Whoa. You know, usually it's two or three from one, and that was France. And that was France. Yeah, the, yeah, sometime last year. And then when I, when I look at the U S now I don't, I don't report on the cities but it's, it's, you know, Silicon Valley gets the lion's share of the VC investment. But the good news is, you know, I'm seeing I, you know, there has been, I don't want to, it's not like some an Exodus. But they're, you know, many cities have built you know, an ecosystem for startups and technology to attract more talent to attract investment businesses. And that's starting to be reflected, but it's a sort of like, you know, it's, it's analogous to comparing the U S to other countries. You know, Silicon Valley sees the bulk of it. That's where the bigger, you know, sort of top rate VCR where you see the big mega rounds coming out of. But you know, it's, it is starting to expand within the US a little bit. Joel: Let's talk about chatbots for a second. And I, I want to say going back to like 2017 was when I think Maya got their first big round and then you had sort of a, you know, a cavalcade of, of players come into the space that got money. What's sort of your take on what's gonna happen with them in the next couple months or years? Are we going to see them, you know, consolidate and at how much? I think we're looking at AllyO at, you know, above the $50 million mark. I'm sure you can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but we're seeing some big dollars there. And also, what other spaces do you see becoming hot or heating up in the next, you know, 12, 18 months? Chatbots? George: There's no you won't get any disagreement from me that conversational interfaces, chat bots, messaging, all of that automation surrounding it, machine learning, behind it, making the system smarter. That's, you know, that's the future. There's a run on chatbots, right? It's and, and it's not just the startups. So the thing that we're starting, you know, all of the larger vendors that were a little more hesitant or they started looking at these interfaces. Not really, not rushing to market with a product, but exploring AI, seeing, you know, where does it make sense for our customers, but now they've been coming out with these products. I think you're going to see some acquisitions. That's a, it's a place where you're going to see some of these vendors who might have raised some cash, got some traction, share some customers with, with some platforms get acquired. George: You're going to see if, if you're going to see a lot of these vendors have to branch out. Because there are, there's just there, there are, there are a lot of vendors across every category right there. There are too many recruiting chatbots, there are too many benefits advisor chat bots, there are too many internal HR help desk chatbots. So they're going to have to branch out and start to do more and start to look like some of the platforms that they've tried to avoid or they're, they're, you know, they're just going to turn into, you know, zombie vendors out there that, you know, they make enough recurring revenue to keep the lights on and show up at a trade show here or there. But and maybe run a lifestyle business, but they're not going to take over market share bold statements. Chad: Yeah. Let's dig into some of these categories real quick. So to me, it looked like talent acquisition, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like talent acquisition in this quarter took more of the pie than it normally does because HCM usually dominates the dollars side of the house is that the case? Is talent acquisition, talent acquisition tech actually on the rise from an investment standpoint? George: So over the last three years, we've had 9.2 6 billion across all HR tech, 3.9 to HCM and 3.4 to talent acquisition. Okay. So I would say like, I, I w I didn't have that reaction to this chart. It's always to me there, it's always w which one's going to be edge out, the other one, talent acquisition or HCM. The thing about HCM is they consistently, that that category consistently has a small, you know, larger, average deal size bigger deal amounts because you were looking at, you know, payroll and benefits and you know, larger systems and systems that everybody needs. Right? So, yeah, there's a everybody needs payroll. Every, everybody needs in the U S everybody needs a benefits platform. Chad: Well, and it's the difference between getting money to something that is a feature that could go on and get acquired and an actual system, like you're talking about a payroll system. George: Yeah, you're right. You're right. And, and investors, I think yeah, that's why job boards and talent acquisition do well. Another reason is because w w an investor sees a marketplace and they see a need that regard regardless of the economy. People are looking for jobs. Either they're looking at their other, either more people or fewer people looking for jobs. There's, there are always people hiring more. You know, there's a two sided market investors love that you can go in and really specialize and go after that. That, you know, that segment of the market investors can really get their head around that business. Whether they understand the nuances of it or not. Totally different conversation. Human capital management, you know, payroll, everybody needs payroll. Everybody needs to be compliant. Everybody needs to pay their people on time. And they, they need to, they need to do it in more modern ways where funds are more accessible. I can get my head around that pretty, pretty easily. Talent management, we get into like, you know, learning and employee engagement. Those are those by definition that that's sort of where you need to have a deeper understanding of what's happening in leadership and development and management and so forth. Yeah. And so investors that, that's a, that's a scarier ground for most VC investors because it's not a a transactional marketplace or a, I, it's harder for me to see every company needing your learning management system. Joel: All right, George, I'm a, I'm a young entrepreneur and I want to get into this space and I want to raise a lot of money. What recommendation would you give me on what kind of company to start to really make the bank? Don't do it. Chad: Pretty fucking simple. Don't do it. This is not the space for you. Get the fuck out of here. Joel: No, it's seriously, isn't it? Is it, is it automation? Is it AI? And what kind of AI? And I mean, the crypto, right? Is getting money. Like what? Blockchain? Chad: On my God!, Joel: Bad recommended or what is it? Just start a job board. Chad: God, he's reaching. George: So, all right, here's what I think. And I, I'm not I'm not, again, I'm not a financial analyst and I'm not giving anybody any advice on what kind of company to, to start necessarily. But I, I see you know, blockchain is still early, although I know at Workday rising this week they reportedly demoed some pretty cool stuff about, you know, skills who've been Tory and you know, PO PO Joel: ...And recruit holdings just bought a block chain company. Right? George: That's true. That's true. So I think it's still early on blockchain and I think it's really hard for buyers to get their head around a block chain until it becomes a requirement from, from it. Right? It's like, it's sort of like GDPR or data security. You know, they're trying to solve business problems that are out in the town, in the recruiting pipeline or in the, in internal mobility or their, their level of engagement inside. They're inside their company and starting to deal with like changing my complete infrastructure and you know, how data gets to, gets to move through the organization and outside of the organization. I once it says we're going blockchain, that's, that's when, that's when we're going to have a run on blockchain. Now it's like the move to the cloud. I think you're right. And so here's the deal. George: We've seen a lot of vendors like look at all this programmatic activity. I remember in you know, I'd say about, you know, seven years ago, there were some vendors that came out with retargeting and, and they were talking the programmatic talk. They flamed out. Yeah, I can't remember the names, but they flamed out. And now you've got you know, the market's moved to where, you know, app cast and the others they got, their timing was, was better. Their timing was more right than, than wrong. So, so I think blockchain's a scary one for me. If I'm an entrepreneur in this space unless I've got a real patient investor or I'm willing to sort of go, go as a on a, on a bootstrap or you know, sort of go with the market, you know, stay with it early at a lower earlier stage until I start to see more adoption. George: So that, that's a scary one to me. Chad: Job boards are getting a shit ton of money, right? George: They are, they're getting a ton of money and I think there's some, they're not dead. And I, I think there's, there's an, I don't think they're ever going to be dead. And I think you're going to see so here is some interesting that one of the big things I love in the job board space is so we talk about the skills gap in the skills shortage and all this stuff. Now you've got these job boards, they're coming out and they're blending education and job boards. So there was one in Q3 called paths stream, they raised $12 million. They are, they work with traditional universities and they create branded learning content. So like Salesforce creates a CRM essential certificate. Tablo has like data analytics certificates that you get through. George: I dunno if it's universities, I don't know if they get down to the community college level, but what are they doing? They're creating a pipeline of talent for themselves. Right? And they're creating a marketplace where as a student, I'm coming in to understand what's available at, at these shops. There's another there are others which companies should be doing with their own data and their own applicant tracking system. Yeah, I agree. Now there's another one. Next step. It's a healthcare. They don't work with they don't work with universities, but they create a health care learning and education for individuals that are displaced in the workplace and want to move into the healthcare sector. Now that, that's a, to me that's like, that's, that's the kind of thing you expect to hear politicians talk about. Right? This is like job retraining except businesses are doing it and so it will probably be more successful. George: And it's and that's something where now then you start to think about what's in their tech stack. Now did they bring AI and do they bring machine learning in to make their systems more effective and more valuable for the, for the students and for the candidates. And you know, the consumers that are going through the process and for the employers, there have been some others too. There's you know, last year there was a big round to a university in San Francisco that is funded by Apple Microsoft, Salesforce and all they do is train people for a skills that those companies you know, and they've impacted the curriculum, let's put it that way. So it's, and it's, and it's, there's an online marketplace for this stuff as well. So it's, it's pretty cool to see the talent acquisition and learning training side of things coming together. George: And that's, if I were starting a job board, I'd be looking at, let's look at rig up $300 million. Why specialization? I'm, I'm drawing a blank on the guys in Boston who do no collar, blue collar Jobcase job kids, right? Underserved market, underserved, underserved, right. They now, but, but so LinkedIn is for you know, S, you know, we'll call it skilled re PR candidates, job case. Well the electricians have mobile phones, they have iPhones, they have hand. Troy's you know, folks that are, that you would think blue collar. They’re out on the road. They're not in front of laptops every day. So the market has caught up with that segment of candidates. So there are a lot of places where job boards are really leading this specialization trend for all of HR tech. And that, that's where you're going to see all of HR tech go ultimately is you know, they're going to be, you're going to have the apps that are better or the, and the platforms that are better serving healthcare or industrial or tech or whatever. So is your answer to the young entrepreneur a specialized job board? I think that's, that's one, that's one of the answers. There's another area that I think is around analytics for workforce planning. I'm hearing a lot, a lot of a lot of employers are looking for help aligning their company's goals for the next, you know, two years, five years. SFX: <> George: Yeah. Okay. But, but with aligning that with their internal talent and the external talent that's available and the platforms generally don't do that well. And I'm getting, I'm hearing a lot of that. I'm hearing a big need for that. And so that's something that's, that's, that's interesting to me. Joel: Fantastic. George, as always, we appreciate your time and your sense of humor and your humility. If you were sending someone to learn more about you that's listening right now, where would you send them? George: Go to HRwins.com and you find everything you need to know or links to it from there. Chad: Excellent man. Chad & 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. #Acquisition #Merger #funding #capital #venture #privateequity #GeorgeLarocque

Chad and Cheese are handing out tricks and treats this Halloween. - VONQ wants more candy! - Engage Talent breathes a sigh of relief... - Joel says "Careerbuilder ad sucks" - Chad says "LinkedIn ads knock it out of the park" - Chipotle deserves the park - Amazon orders more garbage cans and... Tim Sackett should allow Halloween in the office! All of these treats handed out by Sovren, JobAdX, and Canvas. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Hung Lee: It's Hung from recruiting prey food and you all listening to the chat and she show this, in my opinion, is the number one podcast in our industry. You just have to subscribe and listens to these guys. 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: Awwwwweee yeah, Chad: What the fuck was that? Joel: What's up ghouls and goblins? You cannot leave dude. Listeners cannot leave. It's the Halloween edition of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: Trick or treat Joel: Be afraid, be very afraid I'm your cohost Joel. "Here's Johnny " Cheesman Chad: And I'm Chad "I love candy corn" Sowash, Joel: This week's episode, CareerBuilder and LinkedIn. Drop new commercials, tricks and treats a bound in the acquisition game and we break down the office party rules for Halloween. Grab your bag of rocks. Charlie Brown. We're smashing some great pumpkin's this week, right after this 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. 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 go canvas.io get ready to text at the speed of talent. Joel: Oh yeah. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Are you a trick or treating this year? Are you a Chad: No, I'm not too old for that. I mean, we sit me in the neighbors. We have like a three or four different houses. We sit in one of our driveways. And we'll probably have prior to have the fire going this year. We'll have bourbon out and we'll have plenty of plenty of candy for the kids. So, yeah, it should be a blast. Joel: Pumpkin spice. Goodness. I will say that one of our most more memorable Halloweens was when we went to Columbus to partake in Columbus's Halloween. Now what we do remember is there one of your neighbors actually created a, basically, I dunno, a haunted house and the garage and the kids walk in, some dude with a chainsaw and like it was, it was horrors, horrors galore. So yeah, if you're in the Columbus, Indiana area go check out that homemade haunted house. I of course with a two year old, a 10 year old and a 13 year old, we'll be hitting Halloween head on. I'm going as a prisoner this year. Prisoner. my wife is a funky chicken. Yeah, that's a little odd. Okay. Hey, it's Halloween. Jeremy, the two year old is going as a PJ mask character, which some parents will know out there. You probably don't know. He's, he's going to be cat boy. Stella. My 10 year old daughter's going to be 11 from stranger things. The popular Netflix show. And Cole is going as an executioner. So he's in a black robe and acts, some wild mask. All black. Yeah. That's my 13 year old son. Chad: After last week being in Paris, I mean they did two, two entirely different weeks being in Paris, just Julie and I all last week and go figure going to the the catacombs where they actually talked about executions and things like that and seeing walls of bones and then thinking about Cole actually dressing up as an execution or that's yeah, that's, that's surreal Joel: At best. Yeah. It's been a scary week to say the least. Catacombs is a fucked up place. Yeah. And only the French would S would think to say like, let's make this into art. Chad: Yeah. I think it's, it's definitely a different way to, to, to quote unquote barrier people cause they are underground. You do feel, or at least I did and I know Julie did. We felt like this, just this, this reverence when you go down there, much like when you go to a, like the, the big cemetery, can't remember the name in Paris, which we actually visited where Jim Morrison is buried and whatnot. I mean, when you step on those grounds, you feel that reverence. And when we went down to the catacombs, yeah, it was scary as fuck. Cause there were 6 million ish people that are actually stacked up on top of each other bones. Yeah. But there was that, that, that reverence and I can't believe that people actually go down there and, and take bones or at least they try to, I mean it's just, it's fucking crazy. Joel: Yeah. A lot of old timey, scary shit in France. Yes. Along with all via the glorified art and you know, creative stuff that's there. Yeah. Yeah. Jim Morrison, his grave was interesting. If you've seen the movie the doors, there's a scene at the end where they show Morrison's grave. And he, his, he has like a, a bust with his head on it and it just, it just says Jim Morrison 1948 to 1971 or whatever it is that's there anymore. The grave now is like James Douglas Morrison. It's like a more official, it's gated off. So I was kind of expecting to see the doors movie version but did not get that Chopin is buried there, which is kinda cool. And Oscar Wilde is buried there as well. I don't know if you saw those graves. Yeah. Behind glass. Oscar Wilde was weird, right? Yeah. Yeah. If anyone knows what's up with that grave, let us know. We have some Irish listeners, maybe they know what, what the deal is with that grave. That's, that's a weird sort of hood ornament on a car looking grave. Chad: Thanks again to Unleash and SmashFly. We had a great time at Unleash was a really cool frickin event. If you haven't listened to our Unleash podcasts, go back, listen to both of them. They're a blast. One was a panel, talked about pretty much employer brand cult, brand experience, that kind of stuff. And then the other one, Joel and I were we pretty much took over the Mya booth just because it was nice and quiet over there and they had nice, comfortable seats. So we just took over the Mya booth. Joel: Yeah. And getting flipped off by, no numerous CEOs was fun too. There in the Mya booth. Yeah. Unleash was, Unleash was great. We're excited to you know, to sort of be a part of that show to, you know, a few, if you have a conference take note. They do, they do a really good job of combining the vendors and the attendees and a really cool way. Chad: Yeah. They do. And talking about shows, Bill Boorman, you might know this guy, he is having his 10th anniversary for true and a, so a big, big shout out to bill. Congrats buddy. 10 years. Chad: He's one of our favorite Hobbits, you know. Joel: Dude loves him some. Bob Geldof by the way, he he had a major conference boner when Bob Geldof spoke. That's the the live aid guy in case our young audience audience members don't know who Bob Geldof is. Yeah, Chad: He's done a few things but live aid definitely. So big. A happy anniversary. Bill a hope to see at a, in a show soon. Man, I'm next in the shout out list. Adam Gordon at Candidate ID for launching a free CRM. Chad: ...And It was funny, we saw him in Paris and the question was, so why, why a free CRM? And he said, it's pretty simple because that's what CRMs are worth. Joel: That's what he said? SFX: That just one big pile of shit. Chad: Yeah, he's, he said that's what CRMs are worth. That's why we're giving it away. Joel: I was going to say, I typically don't like the free model. I think it works in this case because it's free for a certain number of, you know, individuals in your database and then you gotta pay for it. So it's a, it's a nice little gateway drug for small companies or who just want to kick the tires. But I didn't, I didn't realize he said CRMs or work Jack. So that was a, that's an interesting take. From him. I'm going to give a shout out to welcome to the jungle who just got 22 point $3 million, but I want to, I want this company. Yeah. I want to, I want to point out that it's a French company and no French company should be able to name their company after one of the greatest rock songs in American history. I just think that's wrong. And these guys should, should be deep six just for thinking that they could do that. Chad: Well in naming a company and or a product a phrase is one of the dumbest fucking things. Especially, I mean, it just, that's stupid, Joel: Yeah. Why don't you just launch some company's name like born to run and Jack and Diane and a American girl or something like what the fuck? Chad: Born in the USA. How about that? How about you do that Joel: Launching in Germany this week? Born in the USA recruitment solutions. Yeah. Chad: Ah, big shout out to Megan Irwin over at SAIC, she's over in the employment marketing side of the house. Hey Megan. You get a chance, say hi to Amy for us over there. Really appreciate both of you guys listening. Joel: Big fan Joe. And I'm going to butcher every name that I say on the show today. Joe Zen. I do you know how to pronounce this name? Josie. This is worse than Maura or whatever his name was a couple of weeks ago. Like, so Joe Zeinieh and I, I'll go with that from TMP. You, you had probably one of the best lines of the year at unleash when you called TMP Sibyl and that they should change their name to sell blood because they can't figure out all the brands that they have on board. Joe at TMP said, you guys got some good points. That's all. And that was it. So Joe, shout out to you for the, the short succinct message. And we love that you're listening over there, TMP. Chad: And it was funny, not just Joe, but I received WhatsApp texts, Facebook messages for a bunch of TMP, AIA, TMP ER's. Let's just call them TMP as a whole, a saying. Pretty much the same thing. Laugh out loud. That was fucking hilarious. So we really appreciate, again, when we give company shit when they either give it back to us or you know, they just, again, they join along in the hilarity because that's some fucking funny shit. Joel: And a shout out to Fountain, another gig economy platform, marketplace put in whatever words you want in there. A raised 23 million this week of a series B. So another win for the the gig economy. Congrats to them. Chad: Big shout out to Talkpush and Francis Chan. So if you don't know Francis Chan, he was actually like employee number 11 over at Successfactors and TalkPush just landed him as the VP of product. I think it's pretty big. And when you see these companies making these types of hires, I mean that, that means something. So it was really cool to see something like that happen. Joel: Yeah. Push it real good. Shout out to Facebook, although they've been in the negative news of late posted a job. This was shared by our buddy Matt Charney. They're hiring a product manager for recruiting products. So yeah, we talk about Facebook quite a bit of, of being serious. They keep doing stuff. This is definitely another move into the gee I don't know, the recruiting tech space, so expect some interesting things from them. Them heading into 2020 Facebook. Chad: Yeah. I still don't expect exciting things happening from them because they're going to hire somebody with no background in this space is going to put together shit products. Fairly simple. Joel: Now what if they hire me? Are you still going to say that? Chad: Probably. Joel: Yikes. Yikes. Chad: Ready for events? Joel: Yeah. Let's go to events. Chad: Just off the backs of Paris. We're getting ready, getting a locked and loaded. You're going to recruit con in, in Nashville. I think you're going to, you're going to play this startup performance for my wife. So Julie's going to be on Joel's like this. The warmup act. I'm the warm up that Joel: For Julie. Sowash that's just my lot in life. Chad: And then we're going to ICIMs Influence where they have a new format. Last year we went and it was just the analysts and we just kinda sat in an area and talked about the industry and listened to what Collin and all the other leaders had to say about ICIMS. But this year they're going to have partners and clients and it's going to be a one big room full of people I guess. So we're going to have to see how this works. Joel: Nice. That'll be an interesting take on the analysts meetings. That's a real risk for them because analysts are sort of stupid sometimes, but we'll see. We'll see what happens there. So Recruitcon, that's going to be in a couple of weeks. I'll be there with Julie. My presentation is only 15 minutes, which is interesting. She's probably an hour, which gives me a lot of a lot of grief. And then talent that in December. This looks like the final show that we'll, we'll be doing the naughty or nice show from Dallas that week. Chad: Ah, yeah. Naughty or nice. I am stoked this year about naughty or nice. So if you're not going to talent net in, you're in or around the Dallas area, the fuck are you waiting for? Check it out online. Go get registered and come on out. Should be a blast. Let's get to the news shall we? Joel: Yes. Acquisitions. We got one, one trick and one tree on this. Chad: Yes. We're going to go, I'm going to go with the, with the treat first. And that's VONQ. Who is a Euro programmatic player? Yeah. V O N Q. VONQ. A capital D acquires 54% stake in the disruptive recruitment marketing technology business known as VONQ. Joel: VONQ. Would you, would you rather be a sales person saying, hi, this is Chad from welcome to the jungle or hi, this is Chad from VONQ? Chad: Yea, I think VONQ is easier. I think you can make that much easier. This is, this is another programmatic play. I mean, we've seen so much programmatic work happening out there. So many acquisitions. Joel: Yeah. Netherlands, Germany, English and other European play. I mean, aside from the programmatic side, I mean they're into a lot of different things. Employment, branding, analytics, almost sort of a new style agency right out there. So yeah, not knowing a ton about them. You know, I'd say this is a definitely move that's trending in our industry. Programmatic remains hot and will remain hot apparently through 2020 so yeah, it's not too late to, to, you know, create that start up kids programmatic solutions are hot. Chad: Yeah. I, I think this is what the new ad agency looks like. The, the programmatic scene is changing quickly and all around programmatic. You have branding, you have all these different aspects that talent acquisition just can't fuck with. I mean, they just don't have time to mess with. Right. they might have employer brand people or what have you on site, but they just, there's too much to do. So they need to have an agency to be able to work with an agency, not to mention from a technology standpoint, this is the big change app cast became the major tech player. And then we have the four different acquisitions in the, like what was a six to eight week span that turned the entire agency world on its head for pretty much at cast powered the entire infrastructure for agencies. Right. And that is being shattered. Joel: Switzerland. Chad: Yeah, that's being shattered right now. TMP and Perengo right. You've got 'em symphony had their own thing that the M cloud thing for awhile and then you have ClickIQ going to indeed. I mean you have all these different plays happening. Recruitics says hold my beer and buys KRT. Right. And that's, that's a flip on it. So now we had this one playing field that was pretty much for the most part, powered by Appcast and that is just being rustled to fucking death and watching an organization like VONQ who I believe does have some technology, but I guarantee you behind the scenes they are leaning heavily on a partner vendor tech. So that capital that they're, that they're seeing that that they're getting now is definitely going to help accelerate growth. But I also believe it's going to help them develop themselves out of needing these partners or these other vendors. Joel: Yeah, very interesting. As we head into the new year to see what happens to the, the Joveo's of the world, the Pandologic's, the JobadX is because they're in the catbird seat and they have to be fielding offers as we speak, I assume. Chad: Yeah. And then to the, to the actual acquisition Engage Talent acquired by Workforce Logiq. And that's Logic spelled L O G I Q... Yeah. Formally known as ZeroChaos. So in January of 2019 they switched their name from ZeroChaos, which are two words you should be able to spell. Joel: Yup. Chad: To Workforce Logics or Logiq or whatever the fuck it is with the Q. Joel: You like this as a trick. Chad: Yeah. I like this as a trick and here's why. And, and sorry, Engage Talent guys. What we've seen is Engage Talent is really, I think, wrapped in kind of like this, this marketing spiel of "predictive" and whatnot, and to try to make it feel different than that of an Entell or an Uncommon or some of these, some of these companies who have had issues and really haven't been able to get the play or the revenue that personally I think they should be getting because this is, I believe, the most important technology that we have out there today. Joel: They Engage Talent? Chad: I think this type of technology, it's more matching. It's more of that AI kind of like sourcing predictive model that that's, I love this type of technology, but it's just not getting the play. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Would you put like an Engage Talent and like a Glint on the same, on the same plane or different? Chad: No, I'd say it's different. Glint. Glint entirely, yeah, I think that's, that's one of the, that kind of like tricks that Engage Talent is kind of like wrapped themselves and more of a predictive packaging. I think this is a big win for Engage Talent. Don't get me wrong, but it's a big win because they had to take an out quickly because most of these companies just, they're just not doing well. Joel: Yeah, I agree. For whatever reason, they might be ahead of their time and we've certainly seen that in this industry. Chad: Yeah. I love the tech for some reason it's just not getting the traction. I believe it should. Joel: Let's talk about a scary ad from career builder that's hit the the airwaves and then talk about a much better ad that LinkedIn has put out. Chad: We've seen Careerbuilder ads over the last couple of years and they really haven't been great at all. Joel: So the, the Careerbuilder ad is basically one stock image, like one stock video after another. Like basically either someone internally at Careerbuilder or some agency like searched whatever solution gives you videos, stock videos for work. So you've got like the worker in the hospital, you've got the worker by the truck, you've got the worker among like schoolchildren, you have the worker with you know, in the business sort of setting in the office. They don't speak at all. It was just a narrator with all these sort of stock images. And then at the end there's like a general I dunno, it looks like they're having a cookout or something and then it says, ah, shoot, what's the....? Chad: Work can Work. Joel: Uh work can work. Yeah, work can pay more working. Don't do all this stuff. I dunno. Good on them for like creating an ad. But it's literally like a kid in college could have made this ad. I could've made this ad. Chad: Do you think it's a trick? Joel: Oh, it's a trick from a, I mean, there's nothing unique there. There's nothing that is going to make people go, Oh that ad is funny or oh that ad is touching or Oh that ad really, you know, connects with me. It's just like stock images on a, on a website, right? Like it's just people that don't connect whatsoever. It works on a website sometimes it doesn't really work that well on a video, commercial advertisement. So do they actually have money to run this thing? Cause they sure as hell didn't spend any money producing it. So yeah. W it's just sort of an, it's sort of like, like what's marketing going to do this quarter? Oh we're going to make an ad. Okay, your budget is $200 to go make an ad. And that's what they did. Chad: See, I got something entirely different because what I was used to from Careerbuilder was it was really sterile. Right. And this to me I'm amazed you didn't see like the kid running up to the dad and the, there was more, there was more of this kind of like your work doesn't have to be just work. Work can be closer to home. It can pay more, you know, it can make us proud. Right. So there was more of this, more of this aspirational kind of a feel behind it. And then it was the, you know, CareerBuilder work can work and, and they used to work can work with those other sterile ones before. But I thought this really brought it together better. Was it an amazing ad. Was it a five out of five stars? No. Was it better than anything that I've seen from them in the last five years? Yeah, easily. Whether you didn't like the, the quote unquote stock footage or not, I thought the actual actual message, the aspirational message around work doesn't have to be just work was a, it was, it was pretty cool and it was better than anything they've done in a while. SFX: That is one big pile of shit. Joel: I can't believe you liked this ad. I'm just shocked. It's awful. Chad: Alright. I'd like to talk about is the new LinkedIn ad because this takes that aspirational idea and takes it to another level without all the stock. Right? So what are you searching for? That's really the message behind LinkedIn and this new ad that they've launched in the UK. And a, I think they took the, the, the aspirational ad that Careerbuilder was, was trying to get to and they actually, you can hear it from the actual people themselves that they're currently helping and people that they want to help. And this was a very diverse group of, of individuals as well. Joel: Yeah. First of all, I want to go back to CareerBuilder. I want to hear from our listeners, like hit us up on Twitter, #chadcheese delight, the CareerBuilder ad. Do you not like it? I'm just amazed. Chad likes the ad and I just want to know if I'm just way off here. I'm just a cold hearted son of a bitch. Chad: Oh, we know that. Joel: So hit us up on social about the CareerBuilder ad now on LinkedIn. I did like it. It wasn't, it was what you would expect from LinkedIn, right? It was produced really well. You know, I, I like that they were actual users of the product and at the end they said, you know, I'm Joe, whatever. And I got my job on LinkedIn and it says what their position was. And they have a nice little variety of positions. Joel: It was very UK focused, right? So, yeah, like they're playing soccer. Slash. Football, there's a diversity spin. So they have different obviously diverse audiences in the ad. I think most people don't think of LinkedIn as a job search site. And I think LinkedIn is trying to change that perception. I think they'd been a good job in the States and now they're obviously turning their eye toward Europe and other parts of the world. So yeah, I thought it was, it was a good as effective. It's not, you know, it's not monster super bowl 1999 kind of stuff, but it is an ad that should resonate with people who are looking for work and never thought of LinkedIn. Is there anything more than just a professional networking? So, yeah. Chad: Well, I think in a world today that is so divided, they're building on this in it together feeling. And it's really cool to have a company like LinkedIn ask bigger questions, then do you need a job? And more focused on what would you like to do with your life? And, and again, this was another ad that I felt was not centered around work a was centered on life. Right. And then how, what do we want to do with our life and work as part of that, but it's not the central part of it. So I, I really liked it was I thought it was pretty cool. Joel: Yeah, it's a little bit of a change from a lot of the indeed ads which are really focused on work. So it is a, it is a nice little warm and fuzzy take on the the job search side. So the ads are definitely supportive. I don't know. So there's report this, this past week from aim group on LinkedIn revenues and sessions grow by double digits. Yeah. Things are, continues to do well at LinkedIn. I continued to drink the Koolaid, a revenue surge 25% year on year in the last quarter. This is from the earnings report from Microsoft. This continues the multi quarter run of double-digit year on your income growth for LinkedIn sessions grew by 22% year on year a reaching record levels. This is such and the Dalla I said, quote marketing solutions, this sale of ads targeting LinkedIn users was the fastest growing part of LinkedIn's business with income increasing 44% year over year. It's good for them to see them as an ad solution. Twitter banning political ads. I don't know if we'll start seeing political ads on LinkedIn. Chad: You better fucking not Joel: All right. It's the Halloween show. We don't need any more horrific political political speak. That's a, that's a trick. Yeah. In fact, let's, let's hear from a sponsored job ad X and we'll talk about some treats out of Chipotle. JobAdX: Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Oh, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just half heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it. We live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people and benefits with JobAdX. 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 employees with JobAdX Joel: Free degrees at Chipotle. You love this story. Chad: Yeah, so Chipotle pays for college $20 million in tuition assistance over the over the past two years. Joel: Dude, if this isn't a recruiting and retention tool, I don't know what it is. Chad: Well, this is not just recruiting and retention, this is pipelining. This is knowing what your organization needs for the future. So instead of looking at it like, yeah, we, you know, we need to fill positions now. This is not about fucking filling positions now. It helps, don't get me wrong retention recruiting, but this is about the future and where to polo needs to go. Right. And this is one of the things that really pisses me off about major fortune 500 companies is that they're not thinking about talent pipelining and how to do exactly this. This is, this is too easy right now. It is way too much fucking money for are for a kid to go to college. $100,000 for God sakes. There's no reason for that. Get them in locked in for a three year contract. Who knows and and pay their fucking tuition. Joel: Yeah. And some companies get this. I mean we, we tend to see stuff like this at a Starbucks, Chipotle, a Walmart, you know, companies that are willing to sort of go to the mat in terms of education and paying for college. And, and degrees. It's a great strategy in terms of, you know, keeping people loyal educating folks, putting people into college that maybe wouldn't have even thought about going in the first place. So a big round of applause, you know, for me, for Chipotle companies that are willing to take this expense and again, it's a great, you know, you'd build some great loyalty and your workers if you're going to pay for them. Chad: Well, this isn't an expense. Okay, let's, let's go ahead and put this out there first. This is not an expense. This is exactly what a company should be doing. Joel: An investment. Chad: This is exactly what a company should be doing to ensure that their skilling, their people up. How many companies do we hear about today who are talking about skills gaps? This is ensuring that they can get product out, they can get product developed, they're waiting for somebody to walk through the doors with the actual skills that they need right now and they're losing product time. They're losing development time so that that's a problem. Joel: Yeah. And they're gaining new skills, by the way. Yeah. Love this. This definitely a treat on Halloween from Chipotle, and I have to mention, I don't know if you know this or not, but if you, if you go to Chipotle on Halloween and dress like a burrito, you get a free burrito. Not that I've ever done that, but I wouldn't be above doing that. But yeah, I'd love to hear from some listeners if they're going a wrapping themselves with selves up in aluminum foil to get a free burrito at Chipotle today. Oh, it's a thing, man. Go check out the socials. Chad: I will. And I believe it. I just don't believe that you haven't. Joel: Oh, well, you know, there's no proof out there. Let's put it that way. No visual proof that I've ever wrapped myself up in aluminum foil and gotten a free burrito. Not that is there anything wrong with free burritos? Less of a treat. Is this new story out of Amazon where automation just as sort of lurking in the shadows ready to lay off a bunch of people? Chad: Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean Amazon top 750,000 employees and nearly a hundred thousand in the past three months. Now. I mean, they're getting ready for the season, right? I mean it's, it's more pronounced this year because of the, the onset of prime one day. But but yeah, I mean they, they finished their third quarter with a head count of 750,000 people a year over year bump of 22%. The U S headcount is over 400,000. So this is a little scary. It's very scary because when somebody, something grows this large, everybody looks at and they're like, yay. But we know Jeff Bezos and all, he gives a shit about his dollars. Okay. He doesn't give a shit about the people. He just cares about the dollars, which means, you know, automation is going to come and when they start retrofitting these warehouses or what, whatever thought automation, that number is going to drop dramatically. Chad: And, and again, you know, robots taking the jobs, that kind of thing. That's, that's what we get ready for. Joel: If you think it will happen gradually and nicely and friendly, you're probably lying to yourself. Cause when the automation change comes, it's going to be fast and furious. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. But pull your nuclear you know, button kind of shit. Until then, I hope they've also pur purchased more garbage cans for their employees to piss in. Joel: Yeah. By the way, I, yeah, I love you said because I have a message for all the Amazon workers who want to take a bathroom break. SFX: You cannot leave... Joel: Oh shit. Let's hear from Sovren and then we'll talk about company Halloween party rules. Do it. Sovren: Sovren parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions. You can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com. That's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human Sovren software. So human. You'll want to take it to dinner. Chad: No, it. Okay. So this next one is from our buddy Tim Sackett and I think it's fucking awesome. Hilarious. And definitely it's a trick because it's, it's, it's from, it's from Tim second. Other than the picture of him, his Trump is, is pretty much a treat as far as know. Pretty fricking hilarious. He's spot on. So we have the Tim Sackett office Halloween party rules. Now, first off, Tim says that his office does not participate in the dress up festivities. And, and I, that's just a big boo. I mean, come on Tim. What the fuck? Joel: That is a pretty big boo. And he does say in his roles, if, if, if more than 50 aren't gonna dress up, then just don't even have it. So maybe he just works with some lame motherfuckers. Chad: All goes back to leadership, right? Joel: Uh if he showed up looking like Trump, like that, probably not. Chad: Now he did that before Trump was actually president. That was funny. Then. Right now it's, it's, it's scary. So I guess before and after. Joel: That's probably a big no, that might, that might tip the scale at his number one keep racism out of, out of your your party. And I love this quote. No, really? We're going as the black KKK. Yeah, just don't do that. That's a, that's a great number one role and I love that he has eight rules because I guess 10 roles would've been just too much for him to come up with. Chad: Well, I think, I think that's perfect. 10 top 10 if you go top eight it's like, yeah, I can do eight top three that's fine too. But yeah, number one, racist theme costumes. I mean, we all think that we're, we're woke enough to understand what quote unquote racism is. Chad: Especially a couple of dumb white guys. Stay safe with your, with your costumes. Joel: Yeah. And I think you could add sexism to that. Although I don't think that made his list. I don't think guys can dress up as girls anymore in the office. Chad: I don't know why. I mean that should be more, that should be more heralded more than ever at this point. I mean, if that's how you feel comfortable there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. I am behind that 100%. Joel: Alright, alright I'm clearly not woken up to dude connect with this list. Chad: Yeah. You're one of the most unwoke dudes anything with naughty in the title is number two. And I told him to get with, get that. Here's the thing, if somebody comes dressed as naughty nurse or something like that, more than likely during the rest of the year, he or she is, they're wearing things that are way too revealing already. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: This isn't, this isn't going to be a thing where it happens once. Okay. So I get the whole naughty thing, but still it's gonna happen more than that. Joel: Yeah. Which is rough because I mean Halloween is the one time of year where everyone can, you know, let their freaky fly, but not in the office place. So this is a good number two rule. Chad: Yeah, number three, don't be the guy offering tricks all day. That's that. I don't even know what that means. That's just creepy. You know, because Tim was that guy and he was told this. Now that's just creepy. Stop that. Joel: Now I know you can't turn tricks but offering tricks. I'm not, I'm not exactly sure. We might need some clarification on that one. Chad: Number four, anything that interferes with your ability to do your actual job shouldn't be a costume selection. That's pretty simple. Yeah. Coming in as an Amazon package where you can actually sit down and do your God damn job. That's just stupid. Joel: The Rubik's cube one is a good one. Yeah. Don't dress like a Rubik's cube or a, or a minion. I guess that's, that's not good. Chad: Oh, number five, dressing up like your boss is probably not a K. Especially if he hates you. He or she hates you. Joel: Yeah. Don't do that. It's a good joke. If they like you and they have a good sense of humor, that's always a good, a good, a good costume. But yeah, if they, if they're a Dick, if they're, you know, a douche don't like you, don't do it. Chad: Yeah. If you have to put up a sign to explain who you are, go back to the drawing board. That's pretty simple. Joel: I'm a one night stand. Hahahaha. Get it? That's always one that needs some explaining. Chad: Yeah.. Okay. Once again, you're probably the main reason for all eight of these. Uh... SFX: That's just one big pile of shit. Chad: If less than half your staff will be dressing up. You need to cancel dressing up. See. I don't get this at all because this is about being a individuals in a team environment and being, and allowing those individuals to be who they are. Not to mention this might also spur, I don't know, some creativity through the rest of your fucking team. So allow it to happen. Just make sure that they don't dress up like, you know, naughty janitors or something. Joel: Oh shit. So what's your favorite candy before we we depart. Chad: Reese's peanut butter cups. Very, very simple. Joel: Boom. I knew there was a reason why we had a show together. It's definitely the number one candy. And with that, Chad, happy Halloween. Don't drink too much. Get woke. And we out! Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast, the Chad the Cheese. BRILLIANT! They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, swiss, 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 so weird. We out! #VONQ #Programmatic #EngageTalent #WorkforceLogiQ #Amazon #TrickorTreat #Halloween #Careerbuilder #LinkedIn #TimSackett #Chipotle #College

Conferences are fun when Chad & Cheese take the stage. And they're twice as fun when big brands and influential voices join the boys on stage. That's just what happened at Unleash in Paris last week when Brandy Ellis of Smashfly, Chris Wray of Sainsbury's and Adam Yearsley of Red Bull joined the fun. Hint: There were disagreements. And loads of knowledge droppin'. Enjoy this Smashfly exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Chad: This Chad & Cheese cult brand podcast is supported by SmashFly, recruiting technology built for the talent lifecycle 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. 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 on for the Chad & Cheese podcast. Lars: All of you, if you can find it on any podcast hosting tool you want I definitely recommend. It's fun. It's entertaining. It's lively. And it's going to challenge the way you think about the field. And that's what we want at a podcast. But I'd love to introduce the host of the chatting cheese podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman, and they're going to bring out their panel. Let's give them a warm welcome to the influencer stage. Sir. Have fun. Joel: Should we bring out the folks while we're dealing with technical issues? Chad: Yeah, go ahead. Joel: Brandy, why don't you to come up? Brandy from SmashFly. Big round of applause for Brandy. Chris from Sainsbury's, everybody. Big round of applause. And Adam from Red Bull may have run away. He didn't want to be on... Oh, there he is. Okay. Adam from Red Bull. He has wings, everybody [crosstalk 00:01:33]. Chad: All right. Yeah. Technical issues, screw it. Okay. If you haven't listened to the Chad & Cheese podcast before, just so you know, this is an adult setting. They're going to be explicit, possibly F bombs dropping. We're dumb Americans. We do this shit, right? Joel: Not safe for work is what this is. Chad: Yes. So luckily- Joel: Feel free to leave. Our feelings won't be hurt. Chad: We have actually conned Red Bull, Sainsbury's, and SmashFly on stage to talk about brand today and candidate experience- Joel: And we're sitting on bookings so they can't escape. Chad: Yes. Joel: We've got them. Chad: Yes. And we have people in the audience that will stop them as well. We're going to start off first with the introductions. We're going to do that with Adam from Red Bull. So give us a Twitter version, who you are, what you do, why are you on stage. Joel: Elevator pitch. Adam: Adam Yearsley, global head of talent management at Red Bull. I do people. Chad: I love that. Joel: How much Red Bull are you on right now? Adam: I'm actually tired so [crosstalk 00:02:29]- Joel: Oh, you're tired? Okay. But you do come down off Red Bull eventually. Good to know. Brandy. Brandy: I feel like that's kind of a bad representation of brand, right? You're supposed to be not tired. Joel: Yeah, "I'm never tired." Adam: I'm just human. Brandy: Hi, guys. Brandy Ellis from SmashFly. I lead the recruitment marketing function there and previously I was a practitioner for about 18 years. We're going to stop counting right about there. Joel: You were six years old. Brandy: What? Joel: You were six years old. Brandy: Absolutely yes. I was six years old when I started. But no, I've come up through candidate experience and recruiting and all of the things. So very glad to see all of the mix of people here in the room because I think we've got a good group. Chris: Hi, my name is Chris Wray. I'm head of recruitment strategy for Sainsbury's. I look after 60 work streams for the business and one of these work streams is brand and attraction. Joel: Excellent. So I know, Chad, you have something you want to start off with. Chad: Hell yeah. Joel: Something Adam wrote. Chad: So Adam wrote this awesome idea/article that you actually put into play where you partnered with marketing. Believe it or not, marketing you can do this. Joel: It can happen. Chad: So I want to learn and want these guys to hear more about the partnership of becoming a force multiplier with marketing. Adam: Yeah. I'm a organizational psychologist by trade. So a lot of what I do is work out how to influence behavior. And at Red Bull we have a marketing department. Guess what they do? Influence behavior. Chad: Give you wings. Adam: Yeah, they give you wings but they do it on scale. So a lot of the techniques marketing is using to influence behavior to get people to buy products we also need to use to get people to use our products and get people engaged with our products. But probably taking three steps back, the first learning I really got from my marketing people was consumer centered design. Design- Chad: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Say that again. Adam: Consumer centered design. Chad: When candidates or what also. Adam: Right. But that's the point. They're consumers- Chad: Yeah, I know. But I don't think in talent acquisition we get that shit. Adam: No- Chad: We think candidates are candidates and they're our customers. But carry on. Carry on. Adam: Good. No, I think we do. I think people get it. Adam: People I don't think they're aware of what you can really do with employee brand within the company. I think we sort of go, "Oh, well I'm going to create something and then I'll send it to my marketing department, see if they like it." Get your marketing department in and co-create with them something. And often marketing is really interested because around employee brand they've got more space to maneuver than they do around the company brand a lot of the time because normally it's quite a wide space. So normally you can get marketing in with you it's- Chad: They have more influence. They have more influence. They have more dollars. Adam: They do. They have more money. Chad: They have more dollars. Adam: Always more money. Joel: More money. Adam: Yeah. And then if you can convince them that your EVP play is actually a marketing play then you can take some of their money. Joel: Does the Red Bull gives you wings work on the employment side as well? Do you guys sort of into each other? Adam: Yeah, yeah. Gives you wings. Get up in the morning, man. That's…. Joel: So if I go to your career site am I going to see a career at Red Bull gives you wings? Do you carry over that same message? Adam: Yeah, yeah we do. Joel: Good. Adam: It's also an internal message in terms of how we run and drive our people. So if you're not doing people development it's against the brand. Chad: Jump in Chris. Chris: So I think there's two points. You say people get it. I honestly don't think businesses actually get candidates king. I still think companies think they're better than the candidate. Also we talk about marketing and EHR and who's better to influence. Actually no. Marketing turn up with data, HR turn up with a presentation, which all looks fluffy. You need to turn up with data. And I think that's the reason why marketing are seen as respected at the table because they understand the data. Joel: And what kind of data does marketing want to see to care? Chris: They actually get a benchmark. They understand their click through rates. They understand what paid search is. Like trying to educate the business about paid search, I did it the other day to some senior leaders and used the analogy as see paid search as everyone knows park, they choose a theme park, it's fast tracked at a theme park. It's getting you to the top of the results, it's getting you there quick. And it's that education base and the storytelling I think marketing are great at. I just think sometimes HR colleagues, I'm not saying Sainbury's because we're great, could say it without getting fired, but I just think they just don't understand it. And I think is also is we don't pick the right agency sometimes. Chad: So isn't that one of the reasons why we're not at the big kid's table? Chris: We still can't even get an ATS right? And that's been around for 20, 30 years. Chad: I mean, we try to make things more complex and we're not speaking the business speak. To be at the C suite table, to actually have a business conversation you're talking about marketing has data and that HR has all the fluffy shit. The reason why marketing gets the money is because they have the data to be able to demonstrate that they are actually impacting the bottom line. Chris: Unless - Chad: Who thinks at NTA we don't impact the bottom line on the consumer side? Who believes that they don't impact the bottom line? Yeah, exactly. We do. Why aren't we talking about that shit? Chris: Let's use example. Would you wait 45 minutes for your Uber? No, you would not wait 45 minutes for Uber. But let's put a candidate through 45 minutes of shit and the hiring manager is never going to use it. I just think it's an absolute disgrace. Brandy: I totally agree. However, Uber has set the expectation that they're going to be there immediately. Talent acquisition- Joel: I like Amazon better. If it took 45 minutes to buy something you never would. Chris: They started doing taxis? Brandy: Whatever product. We already have an expectation of it's going to be here immediately, then it better be there immediately. Unfortunately, we've set the expectation with a lot of people and applicants and candidates or even employees today that the process sucks. They know it sucks, and they're willing to go through the pain to fill out our applications. And that's bad. Adam: Well, not in this market. They're not. I mean, the great candidates that are out there today who already have jobs will not go through 45 minutes of bullshit to be able to apply for a job, which is why you're losing them in the first place. Chris: I think someone said it the best to me, and this is the best analogy. Most application forms are like Game Of Thrones. It's not the best person that actually gets the job. It's the person that actually lasted through the application. So I [crosstalk 00:08:55]- Chad: Survive the winter. Chris: Survive. That's what it is. Joel: How surprised were your marketing departments when they learned how many profiles, resumes, data points were in your ATS? Chris: So marketing don't actually get involved in any of our attraction. We have- Joel: And how many resumes are in your ATS? Chris: So if we look at we get about 500000 applications from our retail perspective at Sainsbury's. Brandy: Is that annually? Chris: Annually. Joel: And do you think your marketing department would be interested in 500,000 potential customers? Chris: They would do. Joel: Yeah. That might be a conversation you want to have. Have you had that conversation? Adam: We're in Europe. So we have a thing called GDPR. Joel: GDPR. Adam: It's like we care about - Joel: There's the wet blanket overall. Adam: I get the Americans to hear like, "Yeah, great. We'll grab the data." No, no, no, no... In Europe where we're a little bit more sensitive to data. Look, I think there's a starting point and the starting point is to take a lot of the things I think we all know really seriously. So just really look at what you already know. You know that it's your candidate experience is your recruiting flow. So really take a candidate view from that and just re-look at what [crosstalk 00:09:47]- Joel: You know what though? I'm going to push back a little bit. Okay? So there's really nothing in your process that says if I apply to Red Bull that I don't get an email after saying, "Thanks for applying. Here's a 25% or whatever discount on your next purchase of Red Bull," which I assume you don't do, but you could. And GDPR does not affect that action whatsoever. Adam: No, 100%. But what we do is we come back to and say, "Well would you like to find out more about yourself and your strengths and how you could develop and grow? If you want to work with us, you're going to need to do that." And then we give you a free psychological assessment with a 20 page report. So we do that. Chris: And how many people uptake that? Joel: Well, that sounds sexy. Chad: I just want a Red Bull hat, man. Just send me a Red Bull hat. Joel: Because when I think Red Bull I think psychological assessment. Chad: Yes. Joel: Give me something I can put some vodka in and have a good time. Brandy: Question on that though, so I get my 20 page psychological assessment and somewhere along the way it says, "You're not right in the head to work here at Red Bull." Chad: Well, it's good to know that now. Joel: Here's your coupon. Brandy: I know, but how do you deliver that message? Because that's where companies fall off the ledge every single time is it doesn't matter if you give them a 20 page assessment or just a quick email delivering that message. Is the tough news. How do you do that? Adam: Well, I think that's exactly the point that I made with my marketing department. I said, "Look, wouldn't it be great if we could add some value to those people, whether they get a job or not?" And we said, "Well, let's help them uncover their story." And so they can use that for the next job or the next interview. They can talk more succinctly about their strengths, about how they can develop and how they can grow. So- Joel: This is sort of for both of you. You guys have applications. Majority of people do not get a job at your companies. Are you doing anything to keep them warm, communicating with them on a regular basis as marketing and [crosstalk 00:11:47]- Chad: Nurture. Joel: Yeah, nurturing farming. Chris: We're trying a lot of products at the moment and we're putting in a couple of SJTs, but also we're doing new app based at the moment. The app gives the candidates... we're bypassing Taleo. I'm not a big fan of Taleo and I'm just an awful ATS. Chad: Who's a fan of Taleo? Yeah, one person. And they work for Taleo just so you know. Chris: And it's interesting. We give the candidate an option. So I'm always candidates choice because I want choice when I go on to any website. So this instead of doing a CV sift we took the CV away and we've asked the candidate for three pieces of information. Quick, easy, let's get to the point. We give them two tests, critical mind thinking and a coding challenge. It's multiple choice. They get to pick it. Each question is 40 seconds. Inside 21 minutes they get a response saying they've pass/fail. Chad: How long does that take though? Chris: Straight away. It's instant. Chad: So how long does the actual assessment- Chris: End to end, 21 minutes. And that's your application as well. What we did do and what we're monitoring at the moment is we give the candidate choice to speak to a recruiter and we give the candidate choice to whether they want to discover about us. We had 100 downloads- Joel: When you say speak to recruiters is that a human being? Chris: Yes, speak to a recruiter, have a chat, automatic input. Joel: That's crazy. Chris: Here's a list of times, anytime you want to book in Monday to Friday. We're at 100 downloads in our first week. One person has picked to speak to a recruiter. Joel: But they'll text them. Chris: No. They don't even want to speak to... They just want to literally get to the next stage of assessment. So that starting us just understand is candidates just want convenience until actually they come through. And I'm reading loads of reports is brand loyalty doesn't happen until 60 days after into business. A lot of Gartner is starting to say that, Mercer is starting to say that, is candidates have got choice these days and if we don't realize that you're going to be left behind. Chad: Well, that's the experience though, right? You're talking about the experiences now, but it carries on. It's not something that just happens in that moment. It happens in the moment, but it also carries on, which goes back to the whole nurturing conversation. Joel: Brandy, you probably have an opinion on nurturing candidates, don't you? Brandy: I do. I have a lot of opinions on nurturing. I'm not going to talk about the company that I worked for necessarily but- Chad: When you were a level three. Brandy: I was with IBM. I've been with- Chad: I knew that. Brandy: ... large organizations and- Chad: Small companies. Brandy: ... small companies, we never had a nurturing program. It was moment in time, fill out the application, whether it's 20 minutes or however long the psychological assessment take. But it's moment in time. That's what we're looking at. And today the conversation is shifting to that candidate's life cycle of a job. I mean, people are averaged in the workforce 40 years, unfortunately. And so they're going to come back to us. Chad: They're not qualified today but they might be qualified tomorrow. Brandy: Correct. Chad: I think we're working too much in this segment in time as opposed to filling pipelines because we're going to have to fill these positions next year, the year after that, so on and so forth. And if we piss these people off not only they're not going to buy our product but they're not going to come fucking work for us. Brandy: No, it's absolutely true. And you reduce the amount of workforce that you have access to. So the worst the experience the people go through it and then the available talent becomes talent scarcity even more because they don't want to work for your brand and they're not going to deal with your brand, both as a consumer and as a candidate. So the people you can recruit go down. Adam: Yeah. There's a lot of companies here selling artificial intelligence, machine learning, and black box algorithms that'll magically match people to jobs. Chad: Does that work? Well- Joel: I don't think you can have a booth here unless less AI is somewhere. Adam: I know. I know. Chad: That's a checkbox. Adam: Does it work? Well, I haven't seen it work with the sort of accuracy that I'd put my job on it. I haven't gone up to an AI yet and said, "Show me what my perfect job would be and have it spit back global head of talent management." Now, it could be I'm in the wrong job. I don't know. Let's see. Chad: Take that assessment and you'll find out. Adam: Right. But, I mean, even take five steps back from AI look at how you market the jobs. Look at how you position yourself as a company. Take a marketing approach to consumer segmentation. The people applying for jobs in your retail section at Sainbury's are radically different to the people that apply for jobs in marketing. Yes, you have a brand, but don't assume that that brand goes beyond everything. Different sorts of people go for different jobs. We know that. So segment based on that and then get your marketing group in and say, "Let's build a map of who that person is," and create that person and then say, "Now, how do I market to them? What does the job ad need to look like? What sort of words are going to trigger their attraction and where can we place that ad?" And it's just taking what we already do, I think, in recruiting three steps further, and then you end up with individual ads for different jobs, which makes sense [crosstalk 00:16:47]. Chad: So here's the question. Those are the people that you're targeting, but there are a ton of candidates that aren't going to be qualified for your job, and yet they could perspectively buy your brand and you still want to have that great brand loyalty with them. How do you still ensure that this person is never going to have a job perspectively within your brand, but yet you still have to give them a great experience? How do you focus on that too? Because I think we focus on talent acquisition and brand management on, okay, I've got to go find that perfect candidate. Well, that's great. But what about all those candidates who are silver medalist, bronze medalist, and ones who won't even ever work at your organization but yet could buy your product? Joel: And also do you think about people who come to the site, don't see a job for them and then leave the site? There are ways to capture those folks, whether it be retargeting, advertising, or hey a pop up that says, "Hey, don't leave yet. We may not have a job for you but give us your information. We'll keep you updated on opportunities." Adam: The candidate experience thing is exactly as you described it. So we have a tiered... so depending on how much interaction we've had, how much investment you've given to us depends on how much investment we give back to you. So if you're phone interviewed then we'll post you four cans of Red Bull and a nice note. So it depends. It's all gradual and it's graduated. And as I said, everyone touching us from a recruiting side gets a free psychological assessment with a 19 page report. So it's a beginning. It depends on what level. But each [crosstalk 00:18:19]- Chris: Have you tracked what's candidate satisfaction? Do they actually read it? What feedback have you had regarding that report? Adam: I've never asked them because we just look at social media, because what they do is they share it and they talk about it on social media. Chris: What's your engagement in social... What percentage would it sit at or- Adam: Yeah. About 40% of the people that do it share it. Chris: Wow! Adam: Yeah. It's okay. Joel: What's the percentage of positive versus negative? Adam: Negative is really, really small. Yeah. I went to SHL just a minute ago. So expect some negative feedback coming. Chad: If you hang on our show you'll get a few negatives. Adam: Great, great, great. But no, really it's people want to share the experiences and it's such an open playing field because so few companies are giving positive candidate experiences to a no response. So when you do it, it stands out so much that candidates share. And what do they do? They talk about your company in a positive way. "Oh, my God." You've got word of mouth marketing. Oh my God, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:19:15]- Joel: But are you doing either a direct tracking or sort of passive of how much referral traffic you're getting from... I'm sharing this on Twitter, so all the Twitter traffic that comes in I assume that's been increasing over the years as you've done this as well. Adam: Yeah. More on the professional for platforms like LinkedIn and Xing in the Germanic world than Twitter. Twitter is a little bit different platform for us. Chris: And is that test used as a sifting or does the hiring manager give feedback? So you do it at the front end of the process. I come in and interview you. Is your managers giving feedback or - Adam: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. We still very much rely on hiring managers. The candidates are imperfect. The hiring managers are imperfect, and somewhere in between we find beauty and love. Brandy: So this is the one time when my inner recruiter... because I spent a lot of years recruiting. Recruiters used to have such a bad rep, and for that reason the hiring managers are equally as bad, if not worse. And so a lot of the best in breed companies that I'm seeing now are starting both recruiter education programs and hiring manager programs, how do you speak to the candidates, how do you get their mind around that experience itself. And one of my clients, actually CBS, I don't know that you guys have them here, they're just a US based company, but a very, very large pharmacy brand. They have over 4 million contacts in their talent community just alone. They get something like three million applications a year. It's absolutely insane. And if you think about they only hire about 130000 every year that's like 2.8 million thanks but no thanks. Brandy: And what they've started doing is putting the candidate experience survey throughout the recruiting process. So anytime you send an automatic letter out of the system it has a link to tell us what you think. And they've gotten several comments, and one of them stood out to me so much, especially for this panel, and it said, "I feel like your company actually cares. Thank you. I'm going to buy more products," verbatim in the survey. Chad: Yeah. And how does that impact do you think the line of business, and do you talk to the line of business? Because we impact product. We impact customers. I mean, are we doing that? Chris: So we did a rough estimate. So we worked out in Sainsbury's retail from a 10% candidate experience. We looked at our average number of applications. We then looked at the average number of job offers versus a 10% candidate bad experience. And we worked out about 147 million in sales it would cost us as a business. My team has been here a year, and it was newly created into the business. Those conversations people started to listen. People started to go, "Holy shit." Chad: Who did you go to with that number? Because that's a big number. Chris: So that's the heads of departments, that's my boss. And that opens up a conversation when you're saying number people go, "Whoa." Chad: Well, that's a business conversation. Chris: He didn't want to know more. But this comes back to data is we don't have data or we don't understand that and we don't pull. So again, best friends. We talk about marketing being our friends. Is the chief data scientist officers my best friend? Joel: That's a good point. Chris: The Sainsbury's data and I'm all over them because they're the expert, and I use the example is they always say is I come to you for data but when you ask me about recruitment I'm the expert. And I think our recruiters are shit at doing that, is I don't tell you how to code you shouldn't tell me how to recruit. Adam: Chris, there's two sides to this though, the data, yes, 100% data, the best friend, but at the same time I really think you need a story as well and that's why you need the marketing best. You need all the best friends, right? Chris: I think you need a story, but I also think is the data will help inform where do you put that story or what site you put it on. Chad: I think it's impacted too, right? Because it provides a bigger impact. It's not just a bunch of fluffy talent acquisition bullshit. When you can go to them and say $145 million that provides really impact to that story. Chris: To some businesses dirt is I like to call them the vanity projects. They don't want to have the conversation so they put a billboard outside of their office and, "Look I'm doing some work," is actually that really frustrates me. And I do come back and say to the data is it will speak itself and you understand where you need to be, your priorities. So- Adam: Getting marketing in those, it's not too hard because, I mean, you just need- Chad: Talk about that though because I think everybody out there is like, "How in the hell do I connect marketing? They won't give me the time of day." Who's tried to actually connect with marketing before and they're like, "Go away"? I mean, that's not easy. Tell us how you did- Joel: Who has connected with their marketing department and has a good relationship with them? Chad: Excellent. So- Joel: Good for you. Chad: Good collaboration. How do you get the- Chris: Let me ask the question, who owns their own brand guidelines? Who's gained that trust with marketing where they just say is, "We trust you to do your job"? Chad: Two people. Joel: The minority I think. Chad: Two people. We're going to podcast. So I've got to actually say this. Go ahead. Adam: For me, and I mean I've no idea how you need to do it in your companies, I mean, Red Bull is a marketing company. So it makes it easy. Most things come from marketing. But it was really a case of sitting down and saying, "Look, we have these people coming to us, 500000 every year who actually invest 20 minutes to apply for a role. They're not candidates. They are fans." And then I took a step back and said, "In life there's three really big decisions. Who am I going to marry, what house am I going to buy, and what company will I work for." And I said, "They're willing to make that bet on us." Now the question is, what are you going to do with that? What can we do with that together? Marketing. How could you maximize that experience? They're open. They want us. Adam: And then at the same time you stand there and you show marketing its numbers in terms of how much does it spend trying to find new people to attract to the brand. And you say, but these guys are already coming and they're already saying they love us. We've just got to have a better conversation with them and add some value to them. Brandy: I think it's two part. One, with marketing you have to go to them and translate the data because you're both right in saying that you have to have the data. And in HR in general we're not very good at translating the data into the impact and into the story. And I think that's one of the pieces. But then at the second time creating a candidate, a journey map of some sort, is one of the more important things because we forget in the transaction of recruiting the moment in time what that person is feeling when they choose to commit to your brand and be willing to work for your organization. That's an emotional high. And then they drop off. I mean it's a roller coaster. Joel: I want to talk about some external issues. So many times your brand is what other people say about you and not what you say about yourself. So the advent of Glassdoor and other employer review sites obviously impacts what you guys are doing. Talk about what you're all doing or what you're seeing in terms of how companies are engaging with Glassdoor, what's best practices, what you're saying, or what you're doing. Adam: I ignore them. I don't deal with them. Brandy: I would love to advise my clients and in a past life I would love to say that we didn't deal with Glassdoor, but we did for the reason that I worked for a very small technology company that was recruiting data scientists and we were competing with the likes of Intel and Google. And there was just no way that we would get them. And so we had to reply to our Glassdoor responses, but it had to be incredibly authentic. And that's a word that gets thrown around all the time. What I mean by that is we owned our shit. I mean, we said, "Yes, it's bad. Yes, we're fixing it, and yes, here's a program. Give us specific example, proof if you will, of what we're doing to make the environment better." And we actually had really great feedback from the data science candidates that appreciated it. But it takes time. Chad: Well, aren't those great signals though? I think there's so many signals that are out there and a lot of them are noise, but these could be signals that actually demonstrate that this is a problem and it might be a problem that you're not even aware of until it pops up. Adam: Yeah. I've just got to say something that I forgot. We actually as part of that the decision not to work with Glassdoor was one part. The other part was to put a big fat contact us button in the middle of it. So we got the signals direct from the candidates themselves and not via a social media platform. So we let them come to us and talk with us a lot more easily. Chad: So you do listen. It's just the whole Glassdoor mafia game you're just, "Screw Glassdoor." Yeah, I agree. I agree. Joel: I think it's stupid to ignore reviews that are online. And it's not just Glassdoor. There are 20 plus sites out there that are dedicated to anonymous employee feedback, and whether it's InHerSight or Fairygodboss or WomenHack that is dedicated to female engineers or females, I just think it's a mistake to ignore it. Obviously you've done this a long time and it works for you, but I think as a company you should at least listen to what's going on. Whether you engage or not, I would invite you to engage. Chris: So that's the difference. Joel: Just simply ignoring it I think is a bad strategy. Chris: So the differences is engaging with it is you maybe don't want to engage on their platform, but it's showing you've actually done something about it and seeing there's going to be a trend to that. So I don't read Glassdoor. I do read Indeed. I know Indeed own Glassdoor now, but to me is as long as you're monitoring it and you're understanding what's going on and doing something about it- Joel: So are you engaging with reviews? Chris: So we're not engaging with. We're looking at them and we're understanding what's going on and what people are saying. Joel: Was there a decision to not engage? Was there a discussion at the work? Chris: Yeah. Joel: And why did you come to the conclusion of not engaging? Chris: We wanted to show we're doing something about it and it's that uptake of do we have the resource to actually continue to answer and respond [crosstalk 00:29:01]. Joel: So it's a resources question. Brandy: So do you have on your Glassdoor pages or your sites, because you don't have to pay in order to put something out there, do you have a statement that says while we're not responding to these we are looking and listening? Adam: We have curated our Glassdoor page and yes, occasionally we do look at it to monitor it and to curate it. I think that's a differential. Joel: So forget Glassdoor for a second. I mean, you mentioned Indeed. Indeed will tell you the have more reviews than Glassdoor. So do you pay attention to indeed and what's going on there? Ignore it. Okay. Brandy: Chris, do you guys have a statement that says, "We're reading this and-" Chris: No, but I'm taking that straight away and texting like, "Please update." Brandy: Honestly, that's one of the things we're here to talk about though, is we're impacting brand and experience. And if you're not telling them that you're doing it then how do they know? Chris: 100%. And I always say is we're not perfect. And I wouldn't sit here on stage and say we're perfect, is we're on a journey and I've never seen... it's such a fast paced moving social. You just got to keep up, keep on evolving, and keep learning. That's the big thing is learning from people's mistakes and from your network as well. Joel: Yeah. Let's to get to some questions here on the board. Max, is that you, Max? No. Maybe. All right. All right. This one is for Red Bull. Do global employers like Red bull get a different CRM in Europe versus the US versus... ROW is what? Rest of the world. Okay. Americans don't care about the rest of the world. In order to adapt to local preferences, regulations. Different CRMs. Adam: Candidate CRM I assume we're talking. Brandy: Yes. Adam: No, we actually have one global CRM. We have a few different workflows for exactly that, for adapting to both regulations and volume because some markets, like the US for instance, very large volume. We have different roles there, high turnover recruiting as well. Other markets are incredibly small. We only have 150 people so we can have very different candidate workflow. So we built it very flexible depending on volume but also on legal requirements. Joel: Chris. Chris: We've got Taleo, which kills me inside, mindful this is being recorded. But we're having conversations now. We're really understanding, and again it's back to the figures. We're starting to educate the business. I'm really telling that story to the businesses. If we don't step up we are going to lose candidates. And we use the example now, which I say is in retail we do not struggle to recruit. Some of our adverts have to be taken down in 24 hours because you get 600 applicants for one role where in data, digital and tech, we do. People can see past the shop window. They see us as a retailer. They see us as this 150 year old boring business. So that's when we do have to change the experience and bringing in apps and bringing in different systems. Joel: So Mario wants to know about multimedia. As you guys know, video is eating the internet. Video is huge, right? You've got TikTok, you've got Snapchat, Instagram videos. What are you guys- Chad: Podcasts. Joel: And podcast. Yes. Thank you. What are you guys doing multimedia wise? I'm sure Red Bull, you guys are probably doing something interesting in that way with either video or podcast or blog. Chad: Dude, they've got people jumping out of space and shit. I mean- Joel: Yeah. That was crazy by the way. There wasn't an apply at Red Bull link anywhere but I'm sure they got the message. Adam: From an employee branding point of view, yeah, I mean, we leveraged the different plat social platforms. From a video side I integrated videos into the psychological assessments. You get video coaching from Red Bull athletes based on your personality. That seemed to work very well. We have video- Joel: So Red Bull athletes. Adam: Yeah. Joel: So the athletes that represent your brand, they're the ones that are engaging with candidates. Adam: Yeah. Joel: That's cool. Chad: That's pretty fricking awesome. Adam: And then we use companies like HireVue for video interviewing platform. We have that as well. A lot of the branding activity I'm doing on LinkedIn... and we post content that is work related on LinkedIn. Sometimes it's video content, sometimes it's funny video content, sometimes it's an athlete racing to get to a plane and he's a parkour athlete. So he's running, jumping, and diving as he tries to get to the plane. So it- Chad: Hertz and OJ Simpson. Adam: Kind of. Yeah. So it depends on what we're doing, how we use it. But yeah, video, multimedia - Joel: We brought up OJ in a podcast. Yes. Chad: I should take that. Brandy: Since I'm not in the recruiting space specifically anymore, I'm consulting now, I'm seeing across the board AI especially, buzzword for the conference, interlocking all of your technologies. So AI can trigger recruiter, can trigger workflow to talk to the person in the moment. And then video is taking over. I think predictive intelligence is probably the next that we're going to start to see of candidate matching. And we talked briefly about that. Candidate matching with jobs and that sort of thing is starting to be the next on the list. Chris: So are we talking from a brand awareness or are we talking about through the process? Because from a brand point of view is... so we've created a new EVP, which I'm going to talk about later. Awful. Please come. But we're starting to do a lot of video content. So we're split into two pieces. We're split into thought leadership content because people are starting to move for thought leaders. So we're doing 30 to 60 second videos, which we're pushing out to multiple channels and starting to look at the impressions and the click through rates and understanding. Our engagement rates are through the roof. We're sitting at 4.8%. Chad: These are videos. Chris: Videos. So Cisco have used a stat by 2022 82% of people will watch video. That's what you're saying is if you are... I use the example is and I use my dad for example, is hate when he's building something he looks at the instructions. When I'm building something I go on YouTube. And that's what gen Z are doing. Gen Z are watching two hours to fours video a day. If you don't have a video strategy in your marketing pace you're going to be screwed in two years time because people don't want to read stuff. They think it's HR and they think HR sat in their ivory tower and they've read it out and they've published it. Video doesn't lie. You can see authenticity, and it's.... The whole corporate stuff annoys me as well. It has to be authentic. Joel: So will job descriptions start having videos within the job description or should they? Chris: I think they should. Chad: Like a day in the life kind of [crosstalk 00:35:24]? Chris: And I saw in ATS and ATS has done it. And also they've done endorse where they've got colleagues going on and endorsing the job. So it's video endorsement. I'm like how authentic can that be - Chad: So how you're getting engagement? Because we see a ton of video out on YouTube and it'll get like 10 views. They're like, "We did this great video. We put it on YouTube, and then we put it on our website." How are you getting the engagement? What kind of strategy do you have from an engagement standpoint? Adam: We just take a content marketing view of it. So what we need to do is add value to the candidate. It's got to be valuable information either about the company or about enhancing themselves, growing themselves. So we kind of stick to that from a content side. We have videos- Joel: And when you create content are you leveraging the main Red Bull brand- Adam: Sometimes. Joel: ... or is it a separate? Adam: These days I'm asking the brand guys to go create a piece of content weaving their stuff with my stuff. So it's going backwards and forth. Joel: Smart. Brandy: That's how it should work. Eventually hopefully that's how it will work. Joel: Historically it hasn't. Adam: And we have four- Joel: Employing brand has their YouTube channel and the main market [crosstalk 00:36:32]- Adam: No, no, no, no, don't do that. That's bad. But we have four day in the life micro-sites as well with video integrated showing people. These are high volume roles. We have a lot of them to show people really what the job is about because the best AI at the moment for me is a candidate that really understands what the job is and also really understands themselves. And if they can do that, they can make a match, and that's very cheap for me. It's very time efficient for me, and it's normally fairly accurate. Joel: So does this video go across all social media platforms or what is sort of the distribution strategy for you guys? Adam: Yeah. It's LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. There is YouTube parts of it, but it's a micro site with video components. So it lends - Joel: More social media that YouTube. Chris: Just out of curiosity, do you have to love Red Bull? I'm getting a feeling is you have to love Red Bull to work for them. If I say at Sainsbury's we see people walking with Tesco bags. We see people walking Ocado. But I get a feeling is you have to live, breathe red Bull to work there. Adam: No. Joel: You're saying like it's a bad thing. Shouldn't employees love the brand? Chris: It from a diversity point because I'm like is consumer different to employer brand? Adam: Yeah, it is. That's a really good question. So our consumer brand is very risk-taking, very rebellious, whereas my EVP brand is very professional and it's about the quality of the projects and the executions we do. And there's a nuance between those two. There's similarities. Chris: And what is that nuance? So I give you Sainsbury's. So let's look at the digital and tech. Our Achilles heel is the stores. People don't realize the coll shit we do. They don't realize the 1.2 billion transactions, they don't realize about the nectar card, et cetera. What is the perception gap between the Red Bull brand versus the consumer? Adam: Like I said, from a brand side it's extreme sports. It's about taking risks constantly and it's very winning sport based. On the company side, it's a lot about failure and making mistakes and learning very rapidly. It's about having an extremely high level of professionalism and I think it's a lot about being authentic in terms of how we deal with each other within the organization. So there're nuances, and so what I have to do is counteract my company's brand. If I put running, jumping, flying imagery I've got to be very careful to counteract that with professionalism, look at the execution of that event, look at how we do this, think about how that comes to life to counteract if you like. Chad: Let's hit these next ones pretty quick. Joel: Sure. Chad: So talking about experience and Ethel asks about employee experience, customer experience, candidate experience. My question to you is do we make things harder than it should be? Shouldn't it just be that human experience that they have with your brand, whether they're an employee, whether they're a customer, whether they're a candidate. Shouldn't we always just be focused about the human at the end of the experience and stop fucking labeling it with all these different labels? Brandy: Yes. Chad: We make it too hard. Brandy: Yes. Well, as humans we naturally over-engineer things anyway and humans are complicated. So if you take the human on that journey whether it's the consumer buying journey or the candidate journey, whatever it is, they're in the emotional highs and lows. But then at some point you do have to track and map out what they're going to interact with and where they interact. And that's where it becomes somewhat complicated internally in the organization. Chad: So a candidate experience for somebody who is a developer could be entirely different for somebody who's in brand marketing or something of that nature. I mean, we could chop this up all day, but if we're just focused on the human being, I mean, shouldn't that be what the focus is? I mean, am I making this too simplistic, Chris? Chris: I think you are. I think it also comes down to resources as well, is certain processes in high volume you have to automate the process. You have to be able to give that tough shit through. Chad: That's not a bad experience though. Chris: No, it's definitely not a bad experience, but I do think you have to adopt. It depends. Is there a talent shortage in the market? The thing also annoys me sometimes is the exec recruitment hire is why sometimes, not Sainsbury's but out there, but is they get the golden glove or the white glove treatment and then the rest of the business gets something different. And I never remember. I was actually speaking to a C suite team. They told me how to recruit one time and I said, "When is the last time you actually applied for a job?" And they all looked at me and go, "They usually get phone calls, wined and dined, flown in, taken around a racetrack," I won't say which company and then put up in a nice five star hotel. That's not the typical candidate experience. So I do think you have to adapt sometimes, but I don't think there should be such a big difference between a C suite candidate to your experienced higher point of view. Joel: Next question. Emily asked do we always have to go cap in hand to marketing or should we be pushing to attract more rockstar marketers to employment brand? And I'll also add I see more companies having a middle person that talks to both entities. They talk employment and they also talk marketing to be a bridge between the two. So do you guys have any opinion on that question from Emily? Brandy: Never go cap in hand. That's my first piece of advice. Chad: Go data in hand is what I'm hearing from Chris. Brandy: Well, that's what I was about to say. Chad: Go data in hand. Yeah. Brandy: Go data in hand and- Chad: With the story. Brandy: With the story. Chad: With the story. There you go. Brandy: Exactly. Go data in hand with the story. Don't go cap in hand because if you go cap in hand it's devaluing what we do in the talent function, and by devaluing that going cap in hand you're not leveraging all of the resources and the data that you have. HR and recruiting, we've got a ton of data whether we can do something with it or whether it's organized that's a whole different topic, but go with confidence and go saying this is my number of people who interact with my side of the brand every single day and wouldn't it be nice if those people were also brand advocates and start there. Chad: Beautiful. Well, thank you very much. Joel: Thank you guys. Everybody let's hear it for them. Chad: Chris, Adam, Brandy, give it. Joel: Hey, guys, real quick. If anyone out there wants to learn more about you guys Twitter handles LinkedIn- Chad: Where can they find you? Joel: ... any last words. Adam: LinkedIn. Thank you. Brandy: Twitter @BEllisrecruits. Chris: LinkedIn. I won't share my Instagram. It's too dodgy. Joel: Chadcheese.com. Chad: Thanks everybody. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad & Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com. #RedBull #Sainsburys #Smashfly #UNLEASH #EmployerBrand #Marketing #EmploymentBrand #Brand #Branding #UX

Recorded LIVE from UNLEASH World in Paris' showfloor. Brought to you by our friends at Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdX. 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 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 is time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. Chad: I just love that. Joel: Bonjour Monsieur, Chad. Chad: Bonjour, Mr- Fromage Joel: Bienvenu...to the Chad and Fromage podcast from Paris France. Chad: France. Joel: What's up listeners? We're here at the unleash conference in Paris. We've invaded the Meyer booth. We've taken their WiFi. We've taken their tables. We've stalled the sales process. Chad: Yes. Joel: We've probably put them out of business because of our weekly show. We are the Chad and Cheese Podcast HR's Most Dangerous. Chad: Live. Joel: This week we're going to be talking the UNLEASH show. We're going to be talking Indeed shake downs and we're going to be talking Glassdoor mobsters. Stay tuned. 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 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 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: And we're back dude. If you hate shout outs, you're going to hate this part of the show [crosstalk 00:02:01], there's so many people to thank from our week in Paris. I'm going to start with UNLEASH in general. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: They gave us a Mic, they gave us a stage, they gave us a voice and we appreciate that because it's not the safest choice. Chad: No and they gave us some really good panelists. It's one of the things that I love when we work with shows and they want to be able to get their people up on stage. Joel: Sure. Chad: We had Chris Wray from Sainsbury's. We had Adam Yearsley from Red Bull. Had Brandy Ellis from the SmashFly. So yeah, I mean we had... They even extended our period. We were supposed to have 30 minutes. We went to 45. We're talking about brand, experience and just really cool shit. So we will be dropping that Podcast. Joel: They even gave us Lars, as our master of ceremonies. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: He's like he doesn't just do anybody. Chad: Yeah. You get it. Get a little Lars actions. Joel: That's good. You got through a lot of shout outs there with our guests. Chad: Oh good. Joel: So that's good. Shout out to Paris. Chad: Yes. Joel: It has been very good to us. The food's great. The wine is amazing. The city's beautiful if you haven't been to Paris, could not recommend it more. We're very lucky. Indianapolis does not have a lot of international direct flights and amazingly they have a direct flight- Chad: It does. Joel: ... to Paris. Chad: I love it. Joel: So we're really enjoying the town and the quick flight over to Europe. Quick shout out to Neely Verlinden. Chad: Ver what? Joel: Yeah, she's with AIHR, which is not- Chad: Say that again. Joel: ... Artificial intelligence- Chad: No. Joel: ... Yeah. Chad: A-I-H-R. Joel: Neely Verlinden, AIHR. We did an interview with her yesterday. Talk shop, podcasting industry stuff. Be on the lookout for that. We'll link to it from chadcheese.com we'll share it on socials. It was a good time. Chad: Big shout out to all of our friends and I'll try to hit as many as I possibly can. Joel: Our dinner friends is that who you’re going after? Chad: Well, we had the dinner friends. We had the Adam Gordon's of the world. You know, Andreea Wade- Joel: Yup. Elin, from Tengai. Chad: Elin, from Tengai. Max Armbruster. Joel: Max twice. Chad: See Max is French. Joel: Yes. Chad: He leaves in Hong Kong now. Joel: He is Parisian- Chad: ...but he hooked us up two nights in a row. Amazing restaurants so big shout out to Max and the Talkpush peeps so... Also we just saw Matt Alder. He looked like he needed some sleep. Joel: Not as much as you look like you need sleep. Chad: Well, that's because I was up till two. Joel: Hung Lee. We saw Hung- Chad: Yeah. Got to love some Hung Lee. Just plenty of guys. The guys over at social talent, Dave, Johnny, the crew. Joel: Yeah. We had a good time with the social talent guys. They had a giveaway idea for condoms. Apparently- Chad: The Johnny. Joel: ... the condoms in Ireland are called Johnny's. Chad: Johnny's, yes. Joel: So Johnny Campbell and the Johnny giveaway. I thought it was funny and frankly I think there is no better [crosstalk 00:04:57], than Johnny's face on a condom. Chad: Yeah because you're going to stay hard putting that thing on. Joel: Yeah and we're going to continue to hound them to one day have fresh Guinness from Ireland actually in the booth. Chad: How are we in Europe and we don't have fresh Guinness from the booth. I mean, come on guys. Joel: When we saw Shane Clinch for a very short period. Chad: Oh yeah. He was in and out. Joel: So you know, he's usually the one that brings us our supply. He's our Mr. Dr feelgood. Chad: Yeah. And he didn't- Joel: And he failed us this time but he's... No hate on Shane. He's always good for it. Chad: Shane's brought us so much beer. Joel: If there's an Irish in the house and there's no whiskey or Guinness I'm pretty upset. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Shout out to Laura Drori from Saba software in the UK. She's a big fan. She was at the show- Chad: Saba. Joel: ... yesterday and wanted to send me a message saying, great show guys. Thanks a lot. I'm a big fan. Keep doing what you guys do. Andy Whitehead, another big fan that hit me up on LinkedIn. He's with a LiveHire out of Melbourne, whatever. Andy, we love the Aussies. Keep listening and keep spreading the joy. Chad: I have to say Muir McDonald and that's how you have to say it. It's like you have to say it... You have to say with some confidence. Joel: With some Cheesertude- Chad: Yes, some confidence. So Muir McDonald. Yes. So we appreciate again, all the shout outs and also helping us to understand how to exactly pronounce your name my friend. Good job. Joel: I'm going to go Richie Bodo from Neuvoo out of Missouri, another big fan of ours. Chad: Missouri. Joel: Mizzou, the show me state and we show them the knowledge by... Anyway. Wow. We went through shoutouts pretty quickly actually. I'm really impressed. Chad: Yes. I'm sure everybody's happy about that. Joel: Why did we not go that quickly on the regular show? I don't know. Our travel schedule is dwindling as the year comes to a close. Chad: Yup. Joel: But we still have iCIMS- Chad: Yeah, iCIMS. Joel: ... coming up November. I'm going to be doing a session at recruit con in Nashville in November. If you're interested in- Chad: Julie will be there. Joel: ... optimizing your shit for Google for jobs, come out and say hi. I'll be there. Chad: Julie will be there. Joel: Julie Sowash will be there. So she's doing DNI stuff I guess. Chad: Yeah. She just talk about how you actually get outcomes and hire people and shit. Yeah. That's- Joel: She better not be on a bigger stage than me. That's all I'm saying. Chad: She should be. Yeah. And then we have TalentNet in Dallas. Joel: TalentNet, yep. Closing the year out in Dallas. We're still waiting on Carrie Corbin to say yay or nay coming on stage. You looking like that that's not going to happen. Chad: She gave me the cold shoulder. Joel: Cold shoulder. All right. Chad: Come on- Joel: Carrie you can talk the talk. Walk the walk. Chad: Come on girl you walk the walk. Joel: Come up on stage along. Otherwise we'll be doing our world famous naughty or nice list from the year from Dallas live. So if you're there, come out and say hi. All the usual Dallas, Texas suspects should be there. Charney, obviously Fisher and others. Chad: Got a big group there in Dallas in Texas. Joel: And by the way we're formulating next year's schedule. Chad: Yeah. Joel: If you thought you had too much of us this year, well damn it, you're out of luck because you might get more of us next year based on what the calendar starting to look like. Chad: Not enough of Chad and Cheese in anybody's diet. Let's just make- Joel: Especially if you're French. Chad: Yes. Joel: Cheese is everywhere. Chad: Chad and Fromage Joel: Delicious. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk the UNLEASH show in more detail. JobAdX: Nope. No, not for me. All these jobs look the same. Oh, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just 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 job Adx. 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 at J-O-B-A-D-X dot com attract, engage, employ with JobAdx. Chad: And we're back. Joel: And we're back. Chad: And we're back. Joel: All right UNLEASH one of the, I'd say top five at least HR conferences in the world. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That's probably non debatable. Chad: No, I don't think that's debatable at all. Joel: And it's our first time. What are some of your first takeaways and things that caught your attention here? Chad: Again, this is one of the most interesting because everything is in one place. You're not walking from one part of a conference center to the next part of the conference center. They're all together. The stages are integrated with the expo hall. I mean... So I mean you- Joel: It's not a go for coffee and maybe talk to a vendor. It's like the sessions are in the expo hall. Like you can't escape. Chad: I mean, I would say if you are a vendor you would fucking love this show because you are always amongst the people. Joel: Yeah. If you're a vendor, you're probably loving the show because there's no like waiting around. Chad: No. Joel: Till the expo moment when they come in for drinks or coffee. Like the entire show you're talking to people who are here at the conference. Chad: And drinks and coffee are always out and they're always around. So it's like, again, you go to a stage, which again, some of these stages are out in the middle of the expo hall, which we were on one of them but you can go from stage to stage. Go to the main stage, which is within the actual confines of this- Joel: you can bounce around and not feel- Chad: Easy. Joel: ... like, Oh, I've got to get up and open the door and be really quiet. Like you just get up and walk away and no one notices. Chad: Yeah, there's so much going on. It's really cool. I do like... It's kind of like a start up area but it's not because SurveyMonkey is there for God's sake. Joel: Well, it is very much like the kiosk HR Tech type pavilion where you have a little kiosk. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But yeah, SurveyMonkey, a large public company in America is in the startup pavilion. Chad: Interesting. Joel: E quest, who's been around for 20 some years in the startup pavilion. So they might want to tighten up the regulations on who can get there. Otherwise, we'll start seeing Microsoft in the startup- Chad: Is it the startup area though, is that what it's called? Joel: Pretty much. I mean the- Chad: Is it? Joel: ... startup stage is right there. Chad: Yeah, that's a good point. Joel: Those are pretty much all startups. Chad: Pretty much all startups. Joel: Now there is a bronze area, which I'm not exactly sure. So SurveyMonkey is a bronze but it's still a kiosk. They can obviously afford a 10 by 10 or something bigger here. So I'm a little confused why they're there but I don't know? Good on them. They budgeted wisely and got a cheap booth technically. Chad: I'm going to say there is no there there. Joel: There is no there there. Yeah. I wonder how many people are going up and saying who are you guys? SurveyMonkey, never [crosstalk 00:12:31], of course primarily American company. Maybe here in the European market they're more new. Chad: So what do you think? Joel: So obviously, I think I agree with all your sentiment on the conferences as it is. It's a big open space. It's vendors and attendees living together. [crosstalk 00:12:49], even the food is given out in sort of small portions on multiple parts of the area. So it's not like you go to one big buffet- Chad: At the back of the hall. Joel: ... at the back of the hall, then you sit away from the vendors. So they've really done a good job of making the people who pay the bills happy I think and that's been the feedback that I've gotten. You mentioned the startup area. Talk to quite a few of those. I think we sat through one of those startup sessions, our buddy George Laroque is a judge there. You know, my takeaway is there are too many startups that are just making stuff that they think is cool and they don't think about what pain am I like solve... What problem am I solving? What pain am I healing? Joel: In fact in many cases, too many companies are creating actually more work for companies. So like you see survey companies where okay, sign up for our shit and then you email all of our people and then your workers have to do more work and then you have to do more work to maybe get something out of that. So I think that's been kind of a bad idea and shit storm for a lot of... Sorry, we are having a lot of activity here outside with a lot of middle fingers. Chad: You pull out the Mics- Joel: A lot of middle fingers and- Chad: You pull out the Mic's and shit happens. Joel: ... bite me kind of a hand gestures, which is nice. So a couple of- Chad: Say hi Aaron. Aaron Matos: Hi. Joel: So yeah, not enough startups solving problems. They're kind of just cool and giving you more time and things to do on your to do list. A couple that stood out to me were Real Links, which I think we both actually stopped by and talked to, which was a referral system. Chad: That was really interesting. Joel: And what I liked about it was it was a pretty automated system. It synced up with your employees LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera friends and then based on job postings, tried to match them with people in your network and then said, hey, so and so, we think might be a good opportunity for our marketing position. Here's link to send them if you think you agree with that and that was- Chad: I can see that integrating with Slack, who also is here. Joel: But not in the startup. Not in the startup. Chad: Yeah, not in the startup. Joel: So kudos to them for that. Yeah, we'll get to Slack in a second. My other highlight from the startup was Peachy Mondays. [crosstalk 00:15:11]. Yeah. We have way too many animals in the startup area and the vendor areas as a whole but now we're getting into fruits. So we should start saying- Chad: Fruity Mondays. Joel: ... Strawberry jobs forever and maybe- Chad: Oh I like that. That's good. Joel: So they're basically an internal glass door. Chad: Okay. Joel: So you leave anonymous feedback that's internal, which for companies is nice because it's not public and maybe for employees it's nice because they feel like they're being heard and they're not being just voicing out in the world. I do think however, a lot of people would prefer to be heard by the most people possible even though it's anonymous. Whereas a platform like Indeed or Glassdoor is going to give them more of a voice than an internal system but those are two startups that sort of stood out to me as at least interesting. Chad: Yeah. Well, we did see our friends from VideoMyJob here in that area, Candidate.ID, Job Pals. So seeing some of those organizations here are really cool. Joel: Yeah, that we've talked about before. Been on firing squad. Chad: Yeah. One organization that it was easy and I honed in on it quickly. It was called Juno. Joel: Just the logo. Chad: If you have a logo that is your name. It can't be so complex that- Joel: If it looks like Morse code. Chad: Yeah. I can't actually... If it takes me more than three seconds to actually figure out your fucking logo then the logo sucks. Joel: Try to explain their logo for listeners. If you... Like not being able to show it. Chad: Yeah. You know, like that the Etch A Sketch, when you're like you can do things on the Etch A Sketch and it's just like you're doing like little circles and stuff. Joel: Blind Etch A Sketch. Chad: Yeah. It's horrible. You look at it and you're like, what the... Does that... Is that actually what I... No, I think it's Juno and then I look underneath and it's like, yeah it's Juno that is horrible. Joel: It is horrible. Yeah. And whatever marketing firm person, company, (five 00:17:06) or contractor came up with that. Like not good. Chad: It's a five year old with an Etch A Sketch. Joel: Agreed on that. Okay. A couple main segments we wanted to touch on was messaging. So you mentioned Slack. Go ahead and then what's your take on them? Chad: It was interesting that Slack would spend time at a show like this. Joel: Sure. Chad: Because we don't generally see them at shows like at the state. I didn't see Slack at HR Tech. Joel: Nope. This is the first show that I've seen them exhibit on. I think maybe the second time Facebook At Work- Chad: They've been here. Joel: ... has been here. Yeah. Chad: So it was interesting because we went to Slack and said, why are you here? Right? And I think it was interesting because they're doing the integrations with applicant tracking systems with surveys that kind of thing. So they're trying to get into the basic flow of work. So instead of going to your applicant tracking system and using your applicant tracking system or going to your applicant tracking system for updates or going to email for updates. If you're in Slack all day and these channels pop up and you see that there notifications then it's just automatically integrated. I thought that was really cool because it's all about process efficiencies. Joel: Yeah and those integrations I think are powerful because it's not just a, hey, you got a new applicant from whatever, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: It was like very detailed information that you get from your Slack dashboard. Chad: I could see background check companies and I mean just all of the data that's coming through you can see it and then you know, when you have to go back to the applicant tracking system to get work done in there. Joel: And looking at Slack, there's actually an HR and culture category within their app store. A lot of it is very heavy with surveys, polling, engagement. You know, send little smileys to your coworkers kind of thing but we mentioned Greenhouse, Lever was there. I don't remember any others that were there but if you're an ATS and you're not integrated with Slack, we both think that was a pretty cool integration. Chad: We have to talk to iCIMS about that when we're out there in a couple of weeks. Joel: Sure. iCIMS, Jobvite. We need to tell Amen to get on that as well. Chad: I think Aman's all over that. I could be wrong. I think he is all over that. Joel: I'd be surprised if he wasn't at least aware of it and had it on their roadmap. So I would... We mentioned Facebook At Work, which is their messenger at work product. What was your takeaway on their stuff versus Slack? Chad: I would say that we knew their product better than they did or at least how to articulate it better than they did. It was weird because you just kind of stepped up and said, okay, tell me about your product and really all they had to say was first, do you use Facebook? Yes. Do you have groups in Facebook? Yes. Okay. That's pretty much it. It's just you have a business side. It's not your personal profile, you have a business profile. So it separates business from personal and what are your questions? That's the pitch. Right? Joel: Yeah and it was pretty clear that... Well, the app store is as an obvious example. Slack has, I'm assuming thousands if not tens of thousands of apps. We asked Facebook how many apps- Chad: They are like 60. Joel: ... were made? Is 60. Now a lot of those are big. Right? Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Like G Suite, Microsoft, which are pretty easy wins for Facebook. They can make one call and get that probably built pretty easily but if you're not connecting with the app makers of the world to create really cool applications to your product. You're probably going to lose to the solution that is doing cool things and creating great integrations. So if I'm a Greenhouse user and it's between Slack and Facebook, I'm obviously going to go to Slack because I can integrate my ATS experience within my messaging system. Chad: Yeah. iPhone had like this huge app store and droid didn't then droid did. Right? I mean, it's just one of those things. So Facebook is such a big brand. All of these organizations are going to want to have and need to have an app there. So I don't think that's going to be that big of an issue. I think they're just going to have this flood but I think they're prioritizing well. They're not just waiting for the little app guys to come in and start creating the... They're doing the big integrations first. Chad: So yeah, I'm not too worried about that. I'm just not sure about them in this space. Facebook in this space. They don't understand this space. I mean with their ads, their job ads and being able to boost those and that kind of shit. I mean they just don't get what we need so why would they get from a business standpoint what we need from a communications or what have you? So I don't know. I don't buy Facebook in this space. Joel: Yeah. We did ask them, hey, you guys have job postings on your marketplace. You have this corporate sort of a solution. When can we start seeing integration between posting jobs and you're at work messaging platform? And they seem to think, yeah, that could happen. Again, you said we knew more about their product than they did in some cases. So I wouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon but it is something that they would have over Slack, which does not have 3 billion consumers use it on the planet. Chad: See that and that's exactly right. So if you do have that Greenhouse integration and you're automatically pushing a feed of jobs into the Facebook marketplace, right? So I mean, that could all go along and then again, you could get messages on that on workplace. Joel: Totally true. Chad: So yeah. So I mean, they have a huge leg up from a market standpoint and their marketplace on Facebook. So I mean... So they know how to do that. Again, I'm just not satisfied with what they've done thus far in the business space. Joel: Yeah and there's really nothing stopping Facebook from building integrations into ATS already to automatically post jobs, which we know that they're doing anyway. So that's obviously on the table. Let's talk about bots. Particularly chat bots I guess, because they are [crosstalk 00:23:04], right after this we're going to be going to the battle of the bots- Chad: The battle of the bots. Joel: ... session, which is going to not only feature Meyer but- Chad: We've got like half an hour till that starts. Joel: ... Paradox. Our friends at the robot, Tengai will be, Max at Talkpush. Pretty much it's going to be a who is who of this sector. The only ones here are Meyer and Paradox. The others are sort of hanging around and doing sessions and whatnot but what's... I don't know what your, I guess highlight from that or takeaway. I mean, it certainly seems like the time for the bots is here if it's not coming in a big way soon. Chad: I am so big on bots overall. Not just chat bots but bots from a process efficiency standpoint because there are so much that can be done from automation. So yeah, I think there's just still blue sky out there for chat bots and bots overall and being able to do this chat bot thing is awesome but what about the actual process bots that you don't need human interaction. You know what the process is supposed to be and you just engage in signal. It's big and these guys are obviously getting a shit ton of cash already, right? So it's going to be interesting to see if they can. Because you received all this money, can you actually sell with a valuation that large or do you turn into your own platform? I mean seriously. Joel: And look, I think without naming names. People I've talked to, I think there are offers out there. I think there's [crosstalk 00:24:47], conversations about how much do you want and the question of do you make a lot of money now or do you roll the dice and take a lot of money potentially later and I think a lot of these chatbots are struggling with that question and we'll see. One of my predictions for 2020 maybe yours as well could be, we'll start to see the first chat bot go for allegedly $100 million is sort of the price that we're hearing but yeah, it's a hot space. Joel: I expect it to get hotter. I'm kind of surprised we're not seeing more competitors. Yeah, clearly a big trend here is automation and chat bots are kind of driving that. I also think it's worth noting that the conversations that vendors are having with folks is not so much what is a chat bot but it's how are you guys different from Paradox and ALIO and all the others out there. So there's an education in the market that's happening that I think is really healthy and really underscores how healthy and trending this industry is. Chad: Yeah and I think also as a company it's great to try to understand the differences between them but the biggest key is what is your fucking problem and take that to those vendors and say, this is my problem. How are you going to solve this problem? So having these kind of like high level, how are you different conversations. Okay, yeah, they might be good but they're nothing compared to taking an actual problem to them. Problems. A fucking portfolio of problems and saying, okay, problem, A, here you go and then take them through that. I mean this is the thing that we have to do better Intel acquisition. We can't just have all these box checking, oh will it do this? Will it do that? Will it... You know, will it make me copy? Will... You know, bullshit. Will it solve my fucking pro... What's your problem? That's the key. Joel: Yeah. We need to move away from the days of like, I have a checklist and chat bot is on it and I'll buy any chat bot as long as I can check it off my list. Chad: Challenge your thinking. Joel: What problem do you need solved? Chad: Exactly. Joel: Very important. Because they all are very different in certain ways. Chad: Yeah. And how are they going to solve it? That's the question. How are they going to solve... How's one chatbot going to solve it versus another. Right. And I can guarantee you like Talkpush, which is an entirely different platform, right? Then like maybe Meyer or something like that. They're going to have different ways to actually solve. Joel: Sure. Chad: And from your standpoint, that's the biggest key. Joel: Yup. An actual robot may not be for you. Chad: Yeah. That could be it. Right? Joel: It could be it. Chad: That could be it. Joel: That could be it. I will say another trend that is either troubling or just worth noting is like engagement is getting a little ridiculous. Everyone wants to engage candidates. Chad: Yes. Joel: And I just don't know if we need that many companies trying to solve that problem. Chad: The engagement and then you're engaging but you want something back from them. There's a lot of... They call it engagement but what they're looking to do is get info from the candidate whether it's surveys or whether it's this or that. It's like how much can you inundate an actual human being with? I don't care if it's a question or five questions or whatever it is weekly or biweekly or it's just like, what's that actual person's flow look like in their job? And then how much other shit can they take on? Joel: Do I actually benefit from this and how much of my time is required to give my feedback to you? Chad: Right. Joel: These are all questions that are troubling and also what's the actual benefit aside from data? Are you retaining people more because of what you're getting back? Is there a recruitment element that's in there? I think those are questions that aren't really answered and if it's not making you money or saving you money, what is it doing for you? Chad: Yeah. It costs a hell of a lot less to retain an employee than it is to go find a new one. Joel: And is the engagement tool you're using actually doing that? Chad: …the fuck away. Joel: Or is it pissing them off and getting in their shit? Chad: It could be. Joel: I'll also note from the show, my takeaway was big tech is still big tech. The biggest booths here are still Oracle, Workday. The usual suspects. So in some ways - Chad: The cash cows. Joel: ... things are changing significantly in other ways- Chad: They're not so much. Joel: The shit is still the same as it always has been. One take away from you. I know we've given TMP shit about all the acquisitions they've been doing. What brand are they? What should we call them? They have an interesting presence here at the show. Chad: Yeah. They have a talent brew booth. Right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Which is an awesome booth. Joel: It is nice. Chad: But once again, what we've talked about before- Joel: There is no beer in the talent brew. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But anyway. Chad: Yeah. We should probably have that discussion but if you think about it, once again, we talked about this last week. You have TMP, AIA, CKR, Maximum I mean and the list just keeps going on and then what happens? Well, and then they just, right? And then they show up here as none of those. As none of those. They show up here as their product Talent brew. I mean, again, I love that they're trying to get the Talent brew name out there but I really think that they had this simple situation going on. Joel: By the way that's a great analogy. Chad: It just so many different names and so many different likenesses- Joel: So just go on by symbol dot AI and be done with it. Chad: And be done with. Put them all up underneath that umbrella and you're done. Joel: And to add to the confusion. You saw a booth that was like TMR or something. Chad: TMF. Joel: TMF. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Because the F was almost a P. Joel: Almost the exact same font as well. So I would be very confused if I didn't know one thing or the other as to whether that was TMP or what exactly that was, so. Chad: Love those guys. Again, we love the acquisitions that are happening. It's just again, the confusion and all of these multiple personalities are just confusing the fuck... I mean, I can't imagine how it doesn't confuse the market. Joel: All right, well let's take a break and get unconfused. Chad: I like that. Joel: We'll come back and talk about Indeed shaking people down and the mobsters at Glassdoor. 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 Bit emoji. 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: And we're back. Joel: And We're back. All right dude. The Indeed hate is... It went from a trickle to sort of a nice flow every day we seem to get new intel about what Indeed is doing. Chad: Well in... and companies aren't sure what's happening. That's the problem, right? So again, we were talking about like TMP and there's confusion there, at least from my standpoint there could be. There's confusion on the Indeed side because we've heard... We reported on a company that really had their traffic almost turned off. Right? Their organic traffic and we felt like that, Oh, here we go. They're going to start the smack down and then guess what? Once we put that out there more companies started getting to us and saying, hey look, that's happening to us too. We just saw our organic go flat. What the fuck is going on? Joel: Now word that we heard this week which is new is throttling. Chad: Yes. Joel: A company that we had come to us say that they were getting, was it $5 per apply or the cost that they're paying for an application went from $5 to 15 and they believe that Indeed is sort of moving the knobs on how effective your postings are based on are you going to play or not. Chad: Yeah. I mean there's always been rumors of... and these are... I mean okay so we've had inside information from actual sales people at Indeed when this was happening that there would be money to be spent and it wasn't spent until that last week and then they just jammed it all through. Right? Joel: Right. Chad: Because it was like, do we have budget shit? We've got to do this and now we're talking about more of like a throttling type of an issue where it's like, look, if you're going to get people, you're going to have to pay for them. Right? So the organic and start the payment and then what you're talking about the actual payment is like, well that price that we were looking at is actually going to be going up. So it's interesting. Joel: Ultimately allegedly Indeed is sort of playing with the algorithm to say, look, if you're not paying more, there's a good chance that you're going to start at certain times of the day or month being on page 29- Chad: It's like Uber. Joel: ... and then when the budget... Yeah. Chad: In surge. Joel: Yes. Chad: Surge rate. Joel: Yes, so when the budget needs to be spent, you're going to start showing up on page one and things like that. So it's not about- Chad: It could be their new model who knows? We don't know, but Uber does it. It's called surge and Indeed could just surge the fuck out of- Joel: [crosstalk 00:34:27]. Let's be honest, most people are just going to say, oh shit, I need to spend more money with Indeed. They're not going to ask hard questions or go to an alternative, which I know we talk about quite a bit. That was the advice you gave the Informant that we had this week. Like go check out Neuvoo. Go check out the programmatic solution providers. There are options out there. Chad: If you don't start looking out and diversify your traffic and all your traffic eggs are in one basket, that's on you. I mean, you're fucking yourself. Joel: No doubt then again, if you have information, juicy gossip for us on Indeed and anyone else, hit us up at chadcheese.com either on the record or off the record. We will honor either. Chad: It'll work. Joel: All right. Let's talk about our session. The panel's great. We've already mentioned who was on it. The companies represented Red Bull, Sainsburys, a very popular retailer, SmashFly. Chad: Were all decked out in the SmashFly gear by the way. Joel: And the title I believe was your brand sucks or something along those lines. Chad: Brand matters, experience matters and then in the synopsis, pretty much your experience sucks so therefore your brand sucks and I think that's one of the things that companies are really focused heavily on their brand. They don't get where this whole brand thing comes from. It's the experience. How are you treating actual human beings? Whether they're customers, whether they're candidates, whether they're candidates and customers, whether they're employees, how are you treating them? Right? Joel: Yup. Chad: And if you don't focus on experience then it doesn't matter. Your brand is going to suck. Joel: Yup. And one of the things that was really well said by both of the companies on the stage was how they are engaging with marketing and we preach this all the time. If you're not having sit downs with your marketing department coming with data, which was obviously a huge- Chad: Very much. Joel: ... point taken in the conference, like don't just go to market... Don't go to marketing with your hat in your hand and like help us. Come at them with actual numbers in terms of traffic profiles that are in your system or resumes, applications per day. How many people come to the site? Like these are numbers that will get marketing's attention because in Red Bull's case they get 3 million applications per year. A few tens of thousands actually get hired. Those are all people that could buy Red Bull. Chad: Easily. Joel: And marketing should be aware of that and provide deals, information, whatever the brand should carry over into the application and the job seeker component to hiring people but that was a big takeaway for me. We did talk a little bit about external anonymous reviews. How those play into your brand. I was really surprised to hear, Red Bulls, Adam say that they ignore reviews. Me personally, if you're just putting your head in the sand- Chad: I know it was an arrow to your heart. Joel: It was a point of some controversy. Chad: You should have seen Joel's face when he said that. Joel: Yeah, I took it at Red Bull with wings on that one that how can you ignore 20 some review sites that are out there but his answer was very revealing to me in that he feels like to be on Glassdoor, to use Glassdoor, to engage with Glassdoor. There's sort of a payola situation. I have to pay them to delete bad reviews. I have to pay them to move certain reviews up and certain reviews down, which obviously if you talk to Glassdoor does not happen. No matter how much you pay them. You can't delete stuff. Now you probably have a better voice at Glassdoor if you're paying and you call them and say, hey, this review is a plague... or whatever, a slanderous. They'll probably listened to you much more readily. Chad: You are higher in the queue. I'm sure. Joel: They won't admit that. Chad: I'm very sure. Joel: Paying does probably get you a little bit of preferential treatment but Glassdoor to me has a real brand problem. If companies like Red Bull think that it's a payola situation and they have to pay to play and if they don't, they're going to get screwed over because that ultimately is going to be really bad for Glassdoor and by the way Glassdoor is sister companies with Indeed. If Indeed starts getting the similar reputation, which they already have on job postings. Now if the review section becomes a payola situation that's really bad for both those companies. Chad: Yeah. So there are two things here for me. First off, if that is what companies think and I guarantee you many companies think that. They feel like they have to pay to play and I think to an extent, there is a pay to play. There's no question you get more if you pay so that- Joel: You can get someone on the phone if you're writing cheque. Chad: So here's the thing, if that's the whole thought of some of these companies, right? And that's what they're getting. Then Glassdoor needs to articulate their deliverable much better than what they are today. Joel: Yes. Chad: Number one and number two, what I heard from him was there is so much noise out there as Red Bull. Glassdoor really doesn't mean that much to us because there are all these other segments that we're hitting that actually have better return. So they're big enough I think and they have a brand where they can kind of feel like that's noise whether it's wrong or right. That's how they feel. It's noise and sometimes portions of it we just have to ignore and that's what they choose to ignore. Joel: Yeah. My guess is all a lot more companies than we think take the head in the sand, ignore it strategy than we probably believe. I disagree with the strategy but it is a very real thing I'm sure. But yeah, it's similar to... You know, I've talked to many restaurants who think Yelp is the same situation. If I don't pay Yelp. I'm not on Yelp. My reviews are shit that I never come to the top. Glassdoor to me has a similar situation and they need to fix that if they're going to survive and thrive in the future. Chad: They've got to look at different ways to monetize because they have to make money. I mean, that's the reason why they're there. I mean, Job postings obviously, I mean, there are different things that they... I think they can do to be able to monetize, which they don't feel like the mafia. Right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: You know, you're going to break your window and then I'm going to send some guy over to fix it and then they're going to charge you for fixing your window. Joel: Yeah, we don't need any broken kneecaps in our industry. There's enough of that going on around the world. Well dude, we have a lot more show left. I think battle of the bots is coming up. Chad: I can't wait. Joel: We're going to try to get some content from that, hopefully. Otherwise I'm headed home in a couple of days. You're headed home a couple of days after that. We're going to spend some time here in Paris, so don't expect much from us in the next couple of days. It's been fun and we out. Chad: We out. Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast the Chad, the Cheese. BRILLIANT! They 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. 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 grub cheese. It's so weird. We out. #TMP #AIA #CKR #TalentBrew #UNLEASH #Smashfly #Indeed #Glassdoor #LIVE

How does a Cult Brand lose its luster? Losing Cult Brand status and then making a comeback is not an easy task. Ellie Doty, CMO of Chili's Grill and Bar, tells a brand story that ends in a hashtag. Yes, I said a hashtag! Oh, and Cheesman sucks-up to one of his favorite eating destinations like never before. It's embarrassing. Supported by SmashFly, big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Chris Kneeland: Hi everybody. This is Chris Kneeland, the CEO of Cult Collective and the co-founder of The Gathering of Cult Brands. Excited today to introduce you to Ellie Doty. Ellie is the marketing bigwig over at Brinker International. Brinker is best known for Chili's Bar & Grill and Maggiano's, two beloved American chain restaurants. Chris Kneeland: What I love so much about Ellie is, as I've gotten to know her over the past couple of years, is she's been on a journey. Sort of migrating from more traditional advertising and marketing communications to embracing audience engagement and cult brand principles. Really using her budget, her resources, her clout, her credentials and the C suite there at Brinker to get the organization to think differently about HR issues, about products and services, about customer segmentation, and really becoming a very sophisticated marketing organization. I'm sure she's going to have a lot of great things to share with us. 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: Yeah. Joel: I really need an old timer with cheese right about now. Hello everybody. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: I am Chad Sowash. Welcome to another installment of our cult brand series of podcasts. Joel and I are working closely with The Gathering of Cult Brands. You know, the best branding and marketing event in the world. Joel: The cult. Chad: To bring discussions around how companies become or remain cult brands. Today is a Joel Cheesman interview for the ages. Joel: That's right. We're going to be talking about meal kits from Taco Bell. Chad: Today we have Ellie Doty on. Ellie, you got to allow me to do this kind of like this bottom-up, LinkedIn kind of intro to you. Ellie was brand and fielding marketing manager at Long John Silver's. She was a senior brand manager at Taco Bell, CMO for Kentucky Fried Chicken Canada, director of marketing at KFC, big KFC, VP of marketing and culinary at Chili's, and today she is the SVP head of marketing at Chili's. Yes. Joel: We're not worthy. We're not worthy. We're not worthy. Chad: Ellie, what did we miss here? This is pretty amazing. We're going to get into this, but what did we miss? Ellie: No. You got it. You nailed the high points. I've been at Chili's for about two years now, and head up the marketing function over here. Probably the biggest part you missed was one of my favorite times which was with KFC Global out of Plano, Texas. Just an amazing experience working on KFC Global. A huge business outside of the US, so that was a really fun chapter. Joel: I used to be employed by KFC. A little known fact about me. Ellie: Really? What did you do for KFC? Chad: Chicken guy. Joel: I made Chicken Littles back in the 80s if you can believe that. Chad: Before we get into Chili's brand journey, I've got one question. Your last job was VP marketing and culinary. What in the hell? Marketing and culinary. I want to know how those two fit together? Ellie: Well, the better question, how do they not fit together? Joel: Boom. Ellie: What an exciting job that was for me there. I had never run a culinary function before, but actually at that time a new executive chef for Chili's started the same day I did in marketing on my team. We came in at a real turnaround time for Chili's, having faced several years worth of traffic declines. We faced a menu revolution that needed to happen. That's why marketing and culinary were together. Ellie: I needed to take another look from the chips and salsa and ranch, all the way to the Molten Cakes, and see is this the right menu for Chili's to have, and are we living up to our founding promises around it's a pretty simple menu. It's burgers and tacos and fajitas and margaritas and throw in some ribs. That was one of the reasons those were together at that time. What should this menu be? Joel: Hey, don't downplay ribs and chicken fingers. Let's not do that. One of the themes that we get in this series has been companies finding their why. Why do you exist? I'm wondering if you had a similar journey and what did you land on in terms of what is the WHY of Chili's and other restaurants you've worked for. Ellie: Yeah. We definitely did. At Chili's when I started I learned that there's a saying that we love each other and we like our guest. Chili's has been really into, we're really into ourselves. In fact, team members at Chili's are called Chili Heads for their devotion to the brand and the fun we have in the restaurants at the RSC. We love each other like family. It was definitely something that it's kind of the reverse problem a lot of brands see where they lack the soul and the heartbeat of meaning behind why they exist, and have to create that from the inside out. Ellie: For Chili's, on the flip side when I started the first task was tap in to what already exists, and bring the guest to that party. We did a lot of that work last year, and we're starting to see some of that show up in some of our marketing channels. We got very focused on our menu, eliminated a lot of the extra thing. In fact, we cut 40% of our menu items in the first year that I was part of the Chili's brand. Ellie: We had a really strong why around boldness and togetherness. We shorthand it Bolder Together. We're now living that, have been working on living that for the last few months. As you said, we're on the journey. We're on the journey to bring it to the guest. Chad: Does Chili's see itself as a cult brand now or are you on that journey? Does the journey stop or is it never completed? Ellie: I think the journey never stops. Chili's used to be a cult brand, I would say. Its founding principles on Greenville Avenue with a shorthand written menu and just some guys who put stuff on the menu they thought were cool, like what's a fajita? I don't know. They put a pronunciation guide on the menu. Things like that are how Chili's was founded, but I think over the course of going into 32 different countries and 1,500 restaurants, and being part of a giant, becoming a giant can sometimes take away some of those cult founding principles. Now, we have the task of how do you be mass and cult at the same time. Chad: Well, cutting 40% of the menu, I think, is genius because I know going into Chili's before it took me so long to actually find something. Then when the menu was actually cut down, it was like, "Okay. Now I know exactly what I want." It was so much quicker. For guys like Joel who actually pronounced it fajita, thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. Joel: That's low. Ellie: Low blow. Yeah. Joel: Just don't get rid of the buffalo chicken sandwich anytime soon. Ellie: Yeah. That thing is delicious. Joel: Yes it is. Chad: You have what you call an MVP. Your mission, vision and passion. We saw that not just on the actual website but on the employment area of the website. When you start to take a look at your mission, your vision and your passion, that obviously starts with the employees. How do you get that ingrained into your employees? How does that start? Because that's got to be the hardest part. Ellie: The first place is actually we have Chili's-wide, brandwide cultural beliefs. There are four of them. We have four key cultural beliefs, and that's really where it starts, if we have these shared beliefs that we all buy into. We support those beliefs on a daily basis through storytelling, recognition, live experiences we create. Ellie: I'm sure you guys have heard lots of times many, many companies have recognition cards. Well ours have our cultural beliefs at the top of the card, and you recognize somebody for living that cultural belief. That's where it starts from the inside out. Then all of those cultural beliefs are backed up in every single restaurant. That's what you get recognized for in restaurant. That's what the recognition boards in the back of the restaurant say. Really I think it starts from those foundational beliefs. Joel: One of the topics that we cover on the show quite a bit that cover both employment and just branding in general is the diversity and inclusion, recruiting both people of diverse backgrounds but also having customers as such. Do you find that you've meshed those two together in terms of your advertising, or your social media to make sure that not only are you tracking a diverse customer, but also potentially diverse candidates to apply for jobs and work for Chili's? Ellie: Yes. For sure. It's incredibly important to Chili's. In fact, we believe inclusion is one of our top values. Inclusiveness in our workforce, inclusiveness in our dining rooms. That's a journey that we're always on. One that we're working on right now is just one of the foundational reasons people love to come to Chili's, is because in their words they say it's a "come as you are" kind of place. Ellie: Whoever you're with, whatever you were doing right before, however your kids act, you're welcome at Chili's. Kick back. Let your hair down. Have a good time. Joel: That's what I'm talking about. That's why I wear sweatpants every time I go to Chili's. Ellie: You're welcome to. Chad: That's why I eat in the bar, so I don't have to hear your kids yelling. Back to the MVP real quick. Mission is awesome. Delivering burgers 'Ritas, fajitas, that's for Joel, and 'Ritas like no place else. The vision, Chili's Love by 2020. What is Chili's Love exactly? Ellie: Chili's Love is a, well, it started as a hashtag on Twitter, and it is one that we started really in our people channel, so our team members or people who are Chili Heads really start saying #chilislove to whatever they tweet about what we're doing. Interestingly saw it really catch on. We can't really put marketing efforts behind it. We didn't try to make it into a thing. Our guests started to latch on to this, and so then they would tag themselves with #chilislove. Ellie: We said, you know, we need to make this true. We need to make it go beyond a hashtag, and just that people are wanting this from us. Our guests are rooting for us, and they want us to show up in a #chilislove kind of way. We set that as our vision. Well, we really want that. Instead of our vision being something like a sales revenue goal, or a number of restaurants we've built goal, what if it was a love goal? Chad: That started grassroots from your employees and then it actually stemmed out to the guests. Ellie: Yes. It was one of those fun things where you tap into something people really, it's sort of inadvertently, but that they want you to do. Now we make a pretty significant effort not to start too many new hashtags. Chad: Well, that actually ties into your passion, making people feel special. Obviously people who are feeling special are going to use a hashtag. They wouldn't be using a hashtag any other way, right? Ellie: Right. Right. Hopefully not. I guess they could. We're hoping they do though. If you're feeling Chili's Love, you're feeling special. 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. Joel: Thom, there are a lot of companies out there that are small. What do you tell those companies that say, "We're too small to worry about having a cult brand from an employment perspective"? Thom Kenney: I'd say do you know how many people WhatsApp had when they got acquired by Facebook? 13. Now if that's not a small company, they got a billion-dollar valuation and a billion-dollar acquisition. They know how important it is to have that cult brand mentality. Nobody really understood just how few employees there were with WhatsApp, but look at the following that they had. Look at what they created. They did it mostly because they had really great people. They didn't need a ton of great people. They just needed a really good core team. Thom Kenney: When WhatsApp and 13 people is thinking about, "Well, you know what, I need one more engineer," that cult brand of WhatsApp is like that one engineer, they've one engineering position, they've probably got 10,000 applicants just for that one engineering position. If you think you're too small, then you're probably too small to really get big anyway, because you're thinking small. Thom Kenney: If you think big and you think about what do I need to do to create that critical mass that I need in the market to be able to have a really, really great product or service. If I'm creating that cult brand for me, just think of what that's going to do for my recruiting. Chad: To find out more, go to smashfly.com. Joel: I feel the Chili's Love every time I'm there. You guys have embraced technology for quite a while now. I know that you guys were one of the first national chains to embrace the kiosk at the table, ordering from this kiosk, giving your kids games to play while you're waiting for your extra chips and salsa refresh to be brought to you. How does technology play into the brand as a whole, maybe from an employments perspective, social media? You guys have really embraced technology early on, and how do you look to use that now? Maybe what platforms are you seeing for the future as being a really hot Tik Tok in the future of your marketing strategy? Ellie: Tech and tech innovation are a key priority of ours. It's if you named of three or four things that are really important at Chili's, that's definitely hits that shortlist. As you said, we did get out ahead of the curve. Some of the things that I would mention that you didn't in terms of marketing are around we really made some pretty significant shifts away from mass marketing in mass channels, and into much more personalized ways to interact with our brand. Ellie: As an example, we've pretty dramatically increased our commitment to CRM and loyalty programs. Ours is called My Chili's Rewards, and every time you use it or identify you get free chips and salsa, or a free NA bev. It's super simple. Moved away from any kind of complicated point systems and made sure that our guests felt special every time they let us know that they were there. Ellie: We also pay a lot of attention to our online ordering, our OLO platform, so that it's as frictionless as it can possibly be. We're pretty proud of our app development and web ordering development. In fact, 60% of our orders come through those channels now, which is great. That's where we want them to be. Our guests have amazing experiences there. We get rave reviews on it. Ellie: We stay out ahead of that. In fact we've just launched that favorites option, so that if you've ordered from us before you can click it, and all your favorites with your preferences go into your basket. That's all it takes. One of the beautiful things about Chili's is that you can customize everything, get it just exactly the way you want it. That also means it can take a little while to order it if you want to customize it every time. Now we can remember it for you, no worries. You get your same order. Joel: Will I be able to say, "Hey, Alexa. Bring me Chili's tonight," and it'll bring me my favorite from Chili's? Is that coming soon? Ellie: I'm sure someday that will be true. That's not something that's happening right now. Voice ordering, it's going to happen. Joel: Fingers crossed. Chad: Joel wants to walk into a Chili's, have his face recognized, and by the time he walks over to the table he has his meal ordered. That's what Joel wants. Joel: Joel just wants Chili's to move in with me, so I don't have to leave the house ever. Chad: Back to the tech. When that first came out, yeah, it was great for the kids to play games. It was great for the actual customer, I think. What about for the employees? What about for the individual who's waiting, serving on the table? Is that something that they embraced, or did it take a little time for them to really gel with the technology on the table? Ellie: No. For the most part it's embraced. It's got a number of benefits for the servers. I think one of the biggest benefits to mention is we get real-time feedback from the guests on how their experience was. That makes it a lot easier to make them feel special in a really detailed way. If you don't have that technology, the way we were before, and a way, I know, some of our competitors are, is you have to count on people to contact you either through a phone call or otherwise on their receipt. That way you just really don't get enough or detailed enough information. We value a lot the amount of info we get about the experience that people have. Ellie: We are able to improve and train our servers on the basis of that feedback. For example, if we have a lot of guests with a problem for a certain shift at a certain time, we're able to coach against what might have been going on. What was causing those problems, and really improve that shift to shift to shift. The other thing it does that's really cool is you can pay right at the table. That's a great benefit for the guest and for the server, because the server spends a lot of time walking those checks back and forth. Chad: I bet. Ellie: They don't have to do that. 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. Chris, why is The Gathering of Cult Brands so important? Chris Kneeland: Well, because these are stories that I don't think are being told. If you look at just the marketing and advertising space much less the traditional HR or employee engagement space, we're just not telling the right kinds of stories. We don't have the right kinds of role models. The Academy Awards for the marketing industry is probably the Cannes Festival. That's just this celebration of creativity. It's not tethered to business performance. It's not tethered to audience engagement. It's just tethered to who had a good fun idea. We see that as rampant in the marketing industry. Chris Kneeland: What we wanted to do was to find a platform where brands who are doing the right things for the right reasons. You know what, they may not even be advertisers. Costco, Kiehl's, Lululemon, brands like this don't ever go to those other kinds of shows, because they're not telling creative paid media campaigns and they're not doing Super Bowl commercials. This is their home and the chance for them to get the recognition they deserve. Chad: Register now at cultgathering.com. Joel: Restaurants have a unique situation where most of the people that interview there, a customer there as well. How much direct contact or activity do you have with the recruiting process to make sure that when someone interviews at Chili's they don't have a bad experience and say, "I'm never going back to Chili's. I'm going to tell my friends that I had a bad interview at Chili's"? For example, do you give coupons for anyone who interviews, saying, "Thank you for your time. Please come back and enjoy a free app on us," or something like that? Ellie: I don't know the answer to that specific question about if we give anybody anything for interviewing. However, I will say that we have a whole program, it's called Higher Train Retain, and it's a 360 program around our branded interview process, hiring process, and retaining process. It all works together in terms of the value proposition we're bringing to our employees. Ellie: We happen to work in a category where hundreds of thousands of people have at one point or another worked there. How the Chili Heads or former Chili Heads or possible Chili Heads feel about the brand is big. It's a sizable group of people. We not only want to make the guests feel special, but we do want to make all of our Chili Heads feel special too. It's a strength of ours. Ellie: We definitely pay a lot of attention to ensuring their experiences are great. One recent piece of headway we made there was around the first week training. We got a lot more prescriptive about what happens in the first week for somebody being hired, because that's when they are at the highest risk of having a bad experience at a Chili's. If you just imagine you start on a Friday night and you get thrown in to dish, you don't know what you're doing. You're not sure who these people are. You're not going to get any tips that night. It's not a great first-off experience, but sometimes that's what happens because it's Friday night and it's busy. We just take a much more thoughtful approach to how you start off on your first day, first week. Chad: Do you have a team that manages that process? Because I would assume, I mean how many franchises do you have out there? Ellie: We're by and large company owned. We own most of our restaurants. It's about 25% franchise owned. That's held by three big owners. Chad: Got you. I think here in Columbus, Indiana, where I live is actually a franchise. I could be wrong. Do you have somebody that actually manages those franchises to ensure that they have the same brand standards? Because I would assume that would be a little bit harder to manage the brand and the experience and obviously the Chili Heads and everything like that, to be able to seem like one family. Ellie: It is. It is. Of course, across the thousand restaurants that we own, that Chili's runs and operates we are able to make sure that we are living up to those standards in all thousand of those restaurants. In our franchise restaurants, we do have coaching and support teams to help ensure they are aware of and know how to use all the programs, are deploying them where they can. We make custom versions of them if they need them based on what their business dynamics are. Joel: Employee reviews are something that we talk about on the show quite a bit. I know in your line of work Yelp reviews, Google reviews, anywhere people are spouting off about the company as a customer, good or bad, is something that I'm sure you keep your thumb on to make sure that people are having a good experience, and that you're engaging with those folks. Joel: Do you pay much attention to the employer side of reviews? I think that we're seeing a little bit of the two bleeding together with social media and particularly video in the format of Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok where employees even are going on and talking about the secrets of the company, what it's like to work there, why you would or wouldn't want to work there. Is that something that you guys are conscious of? If so, how are you managing and monitoring that? Ellie: It is something we're conscious of. I will say we don't spend a lot of our energies around the employee reviews, just because we're pretty focused on the guest. We have our own internal channels to hear from our employees. Usually we hear the bulk of what we need to from our employees through those channels. It's not a main source of information on public channels. Ellie: We love for our teams to post about their Chili's experiences. However, if they're having a challenge we have channels for them to reach out to us directly to address what might be going on. We do have some social media policies around how we engage on the Chili's brand, whether we work for the brand or we're posting on behalf of the brand. Chad: What kind of advice would you give a company looking to start this cult brand journey? It's ominous as it is to be able to take a look at even a small organization, but a big organization, and say, "How in the heck do I eat this elephant?" What bite should they take first? Ellie: I think it all starts with knowing who you are. At Chili's that's been one of the challenges over the course of the last, say, decade or so. Who are we and where did we start, and how is that relevant today? It may sound super-obvious to say who are we in that way, but I have had some super-smart people to say if a brand is losing its way, look back to look forward. I believe that was a Coca-Cola- Chad: That's good. Ellie: Yeah. I think that came from Coke. It's a good one. It's a good source. That's what we did at Chili's is look back to look forward. I think sometimes when I was coming on board at Chili's and learning about our past efforts, especially with a 45-year-old brand there's hardly anything that hasn't been tried before. It's not about a new idea. It's about new days, new people, a new way of looking at it. Ellie: In this case there had been a number of different, "Oh, we're going to find our brand. We're going to know who we are." It was by being that thing over there. We're going to go become something else. Unfortunately, just as with human beings you're never going to be a world-class version of something else. You're only going to be a world-class version of who you are. Ellie: Who you are as a brand, even if there's some aspects of it that seem like, "Well, that's not really relevant today," it's a huge mistake to go undo your greatest strengths to try to address your greatest weakness. That's one from KFC. The biggest criticism of KFC is that everything is fried. Well, yeah. Hell yeah, everything's fried at KFC. Joel: You say that like it's a bad thing. Ellie: Saying it like it's a bad thing. No. If you undo everything is fried, you undo one of the greatest strengths. I think this effort that we're making right now at Chili's is really about uncovering and living the real truth of the brand, first and foremost. Joel: The gig economy is real. We talk about it a lot on the show. One of the latest numbers was by 2021 or 2 or 3 maybe 40 million Americans will be employed by the gig economy. I know that you guys embrace things like DoorDash and Uber Eats and basically contracting out the delivery of your food. Inevitably more and more of your employees will be contract or gig workers. Do you think about that? Is there a strategy around protecting the brand and the brand experience and using gig or contract workers to come in? Is it something that you think Chili's will stay away from in the Ellie: No. We're actually having at the moment a great experience with DoorDash. A little over a month ago we entered into an inclusive arrangement with DoorDash, so we're only with them now. We have learned and our restaurants have learned that you want to be a brand of choice for dashers. In that gig economy there's all kinds of clients at play. We actually strive hard to help our restaurants learn how to be a great client to a dasher and how dashers are parts of our teams in a lot of ways. We seek to make them feel special too. Ellie: In that way, you have this influence over the brand experience that's created by the dasher. I also think a couple of years ago there were all these conversations at restaurant chains about what happens with the food between the time it leaves the restaurant to the time it gets to the guest. You want to be able to control what that experience is like. Today our guests are so accustomed to in this situation, they get it. They know what a dasher is. They know that they've carried the food from the restaurant, so they understand the dynamics at play here. Ellie: We have less concern over, not less concern over the quality of our food, but we feel confident that we can share, that we can make ourselves a great partnership with our dashers, so that we can all be part of a great guest experience at the end. Even if we're partnered together to get it done. Joel: You could see a day where a restaurant would partner inclusively for workers to come in and work, so that they know that the brand is safe and that there's a relationship there, as opposed to multiple services delivering contract workers? Ellie: Yeah. It could be. A lot of our workers participate in the gig economy too. They work at Chili's. They drive an Uber. Maybe they're a dasher. Many of our guests also participate in the gig economy. We have a target, our tribe we call it, our target guests of families, and we know that almost all of them have some kind of side gig of one kind or another. Nobody's just doing one single thing anymore. Knowing it's our guests, it's our team members, it's the people we partner with, everybody's part of this gig economy today. Chad: Just another reason why you want and need to be a cult brand, right? Ellie: Yeah. That's exactly right. Chad: Well, Ellie, thank you so much for taking the time today. Again, Ellie Doty, head of marketing at Chili's talking more about the journey to becoming a cult brand, and back to being a cult brand. We appreciate it. We had a great time. Thanks Ellie. Ellie: Thanks. Joel: Bless you for the work you do every day, Ellie. Chad: Bless you. Joel: Thank you. Ellie: You bet. Go get some Crispers. Joel: Yeah. We out. Chad: 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. Be sure to check out our sponsors, because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome. #Chilis #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #Marketing #Automation

Ed Sayson is a TA leader at ARC Document Systems. Yeah, sounds kinda boring, but hold on, the company is a drone trendsetter. By employing a lot of drone jockeys (not sure what they're called officially, and driver sounds like a UPS worker), they're able to crush the competition and gain a strategic advantage. And if you think hiring for such an army is easy, think again, as Ed reveals all his tricks and tips in the exclusive interview from Jobvite's Recruiter Nation Live event from San Francisco. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad: Here's another selection Joel and I recorded live from San Francisco at Jobvite's Recruiter Nation Live. We had a chance to catch up with talent acquisition leaders, turn on the mics and talk drones. Hell yeah. Drones. Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: We're back, live from Recruiter Nation Live. That sounds a little redundant, doesn't it? Chad: RNL. Joel: RNL? Chad: RN Live, RNL like SNL, but RNL. Joel: Jobvite's RNL '19 coming at you with another live interview. Chad: 2019 live review from San Francisco in the Parc 55. Parc with a C by the way, not a K. Joel: Lovely part of town. Chad: Yeah, I don't know how that happened. So we have Ed Sayson? Joel: Sayson? Chad: Sayson? Edward: Sayson. Joel: Sayson. Chad: Sayson. I like Sayson, but we'll go with Sayson. Joel: Sayson's kind of cool. Chad: It's just a last name, yeah. Edward: It's French. It's French. Sayson is Swedish. Chad: Okay. Swedish. Joel: I can tell already this guy is way smarter than we are. Chad: That doesn't take much. Joel: I'm a little nervous. Chad: Does not take much. Joel: So you're with ARC. Chad: I am. ARC Documents Solutions. Joel: All right. For our listeners and us, what's the company do? What do you do? Edward: Well, first of all, let me answer your first question about what ARC is. ARC Documents Solutions is a 30-year old publicly traded company that is known now as the largest provider of wide format printing to the architects, engineering, and construction industry. We're also the largest network of drone pilots. Think of us as the Uber of drones. Chad: Do what? You're the largest number of drone pilots? Joel: Ed just blew my mind. He went from paper to drone pilots. Edward: That's right. Chad: Wow. How do you spin into something like that? Edward: Well this is why we're talking, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: He sets you up with the soft stuff and then unloads drone pilot on you. Chad: Wow. Edward: We serve the needs of our clients in the AEC industry. Originally, started with their needs to print information and then we started managing the print services for some of the largest AEC companies with a global footprint. Chad: Yeah. Edward: They're not going to run every revision of their blueprint down to the corner print stores. Chad: Right, right, right. Edward: So they're going to try to set up print themselves and we come in and manage it because they don't know what they're doing. And we realize that they also have needs to improve productivity. Like every time a project manager needs to go out and take pictures and measure so he can send up a project status report, we said, "Why don't you let us take care of that too?" Edward: So we created this network of drone pilots and now we are the Uber of drones for the AEC world. That's just one of the other things that we do besides print. Joel: What's a day in the life of a drone pilot look like? Edward: I have no idea, because I'm not one. Chad: I was going to say, do they sit in a conex like in Vegas? Joel: Or in grandma's basement? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Like unloading armies of drones throughout the world. Edward: I imagine it's more like the Air Force drone pilots who are in between missions. They send up another drone for ARC for construction project status reports. Chad: How many drones are we talking about here? You really have me interested now, jeez. Chad: We're talking probably over 150,000 drone pilots. Chad: No way! Joel: Pilots? Chad: Yeah, the drone pilots. Chad: Drone pilots. Joel: Holy shit. Is this global? Chad: I love this shit. Edward: Yeah, it's global. Joel: Or is this just in the US? Edward: Well, most of it is in the US. But it's because there was a need to shorten the way in which the project managers would have to write their status reports on the building project. Chad: Okay, so when did the drones start to come into play and how easy is it to find drone pilots now? Other than going straight to the military and just trying to pull them as soon as they come out? Edward: Well, the FAA has a certification program to get a drone license. It's called FAA 107. So we just go to that report and go enlist these. Chad: Oh, so they have a list? Edward: Yeah, there's a list of drone... Chad: There's a list. Edward: As long as you have a drone license, it's like truck drivers, right? Chad: Yeah. Edward: Everybody's looking for a commercial, A license or C license, and you just go get those people and say, "How'd you like to be part of that network?" Chad: So your own network? Joel: So you're 150,000 now, how many are you adding say in the next year or two years? Edward: You know, I have no idea. Joel: This is a growth industry. Edward: It is like the Uber of drones. Chad: Oh yeah. Holy crap. Edward: You need a drone? Call ARC. That's just one of the things we do. Joel: I want to hear about Ed a little bit. Because he's blown our mind with drones. Let's hear more about you and your recruiting past. Edward: So I am now the talent acquisition leader for the company. Chad: Okay. Edward: I oversee all recruiting and talent acquisition. I have a 25-year track record of recruiting. I had my own executive search practice for over 10 years where I did retain searches for other private companies. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Edward: I've also been in-house with companies like Commerce One, which was one of the first eCommerce companies in the Bay area. I was in charge of all of their global talent acquisition. I ran recruiting and employment for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where we recruited all kinds of scientists and researchers. Joel: So unlike 90% of this room, you've actually placed a five-line newspaper ad at some point in your life? Edward: At some point early when I said I would never do print and who am I working for now? Joel: Right, right. Edward: Then I've done startups. So after I sold my medical staffing business, which I thought healthcare was where you wanted to be at. I did that for six years, sold it on the peninsula and came back to the East Bay where I live and got hired by ARC two years ago and I got rid of their ATS system and brought in Jobvite. Chad: Really? So you got rid of their applicant tracking system because it was a piece of shit. Why did you get rid of it? Joel: What were they using before Jobvite? Edward: Well, they were using an archaic product when I say archaic, it was probably third generation. Whereas we can consider Jobvite to be fourth generation. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Edward: It was just not meeting the needs of how we needed to recruit in today's economy. I was looking for a product that had marketing capabilities, CRM capabilities, and had a very easy user interface. Edward: So I scoured the market, looked at the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report, and Jobvite was on there. And I did a shootout with a whole bunch of others and ended up selecting Jobvite. Chad: And that was two years ago? Edward: Two years ago, yeah. Chad: Two years ago. So tell us, obviously the big acquisition that happened, all these new players that are a part of this. How does this affect how ARC is going to be using technology moving forward? Because it's almost like an embedded tech stacker. Edward: I'm glad you asked because I was already in touch with all of those three companies before I read that they were acquired by Jobvite. So it just made me really happy that we are eventually going to see an integrated product that I can access from one platform. Edward: We were already introduced to Canvas for texting, by Jobvite. When we asked for it, they said "We happen to have a product." And it was a bolt-on at the time. So we're now using that to communicate with candidates. Edward: I was looking for an employee referral program and I was talking to RolePoint. In fact, I even got some of their swag when I read they were acquired by Jobvite. Joel: Do you remember what the swag was? Edward: Yeah, it was a couple of mugs, it was t-shirt that said "employee referral action hero" or something like that. Joel: It's not often people remember the swag that they get from a vendor. So I was curious what was it? Chad: Swag is making a comeback though. Joel: It is making come back and we're helping drive that. Chad: Yes, we are. We're doing our damnedest. Edward: So swag is good because all of the vendors today are offering swag that they are asking us all to take. Otherwise they have to ship it back home. Chad: That's right, yeah. And the only way that you're going to take it is if it's good swag. Edward: That's right. Chad: So all you vendors out there, get the good swag. Don't be playing with that nasty, cheap stuff. Edward: No plastic cheap stuff, yeah. Chad: So you've been around a long time, what are some of the most effective marketing platforms or strategies that you're currently using to engage with candidates? Edward: Well, a lot of people in marketing have developed what's called demand generation marketing. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Edward: Part of that includes email content that's different that gets sent to people who have been on the website at one point or another, ads that show up whenever they type in a particular keyword on a website or on their browser. So the same thing can be applied to recruiting, because recruiting is all about selling the company. We're salespeople, so we should also have marketing to create that demand. Edward: So when I looked at what Engage was inside Jobvite, I was thrilled. That allows us to do email drip marketing, which I use internally and externally. It also has a very robust capability for reports. Anytime I spend money, I have to show the value of that investment and Jobvite has great reporting capabilities. Chad: So are you working with marketing at all to be able to pull all this together? Edward: Yes I am, but when you're not on the product side, you take a back seat whenever a new priority comes in. Chad: Right. Edward: Let me give you an example. I went to my boss and said we need to rebrand our employee referral program. Every company says they have an employee referral program. Chad: Right. Edward: They'll pay for referrals, but unless you keep it alive with a personality and market it properly to your employees... Chad: Any product, right? Edward: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Edward: So I went to marketing and I had already spoken to the CFO about it. So the CFO gave me blessing and then marketing heard that CFO wanted to do this. So they put me at the top of their priority list. They came up with a wonderful website, they came up with collateral, they came up with props. Edward: Today, we just launched this rebranded employee referral incentive program, which I rebranded as TRIP, T-R-I-P. Talent Referral Incentive Program. It's a play on words, because at the end of the 12-month period of this new trip program... Chad: You get to take a trip. Edward: We have a lottery for a trip. Joel: I'm feeling some upcoming swag of this trip promotion. Edward: Yeah. Chad: Yes. Edward: So the trip is a lottery, but every time you refer a candidate to me, you get a ping pong ball with your name put into the the lottery bin. Chad: I love it. Edward: And we give you a $5 gift card for just giving the email as a thank you. And then once we hire your referral, you get X thousand dollars. Chad: Excellent. So how does RolePoint actually help you with this whole process? Edward: Well, RolePoint Was going to provide me with their website and their swag and the marketing collateral. But my marketing team already developed it so I didn't have to go to RolePoint. Chad: Gotcha. Edward: But the marketing team did it as a one-time effort for me for this launch. Chad: Uh-huh (affirmative). Edward: I don't think I'm going to have the same visibility next year, so I'm going to need something like RolePoint to keep this personality of the program going. Joel: Are referrals your number one source of traffic and candidate? Edward: Not today, but it should be. Joel: What is number one? Edward: Number one has been the career site and our job boards through JobTarget, which is another function of Jobvite. Chad: Another vendor that's actually here, JobTarget. Edward: That's right. Chad: Wave at the guys at JobTarget. Joel: What are some other sort of top ways that you're driving and engaging with candidates? Edward: Boomerang employees. We've gone after people who have left and we've been able to bring back a couple. Joel: So tactically, how are you doing that? Edward: We just approach them and tell them what a great company it is today. And of course the company has done well. Joel: Say we have drones now. Edward: Yeah. Joel: You might want to come back and check it out. Chad: Yeah. Are you thinking about getting your drone pilots license? That's good shit. Edward: No, I don't think so. I actually had at one time a private pilot's license and I don't think I could ever sit and fly a drone through a screen once you've been up in the air yourself. Joel: Obviously we've talked about job Jobvite adding features to its platform. What are some features that you'd like to see in the next two, three years added to the platform? Edward: I'd like to see a single platform where I don't have to go to so many things like a Chrome extension just to get the text feature. I don't have to sign on to Telemetry's platform. Chad: So a unified platform? Edward: A unified platform, right. Chad: So you don't have to have all these browsers open. Edward: That's correct. Joel: One platform to rule them all. Edward: That's right. Joel: Edward, thanks for your time and sitting down with us today. For people who want to know about you or your company, where would you send them? Edward: I'd send them to our website. It's dubdubdub.e-arc.com. Joel: Thanks Edward. Edward: Have a good one. Joel: We out. Chad: 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. Announcer: For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #drones #Jobvite #Canvas #Rolepoint #Talemetry #RNL2019

Falls is here and the leaves may be dropping, but it's nothing to the news-breaking and the knowledge-droppin' that's going down on The Chad & Cheese Podcast this week. So what happened? Glad you asked. TMP / AIA made another acquisition LinkedIn puts Meetup / Eventbrite in the crosshairs RigUp breaks the bank Cannabis jobs are growing like, um, a weed Talroo gets integrated ... and what show would be complete without some Indeed rumors? Enjoy, and write our sponsors - JobAdx, Sovren, and Canvas - a blank check while you're at it. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance.​ Tengai: Hi, this is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I love these guys. Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: Hello. Joel: Waxing chumps like a candle since 2017. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous and soon to be biggest groups of whinos. France here we come. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheeseman. Chad: And I'm Chad Getting-On-A-Plane Sowash. Joel: On a jet plane. On this week's episode, LinkedIn connects with its inner Meetup. TMP carves out more market share and opportunities in the cannabis industry are growing like a weed. Chad: Woo! Joel: See what I did there, Chad? Chad: [crosstalk 00:01:10] Joel: Anything less than the best is a felony, we'll be right back after this quick word from Sovren. Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. Sovren: We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it dinner. Joel: Shout outs with a brand new invention. Can you believe how old that song is now? Chad: God, stop aging us. Joel: Sorry, sorry. Chad: I'm already down because I'm down a Peepers. Joel: Explain to people who the hell Peepers is because it sounds like a strip show or strip club. Chad: Is your dog. So Mr. Peepers is your dog. You were gone last long weekend, you dropped the little guy off here. I have three dogs, girl dogs, and they just had a blast. We always enjoy having Peepers around. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Took the family on fall break to paradise, also known as Cleveland, Ohio. Had a grand old time at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Many people don't know this, but A Christmas Story was largely filmed in Cleveland and the house that's in the movie is in Cleveland and it has since been turned into a museum. The Bumpus' house next door is now a hotel where you can stay overnight there. Chad: The Bumpus'. Joel: Across the street is a garage with the firetruck when Flick got stuck to the fire pole, or the flagpole. So the firetruck from that is there and also the car that the family drove where the tire gets flat and Ralphie says "Oh, fudge." Chad: That wasn't quick "fudge." Joel: So yeah, the kids enjoyed it, we did some other things. Peepers had some fun with your bitches there. Chad: Yeah. Well, he understands that when he comes here he's apart of the pack and he has to listen to them. Because if you fuck with one of them, you fuck with all three of them and no guy wants that kind of shit. So he's great. Joel: Where's his place in the pack there? Is he at the bottom? Because I feel like he beats up Amber enough that he leaps frogs her. Chad: Yeah, but that's playing and they all kind of gang up on each other every now and again. But he knows better. He's a smart dude. He's like, "Yeah, I'm going to have some fun here, but I'm not going to take it too far." Joel: I don't know about smart, but anyone, someone who is smart, our buddy Jamie Leonard from Recfest was sporting a Chad and Cheese t-shirt while doing a presentation down in Australia, I believe, this week. Chad: Yeah, I think it's got to be one of his favorite t-shirts. I'm going to have to send him another half dozen or so, because every time I see a picture, not every time but most of the time, he has a Chad and Cheese t-shirt on. So I'm going to have to make sure we get him stocked up. Chad: Along with Martine Radcliffe who is the VP of TA over at American Cancer Society. It was great meeting her at HR Tech, and she was one of those "I have to have a t-shirt" people. So she's wearing it, she's enjoying it, she's LinkedIn and tweeting about it. So you're welcome Martine and thanks for listening. Joel: Yeah, Martine was one of these nuts that actually went to both of our sessions at HR Tech. That's how fanatical she is about the show. Chad: Love it. Love it. Joel: So Martine, thanks for the fanatical behavior. Chad: Exactly. So how do you say, Muir? Is it Muir? How do you say that? That's probably an English name but not an American name. Is it Muir McDonald? Joel: Well, it's got to be some Scottish-Irish mashup. Chad: Okay, I love it. Joel: McDonald I get, I could pronounce that. Chad: That's too easy, yeah. Joel: Yeah, give us a shout and let us know how to pronounce that name. Muir McDonald. Chad: M-U-I-R. There you go. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Put us number one on his HR podcast list, so we appreciate that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Shout out to him. Chad: Love that. Along with, this is very, very interesting, Recruiting Future Podcast with Matt Alder and Talent Cast with James Ellis. A little tease, something very interesting happening with all of those three podcasts, so stay tuned. Joel: It's getting kind of hectic people. Shout out to my mom on a little somber note. I'm just going to throw her in here. She's having a rough go in the health department. She's had replacement knees, one replacement hip. One of her knees acted up this week, she had to go under the knife to get that fixed, and then woke up this morning with pneumonia, so she's back in the ER. Joel: So mom, shout out to you. As soon as I'm off this podcast I'm going to come down and say hi and hopefully lift your spirits. But man, she's on a losing streak. So if you're out there, just send some good vibes to Mama Becky. Chad: Good vibes to mom please. My God, man. So big shout out to Louise Triance for pulling together a great Chad and Louise show with Thomas Prince from Talent Nexus. It was all focused on programmatic job advertising, why you should be thinking about programmatic, how to get things moving in programmatic, all that other fun stuff. Chad: The only way you would've seen it is if you had subscribed to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. We put it in our RSS feed but we do some little special things for people who are already subscribed. So if you haven't subscribed, go to ChadCheese.com, click on the subscribe button or just pull out your app that you currently watch podcasts in, type in the Chad and Cheese Podcast and subscribe. You'll get all the cool stuff that the other kids don't get. Joel: Does Louise have some blackmail on you? This is your twentieth webinar with her. Then I can't imagine you would do that that many times unless someone had some dirt on you. Chad: Yeah, she's just a sweetheart. Not to mention, it's great from an EU expansion. They like to have a little dumb American every now and again, so I fit that bill. Joel: Yeah, by the way, didn't they figure out Brexit this week? I've been kind of out of the loop in Cleveland. It seems like I read that they got their act together on that. Chad: We've got enough shit on our side of the pond to fucking worry about let along that, right? Chad: Some Indeed rumors real quick. Joel: Oh. Everybody loves those. Chad: Yeah. We won't go deep into it, because we're still tracking down some data and speaking with some sources, but the prospect of the Search Quality team is they're starting surface again. If you don't know, the Search Quality team is... Joel: They're the party poopers. Chad: They're like the Black Ops team that's just going to shut down your shit. Right? So if you have organic traffic, all that free traffic, when they come in and you hear "Search Quality team," with regard to your jobs, what's going to happen is your shit's going to get shut down. And the only way that you're going to get any traffic from Indeed moving forward, is to pay for that traffic. This is what I like to call, personally, a scam. Joel: A shake down. Chad: Yeah, a scam that they've been running very successfully. They did it with job boards. job boards came in, gave them a ton of content, they got a bunch of free traffic and then Indeed shut it down and started saying, "Hey, look, the only way that you're going to be able to get traffic from us, since now you're on the heroin drip, is to pay for it." Joel: Yeah. Chad: They did the same with staffing companies. Exact same thing. Now, they're looking for different actual corporate companies or service providers or what have you that they can do this with. So now that the search quality team isn't focused on staffing anymore, they're looking for you possibly, Mr. Talent Acquisition Professional, Mrs. Talent Acquisition Professional. So I think right now is a very good time to look at diversifying the traffic that's coming into your website. Joel: You may want to embrace Google For Jobs if you're not currently doing so. Joel: By the way, it always reminds me of the scene in Kindergarten Cop when he's an actual cop and he breaks into the party and they're like, "Who are you?" And he's like, "I'm the party pooper." That's the quality control group at Indeed. The party poopers. Chad: Easily and if you're not doing programmatic advertising to be able to try to look for exit strategies on how to get the fuck away from having Indeed being pretty much all of the eggs in one basket for all your traffic, that's what you need to start doing. You need to start looking at the nice Indeed and the Neuvoo, that's how you say it. Neuvoo. Joel: Neuvoo. Chad: Yeah, and [Zunas 00:10:28], the Talroos, all these different organizations you need to start looking at. And I know that makes it hard, you and I have talked about this before, what's the role of an advertising agency today. This is one of the staples and one of the reasons why you should be working with an advertising agency. Joel: It's time to wipe away the party pooper, because it stinks folks. Sorry I couldn't resist. Chad: That was pretty bad. That was pretty bad. Joel: It was all right, it wasn't too bad. Chad: Okay, so one last one, I'm going to throw this one in there. You did mom, I'm going to throw in... Joel: Oh, a curve ball. Chad: A curve ball, yeah. So Shout out to my wife, Julie Sowash. She was actually in Plano, Texas yesterday, where she was actually brought in by the OFCCP, for my understanding, for a best practices session. Her company, Disability Solutions, actually works very closely with PepsiCo, one of their clients. And they presented together about how they've been able to actually hire over 15,000 individuals with disabilities into Pepsi alone. This is big for the OFCCP because they're like, holy shit, companies are actually doing this and they're not doing it in onesie, twosies. Chad: She actually has three legs of her trip, but what she's doing today is she's in San Francisco with SmartRecruiters doing a reverse recruiting event, where at the end of the event they're going to have 50 individuals with disabilities that are hopefully going to be matched up with companies who have jobs and then those additional people get jobs. Again, that's a SmartRecruiters event, so good on SmartRecruiters. Chad: The big shout out here is we talk about a lot of shit that's really cool from a tech standpoint, but impact and outcomes are what we should always be focused on and organizations that are helping individuals actually get fucking jobs is what really matters overall. So she's literally changing the world and that means a lot. Joel: Do she get free Cheetos for working with Pepsi? Chad: Fritos, I think. Maybe Cheetos, possibly. Joel: Oh, Fritos. I thought Cheetos was a PepsiCo product. Chad: They might be, I don't know. Joel: Fritos definitely is. You're right. Chad: So yeah, we're flying. Joel: Dude, I'm so pumped to go to France for Unleash. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Arguably the best conference this month. I don't want to piss anybody off. Many people consider it the top conference in the world for this thing that we do called recruitment. Chad: And we've never been to it. Have you ever been to it? Joel: We've never been. Chad: I've never been. Joel: Never been. Paris in October, although it does look rainy and cold. Should be nice. Chad: Yeah. Joel: My wife is joining me, as I think yours is you. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We're going to get a little vacation time as well as business. You guys know how that works. Definitely looking forward to it. Chad: Yeah, so Unleash World in Paris, France, brought to you by Chad and Cheese brought to you by SmashFly. Joel: SmashFly. Chad: SmashFly. Joel: Have you got your swag yet? Chad: Yeah. No, I got my swag. The ball cap's awesome, got the t-shirt. Joel: I do love the cap. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: The cap's good. Chad: Yeah, you know Josh, JZ, had something to do with that fucking ball cap because he's like a ball cap fiend. Joel: Well, I hope he had something to do with the old style snap sizer on the back, because you don't see those too often anymore. Chad: Yeah, exactly. October 22, coming next week at 11:45 Paris time, we're going to be on the influencer stage with Chris Ray, group head of recruitment at Sainsbury's, Adam Yearsley, global head of talent management at Red Bull, and also Brandi Ellis, head of recruitment marketing strategy at the SmashFly. Chad: We've got a pretty awesome crew that's going to be up there and were going to be talking about why pretty much most company's recruitment branding sucks, why the experience sucks and the impact on the actual big brand itself. Chad: We don't talk enough about talent, and that's what we're trying to do with our Cult Brand series of podcasts; is we have to understand in talent acquisition how big of a role we play in bottom line, in everything, in big business, and we need to better articulate to the C-suite that without us, you're fucking dead in the water. Joel: Following that, I think is it iCIMS in November next? Chad: iCIMS. Yep. In November. Joel: So we're going to be going down to sunny beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. Chad: Goat yoga. Joel: And it is beautiful in November, I can vouch for that. Yes, yoga is on the schedule. So geez, I got to start limbering up now or otherwise I'm going to just kill my back or legs. Whatever body parts you actually use in yoga I'm going to fuck up. Chad: I asked Susan Vitale, who's the VP of marketing over there to make sure that we could do goat yoga. So hopefully she'll have the goats in play and we can do this right. Joel: Do they have goats in Arizona? That sounds like Diamondback food to me, but we'll see. Chad: I can see this, yeah. Joel: Then little side note for me, RecruitCon in Nashville, I'll be there in November doing a little presentation on SEO for Google For Jobs. So if you're going to be at Recruit Con in Nashville in November, come down and say hi. Chad: Then December 6, Talent Net Live in Dallas, Texas. Joel: The coup de grâce, the Naughty or Nice Show live from Dallas. Chad: Yeah, we're doing to the Naughty or Nice show. I reached out to Carrie Corbin over at Dell, known her for a long time, I've known her for a long time, to be able to join us on the stage to do Naughty or, not Naughty and Nice, so we'll see. Joel: I'm sure you did. And what'd she say? Chad: She said she'll look at her schedule, so we're going to continue to press on that one. Joel: It's a nice of saying, "No thank you." Chad: She lives in Dallas, she better fucking come. Joel: That's what saying, "I'll look at my calendar means." She ain't fucking coming. Chad: Topics! Joel: Topics. Top news from this past week, agency TMP made an acquisition. What the hell did they do? Chad: AIA, otherwise known as, also known as, you know as, TMP. Joel: AIA, aka TMP. Chad: This is kind of quietly to an extent, this is their fourth acquisition this year. They acquired CKR Interactive in February. And CKR is still under the CKR banner. Just recently, Maximum, who is remaining under the Maximum banner, and Perengo is the only one so far that we've seen that has actually changed over to TMP Programmatic Jobs. So Carve, which is a social media agency, also has technology. Joel: Carve.social should tip you off as to what they do. Chad: That'll tell you something. So they were actually pulled into the fray and their team's going to stay intact. To me, it's really interesting because you're kind of looking for something that is simple and to me, none of this looks simple. I mean, I love the opportunity to perspectively pull some of this Maximum technology into TalentBrew, some of the social Carve technology into TalentBrew. But there are all these different brands that are floating around that just make this as confusing as fuck. Joel: Yeah, we continue to talk, aside form Perengo is the acqui-hires that sort of get spur from these acquisitions. I think this is another example. I mean, Carve is not hugely well-known. I mean, I know they're in London. I know they're fairly well-known there. Joel: But to me, there's no specific technology that they bring to the table or maybe even deep customer integration or things that they're doing with them. I think this largely a step into Europe, a step into acquiring folks that understand the agency business and all the intricacies of the technologies that are used in agencies now. This just continues the trend for TMP of consolidating a lot of these smaller fish and bringing them into the large ocean that is TMP/AIA. Chad: I think Carve does have technical assets that they're bringing to the table that is specific to obviously social with analytics and whatnot. So they're trying to pull everything together into a platform. If they were trying to capture and kill, then they would pull them under the TMP brand, but that's not happening. They're getting great talent, from whether it's Carve or CKR, it doesn't matter, they're getting some really great talent. But I just don't see this consolidation because it's not happening under one branch. I understand there's another TMP in the EU, so therefore, it's really hard to become TMP, which is why they have AIA. Chad: But still, you would think that they would migrate under one of those umbrellas. Whether it's more of an AIA acquisition, which this was, because it was in the EU, versus a TMP acquisition. Again, it just doesn't feel like that to me. But it is confusing as fuck because of all the brands and all the labels and then all these great people who are still working in running these brands, right? Joel: Yeah, and the acquisitions you mentioned are all within the last year, I think. So there's nothing saying that they don't pull all these into one brand next year or who knows when. Chad: CKR would've been the easiest to do that. Let's make this very simple, Recruitics acquired KRT how long ago? KRT is now Recruitics. Joel: Right. Chad: Okay? Joel: But Recruitics is much smaller than TMP, right? Chad: Well, it doesn't matter. You can still make those things, especially when you're acquiring a much smaller shop. There's no reason why you can't go ahead and start to relabel or at least start that transition process, right? You're not seeing that. I think it was really smart from the Recruitics and KRT standpoint to say, "Okay. We know who we are. We're going to be one brand. Boom, let's do this." Chad: I believe TMP and AIA know what they're doing with all these pieces, parts. But here's the thing, just because you know what you're doing with it, doesn't mean the fucking market does. And that makes it so much more confusing when you're trying to articulate a message. Joel: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, if you were god of the organization for a day, would you put everything under TMP or AIA or create a whole separate brand that can be global for all of the products and services. Chad: It depends on who you're bringing in, in this case, but I think from the social standpoint, these guys, that's what they do. They have a platform, they have a whole team. Then you bring them underneath TMP or AIA as AIA social or something to that nature, right? To be able to really show this combined force. As opposed to what it looks like now is it's just a bunch of scattered pieces, parts. Again, like here in the US, what's CKR doing? What are they actually bringing to the table? How does that works? Chad: Again, it's one of those things, and this is my call to our friends at TMP and AIA, we need a better understandable message on what you're actually doing with all this shit. Because, again, back in February, That's when all this started happening. Which is awesome, we love it. Don't stop. The thing that you have to stop doing is you need a unified message on telling the market what the fuck you're doing. Joel: Yeah, you're like a teen with a new credit card just buying shit. Help us understand what your reasoning is on all this stuff. We'd really appreciate it. Chad: It's the Gemspring Capital card. Joel: That's right. No fees for three months. Chad: No fees. That's right. Joel: And everything you can. Chad: Yeah. So the next thing that has no fees currently is LinkedIn's Event platform. Joel: Events, yeah. Everyone's into face-to-face now. So LinkedIn launches Events, what? Chad: Everybody's into face-to-face now. Joel: It's all the rage. This isn't sort of Events that you would think of for job fairs or what-not. This is sort of a Meetup competitor. Right? So groups can get together, and this is quoting the release from the company, "With this launch, our members now have a safe and trusted avenue to engage with their network online and offline." Joel: This is from the product manager, "We see them using this feature to host networking meetups, workshops, alumni meets, product launches and other fave-to-face gatherings." Joel: More from the news release, "Members can create private or public events while additional invite filters enable members to create events that target specific industries and job titles." That might be significant. "Currently, there's no official way to promote events on LinkedIn besides members sharing them on their profiles. LinkedIn Events is the first feature to be built at the company's new R&D Center in Bangalore," I think I said that correctly, "India. The features available in English only. Company's starting today with a global rollout. Expect it soon." How do we feel about this face-to-face stuff? Chad: Yeah, it's not really as much the face-to-face stuff as it is there are already platforms that are out there that do this and they do it well. Meetup.com, Eventbrite.com, right? So you have to start asking yourself as a bigger player. I like the whole idea of LinkedIn taking it further and saying, "Look, you can meet here. You're going to meet locally too or you can meet locally. Let's go ahead and let's try to spur that from this platform." Chad: Because they're probably seeing people sharing Meetup.com and Eventbrite events on their platform already. So it's like, "Hey, it's already happening, let's make it organic and see what we can do to perspectively monetize and then maybe monopolized on this shit." Chad: But from Meetup and Eventbrite's standpoint, I would love this because it's more validation and I start going to competitors and saying "What are you doing? We already have a base, we already have the technology, why don't we go ahead and do this together." Joel: Yeah, this feels a little lame and haphazard to me. I think there are platforms to do this already that are, let's admit it, sort of lame anyway. I mean, they're not really setting the world on fire, they're sort of just nice to have. I mean, if Meetup was so great it's old enough that it should be really hugely profitable just it's not. Joel: To me, people are just now figuring out how to share QR codes on their LinkedIn app to swap information with each other. Now we expect them to meet in places and organized events through LinkedIn. So I'm not super bullish on this. Joel: I think, the fact that this was an R&D effort, fairly telling, I don't know how serious they'll be with this it doesn't take off. I do like the fact that they have an R&D Center that throws out stuff like this, but I don't think it's going to be something worth talking about in any significance twelve months from now. Chad: So Eventbrite had, in 2017, other $200 million in revenue and that was an increase of over 50% from years past. So they could be taking a look a the market and seeing what they could perspectively plug in, obviously to their ecosystem. Joel: Yeah, I mean, if the goal is an Eventbrite things where you register with LinkedIn, your profile integrates who you're already connected with et cetera, there's an eCommerce system that you can get money, the organizations can make money from this, it's synced in with payment systems within LinkedIn or something like that that makes transferring money easy. Then scheduling where it's hooked in to Outlook or whatever your calendar system is. That's fairly interesting. Chad: It just makes it easier. So I think it's ease of use and there's an opportunity because you can see that there are platforms making money and they can perspectively make more money out of it. Joel: So the key here is, how serious do you think LinkedIn is about this? You think they're fairly serious. Whereas I probably think no so much. Chad: Yeah, I think they're serious enough to put a team on it and to be able to pilot it. And they're rolling it out kind of like in beta form to an extent, right? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Chad: It's like, "Don't expect too much, here's what we're thinking." They're not rolling it out globally saying, "Yeah, this thing is going to kick ass and take names." Joel: Fair enough. We'll watch it and see how things unfold and while we ponder that, let's hear from our sponsor JobAdX and we'll get high with some pot job data coming at ya. JobAdX: Nah, 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 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, just begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across out network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team. Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing JoinUs@JobAdX.com. That's JoinUs@ J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad: So one quick shout out to Roy Mauer over at SHRM. He just wrote an article called McDonald's Claims First 'Voice Apply' Process. I think that's kind of tongue-in-cheek to an extent, because I mean, if they're claiming voice apply and it's really text apply, isn't that kind of like an experience bait-and-switch? I think that's one of the things we should start to talk about more, is it's like you're starting to get this bait-and-switch from technology companies about what the experience is going to be like, right? So the experience bait-and-switch and the quote unquote claiming. I'm not saying he said it or he wrote it tongue-in-cheek, but I take it that it's tongue-in-cheek. Joel: Yeah, the whole things reminds me of when mobile sort of became a thing in 2010-11 or so and job boards or ATS' were like, "We're mobile optimized." Yeah, the job search was optimized for mobile, but once you hit the apply button... Chad: You were fucked. Joel: It took you to hell, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: So this is sort of similar. Apply with your voice, like, "Okay, thanks for that, here's a link that you can follow and apply. Bye-bye now." Chad: McDonald's and paradox, you need to get your shit together guys. Joel: It is kind of a paradox isn't it? Chad: It is. Joel: I'm going to tease a little episode we have coming up with George Laraque, where I ask George if he were to launch a business today in our space, what would he launch? And his answer was a little dancing but we got him to sort of admit that a specialized job site was sort of the way to go. Which our next two stories are sort or relevant to that statement. Chad: Exactly. Joel: The first industry we're talking about is pot, weed, cannabis. Chad: Weed. Joel: The job openings in this industry are off the chain. A story out by Finance Buzz talked about a report from Glassdoor and a few others. Glassdoor, "there were a total of 15,012 cannabis industry job openings and this is going back to last year in December. Which was an increase by 76% compared to the same period from 2017." Joel: ZipRecruiter highlighted that "in 2017, the number of cannabis industry jobs grew by 445%. Which outpaced both technology, which was 254% and healthcare at 70%." Joel: Also, in the report following the legalization of hemp-derived CBD products which is a huge industry, experts noted that "the job demand continued to grow HempStaff, which is a great name for a company. The hemp and cannabis recruiting firm mentioned in March that 80% of its job listings were for upper level positions, such as CFO and accounting managers." So this is an industry that has blown up. Chad: Yes. And those hemp factories are going to ramp up production, which means factory line people, machinists, all those types of workers, right? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: Not to mention, we're seeing big names in the game like Amazon, CVS, Walgreens around the hemp/CBD types of products and that's a nationwide product rollout. One of the reasons why we're seeing a growth of 445%, because this is a baby industry that is only in, I mean, shit, what, a handful of states right now? And it's starting to grow as we start to see more of the states really get their head out of their asses and see that there are some perspective tax opportunities here. It's going to happen. Then obviously from that standpoint, you're going to start to see growth in that industry. So I believe right now, we're just starting to see the tip of the spear with regard to growth in this industry. Joel: Yeah, no doubt. The article also notes Fortune Business Insights highlighting that "the industry garnered $10.6 billion in 2018, but is expected to grow in 2026 by becoming an almost $100 billion business by the end of that year." So $10.6 billion to almost $100 billion in eight years, that's growth. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So kids out there, if you're looking to get into the industry, pot may be the way to go. Chad: Pot or, I don't know, energy. Joel: Energy. Don't just say no kids. Chad: So RigUp, an organization, Austin-based marketplace, one of the things we're high on for on-demand job services for skilled labor in the energy industry raised $300 million in Series D. Now just nine months ago, not even a year ago, they had $60 million in Series C. In total, they have over or close to $450 million in total form a funding standpoint. Chad: Again, niche. Being able to take a look at energy. It's a big industry, don't get me wrong, and it's growing because of renewable, but niche and really focused on the marketplace aspect. Joel: Yeah, and a growing volatile business as well, right? You have a switch from coal and fossil fuels to air, solar and whatever, right? Chad: Which is why this is perfect. Joel: Yeah, people that have skills in one probably have transferable skills in the other. And RigUp is looking to cash in on that phenomena. I love that the platform, in general, is a hugely important and noteworthy business. Joel: But we've talked about healthcare and nursing as a gig platform or a contractor platform and now we're taking about energy. I think we'll continue to see more and more industries do this and we'll see more and more dollars go into it. I mean, we got a big boner over JobCase getting $100 million and Scout getting $100 million, I mean this is a $300 million Series D raise, holy cow. This is legitimate shit. Chad: Yeah, you're looking at all these different niches. I keep thinking back to Communo who's still in the very early phases of this and it is a marketplace for those individuals who are creatives and designers. And in that space, this is what I see as the evolution of what job boards were or are or a job board could start to take that data and turn itself into a marketplace. You have those individuals, now you need to learn how to nurture them, ensure that you understand their skillsets, and start that matchmaking process. Joel: Yeah, there's going to be some big winners in this, you might as well be one of them. Chad: No reason why you can't be. Joel: Speaking of a big winner, let's hear a word from our buddies at Canvas and then talked about our buddies Talroo and iCIMS and maybe even a few others. 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: 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. Canvas: 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. Joel: They're not just making new t-shirts, Talroo is doing all kinds of stuff. Chad: Yeah, and they are a sponsor of ours, who we really haven't talked about a lot. But here's a reason why we're talking about them today. They had two new partnership development, product development... Joel: Announcements. Chad: Press releases, yeah. Announcements pop out. From my standpoint, this first one, which really got me jazzed, is I think a lesson to all startups and rally all those different vendors out there on what you should be focusing on. Chad: The first one's integration with iCIMS. Now, whether it's iCIMS or whether it's another big core system, it's still an integration with a core system. The primary benefit of the integration for employers is to make life easier. There's no IT resources required, integrated into the system, you don't have to pop back and forth from iCIMS to Talroo to this to that. Joel: And more and more customers, if you're not integrated into their system, they're not even going to use you. Chad: There's no reason to, because they don't have time to fuck around with you, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: I love when I see any companies who are starting to deeply integrate into core systems. Because when we do talk tot talent acquisition or we do talk to recruiters, they're like, "M an, I don't need another fucking platform or another tool or another browser." Joel: Another log-in. Another email. Chad: Can't I just do it here? Yeah, can't I just do it here? That's what Talroo did with this integration. So that's big applause for those guys on this one. Joel: Run the soundbite, here we go. Chad: Yeah, as we've talked about Events, they had a new product rollout around Events. Joel: Yeah, this is total coincidence that Indeed launches Events, the company right next door to them, and they launch Events. Totally not connected at all. But yeah, Talroo launched sort of an Event solution, and these are more for the job fair. Chad: Supercharger. Joel: Yeah, it's really cool. So they're integrated with their systems of finding candidates, there's some scheduling integrations that's really cool. They haven't just mimicked or thrown something at the wall, it looks like they've really taken some time to create something that's really cool. And good on them. I mean, we talk about integration a lot, so it's always nice to see companies that continue to innovate like Talroo has. Chad: And again, if you're an organization out there and you're asking yourself where should we focus, if you're trying to talk to the direct employer, this is where you have to focus. I mean, this is where you have to focus. Because if you want them to use your system, you have to be in their system of record or their core system that they're using now, because they don't have time to be popping around from platform, to platform, to platform, to platform. Make it easier for them. Joel: Yep. I also like it because their Events product is a pay-for-performance model. Chad: Yes. Joel: Where customers only pay for the RSVPs they receive and I think that's a good on on them for having a pay-for-performance model in the events space. Chad: Yep. Supercharger events, pay-for-performance, it's a win. Joel: Love it. And if you want to find out more, head to Talroo.com/Start. Chad: Oh, is that start? Joel: Start. Chad: That's interesting. Joel: As in we're about to stop. Chad: Because 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 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. Walken: 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. It's so weird. We out. #TMP #AIA #social #RigUp #Linkedn #CannabisJobs #Talroo #Marketplace #Acquisition #Eventbrite #MeetUp

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