Episode Search

Text messaging, or SMS, first came into prominence two decades ago by voting on American Idol, but the technology is as hot as ever for employers. It’s starting to look like text recruiting is here to stay. That’s why we invited Rick Koerner, VP of unified communications at UPS on the podcast. Rick has been texting with job candidates for almost a decade, and he brings his best tips and takeaways to the podcast. Along the way, he throws in anecdotes on all things UPS, like how deliveries only happen one right turn at a time to increase efficiency, and his own story about why he doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile. Say what?!?!? PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs 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, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. It's your bartender's favorite podcast, AKA the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the peanut butter to my chocolate, Chad Sowash is in the house, and today we are excited to welcome Rick Koerner, VP of Unified Communications at UPS. Rick, welcome to the podcast. Rick: Thanks. Thanks, Joel, for that. Yeah, Rick Koerner, UPS. I'm a UPSer. I've been there 22 years. I'm native to the Northeast. I live in New Jersey, born and raised. Spent a little time in Florida in there. New Jersey Devils fan. And I'll let you guys take it from there. Joel: And a Giants fan as we learned in the green room. So Rick, when I do a show, I go to LinkedIn and I do my research on where you went to school, past jobs. I couldn't find you on LinkedIn because shockingly you're not on LinkedIn. Please explain to me why you are morally opposed to LinkedIn. Rick: So when LinkedIn was first developed, right? So I'm not a social media guy. And being a man north of 40 years old, I will say that I usually tell people, anybody that's on social media or Facebook at my age, only three things are going to happen. You're going to end up in jail, you're going to lose your job or you're going to get divorced. So you should probably stay off of social media. All right. So at the end of the day, that's my stance on Facebook and social media. However, when it comes down to LinkedIn, I was all in. I built this huge profile and I was so proud of it. I put in dedicated hours and I really wanted to do, when it was first deployed, it was about networking with other peers, right? Rick: So we're going back more than 20 years ago. At that point in my career, I want to do some networking. Maybe I'll find another opportunity. Maybe I won't be at UPS. I'll see something else because of my experience. And then the phone calls started and it was every head hunter, and they didn't want me. They wanted to know what UPS was hiring for the next year. And after constantly weeding through emails, and I'll tell you, even after I deleted my profile, it took like a year and a half before I finally fell off the list, and I would get phone calls and it'd be like, "Hey, we want to know, what's UPS looking to hire for the next year?" Joel: You were scrapped. Rick: Yeah. So at that point, I abandoned LinkedIn. If there was a way to build a profile to avoid that, I probably would go back. And I'm sure the profile still exists and I could resurrect it, but at the end of the day, that's why I'm not on LinkedIn. Joel: That's a negative. Chad: So today it's all about wealth managers instead of recruiters. Joel: Life insurance. Chad: You've got all these wealth managers and life insurance like, "Hey Chad, how's your life insurance look?" So it's starting to develop, and let's say for instance, transform a bit, but not in a good way, Rick. Not in a good way. So I appreciate that. Unfortunately, I am addicted. I don't agree. I think that in my 20s and 30s, I would have been screwed with social media. Luckily, it really wasn't around, let's say 20s or early 30s. But as being an adult, let's just say a more mature adult now, I don't have that problem 'cause I see all the kids and them doing stupid shit and I'm learning from that. Joel: Thank God we didn't have it in our 20s. Rick: Yeah, you have emotional intelligence now. My wife will share with me some of the things that people post, and you're right, a lot of it is in maturity, but usually my first reaction is not one the world wants to hear, so. Chad: Yes, I feel you. No, I feel you. The why are you such an asshole response, right? Rick: Right. Exactly. Chad: That being said, tell us a little bit about what you do at UPS. What makes you tick on a daily basis? Rick: Coming out of the gate, I started UPS 22 years ago. I was in the IT vertical. I was part of a team that helped to work on the package delivery system that you have today. Back then it was just all about tracking numbers and tracking your package to see when it was going to be delivered. Just as a lot of new technologies, things tend to mature, and as they mature, the groups tend to change, and that job evolved into more of a project management. As I grew as a person, I think I realized that one of my talents is that I tend to look at things, and it doesn't matter if it's in IT or not, but I tend to look at them and ask myself why? But then I also come to a solution. So I had two really quick examples. One, I was in, of all places, Cheesecake Factory. So when I'm in there, I only eat cheesecake 'cause why else would you not get cheesecake in the Cheesecake Factory? Chad: That's why you go to the Cheesecake Factory. I mean. Come on. Rick: So I was in there and I had said to the waiter, I said, "I want to try all 30 of these." And he was walking me through each one, 'cause you got to go one at a time. And I told him, I said... Chad: We're fast friends already. I love this. Rick: Yeah. I said, I go, "I don't understand why Cheesecake Factory doesn't offer cheesecake flights." I would pay for three or four pieces of cheesecake in a smaller portion. And I said, "Look, you want a job in the corner office. Why don't you write that up and send it up there and see if they give you a bump or something." But my brain constantly works that way. Joel: Rick, my friend, you're an evil genius. Cheesecake flights. I love it. I love it. Continue, please. Sorry... Rick: The second one I had was I was in the Apple store 'cause, of course, eventually, one of those products gives us pain we can't fix with Google. So I'm in there and the Apple genius was helping me out. And as he was, I told him, I said, "I go home at night, and despite this being a wireless technology, I always have to plug it in or I have to put it on the Mac charger or whatever it is." I said, and then I have a watch, then I have earbuds. I go, "Why can't I plug the phone in and then put the earbuds on top of the phone and put the other devices, the watch sitting on the phone and let the phone charge off of it without plugging it in?" So, I'm sure Apple will get there. I also don't understand why it's not self-charging like the old watches, not all day, but just a little bump, something to make me go an extra two hours without having to plug it in. So. Chad: A self-winder. Joel: You're like the Kramer of recruitment, like let's put the mustard and the ketchup in the same jar. Rick: So I've lucked out in UPS in that I've had management and leaders that have kind of accepted the fact that I don't necessarily think that way. And they don't tell me no. And through time, so with HR systems and whatnot, because they don't tell me no, when things come along, they let me spread my wings a little bit. And then sometimes I get pulled back down to earth 'cause not every idea is a good idea, and I'm okay with that too. But if I have one out of every 10, then it's a win-win for everyone. Right? Chad: Yeah. Let's talk about UPS, obviously big into automation. Have to be, to be able to get those packages out as fast and as quick as Americans demand, because we have to have it in the next five minutes. So, being on the recruiting side of the house, what have you been seeing in automation that has gotten you excited and gotten your brain going and thinking, okay, we could prospectively implement something like that to help our recruiters do less administrative types of jobs and tasks? Rick: I like to look at the younger generation, and the ones that are coming up that will eventually replace us. And luckily, I have two of them in my house. I tend to ping things off of them. And I'll say to them, like, "What do you think of this?" Or, "How do you want to communicate?" So primarily, the generation coming up, the high schooler and my college age student, they want to text. They don't want to call. So you sit back and you look at their engagement in applying for a job, they want to do it all online. They have the fastest thumbs I've ever seen in my life, and they fill out an application, and then they just sit back and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm just waiting. They're going to schedule an interview." On top of that, I think they want this. They want the face-to-face interview. They don't want a phone call. They don't want a rejection card like it was 1997. They want a rejection like, "Hey, we're going to keep you on file," via text. That's fine. Rick: It's funny because I made fun of texting back when phones didn't have a keyboard. But the bigger thing I made fun of was the fact that when the camera came out on a phone, I didn't realize that my camera also needed to have the ability to text, But yet, nowadays, I take more pictures and texts than anything possible. And it was a younger person at an amusement park that I worked with on like a day trip that educated me when we parked the car. And I was like looking at the sign, I'm like, "Oh, G37. I need to remember G37 is where the car is." And he takes out his camera, takes a picture and he goes, "I got it." I'm like, "Genius." I'm a little older. I use the camera now to read the menu in the Cheesecake Factory to blow it up so I don't have to wear my glasses. Chad: With the light on. With the light on. Rick: With the light on. Chad: And say, "Can we turn the lights up in here for God's sakes? It's a little dark." Joel: My sister-in-law does that. She takes a picture then enlarges it to see what it is. It's crazy. Younger people are communicating in a different way. We also know they all have ADHD. And I found it really intriguing on the UPS website. It says, "Get a job offer in 25 minutes." Is that driven by youth? Are there stipulations? How did that come about and what's the response? Rick: I would love to answer that question. I have no idea we even have that out there. I am sure that it is driven by the need for UPS to fill the position and the fact that people want instant gratification. Chad, you mentioned it earlier with deliveries, we want... I ordered something yesterday at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. It was in my mailbox at 6:00. How and why, I don't know, nor do I care, but... Joel: That is a great point. If people expect their packages in such a short period of time, you have to have an application process, I assume, that is just as quick. Talk about that. Chad: It's standard. Rick: Yeah, that's exactly where we're taking it. And nowadays, with the texting solutions that are available today, and we use the product offered by iCIMS, and primarily during our peak season, so UPS starts ramping up, September we start thinking about it, October we start deploying. You're talking about adding 105,000 peak helpers. So these are part-time jobs where it's going to be 20 hours or less. We also have PVDs, which is personal vehicle drivers. Based on business need, we need a way to communicate to them. So, from the second that they're onboarded, we ask them if it's okay if we send them a personal text message. So we had to go through the process of getting legal to sign off on it. Now, most people, surprisingly, the uptick in employees that say, "Yeah, you could send me a text," is probably more than 90%. Rick: And they want that text because they want to hear like, "Hey, flight was delayed today. We don't need you until 10 o'clock." They don't want to come in at 8:00 in the morning, hang around and wait. So this communication apparatus helps us to get to that point. Deploying something like that, we did it seven years ago and we vetted iCIMS up against the big boys, which was Google and Microsoft at the time, and that was actually my project. We had a month to do it and to deploy, which is lightning fast when you're moving in a company of 500,000 employees. It takes a long time to turn a battleship around. We didn't have that because they wanted this immediately in the operations. So, we went out, we did a small proof of concept, and the reason that we chose them, and I'll go back to, sometimes it's the salesperson. Rick: So, there was a girl that worked there at the time, and whatever we threw at her, she said, "Yeah, we can do that." And that was the reason. So when I stood and asked for the money to fund this, that was one of the things that came up. It was like, really, you're choosing virtually a startup. It's not one of the big behemoths in the room, and you're gonna vet that this is the company that's gonna provide us with this texting service. Why is that the case? And then I said, "Because every question that came out of every person, they were either going to make changes to make it happen, or they were gonna push it forward," and that's why we ended up where we are today. Joel: I'm shocked that a salesperson said that the company's product could do anything. That's a really rare... Never. Chad: Never happens. That never happens. Joel: Really rare occurrence. So seven years of SMS. How have you scaled that? How much is automation versus they're actually corresponding with a human being, and maybe future features, what are you looking at? Rick: Yeah, so the original deployment started, so a learning curve, right? Having never deployed anything like that, I had to make a manual for what we call the center operation. So in every building, there is an HR assigned human being that now can text all these different centers and all these a hundred thousand people, and each person is put into a different vertical. The manual that we had put together was actually 22 steps to onboard them. So we had one page per step. It was kind of ironic because we deployed it a week later. Our C-level executives were touring a facility and they asked someone like, "Oh, okay, is there any improvements?" And that person whipped out this 22-page instruction manual for how to onboard and they were like, "Yeah, it'd be great if you could get rid of this." Rick: So, ironically, that next Monday, someone was standing in my desk and telling me, "Really?" And I really... It was great because I had no idea that we even had people that could do that at UPS. So we ran fast into the fire, we had a solution, we fixed that. We got all that up and running. But back then, the way that we onboarded everyone and got it working was still UPS internal applications. So nowadays, that right there is all what we call Birthright. So, if you're a UPS employee, you have access to the tool. So that piece of automation in the background and how we make that happen, kind of smooth everything over. Rick: Now, with that, as we deployed and began to text, there were other applications in UPS that send messages or wanna send messages that began to see added value. So they said, "Well, we wanna communicate with our employees too. How are we gonna do it to make their their life better? And we want to communicate through." So while HR started spearheading it, and they were using it to onboard these 105,000 UPSers for our peak season, there were other opportunities that came up too that now the product has grown because there's other messaging opportunities out there beyond HR. Chad: What are they? What are you guys currently using them for? Rick: So even for package tracking incidents. So, say that there's a problem with a belt system, a conveyor belt system. That automated system now has the ability to text directly to the person where it is the location so they can go in and expedite the repair of that system. That's one example, but there's numerous ones on that side of it. Chad: Wow. So early indicators on what's broken and what needs fixed? Rick: Exactly. Chad: Very nice. Okay. So, first and foremost, I've heard two things thus far. The C-suite in operations, when they say something, it moves. It doesn't take the Titanic to turn. You're a speedboat at that point. So my point is, and this is pretty much I would say standard in just about any operation that's out there. C-Suite says something, you're on it. So why is it in, in your 22 plus years of being in this industry, Rick, why is it that TA doesn't build a business case for the C-suite and operations every single time they want something? 'Cause that seems to be the answer. Not that they're gonna get everything, but if they continue to be the squeaky wheel with great business cases, why wouldn't we do that more often? Rick: So, I think for UPS, we do. When our C-suite comes out and they ask for something, the UPSers that I've worked with through the years, we always deliver on what their ask is. Chad: I get it. I get it. Rick: And then, as far as the operations goes, so most of us understand that the only reason that we are still here is because that driver has the ability to pick the box up from point A to deliver to point B. So without him, then you wouldn't need me. So at the end of the day, the operations is our golden ticket, and we need to treat them with the respect that they deserve. And when they ask for things, it's a matter of finding it. We don't expect them to have the technical acumen or to have the HR presence to know what they need. They just know that they need. So when they do present those challenges, I think that's when UPSers really come through to shine through. As example, recently there was a pending teamster strike. That was during a contract negotiation, and everyone was talking about that. Rick: On the backend side, the UPSers that were internally, we were preparing for how do we make adjustments in the case that that does happen. What do we need to do? And there was training going on and people were preparing. These things were done to secure the fact that the company was still gonna be there. UPS just had their anniversary, 116 years old. We wanna all make sure that we're still there and we're providing for our customers, because that's what we do best. Joel: Did I hear a dad joke out of Rick? Chad: Yes. Yeah, of course you did. Joel: Nice one. Chad: You always deliver. Yeah, you didn't even get it, Rick. You didn't even get it. I mean, come on. Rick: I'm in the industry. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, the point to me is that you guys in talent acquisition, you understand the business. 'cause you have to understand the business because, again, you have to deliver. Is that really the underlying thought process that you have? Rick: Yeah, I mean, if the operations tells us that they need to have X number of human beings employed during a peak season, they have an estimate of volume and how many packages, then the HR teams need to get together and make sure that that happens. Chad: So let's talk about calculus here. Knowing what the estimates were going to be, 'cause I'm sure you guys work with logistics and operations, and then knowing that a truck or a position that's open in a truck not working costs the organization money. Have you guys done the calculus to actually say, "Hey, look, that position, if it's open for this amount of time, it costs X per day of downtime? Have you done that so that you can take that business dollar sign to operations and to the C-suite and say, "Look, if we don't get faster automation and/or technology to be able to make sure that we get people in place, we're losing X amount of money per day. Nobody wants that." Are you guys doing that calculus internally? Rick: So that's exactly how a lot of things are driven within UPS. So, how do we budget for the future? How do we budget to prepare for automation? And we do that by presenting it in a way that says, this is the possible loss or this is the loss, or, and this is gonna fill the gap. We do that every single day. I don't know what it was that drove the texting portion of it. I don't know what the metrics were, but you're also talking about a company that routes are calculated to the point where there's no left turns, because left turns waste time, sitting at a light. Everything's right turn. So if we're gonna take that to that degree, you could just imagine when it comes to human capital and how we're going to work those resources in too. Chad: So that being said, do you have your own, instead of Google Maps for navigating, do you have like a UPS maps that does not allow left turns? Rick: So, I don't wanna say it doesn't allow, because the driver is the driver, and there may be a reason that he has to make that left turn as opposed to the right, and they know their routes probably better than most of us do. But yeah, UPS for decades has had their own version of Google Maps with their own mathematicians doing the calculations on all that. Joel: So trucking, UPS in particular, have been in the news a lot lately, and I'm just curious about, one, your take, but also what it's meant to candidate flow for quality, quantity, et cetera. So one thing that Chad and I talked about a few weeks ago was Yellow Trucking, 100-year company almost, I think 30,000 drivers. Company went bankrupt. What has that meant to your candidate flow? And also, you mentioned the labor negotiations at UPS. They make great headlines, the $170,000 a year. I got to think that some truckers got wind of that and that increased traffic quite a bit. How have you handled it? What's been the response? Has it been good? Has it been like over hyped and the flow isn't what you think it is? Talk about trucking in the news and what it's meant to UPS recruiting. Rick: So yeah, Yellow Trucking, so that's a little bit different envelope than what UPS does. We do have a portion of over the road trucking. However, that's not our primary business. So LTL trucking is handled differently. With that, a lot of those drivers do a different type of job, and that's more of a senior position at UPS that's kind of earned over time. However, that doesn't mean that those drivers wouldn't look to join UPS now, especially like you said, with a more attractive package overall, salary plus other opportunities. But I think a lot of that was driven by volume. So if Yellow was down on volume, that volume's gonna get spread out to the other LTL carriers, and then those LTL carriers will either pick up the volume plus the drivers, and then hopefully, they'll be able to pick up some more work in that area. Chad: You're talking about different skill sets to some... I mean, you're talking about package delivery versus over the road driver, right? Rick: Yeah. Joel: So I'll let you out on this. Chad and I have been talking about driverless trucks, drones delivering packages for a long time and it never seems to happen. Just curious about your take. How much longer do we have to wait for the Terminator to deliver my whiskey delivery? Rick: So, I do know a few years ago that UPS does have an over the road project working from, I wanna say California to Texas and through Arizona that was driverless with a third party company. I don't know where that is today, but I mean, drones in the sky and delivering packages, I don't know that we necessarily will be there in the next 20 or 30 years. I don't see the added value. I know UPS has done some great things with drone deliveries in remote locations. I saw a video years ago where we delivered vaccines in Africa via drones to areas that normally a driver just couldn't get to. So, there is an application for everything. We might not see it in New York City, but travel the world and eventually you're run into everything. Chad: Yeah, all I have to do is watch the videos of the Uber Eats drones getting bashed on the sidewalks all over the place to know that's probably not a great deal. So Rick, where can people find you? Obviously you're not on LinkedIn, so if they want to connect with you, maybe you just don't connect with Rick. I don't know. That's okay. But if people do want to connect with you, where would you send them? Rick: So, you could just email me right at UPS. My UPS email is rkoerner@ups.com. Joel: And odd fact, no packages were delivered to my home during the recording of this podcast. Chad: And that never happens. Joel: Which is a very, very rare thing, my friend. Rick: You haven't met my wife who clearly keeps package delivery a business. Joel: Oh, I can go toe to toe with any wife, with my wife. Trust me. Rick, thanks for joining us. Chad, that's another one in the can. We out. 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.

Looking for an episode as spicy as Nashville hot chicken sandwich? Then you’ve come to the right place. Heading into Day Two of Recfest, the boys keep things tight this week, thanks largely to hangovers and healing vocal cords. Topics include a rundown of Recfest, parties hosted by yours truly and insights into all things Nash-Vegas. There is news too, however, and the boys are covering stories from Grindr (yep, they’re back on the pod), Uber taking on TaskRabbit and a certain CEO in Australia saying the things about workers that all other CEOs are thinking. Grab some BBQ sauce, pour a glass of Jack and enjoy this week’s show. 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 HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel Cheeseman: Oh yeah. It's National Double Cheeseburger Day. But when you're in Nashville it's Double Hot Chicken Day. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, pass the sweet tea, Cheeseman. Chad Sowash: And this is Chad, someone get me a fucking aspirin, Sowash. Joel Cheeseman: And on this week's abbreviated show from RecFest, CEOs get quiet, Grindr is back on the show and Uber chases a rabbit. Let's do this. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: And my voice is tore up. Chad Sowash: Feeling it, feeling it, feeling it. Joel Cheeseman: Too many parties, yeah, shouting over everybody. Geez. [laughter] Chad Sowash: There's been a lot of shouting. Joel Cheeseman: And it's not over. We got one more to do man. The pontoon booze cruise tonight. Chad Sowash: Yeah, I don't think that one's gonna be as loud. There's not gonna be a band on board. Joel Cheeseman: There is. Well, not a band but we have music. Yeah. Chad Sowash: Okay. Music's fine. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, music. Everyone signed waivers. It could get ugly, dude. I don't know what's gonna happen. [laughter] Chad Sowash: It's gonna get ugly. Joel Cheeseman: This may be the last episode that you'll ever hear. Chad Sowash: It's gonna be ugly, yes. So three and a half hour drive down, we did the Tin Roof with Aaron app and with our friends over at Plum. We had about 40 people, 65 on the wait list who were literally in the bar. We had like this little roped off section. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: And that just went completely off the rails after that. It was just like too many people. So just come on. Come on, come and enjoy. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, yeah. It was wild. I mean I don't think it's too ambitious to say that the two best parties that are gonna happen at this show are ours. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: I don't think that's too ambitious. I really don't. Chad Sowash: No, no. We actually had people leave another party that was happening while ours was happening, and they came to ours, and they were like... Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. A corporate party. Chad Sowash: Yeah. They were like that one was pretty lame. This is fucking rocking. Like well, we're on Broadway. We got hot chicken, free booze, again. Joel Cheeseman: Oh, hot Chicken, we have hot chicken lollipops dude, come on. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: Doesn't get any better than that. Chad Sowash: Little Plum love all the way through man. And then Dina Piro, as soon as we show up she starts rubbing my nose and beating me on the first week of fantasy football. Don't worry Dina, it's a... Joel Cheeseman: Oh, I can't believe you brought up fantasy football, for the mere fact that you're in last place. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: And you scored the lowest amount of points by a lot. Oh, man. Chad Sowash: In both my leagues. I didn't hit a hundred points in either fucking league, dude. It was a bad week. It was bad. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, yeah. I got beat, but I'm happy with my team. I had like 130 or 40 points. [laughter] Look anyone that has the team that I played is gonna be tough to beat. There's a receiver in Miami who's pretty good. I don't know if you've heard of him? Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, he's pretty good. But it's week one. It's a long season Chad, you can flip that last place to first place. Chad Sowash: Day one of RecFest though was beautiful. It was about 80 degrees. We're gonna go ride the bull today. Okay, we couldn't yesterday. We were on stage pretty much all day yesterday. But that was, it was a great time. I kept hearing from people, I was like, What did you like about today's show? And they kept talking about I'm hearing new perspectives. Which is really weird, because they we go to so many shows. But getting RecFest into kind of like the groove here, into the mix here. There is gonna be new perspectives, new ways that people present just being at RecFest, versus all the other shows, which they all have their own personality. And that was really cool. And there are a lot of Europeans here by the way. Joel Cheeseman: Do they have their own personalities though? Chad Sowash: I think so. Joel Cheeseman: I mean most of the conferences I go to the setup is pretty similar. Like go to a session, go get coffee in the expo hall... Chad Sowash: The voices are different though, don't you think? Joel Cheeseman: What I'm saying is RecFest is unique not just in the voices. Chad Sowash: Oh, yeah. Joel Cheeseman: And I don't think that those shows are that different. In fact I would say one of the major selling points of RecFest is it's not HR Tech, it's not SHRM talent, it's not the typical conference. And we knew that going in 'cause we had experience in London. But Americans, this is their first time. And we asked a sellout standing room only session that we had, who's been here before. It was about three or four. Like who's been in Knebworth? And there are very few hands that went up. Chad Sowash: Nobody, yeah. Joel Cheeseman: So this is gonna be new to a lot of Americans that are coming over. You're right. Weather's great. I think Nashville no one's owned it. I think it's a great hip town. I know we've talked politically that it's a little bit of a minefield, but we've talked like name us a state in America where nobody... Chad Sowash: There's no such thing. Joel Cheeseman: No one's gonna get pissed off. Chad Sowash: There is no such thing. Joel Cheeseman: Until we starred in some conferences in Bangor, Maine, which should be great for our show 'cause it'd be great one-liners, but until we have the Bangor, Maine conference, you're not gonna go anywhere in America where someone's not gonna get pissed off. Chad Sowash: No. No. And I mean Nashville is very diverse. Yes, Tennessee is, it's got its problems. Hell, Texas, Florida... Joel Cheeseman: Florida. Chad Sowash: I mean all the different states that you would even think, Denver, right? Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: That you would think that you would want to go to. You're always gonna find problems. Just find where your vibe is. And I'm telling you man, this is a RecFest town. Joel Cheeseman: I agree. I agree. Now, in terms of differences I wanna know your, get your take on what you saw that was different. So one, few things I need, I think they need to work on. So I asked about the Ferris wheel. Apparently with the Ferris wheel you have to drive huge nails into the ground, and there's like a water duct or something under the... Chad Sowash: Irrigation system. Joel Cheeseman: They were like, We would flood the whole city of Nashville if we put in the the bolts and whatever for the Ferris wheel. Also Ferris wheels in America are a lot more expensive than they are in England for whatever reason. Chad Sowash: Not surprising. Joel Cheeseman: Like 10x, 10x the cost. So they realize the visual aesthetic that a Ferris wheel brings. And they're gonna try I think to do something in the future that's similar to that. The other thing is like the paid bar, the bar should be open like it is in England. I don't know what the differences were, so you had... Chad Sowash: Sponsor, they just need a sponsor on that. Yeah, I mean I think this is the first year. Joel Cheeseman: You had Hackajob... Here's, let me paint the visual. You had Hackajob giving out tokens for free drinks. Okay. So you had one line at the bar which was like 20 deep, and then you had three cash registers for the cash bar which no one was in. So you had this huge single file line for people with tokens. So you gotta figure out the free drinks. Get a sponsor, get everyone lushed up by between three and five o'clock, because most people left before the band started. There were two bands last night. And I think most people probably bounced before that. If you have the the skyline of Nashville behind your conference, that's cool. But it's also a lure to get people out of the conference into downtown Nashville. Chad Sowash: Broadway baby. Joel Cheeseman: When you're on a farm in England, you're not going anywhere anytime soon, you're kind of stuck there. [laughter] Chad Sowash: No. You are. Joel Cheeseman: So they kind of need to figure out how do we keep people there. Getting them lubricated with alcohol is one. And then kind of start the music early. Maybe get a DJ to get the vibe going. They need to figure that out. Chad Sowash: I think you have that, but you just use what you have here and that's Broadway, right? And maybe you cut it off a little bit early. You have some music that's playing, all that other fun stuff. But you tell people to go out and enjoy themselves on the town and they'll come back tomorrow, right? I mean just, you can't fight it. You can't fight the magnetic lure of Broadway. And you shouldn't, because that's what makes Nashville such a great I think event town to be in, so yeah. One thing I do have though is I think the vendors that we see in London, they really put together like the games and I mean they really go all out. The vendors are gonna have to step it up here in the US, right? They are just not making muster like they do from the London show. It was funny 'cause Plum, I think they probably had the most traffic, because every female in the place wanted to go get their hair braided, get their hair done, get a little tinsel in it or something like that. And it was like that was like a huge draw. But we're used to like games and fun and all this stuff all over the place. There was that. It just was muted compared to that of London. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. I don't know how you get the... Some vendor needs to step up, Hackajob in London had the double decker booth, the exclusive party on top, the mixologist, someone needs to step up in that way so everyone follows suit, but yeah, the vendors need to get on it. This is not HR tech, this is not hangout in the exhibit hall. This is a party and the vendors have a big part in that. So you took the words right out of my mouth. The vendors need to step it up for next year. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Well, and I gotta give it to Hackajob because they're going to be the booze cruise sponsor. They're the ones powering the booze cruise. So what they lacked in their double decker on the actual event, they're making it up for the booze cruise. But yes, we definitely wanna see that ratcheted up. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. We'll see you next year RecFest for sure wherever you are, we will be here. Allegedly 1,200 people got tickets, and they're hoping to ratchet that up to maybe 15, 1,600 next year. I think that's easy. I think this will go up to two. There's just too much FOMO, too much word of mouth, too much stuff going on. People will continue to to show up. Chad Sowash: Oh, easy. Easy. Joel Cheeseman: And these changes will be made. So if it's not obvious we're slightly hungover. I'm enjoying a coffee. If you're watching on YouTube Chad is wearing sunglasses. This is going to be an abbreviated show. We're nixing the birthdays, we're nixing the regular shoutouts, we're nixing the fantasy football leaderboard. Chad Sowash: We'll get back to it, kids. Joel Cheeseman: And anything else that you're used to, but yeah, enjoy this shortened show. Actually I need the news soundbite for that, don't I? Let's try this again. [music] Chad Sowash: Topics. Oh, you had it. Okay, I get it, okay. Joel Cheeseman: I had it, I had it. I just pushed the wrong button. Chad Sowash: No, no, it's good. Joel Cheeseman: Hang over, hang over. Like I said, hang over. Okay. Chad Sowash: I get it. I get it. Joel Cheeseman: I wanna push the step bro sound bite so bad but I don't. Okay, so quick update before we get to topics Chad, we called it, we called it. What's up? Chad Sowash: Yeah, no. Deel, this is from the information who actually we were talking about last week, Deel who is embroiled in a government crackdown on online trading sites have paused providing payout services to several businesses in that category as it conducts a review of their operations. End quote. Yes, we called it. These types of "trading companies" represent less than 1% of Deel's revenue. So it's best for optics and business. And remember to all those startups out there, we know you're moving fast. And sometimes like in this case you break shit. The key is cleaning up your mess after breaking. And that's what Deel is doing right now. So kudos to Deel. Joel Cheeseman: Yep, yep. No doubt. Look they were highlighted in the Information, which is a subscription only online publication. Very influential. They're typically writing stories about Google and Facebook. The fact that Deel was in this was a big deal. Rippling, a competitor followed suit and said we're nixing all these prop trading firms from our portfolio. Deel followed suit, we called it. But it wasn't a real, it was kind of obvious that it was gonna happen. It happened quickly though. So kudos, kudos to Deel. Alright let's get to our first story. Chad Sowash: Oh, this is fun. Joel Cheeseman: This is mainly a soundbite that we're gonna play and comment on the other side. But I do want to give some context to this. This is Tim Gurner. Tim Gurner is CEO of the Gurner Group. So he probably owns the place or his dad did or something, there's some connection there. Chad Sowash: Yeah, probably. Joel Cheeseman: They're in Australia. They're an institutional grade private development design and lifestyle business, with a $10 billion portfolio that focuses on transforming landscapes and environments where people can live their best life. So basically it's a service for rich people to make them feel rich and remind them that they're rich, and probably have a lot of service people that work for them that cater to these rich folks. So we're gonna play the soundbite here and comment on the other side. Here we go. Tim Gurner: I think the problem that we've had is that we've, we have... People decided they didn't really wanna work so much anymore through Covid. And that has had a massive issue on productivity. You know trainees have definitely pulled back on productivity. You know they have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years. And we need to see that change. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50% in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. I mean there's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've gotta kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy which is what the whole global... The world is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality. And we're seeing it, I think every employer now is seeing it. I mean there is definitely massive layoffs going off. People might not be talking about it, but people are definitely laying people off. And we're starting to see less arrogance in the employment market. And that has to continue, 'cause that will cascade across the cost balance. SFX: Oh, fuck! Joel Cheeseman: Alright Chad, take a breath and let us know what you think about Mr. Gurner's comments. Chad Sowash: So I mean they're saying the quiet part out loud, and you know that every CEO is thinking this, right? Joel Cheeseman: Oh, yeah. Chad Sowash: It's just that some have much better optics and they're better at narrative. So here's the quote. You heard it. I'm gonna go over it again. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50% in my view. We need to see pain in the economy, end quote. We need to see pain in the economy. So those are his words. And now you know he isn't alone. He he didn't just conjure this up one day. This is what is talked about in rich people's circles. How do we get the peasants back in the fields? Pain. Pain is the answer. And let's get this straight. What pain actually is kids, unemployment rates rise. You don't have a job. No job. You go into poverty mode. Poverty equals pain, period. Right? And how do we strip the "arrogance" away from them? He's framing a living wage benefits, people wanting to be treated like humans as arrogance. Chad Sowash: And this is something that rich people have had the money to really prop up, with the likes of the Milton Freemans of the world over the years, right? To have these people as kind of like their voice boxes. Now, they're coming out and they're saying the quiet shit out loud. And this kids is what every single fucking board of directors is talking about right here. This is it. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. You know I'm guessing the Gurner group is not publicly traded, because no public CEO would say some shit like this out loud. Chad Sowash: Doubtful. No. Joel Cheeseman: He's also Australian which mean he'd... Chad Sowash: He felt comfortable. Joel Cheeseman: Which means he survives 90% of the world's venomous animals. So he doesn't give a shit about what anybody says. [laughter] This is, let's be honest, the powers that be have hated the last two to three years. They've hated the power going over to labor. They've hated the work from home movement. The structure that they've gotten comfortable with of ownership and capital got screwed for the last two to three years. And they're taking it back. And this guy's comments are exactly what others are thinking. Look in case you missed it, Zoom, the work from home company is getting people back to the office. To me that's the quintessential sign that this shit is over. What is fascinating to me is that workers are somewhat fighting back. The UAW negotiations right now with with the auto workers, which I think is gonna be really tough for them, because of something called Mexico, and Mexico is opening up manufacturing with cars. Joel Cheeseman: I know I think Mercedes and Volkswagen have just opened up some facilities in Mexico. That's gonna be a nuclear option that I think Ford and GM can use. Popular culture. You have a song called Rich Men North of Richmond that if you haven't heard it, take a listen. It's basically about the rich fuckers that are screwing us over and the workers' opinion of that. Ultimately rich people have money and poor people have votes. And the sad truth is like no politician on either side is really talking about workers and labor unions and cutting off Mexico or making it painful to do. We're stuck in this rut of talking about indictments, ageism, you name it. And maybe that's what the power structure wants. They want us kinda looking over here and not thinking about the real issues of workers and poverty and things like that. So this guy said it. Everyone is thinking it on the power end of things. And unfortunately unless people vote and put in people that are gonna protect their jobs, the money is gonna win here. And data says young people don't vote. Most people don't vote enough and money's gonna win if they don't vote. Period. Chad Sowash: Yeah. But I think they can vote with their feet too. We'll talk about that at Grindr in a minute. But, the UAW they've actually talked about how the CEO got a 40% raise. And that was a fuck you to the employees, right? Especially after the employees and the union, literally, they capped salaries during COVID, during the hard times, right? So they capped and they kept everything low because they knew that there was a problem and they wanted to help out the car companies. And then guess what? The car companies stab them in the fucking back. The CEO takes a 40% fucking increase, right? And the funny part is we talk about the Rich men North of Richmond. Again, it's a division kind of a thing. What about the Rich men South of Richmond? What about the Rich men East and West of Richmond? This is all a ploy in trying to get the peasants to fight each other. I mean, it just, it drives me fucking crazy. And the horrible part is, what he's saying is true. The tools of government have to deal with inflation, with literally caveman like... I mean, they're using rocks and scissors for god's sakes. Raise interest rates. Well, who does that hurt? Does it hurt an asshole like this? No, it hurts people trying to buy cars, buy homes, you know, the common people shit. Joel Cheeseman: Milk, eggs, bread. Yeah. Chad Sowash: Yes. Instead of cracking down on the other side of the inflation problem with investigations on companies gouging. It's pretty simple. Just look at those companies quarterly profits and the calls where they are bragging about over-inflated profits. We aren't doing what we should to be able to ensure that these assholes like this understand that he's not the one doing the work. The people on the line are doing the work. They deserve pay, they deserve living wages. And another quote from The Guardian, which you will love, he's engaging in the ancient neoliberal habit of dehumanizing working people. It's almost like that guy who came down the escalator and called Mexicans murderers and rapists. Right? Breed division among the non-rich people. And then allow the peasants to fight it out themselves while assholes like this Watch from the safety of the ivory tower. It just, it drives me crazy. And the thing is, fucking people listening to this whole Rich men North of Richmond thing, they like that, that fear and that conflict. And it's like, guys, you're fighting the wrong motherfuckers. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. It's also fascinating in regards to leverage that workforces have, like we talked about the UPS drivers. People need packages. There's not a lot of competition to do that. Car companies, you have the EV revolution. You have a car company in Tesla that is not unionized. So it's not, it's not a level playing field, whereas it is for the UPS workers. So, this dynamic is gonna play out. And if you have leverage, you do. If you don't get your ass back to work, you're lucky to have a job is basically the mentality. Chad Sowash: Well, that's the mentality. The problem is if jobs remain plentiful in the market, there's nothing they can do about it, other than do the stupid shit and lose great talent, and then say that that great talent was arrogant. So they left. They weren't arrogant. They just wanted fairness. That's all they're asking for. And watching, again, UAW CEO getting a 40% raise, while all the workers who are doing the hard backbreaking fucking work, they agreed to keep their wages low and now they want a piece of their own. And I get it, man. Joel Cheeseman: Yep. Yep. It's going to Mexico. And mark my words, you're gonna hear political rhetoric around anti Mexico, or like cut Mexico off from these jobs. I think you're gonna hear that in 2024. We'll see. Chad Sowash: Yeah. It's not gonna be focused on any CEOs or boards or any of that shit. Joel Cheeseman: It's Mexico's fault. Chad Sowash: It's all gonna be the little people. All the little people, baby. Joel Cheeseman: Oh, man. I love that this is a theme show. This is like dark side of the moon. The whole theme is on this whole thing. Chad Sowash: It is. Joel Cheeseman: So we'll be right back, and holy shit, Grindr is back on the show everybody. Chad Sowash: Again. Joel Cheeseman: I know. Alright Chad, Grindr is back on the show, Chad. Grindr's return to office policy led to nearly half of its staff leaving. I'll say that again. Half of the staff leaving, the policy required employees to relocate to designated hub cities or leave with severance following a unionization effort. Grindr United Union filed unfair labor charges after 80 plus workers faced forced resignations due to a return to office policy following unionization alleging retaliation and silencing by the company. Remaining staff continues organizing. Chad, your take on Grindr news. Chad Sowash: Have employers just lost their fucking minds? I mean, and not to mention Grindr is wanting now to try to start helping other companies with their hiring. Right? But they can't even get their own fucking house in order. Many of these workers who you'd actually said, they were hired to be remote workers, and now they're being forced to relocate. Is this a layoff in disguise? Could be, because they probably know that most of these remote workers are literally just gonna go ahead and take the severance. Right? And they're gonna say, well, didn't align with corporate culture. It was really just a layoff. Right? It was really a layoff. But even if this is a layoff tactic, you can't expect to know who's going to eject and who's gonna stay. And if you're getting rid of great top talent, I mean, this is just not how business is done. Chad Sowash: Companies thought that they had a productivity problem before. This is just gonna exacerbate that problem. Low productivity has little to nothing to do with remote work. On the contrary, remote workers work more, the productivity problem lands squarely on the shoulders of leadership. They're losing people left and right. They can't fill positions fast enough. And the staff that have stayed behind are stretched way too thin, and they're doing everybody else's job who left. Right? So you are having a productivity problem, has nothing to do with the people working remotely, has to do with your stupid ass leaders who are playing these control issue games. Joel Cheeseman: I blame Elon Musk. Elon laid off 80% of the tech support staff at X Twitter. And by most accounts hasn't lost a lot in terms of serviceability. At least that is the popular sentiment. Other big tech companies followed suit. And now we're seeing the Grindrs of the world. The app makers of the world follow suit. However, people hate the headline layoffs. They can avoid the headline of layoffs if they do this bullshit, if they say, we're back to the office. You gotta live in these hub cities. Sorry, I don't know if they offered relocation. Probably not. Just said, Hey, the party's over. You need to live, within a certain radius of a hub or a headquarters. And this is a very popular strategy. We're seeing this on a regular basis. It's very convenient. People just leave. You don't have, I mean, they're paying them severance, which is great, but a lot of companies aren't. Joel Cheeseman: They're saying, good luck. Thanks for playing. And in the process, they get to reduce headcount. They make shareholders happy because they're following Elon's lead of being a much leaner tech company. And this is what you get. So the good news is startups are getting money. I mean, I look at the news every day, not just for employment, but who's getting money. Like we predicted, AI is gonna create so many more opportunities. A lot of these people are gonna start their own companies, their own apps. It's gonna be painful in the short term, but I think heading into next year, we're gonna see some exciting companies, some really great Startups that couldn't afford the talent that was working at Facebook and Apple. They're gonna start bringing these folks in, making them owners of the company. And we're gonna see some really exciting things happen. There's just gonna be a lot of pain for the next six to 12 months for a lot of workers. Chad Sowash: Well, and we've talked about it. Those companies, the Facebook, the fan companies, they over-hired, they were literally trying to starve the market because they had so much fucking capital. Right? They're trying to, and this is, if you have the money, if you were a rich company like a Facebook or a Google, something like that, your profit margins are such that you can waste cash, right? And starving the market, your competitors of great talent is a way to do that. It shouldn't be legal, but how are you gonna fucking enforce something like that, right? But that's what's happened. And I agree a hundred percent. These people are gonna come back in the market. They're gonna work for startups, they're going to, they're gonna start their own companies. And we're just gonna see a lot of innovation come out of it. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. So our buddy at VanHack, Ilia, who's a big fan of the show, and I know he is listening for sure. Hi, Ilia. Talked to him. His job is to basically, bring tech talent and companies together, focused in Canada, which we all love. But he commented that he believed August was like the bottom in terms of hiring tech, and he thinks that from here on out, not necessarily hockey stick, but it's gonna trend up significantly. And I think, our sentiment, reflects that. So good times ahead, hopefully. And yeah, there's gonna be some real exciting stuff, I think in terms of new companies. Chad Sowash: Well, and you've got this other asshole that we were just talking about who was like, we need pain in the market. You've got Marc Benioff who told MSNBC, "I'm a remote worker. I've always been a remote worker. My whole life. I don't work well in office. It just doesn't work for my, with my personality." We're going to see companies, some companies continue to treat their employees like adults, right? They're going to hold their feet to the fire with project deadlines, with goals, with all these things that we all as adults understand. And if we don't meet those marks, then we have the opportunity to get our ass fired. Right? But if we overachieve those, again, we're giving the people that we hired, we trusted them, we hiring them, we trust them in our company. Now we have to just allow them to do their work. And the problem is, most of these iron fist CEOs and management that's out there, they don't know how to manage this, they don't know how to manage it. And that is a problem of management and leadership, not of the employees. Joel Cheeseman: Right. You know, there were a lot of tools early on that were supposed to solve this whole engagement and tracking and monitoring. Apparently they're not working as well as they promised. My hope is that all the new startups that are founded by these folks commit to remote work. Like they've been burned. Like they're gonna commit to not being in an office or having an office. And I think we're headed towards a two class company society where you're either, you're in the office or you're not. And we'll see, we'll see who wins that as it shakes out. Chad Sowash: Well, I think there's a hybrid variable that's there too, where you allow somebody to actually say, Hey, look, when are you gonna come again? Cummins Engine Company in Columbus, Indiana, they have, they downsized their footprint from an office space standpoint. And you have specific days that you check in to say that I'm going to come into the office to work. Right? So that they know that they have enough space, there's a space management, those types of things. But they trust their employees enough as adults to say, look, when do you wanna come in? You know when, you know when your meetings are, you know when you should be in the office to do these things. And then when you don't, it's just, and that's been happening for years with Cummins. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. I think we have to get to some resolution to what work, like back to the office is, or return to office. 'Cause to me hybrid is back to the office. If I have to go to the office two, three days a week, that means I have to live within an area that I can get to the office. Chad Sowash: Yeah. I agree. Joel Cheeseman: Remote work to me is, my company is in Chicago, but I have a van and I just travel the country and set up shop at Airbnbs. Like, to me, that's remote work. If you go to the office at all, unless it's like, oh, once a month, we're gonna fly you into town and you're gonna work from the office. Like, to me, that's not remote work. So anyway, resolution in terms of what office is, office is at least one day a week that you have to be in an office. You're not a remote worker. Chad Sowash: Yeah. If it's a mandate. Yes. I agree a hundred percent. Because if you can just, let's say for instance, I do work close to the office, but I do, like you said, I go to Portugal, work out of my place there, or an Airbnb, somewhere on the East Coast or West Coast or something like that. If I have the flexibility to do those things, that to me, again, the autonomy as an employee, as an adult, I think that that to me constitutes, remote work. But yes, if there's a mandate that you have to come into the office one time a week or what have you. Yeah. That is more of a return to office. Joel Cheeseman: Right. Right. Maybe Uber will save us all. When we get back... Chad Sowash: Oh, Jesus. Joel Cheeseman: News out of Uber. Chad, have you taken an Uber since you've been here in Nashville? Chad Sowash: Lyft. I've taken Lyft. Joel Cheeseman: Lyft, much cheaper. Yes. I cost compare. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: And Lyft always is cheaper, so if you can do it, Lyft tends to be the selection. Anyway, rideshare app Uber is reportedly working on a service similar to TaskRabbit, allowing users to hire people for various tasks beyond driving and food deliveries. The potential new service code named Chore was discovered in the hidden code of Uber's iPhone app. Users can hire a tasker for a minimum of one hour. Specify the task duration and preferred arrival time, and the app will calculate the cost based on the task's time requirement. Chad, what's your take on Uber taking it to the rabbit? Chad Sowash: The quest for Uber's continual profitability, you know, profitability, they're just trying everything. Let's throw everything at the wall and see what we can do. But I do believe an app like this, if it's done right, could kill companies like Thumbtack, Angi, and other service apps. Because again, many people use Uber. I know that when we're in a city somewhere, Julie will get Uber Eats if we just don't want to go out, right? So that is an add-on service. But if Uber really wants to do this, I think they buy a Thumbtack or an Angi or something like that so that they have all that contractor or gig base that's automatically there. And it's just add water and you put this app pulled together. And it's just a much easier way to do what Angi and the Thumbtacks of the world have been doing for years. And I mean, that's literally, it's just, it's lead gen is all they do. It's lead gen. This could be more than that, which I think would be really cool. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. TaskRabbit has the benefit of being owned, by IKEA, oddly enough. Chad Sowash: IKEA, yeah. Joel Cheeseman: We talked about that a few years ago. If you've never put together an IKEA couch, you know a little help can go a long way. Which I think was the precipice for, IKEA buying this app. Chad Sowash: YouTube, IKEA and Ryan Reynolds. So YouTube, IKEA and Ryan Reynolds. Fucking hilarious. Go ahead. Sorry. Joel Cheeseman: I have no idea what you're talking about. I'll google it later. Chad Sowash: Oh, it's hilarious. Joel Cheeseman: But these are mostly fringe companies, their kind of features, I guess. I don't think any of them, Thumbtack, Angi, are public companies. So Yeah, they seem... Chad Sowash: Angi was, I don't know if they... Joel Cheeseman: Angi was. There was Angi's list and then it... Chad Sowash: 'Cause they were acquired. Yeah, they were acquired. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. So yeah, I don't... It's not my lane, but I don't think there's any takeoff success stories around this business. Look, Elon must have some serious envy about Uber, because Uber is what I think Elon wants X to be, sort of an everything app. I need something delivered. I need a ride. I need... By the way, I love scooters, Nashville full of scooters. I'm on scooter, scooter alert, everybody if you're driving the streets in Nashville. So they're becoming this sort of, whatever I need, I can go to this "super app" and get it. And to me, it makes perfect sense that they would add this option. I think any contractor they already know about Uber, they're gonna put their profile in there and we'll see can they strangle Angi out of business? Joel Cheeseman: Can they strangle the Thumbtacks out of business? I guess we'll see. But I think that's Uber's goal. I think they just wanna suffocate everybody to where they're the only player and we go to them for all of our shit that we want, all of our conveniences. And this makes perfect sense. So how many drivers become furniture-put-together-ers? I don't know. There's gonna be some bleed over. But yeah, it's gonna be successful. People will see it when they get a ride. Like, Oh, now I can get someone to put my grill together on Uber, and I don't have to go to these other services. And by the way, Uber doesn't have to advertise like the other services do because it's so sort of ubiquitous with our daily lives and when we travel, so they don't have the marketing expenses that an Angi or a Thumbtack does. So yeah, I think it's a good move. If I'm Angi or the others, I'm thinking like, shit, what's our next move? What do we do now? Chad Sowash: I'm Thinking, let's put in a really good bid to get bought, to get acquired by Uber. 'Cause I mean, those companies are legacy. They're old style lead gen. I mean, this is something new. It's much better. They just need a database like an Angi, because they have like the plumbers and the carpenters and the handymen and all those guys. Will drivers do it? Maybe. But I mean, you don't want to like hang your hat on that. Right? You want a database of these people right out of the gate. So if they go full steam, hopefully we see an acquisition. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. And I don't know who would buy some of those companies. I mean, they're so fragmented. They're so localized. It's sort of like Groupon, right? Like Groupon was huge locally, but like other services came along or are coming. So I don't know who would buy these guys. But that is an interesting, interesting notion. We'll keep our eye on it. But until then, Chad, my Uber is here to take me to RecFest for day two. I'm gonna get another cup of coffee. I'll see you on the booze cruise, my friend. Chad Sowash: Yes! Joel Cheeseman: We out. Chad Sowash: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap, because you'll be back like an awful train wreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

What a start-up calls itself usually says a lot about it. It can also say a lot about its prospects for future success. Enter Skillit, a company that connects the supply of skilled workers with contractor demand in the $1.6 trillion annually construction industry through its platform for sourcing, skills assessment, hiring, and training. And you thought a name like Skillit would be serving Grand Slam breakfasts at your favorite brunch spot, didn’t you? Nope, and Fraser Patterson, founder and CEO of the company is on Firing Squad to tell you why he’s the next big thing? Hey, we’ll be the judge of that, pal. Listen and reveal Skillit’s fate. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest start-ups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole another level. Joel Cheesman: Oh yes, it's another Firing Squad, everybody. What's up? It's your favorite guilty pleasure... Chad Sowash: That was orgasmic. Joel Cheesman: AKA The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman, and as always, the Barbie to my Ken, Mr. Chad Sowash... Chad Sowash: Yes, the sexy one. Joel Cheesman: Is on the line. And we are just excited. We got a Scot in the house, everybody. SFX: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is, "If it's not Scottish, it's crap!" Joel Cheesman: Let's welcome Fraser "Don't call him Fraser" Patterson, founder and CEO at Skillit. Fraser, welcome to the podcast. Fraser Patterson: Hey guys. Yeah, thanks for having me. Joel Cheesman: Good to have you here. Fraser Patterson: A little intro? Joel Cheesman: Yes. Fraser Patterson: So yeah, as you pointed out, I was born in Scotland, which you've made quite a thing of. Yeah, I grew up holding a tape measure, come from a construction family and was kind of pulled into construction, pushed into academia by a grandfather. I went to this Harry Potter-like boarding school in the north of Scotland and then made my way... No, no, literally. When I saw Harry Potter for the first time, I actually thought it was filmed in my boarding school. It's uncanny. It's like a facsimile. Chad Sowash: Holy shit. Fraser Patterson: And yeah, and fell in love with the math teacher and math and from there, I kind of became a carpenter. I was an apprentice. I was a journeyman carpenter, and I was also a math teacher and lecturer and researcher. So yeah, live in New York, married, kids, and love cooking and building startups. And I'm an extreme optimist with a passion for leading indicators of bad news. Chad Sowash: So you fell in love with a math teacher? Joel Cheesman: Yeah, that's another podcast. Chad Sowash: So yeah, you fell in love with a math teacher. Was she... Fraser Patterson: That actually just slipped out. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Did you marry the math teacher? Joel Cheesman: I bet it just slipped out. SFX: What are you doing, stepbro? Fraser Patterson: God, I appreciate that. I was in an all-boys school. Let's put it this way, mathematics was packaged well as a subject to me and I fell in love with the subject. Joel Cheesman: He just said "packaged". Fraser, by the way, has never heard our show. So he's in for quite a ride on this one. I gotta know, do Scots construct... Is there like a kilt and a tool belt combo that you can wear, is popular in Scotland? Fraser Patterson: Well, I mean, all Scots have got their own clan's tartan. So mine's a Patterson. There's an Anderson, which is my mom's maiden name. Joel Cheesman: But I can't go to the Home Depot equivalent in Scotland and get a tool kilt? Fraser Patterson: It's been a while, so... None of that was available when I was there. Joel Cheesman: This is going nowhere. Let's tell him what he's won, Chad. Chad Sowash: It's the dry Cheesman jokes that... Joel Cheesman: It works great on the weekly show. Chad Sowash: It should be great. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Fraser. Welcome to Firing Squad. This is how it's gonna play out. At the sound of the bell, there it is, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch Skillit. At the end of those two minutes, we're gonna hit you up with 20 minutes or so of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or you're going to get the "crickets". That just means tighten your game up. At the end of Q&A, you're gonna receive one of three of these: Either big applause, "Skillit serves up a full course Michelin-rated meal. Talent and companies will be hungry for this platform baby." A golf clap. [applause] Chad Sowash: "We're gonna need a new chef and sous chef because Skillit is leaving a bad taste in our mouth." And last but never least, the firing squad. "Instead of Skillit, you should kill it. Get back into the kitchen 'cause you're gonna need to cook something else up." That's the Firing Squad. Are you ready? Fraser Patterson: Brutal. Love it. Yeah, ready. Joel Cheesman: Alright, Laser, I mean Fraser, your pitch starts in... Fraser Patterson: Yeah. So Skillit is building the world's first data-driven, skilled labor recruiting platform for the construction industry. So we provide mid-market and enterprise contractors with really easy access to a rapidly growing network of the nation's best craft workers, so like carpenters, electricians, plumbers, concrete workers, and a suite of tools that are basically purpose-built to make craft recruitment radically easier and faster and smarter for their recruiting team. So we do this by collecting data across hundreds of variables from each and every worker directly. We don't scrape data, this comes right from the worker, everything from trade experience, skills, qualifications, attitude, desired pay, even their future moving plans. And this gives employers for the first time, accurate, full 360-degree understanding of a craft worker, but it also means they can actually find and hire the best employees that they're looking for. Fraser Patterson: It also enables us to build powerful software that automates a lot of the rote work that craft recruiters have to do every day. So that frees them up to do more important stuff and be the hero of their organization, if you will. Today, we're laser-focused on solving our customer's biggest hair-on-fire problem, the skilled labor crisis, so sourcing skilled labor. And we're doing that by becoming America's best matchmaker to craft labor and employers. But the big vision here is use this proprietary data set that we're building and this digital infrastructure to really train and upskill our talent network so they become increasingly important to our employers. And if we can achieve that, then I think we can make skilled labor one of the greatest assets on earth and actually increase the quality and quantity of skilled labor in the world. And that way, I think, we can achieve our housing and infrastructure and clean energy goals. Joel Cheesman: We'll take it. We'll take it. Alright, Fraser, it's already been touched upon. We're recording this right around lunch time, or I am at least. And when I hear Skillit, I think of the grand slam breakfast at Denny's, but that's a different episode altogether. How did you come up with the name? Was it a hard decision? I mean, I get it as I look at it. What was the number two name that you were going with that lost out? Talk about how you came up with the brand. Fraser Patterson: There wasn't a number two name. So August 2019, I took a vacation with my family. I was exhausted and I was basically... I built this vertically integrated GC in New York and we were struggling to hire craft labor, so carpenters and general labor. And while I was thinking about how there had to be a better way to do this, I was actually reading a magazine and there was an article called design... Or a company called Designit, "Designit" one word, and it reminded me of this article that I've been reading and this train of thought about the four-year college degree, the ROI on that is starting to play out, it's not very good. And the future, I don't think, is degrees or school, but skill. And so it had this energy behind it. It was a bit of a thumb in the eye to all the folks throughout the years that made fun of me for being a carpenter and a laborer. And so I had a kind of like... I don't know. It had a kind of "fuck it" energy to it. And so Skillit, that's where the name came from. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Okay, okay. Chad Sowash: Skillit, fuck it. Yes. Joel Cheesman: You have a nice folks-y, "I'm a carpenter", sort of a Jesus Christ angle to your pitch here. But you've founded other companies. You're an advisor. You're a business guy. But you don't have experience particularly, in recruitment or employment. So how did you land here? And how was your lack of experience may be an asset into this business? Fraser Patterson: Yeah, that's a good question. As I mentioned, I founded the company in 2021 after being a GC on the hiring side. So I'd been struggling to acquire craft labor and retain and train and upskill craft labor. I'd also been on the other side. So as you pointed out, I was a carpenter for many years. I was on the trade side. So I was starting to realize that the problem we were facing was really a data problem. So a lot of my time as a contractor was spent in the dark, not knowing how to source workers. 'Cause we've just ignored them for, well, forever, frankly, the desk-less worker. We've built all these tools for knowledge workers and not craft workers. No way to use job boards well 'cause the data isn't there. You can't really assess people's skills. You don't know how much to pay them. Connecting with them is really tough. And so yeah, I think that Skillit was born out of that frustration, but there was definitely a naivete, but I think it also gave us a unique insight. This isn't a labor issue, in my opinion. It's a data issue. And I can speak a wee bit more about what it means to be skills-focused instead of role and job-focused. 'Cause I think that's the future. But we're already starting to see how this plays out in really interesting ways. Chad Sowash: It's also behavior-focused. Fraser Patterson: Behaviour-focused. Chad Sowash: Because we take a look at, yes, all the white collar... There are a lot of types of positions that automatically went online, they went to job boards and so on and so forth. Construction wasn't that. So how do you get candidates into the system? Because this isn't the usual way they find a job. And obviously for you to scale, you need to get those candidates into the system so that they fill out all that information about them so that you have the data and you can actually make this happen. But behavior is really the big key, changing their behavior on how they go after a job. How do you do that? And how do you get them in the system? Fraser Patterson: Yeah. I think there's a couple of things that are at play here. One is we just assume that the world's deskless workers don't know how to use technology, which is rubbish. They're all using Amazon and Netflix all day long. Just no one's ever taken time to actually have empathy for them and figure out, "What's your day like?" So if you're standing by a pile driver in the freezing cold with gloves on, maybe downloading Zoom and getting on an interview isn't the best way for you to get in front of employers. And I think the other thing as well is the world's seen a huge change in the last five to 10 years. The trend has been for more and more workers to expect more. Because they're on Netflix, because they've got these natively digital experiences, they want a faster, easier recruitment process themselves. But also, they are moving away from gig work. So it's really interesting. You see most graphs will show you this trend that gig work is eating the world. In construction, 98% of the workers that are... Of the tens of thousands that are coming on to Skillit, they want full-time work with a company that respects the craft, pays them well, trains and upskills them. They're looking for a home. So that's our value prop. We didn't go out there with, "buy low, sell high" mentality of staffing agencies and RPOs, et cetera. Fraser Patterson: This is essentially going out and saying, "If you create one Skillit profile," which we make super easy to do, just to give you a wee insight there, we basically... It's a self-serve process, captures a lot of great data on their skills, their expectations. We also do proprietary craft assessments that show them for the first time how they actually compare to other workers nearby. But also, we speak to every worker. Chad Sowash: You actually vet them. I went through the process. So the question here though is, you have to get to scale. How do you get tons, loads of construction workers into the system? I understand that they know technology. It's just the difference between desktop versus mobile, texting versus Zoom. Totally get that. We understand that 100%. What I don't get and what I need to understand from you is, how do you get to scale with actually getting more construction workers in? Joel Cheesman: When's the SuperBowl ad, is what we wanna know. When's the SuperBowl ad? [laughter] Chad Sowash: We know that's not gonna happen. But how are you doing it? How are you getting to scale? Fraser Patterson: So a few things. One is we've got a really powerful content strategy, we've got a great digital footprint. We've been able to use that highly data-driven understanding of workers. And actually, it's pretty unparalleled. It means that when we speak to, say, carpenters in New York, it's a different positioning or messaging. It's more personalized than, say, a concrete worker in Charlotte. So we're pulling in workers. And the 52% of workers that join Skillit recommend another worker, we're also building our product so that it becomes... They can network the workers. So this is not for right now. This is not the phase we're focused on, but we're gonna be networking the workers so that they can actually engage with each other. Not a social play. We don't believe in building a social platform. We get compared to LinkedIn a lot. Fraser Patterson: Maybe the same or similar outcome, but not the same strategy. And there's powerful network effects that we're starting to see play out. So there's real value to the worker tools that we're starting to build, the career guidance, salary tools, leader boards, et cetera, and also value to workers platforming other workers. So for example, almost all customers have an employee referral program. If you network the worker, we can actually enable them to bring in... Am I rambling? Alright, alright. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah, yeah. A Scot that talks a lot, imagine that. That's so weird. Fraser Patterson: We're not exactly loquacious, but yeah, sure. Chad Sowash: Yeah, never heard that before. Never heard that before. Joel Cheesman: "You may take our lives... " Anyway, sort of dovetailing into that, you guys just raised, what was it, $8.5 million. It's a total of $13.6 million, which is a really healthy... Chad Sowash: That's a big applause. Joel Cheesman: Organic growth. Good stuff. So what are you spending the money on? How do you plan on spending it? Obviously, I think go-to-market is some of that, but how else are you leveraging the cash? Fraser Patterson: Yeah. So obviously expanding our sales, marketing, customer success teams, product and engineering teams. We've started a really successful sales rollout. So we wanna basically be building on the implementation and activation and an expansion of customer accounts. I think really importantly as well, it's a good healthy signal to our customers because they're looking to build... A lot of these companies have multi-year project pipelines. And what we're essentially building out is a craft recruiting and intelligence platform that has essentially several years of capital in the bank as a runway. So they can confidently engage with us. I think that that goes a long way to giving these larger mid-market and enterprise customers confidence that we're gonna be around for the next few years to build this out and they can rely on us. Joel Cheesman: That's good. So you mentioned being around for a while. So let's talk about the competition. FactoryFix is a sponsor of the show. I assume they're in that mix. It's interesting that you say the gig economy is not on your radar as a competitor. You threw out LinkedIn, I assume you don't consider them a competitor, but maybe there's something there that we don't know. Talk about the competitive landscape and where you guys are different and how you fit in. Fraser Patterson: Yeah. So today we're laser-focused on the construction, W2 construction industry, top 10 trades. These are really critical trades to our critical infrastructure and clean energy goals that we're seeing huge tailwinds behind. So we're laser-focused on that. W2, for the aforementioned reasons, we're really... Over time, once we've solved... Once we've built that data model out and can actually show that the hiring outcomes using Skillit are superior than all the other solutions combined. So faster access to workers, better outcomes in terms of interviews, better retention. We plan to be 10/99, we also... We're in early talks with unions. So this is gonna be both open shop and union. We wanna give our customers a single solution where they can hire anywhere in the country, eventually anywhere in the world, regardless of the flavor of that labor. Fraser Patterson: But I think LinkedIn is not really good for the desk-less worker. Not many of our customers are going on to LinkedIn to find carpenters and plumbers and electricians. And it's not because their technology doesn't necessarily work. It's because that that demographic didn't feel ever communicated to or catered to by... Kind of felt like an imposter in that room. But we do see ZipRecruiter, Indeed, all the obvious job boards. We know most of our customers are using Indeed. We consider that to be our primary competition. And becoming a larger share of hires than them is one of our internal goals. But a lot of the problem here is that, with these solutions is they're point solutions. They're not really truly verticalized. They haven't understood the worker. They don't build out the tools to make the process... There's no automation potential. And often, it just exasperates all the downstream problems. Chad Sowash: So I'm gonna go back to products and things that obviously employers care about the most. So what is the current size of your database and what is your internal goal for the end of the year? What are the marks you guys are trying to hit? Fraser Patterson: So we don't get into the numbers 'cause how we're actually acquiring the workers is a wee bit proprietary, and I get into trouble when I talk about actual numbers on the worker side. But just to be clear... [laughter] Fraser Patterson: Sorry to disappoint, but it is what it is. But on the customer side, we have customer goals, we have market goals, how many trades, how many regions, and we're making great progress towards those. And today, what we've done over 200 times is launched what we call "trade region pairs". So launching a trade in a region and satiating our customers' hiring goals, we've done that successfully over 200 times now. So the network is starting to grow on the labor side. We're growing really fast on the customer side, 50% month-on-month growth there. So very healthy. And look, the goal here really is get to a point where in the next 18 months, we are essentially the critical W2 labor platform for the top ENR and the mid-market and from there, go up and downstream. Chad Sowash: Okay. So it sounds like the way that you're rolling out is more of a regional effect. You're picking areas that are highly, let's say for instance, in need of construction. I'm sure you're doing your research in that area. And then you're rolling that out region by region. And you're doing that not just with all of your construction and pipe fitting and so on and so forth. You're doing that specifically in certain areas and then starting to grow that. Is that correct? Fraser Patterson: Yeah. So the strategy here is really acquire high-quality demand, so high-quality customers. That gives us the ability to then acquire local supplies of labor. And then we can repeat that and go land and expand with those customers, but also that means we can build the labor supply and then start an outbound motion to pull in customers who are, essentially, hiring for the same trades in those regions, like carpenters in Nashville and electricians in Phoenix. And we've been really methodical about how we do that because we've developed a kind of labor... We call it a labor acquisition investment formula. We're quite literally figuring out what is the cost of acquiring labor in all these markets, and what are the top regions, and what are the top trades, crane count, all of these variables go into our mix to inform our go-to-market. Chad Sowash: Okay. So when you actually go into these areas, are you working directly with unions as well? Because in many cases, they are the supply. And to be quite frank, you could be the operating system for unions. And I mean, obviously, there are several unions that you're going to be touching. So is that one of the strategies that you wanna be the operating system for the unions that are out there who really have the supply already baked in? Fraser Patterson: Yeah. We were actually in Washington just at the end of last year with the TAUC. So we're starting early conversations with the unions. Most... Skillit can get very large with purely open shop. It's 88% of all of the skilled labor in the US is not affiliated with a union. But we think that there's a huge value to partnering with unions over time and, yeah, very possibly helping to digitize and power their whole experience, their dispatch experience. They have similar challenges to what our customers have in terms of acquisition of labor, recruitment, retention, training, upskilling. So yeah, I think we can help power their members experience, but we're a little... That's a little bit off from now. Not our primary focus. Chad Sowash: Okay. So right now we do have a limited labor supply, as you had said before. When Joel and I went to school, we actually had what they had comprehensive high schools, where you could go through instead of trying to get ready for college, you would go into electricity to be an electrician, to be a carpenter, to be a plumber, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We wiped those off the map with stupid trickle-down economics, pushing everybody to be able to get a piece of paper as opposed to skills, right? Fraser Patterson: Yep. Chad Sowash: So that being said, one of the biggest issues we have is that we don't have enough labor. We have plenty of demand. We just don't have the labor to be able to supply to it. So when it comes to training, are you guys looking at prospectively partnering up with training organizations and/or prospectively pulling in and using maybe some of that money to do a little training yourself? Fraser Patterson: Yeah. So we believe that by starting with the customer and digitizing the worker, building that digital infrastructure, getting big with that digital infrastructure will enable us to actually start to build products for the workers. So yes, in essence, we can already see the strengths and weaknesses of a worker, we can provide that information to a customer, that customer can then better target the training that that individual worker needs. So it can become much more personalized, which of course leads to better retention and so on and so forth. Fraser Patterson: And of course, I think the powering of that... Yeah, we can connect with trade schools. There's lots of green shoot, labor supplies popping up in an effort to solve this huge problem. I think being really front row with the data, and the labor data on the workers and the trust of the customers as their data-driven craft recruiting solution, I think that gives us a great opportunity to inform all of these entities on how they should be training and upskilling and connect... Build the piping to connect them. Joel Cheesman: I'm interested in your comment about Washington. Are you guys lobbying? What are you doing in Washington? Is there immigration policy that you'd like to see happen or not happen? Fraser Patterson: So, we were invited by The Association of Union Constructors. They're a premier national trade association for contractors. We've had a lot of interest from unions because we're... I think we're tackling this in a unique way and I've taken a anti-Travis Kalanick approach to dealing with unions which is... To actually engage and figure out, can we work together, and how, and not get to scale and then become contentious with one another. And those conversations are fascinating 'cause they have very unique challenges, which I think, over time, we can re-architect and build product for. But for now, no, no lobbying. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I don't wanna make it a political interview. It's about the business. Maybe we can talk about immigration and other things at some point down the road. You mentioned, at some point, hiring around the world, which makes me think there is either an international push now or that there will be in the future. Talk about your global aspirations. Fraser Patterson: Yeah. So we are getting pull right now internationally, but we're choosing, obviously, to stay focused on the US. That's par for the course. But I've lived in different countries. I've lived in the UK, I've lived in Mexico, and I've been in the industry in all these industries and frankly, it's a very similar problem and this really is a global issue. I think if we're gonna achieve these huge lofty goals of clean energy transition, de-carbonization of our real estate, the electrification of our real estate, housing goals, infrastructure goals, immigration is a key piece of that. And I think once we've got to phase two where we can actually start to build product for our worker, I really do see us starting to operate internationally before even being a household name in the US and potentially, yeah, using data-driven immigration as a tool to help solve supply-demand. And I think there's a really worrying idea that robots are coming to the rescue, and I don't know if that's something that interests you, but I think it's a fascinating topic. It's... I don't see that happening in construction... Joel Cheesman: Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. Give us your take on AI automation, how that's gonna impact the business. Fraser Patterson: Yeah I mean, we've seen a huge proliferation of AI across media, banking, healthcare, but that's because these industries naturally produce massive amounts of information, white papers, blogs, et cetera, social posts. That's how you train on a large language model to power an AI. There's no data in construction. There's no data flying off of a carpenter each time they're doing some trim work. So we... The world's intelligentia has ignored that, that the industry itself is not naturally gonna produce information that can help train and refine a language model and AI. So on the one hand, it's gonna be extremely hard for us to fully autonomous anything in construction, but also, it's massively risky. I mean, it's high-risk. You can understand that construction companies are really... Have a low-risk tolerance. So the first part makes it unlikely, and I think the safety part makes it unlikely squared. So this falls on us. This is on humans to solve this problem, which is exciting. That's a great future where you're not just... I don't know. Maybe crossing an ocean is one way to solve climate change in a boat. I think it's better to get out there and build solar farms and help connect people to do that. Joel Cheesman: Fraser, I know exactly what you're saying because I've put together an IKEA couch before. I know how hard construction labor is. [chuckle] Fraser Patterson: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: What do you guys wanna be when you grow up? Is it get acquired? I have a hard time seeing an IPO for a company like this. What do you wanna be? What's the end game here? Fraser Patterson: Oh, go public. Hard to see an IPO? Really? For a... I don't see that hard at all. But we're not... I don't wanna build to anything less. I think what we're building has so much potential, both domestically, internationally in terms of becoming a critical labor platform, a company of consequence that actually solves a real world problem. And I don't wanna put that into anyone else's hands, frankly. I would only trust us to go public. That is the goal. I've been acquired before. I don't like it. And I'm not saying that I would die for fiduciary duty to entertain all of that along the way, but we're aiming to go all the way. I think Skillit is building, potentially, a really important company for the 21st century. All the tailwinds are behind us. We just need to keep building. Joel Cheesman: Going on all the way, Chad. Jesus Christ. Global aspirations, IPOs. This thing must be really F-in expensive. Talk about the pricing. How are you gouging companies so much to have this kind of mentality? Fraser Patterson: Yeah. No, we're not. Actually, we're about 70% cheaper when you tie in together all of the various costs that construction companies are spending across the various point solutions they've got, from Indeed, like job boards, RPOs, staffing agencies, et cetera. We charge a monthly subscription for each region and role and the value equation continues to evolve, but it is a affordable monthly subscription for access to all... An unlimited number of hires. You have unlimited seats. It's better on the bottom line, not just a better solution. Joel Cheesman: Was there an actual number in there? I dosed off a little bit. Fraser Patterson: No, I didn't provide one. Joel Cheesman: Okay, thanks. I just wanna make sure that... Fraser Patterson: You need coffee, man. Joel Cheesman: That was the case. Alright. He's a little dodgy. Is he ready for the firing squad though? Fraser Patterson: It was only 30 seconds. [laughter] That's awesome. Joel Cheesman: Alright, Chad, he's chomping at the bit. He's on his third cup of coffee. Go for it, Chad. Chad Sowash: So Fraser, I grew up in a construction family. Every single male, I swear, had a hammer with him, or fitting pipes all damn day, and they were always busy. And every single one of them had a chip on their shoulder because they had all of these individuals who went to "college" had the paper, that looked down upon them, although these guys made a damn good living. We've gotten away from that. And I can kinda like feel that chip on your shoulder, which I love. I love that 'cause that drives a startup. It drives a founder. Now, I understand that you're very, very early in this journey, and being able to actually get the skills on over the paper but getting the data, that to me is going to be one of the very hard pieces for you guys, especially even as you roll out these trade region pairs. Investing in sales and marketing makes a hell of a lot of sense, but the thing is, as a guy who's done go-to-market for years, you have to have that product solid, and which means we need candidates and you need a lot more data to be able to make sure that you get in there. Chad Sowash: So driving candidates with grassroots and a content strategy. The whole network effect thing sounds great, it sounds wonderful, but you're gonna need more than that. I really believe you're gonna need more than that. 98% of construction workers who come into Skillit, they want full-time, that doesn't surprise me at all. They don't wanna gig from job to job. They want to have that 40-hour-a-week schedule where they know they have stability. That's what they want. Here's the thing. I really believe you need to become the operating system for the unions. Chad Sowash: And the reason why I say that is because they have so many things that you need. Number one, they have the supply. Number two, they have the training. They have all of those things. Not to mention, you talk about going to DC and starting to partner with government. Government needs this too. They need an answer. The unions need an answer. The government needs an answer. Which means I don't think you're ever gonna have problems with additional cash if you can start to demonstrate this type of go-to-market and operating system type of business. And then at that point, I don't think an IPO is hard to see at all. This is very early, very early in your journey. But also, this is what companies are not doing and they're not doing well. I've gone through your process. You do ask a lot of questions, but those are the data points that are needed. And I think you've got a great idea, you just have to pull all of this go-to-market together. Which is why I'm gonna give you a big applause. I really think this is something incredibly needed in our industry and obviously our country. Joel Cheesman: Alright, alright. Fraser Patterson: Thanks, Chad. Joel Cheesman: Lord Fraser, don't get cocky 'cause it's my turn. I'm going from big chips on the shoulder to big waves in the ocean. Listeners know that I love a good wave. It's much better to be a pretty good surfer on a great wave than a great surfer on a shitty wave. A little tidbit of information for our listeners, according to a report by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, an estimated 2.1 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2030 and the cost of those missing jobs could potentially total $1 trillion in 2030 alone. That means there's demand and not enough supply, which means my friend, you're in the catbird seat for an industry that is going to need money, influence, attention. We mentioned government a little bit. We didn't mention the IRA in this call, the Inflation Reduction Act, which puts a lot of money into repairing, let's be honest, a crippling and decrepit American infrastructure... Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: That needs a lot of help. There are seven million or so men, I believe, on the sidelines, that are just opting out of the workforce. I think that the society's impression of laborers is changing slowly but surely. They're not viewed as losers like they were back in the day. I think that all that bodes well for your business. I hope you prove me wrong on the IPO thing. And maybe I'll even buy a share or two if you actually get on the NASDAQ. Joel Cheesman: I think this is also a global problem. There's a little thing called a war going on in Europe. Ukraine's gonna need to be rebuilt. Europe as well is gonna pitch into this process. I think it's all very good. Immigration, as you mentioned, I don't see that changing. I think that's a political grenade that no one's touching, which means the labor supply is gonna continue to be short, which means companies are gonna be paying you a lot of money to help solve their problems. I have a hard time finding any bad around this business other than maybe unknown threats that we don't see. I don't see any Coke competitors out there that'll squash you like a bug. So for those reasons and Chad's alone, I too... [applause] Joel Cheesman: Am giving Skillit a rousing applause. And it's making me a little hungry talking about it. That my friend, is a double-double bi-rating, which gives you... [music] Chad Sowash: Big applause. Joel Cheesman: The Careless Whisper. Chad Sowash: Big applause. Joel Cheesman: Yes, big applause. And of course, I gotta play it one more time. SFX: Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is, "If it's not Scottish, it's crap!" Joel Cheesman: Alright, Fraser, you survived the firing squad. How do you feel? Fraser Patterson: Feeling good. Yeah, enjoyed it. Good format. And great to meet you, guys. Keep doing the great work, it's awesome. Joel Cheesman: Can we consider that a round of applause for our show as a first time? Fraser Patterson: Yeah, absolutely. It is. Chad Sowash: Joel needed hugged a lot when he was a kid. Yeah. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: I need a hug. I need a hug. Alright Fraser, before you leave us, where can our listeners find out more about the company? Fraser Patterson: Skillit.com, S-K-I-L-L-I-T dot com. We're also on LinkedIn, obviously. And you can find us on Twitter and Facebook. It's SkillitUSA. Joel Cheesman: No TikTok? Fraser Patterson: We are on TikTok, but I think it's probably SkillitUSA as well. Joel Cheesman: Okay, good. Alright, alright. Fraser Patterson: It's fairly new. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Good to hear. I would have changed my review of the product. And with that Chad, another firing squad is in the can. We out. Chad Sowash: We out. SFX: 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.

Europe has been a leader when it comes to passing laws that protect individual privacy and support pay equity for years, and a new law taking hold will require a large number of companies to publish salary ranges just a few short years from now. It’s all pretty detailed - and probably pretty confusing to a lot of Americans - which is why we invited Maria Colacurcio, CEO at Syndio and Anita Lettink, future or work speaker & HR tech advisor, to the podcast. We have so many questions, and it’s a good thing they have all the answers. If you’re doing business in Europe, it’s a must-listen. And if you’re in North America, it could be a crystal ball into the future. https://synd.io/blog/eu-pay-transparency-cheat-sheet/ 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 HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. It's your mom's favorite podcast, AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. What's up boys and girls? I am Joel Cheeseman, your co-host, joined as always, the jelly to my peanut butter, Chad Sowash is in the house. And today we welcome Maria Colacurcio, CEO at Syndio and Anita Lettink, future of work speaker and HR tech advisor. Ladies, that's a mouthful. Welcome to the podcast. Maria Colacurcio: Thanks for having us. Chad: From all over. Now, Maria, where are you at right now? Maria Colacurcio: Well, normally I am in Bellevue, Washington, outside Seattle, Washington but right now I'm in Redwood City, California, so, you know. Chad: Okay. Same coast. Same coast. But we have Anita, who's all the way across the other side of the pond. Now, you're in the Netherlands. Where at in the Netherlands, Anita? Anita Lettink: I live close to Amsterdam. Chad: Nice. Joel: Oh, well, that's a bummer. That must suck, huh? Anita Lettink: Yeah, that's really bad. [laughter] Chad: Well, let's go ahead and do this. Let's go over, let's do some Twitter bios real quick. Just really short about you, long walks on the beach, what you like to do, all that other fun stuff. Anita, go ahead and go first. Anita Lettink: I like to travel. I like to read and I do a lot of public speaking, as you said, HR tech and payroll advisor, and currently writing a book on equal pay. Chad: Shocking. Imagine that. So where's your favorite place to travel to? Anita Lettink: Oh, good question. I like San Francisco. I like New York, was there last year and this year I went to Slovenia where I had never been and that was awesome. Joel: And where's your least favorite, whether it's based on the city is shit or the people are assholes? Anita Lettink: I don't know. I don't have a city where I think I never want to go there again because, there's always something... I mean, the moment you're at the airport, it feels like vacation, at least for me. Chad: Yeah. We'll give you a long list about ones here in the States that you just don't wanna mess with. So Maria, over to you. Give us a quick Twitter bio about you. Maria Colacurcio: Okay. I, as you said, am the CEO of Syndio. So I am obsessed with all things workplace equity, which is important. I also am obsessed with these crazy fitness competitions that started in Europe. So they're on trend with our theme today, which is Europe, the EU directive. And they involve running, pushing a heavy sled, all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm just, I love it. Joel: Are you old enough to remember American Gladiators? Maria Colacurcio: Yes. Joel: So there's a great documentary called Muscles and Mayhem, I think, on Netflix that documents... Chad: She's writing it down. Joel: The rise and fall of American Gladiators. It was awesome, as someone who was there. Chad: Are you a big CrossFitter? Is that what I'm hearing? Maria Colacurcio: No, it's not really CrossFit. I think CrossFit's starting to come into the sport. It's called HYROX. And my friend's daughter was like, if you have to spell it, it's not a sport. [laughter] There's that opinion. [laughter] Joel: HYROX is what I say at the bar on Friday night. Maria Colacurcio: All right, but it's running, you run at about 8K, so you run a kilometer and then you do some sort of thing and it's pushing a heavy sled, doing lunges with a sandbag on your back, and then you run again. So it's a lot of running. So what it does is, for us littler folk, I'm only 5'4", it kind of balances it out because I might not be as good on an erg or a rower or a ski because I'm not as heavy, but I can make up for it on the run. So it feels equalizing and I'm all about equity. Chad: So it sounds like equity to me, which goes right into today's subject. What a great segue, Maria. Joel: I thought she was gonna say, do a 1K and then chug a beer. I wasn't expecting push something else. Maria Colacurcio: I mean... Joel: There are those. SFX: How could anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Chad: There are that. Maria Colacurcio: And they do pay their male and female winners the same. So that's another big plug for the sport. Chad: Very happy. You can thank women's soccer for that. Okay. So let's go, we're gonna go ahead and delve directly into today's EU directive on transparency. We also wanna talk a little bit about the US and how we're being impacted, but I think it's important to set up some context for those listeners who don't really understand the problem, let alone this new directive. So let's get into some causation real quick. The gender pay gap basically defined as, my definition, as men getting paid more for doing the exact same job as women are doing. In the US, the newest Pew research shows that compared to White men, White women get paid 83 cents on the dollar, Black women, 70 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic women 65 cents on the dollar. So how did we get here? How did we... How did this huge gap, this huge pay gap, actually form? How did it happen? Anita Lettink: Yeah. So there are several reasons for the pay gap. Traditionally, men negotiate better than women, that has always been thought. But what new research actually shows is that male bosses are more inclined to give men who negotiate a higher salary than women who negotiate. There are all kinds of reasons why this has happened. Other reasons are, for instance, women taking a career break because they're the ones to have children, obviously, and interestingly enough here is that there's also a fatherhood bonus. So if you are a man with children, and research has shown that you get higher raises simply because employers think that you provide more or you have more stability in your career. So those are two reasons. Maria Colacurcio: I think a big part of this is because companies are not yet realizing that they are accountable for this. And it's incumbent upon the employer to make sure they're analyzing pay equity to ensure they don't have disparities that are because of gender, race, or ethnicity. So one of the things that drives me nuts is when people start talking about negotiation, for example, if you are dinging people because they're not a good negotiator, that is not the person's problem, that is your problem as an employer because negotiation is not typically something that you want to say is a reason you pay what you pay. So I think one of the things that's really interesting with all these pay transparency laws that are accelerating really quickly around the country and around the world is that companies now have to be pretty responsible for understanding why they pay what they pay. And in the past, when you look at the way pay equity analyses were done, they were this archaic clunky backward-looking thing, and nobody really understood why it is they pay an engineer X or another engineer Y. And so the more accountable you make employers on that, the better it will get. Chad: So Anita said something that struck me, where let's say for instance an individual's been "mommy tracked." We've heard of that before, where obviously they've gotta go out. You're having the baby, you're having your 12 weeks or the amount of weeks that you're gonna have and therefore you're automatically set back. At that point, are we actually identifying this in organizations or to be able to help them stop doing this? Or is this a part of the equation and/or formula they're using and they think it's okay and it's right. Maria Colacurcio: Yeah. I mean, I can take this first and then Anita I would love to hear your perspective. So one of the things we see all the time is an organization will say they pay for tenure. So they pay for time enrolled. That's one of the reasons why they pay what they pay. And if you look at the detail in the pay policy analytics that we offer in our product, what's really interesting is a lot of times men and women will start out making the same. Sometimes women even start out making more, but over time what happens is that men's pay increases and women's pay flat lines or goes down. And a lot of times it can be attributed to parental leave. So also men are more aggressively negotiating retention increases and women aren't, or maybe they're hitting a promotion cycle while they're out on leave. So they're missing that cycle and they're not actually getting to take advantage of it because they're gone. So they're passed over. So these are all things that a company can easily prevent if they're doing analysis and using software to make sure they deeply understand what their pay policies are doing or not doing. And trust me, I mean, I've had seven kids, so... SFX: What? Maria Colacurcio: Yeah. I have seven kids. Chad: You like, you're in your mid-20s, how do you have seven kids? [laughter] Maria Colacurcio: Oh you're the best, man. That's why I'm wearing your shirt. It's the shirt that makes me look young. No, I mean, that's six parental leaves. So you add all that time up and that's a lot of time. And so you've just gotta really understand how that's impacting folks and use analytics to make sure you're not having that pass over effect. Chad: What are we seeing in Europe around the same conversation? Anita Lettink: We have the exact same conversation... Chad: Really? Anita Lettink: Here. In fact, yeah, the EU directive came about because we have this persistent pay gap in the EU, it's about 13%. We do not break it down into race, so we don't have those numbers, but in the past decade it has only gone down with 3%. Even though equal pay for equal work, treating people equally at work has been part of the EU legislations since forever. And so that hasn't helped. And that is why we now have the new EU pay directive. Chad: Okay. So before we jump with both feet into the EU pay directive, Maria said something around negotiating and negotiating has been the, almost an American pastime. It's like if you can't negotiate for more that's your fault. Now that's been put on the individual as opposed to the employer for probably 100 years plus. So how do we get past this narrative or this thought, this thinking, this behavior to stop thinking that somebody who can negotiate is just a better employee? 'Cause that's what it comes down to. Maria Colacurcio: Yeah. You've gotta give companies tools to address this and you've gotta give them tools to address it at the recruitment level and at the hiring manager level. So one of the things that's really common for our customers is there's a solution called Pay Finder. I'm not getting salesy, but you'll understand in a sec why I'm referencing this. And what it does is it sits on top of your latest pay equity analysis. So you're good, you've done the analysis, you've remediated, you have no issues that are because of gender, race or ethnicity. You're feeling good, but now your recruiters and your hiring managers are gonna go off and not only make a bunch of new hire offers, but they're gonna promote a bunch of people. And so how do you make sure that you stay in range with those new hire offers and those promotion offers so that you don't muck everything up and when you're looking back to do your next analysis, you have a bunch of more issues? Maria Colacurcio: So to me it's really that starting pay, which is the biggest factor in any pay equity analysis, you have to have guidance. You've gotta guide the discretion with real-time data so that you know a range within which to stay. And if you've got that, if someone's negotiating, that's fine. But you also have that guiding light of what is the range within which I need to stay here so that I don't create issues moving forward. And that range is based on folks in your company who are already doing that same work and what are they getting paid? Joel: Have things gotten better or worse since the pandemic? Anita Lettink: I would say roughly the same. Maybe even a bit better because what you see with especially younger people is that they insist on seeing ranges, salary ranges in job ads. If it's not there, then they are much less likely to come and work for you. They simply want to know what you will pay or whereabout their salary will be. So I think slowly it's getting better. But what you see happening at the moment is that there are companies that are publishing these enormous ranges like we think it's... Joel: Zero to 2 million, I think, was that Citibank that did that? Yeah. Anita Lettink: Exactly, those types of, those acts of diligence. And with new legislation coming in you will see that go down because you simply cannot keep that up, your current employees see that, and if you start to publish ranges that are far outside what you give your tenured employees, then you have an immediate issue on your hands. So there have been some excesses, I would say but it is being normalized as we speak. Joel: Okay. Chad and I talk all the time about how diversity and inclusion have been politicized in America. And it becomes an issue where companies just say, screw it, I'm out. I don't, I sell stuff to everybody and I don't want to get involved in this political thing. Transparency seems to like, beyond that balance of not quite political, but could fall into political sort of arguments. Where does it fall in, in European terms? Does anyone talk about this as a political issue or is it sort of a we're all on board this progress? Anita Lettink: I wouldn't say we are all on board, but I would say it isn't nearly as politicized as it is in the US. Joel: Yeah. So the EU directive, when does it happen? Is it only Europe? Is the UK involved in any of this? Is it only focused on gender, get specific about the directive. Anita Lettink: So it is for every country within the European Union, which at the moment is not the UK anymore because of Brexit, so they left, they don't have to adhere except for the employees that they have in Europe, as for every company outside of Europe that employs people within Europe. So the threshhold for the first round in 2027 is 100 employees. If you have 100 employees, you will have to report annually on the gender pay gap in your company, which means for, I would say 90, maybe 95% of companies that they first have to understand what that is. So during the next three years, they will be busy calculating, adjusting, reviewing, so that they are ready for their first report, which is due by June 2027, and then they go on an annual repeat of that report. And then smaller companies have seven years before they have to submit their first report, and then they do it every 3-4 years. Joel: And it's not just gender as I understand it, it's... You can't say just 'cause you're older, you get less. It's a wide umbrella that's influenced by this law. Correct? Anita Lettink: It's a wide umbrella, but as a company, you only have to report on the gender pay gap, but obviously when you only look at the gender pay gap, you miss out on a whole lot of things, and as Maria can tell you, you need to look at much more elements of pay and compensation in order to bridge the gap. It is not just salary and it is not just gender. Chad: Yes. And there is my point to Maria, how do you help companies that are global organizations, they're seeing this happen in the EU, we are seeing it happening spotty through the United States, you know something like this is gonna happen in California, and everybody does business in California for God's sake, so they're all going to have to do it. So how do you start to get companies ready for this move, because many of them aren't ready. I don't know if they're not ready, they don't wanna be ready, they're trying to push back and wait until they start seeing fines to see if they even need to start putting assets and resources to this, so how are you talking to those big organizations and helping them get ready to roll this out? 'Cause it's like eating an elephant, right? You've gotta do it one bite at a time. What are those bites? Maria Colacurcio: Yeah, and just a couple of numbers to kind of set the stage on that. So before the EU directive, there are about 18 countries in Europe where global pay reporting was required, and after the EU directive, that number jumps immediately to 32. The other element of this that Anita can talk about, and she and I have had a lot of conversations about, is this concept of career progression. So before, when you think about just a pure gender pay gap report where you're looking at your median pay gap, your unadjusted gap, and for those who don't know, 'cause these get conflated all the time, there's a difference between pay equity and the pay gap. Pay equity is looking at equal pay for equal work, so looking at folks doing similar jobs and are there disparities that you can't rule out are because of something like gender or ethnicity. The unadjusted pay gap is when you look at averages, so all your men up here and all your women are down here, and what does that gap look like? So the reporting in the UK that's been around for a while, required employers to publish their pay gap. And what's really interesting to watch is the United States, traditionally in the past, was focused on pay equity, mostly because companies have that risk of pay equity class action litigation and lawsuits. And now we're seeing this cross influence where Europe's focus on unadjusted gap is starting to influence the US, and the US focus on pay equity is starting to influence Europe. Maria Colacurcio: So you're really starting to see this global approach, and the EU directive is really the first time we're seeing that global approach. Now, for global companies, these global pay reports are a huge nut to crack, and so what we're really recommending to companies is don't wait until you hit the deadline. What you really should be doing is conducting in-depth pay equity analysis now, fixing whatever problems you have, remediating, putting plans in place to fix your promotion numbers or how people are moving throughout your organization, so that when it is time to do the reporting, you're in a pretty good state. Because here's the thing, those reports are public and everyone from investors to employees who potentially wanna work for you are going to see those numbers, so the worst thing you could do is wait until those deadlines versus getting to work right now. And the last thing I'll say is, we've created solutions over the past year, I would say, in anticipation of this, to help companies get their arms around these global pay reports. Because one thing that folks don't realize until they start doing it, is that of the 27 countries, there could be 27 different little knits and knots in the reports that are a little bit different here and there. Maria Colacurcio: So it's not just one version, some require career progression, some require different cuts and slices of things, so it's really important to take that into consideration as well. Joel: Anita when you're starting to see, I mean, many of these large companies, and again, this is about eating the elephant. For me, we're in a great time where we've got data all over the place. We might not know where everything is, but being able to actually get specific types of platforms like Syndio in place to help you make sense of that, are you starting to see more companies start to lean heavier on those types of platforms to start to figure this out? 'Cause there's a lot of data, getting to it might be a pain in the ass for some, but being able to get to it and collect that data is really job won. Right? Anita Lettink: Right. But then making sure that you're comparing apples to apples is probably the hardest part of all of this. I have been in global payroll for the past 20 years, and I have witnessed this whole move of companies trying to standardize their local payrolls at the regional level, at the global level, and that is only payroll and it was super hard and it still is super hard to do. Now, you do not only need the information from your payroll system or also from your HR system, from maybe your compensation, your time system, your succession planning, so you have lots of or data that you need to put together from different countries with different local regulations. And so understanding that equal pay for equal work works the same in the Netherlands as in Germany, as in France, as in Italy, where you have all these people... Anita Lettink: Is going to be very, very time-consuming. It is not hard in the sense that you cannot put all that data together, but understanding what it means and what it means in Italy when you compare it to Poland or to Portugal, that is a whole different ball game. Also, the EU directive is a generic law that needs to be adapted by the countries. And countries must as a minimum take over the EU requirements, but are allowed to have stricter regulations. It's the same as the GDPR where we all know that Germany has the most strict form of the GDPR, and therefore a lot of hosting companies put their stuff in Germany because then they're covered for all of Europe, so something similar will probably happen for the EU directive. Countries do now have three years to put that into their local legislation and then we'll see, so we're in a bit of a wait and see situation. From a legislative perspective, you know what it will be. It might be a little bit stricter but it does not mean that you can wait. Anita Lettink: Because my feeling is that if you come out in 2027 with a report that says, "Oh wait, we have a pay gap and it is more than 5%, and we need to do something about it." That people... Your employees will turn around and say, "You knew this since 2023. You had four years to remedy this and you didn't." And I think that will be a breach of trust. Chad: Yeah, no question. So, Maria, spending 20 years in the military. Right? I see the complexity of corporate America, and it's funny because the government usually is way too complex, but in this case, if you take a look at the military, you know what everybody gets paid. Everybody has a behavior and they don't... There's no negotiation, right? You have promotions, you have schools, you have all these things, but it fits within a framework that is incredibly transparent, probably because it's all paid by taxpayer dollars, but still there is this very simplistic model in which they have been able to deploy that helps to drive equity. Should we start cleaning the corporate system up and try to move it more towards something that's more structured and more systematic and transparent like that? Maria Colacurcio: I think that's what these laws are trying to do in their own way, and if you come back to the States and you look at Illinois, for example, so the Illinois law that was just past included this provision of career progression, which is in the EU directive. So again, there's that cross-influence, so you've got equal pay for work of comparative value, you've got pay and career progression transparency, you've got the right to information, which plays into what you're asking, pay reporting and then a joint pay assessment. Those are really the components of the EU directive. Maria Colacurcio: So what Illinois does, is Illinois talks about if you have a job that has a career progression, so let's say you're a machine operator and the next level is machine operator senior or lead, they actually are requiring companies to lay out the career progression and explain in detail what skills need to be acquired in order to move up to that next level. So it really takes all the guessing out of promotions and who's being promoted and who's not. If someone is promoted, that promotion is required to be posted in terms of what does it take to get into a role like that? So I think a lot of these laws are sort of circling around the exact idea that you're talking about, which is, shouldn't we just be really transparent about why it is companies pay what they pay, what skills they're paying for, how that's changing or evolving over time based on the priorities of the business, and what it's gonna take to get up to the higher levels of pay bands. And again, it's something that feels very complex today because of how just archaic our job architectures and leveling and all of those things are because they're based on an old model. But I think as we start to modernize, we are gonna get closer to something that just feels more equitable, transparent, consistent and fair, honestly. Joel: Chad mentions the military and the military has a lot of employees. This law cuts at 100 employees which is a lot less than the military. Frankly to me, it seems kinda low for such a bureaucratic regulation to take hold. We talk about laws that have taken place in Illinois, New York and China, I like to say if you show us a 10 foot wall, we'll show you an 11 foot ladder. What are companies doing to get around this whether it's higher contract people, whether it's, oh, we're nearing 100, let's just hire people from the UK. Or let's just hire gig workers, or let's put a range between zero and 2 million in our job, or let's do it in style, like how are companies getting around this and how is the government gonna keep up? Anita Lettink: Yeah, I don't think that companies will skirt around this simply, [chuckle] they will try. But I was thinking about something similar from a legislation perspective that happened about 10 years ago when we started to talk about work councils and works councils were put in place in companies with over 35 employees. And so everyone was looking at a handful of companies that started to break down their entities in smaller entities, never going over 35 employees. Well, if you have to break that down in all these entities, that gets costly very quickly because of all the administration and the taxes and what else? Anita Lettink: So because the number is set at 100, my feeling is that this will not happen. In fact, I have talked over the past couple of weeks with some people that did this for companies with 60 employees or 70 employees and said it was no big deal, simply because people talk anyways. Everyone in a company knows what their colleagues are making or their teammates or when it's appraisal time, they want to know what did you get? And most people will maybe not say the number, but they will say the percentage, and so you have an idea of what your colleagues are making. There's ways to skirt around the official secrecy that happens at the corporate level. Joel: As an American, I think it's cute that you think no one will get around this regulation. Maria, this one's for you. As an American as well, the market tends to be the best way to get change to happen. Indeed, the number one job search site in America recently said, we're doing pay transparency. If you don't put a job or a salary range in a job, we're gonna put it in there for you. We've heard and seen notably a lot of companies do it because they don't want Indeed to just throw in whatever number, they wanna have some control over that. Do you guys have any inkling or data around what has happened with salaries in posting since Indeed made this change? Are we seeing a lot more pay transparency, a lot more ranges, a lot more applications, which is another thing that I think Anita touched on is if you put your salary range in a job posting, you're gonna get more responses, that's a market force driving change and I think that's what we're gonna see happen. Agree, disagree. Why? Anita Lettink: Oh, can I say something to that, Joel? Joel: Sure. Anita Lettink: Actually what happens is you do not get more responses, but you get better qualified to responses. You get actually less response because people self-select out, but the ones that stay in are qualified. Joel: The quality is better. Anita Lettink: Exactly. Joel: Okay. Maria Colacurcio: Yeah, and there's a lot of studies that have come out recently. I'll find the source that say Gen Z won't even apply. They won't even bother unless there's a salary range. I mean with current legislation, one-fifth of all workers in the United States are covered by some sort of pay transparency legislation today, and obviously the EU broadens that globally, so I don't know anything about with Indeed's move, what's happened since then, but I do think the more and more companies that do this, the more competitive and required it becomes. And I think it's one of these things too when you think about all of this is a brand exercise, it's not necessarily a compliance exercise. I mean it is, but it all plays back into, are you a brand I can trust? Are you a place that I believe is going to pay me fairly? And there's two sides of this, the side that nobody talks about that I think is really interesting in particular in today's macro environment with the volatility in the market and things like that, is that workplace equity is about being fair and equitable to the employee, but it's also about being fair and equitable to the employer. And the employer wants to be sure that their pay policies are driving value from the most productive folks and getting the most business performance for the company. Maria Colacurcio: So it's sort of a two-way street in that you have to make sure your pay policies and why you pay what you pay are obviously fair and equitable, but you also wanna make sure that you're paying for the things that drive your business forward. And so I think that's the big benefit for employers in this whole conversation is let's get really clear about your best negotiator might not be your best person for the job, and in fact, a lot of studies suggest that over-confidence in an interview process is actually linked to the worst performance so it's good for the employer as well. Joel: Is there anything that's going on? 'Cause I guess it cuts both ways in some cases. Do you fear that companies will be less likely to give bonuses or increase out? So you have two developers, they're the same title, they make the same money, one is clearly performing better than the other. An employer might say, "Well, I can't do anything 'cause we pay them both the same," whereas maybe without pay transparency you would say, "Okay, we're gonna bump up the better one," I mean do you get around it by giving a new title, do you give a bonus structure that's less transparent, like how does a company get through that for either of you? Anita Lettink: The fact that you have equal pay does not mean that you cannot reward people for a performance. As long as that is very clear that part of pay is performance related, whether that is a bonus or an additional increase, but you have to document it and it has to be used in the overview. So it does not mean that you cannot pay someone a little bit more because they clearly perform appraisal score was four, while the other's appraisal score was three. Joel: So developer number one is the higher performer, developer number two is the less. Well, number two now know that developer number one got a bonus, and I have to ask why, or will that be part of the law, or... Anita Lettink: No. No. So, pay transparency means that... So according to the law, you publish pay scales, it does not mean that you publish everyone's individual, so you are transparent on the process and you are transparent on pay scales if you want to. Joel: So I don't have to report a bonus to developer number one? Anita Lettink: No. Joel: OKay. Anita Lettink: Of course no. Chad: Of course not, Joel. Joel: Thanks for clearing that up for me. Maria Colacurcio: No, of course not. No. And I think that's why there's so much talk right now with our customers. For every customer that's putting in performance ratings, there's another customer throwing them out. And so it's really interesting, this whole conversation because everyone wants employees that are high performers, but this whole idea of how do we actually measure that is something that has been just a mess for decades. And I think what's really interesting about the work that we do is almost consistently when we do our first pay equity analysis with a customer, they're using performance as a control, meaning if they're using performance as one of the reasons why they pay what they pay, the next question is, "Oh, do you have a product that can analyze my performance rating to make sure that that's not biased?" And we do, so we can do that but it's all about then looking at that performance control and slicing that and making sure that you don't have the systemic problems that you tend to see with performance, which is women rate very well in performance, but their potential ratings tend to be much, much lower, it's even worse for women of color. So making sure that you're looking at that reading and taking that pretty seriously, is something I would also highly recommend. Anita Lettink: Yeah, and I think to that point, I think that a lot of companies are throwing performance ratings out in a first go is simply because as they are understanding all these contributors to pay, they also realize how biased their current performance ratings are. Chad: Right. Anita Lettink: And when there is bias in your performance ratings, then obviously it's very difficult to use them when you're setting up this whole equal pay initiative. That does not mean that you cannot re-introduce it, but it does mean that you have to make adjustments and probably train your managers and look at the process itself, but afterwards you can definitely use it again. Chad: So for me, it sounds like much like we're doing with AI today, it's explainability, because as we're looking at compliance, you've gotta be able to take this mess, this black box, which we always talk about AI being a black box. Same thing with pay, pay is a black box, nobody can see in and it's not transparent, so therefore, we've gotta be able to provide, again, a cleaner solution with explainability in there so that when you do have compliance and reports and so on and so forth, you know what the hell is going on. I've got one more question. Maria, you talked about trust, right? And how trust could actually be synonymous, should be synonymous with your brand. Have you started to see some of your clients start using that trust along with like a narrative within the actual employer brand or the total brand narrative? Maria Colacurcio: Absolutely, so we have a certification program that's called Fair Pay Workplace, and the whole point is there's a separate alliance of experts that decides on what is the methodology, standards and tools to have a pay equity analysis that is done the right way. Because there's a bunch of ways you can do this wrong, you can disaggregate to green, you can do all the stuff that Joel said, sort of squint and say, "Well, he's a special snowflake, so he doesn't count. I'm not gonna compare him to her. I'm actually... Joel: I'm starting to feel triggered Maria, watch out. [laughter] Maria Colacurcio: Yeah. The cynic, right? So we put together the certification program so that our customers could actually have the stamp of approval that says not only are we doing pay equity, we're a fair pay workplace. Certified, we're doing it the right way, everything's above board and we do it as acknowledged by this alliance of experts. So what we're seeing is that so many of our customers are now using that in their recruiting, they're putting itt on their website, they're talking about it to new candidates, to existing employees, they're doing town halls around it, they're asking us to come to town halls, and I think there is this really important measure of, you are offering me your time and your labor, and I am in return making sure that I value you for that contribution. And then I'm analyzing and taking it upon myself as the employer to make sure it's equitable. So we're seeing that really, really start to accelerate because I think companies realize that pretty soon this is going to become table stakes. So the ones that are doing it well now wanna try and garner some credit and actually use it as a differentiator while they can. Joel: Ladies, thank you for coming on the Chad and Cheese podcast, that is Maria Colacurcio and Anita Lettink. Ladies, if anyone listening wants to connect with you or find out more, where would you send them? Maria Colacurcio: Anyone can email me, you can email me directly. I'm maria@synd.io. Anita Lettink: And you can find me on LinkedIn or through my website anitalettink.com. Joel: Love it, love it. Chad: Too easy. Joel: Chad, that is another one in the can. We gotta make sure that you and I are both paid equally before we do any more shows on this podcast. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off on the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away and like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

That’s a serious problem for LinkedIn, and the boys dig into the issue and offer some possible remedies. LinkedIn isn’t the only one with problems, of course. Deel, an industry player who’s raised a total of $679 million to date, has its feet to the fire following an exposè by The Information. Plus, AI is trying to kill us, or at least the good folks of New Zealand, while kids in America are the new slave labor down on the farm. Then you have Delta who, along with Tom Brady, have formed an unholy alliance that’s wrong on so many levels. At least there’s some good news out of Indeed … wait, what? Gotta listen to find out. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Chad: Aw, yeah! It's International Star Trek Day, which means this show is ready to boldly go where no podcast has gone before. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel... Joel: I just can't do it, Captain! I don't have the power! Chad: Cheeseman. [laughter] Chad: This is Chad, C is for Champion Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, "Why women are swiping left on LinkedIn." Big deal, little deal, or no deal. And Tom Brady's retirement is really taking off. Let's do this. Chad: Oh so bad. [laughter] Joel: How was your labor day weekend? Summer's over. Chad: It was great. Went to Edisto Island, just about an hour from Charleston. I spent long weekend there with some family, doing some golf, spent some time in Charleston, then I came back. And Bradley, oh, yeah, from Candidate Hub sent me the Red Bank, which is... I've never had before. It's Canadian, I don't generally choose Canadian, but when it's sent to me, Bradley, you know I'm gonna drink it. Joel: Yup, he sent me a bottle of Laphroaig. Your favorite. Chad: So bad! Joel: Your favorite. Very nice, very nice bottle. I went to the opposite side or end of the country, I went to Minnesota. Chad: And it was hotter. Joel: It was hotter probably than where you were. It was in the 90s... Chad: It was. Joel: For God's sakes. And my wife is a huge Pearl Jam fan. Went to see them on Saturday night. During the day, we went to go see North Dakota State University football at the US Bank Stadium where the Vikings play. Which is a very cool stadium. It's very nice, it's a pretty brand new. And North Dakota... Chad: It's cool. Joel: They party, man. They know how to... Carson Wentz, they have a really proud football program... Chad: What else can you do in North Dakota? Joel: They've won like 17 national... Yeah, it's snow and football and beer, probably, but Minneapolis... Chad: And goats! Joel: It's a nice city. We had a good time in Minneapolis. Pearl Jam still brings it. They ended it with 'Purple Rain,' which was a great ending to that show. Chad: Very smart. Very smart. Joel: Apparently they're doing in every city, sort of... Yeah, they did a 'Cheap Trick' cover when they did Chicago. They're coming here to Indi this weekend, I will be there. I'm gonna go with 'Mellencamp' cover, if they're gonna do an Indiana... Chad: Like 'Little Pink Houses' or something. The 'Jack and Diane.' Joel: You gotta do 'Small Town' right? 'Small Town' would get everybody hyped up. [laughter] Chad: Okay. Whatever, okay. Joel: So anyway, a good time. Fall is here. Conference season is here. Football is here. I'm pretty psyched up. Chad: It is here. And we had our fantasy football draft last night. That's right, kids. Go ahead and go through the draft report. It was a pretty quick draft, which I like. I like that we had a quicker draft. The ones that I'm usually sitting through are like an hour and a half, two hours, this was less than an hour, which was fucking perfect. Joel: This is no child's game. When you play Chad and Cheese fantasy, you're on the clock. This is like time chess. You gotta make decisions quickly. Chad: Quickly, baby. Joel: You get extra flex in our league, which includes a quarterback, so you can play two quarterbacks. Which also means, with 12 people, the good QBs, man, they start getting sucked up fast. So we saw that happen. We have a pretty... Chad: 'Cause I took two QBs right outta the gate because I was 12th in the snake draft and I'm like, "Fuck this, I'm switching shit up. I'm going two fucking QBs right out of the gate." And that's what I did. Joel: Yeah, and I picked 11th, so I was right there with you. We have a pretty short bench... Chad: Yes. Joel: If you have an injury... Chad: Five. Joel: Or something bad happens, there's not a lot of talent left for you to weed through the dead talent that's in the NFL. It's a tough league, but it's a fun league. I'm pretty excited. Let's go down the grades. If you're not familiar with Fantasy, Yahoo ESPN after the draft, they give you a grade, typical ABCDF. Here's a breakdown of how we did. Jasper, our European delegate, got an A plus. Big Jets fan, big football fan, so that doesn't surprise me, even though he's from Europe. Your boy here, the Roundabout, got an A plus as well, which I'm really proud of. Which actually, I got A plus in my other draft, which means I'm gonna finish last in both of them. [laughter] Joel: Brent Lowe C, B plus. You got a B minus. Michelle Sergeant, C plus. Which she cleverly said, "C is for champion," so she kinda spun it. Chad: I can't believe she's bringing out the C word already. Joel: Yeah, Joe Dickson, the Factory Fix representative who is sponsoring Fantasy Football, came in with a C, so he's no smoking Joe. He's more of an average Joe at this point in the league. [laughter] Joel: Kristen Urban, C. Dena Parrow, C. Dennis Tupper, last year's champion, C minus. Marcy Mall, D. Dean Awsner, D minus. Jill Patterson, D minus. No one got an F, but there were some bad grades on this one, we'll see. It starts tonight. Chad: Yes. Joel: You'll be listening to this on Friday, so you will have known that the Chiefs... Lions... It starts tonight, I'm fired up. Chad: Yup! Joel: I'm fired up. Chad: It is. Joel: My wife is in Europe, so I have carte blanche to watch much football as I want. My six-year-old is gonna OD on iPad time, and I don't care. Chad: It should be iPad... He should be ODing on NFL time. That's what he should be doing. Joel: Did I say six? Yeah... He's not quite there with Dad. Chad: What was I doing when I was six? Come on! Anyway. Joel: On your pick, so who are you most excited about? Give us a couple of players that you're really into, that you got... Maybe some steals? Chad: Yeah, I didn't get any steals, unfortunately, I had a couple in mind, and I think you took a couple of them, 'cause you were right before me and I was like, "Fuck!" Joel: And don't think I didn't think about that. Don't think I didn't think about like, "Who would Chad take if I don't take them?" Chad: And I don't just take the next ranked that ESPN or Yahoo says. I'm gleaning down through. And I even had Zeke, I had Elliot. I was okay, he's gonna get some time this year. I know he is. I'm gonna pick him a little bit later. And it was right before I was going to pick him. You didn't pick him? Somebody else did. I was, fuck. I've got a, obviously a good team, B minus, pretty cool with that. But yeah, I think Lamar Jackson, and Joe Burrow being my quarterbacks or the highlights. No question. Joel: Yeah. I think Zeke has adopted my diet regimen 'cause he's looking more like the fridge than he is, the Zeke that we know. Maybe he'll punch in a lot of touchdowns like the fridge did back in the '80s. Chad: Possibly. Joel: So a lot of people pick quarterbacks first out the gate, which is not traditionally a fantasy strategy. It's get the receivers, get the highest, the high yardage guys. So I was happy at picking at 11th that Kelsey was around, so I just said, screw it. He's a good 10+ everyday, but he's got a bone bruise apparently. So we'll see how that goes. Chad: Not your typical tight end. Joel: Yeah, Trevor Lawrence pretty boy. I picked him last year and he started blowing up at the end. I think he's gonna have a really solid season. I'm excited about him. Otherwise, starters are pretty good. But my bench is crap. My bench is a whole lot of like Odell Beckham Jr, Dalvin Cook. Hopefully he'll play, so again, this league is not for the weak of heart, man, it's a tough league. So every week we'll start going down the leaderboards. We'll have this adventure together. And I'm really excited. I'm sure the Europeans are really excited to listen about fantasy football. Chad: Thanks. FactoryFix. Well, they should be. It's the top grossing sport in the world. Are you kidding me? Come on. [laughter] SFX: Shout out. Chad: Okay, I'm gonna do something here that's gonna shock a bunch of you. Shout out to Indeed. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: I'm sorry. Did you say Indeed? Chad: Yes. Joel: Okay. Chad: Yes. Shout out to Indeed for offering listen up kids, transgender employees who want to relocate for care or support a $10,000 benefit to cover their moving relocation expenses. So eligible employees will receive approval to relocate to a state or jurisdiction where they will be able to access the care and support they need. Can you imagine that, we're in the United States of a fucking America and people have to relocate to a state or jurisdiction where they're able to access the care and support they need. Missy Gaither, the VP of DEIB at Indeed said, "Our transgender non-binary and gender non-conforming colleagues are integral to our business and culture at Indeed." In a time when many states in the US are reverting back to 1930s mentality... We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Taking away women's rights, creating obstacles for voters, banning books, wanting to build walls, and not embracing child labor laws. That's the shortlist kids. Government, federal, state, and local who should be protecting their citizens are failing to do so. And instead, companies like Indeed, which I'm giving props to right now, they're actually having to protect their employees one way or another. So you all know I'm not a fan of Indeed, but you gotta give credit where credit is due. Shout out to Indeed for stepping up. Joel: So you brought the red meat on the first one. I'm gonna come with a big lollipop for mine on shout out. So Chad, who doesn't love a little rich girl, Sara Smile or some she's gone by Hall & Oates. Am I right? Well. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: The next time the wifi goes out and the data plan is running dry, you can get your Hall & Oates fix by getting this calling 71926 Oates. That's right. Calling Oates. Calling Oates get it. You get a computerized woman's voice telling you what numbers to press to hear one of four Hall & Oates, great songs. Chad: Very nice. Joel: Why does this exist? Why the hell not? I say. You can go for that. You man eater. Shout out to Callin Oates. [applause] Chad: No, can do. [music] Chad: My next shout out again. Can't believe this kids, but it's still Elon Musk. Apparently Twitter has lost 90% of its value and could be worth just 4 billion compared to the 40 billion Elon paid for it. I guess, advertisers like the MyPillow guy could make up the advertising losses after Elon took over and allowed hate groups back on the platform. Shout out to the Once Rocket ship, now lead balloon we once knew as Twitter. Joel: Have you been to Whataburger? It's the southern thing. It's a Texas thing for sure. Chad: No. Joel: All right. Before there was Five Guys and a lot of the others, there was Whataburger, freshly served, really good custom burgers. Anyway, Whataburger and Texans will know who this is, has opened its first digital kitchen in Austin, Texas. That means it's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 364 a year. They are closed on Christmas day because that's how... Chad: Is it flippy in there? I mean, how does this work? Joel: That's how Davey Crockett would've wanted it. The digital kitchen does not have any interior seating areas and customers can only order food through the Whataburger app or the website, and it's no cash, of course. Humans still cook the food, Chad, but let's be honest, that will change eventually. Shout out to Whataburger. The staple of my high school diet was a double, double with jalapenos. You can't go wrong with that and now I'm really hungry. Chad: Well, we've been saying again, Chad and Cheese t-shirts on the socials. And I gotta say kids, if you're out there and you don't know how to get free stuff, we're not just talking about t-shirts. We're talking about t-shirts from JobGet, of course whiskey. That's two bottles of whiskey. One from yours truly, and the other from the Cheese Man, from TextKernel beer, craft beer. Not this bullshit Coors Light or something... None of that, but craft beer from Aspen Tech Labs. All of this delivered straight to your front door, not by Chad and Cheese. We've got UPS and FedEx that does that. But then we have birthdays, oh, kids rum with plum.io. And if you have a birthday... [laughter] SFX: Really? Chad: Guess what? You could win. SFX: Can you feel the tension. Chad: From Plum. SFX: In the air right now? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: That's right, Chad. Another, trip around the sun for some of our listeners. It's a short list today. It's a short list. It's just been big lately so we're gonna crank through these. Alicia Bookler, Alan Bourne, Laura Martinelli, James Ellis, our friends, and Kari Quas all celebrating... SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Another trip around the sun. Happy birthday to them. Chad: Is it Kari or is it Carrie? Joel: Kari Quas. [music] Joel: Oh man, my liver is scared. Chad: Brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing Kids. That's right. Chad and Cheese Adventures and/or let's say Travel. Next Tuesday, the 12th of September at the Tin Roof on Broadway is the Pre-Rec Fest party. Thanks to our friends at plum.io and Aaron App. Hot chicken on the stick, top shelf booze and music. I mean, it's Nashville, so you're getting music whether you like it or not. But this is the start. This is next week. But remember, if you come to the party, it's a marathon, not a sprint, so don't go getting your ass all crazy hungover for the next day 'cause Wednesday, Joel and I are going to be MCing the Disrupt stage, which is all about technology and tom foolery with our friends, Lynn and Tracy from the newly formed Brash and Boozy podcast. [music] Chad: Apparently they trashed the talent rebel cast, and they're now going with Brash and Boozy, which I like the evolution I like. And then Shelley and Serge from the Recruitment Flex, they're gonna be on stage with us. After that, we've got a post party, we've got an after party. On Thursday, we're gonna finish up Rec Fest and then roll over to the after party Booze Cruise. Thanks to the team at Hackajob. That's right, Hackajob is gonna be there and because of Hackajob, we're gonna have Hattie B's Barbecue. SFX: All right. All right. All right. Chad: And all the booze you can handle. Probably more booze than you can handle, but we're gonna have a lot of booze. Joel: Don't fall off the boat people. Please. Please, everyone has to sign a waiver, which I thought was great. Only a Chad and Cheese party does a waiver need to be signed. Chad: Then we're gonna find ourselves in Vegas. That's right. Two days on the expo hall at HR Tech. Obviously, we're gonna be drinking, eating, doing interviews, and the Fuel 50 booth two days in a row. We gotta thank Fuel 50 for letting us crash at their place in Vegas. So big shout out to Fuel 50. If you want to see us, come to the Fuel 50 booth there at HR Tech, that's gonna be a big show kids. Then a few days later, we're leaving on a jet plane. Don't know when we'll be back again. Yes, we're hopping on a plane for what? Unleash. Unleash World in Paris. If you're a vendor or a practitioner in Europe and you're not going to unleash what's... Joel: What's wrong with you? Chad: What's your problem? What's going on? What's going on here? Seriously, get your ass to Paris. Check out great tech, meeting amazing people, and buy us a drink or two while you're there. All of this wonderful stuff you can find at chadcheese.com/events or just go to chadcheese.com, click the events in the upper right hand corner. And also there's a free link there too if you wanna sign up for free stuff. Joel: Did you say Serge and Shelley are joining us at Rec Fest? SFX: Take off Lee. We're doing our movie. Don't wreck our show, you hoser. Joel: I love it. By the way, Steven McGrath confirmed for Paris baby. Chad: Yes! [music] Joel: Oh, topics. Well, let's start with something we haven't in a while. SFX: Playoff layoffs. Intro: Oh, that's right. Layoffs in the industry. Let's start with the big one first. Our friends at talent.com speaking of Canada formerly Neuvoo headquartered in Quebec, technically Montreal, I believe or specifically Montreal. So talent.com had a big run of layoffs. It's a little unsure about how many, but someone inside told me that it was definitely a bigger cut than the 18% to 20% that happened in April, which by the way, 18-20 is pretty big. So if it's bigger than that, then this is I don't know. I don't wanna say a bomb level layoffs. But this was certainly a big one. Apparently, a lot of sales and customer service teams took a big hit. Remember talent.com took $120 million, spent a lot of money on the talent.com domain. They were supposed to give indeed a run for their money. So far I'd say... [music] Joel: Things aren't going so well at this point on that strategy. As well, layoffs at HackerRank. Our friends at HackerRank said goodbye to 53 employees. Apparently, Atlas laid off 30%. Atlas we don't talk a lot about, but they raised $220 million so far. They laid off 150 people. A company called Join, which I've never heard of, but they were on the list at layoffs.fyi, and Pega Systems, which is a public company laid off 4%, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it did impact 240 people in the process. And that is... SFX: Playoffs. Joel: Layoffs for the week. Chad: I think it's interesting because we always look at some of these other like Indeed competitors and we're like, what are you going to do different? Especially from a product deliverable standpoint for employers to be able to drive revenue. And if you take a look at 'em, I just can't see anything differently. I mean, there are some of like let's say for instance ZipRecruiter. They have fill, that does nothing for me as an employer. That is more of a job seeker experience thing. It's still not something that's huge, big fucking deal. But Talent, what have they done that is revolutionary, innovative, or anything like that, that really differentiates itself from Indeed. I can't think of anything. And if you can't, you can expect to wither and fail, and that's what sucks. I know they're Canadian all, and Canadians aren't the most innovative in the world, but there is some really good tech that's happening out there, and I would expect them to shit or get off the pot, man. Get on that innovation train. Joel: Blackberry's coming back, Chad. Watch what you say about the Canadians and innovation. Blackberry is coming back. Chad: Grim Jones, yeah. Joel: Yeah. All right, let's pivot from that to DEEL, that's D-E-E-L, has come under scrutiny for facilitating financial payments for prop trading companies, which are known for their questionable practices. These prop trading firms struggle to find financial partners, because they promise customers the chance to trade using company capital and share in profits. Out of 21 reviewed prop trading firms, 17 of the 21 used DEEL for payouts, some involving cryptocurrency. DEEL has defended its actions stating that its involvement with these companies accounts for less than 1% of its revenue, and that it conducts KYC, or Know Your Clients checks on all their customers. US regulators may investigate DEEL's role in these transactions. Chad, big deal, little deal, or you see what I did there? No deal. Chad: Atlas, as a matter of fact, one of their competitors we just talked about in layoffs. So when you're in startup land, you're moving fast and you're doing, well, and you're breaking shit, right? But you're doing everything that you can to find customers and drive MRR and ARR. So DEEL has taken nearly $680 million in funding. And at this point, I would assume they are moving fast and breaking as much as they possibly can. Now, I remember back in the early 2000s when we started getting scam jobs on job boards, we weren't ready for that. I mean, we were naive and didn't know how people with malintent would scam people using job postings. Well, we found out. Chad: So back in the day, we started instituting standard operating procedures around who can and who can't post, including some QA, QC to make sure that we were doing it right. This being less than 1% of their revenue should be simple. You just cut away the fat, right? That it's fairly, this is an optics play and it's obviously an issue. If you've ever traveled in the UK, this is for our UK listeners, for our Europe listeners, you'll be used to hearing the phrase, see it, say it, sort it. Joel: That was a horrible British accent, by the way, Chad. Chad: Yeah, I'm not good at it anyway. This just ensures that if somebody sees something wrong, they say something about it and it'll get sorted out. DEEL needs to make, to not make excuses and just get this sorted out. It's not a big deal. It's less than 1% of their revenue and they can easily just chunk this off and say, "Hey, sorry, but have a nice day." Joel: Yeah. My first thought was, holy shit, the information is covering a company in our space that isn't like LinkedIn or Indeed. If you know the information, it's a subscription only site. Most of their stories are like Tesla, Apple, like big brands that we all know. So the fact that they even covered DEEL to me was kind of a big deal and sorry. Go ahead. Chad: 680 million in funding, like a $12 billion valuation. That's why they care. Joel: Yeah. My first sense was that. My second was like, yeah, they're a startup. Startups do stupid shit. It's grow at all costs, especially when you take as much money as you have. The best thing they can do is like come out and say, look, we've parted ways with these organizations. Because if it's 1%, like the PR from it would be worth doing it. And in fact, today, Rippling came out and said that they have cut ways with any prop trading companies that they're doing business with. So... Chad: It's too easy. Joel: Rippling said, "Hey, we're gonna do it. So are you gonna do it?" I gotta think by this week, they will have cut ties with these companies that they're doing business with. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: So DEEL is crushing it, by the way. I think it's worth noting that while so many in our space are either laying off or freezing headcount, DEEL has increased their headcount a 166% in the past six months, 321% in the last year, and over a 1000% in the last two years. Their headcount and assuming that they're making money to justify these headcounts, they are clearly crushing it based on how many people are adding to the company, while many others are cutting back or not doing anything at all. So I think it's worth saying like, yeah, they fucked up, but they are growing like a weed and they are one to watch. When we talk about DEEL, Remote, Oyster, Velocity Global, like all these companies, like who's gonna own this space? DEEL might be in the first place spot, man. Chad: We've gotta remember they've got nearly $700 million in funding. So they might be playing the sugar rush game and we fooled ourselves into believing in late 2020, '21 and some of 2022, that that would be the new norm, and this is killing expectations right now. So we're literally seeing companies like the FAANG companies for the most part, who literally was trying to starve the market by buying up talents and getting talent literally to do nothing. But they were keeping the talent away from their competitors. I don't think that DEEL is doing this, although they could see some fatigue when it comes to that much hiring. There are tons and tons of competitors out there for them now. I thought it was interesting though, in the news that there was a report that they might buy Papaya Global, who also took $444.5 million in funding and have 750 employees. That's the total on LinkedIn. This is gonna be an interesting space to watch. EOR I think is hot. Joel: Yeah. Chad: I really do. Joel: There's a lot of sizzle Chad, let's see if there's states. SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: All right, well let's go to a company that we do talk about quite a bit, LinkedIn. A new survey reveals that 91%, I said 91% of female LinkedIn users experience unwelcome advances, resembling Tinder-like encounters. Many women confront senders, but it affects their LinkedIn activity in a negative way. Some women have left LinkedIn due to the issue, and they suggest increasing awareness, stricter guidelines, and bans for repeat offenders. LinkedIn expressed concern and urged reporting such behavior, Chad, what are your thoughts? Chad: Have you ever had this happen to you on LinkedIn? Has anybody connected with you and then said, hey, and they started getting these stupid, intimate types of catfishing conversations. Joel: They're usually from Ukraine and their account is banned a week later 'cause they're probably not a real person. Chad: Exactly. I understand there's a much different expectation for your experience on LinkedIn versus Grindr, Tinder and hell at this point, even Twitter right now, but it's still the internet. I receive requests like that on LinkedIn about five times a month that are total bullshit catfishing. I used to not look at the person's profile before connecting because I thought, eh, any connection's a good connection, right? Yeah. No, not in 2023. It's not. Joel: Yeah. Chad: I've had women or people posing to be women start intimate chats right out of the gate. And I've also had proud boys-like people connect with me and the next thing I know I have all this radical bullshit in my feed. My suggestion is don't click the LinkedIns, just focus like on any other social network on taking a look at who is asking to connect first and foremost. And then if you do connect and have this issue report or block 'em. And in this story that this lady was talking about, the first thing the guy asked is, okay, what's your bra size? Screenshot that shit, put it on LinkedIn and shame the fuck outta that dude. Seriously, public shaming is probably one of the best ways to get these fuckers to quit acting like assholes. Joel: Yeah. So my first thought was, and Twitter/X wants to be the next LinkedIn. You think this is a problem on LinkedIn? Wait till X? Chad: No. Joel: Doing some shit like this. The other thing was like, why doesn't an all female LinkedIn exist? How come no one's thought of that? Like, no men. Chad: Bumble, Bumble Buzz... Joel: Men could be on Bumble Buzz. Yeah. Chad: Bumble Bizz. Joel: Yeah, I don't know that there's a... Chad: Don't they have to be invited on or no? Joel: The dating site. Chad: Ah, okay. Joel: I've been out of it too long. But the dating site is, the women initiate the conversation. Chad: Yes. Yeah. Joel: Bumble Buzz. Bumble Biz. Chad: Bizz, Bizz yeah. Joel: Yeah. I think it's male female. Anyone can look, it's a separate app, but there's no all female like, fairy God boss kind of could do it, but they didn't. So anyway, those were two thoughts that came to my head. The wife and I went to go see 'Barbie' recently, and I don't think you've seen it yet. Chad: No. Joel: You're one of the only few people in America apparently that haven't. My 13-year-old daughter went to go see it before we did. And so apparently, you get choked up at the end. There's a sad part. Chad: In 'Barbie?' Joel: On 'Barbie.' Yeah. Chad: Jesus. Okay. Joel: I'm sitting there watching 'Barbie' and at the end, my wife, who, if you know my wife pretty tough as nails in terms of showing emotion and crying and she starts tearing up. I'm watching it, what the hell is she... Why? There's no dog dying. There's no parent in the hospital. There's no obvious reason to cry. And when I said, "Honey, you gotta explain to me the ending and why that's such a tear jerker clearly for you." And her response was based, "You don't understand, don't worry about it. It's a woman thing you wouldn't understand." When I thought about this story, I thought women deal with shit, we can't even comprehend the shit... Chad: Constantly, dude. Joel: Day in and day out that women deal with, and we get a Ukrainian prostitute, we laugh it off, but they get this shit every day. Harassment, and what's your bra size. I don't even know what people are saying, but these little microaggressions they gotta deal with every day. It's gotta be... So apparently the 'Barbie' thing was, things haven't changed. Things are tough for women anyway. It's pretty cerebral. Go see 'Barbie' and tell me what you think about it. But look, yes, you need to be smart about who you connect with. Don't just connect with somebody who wants to connect with you. Do they actually have a profile that makes sense? Are they in your arena of profession? Don't be an idiot when you connect with people. I think that verifying accounts is a good step forward for LinkedIn. I think partnering with clear... Chad: Have you done the clear thing yet? Joel: I have. I have. Chad: Yeah, me too. Joel: Getting some kind of verified will help this process... This is a big deal for LinkedIn. Look, according to this survey, 75% of the respondents found that the relentless flirtations were too much to bear and either limited their use or left the network entirely. If you have a user base that 74% say they are mad enough to stop using your service or use it a lot less, that's a major problem that they need to figure out. So have harder restrictions, put people in timeouts, have better spam filters, have algorithms like, if you literally put, what's your bra size in a message that LinkedIn says, hey, wait a second, there's some potentially aggressive language in this message. Do you really want to send it? Guys are dumb. Making them think like, oh, wait a minute, I said something really stupid that might offend somebody, may decrease the number of stupid messages and aggressive messages that go out. So LinkedIn can do a lot more stuff, and I'm saying it's important enough to them. This isn't 2% of their users, this is a huge amount of users. And this is a blind spot that they need to cover, and I hope that they make efforts in the future to whether algorithmically, verification-wise, education, whatever, that this stops, because clearly, we don't understand or comprehend how bad this is for women, and it needs to stop. Chad: Now, here's the thing for me, is I don't wanna see women leave the platform. Don't allow these assholes to drive you off. I mean, report them, block them, screenshot, shame them, do those kinds of things, because without you in the workforce, or in those types of social networks, literally, we're half as good as we could be. Joel: I think it's a stretch to expect women to shame men publicly on the platform. Chad: Why? If you're acting like an asshole. Joel: Again, I'm not a woman, I'm not a woman, but like... Chad: I know. Joel: Does it open you up for, oh, what a bitch, or way to go, Karen, or I mean, again, I'm not a woman, but I would think, oh, it's much easier to just ignore, block, get the hell off the platform. Chad: Can you imagine how many women, 74% of the women who are actually already experiencing that right now, they need to know that it's happening to other women. If they see that happening, almost guarantee that you would actually have a groundswell of other women saying, that's bullshit. If they are experiencing it, they need to know that somebody else is experiencing it too. Joel: Yeah, but most women aren't warriors like that. They just wanna go on and network and be like... Chad: Women are fucking warriors, dude. Women are fucking warriors. They're just a much more silent warriors than our dumb asses. Joel: Most just wanna move on with their lives. Now, what would be interesting is if LinkedIn put out a most wanted page of douchiest dudes on the platform where you could access, and LinkedIn called out these people. That won't happen either, but that would be a fun compromise, I guess. Chad: It would, it would. Stay on the platform. Joel: Yeah, don't leave. That's... Chad: Don't leave. Joel: Don't quit. Don't leave us. Chad: Don't you quit me. Joel: Some of us are okay. Some of us are all right. All right, Chad. So much for AI replacing Gordon Ramsay. A New Zealand supermarket's AI meal planning app generated unusual and potentially dangerous recipes, including chlorine gas, poisoned bread sandwiches, a mosquito repellent roast potato. The app created by Pak'nSave, originally aimed to help users creatively use leftovers, but led to unexpected and concerning recommendations. Yeah, you think poisoned bread sandwiches is concerning? Yeah. The app's terms and conditions state that users should be over 18 and that recipes are not reviewed by humans or guaranteed to be safe or balanced. They would be sued out of their lives if they were in the US. New Zealand must have much, much more lenient legal rules. And you wonder why I choose Chipotle. SFX: Oh my God, I love Chipotle. Chipotle is my life. Joel: What's your take on this AI nightmare in the kitchen? Chad: Yeah, to think that Ts and Cs, right? The terms and conditions are actually like a get out of jail free card for poisoning people. That to me is fucking ridiculous. I think it's about time we start performing QA/QC on these large language models before somebody dies maybe. The attorney that used ChatGPT for remarks and then got nailed with a fine because the AI hallucinated and made shit up should have been a shot heard around the world. So do your fucking research. You can't let these things around loose without supervision. And that's apparently what's happening. It's ridiculous that this could even happen. And again, we just talked about deal, being a startup, so on and so forth, but yeah, they're not poisoning people. Joel: This sounds like the worst Brothers Grimm fairy tale ever, like witches serving poisoned bread and mosquito repellent roast potatoes. Yeah, this is a real story. Look, the supermarket expressed disappointment and pledged to improve controls, emphasizing that users must exercise their judgment when using the app. Again, it's not our fault people, we'll check it out, but this is really on you guys, part of this. Look. Chad: Yeah, it's your fault. Joel: Yeah, don't blindly just do what the machines, the AI tells you to do. Chad: Please God. Joel: Don't just click serve and like the lawyer got pinched. I don't know if he got disbarred or not. Chad: No, he should have. Joel: Hallucinations, especially if it's something you're putting in your body or something you're putting in someone else's body. Like don't just blindly listen to the AI. They're not infallible, they make mistakes and this is a perfect example. This is going to make its way into employment and hiring and recruitment and retention. Some story like this is coming, and I can't wait for it because it's gonna be great podcast content. Well, from one horrible story to the next. Joel: In Colorado's San Luis Valley, the clash between the demand for cheap labor and child labor protection laws has drawn some attention. Children as young as 12 are working in agriculture, especially in the lettuce fields alongside adult laborers, many of whom are Hispanic and Latino. Some Republican-led states have been seeking to roll back child labor protection laws, making it easier for children age 14 to 17 to work longer hours and in previously off-limit jobs. But Colorado already allows children to work in agriculture. Child labor in agriculture is a concern with frequent injuries and fatalities reported. Chad, your thoughts on child labor in America? Chad: So the Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938. 19 fucking 38. So back in the 1930s, is this what Making America Great is all about? I mean, child labor? This is from the New Jersey Monitor. Arkansas, Iowa, New Jersey, and New Hampshire have enacted legislation to weaken America's child labor protections at the state level and lawmakers in at least another eight states have introduced similar laws, outstanding investigations, including the deaths of three 16 year olds in Mississippi, Missouri, and Wisconsin, including a Guatemalan boy who was killed working in a poultry plant. A boy who was killed in a sawmill, and one working in a landfill site. So people are asking, here in our country and outside of the country, why is this happening in America today in 2023, not 1923? Chad: Well, here's the dynamics that I'm seeing. Rich white people, white nationalists, let's say, don't want immigrants in the country because America is already estimated to be predominantly non-white by the year 2040. So, but the immigrants, which this nation was built on, by the way, they performed some of the most backbreaking jobs in America since the number of immigrants will be lower if we keep them out, we're gonna need a workforce. So send in the poor kids. Iowa has the most radical new law designed to roll back child labor protections. It allows children as young as 14 to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries. And teens, 15 and older can work on assembly lines around dangerous machinery. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds should be forced to send her grandkids into these jobs first. 'Cause I guaran-fucking-tee you, nobody that she knows or none of her family are going to have kids working in these jobs. Keep the immigrants out, have the poor kids do the job. This is fucking ridiculous. And it's horrible because it's the haves and have nots. Joel: So I have farmers in my family, let's say. My aunt, uncle, farmer, my grandfather, very typical in Indiana. Midwest. And I had two cousins, one was older, one was younger, and both of them were driving tractors at around 12, 13 years old. Like big ass John Deere tractors. And I was the "city kid" who couldn't drive till he was 16. So it was very odd to me that these young kids could drive tractors and work on the farm. Well, America has this rich history of like, the family farm, agriculture, puritan sort of history. And then in a perfect puritan world, it makes sense to let the 12 year old work on the farm, milk cows, feed the pigs. Like it's a vision of America that I think a lot of people have. Joel: Unfortunately, these laws have now been skewed and bent to allow non-family, 12 year olds, 13, 14, and younger, to work on these farms. And these laws haven't been changed because it used to be, well, if you're working on the farm, then you could be younger than if you worked in a normal job. So the laws in a lot of these states are antiquated and haven't been updated in forever. So it's sort of a loophole that farm these plus you have these big factory farms, the family farm of the olden days has mostly gone by the wayside in America. Joel: Look, we talked about how AI is a potential mess of society with your recipes in New Zealand. This is where AI and automation definitely can help come into play. If machines are picking lettuce and crops, we don't need kids or adults to do the dangerous work and the incredibly hard work that's there. Now, we can't flip a switch and automate everything. Farmers live on borrowed money paying. I mean, it's a tough business. So it's not like they have all the money in the world to just buy robots to then start this. I think you need to have a balanced government, human, AI, hybrid, increase immigration, legal immigration. I mean, stop sending immigrants to Martha's Vineyard and send them to Iowa. Send them to Colorado. And then you need to pay them a living wage, pay them, like have a $25 minimum wage. So they don't have to be in a situation where all the kids have to work because I'm not making enough money. If the parents are making enough money, then the kids don't have to work. Chad: Now. You're just making sense. Joel: Then they can go to school and be productive citizens. And then also maybe increase investment or government, I don't wanna say subsidies, but encourage innovation around farming. Whether that's by tax, tax breaks or grants that go into agriculture to create more startups in this space. I think there's a really great sort of partnership between government, technology and everything come together. Anyway, you get where I'm going with this. We all need to come together. I don't think it's gonna happen. This is America. Shit is gonna be fucked up. But in a perfect world, all these things would happen and we wouldn't have children working as basically slaves. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, this is a new form of slavery for the most part. Chad: It is. Well, and again, it goes beyond the farm. It's the saw mill. It's the poultry factories. It's the slaughter houses. Joel: Yeah. Slaughter houses. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these are things that were happening in the 1920s, 1930s, and we made laws to stop this shit because kids were dying. And yet we're reverting back to that now. And we've got these assholes, like in Iowa, this governor in Iowa who is saying, we should roll all this back. It doesn't make any sense. Hell, Newt Gingrich said this shit years ago. Well, guess what? Put your fucking family in those jobs. As soon as you do that, we can start to have the conversation until then, shut the fuck up. Joel: You can't have your cake and eat it too, Chad. You can't have your Chipotle and eat it too. Let's end with a little football, Chad. NFL legend Tom Brady. The GOAT... Chad: TB12. Joel: Undeniably, is set to become a strategic advisor to your favorite Delta Airlines. In this partnership, Brady will appear in Delta's marketing efforts and assist in creating "Teamwork tools for the airline's employees. He will also share insights on greatness, resilience, excellence, and team performance." Delta CEO, Ed Bastian expressed enthusiasm for the collaboration. Some fans have expressed skepticism about Brady's qualifications in the airline industry. Just 'cause he throws footballs doesn't mean he knows about airlines. While others noted his busy retirement schedule, including signing a significant contract with Fox Sports and investing in sports teams. Details about the duration and compensation of Brady's advisory role are yet to be disclosed. Chad, what do you think about this news TB and your favorite airline getting together? Chad: We just talked about Tom Brady buying like or buying into a premier league team, right? And it was like, first off, did you not see welcome to Wrexham? You're buying the wrong side of the spectrum. You should be buying on the bottom, like Ryan and Rob did. Just watch the show, you'll get it. So he did that wrong. And then now, I think Delta's doing, other than really just the bright, shiny face and having the GOAT to be able to take through the halls of Delta every now and again, they obviously have money to spend, they should probably be putting that toward their people in training and making sure their shit's tight. I know as a Delta platinum kind of guy. Joel: It's fair to say you're a fanboy, isn't it? You're a fanboy of Delta. Chad: I do like Delta, but I don't like, this is the stupidest way to spend your money. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Chad: If you're going to spend it, spend it on your employees who give better service to the people who are actually spending money with you. This, to me, does nothing for me as somebody who spends a shit ton of cash with Delta. Joel: So from Oscar the Grouch, remember that story from, I think united as a spokesperson to Tom Brady? Like airlines have lost their minds, apparently. So this is messed up on so many levels. When was the last time Tom Brady flew commercial? He's been flying private jets since 1999. How about the diversity message or the anti-diversity message on this? Like, was Serena not available to at least maybe co-sponsor or co-delegate of the company? Chad: Jerry Rice. I mean... Joel: I'm looking at Tom Brady with Delta's CEO on CNBC. And it's like watching an episode of 'Mad Men'. Like, they're ready to head off to their two martini lunch after the interview. It screams vanity project. It screams like, hey, I'm the CEO. I want to hang out with famous football players. And I can't afford a team. So I'm just going to buy the next best thing, which is a player. This is clearly feeding Delta's CEO's apparent man crush. Yeah, wrong on so many levels. I like Delta for the most part. I hated the fact that they made me run through Atlanta's airport with you and almost have a heart attack. But more or less, it's one of the better airlines out there. Chad: It's always a great story, though. Joel: Yeah, yeah. And oh, yeah. Fuck Michigan, because Brady went to Michigan. The NFL is back, baby. Fantasy football is back. Chad: Yes. Joel: For you and Nashville, rest in peace, Jimmy Buffett. We out... Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. A valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and Bug Fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Newbies in recruiting have a hard time understanding the time when newspapers ruled the world of work and finding talent. Gannett was one of those world rulers. Maybe you know USA Today, for example? Anyway, technology has forced them to evolve to survive, and they sometimes play an invaluable role for employers looking to attract Human Resources. That’s why we had to get Anna Brekka, Director Recruitment Strategy at Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK, on the pod. Anna is an industry veteran with a robust understanding of the business, so you’d be wise to put on your thinking cap while you listen. Yeah, she brings data to the party too. (By the way, this one isn’t just for the kids; it’s an awesome trip down memory lane for the gray hairs too.) PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. TRANSCRIPTION COMETH

Looking to celebrate Labor Day with some labor-focused news? Then you’ve come to the right place. Twitter taking on the world of workA with X Hiring is officially official as Elon Musk trash talks LinkedIn. Indeed is flexing its muscle expanding Indeed Flex into storefront locations in Texas. Two startups - TeamSense vs. Nursa - battle it out in a game of Who’d Ya' Rather? Amazon’s CEO is whipping employees back into the office after supporting a very relaxed policy since Covid, and airlines are making life a little easier for travelers who enjoy a little peace and quiet, while making things less comfortable for plus-sized trekkers. Plus, we update you on iCIMS exiting CEO, upcoming parties and “masterdating.” TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah! It's National Lazy Mom's Day. So give your mom a much deserved break from your typical bullshit, you son of a bitch. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, every day is Lazy Day Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad, Edisto Island, here I come, Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, LinkedIn cringes, Indeed flexes and Amazon summons your ass back to the office. Let's do this. Holiday weekend Chad. Holiday weekend. Chad: Hitting the airport and that so how often do you fly out of Louisville Airport? Joel: Once a decade. Chad: Yeah? Okay. Joel: Very few times. Cincinnati more than Louisville. Chad: Yeah. It's much closer, obviously to me. Indianapolis Airport is 45 minutes away from me. Cincinnati is an hour and a half and Louisville about an hour and 15. So you get a chance to kinda like pick the one that you want, but you coming that far south is... I didn't think that was normal. Joel: Well, here's what's going on for people that don't talk to me on a regular basis. My wife is a huge Pearl Jam fan. Pearl Jam is touring for the first time in a few years, and they're hitting a limited number of cities. Now they're shockingly hitting Indianapolis, which is nice. Which is next weekend. So I will be seeing them then. My wife is out of town, so we have to go to Minneapolis to fit our schedules to go see Pearl Jam. So I have family in the Louisville area. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We're dropping the six-year-old off at my niece's, who has I think a 10-year-old and a two-year-old. So he'll get some kid time while we fly out from Louisville, to Minneapolis, and then fly back to Louisville, pick up the kid, drive back up to Indy, and call it a weekend. So that's why... Chad: Nice. Joel: Louisville is not necessarily more friendly to direct flights to Minneapolis. Chad: No. Direct flights to anywhere, but yeah, I'm throwing the clubs in the plane and going to Edisto Island, which is in South Carolina. Gonna meet my cousin there who loves to golf. We're gonna swing the clubs and have a great long weekend. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, come back Monday. Joel: I know there's a hurricane. I assume it's at least touching South Carolina. Are you watching the weather? Is it death and destruction that you're flying into? Or has it mostly passed? Chad: No. It was passed. Matter of fact, I read an article this morning that, Edisto's cleanup isn't really considered a cleanup, so that makes me feel better. Hopefully, that's the same for the golf courses as well. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Weather report looks good then. Chad: Oh, weather report looks amazing for this weekend. So pretty stoked. Yeah. After a hurricane moves through, generally everything opens up. Joel: Yeah. Fortunately for me, it looks like Minneapolis in the beginning of September is gonna be in the '90s. Which is a really strange thing. SFX: No. God. No, God, please. No. No. Joel: Fortunately the concert is indoors, so it's not too big of a deal. SFX: Shout out. Chad: So, while you're in Minneapolis, are you spending any time with Brian Provost at all? 'Cause that's where he is at. Joel: No, I'm not. Chad: Okay. Joel: I tried, I tried. We both know, Bigfoot, Toby Dayton, who makes occasional appearances. I hit him up. Apparently he broke his foot or, but so yeah, he was gonna go to the concert. We were gonna connect but that's not gonna happen. Chad: Just didn't happen. Joel: If Provost if you're listening, and you're gonna go see Pearl Jam. [laughter] Joel: Hey, hit me up. We'll get a selfie and blow up the socials for sure. Chad: The socials. Okay. So here's a post, and this is an update on Brian Provost. If everybody's been paying attention, which I'm sure you have. He is the now former CEO of iCIMS. This is a post that Brian actually put out last week after we did our show. "Yes, it's true. I decided to move on from iCIMS. This was a difficult decision as iCIMS is an amazing business with an incredible team. However, after a much introspection," that's internal, that's you're looking in inner space, Sir Joel. "I felt it was the best decision for me and my family at this time." Obviously, to get the fuck out. This is where it gets weird. Joel: Yep. Chad: "There are always several factors that play a role in leaving a business, but one of the biggest was commuting as a remote CEO on a weekly basis. I love being with a team and collaborating in an office." He lives in Minnesota commutes to New Jersey. "ICIMS is absolutely heading in the right direction, and I have every confidence," yada, yada, yada. "As for what I'll do next, I'll be working that over in the coming weeks and months. I'll let you know when I know." So what did you think about this? Joel: Well, Minnesota, as you know Chad is the land of lakes. Chad: Okay. Joel: I believe 10,000 lakes is their claim to fame. It's probably not exactly 10,000, but lakes have a lot of dead fish in them and dead fish tend to stink. And this whole thing stinks to me. If you didn't like remote work, at least have a plan before you leave. Have a new CEO, have an interim CEO. Chad: It's weird. Joel: Have something there. Don't just leave because you don't like the commute. It just doesn't make sense. And it just stinks to high heaven. Chad: It almost feels like all the CEOs are like making employees come back to the office. It's almost like this CEO was being made to come back to the office and he is like, no, I'm not gonna, I quit. That's what this post makes it sound like. And to be quite frank, I think he would've done himself a better service in not posting anything at all compared to this 'cause this was just weird. Joel: Or just be honest and say, I had a disagreement with the board and I couldn't take it anymore. And I'm out of here. Chad: Either way though, as a CEO, you're gonna have other people looking at what happened. This is just nothing. But again, this is one of the reasons why mature people don't post things on social media, right? 'Cause you can look back later and see what the fuck was going on. To, me, if he's looking for another CEO position, leading an organization, definitely not, what I would have done. But I'm a podcaster. I post everything, so. Joel: It also doesn't bode well if he wants another CEO gig. Chad: No, that's what I mean. Joel: The whole thing is crazy pills, Chad. Chad: Weird. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: Well, from one crazy to another, Chad, my shout out goes to Masterdating. That's right. Masterdating. Yeah. I hadn't heard of it either. SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Joel: So you're familiar with Masterbating, Chad, but do you know about Masterdating? The term is trending on TikTok. Masterdating is essentially going out on dates by yourself. Why run the risk of rejection and go on a real date when you can always get to a yes from yourself? That's right. Plus, you can ditch the whole ghosting thing that all the kids are talking about. And the best part, Chad, you're guaranteed to get lucky at the end of the night. Shout out to [laughter] Masterdating. That's right. Chad: Humans are so fucking stupid. [laughter] Shout out to GPU recruiting tactics. So this is from an article in SemiAnalysis, "One of the funniest trends we see in the Bay Area is with top machine learning researchers bragging about how many GPUs they have or will have access to soon. Meta, for example, who will have the second most number of Nvidia H100 GPUs in the world is actively using it as a recruiting tactic." That's right, kids. If ML and AI, R&D people don't have access to the newest toys, they'll, they probably won't join your team. And at about $25,000-$30,000 per GPU. That's right, that's the coveted H100 GPU, Google, Meta, and all the other big boys are going to be siphoning that tech, which means they're also going to be siphoning that talent out of the market. Shout out to GPU recruiting tactics. Joel: Okay, let's go to, Nikita Bier for my next shout out. Nikita is the founder of Gas, an app that was popular with the kids for about a minute. They were acquired by Discord earlier this year, but that's not why Nikita gets a shout out. He gets one for blowing up on X. The artist formerly known as Twitter for the following post, "The best way to stay unemployed is to use the Open To Work avatar on LinkedIn." That's right. It's funny because it's true. But it's also good advice, Chad, desperation is a bad luck. A bad luck on anyone. Just go on a masterdate with yourself and ditch the Please Hire Me desperation of the Open To Work avatar. Shout out to Nikita Bier. Chad: Oh, I'm just glad you don't have a sound effects for the Masterdating masturbating. Shout out to Sean Luchins, one of our listeners, guy's been in the industry for a very long time. As a matter of fact, he was just interviewed. We just interviewed him, a couple of months ago. Here's a quote from one of his LinkedIn posts. "There are those pinnacle moments in your career that are just too tough to top. Does it get any better than being blessed? Blessed, Joel, with a Chad and Cheese t-shirt?" Joel: Oh my God. No. Chad: Very tongue in cheek. We know, Sean is probably using that, t-shirt to buff up like his Maserati or something like that. [laughter] But no matter, no matter, Joel, how do you acquire one of these silky soft Chad and Cheese t-shirts? Joel: His Maserati? How do all of our listeners have Maseratis [laughter] and we don't have one apparently. Yes, Chad. Everyone loves free shit and we love giving people stuff. If you like t-shirts, whiskey, beer, you gotta go to ChadCheese.com. Click the free link. We're talking JobGet does our shirts. Textkernel is sending the brown liquid... Chad: Whiskey baby. Joel: Out to people all over the country. And beer, everybody loves beer. It's getting to fall. That means October Fest Brews. That means a little bit more robust flavors, in your, glass, [laughter] that is powered by our friends at Aspen Tech Labs. But you gotta play if you wanna win. Go to ChadCheese.com, click the free link, fill out the information, and you might win. Chad: So you know what time it is? Time for events kids. [music] Chad: Oh, little Love Shack. But that's a little Love RecFest. Day one, the Disrupt stage is going to be off the chain. We're gonna be talking about technology all damn day with Shelley and Serge from The Recruitment Flex and Tracey and Allyn from Talent Rebelcast. But before any of that happens, kids, we have a pre-party, pre-party on September the 12th at Tin Roof on Broadway, powered by plum.io and Aaron. Joel's gonna try to get his Nashville hot chicken fix that night. Probably not a good idea before the first day of the conference, but, hey, you do you Joel? Joel: Hey, they're lollipops. So they're less, potent, I think than the normal ones. Chad: Sure. Sure, they are. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [laughter] Then we're gonna have obviously all day one on the Disrupt stage. Great lineup of tech and companies using that tech. And then we have the after party on September 14th. It is a booze cruise. Gonna have Hattie B's liquor, beer, and who knows what the hell else. Now there's only gonna be 40 people on that cruise, so if you get a VIP invitation, you better fucking RSVP. If not, it might go away very soon. That's powered by our friends over at Hackajob. This whole thing has come together so quickly, Joel. RecFest is just a machine. Joel: Machine of debauchery. And people that want party. Chad: Oh, it's crazy. So what do you think about RecFest... SFX: Alright. Alright. Chad: In Nashville, year one. Joel: I think it's great. Look in in all transparency, we've heard differing perspectives on how this is gonna go. We've heard people say like, eh, I don't know if anyone's gonna go. It's been kind of quiet. And then we've also heard shit's gonna sell out. And from our own experience, these two parties get togethers that we're throwing have filled up incredibly fast. Much more than I thought they would. So it all unfolds in Nashville. We're gonna find out for ourselves in person how this is gonna go on September 12th through the 14th. I'm optimistic. I think it's gonna be a blowout. I think it's gonna be a statement. It's gonna be a British are coming moment, with RecFest coming to Nashville, and I'm here for it, Chad. I'm here for it. Chad: I have to say one of the cynics that you and I know very closely, they're going to be there. They got their eyes on the list, on the attendee list. Joel: Okay. Chad: And they said it is hella impressive. Joel: Okay. Okay. Chad: Yes. He was a cynic saying, I don't know if this is gonna go well. And then I got a message from him yesterday. He said, holy shit, this looks impressive. So I am pretty excited about that. After RecFest, we're gonna hit a little HR Tech gonna be on the expo floor in the Fuel50 booth for two days. If you're an HR practitioner, DM us and we might have an interview slot just in case. We're Booth 1125. That's 1125. Joel: That's a lot of booths. Chad: Then a few days later, we are on a plane to UNLEASH World in Paris. I literally have no fucking clue what we're gonna do there, but I guarantee you we're gonna have microphones. We're gonna have a lot of wine and cheese and who knows what else? Joel: Well, considering how quickly RecFest became like the Chad & Cheese Party Central, Paris may follow a similar suit. I don't know. Chad: Yes. Joel: If you're a vendor looking for a creative way to, you know, cut through the clutter, like, give us a call. Give us a call. Chad: We can help. Joel: Did I hear you say Plum earlier? Chad: Oh, I did. SFX: Really? Did you feel the tension in the air right now? Chad: Oh I did. Yeah. SFX: I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plum. Joel: Oh yeah. That means we gotta celebrate some birthdays, Chad. Another trip around the sun to Olivia Marquette, Shani Underwood, Matt O'Donnell, Ettel Feinberg, Scott Nelson, Stacy Shaw, Matt Gardner, Marcy Darth Maul, Rosie Pullman. That sounds made up to me. Rosie Pullman, Deb Play, Charles Hunger, Chris Billets, Chris Hoyt, Bill Borman, who will be in Nashville. I know Chris Murdoch, who lives in Nashville celebrating a birthday. And last but not least, Chad, my oldest son, Cole Cheeseman... Chad: Cole Cheeseman. Joel: Is celebrating a birthday, turning 17... Chad: Nice. Joel: This week. So... SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: To everyone for a happy birthday. Chad: Did you say Rosie Pullman. Joel: I said Rosie Pullman. Yes. That's woo. Chad: That's Seymour Butts. I mean, come on seriously. Somebody's fucking with us. Joel: Yeah. I did not, I did not double check that on LinkedIn to see if that's the case, good God. I got, and if birthdays weren't enough, Chad, let's talk about some fantasy football action. That's right. People are aware that we're doing fantasy football. This is our third or fourth year doing it, powered by our friends at FactoryFix. The lineup is set. Here's your Dirty Dozen, Chad, Fantasy Football players, starting with Dennis Tupper, who is our defending champion. Chad: Yes. Joel: He gets a free pass to play this season again, Deanne Osner, Jasper Spanjaart, Marcy Maul, Brent Locey, Michelle Sergeant, Kristin Airbone, Dean Apero, Jill Patterson, you and me, and the FactoryFix representative, Joe Dixon. That is the fantasy football lineup everybody. Chad: Hoo. Joel: I'm excited. Draft is next Wednesday. Thursday when we record this, we'll have our draft grades and we'll break down, who scored well and who fail on their butts. Yeah. It's all happening everybody. SFX: And topics! Joel: All right. The cringe level is high on this first story, Chad. It's official. It's officially official. Get ready for hiring on X. Again, the artist formerly known as Twitter, case in point, an Elon Musk tweet. I guess we're still calling them tweets, saying, "People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can't bring myself to use it. So I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed. We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool." What's more, Coinbase public company is leveraging the platform now, and the final nail in the coffin is a new Twitter handle or X handle, @Xhiring with the post this week, "Unlock early access to the X hiring beta exclusively for verified organizations. Feature your most critical roles and organically reach millions of relevant candidates. Apply for the beta today at verified.X.com/en/hiring." They could have shortened that probably. Chad... Chad: I don't think. Joel: Elon, Coinbase, and a new handle, I think that's a triple X. What's your take on this news? Chad: It still feels like Facebook jobs all over again. This is very early on kids. So, you know, as what we're talking about, I'm sure will evolve and I hope will evolve. But first, let's look at the desktop version. I had to look twice to even see where the very muted jobs carousel was. And on, this is on Coinbase's account. They had just three jobs in the carousel. You could click on those jobs, obviously, or you could click View All Jobs, which is a link that takes you to a long list of Coinbase's jobs. There's no search functionality. I mean, it's fairly primitive compared to what we're used to, right? So again, it's very, very early on, but let's be clear, 80% of users access Twitter via their mobile device. So I popped over to Twitter on my phone, jumped onto the Coinbase profile and nothing. The carousel isn't even available on Android. So that was weird. Twitter's a global platform. You would think that would be something that they would dig into pretty quickly, especially if they're trying to make this look serious. Chad: But I think that any company should go to the application. It's a simple form and it can't hurt to get your jobs out there. But again, I'm gonna double down on what I've said. LinkedIn has much more content, context, experience for my profile than any other out there and they still do a shitty job on trying to get me relevant content. Twitter doesn't have even close to the amount of information, career information, jobs, pathing, experience, those types of things. I don't see how they're going to pull this off. Somebody in the threads actually said, "Well, I'm sure they'll have an API with LinkedIn." Really? You think so? I don't fucking think so, right? So there's gonna be a war happening here. I personally think that this X hiring thing is gonna go to the way of the dodo much like Facebook jobs did. SFX: 60% of the time it works every time. Joel: LinkedIn, however, doesn't send rockets into space, Chad. There's a big difference between the two. Chad: Yeah. Which means he's got diversions. Joel: So here's some shit here. Elon has 155 million followers. Everything he says gets talked about on LinkedIn. He paid 40-plus billion dollars for Twitter. LinkedIn was acquired for Microsoft for 26 billion-ish. So if Elon's looking for a quick way to chip away at getting his money back on what he dropped to get Twitter, targeting LinkedIn is probably the shortest bridge to try to get there adding to the fact that a lot of people hate LinkedIn, the incumbent, and you have more favorable odds than say, I don't know, going after Google for search. Do you wanna say the guy who took on Detroit and is winning the EV battle can't put a dent in LinkedIn and make some noise in our industry? Time will tell, Chad, but it's clear that he's serious now and it's gonna be a lot of fun for us to cover Twitter, X, whatever you wanna call it, getting into our space. Chad: Yeah. I think it's interesting because what Elon really did was he forced the entire automotive industry to focus on EV and they're going to blow Tesla out of the water in long-term, right? Unless somebody actually buys them up. Joel: We'll see. Chad: I think this is exactly the same thing. LinkedIn does suck at what they should be really good at. I think this is gonna be an opportunity for them to be challenged and hopefully actually up their game much like the car companies have on the EV side of the house. Joel: Yeah. Chad: I think Twitter is much more hated than LinkedIn is at this point. Joel: It's X now, Chad. [laughter] Chad: I'm gonna call it Twitter no matter what. Because it's so divisive, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: So I think, I think there is an entertainment value there, but it's not a professional network. I don't wanna say it's like Hinge or what was it last week? Joel: Grindr. [laughter] Chad: Grindr. Yeah. Like Grindr, right? They're used for entirely different reasons. LinkedIn was created as a network, then turned into a professional network. I don't see that happening here, I just don't. And the cost might go up, but the current get-in fee is a $1,000 a month to be a verified organization. Joel: Yep. Chad: That's only $12,000. That's cheap as fuck. Joel: A lot of companies are gonna do this. Do you agree? Chad: Yes, yes, yes. Joel: They're gonna try it. Yeah. They're gonna see what happens. Chad: But it doesn't matter just because the price point's so low that it's not gonna pay off. He needs to try to gain back hundreds of millions of dollars that he's lost in ad revenue and this isn't gonna do it. Not even close. Joel: Yeah. I mean, I'm no mathematician, but if you follow the money, if advertisers are leaving in droves and there's no hope of them coming back anytime soon, like to go after LinkedIn, share the pie is probably the smartest thing to do in terms of getting money fast. This is not a $100 billion business a year, but if he can start getting some money back, if he can start getting some subscriptions, some people that are used to paying money on a monthly basis, he can slowly ratchet up the price. If he gets results for these people, they'll continue to use it. If he adds value to being a subscriber, whether it's on the individual end, whether it's like, hey, get special access to jobs or get a resume if you're... I don't know where this is gonna go. That's why it's so fun to talk about it, but he's gonna get companies try it. He's gonna get companies become verified users... Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: And post jobs. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: And if people apply and people get results, well, money is gonna start going into Twitter or X, and agencies are gonna be told or asked like, "Hey, are we on Twitter? Like, should we use Twitter or X to post our jobs?" Like, it's just gonna be a lot of fun to talk about. Facebook never felt really committed. It felt like a project manager was on it. This is like the CEO talking shit on his own social platform and to me, that ratchets it up a little bit and it makes it just tons of fun to talk about. Chad: As soon as he gets in a cage against Mark Zuckerberg after he was talking all that shit, then I might think that anything else that he's talking shit about is actually real. This I just... It feels like, it feels like a diversion. Joel: You watch. There's gonna be a story about him poaching someone from LinkedIn or Indeed or somewhere. Like that's coming. That'll be one of the next stories that we talk about. And speaking of Indeed, Chad. Chad: Oh, yes. Joel: If you've had your daily dose or weekly dose of Elon, we'll talk about our next guilty pleasure, Indeed. Chad: Yes. Joel: So in case you missed it, Indeed Flex is a platform that connects job seekers with temporary work opportunities. It is a subsidiary of Indeed and it now offers storefronts. That's right. Brick and mortar locations. Chris Johnson, market director at Indeed Flex shared the following on LinkedIn this week, "Great few days in Texas visiting the Indeed Flex hubs and meeting the teams who make it all happen. Loving the energy and passion for change here. I'm definitely right where I need to be." Maybe it's where Chris Johnson needs to be, but is it where Indeed needs to be? Chad, your thoughts? Chad: So, yeah, congrats Chris. That's fucking awesome. I thought this was a very poignant story as we start to see companies like Appcast acquire Bayard, which means one day Appcast is a solid partner. And the next day they're your greatest competitor. Joel: Yep. Chad: We've seen this with Indeed before, and it's happening once again. So here's how Indeed is currently smothering the market. First, we're gonna talk about their trusted network partners. Indeed pays trusted network partners, millions of dollars each month to deliver job seeker traffic to jobs on Indeed. Yes, competing job sites are driving tons of job seeker traffic to Indeed, but the money is good. So job sites keep doing it then Indeed adds mandatory job seeker registration to their apply process. What does this mean? It means Indeed is building their database with job seekers from those competing job sites until they don't need those job sites anymore and then they cut them off at the knees. They're strangling the job sites. Joel: Yep. Chad: Same thing is happening over at Indeed Flex, but [chuckle] in a much different way. Staffing and RPO companies are spending millions of dollars monthly on Indeed. Not the other way around, to drive job seekers to their open positions. Indeed then uses the money to drive job seekers from other sites like we just talked about to apply on Indeed. The staffing and RPO companies, get the job seeker data for all the applicants, but so does Indeed and now Indeed Flex. So basically Indeed is using the likes of Randstad and Adecco's money to build their own candidate database to place those candidates through staff-mark. Joel: Yep. Chad: You've got to remember, Recruit Holdings is a staffing company first. Joel: Yep. Chad: So I was texting with a practitioner about Indeed continuing to move down this path, and their response to my Trojan horse comment was this, "Oh no. No more Trojan horses. They, Indeed, just put on a Trojan condom and they're gonna fuck everybody over." [laughter] Chad: How do you really feel HR? How do you really feel? [applause] Joel: That's good. That's good. Yeah. I'm giving this the evil genius [laughter] badge for the week. Indeed is owned by staffing companies. You mentioned it. Chad: How stupid is everybody else? Joel: We've talked about them becoming more staffing-focused in the past. Well, shocker. They acquired a company called Syft, a UK-based staffing platform in 2019, and Flex was born two years later out of that. Chad: Crazy. Joel: Indeed Flex is expanding into the US market and growing further into the UK where it's former company Syft has been available since 2015. So they have a little bit of experience in this space. And the United States, the labor shortage is even more serious, and the openings rate reached 6.9% as of July last year. To me, this is a logical brand extension. The power of Indeed will supercharge awareness. It's something Google, LinkedIn, or Elon Musk have no desire to chase. It's solid strategically. So I don't say this a lot, but Indeed, Good move. They just need to improve the signage on these storefronts, because they look like some intern went down to the clearance rack at FASTSIGNS for this branding. Chad: Yes. You are right. You're right. Joel: So they need to improve the branding. Going in looks fine, but they look like Bush League retailers from the outside. But I think they're onto something. Chad: I agree. I just, it blows my mind that huge companies like Randstad and Adecco are still paying Indeed millions of dollars a month, right? They've got that going on on one side, and then you've got the other side of the ecosystem. All these job sites are driving candidates into the Indeed database. Now Indeed's paying them to do so. But they're gonna cut them all off at the knees one day 'cause they don't need fuckin them anymore. It's, I mean, it is a Trojan horse or a Trojan condom fucking all the way around. It is crazy. Joel: And we've seen this movie before. We've seen this movie before. Chad: We have. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: All right, let's take a quick break and we'll play a little Who'd You Rather? SFX: Just the team. Joel: When we come back. All right, Chad, are you ready to play a little? Who'd You Rather? Here's how we play it, gang. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: We take two companies that have recently gotten funding. We summarize what they've done and what they're doing and Chad and I sound off on who'd we'd rather. Let's play, Who'd You Rather? In this corner, we have TeamSense. Seattle-based startup TeamSense has raised $4 million. TeamSense offers an app-free platform tailored for hourly workers in the manufacturing sector, enabling them to manage attendance, communicate with managers and access company resources through SMS or text messaging. The funding will be used to expand the development and go-to market teams. Founded in 2020, the company employs 20 people. And in this corner, Nursa. Nursa has closed an 80 million Series B funding round that brings total funding to $100 million for the Salt Lake City-based company. The platform is designed to assist healthcare facilities in filling shifts with local nurses. The company established in 2019 currently employs 300 team members and boast 95,000 nurse practitioners. Chad, who'd you rather TeamSense or Nursa? Chad: So I'd rather TeamSense and here's why. Nursa, they're applying a bandaid to a sucking chest wound. Will the ability to shuffle healthcare workers help? Yeah, in the short term, but it doesn't address the larger problem. We need more people to enter into the care economy. That's the answer. Not a shuffling app. We talked about borderless on the Europe show this week. And that helps the larger issue by aiding healthcare workers who want to come through the immigration process to the UK. Nursa doesn't do that. They're not taking care of the big problem TeamSense, the hourly segment is one of the biggest opportunities for tech startups today. Why? 'cause number one, this segment represents a 70%-80% of the working population. Number two, according to the CDC, absenteeism costs the US employers almost $226 billion every year in productivity losses. And against that CDC number, TeamSense's 39% reduction in absenteeism would in effect save companies $88 billion. I'd rather TeamSense all day. SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Joel: All right. We're gonna disagree on this one, Chad. The SMS-only thing I just can't get over. If this were 2010, maybe I'd be super pumped about team sense. The problem is, whereas very few people had a smartphone in 2010, almost everyone has one In 2023. Android phones are being passed out at my local Kroger, so everyone can have one. The SMS side of this only just makes me feel like it's antiquated and not going anywhere. Especially now that they're just getting their seed Series A funding, I don't think that bodes well for the company long-term. However, Chad, whether it's 2010, 2023 or 2053, nurses are going to be in high demand and companies are gonna pay a lot of money to get them into the door. Nurses are going to continue to want flexibility and this sort of staffing on demand work, your own hours platform to me makes a whole lot of sense. Look, there's a lot of competition in the nurse staffing space for a reason and there are 100 million reasons with a Benjamin sign, dollar sign next to it to like TeamSense less than Nursa. So for me, that's right. Nursa, naughty Nursa or just Nursa, get my... Chad: Naughty Nursa. Joel: My vote for Who'd You Rather? All right, now to what none of us would rather, the RTO game keeps playing out. The frog continues to boil, Chad. Amazon, CEO, Andy Jassy, your boy, has run out of patients with remote workers who refuse to come back to the office. In a recent meeting, Jassy reportedly told staff that they need to be back in the office at least three days a week. And if they don't comply, they will be forced to resign. Isn't forced to resign getting fired? I think it's just a different label on that, which is... Chad: Yeah, without severance. Joel: This is a significant change from Jassy's previous stance on remote work, which was way more relaxed. What's more, Chad, is CNBC's story says some staffers are being told to relocate to hubs in different states if they wanna keep their jobs. And in other RTO news, Goldman Sachs boss David DJ Solomon has pulled the plug on Summer Fridays, the hits keep on coming, Chad, the hits keep on coming. What are your thoughts on all the news on RTO this week? Chad: So we predicted Solomon was going to do this, that's not a big deal. But the Amazon, I mean this is really a huge bait-and-switch is a quote from Andy Jassy. It's not right for all of our teammates to be in the office three days a week for people that refuse to do so. That's from Andy Jassy. So why are employees reluctant? Let me count the ways. Number one, in September of 2022, just a year ago, kids, Jassy told staff he had no plans to ask them to return to their desks from the same CNBC article, "An employee in Texas who was hired in a remote role," say that again, they were hired in a remote role, "said managers assured his team in March of 2023 that nothing would change despite the RTO mandate. But in July the team was informed by management that they'd have to choose between working out of Seattle, New York, Austin, Texas, or Arlington, Virginia." Chad: So back to Jassy, who said, "It's not right," what's not right? I mean, the bait-and-switch tactics here are not right. So for me, outside looking in from the market looking in, first and foremost, we have reports of Amazon running out of warehouse workers in some regions due to high churn rates and they're losing around 100% annually. More than double the industry average. Only one out of three new hires in 2021 stayed with the company for more than 90 days. Leaked reports of Amazon attrition, costing $8 billion in lost revenue. But these are different jobs. These are office jobs. So it feels like this is a forced downsize so that they don't have to pay severance. And I mean, no matter, no matter the optics suck. Andy Jassy looks like a bait-and-switch asshole at this part. I mean, that sucks. He doesn't care. I'm sure he's making these decisions from his office in the Hamptons or something like that. It's fucking crazy, man. Joel: Yeah. Are we really surprised that the old white guys are winning this battle? So the pendulum continues to swing in the opposite direction of 2021, '22. Stemies are running dry, real estate markets are frozen. Hiring for many companies is frozen and drying up. The Fed is getting its wish with higher unemployment and as a secondary benefit, the rich white guys, the balance of power is going back to the corporations and the grip continues to hire. As we talk about these stories on a weekly basis. Look, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were a rich illuminati guy, I would go to the government and the Fed and I'd be like, okay, we can't have this chaos of people living where they wanna live. All my commercial real estate holdings going to hell, the stock market going to hell. We need to go back to status quo. Let's tighten the screws on these fuckers. Let's get inflation up. Let's get unemployment back up due to higher Fed rates. We'll get people back to the office. We'll be able to fire who we wanna fire. People have to sell their homes and suck it up for the man again and we'll be in charge again. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were a rich white guy with billions, that might be a conversation that I wanna have. And speaking of billions, Chad. Chad: It sounds like history. Joel: It's a new season of Billions on Showtime. And if you're not watching, you should because the main character is running for president like all this shit, this is why my brain is going in this way. I think the whole system is built to screw us all. And this is an example. The white rich guys win again. I'm not surprised. Chad: And they're really good at turning everybody else against each other. Joel: Yes. Chad: While they sit up in their tower, their fucking ivory tower counting their goddamn money, but, and we're dumb enough to actually do that. Well, it's only fair that you're in the office because, do you think that they shouldn't be, hey, come over here. Let's see if I can start a fight among you guys while I walk out of the office. Joel: Yes. Yeah. We're dumb enough to buy crypto and think that GameStop is like the next big thing. We're dumb enough to buy houses in Vermont thinking that we'll be able to work there for the rest of our lives. In the meantime, they're rigging the system and just filling their pockets with more and more money. Chad: Bastard. Joel: Damn it. I need a break. And we'll come back and talk about airlines. Some airline news to close the show, Chad, two stories this week. Chad: Okay. Joel: Number one, Corendon Airlines, which I've never flown, is launching... Chad: Never heard of them. Joel: An adults-only zone on its flight between Amsterdam and Curacao, which is a 10-hour flight. But the adults-only zone is not what you think, Chad. The airline believes that there is a demand for adults-only zones, as some passengers prefer to travel without the disruption of young children and from no kids to no fatties, Korean Air is weighing passengers before boarding their flights starting next week. There's a law in Korea that requires airlines to weigh passengers and their carry-on luggage at least every five years. I'm guessing they weigh the luggage every time, but only the weight every five years. Korean-based airlines are following the law saying that average, that the average plays a role in determining aircraft weight distribution and enhancing flight safety. As of yet it doesn't cost extra to be XL, but critics say the writing is on the wall. Chad, your thoughts. Chad: So, adults-only airlines. If it's a long flight, I like my peace and quiet. Right? I definitely do. So would I pay a premium for something like that? I might. But and it comes to... When it comes to bigger people on flights, I don't know how many times I've had a guy in the middle seat has to force the armrests up and he spills over into my space. That's my seat. That's my space. Right? So it's like if we can actually have segments of the plane that are for larger individuals might cost more 'cause there's more space. I think that would be great, but it would be a better experience for them and it'd be better experience for everybody around them. I don't know. This has been a problem for a very long time. Much like people taking their fucking shoes off. Like bare feet on an airplane. People don't do that. Stop that. Joel: Yeah. If you're not following passenger shaming on Instagram, plenty of feet to look at on airplanes. So... Chad: Horrible. Horrible. Joel: So in terms of adults-only for noise, like the noise canceling headphones now are really good. Chad: Yeah. They're. They're. Joel: Like literally you can not hear anything but your podcast or music or whatever you're listening to. Yeah. Like invest in some noise canceling headphones and you're good to go on that end. I appreciate the airline trying to make an extra buck on an adults-only, I think people may take that the wrong way and take advantage of like... [laughter] Chad: Swingers. Joel: Yeah. Adults-only section. I bought the adult-only section and I'm gonna use it. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's in terms of the fat thing, like it's difficult. Americans are getting bigger. All the data shows that, but also airlines are getting smaller. Like American Delta, Southwest and United have lost anywhere from two inches to five inches in leg-room and two inches in seat width since the 1980s. This is some data that has been collected. Chad: Wow. Wow. Joel: If you're too fat, literally, and I have some people in my family that are, you think I'm a little chubby, like take, come to my family reunion... [laughter] Joel: They have to buy two seats because they can't fit in the one seat and they have to get... Chad: But they buy two seats. Joel: They buy two seats 'cause they really have to. Like, they don't... It's not the spill, like they're literally too big. They have the belt extender, like the whole ball of wax. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Or you sit in first class where you got plenty of room, probably no matter how heavy you are. The point of like putting people on a scale at the check-in counter, if that's what it, that's really degrading. That's really kind of sad. That shouldn't be happening in my opinion. But, Chad, I've got the answer as I do to most things. Chad: Okay. Joel: I got the answer here. If you wanna make flying a lot better, Chad, here's the answer. Chad: Okay. Joel: Bigger seats, more leg room and discounted rates for big booty Latinas. [laughter] SFX: I'm happy. Joel: We out. [laughter] Chad: We out. [laughter] Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok, no, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Summer is winding down and Europeans are coming down from their holiday highs, so it’s a great time to drop some knowledge bombs from the Old Country. Staffing agencies are under fire for what politicians say is price gauging customers for in return for placements in the healthcare space. The care may be subsidized in Europe, but the placements are capitalism at its best (or worst). A toxic combination. A little Who’d Ya' Rather? follows, pitting 11x AI against Borderless. Weird names, but interesting businesses. Who wins? Gotta listen. A story out of Italy closes out the show with a new story about ending benefits for thousands of families and individuals deemed "fit to work.” PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. It's International Slinky Day. And this podcast too is fun for a boy and a girl. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your co-host, Joel "Slinkity" Cheesman. Chad: I'm Chad "It's called soccer" Sowash. Lieven: And I'm Lieven "Totally into nurses" Van Nieuwenhuyze. [laughter] Joel: And on this episode, healthcare research, Italy says ciao to freebies and who'd you rather. Let's do this. Look at Lieven how refreshed he is. Chad: He should be. Joel: He's so rested and refreshed. This whole Europe take July and August off is working for me, even though I'm not partaking. Chad: Well, yeah, I think you probably get a good enough July and August off. But anyway. Joel: That's... [laughter] This podcast is really cramping, my napping schedule. By the way, Chad. Chad: Yeah. Having to be up by 11:00. Yeah, that's too much. Yeah. No, dude I love just the opportunity for time away for yourself. And Europeans do that better than anybody. Probably the French mostly but Europeans do it better than anybody. Joel: Well, I love that you're talking about it in the green room, you leave Europe at this time of year because your Airbnb can be a cash machine for a couple months for all the Europeans going to Portugal. Chad: Yeah. I don't... I mean, I like Europeans, but I don't like that many Europeans. [laughter] Joel: Nobody. So you're done vacationing, Lieven. Do you want to fill us in on where you went, what you did? Chad: Tell me a little bit about Madeira, man. I want to hear that. We got a chance to go. I wanna hear your experience. Lieven: So that's how we pronounce it in English, Madeira? Chad: Yes. Lieven: Okay. Yeah. We say Madeira, but probably so it's Madeira. It's nice. Joel: That's way sexy. Lieven: So Madeira actually it is Portugal. So we have something in common, Chad. It's nice. Madeira, Madeira. It's a beautiful island as you know. And the climate, I love the climate it was like in Celsius, but you have Fahrenheit or something, but at 27 degrees. A bit clouds, not too hot. And that's something people start to appreciate with this long hot summers in the south of Europe, 27 degrees is just perfect. So it's nice. I love it. Chad: I can't wait to go back. We've got the family, we're taking the family there for Christmas and New Year's, so really stoked. Luckily, luckily, I've got a buddy who has a big house there, so we can fit them all. Lieven: Nice. Chad: We can fit them all in. SFX: Shout-out. Chad: All right. All right. We gotta do this first. Again, it's called soccer. Why? Because Messi, the GOAT is in the United States, and he is lighting it up over here. He is filling stadiums, he's doing things that Joel Cheesman never thought was possible. This, to me, deserves a shout-out. Yes, he's Argentine. Although football, we all know is very, very European. So a big shout-out to Messi and bringing the love of the game to the US. Joel: The dude is ridiculous. I'm not the biggest soccer fan, but like the highlights and what he's doing. It looks like he's... Chad: A man playing with kids. Joel: Yeah. It'd be like Jordan playing with kindergartners in his heyday. Like, I can't even... I'm tempted to buy the MLS package just to watch him. It's 30 bucks a year, I think, or the season. Pretty good deal. I mean, he's doing what Pele, Beckham, Rooney, all these guys couldn't do. He's selling out Cincinnati. He's selling out Columbus. He's selling out all these stadiums. And I mean, dare I say, Premier League Soccer, I feel is more important. The season just started recently. Like, I'm kind of watching on Saturday mornings. My six-year-old has soccer, so we'll usually pre-game with some Aston Villa or Man U, like get pumped up. Chad: Liverpool. [laughter] Joel: I don't know, man. I'm feeling a little bit of the football fever, little bit of the football fever. Chad: As Lieven's over there. He is like, yeah, this is old hat for me. So what do you... Have you heard about it? Have you seen what Messi he's been doing over across the pond? Lieven: Some people who like soccer or football probably have, but I couldn't care less. I have really no idea. I know his name, but that's about it. Chad: We gotta give Lieven a test. I'm not really sure he's European. [laughter] Joel: He is royalty. He doesn't deal with the commoners and their games of soccer and footy and rugby and all that. He's doing like fencing and horse... Lieven: Polo. Polo. Yes. Yes, yes. During when we go to the stadt, where we have those sleighs and then we sleigh riding with horses. Joel: Yeah. Lieven's with horses. He's skiing in the Alps. Like that's his jam. That's his jam. By the way, it's the summer of pink over here. Barbie's the hottest movie. Messi's the hottest athlete in the country. All doing it in pink and doing in a hot pink. And speaking of hot, Chad. Chad: Yes. Hot chicken. Joel: My shout-out goes, my shout-out goes to air conditioning. Oh, yeah. Nashville's coming up. That's a different podcast. Air conditioning. As an American, I take air conditioning for granted, especially in August and with climate change. But I recently found out, Chad, that 20%, only 20% of European homes have air conditioning. That's compared to 88% of homes in the good old US of A. Europe, by the way, is the world's fastest warming continent on the planet. So stay cool Europe. Shout-out to air conditioning. Chad: So Lieven, do you have air conditioning in your place? Lieven: We don't need it, really. Chad: Yeah in Belgium, yeah. And so down in the Algarve we do, but I mean, it gets, yeah, a little warm. Lieven: Of course. Chad: It gets a little warm down there. So we do have AC. Lieven: This summer we didn't really need it. It was mostly very cold. [laughter] Lieven: No, really it was, it was. Today we have the heating on actually, because it's chilly. Chad: Yeah. For those listeners who can't see. But Lieven's all bundled up. I think he had a scarf on before he started. [laughter] Lieven: It's not a scarf, but a... Joel: He was wearing his ascot with his smoking jacket and his leather slippers. Lieven: Oh my God. Joel: I'm surprised in the summer when we go, Chad, how hot the UK can get. It can get pretty warm there in the UK. Chad: Well, remember when we were there for the... Not this last Wreck Fest, but the one before, but the Luton Airport tarmac was melting. Joel: Melting, yeah. Chad: It was so fuckin hot. Joel: Yeah. Enjoy that cool Belgian air while you can, Lieven. By the way, Chad, in October we're gonna be in Europe and I'm sure it's gonna be cool enough by October. Where are we going in Europe? Chad: Yeah, we're going to UNLEASH Paris. As a matter of fact, I just got my Airbnb yesterday, thank God. Early October, kids. If you're going to HR Tech or you're not going to HR Tech, you definitely have to go to UNLEASH. It is a spectacle, UNLEASH World in Paris. It's a blast. And you can go to chadcheese.com and find all the places we're gonna be and register right there. Joel: And Lieven is continuing to take a vacation from shout-outs this week. Maybe next week he'll have something. Lieven: I changed my mind. Joel: Oh, okay. Lieven: I've got a shout-outs just because... Chad: Here we go. Joel: Bring it. Lieven: You're making me look like some, how did you call it? Royal, huh? My shout-out goes to... [laughter] Joel: Royal, the Bourgeoisie. Yeah. Whatever. Lieven: Do you know her? Lotte Kopecky. Ever heard of Lotte Kopecky? Chad: No. Joel: No. Lieven: Ah, you male chauvinist pics because it's a girl, huh? [laughter] Lieven: No. Lotte Kopecky, she's Belgian and she just became the world champion on the road cycling. So cycling is something pretty big in Belgium. And she became the world champion, so suddenly we're all into female cycling. Joel: All right. Lieven: So my shout-out goes to Lotte Kopecky just to show that I know her and that my knowledge basically enhanced but still. [laughter] Joel: Inclusive and sports related shout-out from Lieven. Chad: Yes. Joel: I love it. I love it. Lieven: And there's also a link with HR because she's sponsored by SD Worx. You know SD Worx? Chad: No. Joel: No. Lieven: No, it's an HR company, whatever. Chad: Okay. Lieven: Okay. Chad: There's the connection. Lieven: Lotte Kopecky. Chad: Very nice. Joel: Love it. Good job, Lieven. And topics. [music] Joel: Let's talk healthcare, guys. The World Employment Confederation recently published a strategic paper outlining the importance of quality and cost-effective healthcare services around the globe and how the HR services industry, particularly agency work is an important piece of the pie. Highlighted was the balance and appropriate national regulation as a basis for the effective use of agency work and staffing services in healthcare. The article also expresses concern that attempts to restrict the use of agency work in several countries in Europe, risks aggravating the staff shortages that already prevail and therefore undermines the sustainability of healthcare systems. European healthcare staffing. Lieven, you have some deep insight on this one. What are your thoughts? Lieven: We're pretty much involved because we have some companies in Belgium and the Netherlands and Germany active in healthcare staffing. So we are definitely watching this one close. And you have to know the World Employment Confederation, they launched this paper or this survey because of a series of newspaper articles which were published during the recent months on politicians, mostly populist politicians who thought attacking temporary and contract work in healthcare would give them them some easy attention in view of the upcoming elections. And that's basically what is happening because there's a big difference between healthcare in Europe and in the US, of course, everyone knows. In Europe it's accessible to anyone. Standards are pretty high. That's great, but it's expensive. Healthcare is really expensive, and it's paid by the government so it's mostly financed through taxpayers money. So for politicians, it's easy to say those companies are stealing money from the government so basically are stealing money from you poor taxpayers. And they try to get some attention and nobody can be against politicians attacking multinationals trying to abuse the taxpayer. Lieven: So that's their point. Problem is, of course, it's totally not as those populist politicians claim it is. It's really, it's a complicated situation. So I'm going to give a short introduction and then you can fire away. But just to give you an idea, do you know how much it cost to go to a doctor in Belgium, for example, or in Western Europe? Do you have an idea? Chad: For the end user? Lieven: Yeah, just for let's say out-of-pocket money for me as a patient going to a doctor. Joel: Zero. Lieven: What do you think I'd pay? It's not zero. Joel: Okay. Lieven: No, because if it was zero then... And if that actually was the case, some people went to the doctor. Joel: It's €1. [chuckle] Lieven: No, it's €4 actually, four. Yeah, because... Chad: Wow. Okay. Lieven: Yeah, I know. Because if it's zero, some old people actually went to the doctor just because they were lonely and they had to talk so they had to make them pay something just to put, in Dutch it's called (NO CLUE HOW TO SPELL THAT) it's to put a break on that. Joel: Sure. Lieven: So it's really cheap. But with the aging population, the healthcare system is getting really expensive for everyone. So the politicians thought we're going to cuts on the money, and they tried it but then suddenly COVID came and they realized it wasn't a very good idea to save too much money on healthcare. We definitely need healthcare. So now they're trying to raise taxes, but then of course nobody likes that, huh? Raising taxes. That's a difficult subject. Joel: And when you say it's getting expensive, you don't mean the €4, you mean the taxes that come into it. Lieven: No, no, no, no. It's basically the system is getting expensive. Joel: Okay. Lieven: Just free healthcare is getting too expensive for the government. Joel: Yep. Lieven: And they have to transfer lots of money from other departments to healthcare just to keep it up. So they started first by, some politicians started by attacking some doctors. They said those doctors they make too much money. But that wasn't really a popular subject because basically most people feel those doctors should make a lot of money because studies are really hard. It takes a lot of time, 12 years at least at the university and basically people feel those doctors they deserve it. So as a politician, you didn't become really popular by attacking doctors and now they're trying something else. They're trying to attack the staffing companies who put mostly nurses in hospitals. And they say those staffing companies are making money on the backs of the taxpayer because that's something you need to realize. The healthcare industry is privately owned. So healthcare is supported by the government, but the industry is privately owned. So all those doctors are mostly self-employed, and those nurses are mostly employees of those private hospitals. Lieven: In the end, it's the taxpayer who pays and that's something you have to realize. So healthcare is becoming more and more expensive. Cost cutting didn't really work out so they're looking for a different way to save some money. And now attacking temporary contract work in the healthcare sector is something new they try. Joel: So are they tightening the screws in terms of profitability of the staffing companies or is this just a, "We're mad at you and it's getting political." Like, are they really passing regulation in terms of ceilings on profits? Lieven: Not yet. Joel: Or is this just theater? Lieven: Not yet, it's theater. It's because they just, next year, there is election in Belgium and in the Netherlands and those politicians now, they're just looking for a subject with which they can get some attention. So there's no talk about, not yet about legislation change or anything. It's mostly newspaper articles. But the problem is, and that's something they don't tell even their voters, healthcare industry absolutely needs flexible staffing because otherwise there will be a huge problem. I'm going to give you a few examples. There are many, but just a few. For example, there is the need for a flexible pool of nurses to fill in a certain urgent demand. It would be totally unsustainable to be constantly fully staffed. You have to have some kind of a flexible pool. If people, if a lot of nurses suddenly become ill, they have to be replaced. If there is some kind of a pandemic, you have to be able to provide extra nurses. So this flexible pool has to be there, but it's something those hospitals, they can't organize themselves. And this is basically where the flex work came from or why it's becoming more popular. And to put things in perspective, in Belgium, for example, only 3% of all nurses are working in some kind of a flexible contract. In the Netherlands, it's about 10%. And in most countries, it's somewhere between 2 and 7, 8 percent. Lieven: So it's not like it's huge, but it's a fact that the numbers are growing because more and more nurses want to work in some kind of a flexible contract. And that's actually a fact. And House of HR has done a big survey, about 1,500 nurses were asked about why did you became flex worker? Why did you became a freelance worker or maybe a temping worker or a projects? Why did you work in project staffing? And we wanted to know because politicians mostly claim they do it to make more money. And we found out that's totally not the case. It's not even in the top five of reasons. So the five most important reasons were, nurses saying, I want to have more flexibility in my work schedule. And that's something which definitely makes sense because those people also have families and they have to be able to put their children to school, etcetera. So flexibility, also nurses needed. They want more variety in their jobs. They are... And that's something I liked. They enjoyed being a freelancer more than working as an employee. It's like saying, when I'm a freelancer, my boss is my client. And that's a different approach. They say, I want to gain experience in multiple places. Also makes sense. The moment you graduate, you don't know what your career should be like. Lieven: There are so many different ways to work within healthcare and they can try several. And the fifth one was, I wanted to be able to do other things besides working in healthcare. So these were the first five most important reasons. And I believe making more money came on the sixth or seventh place. And it is true in some cases, if you work with a staffing company as a nurse, in some cases you will make more money than if you work directly for a hospital. And that's the difficult part. There has been some cases where temping agencies were poaching nurses from hospitals. They were contacting them directly and saying, if you work with us, you can still work in the hospital, but you will make more money. And that, of course, that could be a problem because if all nurses would work in the same way, then actually healthcare would become extremely expensive. But in this case, it's different. We're talking about most nurses, 3% of those in Belgium are choosing to work in a different way of work and in a flexible way of work, not for the money and they don't make more money. It's just a different way of working. And this is something I think nobody can be against. Lieven: But I definitely feel there should be within the industry, some kind of a self-regulation. And I feel there should be a code of conducts in which something should be stipulated, or how do you say it, should be mentioned. Like a non-poaching agreement makes sense. You can't just call a hospital nurse and say, we're going to hire you and then put you back. Shouldn't be allowed. Joel: When staffing companies say, you can make more money with us, is that because they're negotiating a new contract with the hospital and giving that money to the nurse? But then you said you're not making more money. Like, help me understand... Lieven: No. Joel: If I'm a staffing agency and say, hey, come with us, you'll make more money. How does that work? Lieven: It depends on the, how do you say it in English? Statut, the status, is that the word? Chad: Status, yeah. Joel: Status. Lieven: Status, yeah. If you're employed or if you're a freelancer, tax is totally different because you have to make sure you get your insurance as a freelancer. That's totally a different structure. It would lead us too far now. But if you have your own company as a nurse, if you're a freelancer, then you could probably make more in the end if you have a good accountant and it's a possibility. But it's definitely not a reason why people... Joel: Kind of like taking an employed truck driver and saying, be your own driver, you'll make more money. At least that's the argument. Be your own boss, okay. Lieven: Yeah, but then you have to have your own truck. You have to buy your own truck. You have to, of course. Intro: Oh, yeah. Lieven: I think in many cases it would be easier not to be your own truck driver, not to be your own boss and just work for a company. So I think there are so many things you need to take into account that I don't think those nurses make much more money, definitely not still. So have, it would lead us too far. In any case, it's not a reason why they chose to be freelancer or why they do staffing work. So I also think a fair pricing should be definitely negotiated. It's not like a staffing company can say, we are going to claim all the nurses and then we're going to charge ridiculous amounts. This is something, and I feel you just should have the competition work this out. There are many companies and normal competition will realize, I think, a reasonable pricing. It's mostly, it's like always in staffing, it's just a coefficient, how do you call it? An extra percentage on the wages paid to cover your own expenses as an agency. Chad: Margin, yeah. Lieven: A margin, of course and of course there should be a commitment to legal and ethical standards, the quality of service should be guaranteed, respect and fair treatment, those kind of things should be in a code of conduct. And this is something the politicians could look at, but claiming temping makes the industry too expensive, it's just ridiculous, it's totally not the case. I think as a contrary, if each hospital should have a flexible layer and they should have to manage it themself, it would be totally too expensive. So the World Employment Confederation came to the same result. They've published a big survey on it, and if people are interested, you can find it on the website of WEC. We also did a big survey on it, we did a paper on it, and now it's the nice lobby work contacting politicians and trying to make them see reason. Chad: I want to be able to clear some things up with regard to like, costs for US versus Europe. Okay. So, first off, the most expensive country in Europe costs about 8000 USD, a little over 8500 USD per capita. Okay. So, per person in that country. In Belgium, it's around $6600 per person. And again, in Europe, everybody's covered. In the US, it's $13,000, more than twice, rather around twice that of what it is in Belgium and not everybody is covered. That's so, I still love the European system no matter what, right? What we're talking about, and for $4 copay, we're paying anywhere from 20-50 bucks, and I had to pay $850 outta my own pocket for an MRI. Total, it's total fucking chaos and 20% of our GDP by the way. Lieven: And you have insurance of course, so they've paid, yeah. Chad: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've got "great insurance" but I'm still paying. Most people can't afford to go pay $850 to get an MRI. Lieven: Of course not. Chad: To get their self fixed so I just wanna be able to carve out the huge differences between the two systems. Secondarily, I think there's a, there could be a huge danger in, I think Europe is taking a look at what the US, the US media has been talking about and that's gouging profiteering, they're trying to make that a narrative in Europe as well. And if they've got the numbers, they're gonna play that game. But here's what happened in 1968 that I think is a much smaller scale, but something that I think it's important that you guys do self-regulate and you work directly with the government. Chad: Because Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 privately employed air traffic controllers when the union said that they were going to go on strike, right? Because this was going to put massive harm on the US economy, the exact same thing. The types of positions that we're talking about are vital to the importance of the number of people aged 85 and overs is looking to grow 55% by 2037, just in the UK alone. So this has gotta be something that government looks at and you guys look at in together to be able to fix this problem, because if government takes over and says, okay, we're just gonna do the Reagan thing, and maybe not the entire industry because we're talking about millions of people. But taking swaths and saying, look, nurses, we need to be able to take control over this because this is a huge problem and vital to not just our livelihood, but our economy. So I think it's incredibly smart that you guys are doing what you're doing in digging into this to try to find out where the answer is. Lieven: And the interesting part is, if you look at Norway, for example, Norway has extremely strict laws concerning temping and project staffing. They're really even for us, left wing, and normally unions aren't really into flexible staffing thing because people who work for a staffing agency, they're not allowed to vote in the social elections, so for the unions, they unions just don't like it. So in Norway, regulations are really strict and they made an exception for healthcare. In, I think it was in April this year, regulations were changed in Norway, but only with the exception for healthcare because they realized we need the flexibility in healthcare, and this is something that totally makes sense and something... Chad: Great precedent to go off of. Lieven: Yeah, definitely, and something and the Western Europe should take into account. Joel: So Chad outlined the differences in American and European healthcare. There's one thing that we both have in common that happened recently called the pandemic, and the pandemic put incredible stress on healthcare systems across the world. In America, just as it did in Europe, we saw burned out nurses quit the profession altogether, we saw doctors burned out, just stresses that really tested the system. On top of that, there's a theme riding on this European show on employment, and it's the demographic challenges of Europe. Europe is getting older, it's not producing a lot of young people in comparison, and when you have older and older people, that's a stress on the healthcare system as well. Older people don't get healthier, they get sicker, and they need young people to, one, pay for them to get healthcare as well as take care of them directly. Joel: We saw France up the retirement age, we're gonna talk about Italy in a second, governments in Europe are struggling with this issue of paying for healthcare, paying for entitlements, and now paying more and more for military expenses and that's a really tough question to answer. And what tends to happen is they look at the boogeyman that is most available at the particular time, I think in this case, staffing agencies are the boogeyman in this scenario, they're easy to go after. It's easy to say, hey, staffing companies are gouging us, that's why you're paying so much, that's why nurses aren't in hospitals or, you know, like, it's an easy, easy target, I think for governments. The bigger question is how do we get our population up? How do we get people working again? How do we get tax revenues up? Like, those are the bigger questions. The staffing agency question to me is not a big issue here, they have much bigger fish to fry, but this is a nice headline. It's an easy win politically. The unfortunate thing is demographic changes are not Democratic, Labor, Conservative, Tory, it affects everybody no matter what the borders are, and this issue is sort of underscoring the ongoing demographic challenges that are encompassing Europe. Lieven: Absolutely, and the shortage is really structural, it's getting harder each day. So that's interesting part in fact within the survey we did with those 1500 nurses, we asked one of the questions was, if legislations would change and you would be forced to become employed again or leave the nursing industry altogether, over 75% said they would at least consider looking for a totally different job because they want the flexibility. And this is something we have to keep in mind also, it's not like the employees or the employers can still decide. It's the employees who are in charge. And if they want to work in a flexible way, you have to allow them. Joel: I was interested, the paper from the World Employment Confederation had no mention of automation, augmentation, how technology can kind of help bridge the gap between not enough people and giving them superpowers like we talk about in recruiting. None of that was mentioned on that paper, and I think it is something that every country's gonna have to consider moving forward, is how do we get technology to help augment some of the healthcare issues that we're facing? Chad: That's, and that's where you get an organization like House of HR who's an expert in this space, who can actually bring that to the table. This doesn't get fixed by government alone. This does not get fixed by private industry alone. Right? This has to be a collaboration between the two. And when that happens, the optics are much better for the politicians, which is exactly what they want in the first place. You guys have the experience, you have the tech, you know all of this. Being able to actually be the guide is the biggest key here. Lieven: Absolutely, and I always say the recruitment industry is getting more technical each day and it's getting more complicated and given the shortage in basically every industry, it's becoming more technical, so you have to know what you're doing and it's becoming more specialized. And hospitals, they just can't hire the nurses they need anymore. And companies like ours, we are still able to find the people because we do have the technology. We hire them, we train them, we offer them whatever they need to work as efficiently as possible. And this is something we need, you can't just have nurses sitting around waiting until they are asked to fill in someone, to replace someone who became ill, for example. So those few nurses we have, they need to be able to work as efficiently as possible, and there's definitely something our industry could manage, we are... It's our core business, hiring people, matching people, matching or scheduling those pools, it's our business. Joel: Yep, well when we come back, things will lighten up a little bit with who'd you rather. Who's ready for some who'd you rather? SFX: What are you doing, step bro? [laughter] Joel: All right, here's how we play the game, gang. We talk about two companies that have recently gotten some funding. I'll read a summary and then at the end we decide, who'd you rather each of the guys sound off? Are you guys ready to play? Chad: Yes. Lieven: Yeah. Joel: Who'd you rather? All right. Well, in this corner we have Borderless, London-based startup Borderless has raised 2.5 million pounds in a seed funding round to address the country's shortage of care workers, sound familiar? Borderless offers automated vetting and sourcing via visa processing and relocation management services for care providers. A former Microsoft executive was an investor in the round. Borderless aims to automate the hiring and onboarding of international workers, simplifying the process for both employees and employers while reducing costs and risks. The startup plans to expand its services to the wider UK healthcare sector in the near future, that is Borderless. Now let's talk about UK based startup 11x AI. They've raised $2 million in pre-seed funding to launch their AI digital workers. The company's first AI digital worker is named Alice, an AI sales development representative. 11x AI says that it's AI-powered team members can help businesses of all sizes to automate repetitive tasks and "amplify human potential." The funding will be used to develop additional AI digital workers and to create a platform that will allow businesses to build their own AI digital workers. That is 11x AI and Borderless. Chad, who'd you rather? Chad: Whew. Let's start off with 11A or 11x AI. They've launched obviously these digital workers, but they're doing it to the SME market, which we all know is a very hard market to try to break into. You wanna spend money on AI in GPUs to make this thing work right, right? You're not gonna have the cash to spend on marketing, which is exactly what you need for the SME market. And then as the company says, its mission is to automate everything. I mean everything, there's literally no place for me to start here, okay. Then Borderless, who is taking aim at the country's shortage of care workers, this is obviously a big problem, we just had a whole segment about it. It's a legit issue that will be a very persistent problem that needs fixed as reported by the BBC. Chad: The average churn in the care industry is 50% year over year. Plus, as I said earlier, the number of people aged over 85 is expected to grow 55% by 2037. Who'd I rather? It's very simple, Borderless is who I would rather, because I think that might be an House of HR, I don't know, acquisition target sometime very soon. [laughter] Joel: Oh, that's one for borderless. All right, guys. Lieven: Might as well be. Joel: So I agree, healthcare is a huge issue care workers, huge issue in the UK and everywhere in the world, which we just spoke about. However, the market potential with just a UK healthcare business, assuming even they grow throughout Europe, is fairly limited. I do believe that more and more companies, yes, Chad, you can't see it on the audio, but yes, Chad. The total addressable market for digital workforces is humongous, there's gonna be a lot of competition in the space, there's gonna be a lot more money come in. 11x AI, as bad as the name is, is gonna get a lot of funding for what they're doing. Look, we had a story on the weekly show a couple of weeks ago about a customer service company let go 90% of its workforce to be replaced by digital workers. I can tell you if companies could replace a lot of their Salesforce to do sort of the initial SDR process, they would definitely do it. Joel: A lot of companies, particularly startups that can't afford the headcount of salespeople, particularly good salespeople, are gonna drop coin on companies like 11X AI to save money, get more sales in the door. Like the website says, hi, I'm Alice, your new AI SDR. I consume trillions of bytes of data to become the world's best SDR. I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week at scale to help you grow faster and automate prospecting. Hire me today and supercharge your growth. Those are words that I can get behind, and those are words that say I would rather 11x AI. SFX: Just the tip. [laughter] Joel: All right Lieven, break the tie, baby. Lieven: Okay, who would I rather? I don't think it's a coincidence that Borderless was launched in the UK because it's the only country within Europe where it actually might succeed, I feel. Because of the language, so many companies have tried and the word might sound a bit harsh, but importing care workers from all around the world into their own country, and there is always a big language problem. I know some Belgium company who tried to get nurses from the Philippines in to Belgium because we needed them but even after one year of intense language training, it just didn't work out. And after two years, those people were getting, they didn't like it and they return to the country, to the Philippines, and they tried it from the north of Africa, different countries. I don't know any case in which it succeeded. Lieven: Of course, in the UK it's a different thing because they have their old colonies, where many people still speak English and that might be the big game changer. If it's UK, I think the 2.5 million investment is I'm sure a pretty good investment. The other one, 11x, it's a difficult one, of course, and today it's very sexy to be active within AI. If you call your company X, it makes a difference. I'm an ex user for example, an ex user of Twitter that is. I do believe in the whole concept about the digital shifts, and we've been talking about our congress, March 19th, it'll be in Amsterdam. And the title of the congress is the digital shifts and as the shift from traditional economy to a strictly digital powered by AI but it's also about the digital shift like you have the night shift and the early morning shift. You also have the digital shift, there will be digital people working in your company, being your colleagues, and this is exactly what 11x is doing with Alice. And they are creating a persona, a difficult, sorry, a digital profile which will more or less behave like a human being. And this will only get better and more realistic. I'm not sure about it, so it's sexy, but I think I would wait a bit just to see how it turns out. So today I would go for the Borderless. SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Joel: All right, gang, that is another... Chad: Who'd you rather? Joel: Who would you rather? Thanks for playing, thanks for playing. All right. Let's get to our final story, the Italian government is ending benefits for thousands of families and individuals deemed "fit to work." The citizen's income allowance will only be for families meeting limited criteria such as those with a disabled person, a minor or an individual over the age of 65. The benefit was introduced four years ago, but the new right-wing government is tightening the social welfare system, opponents criticized the decision saying it would be particularly difficult for those in their 50s to retrain and find new jobs. Get a job hippie. Chad what are your thoughts on the news out of Italy? Chad: It's interesting. First, let's give a little background. Meloni is she's actually a Mussolini fan, she's a radical right winger, she's a fascist. Here's the kicker. Hey, Italians, this was one of Meloni's campaign promises. She promised to do that if she'd get in office. She said she's going to abolish these monies. So nobody should be surprised, but whose job is it to create jobs in Italy? Everyone wants to point at the guy on the couch and say, hey, man, you're lazy. But there aren't any fucking jobs in Italy. Is it the individual's job to drive economic development for the entire country or Italy, the actual government by building and bringing companies into the country? The thing here is we're always demonizing the person who can't find a fucking job. If you take a look at Naples, it is depressed. It is impoverished, and then we're pointing a finger at somebody and saying, you're lazy. Chad: It's the government being lazy and not doing their job and actually doing economic development. So we've got to stop demonizing people who can't find a fucking job. That's the biggest key. And we've got Mussolini fans who were loving this. This is something that we see in the US, we see all over the world. We're always pointing at the lazy bastard on the couch, who, to be quite frank, has to work three jobs just to be able to make ends meet. So that's my two cents. I think it's ridiculous. And for a government to be able to point at people and call 'em lazy, the government, Italy in this case is lazy. Joel: Not to sound like a broken record, but the political side of this, not that it doesn't matter, but Italy has the highest share of people over 65 years of age in the EU. Aging residents and failing birth rates will decrease the population from 54.2 million today to 47.7 million in 2070. Similar to France changing the rules around retirement, Italy has the same tough choice to make and this is probably one of many that they're going to have to do. I do love that if you have children that you still get the benefit, which is basically saying, have more kids so we can help pay for an aging population. Politically, this becomes a strategy to win office. It makes great headlines but the, ultimately the bill is gonna be due on these issues of not having enough money to pay these things that people need. We had one of the... Joel: One of the politicians made a great point in terms of supporting women. And if you support women, they're more likely to get a job because they feel they have childcare and that they can have that support. Initiatives like that are perfectly fine if the end goal is to get more women in the workforce. I think that's a good thing. But ultimately everyone should take a page out of Portugal's playbook and get more Americans, Canadians, and Brits to come in the country and spend more money and buy more real estate so they can buy more benefits for their populace. Chad: To create more jobs, I don't care how many women you make feel good about going to work, if there's no fucking work, you can't do anything. Joel: Well, you need customers to have jobs and if you have a declining population, there's less customers. Chad: They don't have people coming in to actually create jobs in the first place. That's the problem. You can't get a tax revenue base if you can't actually tax the people off the jobs that they're doing 'cause there aren't any fucking jobs. Joel: Well, there's a declining number of people. Chad: Which should make for more job openings. The problem is, Italy's not doing its job and creating economic development. Joel: But you need consumers to buy the goods that you're selling, those are where the jobs come from. If you have an aging population... Chad: Where do they get the money? Joel: 80 year olds don't buy anything, I know 'cause my dad's 84. Chad: There aren't enough jobs, so if you've got a declining population, you need to bring more jobs to the people so that they can actually get money in their pocket so they can pay for shit. Joel: Sure. Chad: If you have more kids and you don't have jobs to be able to drive tax revenue and buy shit, none of that matters. Joel: Immigration's a whole other point of this as well. I don't know what Italy's immigration policy. Chad: That's a diversion, but yes. Joel: If you want more people, you have to have more babies. Let people in, you become Italy in Japan. Chad: What's the problem right now? Jobs. They're pointing at people that are saying lazy on the couch where there are no fucking jobs. They need jobs first. They don't need more people. Joel: More Americans. That's the answer, Lieven. What are your thoughts? Lieven: More Americans. Chad: Yeah. To spend money. Lieven: The world needs more Americans. I think there's a very big difference between the north and the south of Italy. If you look at Milano, there are plenty of jobs and it's rich and the economy is booming. The south has always been a problem area. And I do agree with both of you. Definitely, it's at least job to create more jobs definitely in the south and to help those people if you can't find a job, the government needs to take care of you. And this is what's been happening for hundreds of years now. There is only one problem. If the social security is that good in some regions, you probably don't feel the urge to find a job, and there are ways to make some more money without paying taxes. So we call it... I'm not sure if it's called the same in English as (What did he say?) if you don't pay taxes, you work in black in the firm, you probably don't know the expression. I can't translate it literally. But I'm sure many of those people who take money from the government because they are unemployed, also work without paying taxes. Lieven: And this definitely is the case in the south of Italy. That's one thing. And I feel there should be a big difference between what you could make working and what you get from the government not working. And in those countries, and in the south of Italy, the average income is pretty low. And what they got from the government was high income, if you compare it and then people aren't motivated. What I should do or what I would do, but it's politics, is the moment you lose your job, the first three months you should get a really high allowance because it would allow you to look for a new job, maybe even five months, but then it should go down pretty fast. So you don't have the time to settle down and getting the money from the government and not working at all. For people losing a job, there should be some kind of a net to catch them. But you can't just use the system for years and years. There are jobs definitely even in the south, so people should be motivated to get one. But that's more of a political discussion, I feel. Joel: Did Lieven say he agreed with both of us? Lieven: Yes is because I'm very diplomatic. Chad: Very European, but what I heard from you there Lieven was if there needs to be greater wages as well, the wages need to increase. Lieven: Yeah, of course. Chad: There are many different layers to this onion. But at the end of the day, you're right, there are pockets of Italy that are impoverished, you just can't find a job. But then there are other areas, I mean, there's no reason that they can't treat those differently, right? Lieven: And you are talking about migration in the '50s and '60s, after last century. So many Italian people came, for example, to Belgium to work in the coal mines because Italy was really poor, and those people were invited to come to work in Belgium and in Netherlands and Germany and work in the mining industry, which was a terrible job but it paid pretty good. But then when those mines closed, closed down, then those people were unemployed in Belgium as well, it's still something which isn't totally solved even in Italy. Joel: Keep hope alive Europe, because team Sowash is eventually gonna be back in Portugal, spending lots and lots of money. Lieven: Tons. Joel: Guys, this was intense, but I loved it as usual, we out. Chad: We out. Lieven: We out. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away and like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either, we out.

As summer drags on, the boys had to get out of the house for a change of scenery, deciding to head to Chicago to see how things at Shaker Recruitment Marketing were doing … as well as do a show in the process. (That means the usual dose of cameras, crowds and debauchery, of course, just in real life this time.) The boys discuss tons of AI topics, including The New York Times taking on OpenAI and the state of New York regulating employee monitoring. Plus, The America First Legal Foundation is crying reverse discrimination, while Kid Rock is still drinking Bud Lite and Grindr and X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, are looking to be the next LinkedIn (yeah, really). As an added bonus, Shaker president Joe Shaker, Jr. joins us for a fireside chat, focused on the state of programmatic job advertising, to close out an amazing 24 hours in the Windy City. TRASNCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. Just a couple of wind bags in the Windy city. What's up kids? We are in front of a live studio audience in Chicago, hosted by our good friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. You are listening to the The Chad & Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel the fridge Cheeseman. Chad: This is Chad Italian Beef Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, AI, DEI, LinkedIn better watch its back. And a fireside chat with Shaker President, Joe Shaker. Let's do this. Chad: Chicago, Chad, my kind of town. Joel: Love Chicago. Chad: Once you get through all the traffic, it doesn't suck, right? It's awesome when you get through all the traffic [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Somebody said, oh, that one freeway is awful. There's 10. Which one are you talking about? They all suck. Chad: They do. Joel: Yeah. Not built for the traffic here, but... Chad: The trains. Joel: Smaller more manageable than New York. Chad: Yes. Joel: Bigger than Boston. Six pro sports teams... Chad: And Shaker's here. Joel: Lake, decent weather... Chad: Skill scout's here on video. Joel: Considering the news. Everywhere's on fire, everywhere is flooded. [laughter] Chicago is a broad shouldered, environmentally sound city that people can visit or live. Chad: Another great place right now is Spain. I don't know if you saw the Women's Cup. Joel: I did. Chad: World Cup. Joel: I did. Chad: Yep. Joel: I saw the highlights. I'm not gonna try to tell you, I woke up at 6:00 AM to watch it. Chad: Second time in a row. You chose London. Joel: Yeah. Chad: And you failed. So all of our listeners in the UK don't blame the lionesses that, their injuries, anything like that. Blame... Joel: Blame me. Chad: Joel Cheeseman, kids. Joel: How much does it suck to be an English fan? They always get right there and then... Chad: They've got... Joel: And then fumble it. Chad: Yes. Joel: They're the Cleveland Browns of the soccer world, I think. Chad: [laughter] Or it could be the Chicago Bears. Hopefully they play a hell of a lot better this year. Joel: Yeah. So shout out to some friends here in Chicago. Chad: Yes. Joel: We had dinner, that goes to Matt Grover of Recruitics and Ben Russell at Sonic Jobs, took us out to a fine Italian restaurant. I had the chicken parm. I think you had some sort of fish thing. Chad: Sea bass baby. Sea bass. Joel: Sea bass. Yeah. Gotta keep that figure. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: In check, which then resulted into shocker, whiskey afterwards. [laughter], and then a slight hangover this morning for sure... Chad: Oh yeah. I blame Ben on that one. I kept finding new topped off glasses of whiskey and... Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Good selection. Chad: Yeah. It was very soft. Joel: The Widow Jane is a winner. If you haven't tried that. Have you haven't tried that case? Chad: It is delicious. So... Joel: Thank you to Chicago. Chad: Yes. Joel: Great people. Great town. Chad: Beautiful. Joel: Let's get to some shout outs. Chad: So I'm gonna use my shout out time to play a new game I like to call back to the future. Joel: Back to the future. Chad: Yes. Joel: There's no DeLorean. Chad: No. Joel: For this one. Is there? Okay. Chad: So what I'm gonna do, Joel, is I'm gonna read two press release bylines to you from our friends over at CareerBuilder. Joel: Okay. Chad: Okay? And you're going to tell me... Joel: These are real headlines. Chad: These are real headlines. Joel: Okay. Chad: One happened in 2018 and the other one happened in 2023. Joel: Ooh. Chad: Just this week, right? Joel: Okay. Chad: I want you to tell me which one happened this week. Joel: Let's play. Chad: Number one. CareerBuilder launches pay per resume. That's number one. Joel: Okay. Chad: Pay per resume. Joel: Needed that about 10 years ago. So that's... Chad: Okay. Joel: Okay. Chad: That's suspect. Right? It's suspect. The second one. CareerBuilder creates a major industry disruption with... Get ready. AI technology that delivers next generation job search and hiring. Joel: Ooh. Chad: Okay. So we've got a per resume. We've got patent pending, by the way, AI. Joel: Okay. Chad: From CareerBuilder. Joel: Okay. Chad: Which one of those press releases came out this week? Joel: Can I call a friend or do I have... Okay. Chad: No, there's no dialing, no calling a friend. Joel: Well, again, the pay per resume, pretty old. That's 10 plus years. Indeed did that. 2018 CareerBuilder was dropping Pokemon Go for jobs. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They were kind of getting sort of innovative, I guess for them. Chad: Getting jiggy with it. Joel: But I can't. It's gotta be the pay per resume. There's no way that that is 2023. [laughter] Joel: It is. Chad: So which one are you picking? Joel: I'm going with the pay per resume. That can't be a current headline. Chad: That is what dropped this week. Joel: Oh, geez. Chad: CareerBuilder dropped pay per resume as a new model. A new business model. Yes, that's right. Back to the Future, kids. We're talking about something that Indeed did what? Joel: Well... Chad: 10 years ago. Joel: We've had a good joke with the new CEO. Oh, what's his name? Abe Froman. The Chicago, the sausage King of Chicago. Something like that. Chad: Furman, I think it is. Yeah. Joel: If this is his, like... Chad: The real estate guy. The real estate guy. Joel: His first big headline. He's in trouble. Chad: He's. Joel: And they're definitely in trouble. Chad: He's literally in the office by himself. I... Oh my God. I'm sure of this. Joel: Oh my God. [laughter] Joel: Oh my God. Well, my shout out goes to Kid Rock. Mr. Ball With the Bar. Chad. Well, you might remember Kid Rock. Chad: Why? Joel: When we last saw him. Chad: Why? Joel: Shooting, literally shooting cans of Bud Light, flipping off Budweiser. Chad: Yes. Joel: And dropping F-bombs everywhere. Chad: Yes, 'cause that was cool. Joel: Well, Mr. Rock, which is what his accountants call him. Mr. Rock was seen drinking, you guessed it, a Bud Light this week reunited. And it feels so good, Chad. Thought leaders have two things going for them. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Not thought leaders, influencers. Chad: Yes. Joel: Attention. Chad: Yes. Joel: And trust. After he blew up cases of Bud Light and told to F off, does he have any trust with his users now that he's back to drinking Bud Light? Chad: All I can say is in his defense, you can take the kid out of the trailer park. You can't take the trailer park out of the kid. Joel: Yep. I ain't straight outta Compton. I'm straight out the trailer. [laughter] Joel: Another shout out... Chad: Yes. Joel: You know I love the Canadians. S?: Take off. We're doing our movie. Don't wreck our show. You hoser. Joel: We talked about LinkedIn partnering with CLEAR. Chad: Yes. Joel: To authenticate profiles. Chad: Yes. Joel: Well, that was an American only solution. Now they've rolled it out to our friends up north. Now our Canadian friends can basically be real people with CLEAR and LinkedIn. So if you go to LinkedIn in Canada, you should start seeing, do you wanna authenticate your profile. Chad: Yes. So, all the five LinkedIn users from Canada are gonna have access. That's awesome. I love it. Joel: That's cold, man. Chad: [laughter] Joel: That's cold. They're at least up to six or seven at this point. Chad: We've got free stuff. Let's talk about that. Joel: It's hard to compete with linkedina.com, which is the competitor there in Canada. Chad: That's bad. Joel: Sorry. Chad: So bad. Joel: Bad jokes come to... Come with me to Chicago too. Chad, we got free stuff. We brought some t-shirts to this event. Some people are donning some fine t-shirts... Chad: We might even get a Shaker T-shirt Cannon. Joel: Yeah, we got Shaker swag to take home with us. But for people that didn't get a shirt here at Shaker HQ, you can go to chadcheese.com, click the free link, give us your contact information. We got free shirts from our friends at JobGet. We're giving away free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs. Chad: So good. Oh, craft beer. Joel: And maybe most importantly, free whiskey from our friends in the Netherlands. Textkernel. Chad: I still have a headache this morning thinking... Just thinking about free whiskey. Carry on. Joel: I do remember our debate last night as to how early we were gonna get up. Chad: Yes. Joel: It went from 7:00 in breakfast. [laughter] Joel: To 9:00 and I'll just see at the... I'll see you there, kind of thing. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That was good. Chad: And ended up being 10 o'clock. Joel: In addition to free stuff, Chad. We got some birthdays to celebrate as we normally do. Chad: Birthdays. Joel: Some big hitters, big hitter birthdays. Chad: Who? Joel: This week we got Tracy Cole. Chad: Oh. Joel: Bradley Clark. You might remember we celebrated his co-founder at Rectxt last week. So Bradley... Chad: Fucking Canadians everywhere. Jesus. Joel: Another trip around the sun. That's right. Chad: That's crazy. Joel: Andrea Wade. Chad: Yes. Joel: In Ireland. Chad: Love her. Joel: Beverly Collins. Chad: Ooh. Joel: I wonder if she got a new Maserati for her birthday. Who knows. Chad: She might have. Joel: Who knows? It could have happened. Chad: I hope she did. Joel: Nick Livingston. Chad: Oh. Joel: Our friend at Honeit. Aman Brar on the beaches... Chad: Wow. Joel: Of Fiji or Bora Bora at this moment, probably. Joey Stubblebine celebrates a birthday. Chad: Nice. Joel: Dina Funky cold Madeiros and my wife Dr. Christine Picard Cheeseman celebrates her birthday this week. So happy birthday to all our listeners that are celebrating another year. Chad: The Bug lady, does she go by that? Joel: You saw her license plate in... Chad: Yeah. Insect. Right. Joel: Insect. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. That's fun. Joel: That's fun. All right. Chad: So we're gonna go ahead and roll into events Kids. We've got RecFest coming up, September 13th and 14th in Nashville. What's happening at RecFest? It's gonna be a party, it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be learning, bonding, drinking, all that stuff. It's kind of what we do. So it's perfect for us and our listeners. Not to mention, for TA Pros and their entire teams, they should be bringing their entire team to this thing. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Even if, let's say for instance, a TA leader wants to come to do a little recon. Joel: Yep. Chad: Sounds great. But those who need that all-in-one kind of package for a team meeting. This is perfect. Go to RecFest, almost here about three weeks away. Joel: And I'm pretty sure our Groupon still works, doesn't it? Chad: It does. Joel: Use Chad and Cheese as your coupon code and we're talking half off. Chad: Yes. Joel: It is legit Groupon status. Chad: Yes. Joel: Discounts at Chad and Cheese everybody. Chad: Then September 20th we have a Gem Virtual event. These are slowly going away. Remember we were doing virtual events every other day. Remember that. Joel: Wasn't a fan in mass. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I can do it occasionally. Chad: I like it occasionally. Well, we're gonna have a Mona Sloane, PhD from NYU and Keith Sonderling. You know him as Commissioner. Joel: That's right. Chad: From the EOC, where we're gonna be talking about AI's ability to unlock recruiting efficacy, the trials, tribulations and reasons why or why not the recruitment community should embrace AI. Then HR Tech's happening. This is gonna be ridiculous. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Fuel50. We're gonna be in the Fuel50 booth for two days straight. So find us, bring us beer please. Food, beer, all that other fun stuff. But come to the Fuel50 booth and then the very next week, this is ridiculous. We're gonna hop on a plane and go to one of our most favorite shows in Paris. Joel: Yep. Chad: UNLEASH World. So we're really excited about that in October. I can't wait. Joel: Is there gonna be an AA booth at any of these shows? [laughter] Joel: 'Cause I'm a little scared about all this, but not nearly as scared, Chad, as fantasy football. That's right. People watching us on YouTube know that you were donning a Chicago Bears jersey, the Bears Justin Fields. If you love fantasy football, put in your name for our league, we'll be choosing players very soon. Chad: Okay. Joel: We'll be drafting very soon. Chad: Yes. Joel: And it's our third, I think installment of fantasy football. Chad: I think third or fourth. Joel: Third or fourth. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, it's becoming a tradition... Chad: It is. Joel: Here at Chad and Cheese and we're excited. So if you love fantasy football, hit us up and put your name in the hat to get into the league. Chad: I'm getting texts every day from people who are trying to find their way into the Fantasy Football League. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's really funny 'cause I feel like we had to pull teeth to get the first round of people. Chad: Now everybody wants to do it. Joel: And, now that they know that, the leaderboard every week, it's so much fun. People want to get on it. And, big shout out to FactoryFix. Chad: For this jersey. Joel: Another fine Chicago company. Chad: Yes, yeah. Joel: For sponsoring Fantasy Football. We'll see you in September. Chad: And Mike and the kids over at FactoryFix for getting me this beautiful Justin Fields jersey. Joel: It is nice. They spent some coin on that. That's not the cheap... Chad: Not playing games. Joel: Street jersey that you get on the way to the game. Chad: No, it's not. Gotta watch it on YouTube though. Now we go to topics. Topics! Joel: All right. AI, first time. All right. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: New York Times. Chad: This is constant. Dude. Joel: The New York Times and OpenAI could end up in court, Chad. The Times is considering suing OpenAI over intellectual property rights as negotiations for a licensing deal falter, concerns arise that AI like ChatGPT could replace original reporting, legal implications of AI's use without permission remain uncertain. Chad, How is this case going to shake out? Chad: It's fairly, I mean, this is going to be commonplace and, I mean, OpenAI actually has, they put out a report, really instructions, on how to get your site ready to not be scraped, indexed or what have you. So I think, we've learned from the days of Google, robot TXT files, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: So what those robots can actually come after data wise and get, and what they can't. So this is, this isn't anything new. It's... You mentioned the banana in the tailpipe [laughter], which is brilliant. I'm not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe again, New York times, they're not falling for the banana in the tailpipe. Joel: Yeah. So historically, Google took content from newspapers, created a advertising model. Chad: Yes. Joel: I.e. A money printing machine in the back of the office and the New York Times and other newspapers fell in revenue and eyeballs, et cetera. And more and more of that is happening as Google is just taking snippets of news, answering questions. Nobody even goes to news sites anymore in most cases. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So the New York Times learned their lesson that, we let Google take all the money, Facebook take all the money, and we're not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe again, [laughter] and let openAI and Bard and everything else take money off our plate. Joel: Because we own the content and we should be paid fairly for that. Now, historically, there's some interesting precedent cases. So number one, you have Google scanned books at one point, and you could get Moby Dick and other historical books and things off the internet. There was a case against that. The court said that that was okay, because it wasn't an original take on what was already done. These are books that are already in the public space. But then there was another case with artist Andy Warhol. Chad: Yes. Joel: Where he would take historical pictures and he would do the Andy Warhol thing with those. Now he lost that case to be able to do that. So where in the justice system are they going to put what OpenAI is doing with content, are they going to win or lose. I think it's a very important case of how the future of AI is going to pan out. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And we will continue to watch it very closely. Chad: Yes. It is... It's not just text and that's what we cared about mostly with Google. And I mean, they did also with images, but yeah, we're talking, this is multimodal. So it will be something that will continue to happen. But again, anybody who cares about guarding their contents there's way to... There are ways to do it. Joel: Yeah. If the New York Times was smart, it would build an alliance with all the other major newspapers and do an auction between OpenAI and Microsoft and Google and Facebook about who's gonna to get our content to model their AI after, and make a ton of money from one of those companies. Well, New York Times, but also the New York State of... Chad: Empire State of Mind, baby. Joel: Is in the news. A new bill in the New York State Senate proposes regulations for AI tools and employee monitoring and decision making tools used must be deemed necessary requiring clear notice and must undergo a bias audit. Employers must notify employees about their use, violations may result in fines. Get this, Chad, hold onto your seats, of up to $1500 for subsequent offenses. Chad, what is your take on the New York state of mind? Chad: Well, this is two aspects that they talk about, Monitoring tools and automated decision making tools. Right? So the bill prohibits these employers and employment agencies. I think this... The employment staffing agencies are really the ones that could take the big hits here. And I'll tell you why here in a second. On the, not just the monitoring, but the automated decision making. Because if you take a look at every instance, right? And they're talking about instances because the fines seem pretty pathetic, but when you scale and you're scaling decisions with AI and you make 30,000 decisions in a second, 30,000 times 1500, 30,000 times 500, right? Yep. So it does seem pretty pathetic. But if there are all these instances against who knows how many individuals in a specific timeframe, Yep. Then this could be a big fucking problem for companies. Now they talk about auditing, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: And that you must audit within a year's timeframe. I think any, this is great for consulting companies by the way, but I think any company who, especially major Fortune 500 company, who waits a year to do an audit, is actually, they're tripping themselves up. They should be auditing every quarter. Fortune 500 companies, staffing companies who have a multitude of clients and brands that they have to serve. They should actually have a whole unit of people who are doing this, at least on a monthly basis. Because again, if you're making that many decisions through automation, and they are for all those different brands. This could rack up a huge, huge bill. And what New York City did early on, their legislation, their regulations or proposed regulations had a lot of holes in it. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Right. And we talked on the show back then that this is just the first step. Don't get ready for, perfection right out of the gate. I mean, we're talking about the government. If you're looking for perfection on the first step, I mean, come on. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Really. This is tying up a bunch of loose ends, closing some gaps. It's not perfect, but it is definitely, a step in the right direction. And employers and staffing companies have a lot of work to do because they could be caught in a ringer pretty quick. Joel: Yeah. I gotta laugh outta this. 'Cause it reminded me of the pay transparency laws, in New York, that happened and people were posting jobs of 0-2 million [laughter] in salary, which is, I guess that's pay transparency technically, but, those companies got pinched pretty hard. Chad: Yes, and they should be. Joel: For those job postings. I mean, look, you mentioned, businesses are going to be created for consulting. There's going to be audit companies that have official badges or official certification. Chad: They're already out there, dude, that's a thing. Joel: They're going to make a lot of money doing this, assuming it spreads in other states and cities. Lawyers are going to make a lot of money... Consulting with companies. Chad: Yes. Welcome to America. Joel: The lawyers are gonna make a lot of money. But ultimately what you said in terms of the winner here is the citizen, the worker. It's amazing to me how many people at work don't know that their company can read their email or that... Chad: Yeah. Oh God. Joel: Companies are looking at calls sheet. So the fact that that wasn't... Hey, we're gonna... You need to alert people that you're doing that. Yeah. Let's at least make this right. That if you're using highly scalable mass data points to figure out who's doing what, who's at risk of whatever, who's a threat to whatever, that people know about that. And that they can act hopefully better than they would if they thought they weren't being watched. Chad: Well, on the monitoring side of the house, during remote work. I mean, we've stepped into an entirely different narrative around how people are working from home. That's their space. Right. There's no reason... I don't care if they're doing work and it's your work or not, that's still their space. It's their home. So there's gotta be some respect that happens there. Joel: Yeah. Chad: No. We've talked about some companies using the cameras, automatically keeping the cameras on, so that they can monitor, visually monitor their employees while they are working or not working, keystroke programs that are actually installed. They're all irrelevant to be quite frank, because at the end of the day, if the job is getting done, if the KPIs are getting met, if the goals are getting hit, I don't care when you're in front of your computer. As long as you're not missing meetings, you're doing your job, you're meeting all those things. I don't care. This is a culture of control that we're seeing. Joel: Unless you're rocking a Jeffrey Toobin, it shouldn't matter what you're doing at home. Chad: Just another reason not to do it. [laughter] Joel: And look, this is gonna make companies think twice about, should we do this? If we have to let our people know that we are tracking this, ultimately, a lot of companies aren't gonna buy these products and services. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: The companies that create them need to think about, okay, if the future of our product is transparency, what kind of future do we have? We're not hidden in the shadows. We're not this sort of checking your keystrokes and what's going on. So full transparency here, I think is good for everybody. To your point of the fines, hopefully those have teeth. Typically, unless someone is in an orange jumpsuit, nothing changes. But if there's some real penalties for some of these companies, then things hopefully, hopefully will change. Well, more AI, we're gonna get artsy-fartsy on everybody, Chad, which we normally don't do on the show, but... Chad: Andy Warhol? Joel: A US district court has ruled that AI generated art cannot be copyrighted. The judge stated that copyright requires human authorship, citing past cases like the monkey selfie. Remember the monkey selfie? Chad: Yes. Joel: Google it if you don't know. While acknowledging AI's role in new artistic frontiers, the ruling raises questions about how much human input is needed for AI created art to be copyrighted. Any thoughts on this ruling, Chad? Chad: It can't be enforced, period. I mean, it was funny, 'cause we've been talking for years about the whole whack-a-mole scenario on how there are gonna be programs that can identify these things. In this new world that we live in, that will not work and here's why. If you build a program for, let's just say, ChatGPT, OpenAI, right? That is one large language model. As we start to have these new islands of large language models that are built, they're gonna be millions easily. Right. And there are plenty that are out there already. It's just that OpenAI's new glory. Everybody now knows about them, but they're gonna be millions of these local LLMs that are out there. Yep. And they're all trained on entirely different data. If you're trying to tune one for a certain large language model, it's not tuned for all of them. So you're going to have to... It's gonna be impossible to keep up with the ones that are public, that you have access to. Let alone the ones that are private in their own private domains. It's gonna be impossible. So the whole whack-a-mole scenario is it's not gonna exist, 'cause you can't keep up with it. It's scaling too fast. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. So I was trying to spin this as an employment take on this. And I think I got it. So we're in Chicago. We're in Chicago here. And who's arguably the greatest athlete in his sport that played in Chicago in the '80s and '90s. Chad: Yes. Joel: Guy named Michael Jordan. Chad: Jordan, MJ. Joel: Well, there's a movie called Air, which I recommend. If you haven't seen it, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, imagine that, about the Nike Air story, how they landed Michael and there's a conversation in the movie where Ben Affleck, who's the founder of Nike says how they got the logo. They paid $35 to some local creative to make it. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And she got $35. But I'm thinking like, if that was today, they wouldn't need an artist to create a logo. They could AI make me a ton of different logo options. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: Pick from those... Chad: Easily. Joel: And we're done. So there's gonna be a lot of creative people that are either gonna have to harness AI in a new way to be more hireable or more valuable, because a lot of companies are going to bypass creatives, whether it be video, whether it be audio, whether it be design, and take creatives totally out of the picture. So to me, it's like, if I'm a creative person, I'm thinking really hard about how do I create original stuff with AI and how do I do stuff with AI that no other creative can do? Chad: You should be using this to scale, no matter what job you have. Right. I mean, look for ways to actually scale this, whether you're in marketing, whether you're in sales, whether you're... I mean, it doesn't matter. You're looking for different ways to progress and scale what you can do and do more of. Joel: Yeah. It's the adage that's becoming popular. If you won't lose your job to AI, you'll lose your job to someone that understands AI. Chad: Exactly. Joel: And with that, let's take a quick break and we'll talk about Grindr. I hardly even know her. Chad: Excuse me? Joel: All right, Chad, LinkedIn has had wannabe competitors over the years for sure. And we've talked about some of them, Polywork. Joel: Jobcase. [laughter] Joel: LinkedIn for those who aren't on LinkedIn and many others. But let's talk about some new participants. First up is X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. Chad: Okay. Joel: We recently talked about job postings being available to verified corporate accounts, but new rumors include a job search function. And Laskie's former CEO, who was acquired by Twitter has hinted at a matchmaking feature on the social network. Then you have competition in the form of some unexpected places. But Chad, I wanna get your take on X's new rumors about enhancing their job search functionality. Chad: So, I thought it was interesting because I had never heard of Laskie. I don't think you had either, had you? Joel: No. Chad: Yeah, they were... Joel: That was a shocker. Chad: They were acquired. They were acquired. I was like, who the hell is Laskie? Which was the job matching site that Twitter acquired in May. The CEO, Chris, I think Bakke or Bakke or. Joel: Bakke, I think. Chad: Okay. Joel: Yeah. Chad: He was also a founder of Interviewed, the interviewing company that Indeed bought, he was at Indeed for a couple of years, left and started Laskie. He did that with his co-founder who took the same trail, the CTO, his name is, what is it? What is it? What is it? Daniel O'Shea. So they've got some experience in this space and they have sold now two companies, to some pretty big brands. Right. Here's the big problem. We've talked about this before. LinkedIn has more data on me than any other platform out there. Intent, context, all of it. They suck at matching. Right. Indeed has a lot of information. Right. They suck at matching. Twitter doesn't have any information about me and what I do, so there's really no context to be able to help me find a job. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Other than jobs near me, which could be admin assistants and things that I really don't care about. So I think it's interesting. Can they get information on me? Can they scrape, do a high queue and try to scrape LinkedIn? [laughter] Or something like that. I don't know how they get the data because I'm not gonna give it to them. I don't trust them. I don't trust them with anything. Joel: Yeah. So there are two sides to this, and one is our company is gonna sign up to post their jobs on Twitter. And I tend to think a lot of companies will spend the 12 grand, which is the current price tag, if they can get their jobs on Twitter, especially if there's a search box, there's functionality. Chad: Isn't only five though. There's an XML feed and then you can like promote five. Joel: It's a little unclear, Chad. Chad: Yeah, it's weird. Joel: Much like all the things that are going on at X, it's a little unclear, but if they do create a search box or their search box includes Hey, search for jobs, and there's like an all encompassing search, companies will jump on board to get their jobs on Twitter. They just will, that'll be something that's not a huge, huge expense. Chad: They'll do it badly. Joel: Huge expense. Joel: Yeah. They'll, yeah. XML feed, upload, whatever, and, and will X be able to handle that correctly. So I do think there will be a good number of companies that say, oh, I can put my jobs on X. Like, yeah, it's how much. Okay, cool. And we're verified and we get all that other shit that a verified company gets. We get the gold check. So I do think that they'll find, they'll get some leverage with companies. The point that you bring up to is the job seeker and Twitter's brand right now is you post little snippets of your thoughts and links and you comment on them. Chad: It used to be a little snippets. Joel: Yes. So now every indication is that Elon wants to be the super app that is popularized in China... Chad: The WeChat, yeah, the WeChat. Joel: And places in Asia. And if he succeeds in that, then if you think of it as everything, then finding a job or networking becomes maybe part of that value add. So the real challenge to me is, can Elon pull off this everything app where you can get your car, you can pay for everything, and now you can like network and upload a profile that's professional. And I mean the matching, they do have the data. They do have people on the platform. So if they know by where you are locally, can they... Chad: They don't have enough data though. Indeed has more data on me. Joel: Oh, for sure. Chad: Right. And they still do a shit job of matching. Joel: They have a long way to go. Chad: They're horrible. Joel: To compete with LinkedIn. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But can they get the young people to embrace X as opposed to LinkedIn is where my grandpa put his profile. [laughter] Joel: So I don't know. It's fun to watch Elon's always good TV, good podcasting, good everything. So we'll continue to cover this, but I... Chad: He's a fucking train wreck. Yeah. Joel: The good news is, I think he's serious. I think I mentioned he came up with PayPal with LinkedIn's founder Reid Hoffman. So he's seen this, it is low hanging fruit to get companies to post jobs and people to do that. So I think he is serious and I think it'll be fun to watch. He's got an uphill battle, especially with this everything app thing. But it will be fun to watch. Chad: Remember when we thought Facebook was serious about this? I think the same thing's gonna happen. Joel: And google was serious about it and they're a little more serious about job postings 'cause I think that's easier for them. Chad: Yes. Joel: But yes, we've seen companies come and go and get the hell out of it because it's a pain in the ass for the most part. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And Elon will probably lose interest. He'll get bored and shoot off some rockets or dig a hole in LA or something. Chad: Yeah, that Squirrel moment. Yeah. Joel: Yeah, a Squirrel moment for him. Well, from X to maybe XXX to some people, you may know Grindr as the go-to destination for LGBTQ+ people looking for a hookup, Chad. But apparently it's now being used as an alternative to the likes of LinkedIn users checking into the dating app to see how many feet they are from a potential love interest can now expect to be poached for work rather than asked out. That's because around 25% of its users are on the app to network according to the company. Chad, should LinkedIn be losing any sleep over Grindr? Chad: No. Chad: I I think it's incredibly creepy. I mean I am so uninformed about, I've never used Grindr and then when I started reading this that you could actually see the proximity of how close you are to, I mean, it is like the the perfect stalker app. I mean, it is creep as fuck dude. And then okay, think of it, just think of it from this standpoint. Oh my God, this brings an entirely different vantage point to company culture. Literally your company culture is a hookup culture, that to me does not go together at all. Right. [laughter] So if you're looking, I mean if you're looking to diversify. We've talked to Mitch Yuova at my myGwork that is a company that was focused on creating a LinkedIn property, for the LGBTQ+ community. Right. This is this is no this is trying way too hard. Don't mix my hookups with my hiring. That is a recipe for fucking disaster in the workplace. Joel: Yeah. So there is some some historical precedence for this. Bumble is also a dating app from what I hear on the news, Chad, but they launched Bumble Bizz a few years ago to compete with LinkedIn. You don't hear a lot about Bumble Bizz. I think it's safe to say. You don't hear a lot of companies and employers using it. So to me Grindr, if they ever did get Grindr Bizz, I don't know what they would call it. I don't see that taking off. Just like I didn't see Bumble taking off. However recruiters are gonna recruit and they're gonna think outside the box. They're gonna try to get creative. And for them to sit outside the corporate headquarters of said company that they wanna poach from, look on Grindr of who is there. Chad: Can you imagine asking your recruiters to go on Grindr to do that? Joel: You won't ask recruiters. They'll just do... You know recruiters, man, they do whatever it takes to get in front of the companies. Chad: I don't care... Joel: Employees... Chad: I don't wanna know whatever it takes. Okay. Joel: This will continue to be a fringe resource for recruiters to poach from people at companies while they're at work. Hey, can we meet up for lunch? I'd like to talk to you about whatever, not a hookup or whatever. And then they pitch them on the job opportunity, that is going to happen. Just sit outside of Microsoft's headquarters, get on Grindr and see who's there and then connect with those people and hire them is gonna happen. And apparently obviously is. Chad: I got nothing, man. Joel: You got nothing. Chad: I got, I literally got nothing. It twists my mind to think what type of company culture you're building in going after people that way. I mean, there are great professional networks that you can get into... For all these different communities. When the network starts with a a hookup it's an entirely different mindset. To be able to build your company on. Joel: Do you remember when Twitter first came out and people started recruiting on Twitter? Chad: That's entirely different though. I mean, we're talking about a micro blogging platform versus a hookup app? Yeah. This is totally different. Joel: Even though the company says 25% of the users use it to network and make friends and contacts. Chad: I call that bullshit. Joel: You call it bullshit. Chad: Their version of network is not the kind of professional networking that we're talking about. Joel: Grindr may be a public company, I'm not, I'll have to check that but I know that they've talked about it. Going out as a SPAC, if they were going public this would be the perfect sort of narrative to say we're not just a hookup site, we're a LinkedIn competitor and that is gonna sell a lot of shares. I'm sure. Chad: Like Handshake and all the other... We're the new LinkedIn. No, you're not. Joel: All right. Well let's go from the new LinkedIn to the new EEOC, I guess, the America First Legal Foundation led by former Trump advisor, Steven Miller has requested that the EEOC investigate corporations including Activision, Blizzard and Kellogg claiming that their diversity equity and inclusion policies violate anti-discrimination law. The foundation alleges that these policies disadvantage white heterosexual men. The foundation's efforts are considered a move to discouraging employers from implementing DEI programs causing a potential conflict. Within the EEOC stance on diversity initiative. Chad, your thoughts and how much have you donated to the American First Legal Foundation? [laughter] Chad: So you had to see this coming. I mean affirmative action was struck down by the Supreme Court. That was the first domino. This is gonna be a wave. The actors here, the players, America First Legal Foundation, if you're listening to this podcast and you don't know the history of America First. Look it up back in the '40s. You've got to understand where this is actually coming from. And Steven Miller, I'm not even gonna talk about that guy. Here's a quote from Bloomberg Law. America First has accused Morgan Stanley, PWC, McDonald's and Starbucks and many more of having discriminatory DEI programs that aim to increase workplace representation of women and minorities. Wait for it, wait for it, at the expense of white heterosexual males, at the expense. End quote. Okay. So here's newest Pew Research when we're talking about expense. Okay. Joel: Dude, you're dropping Bloomberg Law and Pew Research in the same thing. You're gonna blow my mind up. Chad: White women are paid 83 cents on the dollar as men. Black women 70 cents on the dollar, Hispanic women 65 cents. And yet they feel like this is happening at the expense of the heterosexual white male. Another quote from Bloomberg Law, "It also targets the company's employee network groups for women racially and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ workers and others saying that they are also discriminatory because no such group exists for white heterosexual male." So I asked Julie because she is literally the expert in all things of this nature on the diversity side all that stuff. So I asked her I said have you ever heard of a white man ERG? And without missing a beat she said yeah I know they've been around forever. They call them the C-suite and the board of directors. Right. This is total bullshit. That was a touche moment for me. Joel: Mic drop moment. Yeah. Chad: To be able to say that they're disadvantaged is ridiculous. And the question is why is this happening and why are we seeing this happen so fast? And I have one clue. 2040. In 2040 or around 2045. The white demographic in the United States is going to become the minority. There are a lot of white men in power who are afraid. They're fearful for what that actually means. And that's why this shit's happening. The EEOC basically is ensuring companies and their separate locations look like the communities that they're in. That's all they're doing. Right. So to be able to attack these things, and we're gonna see it, you know, obviously go to the Supreme Court. This is gonna be an issue and it's gonna get worse as we get closer to 2040. Joel: Yes. So you remember in the '80s the Sci-fi series, V? Chad: Yes. Joel: For those that don't, it's not worth your time to go check it out on YouTube or wherever it might be. Chad: A trailer. Joel: Basically, aliens come to earth, they look like humans. So we can't like place them as regular. Chad: No clue where this is going. Joel: And there's a big episode where a woman has a baby that's part alien and part human. That's Steven Miller. He's one of the lowest forms of people. Chad: Ever, yeah. Joel: So you mentioned the Supreme Court. We knew this was gonna happen. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We knew what happened in schools. We knew what happened in corporate life. And this is a reaction to that, at its simplest form this is a grift by him and the organization. They're gonna raise so much money from donors, that wanna fight this fight. Chad: The Kid Rocks of the world. Joel: He's gonna make it. They're gonna make a ton of money. He's gonna get a ton of airtime on every television show, podcast. Chad: It's fucking ridiculous. Joel: In this episode, so he's on an ego trip. He's making tons of money from this. It's a grift. The sad part about this, and we discussed this in prior episodes, is that we have politicized diversity. We have politicized... Chad: We have demonized diversity. Joel: Sure, sure. Chad: This organization has demonized diversity. Joel: And the money raising happens on both sides. Chad: Fucking horrible. Joel: What's so sad is that companies that I think had every good intention of focusing on diversity, focusing on a more inclusive company and workforce have now said, we don't want any part of this conversation. We don't want to be the next Bud Light. We don't want to be the next Target. Chad: So shortsighted. Joel: We talk more and more and we're seeing more and more stories about companies dropping their diversity programs. And it's because of this bullshit. What could have been a perfectly fantastic period of inclusion has been politicized, demonized, and this is what we see as a part of it and it's a fucking shame. Chad: Well, and this is a call out to all the DEI leaders that are out there. All the ones that I've talked to over the years that say, I will not talk politics. This is what happened. Politics knocked on your door. You didn't answer. Right. You didn't answer. Then they kicked your door down, went into your pantry, took your Cheetos, sat on your couch, and started watching Fox News. The question is, what are you going to do about it? You DEI leaders who weren't gonna talk politics, guess what? Too damn bad. You have no choice now. You gotta get out there and fight. And if you don't, more of this shit's gonna happen. And that's the hard part, especially in the employment side. Joel: And those are flaming hot Cheetos, by the way, Chad [chuckle] So everyone should be doubly pissed off about that. Well, let's take a breath. Chad: Yes. Joel: And we're gonna bring Joe Shaker, president of Shaker Recruitment Marketing for a little fireside chat Chicago style. And we're back. Joe Shaker Jr: Hey guys, how are you? You know what? Actually, I should welcome you all. So welcome to Chicago. Welcome to Shaker Hub, as we like to call it. Chad: Oh, the Hub. Joel: Always a pleasure. Joe Shaker Jr: And I gotta tell you, it's been fun... Chad: It's gorgeous, dude. Joe Shaker Jr: It's been fun sitting backstage watching the show, seeing what, how animated you all are. But I have to tell you, I'm so happy that I did not join you guys last night for dinner. Joel: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: 'Cause I feel great today. Joel: That was a good choice. And with the Cubs battling for the wild card spot, you have a little pep in your step. You're a little better mood than normal. Joe Shaker Jr: I think you're five back, is that right, Joel? Five? I think you're five. Joel: Yeah. I don't... I'm not looking. I'm not Browns. We'll talk Browns at the end of the interview. But the Cubs you gotta be excited about that. Joe Shaker Jr: I am excited. But it's the Cubs, so let's see how they close out. [chuckle] Joel: Yeah, I know how that goes. So some of our listeners don't know, you don't know Shaker. Give us a quick sort of Twitter bio on you and the company. Joe Shaker Jr: Sure for those that don't, I'm Joe Shaker Jr. President of Shaker Recruitment Marketing. All I've ever done is recruitment and advertising. I took over the business from my father about eight or nine years ago, but I've been doing it since birth. My agency has been around for 74 years. It was started by my grandfather and we've been based in Oak Park, Illinois for about 30-40 years of the 70. Chad: It's a great little neighborhood. Joel: Great neighborhood. Chad: And this is a great location. Every time we come, it's like we got the whole escalator set up here, which no, I don't know any other. Joel: It's nice because there's parking. Chad: Yes. Joel: Downtown. You know, like forget about it. Chad: Yes. You're screwed. Joel: Yeah. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck. So Grindr for recruitment. Are you guys working on that now or? [laughter] Joe Shaker Jr: I always learn a thing or two on your shows and I learned something here today. Joel: All right. There'll be a meeting later to discuss the opportunities. Chad: There will be a Grindr meeting just so everybody knows the Shaker Grindr meeting's happening. Okay. Just so you're ready. Joe Shaker Jr: I also since you guys... Joel: Everybody download the app today. Joe Shaker Jr: Since you guys also start with callouts and you mentioned birthdays and you mentioned your wife. My daughter turns seven on Friday. Joel: Oh yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: And she actually is pretty, thinks I'm pretty cool today knowing that I'm gonna be on YouTube later this week. Joel: Ooh. Joe Shaker Jr: So happy seventh birthday to Marian. Chad: Yes. Joel: Very nice. Chad: Oh, we're gonna have to actually just go ahead and get a clip of that and send that to Marian so she can play it for the kids. I love that. Joe Shaker Jr: I gotta get some brownie points for that, I think. Joel: Joe knows some people that can edit some video, I think. Yeah. Chad: So Joe, we're gonna go ahead and hit you with a fastball right out the gate. Big news happening in the industry. Appcast buys Bayard, one of your competitors, friends but competitors, right. You guys have known each other forever. Joe Shaker Jr: Long time. Chad: Those guys have been in business for around 100 years. You guys were on 75. I mean, you guys are the heavyweights in this space. How surprised were you? First off. Joe Shaker Jr: That Bayard sold? Chad: And to Appcast? Joe Shaker Jr: So as soon as Shamrock bought Bayard the first time, right. PE comes in, they're not building another 100 year company. So are we surprised that Bayard sold? Of course not. Were we surprised that Appcast bought it? That was surprising. I didn't see that coming. Chad: So knowing that it was PE, knowing it's been around for 100 years, how surprised are you that they are ditching the Bayard name? Joe Shaker Jr: That did surprise me. Chad: Yeah. I was pretty set on my ass when I heard that... [chuckle] Joel: Were you more surprised that Twitter went away or Bayard went away? Joe Shaker Jr: Twitter. Joel: Okay. Joe Shaker Jr: I mean, Chris knows what he's doing. He's building one company. He doesn't wanna have the two separate brands so. Chad: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: We still lot of times talk about Indeed versus Glassdoor. Chad: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: Should it be one name or two? Chad: Right. Joe Shaker Jr: So right outta the gates. I think Chris is being very clear on where he is going and what his direction is... Joel: They should have called it Radiancy. Is that taken? Does anybody have that one? Chad: So that being said, you guys are obviously closely working and partnered with Appcast. Joe Shaker Jr: Correct. Chad: This is a weird dynamic now. There was always kind of this coopetition that was happening in the first place. But this goes to another level. Where do you guys go from here? Is there an opportunity to use other platforms along with Clickcast? What's the thoughts for not just Shaker but other agencies like yours? Joel: And feel free to... A lot of our listeners. Programmatic is new to them. Clickcast is Alien. A quick historical perspective on how we got here would help. Joe Shaker Jr: Well, you make a very good clear point there too, Joel. So you have to separate the two for the conversation. Joel: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: Clickcast and Appcast, you are correct. We use both. And we use, Shaker uses Clickcast as the technology to distribute our jobs. But I have a team of 20 plus really smart individuals that are then dictating where should we send those jobs based on data and Clickcast is that distribution arm. Chris and his team were at the forefront of that. Bringing that technology, that distribution tool to the table into recruiting and giving it to the groups like Shaker that can then dictate how we wanna send those jobs. But to be clear we control where those jobs go and use Clickcast as the distribution arm. Shortly thereafter, they came out with a product called Appcast, which drives applications to our clients. We judge Appcast no different than we would judge Indeed, Glassdoor, X, Facebook, Google, who's gonna drive the most applications based? Joel: No bias. Joe Shaker Jr: No bias. Joel: Best results are the web. Joe Shaker Jr: Where it's gonna go. And so Appcast is in those conversations and will continue to be in those conversations regardless of the fact that it's owned by Bayard. As long as the client is getting the results from those appropriate media sources, we will continue to use Appcast, Indeed, Google, X, and you name it, Clickcast is the technology. Until we see if there's better technology out there, we will continue to use Clickcast. Chad: There's a challenge, kids, there's a challenge, vendors out there. Joe Shaker Jr: We will continue to use it. Chad: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: And have our team managing it effectively. Joel: So we've seen instances where companies are acquired, they integrate the technology and the competition tends to kind of slowly exit stage left. ICIMS buying text recruits, canvas, Jobvite, these things happen. Have you been given an affirmation from Appcast that they're gonna stick around? They're not going to shut anybody off. You've been given... Are you under contract? That... Joe Shaker Jr: Which you hear is true. And I will say Chris is a reputable guy. We've all known him for a long time. Joel: Yep. Joe Shaker Jr: He's a man of his word and if he's trying to keep both going as well, and so what he said to you all and what you guys have reported on is accurate. He is managing our partnership and relationship no different than he did before it was bought by Bayard and he respects our decision. As long as Clickcast continues to distribute, I think there can be a way for both of us to compete as well as cooperate. Chad: He's one guy though, and he could be gone tomorrow. Joe Shaker Jr: He's got a good team though. Joe Shaker Jr: Yeah. Chad: Okay. So you trust the the the team in itself, not just Chris. Joe Shaker Jr: I trust my team. At the end of the day you also realize it's we're using the tool, but it's what we're doing with the tool. Chad: But they have access to your data though. Joe Shaker Jr: Not technically, legally, no. Chad: They're going through their system. Joe Shaker Jr: I don't think they're gonna be combing through it. Chad: Okay. Joe Shaker Jr: That would cause some bigger issues. Chad: I would think so. Joe Shaker Jr: Yeah. Chad: But again, to be able to poach clients and to be able to know results and effectiveness and all those, always looking for a market differentiator or at least something to try after new clients. Joe Shaker Jr: But as we even talked about, and you guys have talked about in this show today, we're mentioning Indeed, you're mentioning X, you're mentioning case in point, even Grindr. It's one piece to the total puzzle. So I mean, do companies... Yes. Do they pick you for just your programmatic technology? It's part of the equation. But it's not the only thing. So it's what else can we deliver on top of that? To your point. Yes. Could they see who my clients? You can walk down my walls and see who my clients are... Chad: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: As long as I believe. And what I was trained is do what's right for the client. First and foremost. We're not gonna have an issue about client retention. Joel: And that's 75 plus years of proof. Joe Shaker Jr: 73, 73 but I appreciate the fast forward. [laughter] Joel: I'm confident that she'll make it. So if we go upstream a little bit our listeners know that Stepstone acquired Appcast, Stepstone owned by Axel Springer, owns a lot of us... Are you putting any of those pieces together? Do you see a bigger strategy with the European arm and what Appcast is doing? Joe Shaker Jr: It's a clear direction that Stepstone wants, they've always wanted to come into the US market. This is just their first entree. With Appcast. Joel: Yeah. Joe Shaker Jr: Was a clear inclination as you also all reported on, they obviously bought AI technology still to be determined what they're gonna do with that. And now obviously made a big purchase with Bayard. It's evident that they are key in coming into the US market. Joel: And they'll be buying CareerBuilder Win. Joe Shaker Jr: Well, that's your call. Joel: Oh, that's my call. [laughter] Joe Shaker Jr: That's your call, not mine. Joel: I'm here in Chicago. You might have some in insider baseball for us in there, but unfortunately no. Chad: I just don't see that happening. Joe Shaker Jr: You can never say never. Chad: So what about for Shaker and take a look at again Europe as well, from a global standpoint, you guys work with huge brands. Joe Shaker Jr: Yeah. Chad: That have a reach into Europe and beyond how much more traction or even more penetration are you trying to get into those different markets? Joe Shaker Jr: Yeah, we're very proud to be the US representative to a global network called One Agent. Actually just in three weeks timeframe, actually all of our One Agent partners will be coming in to Chicago, where we're gonna be hosting them for three, four days of meetings. It's a good network. It's a way for us to... Joe Shaker Jr: Stay at the forefront, right? I mean, US is not always at the beginning of trends, right? We tend to think we are, but there's things that come out of those respective countries. So it's always a great time in those, during those sessions to meet with our partners to hear what's working, what's not in your markets, and then obviously vice versa. It also, yes, to your point, allows us to expand into those markets very quickly and have a full service agency that has branding capabilities, media buying capabilities, technology consult. They're built very similar to the way Shaker is to be able to address our client's needs and help them scale into those markets as well. Chad: So I'm hearing a London Hub, kids, or maybe even Paris Hub? Joe Shaker Jr: We got a great London partner. It's a hub wheel, it's a spoke in a wheel type of model. Chad: Nice, very nice. Joel: And we'll be recording live as soon as the office. [laughter] Joe Shaker Jr: You wanna go. They'll have beer. They got beer. Joel: Wherever you are. We'll be, Joe. You have an interesting perspective on the ground of what employers are asking for, what they want, what works. Chad and I have our head in the clouds so much with AI and Grindr and whatever else, right? What are employees, employers. Chad: Always with the Grindr. Joel: What are employers asking for? What's working, give us a on the ground take of the state of employment right now. Joe Shaker Jr: Yeah, I would say, I mean, well two big components, right? That are of everyone's interest, right? Ours as well as, which is then obviously in turn becomes our employers, is around data, right? And having that data case in, first and foremost be transparent. I think a lot of times, unfortunately, sorry, some clients, the data is being held back. They're not getting a full accuracy, right? In terms of what's working and what is not and so where are they getting their results, whether it be X, whether it be Grindr, whether it be Indeed, whether it be Appcast, whether it be Google, whether it be Facebook, you know, they don't necessarily care as much, as long as we can have the supporting case to tell them, this is why we're here, this is what they're getting, here's the results and here's how we can even make it more effective. Joe Shaker Jr: So I mean, data's always been talked about, right? It's always been an obstacle because ATSs. Chad: Yes. Joe Shaker Jr: Right? Always made that difficult. Those days are gone. Right? We can now get real access to it in real time and transparently then tell them this is what we're seeing and this is what we should do with it. That would be one of the, I mean, I would say one big trend. The second is around speed. And yes, you can call it automation over AI, but they don't... Employees don't have the time to sit and wait for a candidate three, four, five days to get an interview scheduled. Employee, candidates are not going to spend, we've been talking about candidate experience forever. They're not gonna spend an hour, right. Telling you this is what it's like to work here. So they, employers have to find ways in which to speed up the apply process and make sure that we get them through the bottleneck quickly and efficiently. Otherwise, spend all the money in branding, spend all the money in media. It's just gonna break. Chad: Now how much time are you spending with them on process? Because we all know that the process when we first went to paper applications to online, literally they just mimicked the exact process, right? And it's like there are still those old 1990s processes that are out there. They're just in digital form. How much time are you guys spending in trying to help them reformat, re-framework their process? Because they ask so many things that are really not necessary in many cases, just to be able to speed all that up. Joe Shaker Jr: Yeah. I mean, it's dependent on the client, right 'cause some clients control their HRS system others do not. Right? And so ultimately, right, you have to find out who's the right gatekeeper in controlling those decisions. But ideally we're gonna spend a third around the time around building that right message, a third around where we're gonna activate it and a third around what's that conversion gonna look like. Chad: Gotcha. Joe Shaker Jr: Because to the point earlier, like if you just focus on that one side, like even just the media side, it's not gonna be as effective, right? Having that authentic message is gonna give you that retention. The media's gonna drop their cost per click down and then the conversion is gonna convert more of them and bring that cost per hire down. I know it's a third, a third, a third but... Joel: Bada bing, bada boom. Joe Shaker Jr: It's simple as that. Probably you just call it a trifecta in horse racing. Chad: The biggest key is that we've been focusing on brand and messaging and all those things and drawing candidates in, and then they go through a shitty process and so what you're saying, what you're seeing is, most companies are starting to recognize that they really need to retool if they're gonna be competitive. Joe Shaker Jr: It's, and it's also a numbers game, right? Go back to data. If we know that it takes, let's just call it 20 applications to make a hire and we can drop that from 20 to 10, that's real money saved and so if you automate it, or we can work more efficiently and drive those numbers down, you can ultimately spend less money in those other buckets. Joel: You mentioned horse racing. I'm gonna let you out on this. The over under in Vegas for the Bears this season is 7.5 wins. Joe Shaker Jr: Over, over. So you over. Joel: Over. Joe Shaker Jr: Over, over. Joel: Under is the correct answer. We out. Chad: We out. Joe Shaker Jr: See ya. S?: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuggle heads instead, now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Employees love to be recognized. It’s not just promotions and big deals, however. We’re talkin' birthdays, anniversaries, adopting a cat, everything. OK, maybe not a cat adoption, but you know what we mean. That’s why we brought Aaron Rubens, cofounder and CEO at Kudoboard to the show. He runs the online workplace appreciation solution for special occasions, shout outs, and everything in between, helping to replace the card that’s passed around and signed on birthdays, holidays, and special occasions for generations. Crazy thing is, they’re crushing it. To find out why - and how - you gotta listen. TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to 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: Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? We're live from the Aaron Booth at SHRM in Las Vegas. This is your host flying solo, Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese podcast. And today we welcome Aaron Rubens, co-founder and CEO of Kudoboard. Aaron, welcome to the podcast. Aaron: Joel, thanks so much for having me. Excited be here. Joel: Long time listener. First time, live podcast like most people on the show. So our listeners who don't know you, tell us a little about you, what makes Aaron tick, but more about the company, what you guys do. Aaron: Sure. I'll give you the, the genesis of the company then I'll tell you a little about me and, take it from there. So I used to be a high school math teacher a long time ago. Joel: How does that work with the ladies at the bars? Is that a big... Aaron: It's not great. Joel: Good enough. Aaron: But I was married by the time I got into it, so no a concern... Joel: Oh, okay. Aaron: And at the end of each year, I'd have students write their name on a piece of paper and they'd pass it around the classroom. And the idea was they had gotten pretty close over the course of the year. The instructions were, "Hey, each person write a little nice thing on the paper," and it comes back around. You get, 15-20 people writing something nice to you. And to be honest, it's one of these throwaway exercises that some other teacher told me, "Oh, it's a good way to like, capstone, bring people together, blah, blah, blah." Subsequent years, I had several students come up to me and say, "That was really special. Or I put it on my wall, or something that, like, it meant something to me." I never knew people thought that way about me. And I'll say, I would not do that at the beginning of the school year. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: You get, you get probably some bad stuff by the end you build the right culture, you bring people together. And this idea kind of stuck with me. And it wasn't until several years later when one of my good friends was turning 30 and we were all spread out across the country and we're like, all right, we gotta figure out a way to do some kind of birthday card for them. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And we ended up putting together a website and each person recorded a video on YouTube and we upload, it was super janky and terrible. Joel: Yep. Aaron: We're like, well, there's gotta be a better way. And that was sort of the genesis of Kudoboard. It started as an online sort of replacement for the card that's passed around and signed. Joel: Yep. Aaron: And it's, primarily used in the workplace for things like birthdays, work, anniversaries, get wells, farewells, really anything where you want to bring a group together and celebrate an individual. Joel: And you were founded when in 2015. Aaron: It's been... It's been a road. Joel: Roughly. Yes. So it's been a road. Aaron: It's been a road. Yeah. And it started really as a side project. I had this thing I wanted to solve and I was like, well, we'll see if we can turn this into something. Joel: I would imagine the pandemic was great for you because you are replacing the card in the mailbox at the headquarters... Aaron: Yeah. Joel: That everyone signs at, lunch hour with a digital version of that. Talk about the pandemic and the impact. Aaron: Yeah. No, it was, I mean, we had started to get enough traction where, in the beginning it was part-time, and then it was full-time and I got a couple employees, but it was still super small. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And then the pandemic hit and it went crazy and we grew 2000% Joel: That's crazy. Yeah. Aaron: Which it's partially it's low base. Joel: Yeah. We don't know where we're going from but... Aaron: Low base. But, it's this thing that was already sort of awkward and cheesy passing the card around. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And then add the pandemic in and now it's awkward and cheesy and impossible... Joel: Yep. Aaron: To do. And so you come in with a solution that's easy, that's fun, it's not just writing, but you can add pictures, videos, gifs, just make it fun. Just make it like light. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And convenient. Right. Joel: Yeah. Make it for the kids. Aaron: Exactly. Joel: One the kids could use. Aaron: For the kids. And you can print it out as a book. You get like that physical version that some people like to have, particularly like retirements, things like that. Joel: I'm dating myself but do you remember the SNL skit, frank singing songs that the kids will enjoy? Aaron: Yes. Joel: And it's Frank Sinatra. Okay. Look it up on YouTube kids if you don't know what I'm talking about. So you're a bootstrap business. It looks like you haven't taken any money or any significant money a little bit. So talk about that, the pros and cons. A lot of companies out there are bootstrapping, give them some advice. Aaron: Yeah. It was a road and part of it was, I think in the beginning I just didn't know, is this a venture scale business? And so I wanted, but I felt like I saw a path to bootstrap success. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And I still remember like the nights in the... I dunno if you ever saw that show Silicon Valley. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Aaron: But I remember the night where I was in the bathtub, nothing's in the bathtub. Just laying there. Like, "What did I do? Why did I get into this? This is terrible." Joel: By the way, you're still married to the woman you... Aaron: I'm still married. I'm still married. Joel: Okay. Good. Aaron: And she's been incredible. But eventually we sort of reached a point, we actually did raise a pretty large round of growth equity, about a year and a half ago now. Joel: Okay. Aaron: We kept it pretty quiet. Not secret, I mean, it's out there, but we didn't do... Joel: Can you tell our listeners the number. Aaron: We actually we don't announce it publicly. Joel: Interesting. Aaron: But... Joel: Interesting. Aaron: We usually play it close to the vest. Joel: CrunchBase doesn't know, and our listeners don't know what is going on. Wow. Aaron: Crunchbase doesn't know. Our listeners, don't know. We raised it from a firm who they really focus on, "Hey, we don't need to bet on a hundred businesses. So that one of 'em becomes Uber and the rest of them fail." Yeah. We want have 25 businesses that we all believe can three to five x and that gets us to a great outcome. And it's just a different model, you have to be profitable and to a certain level of profitability for that to make sense. And we were but... Joel: I wish I would've had that advice at the roulette table the other night 'cause I bet it all on black. Aaron: Hey. Aaron: And lost unfortunately. Aaron: At the roulette table you gotta go for it. Right. Joel: Talk about the competitive landscape. I'm guessing a lot of our listeners won't know some of the competitors and the competitive landscape. So talk about that. Aaron: Yeah. The primary competitor, they're actually at this conference as well. They're called GroupGreeting. Joel: Clever. Aaron: As you imagine they do group greeting cards, and where we sort of have differentiated ourselves from them over time, is oftentimes people start with this card that... But and it's shaped like a board, Kudoboard, whatever. Joel: Yeah, yeah. Aaron: But we've started to do a lot of like, big company events and shout outs and kind of moving the use case beyond just a card to more sort of engagement opportunities. So we have a lot of organizations, for instance, in June, a lot of organizations use it for Pride Month and they'll invite their whole organization to say, "Hey, how are you celebrating Pride Month or whatever." And different months different thing, Halloween, they'll do a Halloween costume contest and everyone can post their Halloween pictures and everyone votes on which one they like the best. So there's just these different ways to bring people together that expand the idea of like what a card can be. Sorry, I'm away from the microphone. Joel: That's okay. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. We can't all be professionals. Aaron: I'm a newbie. I'm newbie. I'm figuring it out. Joel: Talk about pricing 'cause that's gonna lead into my next question. Aaron: And I will be honest. I feel like we're still figuring it out a little bit. Joel: Okay. Eight years on, we're still figuring out the pricing. Aaron: I know. So there's kind of two ways you can engage with the platform. You can pay for it one board at a time, just like you'd go into a store and buy a Hallmark card. It's pretty limited in terms of the features that you get. But obviously the barrier to entry is super low. So we have thousands and thousands of people every day that are buying them individually. And then we have broader subscription options for companies. And it ranges from organizations of a few hundred to, you know, we have several customers, 50,000 plus employees that are using it organization-wide. And they'll pay hey 50,000 to 55,000 employees, this is the price. So tiered, essentially tiered pricing on the subscription side. Joel: And what's the typical client look like? I'm guessing it's on the, the SMB side, but I could be totally wrong on that. Aaron: No, I mean, we have a lot of healthcare organizations. So one way that they use Kudoboard that's a little unique is that we have them set it up and then they can collect notes of appreciation from patients or stakeholders in the community. Joel: Okay. Aaron: So one thing, a lot of like recognition or engagement solutions are very internal focused, only. Because Kudoboard's a lot more flexible you can also collect notes externally, sort of out to in, which makes a difference. But we work with a lot of large health systems. And then we also work with a lot of tech companies, basically people who are kinda remote. So like Gusto, Asana, folks like that, that have it available across the organization. Joel: Talk about the marketing 'cause the the pricing is pretty reasonable. So I haven't seen you on the Super Bowl, And I'm assuming I won't anytime soon, but talk about marketing. How do you guys get recognized? Aaron: Yeah. And this is something that like everything, it's evolving, but the way that we've grown primarily is based on sort of the, the natural viral mechanism of kudoboards. So like, if I create one for you, let's say it's your birthday coming up, I create one for you, and I invite 25 colleagues to post some percentage of those 25 colleagues eventually create their own. And it goes on and on and on. And we have 10 million plus people registered on Kudoboard, but at any given month we have 4 million plus people using it. Joel: Okay. Aaron: And so that's been a really nice, really low cost way to spread it far and wide. Joel: Is it like Hotmail where at the bottom it says powered by Kudoboard. Aaron: We haven't done that, but I think it's just you use something and you're like, oh, that was cool. Maybe like six months later, but I come back and do it again. So that's been our primary mechanism of trying to make that virality really smooth, really easy. And then what we find is over time we go to a company and we say, Hey you already have 15,000 employees that are registered on Kudoboard. Maybe rather than having them all buying individually and 10 team plans over here in this, let's move to a single company-wide plan. It is more expensive, but you get your integrations, your single sign-on, all that stuff that company's want. Joel: Does everyone get the gifs, that's the important thing. Aaron: Everyone gets the gif. Joel: Everyone gets it no matter what the price point. That's good. Aaron: What you get at the larger company is the ability to filter out gifs. Joel: And definitely not the naughty ones that I send to people. Aaron: Not the naughty ones. No. It's true. We have a very specific talk track around like, hey, this is how we screen out. Non-G rated gifs from Jiffy and all that kinda stuff. Joel: That's awesome. That's awesome. What's the global opportunity? Aaron: Yeah, I mean, right now we're about 70% of our revenue is in the US, 30% is, is outside the US. And to be honest, where we're limited is we're primarily in English speaking countries because the site is in English. And so I think like the next big step for us in terms of taking the product more global is going down the path of like translating it to Spanish or German or French or all those sorts of things. It requires a level of ongoing maintenance that we're not ready to do quite yet. But it's an opportunity that we're gonna take at some point. Joel: Got it. So this is primarily a recruiting employment show. Obviously onboarding. Welcome to the company, makes a lot of sense to me. Talk about that piece and then also how companies might look at creative ways to recruiting retention with the product. Aaron: Yep. No. Great question. One of the use cases that we push pretty hard and we see people have a lot of success with is to your point, that onboarding one and there's kind of two points at which it makes sense. So one is the point where someone gets an offer and you say, Hey congrats on your offer. You get everyone who's on the team who interviewed them to say great to meet you. We're really excited, we hope you join. And it goes out to them and it's just you get, obviously there's the hard parts of the offer. Like by that I just mean like there's the salary, the concrete things. Aaron: But then there's that softer thing that is trying to just give that little nudge. So that's one point where it makes sense. And then the other point is at onboarding. So you know, you're collecting posts from the colleagues who are gonna join and then the day their first day on their job, they come in and they get 25 emails on the different systems they need to sign up for and this that. And then they get this really nice thing from their colleagues saying, "Hey, we're so excited you're here." Some fun gifs and all that kind of stuff. Joel: Sure. Aaron: So what we have is a lot of large companies that have kind of built it in to their workflows. So it's like, Hey here's our standard onboarding workflow and step seven is create a Kudoboard, invite the team. And schedule it for delivery. And it takes two minutes for someone to do. So it's a pretty low lift. But it's just a nice thing to kind of separate you, you have someone with three offers and they're all great. You're trying to give 'em that little nudge. Joel: Yeah. And you have... You have sort of a keepsake component where you can print out the board. And frame it, etcetera. Talk about that a little bit. Joel: Yeah. So you can print it either as a poster or as a book. And the book is actually quite a bit more popular than the poster probably because the poster, the sizes could be kind of crazy just depending on the amount of content. But what we see is a lot of people for things like farewells, retirements things where like they're getting people writing really nice, less Gifs, but like really nice stuff. And they wanna save it. Sometimes they worked at a company 20, 30 years and they get these really nice notes and they get a book printed and shipped to them with all these notes after. And so we've had some companies, you asked earlier about like creative ideas. We've had some companies who just recently we work with one who had a, a voluntary buyout where they said, Hey, if anyone wants to take this, they can, they had a decent number of people take it. And they said, we're gonna create a Kudoboard for every single one of those people. Everyone's gonna sign it and then we're gonna ship 'em all a book at the end. And so it's just a nice way to like, give you something tangible to remember things by. Joel: Got it. So not something for the exit interview that people are using so much. Aaron: No, not so much the exit interview. The farewell use, it's funny 'cause the farewell use case is actually one of the most powerful. 'Cause people it's, they kind of, I only wish you had told me all these great things when I, when we were actually working together. But it's not the one we sell at the corporate level as much because it's not at that point, it's kind of beyond, they're on their way out. They're focused more on, to your point, like the onboarding, the ongoing experience things like that. Joel: Sure. ChatGPT, maybe you've heard of it being able... Aaron: Once or twice. Joel: To automate content and certainly the ability to write nice messages is now automated or AI powered. Is that making its way into the product or are you gonna keep it kind of human? Aaron: Yeah, it's, we have discussed it. And I think where we're leaning is offering a chatGPT assisted option for people who need a little inspiration. And that might look like Hey, what tone do you want? Oh funny or more serious or whatever else or tell us something interesting about the person you write a little thing and you kind of input some things. And then it kind of helps you form it into something. We're experimenting with that. I don't think we ever want it to be where, Hey, this is fully automated. You don't have to do anything. You just click a button and it does... 'Cause at that point, what are you even doing? Joel: Sure. Aaron: This is a product that's meant to like be authentic and bring people together. And yeah, you could automate that and hey you can automate the sending too. And you never have to even go in the product. It's just sending messages back and forth to itself. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And it gets kind of silly. So I think we're probably not going to get to the fully automated place. Joel: Yeah. I wish some version of that would have existed for my yearbook signings. 'Cause the number of people just said to "a cool dude, have a good summer", was a bit repetitive. Aaron: Maybe a little illustration in there. Joel: Yeah. So anything else future wise, this product evolution, you mentioned chatGPT, you mentioned more languages, anything else that you're looking in terms of evolution? Aaron: Yeah. So, I mean, I think in the near term roadmap, one of the big things we're thinking about is just like, how do we make this more integrated and automated for our largest customers? And by automated, I don't mean the actual content. But like, Hey, we want to make sure that every single one of our employees get this for their work anniversary. Well, to do that, we need to integrate with your HRS system. We need to integrate with your, if you use teams, we need to integrate teams. And we have some of those integrations built. But getting them deeper and more powerful so that it works across the board for companies. It's big because it just drives a lot of engagement. Joel: Yeah. Aaron: And it doesn't require, what's really powerful is it starts with this bottoms up ad hoc use, but at a certain point you want to have a solution that says, "Hey, and if you do want everyone to get this, we can do that." So that's really where we're going in the next year or two. Joel: Sure. Integrations while a pain in the ass are a necessary evil... Aaron: They are. Joel: In this business. Aaron, for our listeners who want to find out more about the company or connect with you, where would you send them? Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. So they can go to Kudoboard.com to sign up and there's a free trial. You can always just get started super easy. And if you want to reach me, Aaron@Kudoboard.com. Joel: Very cool. That is another one from the Aaron Booth at SHRM in Las Vegas in the can. Thanks Aaron for joining us and we out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on Tik Tok. No, you hung out with these two chuggle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

It’s a rare breed of professional that has worked on the vendor side of HR tech, as well as the TA practitioner side. So, when we got the opportunity to chat with Josh Rock, currently Talent Acquisition Manager at Nuss Truck, and former executive at JobDig, LinkUp and CollegeRecruiter, we jumped at the chance. Recorded at SHRM, it’s a candid conversation about the industry from both sides of the fence. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? We're live from the Aaron Booth at the SHRM National Show in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host Joel Cheeseman, flying solo as Chad is getting his tan on in Portugal. And we are, well, happy to welcome Josh Rock TA manager at Nuss [laughter] Nuss Truck & Equipment. Josh Rock: That's correct. Joel: Tell me you are blue collar without telling me you are blue collar Nuss Truck & Equipment. Josh, welcome to the podcast. Josh Rock: Thanks Cheese. What's going on, man? Joel: Yeah. You're a longtime listener. Josh Rock: I am. Joel: First time interviewee. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: So we're excited to have you on. Now you are one of the magical unicorns [laughter] that have made the transition from vendor. Josh Rock: Yep. Joel: To practitioner. Josh Rock: Yep. Joel: Let's talk about the vendor side first. 'Cause you've had a long journey. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Go. Josh Rock: I usually say I'm a recovering HR vendor. Never really goes away from you. Joel: Do you ever recover [laughter]? Josh Rock: No. No, you don't. Joel: There's no 12 step process for that. Is there? Josh Rock: Well, there might be 12 steps. I'm drinking lots of Mountain Dew, but we're still working on the recovery part. Yeah. I started my career 16 years in advertising. Worked with a company called JobDig in Minneapolis with Toby Dayton and Crew. Starting with. Joel: Sasquatch. Josh Rock: Exactly. 12 employees doing print online. I helped bring radio, developed it into TV. They created this thing called Fetcher, which became LinkUp. Joel: Oh my God. Josh Rock: Which is now Getwork by Adzuna. Joel: Fetcher. Josh Rock: I mean, it just goes on and on. I mean we even did a white label of cats one we called JobDig Tracker. Joel: LinkUp is their site as well. Josh Rock: LinkUp is... Joel: Were you there for that? Josh Rock: I was, now, so they turned, Fetcher into LinkUp. Joel: Okay. Josh Rock: And then LinkUp became Getwork, which is now owned by Adzuna. Joel: Got it. So Toby Dayton exists. Let's just get that on the tape. Josh Rock: Toby still exists... Now Toby exists now he's all on the jobs data side, the labor force market data, and that's what they do. That's what Toby does now. Joel: Yeah. He's blogging kind of now. Josh Rock: He's blogging now. Yeah. Yeah. He's still finding his way. Toby's a great guy. He just, he is evolving. Joel: I love Toby. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: I talked to him once in the aughts. And then I mysteriously got a bottle of Irish whiskey and Sasquatch shirt [laughter] about four years ago. [laughter] And that's all I know of Toby Dayton. Josh Rock: He's just showing you that he is still around. [laughter] Joel: And now that, now with VR, he will live forever. Josh Rock: Yes. Yes. Joel: In some form or fashion. Josh Rock: I haven't seen him in forever. It's crazy. Joel: Is it true that he is part of the Target family and he is like super rich and just does this job thing for fun? Josh Rock: No, I don't think, he may be, I don't know if that lore is exactly accurate but he is related to the Dayton family. I think the former governor of the great state of Minnesota, Mark Dayton is a like uncle or something to him. But yeah. Yeah, there's some lineage there. Joel: Yeah. And another one of our favorite Minnesotans, Steven Rothberg. Josh Rock: Oh. Joel: You've worked with. Josh Rock: The Gopher. The Gopher fan. That is Steven Rothberg, who will not end talking about hockey in Canada. Because he is from Winnipeg [laughter] Joel: Is he a Jets fan? Josh Rock: Yeah, I think he is a Jets fan. I can't confirm or deny that fact, but he will always hold or linger Canada hockey over anything else. Joel: So as you look at the industry now. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: And what you came into, is it night and day or is it the more things change, the more they stay the same? Josh Rock: No. It's completely different. I mean, granted you're still gonna have vendors trying to find, I mean, we're here at SHRM '23 where there's three football fields of vendors trying to get the attention of non-buyers. Joel: Some have crazy podcasters. Josh Rock: Some have crazy podcast podcasters. Joel: To try to get attention. Josh Rock: I've seen a few of you around here. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: You and Tin Cup and Sherry over at the other company over here and. Yeah. There's a bunch of you guys. But it's still the same thing where oftentimes the vendors are selling to non-buyers and they don't know how to get garner the attention. And so when I was on that side, I always tried to make the buyer the angel. What is their problem? Give them the solution to sell whoever that needed to sign the check and make them look good. It had nothing to do with my product or what I was offering or the solution. It was making them look good because then they were in long term. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: And some of these guys, they're just looking for the quick transaction that doesn't work anymore. So there is a bit of a change. And granted we don't see the job boards like we used to. There's no Trump the monster mascot here anymore. Joel: Not after the legal issues with Donald Trump. Josh Rock: Yes. Joel: Trumpsters no more. Josh Rock: Yeah. Trumpsters no more. Joel: We both remember that. Josh Rock: I mean. Indeed's here, there's no ZipRecruiter. Joel: Kind of. Josh Rock: Well, they got a big booth. I don't know what they're doing. Joel: Well the banner that hangs from the roof. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Looks like they printed it out on their HP printer. Josh Rock: That's okay. Joel: At the office somewhere. Josh Rock: I mean, they took the canon out this morning and printed a new one because. Joel: I'm only jealous of Indeed. That's why. Josh Rock: That's fine. You can be jealous. Joel: Our podcast is better than theirs though. Josh Rock: Well, when we talk about your podcast, let's go back to the intro where you're talking about punching HR in the throat. Joel: Yep. Josh Rock: Coming from a hockey guy. Drop the fricking mitts, [laughter] I mean we got game five here tomorrow night. Joel: We do. Josh Rock: Vegas versus Florida. I may still go. Joel: City could burn tomorrow. Josh Rock: No, they're a positive rider here. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: They're fun. They're not Golfers winning the national championship and starting car fires after turning over cars. Joel: The couches will be safe in Vegas tomorrow if they win the cup, which they just won it, so. Josh Rock: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: There's just, it's just another day in Vegas where a pro team that just moved in wins another title. Josh Rock: I actually have a photo from my JobDig days where a bunch of University of Minnesota students had one of our newspaper boxes lifted up and were throwing it into a fire during a national championship ride. Joel: Can you explain newspaper box for the kids that are listening? [laughter], Josh Rock: There's this thing called print ads [laughter], where you each week call your account representative and change the content and put it in tree turned paper that they colored and distributed to mass locations. Joel: Yes. And change the content means the date. [laughter] Josh Rock: The date... They may have reorganized the position listings from... Every nursing position in your organization maybe put the admin person first. Who knows? Joel: There you go. There you go. Josh Rock: Yeah. Good times. Joel: Damn world. Josh Rock: Black and white. Sell it by the inch. Joel: Okay. So things have definitely changed. Josh Rock: Definitely. Joel: And now you're on the buying side of the equation. What got you to take the leap into the light? Josh Rock: Well, funny thing 'cause we're still talking about it to this day. It's a thing called layoffs. I was laid off and there wasn't companies in the northern region of Minnesota that did what we did. And so I went to teach my customers what I was doing as a... Or not as a vendor but as a practitioner. Joel: Yep. Josh Rock: And I'm still doing it. So it's fun. I enjoy it. I love when these new sales people from these companies that are here and others call me up and they're like, "Yeah, I wanna sell you this." I'm like, "You haven't even asked what my problem is? What I'm experiencing as a TA leader." Joel: Yeah. So, let's start there. So a lot of vendors listen to our show. They're doing that same thing. Give them some tips on how to approach a buyer. Josh Rock: First thing, stop it. [laughter] Josh Rock: I laugh because one, before you call a potential buyer case amount, go to their career page, find out what they're posted, what they've got posted. If you're calling for TA guy like me. Go to their LinkedIn, find out what they're about, find some connectivity between you and the buyer. Whether it's Twitter, finding out they're a sports fan, or they like food. Find some commonality between, but then when you open up the conversation, say, "Hey, you know what, here's who I am. Here's who I represent. I wanna know more about what your problem is today. What are you experiencing?" And then paint a vision about what your service will solve. But don't put it on you like you're God's gift. Say, "Hey, I wanna make your job easier and be a partner. Not just a vendor." Those are the ones that win when those people call me. They're the ones that get my time. Joel: The ones who say, "I heard you on The Chad and Cheese podcast." Josh Rock: Exactly. Joel: Are definitely getting a blank check from you, is what you're saying. Josh Rock: Yes. Yes, yes. They're getting... They will get my time, attention. Maybe escalate to my leader for a potential conversation and a check. Joel: There you go. How many calls a day do you get on average? Josh Rock: I don't get calls. I get emails. Joel: Emails. Josh Rock: I get emails saying, "Hey, come do our demo." You don't even know what I need, but yeah yet you want me to join your demo. Waste my time for you to pitch your product when, you don't know what I need. Joel: So is it safe to say if you actually got a call, it would knock you out of your seat, because somebody actually did the work to dial the phone. Josh Rock: Yeah, when those people call me, I will take the call. I will usually chew them up just a little bit. Joel: Sure. Josh Rock: Just saying, "So how long you been there? Tell me more about what you do. What's your product? Why should I buy from you and not your competitor? Whatever, X, Y, Z." And make the sales person actually work for it. And then I'll usually let them know. I'm like, "Hey, did you look at my LinkedIn profile before you called me? 'Cause you know, I was you before you were you." Joel: Yeah. [laughter] Josh Rock: I just make them stew just a little bit. You gotta have a little bit of pain. 'Cause trust me, I'm going through pain when leaders are calling me asking why they don't have candidates for decent mechanics or what have you. But I wanna find a partner, somebody who's in the trenches with me, not just sitting behind a screen. Joel: Yeah. Of the vendors here, who has impressed you? Who's an actual piece of shit? [laughter] Joel: Let's get down to the nitty gritty. Josh Rock: You know, one who... Or who I'll just give it away. The vendor who impresses me Motivosity. Joel: Motivosity? Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: I don't even know who they are? What do they do? Josh Rock: They do rewards... Joel: They motivate you... Josh Rock: They do rewards and recognitions. Joel: Oh, that makes sense. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: And what's different from what they do that impresses you? Josh Rock: So for one, their corporate culture for one. First thing, they're based out of Utah. They... Joel: Why are they all based out of Utah? Josh Rock: I don't know. Joel: That's weird. Josh Rock: I don't get it. I don't think there's any companies here that are based out of Minneapolis that I found anyway. But they don't work Sundays. So you come to National SHRM. With 23,000 practitioners in the room. And the expo starts on Sunday and you have nobody in your booth. That's saying something. You spent tens of thousands of dollars to be here and you don't staff your booth on a Sunday because your culture is that set. Joel: Was there something in the booth that said, "Sorry, we're not here. We take Sundays off for religious reasons." Josh Rock: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a big sign in front of their booth. But moreover, I knew their... I know their platform. I've seen it. I've demoed it. Their salesperson calls me. Her name's Kennedy. She's fantastic. But I'm like, "I wanna know what you've brought forth new that I haven't seen in the last year." Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: So get your senior sales leader and let's talk about it. And so I can't give away what's coming from them, but in my eyes, as a practitioner and somebody who's in a somewhat retail space, it's a game changer. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: I'm super excited about what they're gonna do and how it can impact my service lines and my people. Joel: Who else has impressed you? If anybody? Josh Rock: I stumbled across this company that I think you might know Aaron. Joel: Oh, stop. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: What a coincidence. [laughter] Josh Rock: I mean, what a coincidence. One I walked by actually yesterday and their staff actually engaged me and said, "Hey Josh, I see you have influencer on your tag. Tell me more about what does influencer mean at SHRM 23?" Joel: Oh, okay. Josh Rock: I'm like, they wanna know more. They don't wanna just sell me. They wanna know more. So what we talked about earlier about doing it right, they did it right. They stopped me on the way through. Joel: And they have red Nikes on as well... Josh Rock: I'm actually kind of jealous of the red Nikes. I'm rocking the white Adidas. Joel: Of course you and I are old enough to remember the career builder Chuck Taylors. Back in the day. Josh Rock: Yes. I have orange Chucks. Joel: Orange Chucks. [laughter] Josh Rock: I have orange Chucks because JobDig was orange. Joel: That's your answer to why are you an influencer. I have Orange Chuck Taylors. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Any other companies though that have impressed you? Josh Rock: Let me think. Joel: That says a mouthful. [chuckle] Josh Rock: Yeah. I see a lot of the same stuff, unfortunately. Nobody has really wowed me. I mean, I go from HR tech and seeing the triple wide booth of Paradox to a single stall with very little signage. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: That's kind of telling. I see... Joel: What does that tell you? Josh Rock: They're not here to hit buyers. HR tech, they're there to hit buyers. This isn't their environment. Joel: They're here to say they were here. Josh Rock: They were here. Joel: Okay. Josh Rock: Yeah, yeah. So that's telling me something. I like Paradox. Great organization from what they do. Obviously, here we're seeing the spend differently than we saw in March at HR tech, or at UNLEASH, excuse me, and last fall at HR tech. The spends are different. We're seeing some maybe possible telltales on acquisitions. Joel: Okay. Josh Rock: Should be interesting to see... Joel: Okay. Say more about that. Any predictions? Josh Rock: I look at what Eightfold is spending and I'm wondering where they're gonna go. That's interesting. Yeah. And just being on the outside, not being on the vendor side anymore. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: Being on the buyer side. Joel: But you have that perspective. Josh Rock: Yeah. It's like... Joel: Like, you know what's coming. Josh Rock: I'm like, what's going on here? But seeing some of the new companies, I mean, seeing Siobhan from Reejig, she's fantastic. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: And what they're doing. They're not here. I would have loved love to see them here. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: But we'll see them in Paris at UNLEASH World and HR Tech. But yeah, no, it's the money that's been spent in this vertical. Now we're in a cycle of non-buying. What's gonna happen? It's kind of fun. And... Joel: And you're not talking about Nuss. Josh Rock: No. Joel: You're talking about everything that you see. Josh Rock: Yeah. On the vendor side. Joel: Do you... Is the term nuclear winter too strong? [laughter] Josh Rock: It might be close. Joel: I'm very serious about that. Josh Rock: Yeah. It might be close. Joel: Really? Josh Rock: Yeah. HR Tech for me last year was a telltale of who's spending and who's trying to make it an image to who's going to gonna be acquiring or be acquired. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: And here it's different, which is kind of fun. I get to see the different side of the perspective. Some companies are trying really hard. Some aren't trying very much. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: But everybody's struggling at getting buyers. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: I'm hearing it everywhere. We're seeing more layoffs. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: We're seeing people are switching. We're seeing the churn from vendor to vendor to vendor. And the tough part is, as a practitioner, I don't know who's gonna support me. The guy that I had managing my account at XYZ Provider has is now gone to somebody else. Now I got somebody else who I have to teach. That sucks. I mean, I may come from the Cal Ripken era of Longevity and staying with one organization forever, but now we don't. Now we just see people moving to companies or spinning off their own. Their new tech startups. Yeah. It's kind of fun. Joel: Keeping your buyers educated on how the product works is a challenge for companies. Any dog shit you see here in the exhibit hall? Josh Rock: I don't see dog shit besides some of the pet insurance companies, because maybe they have some dogs at their booth site. I feel bad for the people on the ends, the people back by the meals who spent a lot of money to invest, and they're not getting any traffic. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: I feel bad for those guys. I feel bad for their sales reps who are trying really hard and want that great experience of being here and get impact, and they're not getting any. Joel: And then you have the big company like Kroger. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Who just has someone that's manning the booth, I guess. Josh Rock: Kroger is here... The grocery store? Joel: Kroger is here, yes. Josh Rock: What? Are they handing out bread? Joel: They have one of those... Josh Rock: Ramen noodles? Joel: By the bathroom, next to the bathroom. Josh Rock: Oh, really? Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: Maybe I'll go back and get a thing or ramen noodles on the way. Joel: Plug for Kroger, everybody. Plug for Kroger. I want to wanna talk about job postings. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Because Indeed is here. You mentioned, geez, they might be the only job board of significance that's here. Oh, Talon is here, talon.com. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: How do you see that? Josh Rock: Acquire is here. Joel: Who's here? Josh Rock: Acquire. Joel: Acquire? Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Okay. How do you see that space? Google for Jobs, obviously. What is that? He rolls his eyes. So we'll get to that. Josh Rock: There was a great nonverbal there. Joel: But you know, Programmatic, Indeed. Like it's not just post on whatever and hope for the best. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: How do you see the job posting business? Josh Rock: I mean we're seeing, obviously, aggregation. Everybody is doing Programmatic, geo-targeting, geo-fencing. Some people say they do it, and some of them really suck at it. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: They are just... Joel: Who sucks at it? Josh Rock: My local radio stations and TV partners that say they do it, and they don't know what I do and why I should be doing it, I have to tell them who I want to geo-fence and/or target around. They don't know it enough. They're just saying, hey, we do this. Great. Everybody can do this. I want people who do it well and position me the right way. Joel: Okay. Josh Rock: Those are the ones I watch out for. For us, on the blue collar sector, I don't care if you're gonna post me all over LinkedIn. Because guess what? Diesel mechanics aren't on LinkedIn. Joel: Right. Josh Rock: Shocking. I wanna put them on Programmatic, where I can geo-fence my competitor and inundate the living daylights out of it, so whenever they go onto their phones to look up a parts manual for working on a Peterbilt, which is our competitor, they see my stuff and they wanna come work for me instead. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: That's fine, but I still got to do some of that stuff. I still got to do the Indeeds and at least have a presence, but I'm not gonna spend a ton. Joel: Yeah. How does social media play into your recruiting efforts? Josh Rock: I love social media. I'm all over it. Joel: Say more about that. Josh Rock: We do a short apply. We do pre-forms on... Or on Facebook, where candidates can just put their phone number and all that. While it's a lot of extra riffraff for me, I don't know what I don't know. I call them up genuinely interested of who they are, where they wanna work, what kind of career they want, because even though they may say they wanna be a diesel mechanic, they don't have the qualifications or the skill set to do it, I can pivot them into a couple of different roles, then through our tuition reimbursement program that we offer, get them schooled in diesel. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: So they can become a mechanic and give them a complete different career trajectory. Joel: So is your strategy more, there's a job, learn more today, as opposed to we're gonna karaoke and dance on social media to get your attention? Josh Rock: Yeah. I'm gonna profile my people. I'm gonna show actual people who work in my organization and say, hey, if you wanna do what these people do, call me. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: Let's talk about it. Joel: What's your take on the future of sourcing? My take is that LinkedIn has sort of won. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: The HiringSolveds, the HighQs, the people that have sort of done this, they've either pivoted or gone out of business. But I wanna hear your take on sourcing versus you mentioned social media and then job posting. Where does sourcing fit in? Josh Rock: You know coming from healthcare prior to being at Nuss, and I was doing sourcing before that organization even knew what sourcing really was. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: They didn't have anybody doing it. I did full cycle. I would post my stuff out there. I'd go out there and look on state board lists for nurses and pharmacy techs and you name it. Nobody had done that at the organization. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: And so it was crazy for them. They weren't even doing video interviewing for that matter, which was crazy. Now we all do it for pandemic. We've all had to. But sourcing is still important. We can still use great tools and technology to bring candidates out and find them where we don't know that there are. You know these people as well as I do. Shannon Pritchett from hireEZ. Shannon's a good friend of mine. Joel: Lovely person. Josh Rock: Yeah, she's fantastic. But their technology bridges some of those gaps so I don't have to have all the tools. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: She can help... Their tool can help me build a string and make that easier. Joel: Talking about tools, Jobcase has built itself as LinkedIn for everyone who's not on LinkedIn. It sounds like that's the kind of people that you're looking for. Josh Rock: Yeah. Joel: Has Jobcase been a tool, effective tool for you? Josh Rock: I haven't gone to it yet. Joel: Because? Josh Rock: Just haven't done it. Joel: Okay. Josh Rock: Not... It's just not that I have anything against it. I just haven't done it. I go more boots on the streets. I visit probably 30 different schools a year. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: And I go right to the schools. I'm on the advisory board of just about every single one of them. Telling them what makes candidates successful, talent successful in our organization later on. Giving them the buying signals of what it takes to get a career with us. And then visiting them often and cultivating relationships. People want to come from El Paso, Texas, Jacksonville, Florida, Lima, Ohio. Joel: Yeah. Josh Rock: To somewhere in Minnesota. Joel: Importance of SMS to your recruiting. Josh Rock: I love SMS. I'm constantly texting people. I use, since we're talking vendors, I use Emissary. It's inexpensive. Now my current ATS provider, Dayforce Ceridian, is bringing out SMS. I haven't used it yet, because it's just coming out. It's supposed to be out third, fourth quarter. Who knows, they may delay it. It'll come out next year. That's kind of how it works. But they're doing on a per text basis cost, which kind of baffles me. $0.07 a text. I'd rather go subscription and not have to worry about what my bill could be at the end of the month. Joel: Yeah. That's a nice margin, though. [laughter] Josh Rock: It could be. Depends on who the backbone is for their... If it's directly in them, or if they're using a partner, which I believe they are, some of that revenue could go to the partner. And so that's why they do it. So I've advised them to maybe go to a subscription model. We'll see what they do. Joel: Their partner is probably Twilio. But any way. [laughter] Josh Rock: Probably. Joel: Let's go to AI. Few companies here, not a ton. I thought there would be more ChatGPT, obviously. Writing jobs, letters to candidates. Josh Rock: Cover letters, resumes. Joel: Companies that do that. Companies here being disrupted. Give us your take on AI and the industry. Josh Rock: You know, AI is obviously bigger in other areas. I'm gonna see it more in technology, maybe in corporate America positions. I'm not likely gonna see it in diesel. I'm not likely gonna see it in health care, at least practitioner side. Nurses and stuff, they don't need to. They're board licensed. They don't need ChatGPT to write a resume for them. They can talk about what their patient acuity is, their patient volumes. And that's what's gonna sell. Not because ChatGPT said, I took care of this many patients and these procedures. So yeah, it's gonna be, it's already there. We're already seeing it in cover letters. We're seeing BS and... Joel: Do you care as a recruiter if a cover letter was written by AI? Josh Rock: Do I read cover letters? Joel: Okay let's go there. [laughter] Josh Rock: That's an assumption. I don't read cover letters because you know what? You don't need to sell me. Your resume is gonna speak volumes to what you've done and how it's relatable to the position I have. I'm not gonna waste time. I mean, we know this, that the average recruiter makes a decision on a candidate in six to 30 seconds. No one's gonna read a cover letter? The hiring manager will read the cover letter. I'm not gonna read a cover letter. I just wanna know why are you relevant to the position and how are you gonna make the team better tomorrow than we are today? That's what the resume does. The cover letter is just added fluff to a hiring manager. Joel: Yeah. Talking about relevancy, we hear a lot about VR in terms of training and it sounds like something that you are on it. Josh Rock: It's big in our space. Joel: So yeah, so talk about VR, whether it's recruiting, training, upskilling, et cetera. Josh Rock: So in the diesel industry, VR is definitely used a lot for training on how to find issues in a truck. A technician can put on a set and look through from the outside directly into a small component of an engine and find out how do I either A, diagnose the issue or repair the issue if I haven't done that procedure already. A lot of the schools, shout out to my friends at Western Tech, they're doing that right now with their students. Their students actually get trained both in the classroom, hands-on and VR on how to repair those 18 wheelers that we're seeing delivering our toilet paper to Target. And so it's great for them to see if they can't get hands-on because they may or may not have the equipment on site, how to do it virtually so they can know how to navigate to get to the issue. One, expediting the repair, but then two, doing it in a quality performance that makes the customer happy and gets the product out faster. Joel: Have you ever had Mountain Dew with a light beer? Josh Rock: You know what? I saw some dude on TikTok or whatever doing Mountain Dew with beer. I don't know. I see some of that crazy mixology stuff. Joel: All the kids are doing it. You can be an alcoholic and a diabetic in the same activity. Josh Rock: I thought that's what Jagerbombs were for. Red Bull and Jägermeister. Joel: Speaking of, it's almost closing time at the conference. So we better wrap this up. That is Josh Rock, everybody. May or may not be a porn star [laughter] name. Josh Rock: It could be. It could be. My radio is where it really took off, but we'll leave that for another story. Joel: Josh Rock. Josh, for any of our listeners that wanna connect with you or know more about your company, where would you send them? Josh Rock: So for me, you can find me on LinkedIn, obviously, usually using Josh Rock. I'm easy to find. But in Twitter Josh E Rock. You may look for the old JRock96. That's the old handle that got hacked. You might find it as crypto nerd now, unfortunately. [laughter] I'm still trying to get that back. Fricking Elon Musk. But for Nuss, you can find us at nussgrp.com. A Mack and Volvo dealer group in Minneapolis. Eight locations, 400 employees. Joel: Thanks for sitting down, man. I am Joel Cheeseman of the Chad and Cheese Podcast broadcasting from the Aaron booth at SHRM National in Las Vegas. And that is another one in the can. We out. Peace. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas send and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

This week was all over the map. After less than a year on the job, iCIMS' CEO is stepping down in a rather unexpected way, the EEOC settled its first AI-based hiring discrimination case, Recruiter.com sold some IP to Job Mobz (who?), college degrees lose more luster, tech jobs remain strong after layoffs from Big Tech throughout 2023 and chatbots continue to have their fans, as well as their detractors. Oh, and robotaxis are invading San Francisco. The summer may be starting to wind down, but the recruiting news remains red hot! Enjoy, Like and Share! TRASNCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. It's National Bad Poetry Day. There once was a man from Nantucket. I'll let you guys google the rest of that one. Are you listening? Yes. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Edgar Allen Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad "The sugar rushes over" Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, iCIMS CEO says, see ya. The EEOC chalks up a win against AI and college degrees. We don't need no stinking college degrees. Let's do this. What's up, man? Chad: What is up? Joel: That's your Buckeyes jersey on. Chad: Yes. I'm so excited. Joel: For those of you watching on YouTube can see that. Chad: That's right. Joel: If you haven't checked us out on YouTube, please do so. Chad: Come on. [chuckle] Joel: Youtube.com/@chadcheese. Chad: Yes. I'm pretty stoked. Couple of things though. I think right out of the gate you wanted to throw some love out to Maui in Hawaii. Joel: Yes. It would behoove us to mention the fires in Maui. My first marriage was in Maui, so there is a certain place in my heart for the island. But just the visuals and the stories are just horrible. Chad: Yeah. It's crazy. Joel: If you can, there are a lot of donation platforms and charities that are helping out Maui. If you can, go on the web search some causes that you're in favor of, and... Yes. Chad: Find a reputable charity and get some cash to them. Get some clothes to them, get to whatever you can. I think that's the key. Joel: Stay away from the scams on, I don't know, Twitter. [laughter] Chad: X. Joel: Don't go to an ad handle and give money. [laughter] Chad: Oh, Jesus Christ. Don't do that. Don't do that. Joel: So speaking of football... Chad: Yes. Joel: You're in your football jersey and football is right around the corner, but we have some Women's World Cup that's going down. We got Spain and England. Two traditional powerhouses. I'm assuming with your Portuguese heritage... [laughter] Joel: And real estate empire, that you're leaning Spain or is there a rivalry there that you hate Spain? I don't know. Chad: No, I, definitely, I love Spain. I go to La Liga games when I'm there, so, the Spanish women look great. The Brits are having some injury issues, as we said, in the green room. And I would love to see Spain win. That would be pretty great. Portuguese not too fond of the Spanish, but I think they would rather see Spain win than England. England is kind of the US, the Mini America over in Europe. So if anybody's hated the most in Europe, I'm gonna go ahead and say it's probably the UK. Joel: Okay. Followed by probably the Danes or somebody, the Swedes, I don't know. I don't know. Chad: [laughter] And you're gonna follow along because you've only been on the Brit train. Joel: Hey, 64% ancestry.com can't be wrong. I got to root for the lionesses. [laughter] Joel: Lioness. I don't know what the... Chad: I just want to see a great match. And there's been some pretty great matches, so can't wait. Joel: And Messi keeps tearing it up. That dude may officially bring soccer to the US. Chad: He's gonna prove you wrong. 'Cause you said there was no way that... Joel: No. Chad: Even Messi can bring... And and I think that like back in the Beckham days, there's kind of like been this nudge of soccer in the US where it's gotten more popular, it's gotten more popular, it's gotten more popular. And now we can watch Premier League all on TV where we couldn't back then. La Liga and even Bundesliga which I love watching all that. So, I think that it's a lot more popular. And then you got the goat. This guy is the greatest of all time. There's no fucking, and he just is. He's here in the US. He is lighting things up, and he is filling fucking stadiums. And that to me is just amazing. Joel: Yeah he is. You've seen Billy Madison, Adam Sandler when it, what is it? Dodgeball? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Or he's just destroying. [laughter] Joel: That's basically what it looks like. The friendlies that are played when Man U comes over, or Chelsea, I think that's cool. And apparently the demand is so high on Apple that there's rumors of Apple buying ESPN because there's so much appetite for the soccer that's on Apple TV. So anyway, that's... Chad: Amazing. Joel: That's rumors that that I'm hearing on CNBC. [laughter] SFX: Shout out. Joel: Let's get to some shout outs, shall we? We gotta a lot of content to cover on this week's show. So I'm gonna give a shout out to Robotaxis in California. If you haven't heard, California regulators have voted in favor of Robotaxi operators expanding their paid driverless services in the city of San Francisco, a major milestone toward commercializing the technology. You can guess what happened next, Chad? Just one day after the vote, driverless vehicles brought traffic in parts of San Francisco to a standstill. A group of around 10 Robotaxis stopped in the middle of a city street for about 15 minutes with their hazard lights on, while cars, with human drivers were stuck behind and between driverless ones with no option but to wait until the situation resolved. Robotaxi company crews blame the issue on "wireless bandwidth constraints" due to a nearby music festival. So things are off to a great start. Shout out to Robotaxis in beautiful San Francisco. Chad: Oh, love that. Oof. My first shout out's gonna be somewhat of a rant. Okay? Joel: Okay. I like these. It's been a while. It's been a while. Get it out, baby. Chad: It has, it has. Shout out to all the people saying the market is down and tightening up. Okay. So, we've both heard this, we've heard this. We've heard it on TV shows, on podcasts, even on fucking calls that we've both been on. Okay. Kids listen up. The market was fucking flooded with ridiculous amounts of cash for years, and that was not normal. We saw an amazing amount of startups created. Yes. Unicorns fed with mountains of cash. Yes. Tams exploded. Vaporware narratives grew all across this fine land, that wasn't normal. What we're feeling today, this is normal. And because of that sugar rush as we predicted for years on this very show... Chad: We're gonna see consolidations, dead unicorns, and a vast amount of startups that were just gonna quickly fade away. But this is great news, that companies who aren't solving real problems are just vaporware or overhyped platforms and horrible go-to-markets that we've seen left and right. Well, they won't be around long because only the incredibly well-disciplined are going to survive. So, the market has been noisy and crowded, but on the positive side, we're gonna get a much better market full of products that are more honed, more focused, and just better for the end user. So, shout out to all of those startups out there who are honing those skills and they're not spending cash like drunken sailors. Joel: And we will continue with the fun-filled layoff reports every week when the shit hits the fan. [laughter] SFX: Hasn't anyone noticed this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Chad: There'll be fade away reports, much like JUNECO. They're still not back. Joel: Fade away acquisition. Yeah. Chad: Juneco.co, yeah, Jesus! Joel: Okay, Chad, sometimes you wanna just get in that DeLorean and go back to the future and make new decisions or different choices... Chad: Really? Joel: From days in the past. And if we could go back to 2005 in our own industry, Chad, I bet Monster and Crew Builder might've thought twice about letting their content go freely to Indeed for that heroin drip of traffic. [laughter] Joel: Well, fast forward to today, we see where Indeed is, now we see where Monster and Career Builder are. Chad: Exactly. Yes. Joel: The media, and particularly journalism, is in a similar situation. Back in the same timeframe, they had Google sharing their stuff freely on Google. Well, Google made buckets of cash. New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etcetera, faded into the... Chad: Abyss. [laughter] Joel: Afterglow of big profits. Yes, well, apparently they've learned their lesson, Chad. My shout out goes out to the New York Times. This week it was reported that they are basically blocking AI. So, open AI companies that are using their content to build large language models, well, that's a threat to New York Times. Hopefully they've learned their lesson, they've blocked their content from those services. I'm sure they would give it up for a fee though, Chad, and I'm sure it's a fee that Google's barred, or Microsoft, who's an investor in open AI, would freely write some cheques to get access to the New York Times content. Shout out to them. And if you're a New York Times shareholder, that's probably good news too in the long run. Shout out to the New York Times. Chad: Yes, and if you haven't heard of Google's Gemini project, that is beyond barred. So, go check that out. And that project won't be getting New York Times as well. Chad: What's it called again? Chad: Gemini. [laughter] Chad: Which you and I are both Geminis. Joel: From both Geminis, yes, we should know, we should know. Chad: So, I created an office hours session on my calendar a couple of years ago, so that startups who reach out looking for advice could get 30 minutes with me. So, I dedicated about five hours a week to those sessions. And in the last three months, requests have gone crazy. They've exploded on my calendar. So, I wanted to give a shout out to all the eager startups out there who are digging in, they're hyper-focused, they're looking for advice, they're looking for answers. If it takes a few weeks for me to get back with you, my apologies, but I will get back with you. Or in the meantime, soak up these weekly episodes, kids. SFX: All right, all right, all right. Joel: How am I just now hearing about your open office hours? Like, can you sign up at chadcheese.com? Do I need to DM you, like what? Chad: I didn't make it something that was public as of yet, because I had so many startups just naturally coming to me. LinkedIn, Twitter, I mean, wherever they could find me, they would message me. And I automatically had just a link set up to office hours. And it would be nice and easy. So, it gave me an opportunity to meet some of the new startups that are out there, get some ideas of what was going on, those types of things, and give them at least a little nugget of advice before they came on firing squad, possibly, and got shot to shit. Joel: Okay. And this is free of charge to them? Chad: Yeah. Joel: All right, well, if you were flooded before... [laughter] Joel: We've just talked about it on the show. I'm sure the calls will stop after we talk about this one. All right, let's get free shirt. Chad: Yes. Joel: Which also is free of charge here on the show, thanks to our generous sponsors. If you haven't signed up, you gotta go to chadcheese.com. Our listeners know this. Click the free link, give us your information. We're talking free T-shirts, really soft plush, top 100% grade T-shirts, yeah. Chad: Tri-blend, yeah. Joel: Tri-blend, yeah, really nice T-shirts from our friends at JobGet. We've got Bourbon. Chad and I each select a Bourbon of choice and we send it to you. That's from our friends at Texkernel. The winner of this month for whiskey goes to Cody Nelson. We've got beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs. Listener Eddie O'Neill is enjoying some free beer on us this month. Chad: Nice. Joel: And Rum has partnered with us. They want to send a birthday each month, a very nice bottle of Rum. Rum with plum. Get it, Chad? Chad: I get it. That is nice. Awesome. Joel: That's what we do here. We market shit on the show, Chad. [laughter] Joel: But you can't win if you don't play the game. And you gotta go to chadcheese.com. Click that free link and give us your information for a chance at all these wonderful goodies. Chad: And did you see Chris Cleland gave us a shout out on LinkedIn after taking the plum assessment. 'Cause we always throw out there, if you haven't had your plum assessment, it's free. It's kinda cool. Gives you a little insights on yourself. Apparently he got his plum assessment and he says it was spot on. So all you have to do is go to plum.io. Check that bad boy out. Joel: There you go. You mentioned plum. Plum is... We'll get to travel. I don't know if you want to jump to that yet. Oh, the shaker hat's coming on. Again, our YouTube viewers know about this. All right. Let's start breaking down our travels coming up, Chad. Chad: Oh, kids. We are four weeks out from Wreckfest. I'm starting to get the shivers right now. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Where the Chad and Cheese will be MCing the disrupt stage all day on day one at Bicentennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee with special guests Lynn and Tracy from the Talent Rebel cast and those crazy Canucks Serge and Shelly from the recruitment Lex Podcast. SFX: Hey, we're doing our movie don't Wreck our show you loser. [laughter] Chad: They're gonna wreck our show. I guarantee it. Joel: Yeah. They're gonna wreck our show. Chad: If you haven't been to Wreckfest before, Joel, what is Wreckfest like? Joel: Wreckfest, it's the first time in America. We know the show very well in England. I'm guessing the Brits are bringing the game that they have in Medworth to Nashville. We're talking circus tents, we're talking Ferris wheels. [laughter] Joel: I'm still lobbying for the mechanical bull. Chad: No, they're having a mechanical bull. Joel: Oh. Okay. All right. Chad: Yes. Joel: See, this is a conference that listens to the fans. Chad: They do, they do. Yeah. Joel: And they listen and they follow through. So, mechanical bulls, tents, great food, I'm assuming some food trucks will be there with some great, oh, Nashville hot chicken, I'm hoping, I'm hoping, Chad, Nashville hot chicken, some barbecue, I'm sure, good, good stuff. But, Chad, every good party needs a damn good pre-party. Is there one in town? Have you heard? Chad: So, the Chad and Cheese want to ensure that Wreckfest starts out with a bang, a bang bang, if you will. [music] SFX: Bang bang! On the score, David! Bang bang! You're what? Tin roof! Rusted! Joel: Nice. What's that about? Chad: Most people don't even know what that tin roof rusted means. You should look it up. Joel: Without the kids. Chad: Anyway on September 12th from 7:00-9:00 we're gonna be at the Tin Roof a bar right on Broadway that's where everything happens kids. Where 50 lucky listeners that's five zero lucky listeners... Joel: That's exclusive. Chad: Will get to enjoy free drinks, free food, Nashville music and a little up close and personal time with the Chad and Cheese. None of these... SFX: All right, all right, all right. Chad: None of these kids would be possible without our friends over at Aaron app and plum.io. Joel: Yes. Yes. Chad: Are you feeling the pre-FOMO yet? Joel: I am feeling, I'm feeling it. [laughter] Joel: And I... Chad, the rumor is Nashville hot chicken lollipops. Oh my god. [laughter] Joel: Oh my god, are you kidding me? Can you say... Chad: Chicken on a stick. Intro: Can you say careless whisper to my belly Chad? [laughter] [music] Joel: Nashville Hot Chicken Lollipops. And we're not talking about just beer and wine Chad. Chad: No, what? Joel: No no, no that's that's not how we roll baby. We're talking whiskey. We're talking bourbon, whiskey. Chad: Top Scotch baby. Joel: Scotch, Irish. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, Buffalo trace like Everything you're gonna be happy at this party Chad. It's not even live yet If you're listening and you're a big fan, you're gonna be in Nashville. Hit Chad and I up on the DMs. We'll see if we can fit you in on that Evite. Chad: No promises. Joel: Evite list, and get you in this party. But it's gonna be a awesome time on Broadway. Just the right start to the party just to get your beak wet. Chad: Yes. Joel: Get your beak wet. Get your mind right. And, it's gonna be a hell of a time. And like Chad said, great sponsors with Aaron and Plum footing the bill for the good time. Chad: Yes. SFX: Woo. Really. It's birthday time. Can you feel the tension in the air right now. [laughter] I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: Talk of Plum, man, I can't stay away from the soundbites. Chad: Gotta do it. You gotta do it. Joel: So another trip around the sun for some of our listeners, that includes Sean Kelleher, Brian Thompson, who you might remember. We met couple Canadians. Chad: Oh yeah, Rectxt. Joel: The last time we were both in Nashville and we had some, see. Yep. Had some hot chicken. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Learned about Rectxt and, met a couple crazy Canadians Brad and Brian happy birthday to Brian Thompson also Marley Huckabee, Pete Cucci, Alex Campo, Julie Personius, Brittany Kaiser, Chris long, Stephen Fogarty, Richard Cho and Jerry the Godfather Crispin. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: All celebrating another trip around the sun. Chad: Sean Kelleher and I actually, we're together 18 year olds down in Panama together. We were in the Army together back in the day. Joel: That Sean? Chad: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Big shout out to Sean. Happy birthday buddy. Joel: Okay. I love it. So you have a football jersey on, I got my FactoryFix t-shirt on Chad. We gotta talk about fantasy football. One of my favorite things each year. Chad: Yes. Joel: We get 12 guys together. We play fantasy football. Chad: Yes. Joel: Every week we're gonna do the power rankings. What do you call it in soccer? The something board. Chad: The league table? Joel: Yeah. The league table. We'll read the league table. Chad: The tables. Joel: Yeah. [laughter] The tables. But I can't wait. I love fantasy football. I love football. So, shout out to FactoryFix wearing my t-shirt. Chad: Yes. Joel: Maybe we can get some t-shirts for everyone in the league this year. Everyone that's signed up, stay tuned on that one. But always, always excited for a little fantasy football with my real football. Chad: Exactly. A couple of real quick events. We've got GEMS 2023 Virtual Talent Summit that's happening September 20th. And we're going to be at HR Tech Mandalay Bay, October. Joel and I are going to be in the Fuel50 booth. Two days. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Two days in a row, right? Probably you might be able to come over get some beer from us. I don't know. We gotta sneak it past the guards. Anyway, all of these wonderful events that we're going to go to Chadcheese.com/events or just go to Chadcheese.com, click events in the upper right-hand corner, and register baby. Love to see you there. [music] SFX: Topics. Joel: People are gonna hate us for this episode. All right. But we got some good blood in the streets for the first story everybody. All right. November of last year iCIMS announced Brian Provost would lead the company replacing CEO Steve Lucas who had been CEO since 2020 if my math is right that's less than a year. For the latest CEO Chad with no official announcement yet. Details are sparse. But Chad what's your take and what have you heard about this news out of iCIMS? Chad: I literally just received an official announcement and then we'll talk a little bit about kinda like the impact on this bad boy. So this is from iCIMS. Brian Provost has resigned from his position as CEO of iCIMS a decision that he made for personal reasons. A search is underway for a new CEO, who can help pave the way for our next phase of growth and innovation. There's a lot more but that pretty much contextualizes what happened. This was not designed kids. Right out of the gate, we had people pinging us saying, "Oh look what happened. They must be down. They kicked him out already." Literally, I think it was Monday morning or Monday or Tuesday morning. It was early this week. I got on the phone with Pr. This person was on vacation. She had no clue. And this is not how iCIMS works. This is not how Vista works. If something's happening and it's designed then there will be this smart rollout. This was not, they were shocked. They did not know what happened. So I don't know what's happening. Hopefully that Brian and his family are okay. Again hopefully everybody's okay. But this is not something that was designed. Joel: Yeah. We have some audio from the investor meeting following this announcement. SFX: No, God, please. No no no. SFX: So little backstory. ICIMS was owned by the same guy for a long time, got a big investment and they brought a new CEO and the idea was IPO just rolled this baby out. Then the pandemic happened and then inflation happened and the market shit dumped happened. So Lucas who was there for three years, guy was at Marketo, like had the marketing chops to kind of take this thing to the next level. He left last year. Brian came in, who had sold a previous company called Ascentis to UKG. And I had opined at the time... [laughter] Joel: And our prediction show said iCIMS will sell to UKG. 'Cause if you wanna sell, if you can't go IPO, sell the company to a big dog like UKG. And how what better way to do that than to have the guy that's already sold something to that company. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So. Chad: Yeah, connections. Joel: Personal health family well-being aside, that's a different story but as it is, how I see this is, Brian got in there they weren't gonna go IPO for probably one to two years. Didn't wanna wait around, talked to UKG, talked to some other buyers I'm sure and realize this is not happening and if I can't sell this thing, if I'm not cashing out an IPO then why stick around? And thus the exit. It is very odd that people were blindsided by this, that there wasn't a sort of lights runway someone to come in. As soon as he was out, it looks like the lights were on and no one was home. And there's push the panic button. But this is not good news for iCIMS. I'm sure we'll get more information as it trickles out but just on the surface, this looks bad for everybody. Chad: I don't think it happened the way that you think it did. I don't think he was looking at IPO, I don't think he was looking at sale and everything was souring. I don't think it had anything to do with that. Because if it did, as a professional which he is, he would've backed out, they would've had a designed rollout of him leaving. And they would've had somebody to backfill ASAP. So I think this is something that's, I don't wanna say a more akin to an emergency. But you don't have somebody pull out and eject from an organization like this. I mean that's just the most unprofessional thing to do in the world. But if it's family, which is much more important than business or it is your personal health, which is again more important than business then you hit that fucking eject button. Joel: Yeah. It definitely reeks of emergency, had no other choice. This was something I couldn't get get out of. So if that's the case our heart and thoughts go out to him and his family. Chad: Yeah. What does Vista do though? Joel: It's a rough spot to be in the industry and a lot of companies are going through this, I don't know no man's land of no IPO, no new money. What are we gonna do? No buyers and iCIMS I think is in that category but. Chad: So they go back to their portfolio of CEOs of all the companies that they've pushed money into and all the acquisitions that they've made or had made or what have you. Joel: They pick up the phone and they call our boy I'm on bra and say [laughter] "Can you come out of retirement baby? Come out to Edison New Jersey." And they will tell you, "all no. Maybe I'll maybe I'll take... " No I'll probably wouldn't wanna take up. Chad: I'll doesn't wanna do that now. Fuck that. Joel: Yeah. They have a stable of folks. [laughter] Chad: They do. They have a portfolio. I mean they're. Joel: Yeah. And they probably have an ATS full of potential CEOs. Who knows? [laughter] Joel: Who knows? They're using candid ID to comb keep the database for potential CEOs maybe. Yeah. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: Crazy. All right. Let's get to our next story. Harvard Business Review, also known as the HBR. And our friends at Paradox, have conducted research on the impact of AI in recruiting. Their study found that 97% of those using automated technologies and hiring, reported positive outcomes including more effective hiring and reduced candidate drop-off. The report also highlighted that 91% of decision-makers believe AI and automation are crucial for long-term business success. Chad your take on this new study from our friends at Harvard and Paradox. Chad: Yeah. I believe this report is telling anyone with half a brain what they already know. Joel: Or people listening to our show anyway. Chad: Yeah. [laughter] Anybody who has half a brain kinda gets this. So here are my top three reasons why AI and automation and hiring are imminent. And it's actually backed by this report. Number one, humans can't scale fast enough to provide a great experience for candidates. So the black hole sucks. We know that, and it's damaging brands left and right. Number two, on the flip side, it's hard to retain great recruiters when they are saddled with mundane tasks like scheduling interviews. So this will help recruiter retention. And number three, the market is more fluid today than it ever has been. It's moving faster, ups and downs side to side. I mean it's all over the place. And we need systems that can reflect that and that can meet the ever-changing market instead of stagnant tech stacks which is exactly what we've had for years. Chad: So those are my three top reasons why this just makes sense. And I think everybody sees it coming, in the report 92% said that organizations need to invest more in talent acquisition to remain competitive. No shit. It's called talent acquisition. We need the talent to be competitive. If we don't have talent, then we're fucked. 46% cited screening and assessments as tech. They most want to improve in the hiring process. They should probably check out Plum.io followed by applicant communications at 39%. Funny thing here. Just 4%. Just 4%. [laughter] Chad: Said that their organization is currently very effective at hiring talent it needs. Yeah. No shit. Our industry is slow as fuck. And we have process methodologies that literally go back to pre-ATS, I mean we're talking about paper shit. I mean literally, they took papers and they went, put this electronically into our system right? I mean we're still that far behind. Joel: Yeah. 4% saying that their shit is innovative means there's 96% of the market that's ready to buy your product, which is which is great news for paradox. By the way, did you have a list? Did you have a list of things to say? Like you know what they say about your list though Chad? Chad: What? SFX: 60% of the time? It works every time. Chad: [laughter] Every time. Yeah. Joel: All right. So this study involved... Chad: That's good batting average by the way. Joel: 300. It's not bad. It's Hall of Fame numbers, but free throw percentage not so good. Their study involved 326 senior leaders. So these are the people who write the checks. The people that care about the metrics, care about engagement, care about the black hole, and getting rid of the black hole. And worried about engagement. So it would make sense that the people they asked would have such high numbers and percentages of favorability towards this. My question becomes let's ask what the franchise owner thinks. Let's ask what the candidate thinks. Those would be much more interesting numbers. 'Cause what we're seeing, and we will talk about this at the end of the show, there's a growing number of stories about misscheduling, miscommunication, tech breakdown, just perceptions being out of line with what reality is with job seekers and business owners. Joel: So we talked about this, we talked about the article I think out of Fortune or wherever like a lot of this is growing pains. A lot of this is like there'll be bumps in the road. But it would be interesting to see if they asked job seekers how they felt about the process. It might be great but we, I haven't seen anything that shows me all job seekers are 100% behind chatbots and talking to robots. 100% of all franchise owners are on board with this technology. That would be a different number I think than the 326 senior executives that they questioned on this survey. Chad: Asking job seekers anything is fucking worthless. Because first and foremost, they're doing it once in a while and they have really no idea on what the standard is. We know the standard shit. And those talent acquisition professionals do. Now franchise owners, I bet if you start asking them questions around trying to get people in, scheduling, those types of things, I bet they'd be on board. I'd be interested in that. But the job seeker side of the house, a lot of those surveys that I've that I see weekly, and we get flooded with on job seeker surveys, they're fucking ridiculous. And they're worthless. They are. It's like asking my sister about fucking nanotechnology. She'll give you what she thinks, but she has no fucking background or idea or standard to even understand it. [laughter] Joel: Chad let me remind you that we are a podcast of the people. [laughter] Joel: We listen to the people, Chad. Chad: And our people are the recruiters. Joel: It matters when one job seeker that's had a bad experience goes to TikTok and 100s of 1000s if not a million plus people see this, and drag your brand through the mud that matters. [overlapping conversation] Joel: It should matter to brand managers, it should matter to marketers. It should matter to recruiters and people in our business. So to say that job seekers don't matter, social media says they do matter, because people embrace this stuff and run with it and it can be very detrimental to your brand. Let me bring out Bud Light as an example of what social media can do to a brand. Chad: The Forbes article, I mean the hack job on the Forbes article that we talked about last week. Yeah. Joel: Yep. Yep. Let's move from Forbes, to Bloomberg Law. One of my favorite publications, Chad. [laughter] Joel: As you can guess. The EEOC settled its first AI-based hiring discrimination case. Let me repeat that. Its first discrimination case against iTutor Group, to the tune of $365,000. The company allegedly programmed its recruitment software to reject older applicants. The story didn't say what old was defined as, I guess you can use your imagination on that. However, the secrecy inherent to AI tools make it challenging for job seekers to even identify discrimination and report it to the EEOC in the first place. Employment attorneys say the agency is fighting an uphill battle as it typically relies on job seekers and employees to flag potential bias. Despite the EEOC's emphasis on addressing AI bias, there hasn't been any known litigation on the issue by the commission, aside from this case on iTutor Group settlement. Chad, what's your take on this uphill battle for the EEOC? Chad: Yeah, I mean that had nothing to do with AI, that had to do with stupid humans programming the system to do stupid shit. That's just dumb. That has nothing to do with AI, that has to do with stupid humans. One thing I thought was an interesting, quote from the article, "many AI tools which are becoming increasingly popular in HR departments are trained on historical data that can contain built-in biases." Was it a bad bias or a good bias? In this case, it wasn't a bias at all. It was a stupid decision. The Amazon example, was obviously a bad bias because it kicked out all females for tech roles. But you can also say that there are good bias, if that bias has created a diverse talent pool in the end product in the hiring process. Chad: So you've gotta remember when you start using AI and automation to scale, you're in effect handling more candidates because your ability to scale with AI and automation. The new ability to scale, also scales your bias. Meaning companies should see the bias good or bad much faster because the sample sizes are much larger. The key here for every single hiring company out there is auditing. Having an audit expert on staff or just a phone call away, having frequent and regular audits and engaging with the EEOC and OFCCP to just demonstrate that you're trying to actually work through with some of these different measures. I mean I've worked with major Fortune 500 companies from all over the world with the OFCCP on the OCCP side of the house, in building the National Labor Exchange. And many of the biggest brands in the world had great relationships with the government auditors. While some companies tried to hang in the shadows hoping they didn't get noticed, you're gonna get noticed. Which is why the smart companies have proactive outreach and proactive auditing. This is incredibly important. We're not gonna get by with the vendor did it or the algorithm went awry? Joel: So this is a good time to mention, we're doing a thing with Jim next week with EOC commissioner, Keith Sonderling. And I think this is a fascinating issue. I'm no lawyer. I only read Bloomberg Law when it comes up on my feed. [laughter] Joel: But this seems to me like a real nasty game of whack-a-ball. Historically yes, whistleblowers came to the EOC told them about what their companies were doing. Obviously, if more people came out, that raised the red flag that much more. If it's harder and harder for whistleblowers to know what the hell is going on, then does the flow of reporting decrease to the EOC? That's something I'd love to ask our friend Keith Sonderling. Is the EOC creating any technology around applying to jobs in a scaled fashion where they can do it quickly, to see like can we trip up a company's AI to discriminate against us whether it's birthday or where they graduated or something like their name. That would be interesting to know if the EOC is doing stuff like that because I think their ability to scale and find discrimination cases is gonna take technology and not just people reporting. Chad: Yeah. I think it's interesting because we've actually talked to some "experts" who have gone through and done, and actually did what you did. They applied for jobs. That's not how you do it because you can't scale that way. That's one, that's an anecdote. So what you do is you have the data and I've been through these audits before, the thing is you're gonna... The numbers are the numbers, whether those numbers are 10X or not it doesn't matter. You're still gonna have that pipeline and the continuing way that we're auditing today, we're going through audits today, they can continue because the audits are the same. It's just the point in which we're finding the bias, in which all the females are getting knocked out. That's part of the process. Chad: So yeah, they're not gonna be going through much like you described. That's anecdotal. They're gonna be going through the data and that's what they've done for years. They will continue to do that. They've got laws in the books that demonstrate that. So I don't see that as a problem. I see that as, for the EEOC, I see it as a problem for companies to be able to keep up with it. So they need to audit themselves more frequently to ensure that if they do have algorithms in place and they are all based on any type of behavior whatsoever, then they can start to have signals that are indicators that say, "Hey we need to check this out." Joel: I'm glad you said females knocked out and not knocked up. SFX: Just the tip. Joel: Let's take a quick break and talk some more news. All right, Chad. A company we never talk about but is a public company. [laughter] Joel: And we probably should talk about the more is in the news. Recruiter.com Group is selling intellectual property including the domain Recruiter.com to RPO company Job Mobz. The deal involves a 1.5 million cash payment at closing and additional 250,000 after 90 days and a 10% stake in Job Mobz for Recruiter.com shareholders. The two companies have agreed to share quarterly profits starting in Q1, 2024 and have entered a three-year services agreement with Recruiter.com Group managing online services like job boards, and their recruiter marketplace. Chad any thoughts on the Recruiter.com Job Mobz deal? Chad: Hey, the best thing about Recruiter.com is the domain. The rest of it just seems like the island of misfit toys. I know they've been around for a while. I couldn't tell you what they do. It's all over the place for me. So I mean I think I would use them almost as an example for many startups that are out there, is don't do business like that. 'Cause they're all over the place. And how can I not know what the fuck that company's doing? [chuckle] A company name Recruiter.com that's had acquisitions, to me it is one of the strangest animals that has been in our space for a very long time and I'm surprised they're still alive. Joel: So this is a public company, but don't get excited people. This is a 25 cent penny stock. It's up 25-some percent on this news, but it didn't have far to go, to get to 20%. This was a $30 stock not that long ago. But they've had reverse stock splits most recently as 2021. It's just a crappy business. There's neural, it's a weird ride of like acquisitions, restructuring, selling IP. They just sold their healthcare component to somebody. Miles Jennings, who is the, I think founder or CEO, I've known him for a long time. Nice guy. But you're right. Like for a show that covers this industry, we know very little if not anything about this company. Like their marketing sucks. They never reach out to us with news. I only knew about this news 'cause I went and looked up this news story and then found out all the crazy shit that they've been doing for the last five to seven years. Look, G2 for reviews is kind of the go-to. So I went to G2 to see the kind of reviews recruiter.com has. They have one fucking review, one review of someone that uses their services on G2. Chad: Did Miles do that review? Joel: It's anonymous. It's anonymous, who knows? Okay. Like via Glassdoor, they have an overall rating of three... About 3.1 out of five, based on 45 reviews left by employees. 54% of employees would only would recommend. So like half would recommend working there. 48% had a positive outlook for the company. So basically we're talking like Joe Biden territory for favorability with the employees. This is not a good look for a company. It's not really good signs for a prosperous growing company that you should invest in. And to me, this is just the wheels falling off and getting rid of the domain, which you said is probably the one thing that they have that's a value just does not bode well for the future of this company. I suspect they'll be delisted at some point from the public markets. But whether or not we'll know about it, who knows? 'cause they've never reached out before. Maybe we should add them to the newsfeed and see if anything comes over. Joel: But otherwise, this company is a big nothing burger for the most part. But we do like Miles. We do like Miles. All right, next story. Let's talk about tech, jobs and college degrees. LinkedIn research shows that job advertisements in the UK not requiring a college degree increased by 90% between 2021 and 2022. The trend towards skills-based hiring is exemplified by companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple removing degree requirements to increase diversity in their talent pools. The emphasis on skills over degrees has raised concerns for recent graduates who are racking up record amounts of debt in the process. Chad, I know you have a few thoughts on college degrees and the need for one or not. Chad: Degrees for many jobs have long been a filtering mechanism for talent acquisition professionals. Hiring companies had too many candidates applying for jobs and they couldn't manage it. So instead of building more efficient tech stocks or processes, they would add a bachelor's degree or a master's degree to the job requirement to cut the amount of, "qualified candidates". So now, guess what kids, the pendulum swings the other way in hiring companies are falling flat on their face. To me, it just, none of this makes sense. It didn't make sense in the first place when we started to see this happen because we started to see college degrees going up and that was when the market was different and we had more job seekers than we had jobs. But when it swings back around the other way, which it has, you're fucking yourself. So instead of just fixing it, this is like a bandaid on a sunken chest wound. And that's what happens. Joel: So I'm old enough to remember the days where if you didn't have a college degree, just don't even fucking try or think about applying to most jobs, frankly that were out there. The world has changed significantly. We have online learning, we have gig economies, we have greater competition for employers to where they should relax the degree mandate on candidates. I think the diversity play was big in that 2020, '21, '22 timeframe. I think maybe they said they were doing that for that, but I think competition was such that they, if they didn't remove that, they would find it much harder to hire people. You can get degrees, you can get credentialed online, particularly for developing jobs. Engineering, cybersecurity for example. Like, you can get a basic degree certification for that and get a job, a well-paying job pretty quickly. Joel: So high school graduates are figuring out, well, I don't have to go to college. I can go for six months or a year and have a job at a pretty nice position as a cybersecurity professional or whatever. Your kids are out of the nest. I have kids that are entering late high school to college areas. And my advice to them is, I still think long-term that brands are important to have something where people are lazy. People like shorthand. People wanna see a LinkedIn profile that has a college that I recognize to know, okay, this person is educated or this person has a certain certain skill set or has achieved this certain level of success in life. I think for the tier two schools, for the small liberal arts schools that cost a fortune, look, no one in California knows what DePauw or Hanover is. Joel: And those schools cost a ton of money. If you go out of state, just a state school, it's three x if my kids go to Wisconsin versus Indiana. I think like for or me, and this is just personal story, if you're a college that isn't a brand name, I think that the value of what you have, unless it's a real specific skill like a Rose-Hulman for engineering, that your value to people is only going to go down. Because there used to be a day where you just had to have a degree. The people that would go to a state school, a second tier school that would've normally stayed four years just because they had to have the degree to have the job, they don't need that anymore. So those schools in the middle, I think are gonna suffer quite a bit as people need them less and less, and certainly don't need the bill and the headaches that come with those degrees going into the future. So to me, this is a natural evolution of kind of how the educational system is gonna shake out out. Chad: You're a little biased too. You have a wife that's a professor, and your kids can prospectively go to school for free which is not the case for most. And going into debt which is a wonderful thing for your family. But for most Americans, it's just not the case. Joel: So it's half off, not free. And my wife married me, so how fucking smart can she actually be? Let's be honest, let's be honest. It's not a good future for her either. [overlapping conversation] Chad: You were smart. Joel: All right. Well, let's talk about some layoffs in tech. Sorry. Job strength in tech. Chad: There you go. Joel: Despite a series of high profile layoffs in Big Tech over the past year, the jobs outlook in the sector has held fairly strong TechCrunch reports. It notes that the overall July jobs report was quote, more than decent for a supposedly slowing economy with unemployment at 3.6% nationally. But zooming in on tech shows a sector with unemployment now back under 2% based on CompTIA research, the number of digital job openings is still growing too, though, at a slower pace compared to last year. Chad, your take on the consistently strong job market for techies. Chad: The tech industry isn't only about for tech companies, right? The trucking company or the trucking industry needs tech people. Education, communication, retail, entertainment, healthcare, financial services, yada, yada, yada. All those industries need tech people. This is always going to be strong and it should continue to be strong. Then add the CHIPS Act into the equation, as we talked about last week we don't have enough talent for the jobs the government is creating. Yes. The US government is creating jobs and corporate America is falling flat on their face again, that's the thing. Both the tech and the degree examples demonstrate that in the past, we talent acquisition, we weren't really trying to fix the problem and meet the market where it was, we need to invest in our middle schools, our high schools, our community colleges, things that are close, and we need to start creating actual talent pipelines around these tech sector positions. And again, we had a whole pretty much segment last week around CHIPS on this. We have to be able to be smarter in building for the next 10 to 20 to 30 years instead of like we do here in the US. We're only thinking quarter to quarter. We can't continue to live and strive that way. Joel: Yep. By the way, I have a call out to Erik Estrada. He's still on the fence about coming on the show to talk about the CHIPS Act I think he's confused about what we... Chad: Yes, I can't wait. Joel: What we actually wanna talk about, so... I can't wait. So for years, big tech, hoarded hoarded, the best developers in the world. And companies that wanted great tech talent, couldn't afford it, couldn't get access to it because the Googles and the Apples of the world just overpaid and hoarded tech people when money was free. Well, those big tech companies have laid off a lot of tech workers. So companies that couldn't afford those workers a year ago, two years ago, suddenly find themselves in a position where, holy shit, these developers that used to work at these big companies now wanna work for me. So you can bet your ass that if I get access to this talent and I have stuff I've wanted to build for months or years, I'm gonna hire this talent and get this stuff built and grow my company. Joel: I think that's what we're seeing now with strength in the tech sector. You mentioned the CHIP stuff, cybersecurity remains a big thing. We got solar and batteries and lit. Like, there's so much new stuff that these companies and you're also talking about startups in AI and environmental businesses for climate change that are coming online. And they're being founded by these same developers that are then turning around and hiring their friends that were at the company and saying, Hey, come work for us and get stock and like, make it big. So the evolution of this is just trickling down to they're being released. This talent pool has been released, they've been freed, and now they're going off and, and doing their own thing and getting new opportunities. Chad: But we need more. Joel: Yeah. The question is, we don't have enough people for the CHIPs to be made in this country. So we need to relax our immigration rules to let these folks in, to let them stay once they get a college degree or get educated in these industries. AI to me, is only gonna support the growth of more and more of these businesses because if you don't need... If you need three developers instead of 10, or you need 10 instead of 20, AI will support that. But those folks are gonna go get jobs at other companies where they're needed. And this will just sort of domino effect. But to me, if you're in the tech sector, I initially thought this is a bad sign for like, sites that help you find and hire tech folks. But some of this data outta TechCrunch tells me that, geez, there's, there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of runway, yeah. Joel: With talented tech people to get jobs to start companies. Once the capital starts getting freed with inflation going down or the barring rate going down like Katy bar the door, there's gonna be so many companies get so much money around these ideas and initiatives that it's gonna be fun to talk about. And we're gonna get a lot of new companies, I'm sure do some cool stuff in our space as well. Let's take a quick break and talk about McDonald's as we're on the cusp of, you guessed it. Lunch... Chad: Mickey D's. Joel: All right. Chad, a TikTok user. You've heard of TikTok, right? Yeah. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: If you're not following us on TikTok, we're putting our shorts from the show up. It's a nice little highlight reel. Chad: Oh, it's fun. Joel: Of what's going on? Anyway... Chad: It's fun. Joel: A TikTok user. Let's call him Tristan because that's his username. Recently criticized McDonald's in a video after he arrived on time for a scheduled job interview. Oh, let's just have a listen and, and you can decide for yourself. SFX: "I applied at McDonald's in my hometown and I had an interview at 11 o'clock. It's now 11:08. And you're thinking, why are you in your car, Tristan? So here's confirmation of text, multiple texts from the recruiter saying, Hey, you have an interview, a 30 minute interview on August 10th, which is today at 11:00 AM. Your interview will be held at this location then, Hey, again, 10:01. Hey Tristan. Your 30 minute in-person interview will be held at McDonald's in one hour, reminding me this was yesterday, telling me that this is happening. All of it, following the, this is the whole thread of the application process verification, the interview time, the interview day, how long it's gonna be. I walk up to the front counter at 10:50 and I say, hello, I am here for an interview. Guy looks at me dead in the face and says, no, you don't. And I said, I do. I filled out the application online. He said, no you don't. No one is here to interview. He starts handing me a paper application and said, no, you have to fill the application on paper. And I said, I've been receiving text from the recruiter here, it's supposed to be at 11:00. Joel: Fuck. SFX: He said yeah, no one is here to hire you. So he hands me a piece of paper, he hands me a pen, goes back to work. And like, nothing happened. So I'm sitting there like, I shouldn't have to take this because I've had multiple texts and I've had multiple confirmation. I've talked to a physical recruiter about what time this is supposed to be. I set this up with a physical or a virtually physical person. Talked to the other lady and she said, yeah, that person that's supposed to interview you is not supposed to be here for another 2 hours. And I was like, they want me to wait for two hours? Joel: Virtually physical. So some things are really interesting here. He thinks he's actually talking to a recruiter, like I think he really thinks a human being. He says virtually, like but I know this because my son applied to McDonald's through Paradox and Olivia, and the same process happened. Text messages. Schedule, you get fired up your interview is today. And there's apparently a disconnect. I don't know if it's widespread. Chad: So what happened with your son when he got there? Were they ready? Joel: They were ready. Either this McDonald has totally dropped the ball. But anyway, like I was saying, this guy's post 400,000-some views. Chad: Yeah. Joel: A ton of comments of people saying the same thing. They weren't all McDonald's, of course. Walmart was in there. I think target a couple of Domino's maybe I saw comments on. So we need to get the tech and the humans right with automation and the humans at the location to make sure this stuff doesn't happen. Because job seekers think they're talking to real people. And when you're not there when they show up and you don't show up for two hours, that's bad for everybody. What are your thoughts? Chad: I think it's fairly simple. This is a human problem, period. Number one, from a management problem, being able to actually manage your own fucking calendar when you have a system that's doing all the work for you. And number two, the setup on the front-end, this is a human problem. I mean, literally, it's getting mad at the hammer when you needed a screwdriver in the first fucking place. I mean, these guys, it drives me fucking crazy. So McDonald's in that case, it was more than likely it was a franchise issue. I know that I've heard many individuals who have gone through McDonald's, like Cole did. And it was like, boom. It was quick, it was easy, it was streamlined, it was nothing. Joel: Mm-hmm. Chad: These are the blips in the radar, which you are correct, that are going to get a lot of views. That could be one location that's a problem in the tens of thousands that are throughout the United States. Joel: Technology would be great if it weren't for all the people. The worker had no clue either. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, like the management at this McDonald's needs to let everyone know. Like, hey, we have this computer system that chats with candidates and if they come in and say, I've applied like they have through this system and not hand someone a paper application, that's just miserable. You need to educate your people on what the hell is going on. By the way, Chad, have you heard Mark Zuckerberg regularly eats 4000 calories at McDonald's as part of his new training regimen? Oh, yes. Here's his diet, Chad. 20 McNuggets, a Quarter Pounder, large fries, Oreo McFlurry, apple pie, and a couple of the cheeseburgers just for some snacks later. Are you kidding me? What a lightweight. What kind of weak ass is that? Shit, Chad. That's what I call a snack. We out. We out. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug-fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

The work from home movement is under fire. Jamie Dimon says it’s a productivity issue. Elon Musk says it’s a moral issue. As a result, more and more employers are forcing people back to the office. Even Zoom is bringing people back. The future is uncertain, for sure. That’s why we brought Mary Elkordy, president & CEO at Elkordy Global Strategies to the show. Elkordy Global Strategies is a full-service PR firm, well-versed in influencer marketing, talent integration, social media strategy, strategic communications, and digital marketing. A great guest with a unique perspective on a complicated topic. Enjoy! TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel 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. What's up everybody? It's your favorite semi sober podcast, aka, the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, the McHale to my bird, Chad Sowash is in the house and today we welcome Mary Elkordy, president and CEO of Elkordy Global Strategies. Mary Elkordy: Well, hello. Thank you for having me on. I'm so excited to be here with both of you. Joel: Oh, you look excited. [laughter] Chad: Lies. Mary Elkordy: Lies. No, not at the moment. If you asked me like 20 minutes ago, maybe it would've been like nah, but now I know how awesome you guys are and I'm cold. I'm so pumped. Joel: She's pumped man? She's been in the green room for five, 10 minutes. We're best friends now. We're best friends. Mary Elkordy: Oof, obviously. Joel: Mary, our listeners, however, don't know you more than likely. So give us a Twitter bio about what makes Mary tick. Mary Elkordy: I, started a PR firm three and a half years ago after I got laid off from the pandemic. It's grown to a team of about 22 over the past three and a half years. Chad: Wow. Mary Elkordy: I never managed people in my life besides, working in radio with a soundboard guy and an intern. So you guys can appreciate what an actual radio team looks like. I go to school at night. I graduate in two months from my second grad degree 'cause I am that nerd and, I'm having a good time talking to the both of you. S?: Alright. Alright. Alright. Chad: Radio, what did you do in radio? You had soundboard guys all other, were you a technician? Were you a production person? What were you doing? Mary Elkordy: No, I produced four shows a day at WABC. And then I was a co-host, and producer for DL Hughley's podcast for three years. Chad: No! Mary Elkordy: Yes. And my nickname was White Chocolate. [laughter] Chad: White Chocolate. I love, we've got white chocolate. Why didn't you lead with that? Joel: That escalated quickly. Chad: I'm also known as White Chocolate. Mary Elkordy: I mean, I'm allegedly serious sometimes, but strong on the alleged. Joel: White Chocolate. Chad: That is awesome. That is awesome and we love it. Joel: I don't know where we go from white chocolate. Chad, pull us in. Chad: I think we're done, I think we go ahead and just wrap up. Thanks Mary. Appreciate the time. Mary Elkordy: Anytime. [laughter] Chad: I'm gonna go ahead. We're gonna talk about remote work today, right? The war on remote. Mary Elkordy: Let's go. Chad: And I wanna throw this out right now. The war on remote work, to me, it sounds like it's dead. Zoom just called back their employees. It's like they're boiling the frog. Everybody's trying to boil the frog. They want 'em in for a couple of days, but we all know what that's gonna end up and back in five days. Right. So... Mary Elkordy: You can't even imagine that. Chad: Can we just say that this thing is dead Zoom the prognosticator of working. Like we're doing this podcast right now, remote... Joel: It's like getting married, like it's over. Chad: Yes, it's over. Joel: It never should have happened. And it did. Chad: It's done. So tell us why remote still lives on Mary. Mary Elkordy: I think people have experienced what, like a taste of freedom of having ability to manage your time outside of your hours. Like imagine like, I can't imagine spending two to four hours a day commuting to work every day. Like that's just like, I'm able to do other stuff with that time or I sleep so much more. Like I don't have bags under my eyes anymore. It's a beautiful thing. But I do think that there are some aspects that people miss in terms of the collaboration and being together and in person. And don't get me wrong, I like that too, but I don't think it's like a necessary requirement every week. I just don't see that being the reality of what people need. And then from like, as a business owner, I think we benefit so much from having an access of talent like all over the world, both from finding talent, but also fiscally, you're able to have potentially better talent because you're able to convince them for lower prices because you're not making them go to work or because they can work from home or because of the flexibility. People value different things when you're doing negotiations for roles. So I think the second that you're requiring someone goes into the office and they give up their time with their kids or their ability to maybe go to school or do other things on the side, like that's an opportunity cost for them and they should be compensated for that, I believe, in their opinion. Chad: So we've seen productivity go up from remote work, we've seen happiness happen with remote work. We've seen all these things and some of those points that you talked about, even finding better talent, right? I mean it's easier when you have a much larger pool, you can catch bigger fish. So why is it, do you think that employers are trying to force this measure of everybody getting back to the office when all of the indicators are saying that doesn't make any sense? Mary Elkordy: I think different companies have different motivations. Do they have leases that they've already spent money on for seven years that they feel like they're just throwing the money away. Joel: Bingo. Mary Elkordy: But like also like the same point, like for instance in New York City, I find it really ironic that they're forcing people to go back into the office and then at the same time they're bringing congestion pricing into the city and they're increasing subway fares. So to me, not to be, I used to work in politics for a long time, so to me, not to be that weird person, but like, are you just forcing people to come back to the city as like a business move to enforce people to spend money on the subway, to force people to spend $9 to go above 62nd street in the city? So I think everyone has different motivations. Mary Elkordy: I do think for some industries the collaboration and in-person aspect may be like a requirement. Whether if they're like, if they're doing certain type of skills or industries that are very hands-on and you need like people in the same room. But I think for industries like service-based industries, like what I do, I don't believe you really need that. And I think it also hurts the end consumer, right? Because if I have to get office space, I'm spending money on rent, which means I automatically have to increase my prices. So if you're trying to like have competitive prices and you're in a world where most, there's a huge percentage of companies that have the ability to be remote, you're gonna have a harder time, in my opinion, getting work because your prices will not be as competitive. Joel: I love that you mentioned, the commercial real estate aspect of this and Chad and I talked recently about, WeWork essentially, pooping the bed, if you will and talking about bankruptcy and going out of business. Now Chad and I find that very curious because if any company should be working right now, it should be WeWork with you have flexible leases and employees, individuals can come in and out. What's your read on the WeWork meltdown? Mary Elkordy: I think that in terms of I think they got, with any business, there's this really hard balance of like embracing the growth and opportunities and then moving too quick. I think they got stock happy, right? They got excited that all these people wanted these things to a point where they just signed up for so much before they could guarantee that. And I think a lot of businesses, when you see an influx of clients, and I've even gone through that too as a business where you see much potential, but then you can't predict the future. Like if someone talks about recessions then clients leave. But you just hired three people, and that's similar to what WeWork did, except on a much larger, massive scales with like, things that they are guaranteed to for like seven years. Mary Elkordy: Now, the irony is if they were, if they managed it better, I think that they would be doing very well now. Because for me, like a WeWork is something that I would consider in a year or two just to have like the op because people, some, like some teams, like people want the option to come in once in a while or have a place to go to. Like I love my dogs, but like, sometimes I just need to leave the house. Like I call 'em my chief barking officers, they enter most of my conversations. It's a selling point for some, but for me, by the time it's 6:00 PM like, I honestly need to leave. And I think some people with their kids around, summer vacation, their husband's next to them their whole day. They have no separation of space or their own time. I do think there is value to that. I just don't think you need the same level of real estate or space or commitment to like a landlord or a commercial real estate property or even buying as a business. Joel: Yeah, well from one eccentric founder and Adam Newman let's go to another. So Chad and I have talked about sort of all the reasons that the ivory tower folks talk about coming back to the office. We've heard culture, we've heard just business sense. One of the more interesting one is that it's a morality question. I'm gonna play a soundbite from Elon Musk in an interview with CNBC and get your opinion. Mary Elkordy: Is he gonna carry the kitchen sinks with him this time too? Mary Elkordy: Something like that. Yeah. [laughter] S?: I'm a big believer that people need to, are more productive when they're in person. But there are some exceptions, but I kind of think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, let them eat cake. It's like really you're gonna work from home and you're gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory. You're gonna make the people who make your food that gets delivered that they can't work from home. The people that come fix your house they can't work from home but you can? Does that seem morally right? Joel: Mary, what's your take? Mary Elkordy: For me, I think it's a stretch. I don't think, I think in any industry, for instance, you could complain about someone else, like the grass is always greener. But if you made a choice to be in a certain industry that you know is very hands-on, like building a car. Obviously, that's not going away as a remote work job anytime soon. And if that's something that is bothering you, then maybe find a different path. I don't think it's a moral issue, personally. I do think that when he makes an argument about productivity, I would humbly disagree. I think I work way more, and I think my team does, because they don't have that same level of like, oh, let me go talk in the break room, or let's go to happy hour. Let's leave for happy hour early. Or I need to head home because I have like two hours of traffic and I need to do whatever. I think people like, and then it becomes a problem, right? Mary Elkordy: Actually on the flip side of like burnout, because it's so easy when I have no time, I just put, I put the computer on my lap when I go to work. And there's no boundaries when you're in your home, it's really hard to create those boundaries with remote work at home. So I would humbly disagree with a lot of that statement that he's made. I do think it's harder to monitor people, but I think in any office place, like let's say I'm like a hawk. No one likes a hawk. Like whether you're at home or you're in office. And the thing is, if you don't, in both scenarios, if someone's not doing the work and you have a decent processes and a decent management, you'll notice that someone's slacking. Like I can tell when someone's slacking pretty quickly. Do I need to see them to know that? No. Chad: So I think you just pointed out something, which is really the problem. And tell me what you think about this. I think this is a management issue more than it is a worker issue. Because if you don't have KPIs, you don't have goals, you don't have set phase lines for projects and things like that, and you are not managing those people to those then that's more management than it is the actual individual. So to me this is more control and micromanagement than it is anything else. What's your take on that? Mary Elkordy: Yeah, I think that there's this concept of micromanagement that as I was saying, like no one likes, right? But if you have to create processes, whether it's every company is different on how they measure their time, but it's about creating a process that works for your company. And with any business, there's a testing phase, right? You're piloting something, you're trying something out. It may take a couple of times to find what works best for your company, but I don't think it's at a place where it's impossible for any company to be able to manage or be able to evaluate how effective their team is and can be. And it's also about having regular communication. I think one of the hardest things when we were starting is like getting people to use the phone. Like to call, even for me when I'm someone that's a very big multitasker. Mary Elkordy: Like I may talk, you guys can tell I can talk. But if someone messages me during work, I may send two words. Okay, cool. And people take that offensively like, oh, well she's, that she thinks, and there's a lot of, there's that tone and that learning curve of knowing that person in a different way than in person. And I think maybe that's where some of the disconnect is, but that's why it's like teaching a team to pick up the phone to go on the Zoom. And I think that's probably, I think the hardest thing in terms of building a culture, is building people who can actually communicate with one another outside of like being able to tap on their shoulder. Chad: Right. But that's a management point though. I mean, if you're feeling that as the team, then that's a point where you have to manage your people. So we've seen some companies and some leaders like David Solomon and Jamie Diamond, where they've been very, very harsh around ensuring that everybody's back to work, period. So are the companies actually starting to take on the identities of their CEOs? And at that point, the culture of the organization is much like the CEO, right? So you can start to... At that point understand where you wanna work and where you don't wanna work. Mary Elkordy: Yeah. And I think that's one of the benefits of a remote work and freelancing, to be honest. I find when we're hiring more in today's world, that more people are wanting to test out their employer before committing to their employer because they know that... Especially in these remote companies where you have no office, the identity really is the founder and how the founder sets that tone because everything... Your whole identity is based on that really as a company. So I do think there's that, but I think people are more wanting to test out the relationship on both sides. A lot of the people that have become full-time with me, were freelancers to start with right? Because... And even when I hire certain people, they're like, "Oh, well I have several clients and I'm just trying to figure out which one I wanna work full-time for." The fact that someone can do that is amazing for them. Chad: Yeah. Autonomy. Joel: Let's talk about demographics. So no one on this call is in the 18 to 34 demographic. Chad: I am. Joel: However... [laughter] Chad: I am. I'm 33. Joel: Then you're perfect to answer to this question, so... Mary Elkordy: Okay. Joel: But I do remember those days and I remember being new to the work world and realizing how important mentorship was and realizing how important seeing older colleagues work and how work is done and how the whole game is played. Are we alleviating a large part of the working community by making young people stay at home? In other words, I wanted to be in the office when I was 25. I wanted to get outta my apartment, I wanted to interact with people, I wanted to go to happy hour afterwards. That was something I looked forward to now that at the age I am now less so how does that whole thing play out? Do the older folks have to come back for a few mentoring days? What's your vision on how that whole thing plays out? Mary Elkordy: I think mentoring could happen virtually and in person. I think mentoring is an ongoing process. And I think as a company... Well, it's for two things. If you're in that age group, whether you work for a company that does mentoring or not, there's a lot of opportunities and avenues to find mentors. And I think it's networking and really leveraging the network that you're building for yourself. But I think as a company it's also providing opportunities for people to learn. And then something that we are going to be doing, which is teaming people up, pairing people who have more experience versus those that aren't. And just making them have coffee once a month or chat and just as human beings. Because even if you don't work with someone directly on a team, doesn't mean they don't have value or insight to offer. And so I think it's just really how you structure that within your company. And then, as a remote company, we typically do a one year weekend thing where everyone comes to New York and people are like, "Oh, are you gonna do trust falls?" I'm like, "No, we're just gonna have life experiences together, explore, get to know each other personally, do fun things. Whether it's seeing a sports game or just taking away random walk in the city and get to know one another." And I think for me, building those memories and trust has more impact than me doing a leadership training meeting. Joel: Do you think it's important as an employer, if you have younger employees, that you give them an outlet to get out of their apartment or living situation and go to a coffee shop or go to a workspace where they can have a desk if they want? Do you think that's important or no? Mary Elkordy: For us, we don't care where you are per se as long as you communicate. So I do think people should take advantage of it. Now in terms of a company sponsor like Workspace, I think if the company can do that, they should... We... I'm considering at some point getting a small office or a WeWork or something along those lines, just so that people have a place to go if they just wanna leave and have the thing. But we also... I also try to plan activities where I am. Like going to a baseball game or doing something that's not just surrounded with solely just alcohol. Joel: Yep. [laughter] Mary Elkordy: Right? Or solely just coffee. Something that we actually bring people together... Joel: Or both. Mary Elkordy: And have a good time, or both. I do love my coffee. I notoriously never finished my iced coffee, but I do love coffee. Joel: And I love my Irish coffees, Mary. Mary Elkordy: Me too. Joel: I'll let you go on this one. What does work from home look like five years from now? Mary Elkordy: I think work from home is going to stay. I think that there will be solutions that companies will have to create for those that want that balance and so that they can still maintain different types of talent, right? So if you're looking to have that in-office experience or options, I think it depends on where you're at as a company financially and size wise. But I do think that there should be options for people to do that if they want that but I don't think it... I don't believe it's going to be mandated for most companies 'cause there's going to be a... Unless it's a company where you make badonkadonk money, [laughter] right? You're not gonna be able to compete with the fact that people like the flexibility of having options. Mary Elkordy: I think we're just in a society where people like options, right? Sometimes too much, right? Sometimes I say if it wasn't for my dogs, I would be traveling constantly. I'd have no home base. So I think that there's some grounding that some people may not get if they really dive too deep. But I do think that there's... People like options and the more that we're able to give reasonable options, I think that there's this thing in society where they expect so much from their employer. Not just a place to work, but like I refer to myself as a therapist half the day for the team. I hear everybody's problems or all these different hats that people have to... All these expectations of what an employment means, right? And so I think it's just finding that balance of like, "Yes, I'm offering you a place to work and also offering you a place to grow and place to be able to provide for your family, but we also still have to get work done too." So I think it's that balance of options, caring for people, but being able to obtain and sustain and retain talent. Joel: It's all about the badonkadonk money, Chad. Chad: Always about the badonkadonk money. Mary Elkordy: I just came up with that. [laughter] Chad: You should keep it, you should definitely keep it. Mary, thanks so much for coming on the show. I want to... I wanna give you a chance to tell the listeners where they can find out more about you, connect with you and maybe even start a conversation around remote work, PR, who knows? Where do they find Mary? Mary Elkordy: It's very easy to find me 'cause I'm the only one with this last name and first name. So at Mary Elkordy. E-L-K-O-R... D as in David, Y, by my Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, all the places in the world. Chad: Excellent. Joel: She loves posting the shorts, Chad. So if you like your video shorts, [laughter] Mary's the one to follow. Chad: I love video shorts. Joel: This was fun. Another one in the can. Nice to meet you, Mary. Hopefully, we'll see you around New York City sometime. And with that we out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead, now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Ever wanted to hear an interview with a former recruiter at Facebook, Apple and Tesla? How about one that’s currently blazing a trail at EV maker Rivian? Well, it’s your lucky day, because Chad & Cheese sat down with Rameen Fattahi, director, recruiting operations & insights at Rivian while they were all at iCIMS Inspire to hear Rameen’s story. Don’t worry. Along the way, there are stories about Elon and Zuck.rivian PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. INTRO: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel Cheeseman: Oh, yeah. What's up, everybody? This is Joel Cheeseman recording live from iCIMS Inspire. I am joined, as always, by my co-host, Chad Sowash. Chad Sowash: What's up? Joel Cheeseman: And today we are excited to welcome... [applause] Joel Cheeseman: Rameen Fattahi, Director, Recruiting Operations and Insights... Chad Sowash: That was good. Joel Cheeseman: At Rivian, a little EV company that we haven't talked about on the podcast, at least. Chad Sowash: I've been excited to see those out. Joel Cheeseman: Welcome to the podcast. Now you were at our party in Vegas. Have you recovered, I guess is the first question. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I refrain from commenting on this question. Joel Cheeseman: No comment. Okay. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: For my professional career and... Chad Sowash: That's great. Joel Cheeseman: That's a good time. Chad Sowash: That's better than a comment. Rameen Fattahi: Let's rewind. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I actually promised myself that, I wanna do what you guys do, which is be authentic and true to the industry so that people can hear somebody say something that means something to them. Not what you want to hear, but just to tell you how it is. And I appreciate what you guys are doing, as in the HR function, the TA space, you're bringing light to, not us being a bunch of hermit crabs behind the scenes, but actually normal, fun, kind, loving people. Joel Cheeseman: He's softening us up for the hard-hitting questions later. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Clearly, clearly. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Clear enough. Rameen, we appreciate that and we appreciate you being a fan of ours. Rameen Fattahi: So we had a good time is what I'm hearing, yes. Chad Sowash: Absolutely. Joel Cheeseman: Now, before the show in our green room, if you will, you were getting really personal about your journey and how you got here, which I think is interesting. Tell us the story about how you got into this profession. 'Cause your resume is outstanding. Now we're talking Tesla, Apple. What else is on there? Rameen Fattahi: I don't like to name names, but Facebook and Huawei and... [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: I don't like to name names, but Facebook is on there. Chad Sowash: Some of the biggest names in the world. Joel Cheeseman: A hell of a resume no matter what. So how did you get here? Rameen Fattahi: It's a long road. I think, let's take it back. Who am I? I'm an Iranian American, born in America. My parents and family and my sister were immigrants from Iran. Father's a doctor. My mom was a teacher. When I grew up, everyone was like, "Rameen, what are you gonna do one day?" 'Cause I saw my dad. I was like, "I'm gonna help people. I'm gonna be a doctor. I'm gonna be a brain surgeon." And that's all fun and games, and the reality is... Chad Sowash: What did dad do? Rameen Fattahi: He does veins. He's specialized in veins. Chad Sowash: In veins? Rameen Fattahi: Leg veins, straight up. My dad is one of a couple of people in the world... Chad Sowash: Wow. Rameen Fattahi: Who just worked on leg veins and loved it. Joel Cheeseman: Bulging veins, Chad. That's what he specialized in. [laughter] Chad Sowash: So we know where to go one day. Joel Cheeseman: Yes. When... Rameen Fattahi: Actually, I got the hookup. Chad Sowash: When Aunt Thelma needs to... [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: Oh. But let's bring it back. So, I graduated with wanting to be like my dad. So I did neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis. Chad Sowash: Damn. Rameen Fattahi: I did surgery labs in the last part of school. And it was really exciting, but I also thought it was gross. The excitement of getting there and being like, "I'm gonna work on a live animal and do these procedures and help the research," was exciting. But when you get your hand involved in it, you have to ask yourself, "do I want people to want me to be that person?" [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I don't think so, because I don't know if I love this. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: And you gotta understand when I told you my story, we all come from different cultures and backgrounds. But you have to understand, when I went to my parents and had that family talk, because that's what we do in my culture, my mom cried. My dad was taken aback and then said, "No, I agree." That time when this man was in the people business, when you were promoting a club at 18, I saw just a light in you. When you were in restaurants working in, went from Buster all the way to Manager, I saw a different light in you and you just... I see something about people. So that's where it all started. Chad Sowash: So dad was into it, really? Rameen Fattahi: Dad was into it. Mom was like, "what!" Chad Sowash: So culturally... Joel Cheeseman: I know I've tried to put my hand in a few places that I didn't want to really go. Chad Sowash: Yeah, well you got smashed. That's different. Joel Cheeseman: So I can relate to this. Chad Sowash: That's different. [chuckle] Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: So dad was behind it. And that... Rameen Fattahi: That was that. Rameen Fattahi: He was in the profession. He was medical doctor and usually you love to see son come up behind you. That is amazing that he just was like, he doubled down and said, "no, I get it." Chad Sowash: He's just like, "I really believe that at the core, what will make you happy is not this. Thank you for bringing this forward to the family." Joel Cheeseman: Dad of the year. Rameen Fattahi: Fuck yeah. Joel Cheeseman: Dad of the year. Chad Sowash: Yeah. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: Sorry for my language, but fuck. Yeah. Chad Sowash: Yeah, me too, oh Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: Obviously I pride in family. But my sister, who's seven years older than me, she had spent a lifetime to get into Apple. She truly was invested into the recruiting environment and she was a coordinator there. And she was a coordinator for five or six years. Joel Cheeseman: So you said outside of your mom, so mom wasn't into it. Talk about that. Rameen Fattahi: You know, mom's real happy now. We're 13 years later... [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: She sees the vision, once that vision came through. Chad Sowash: 13 years later. Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: And she sees me happy and I'm helping people, but from a different lens. I think that recruiting is one of the greatest experiences. I was on stage today with Laura and what a tremendous experience. I told her backstage, I said, "I can't be you because I love recruiting." I got lucky. Okay. 13 years ago I was gonna open a restaurant. I came out of school and was going to open a restaurant. Chad Sowash: You were going to open a restaurant? Rameen Fattahi: Pizza, beer, and burgers. That's it. Chad Sowash: Too easy. Rameen Fattahi: 24 beers on tap. Joel Cheeseman: I'm in. Rameen Fattahi: I was excited. And I swear the weekend before we signed that lease, it was gonna be 350 a square foot. And I know 'cause that's what I was that far deep. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: I got a call from one of my buddies and he said, "Rameen, my family comes from the restaurant world. Don't do it." And he's like, I just... "We struggled. We've gone through a lot of change. You win sometimes, but you lose a lot. And it's seven days a week, 14 to 18 hours a day." Chad Sowash: Oh God. Rameen Fattahi: "It's a beast. I don't recommend you do this, but guess what? I'm in an agency. I've been here for 30 days. I'm doing great. And I think your personality would be great for his come recruit. Come recruit, please." Chad Sowash: Oh, damn. He recruited him out of going into the restaurant and just... [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: To be in recruiting. Chad Sowash: Oh, it's awesome. Rameen Fattahi: Yeah. He's a good friend of mine to this day. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: And I trusted him. I said, "You know what? Why don't I interview?" We started in a company called 314E. It's probably on my resume. Joel Cheeseman: So timeout, you had, you're ready to sign on the dotted line to open a restaurant... Rameen Fattahi: Ready to sign on the dotted line with my uncle... Joel Cheeseman: And your boy said, "Come be a recruiter." Rameen Fattahi: Yes. Joel Cheeseman: And you did a 180 and said, "I'm gonna go investigate this." Rameen Fattahi: That's true. Joel Cheeseman: Damn. Alright. Rameen Fattahi: So, you can always open a restaurant, right? You're like, "Let's try something else out, maybe." I really believe in being open to new ideas. I'm told all the time, why don't you push the team in a direction? I'm like, "Let's get there together, I only executive decision one out of maybe 15, 20 things. Why don't we get there all together?" And it helps to build and drive a really healthy team. I wanna share this story because I think there's a lot of people that would appreciate having an authentic look of how did someone develop in 13 years from where I was coming out of school, trying to find my path to 13 years later, leading director of recruiting operations and insights at Rivian. Starting on a team of less than 10 people with no written process. Starting a company of 700 and saying, I'm gonna build an internet, a career site, and an ATS, I'm gonna build an internal mobility referral, everything from scratch. So how that really happened? [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: Going all the way back. I was in 314E and I was an agency recruiter, guys, and it was awesome. But I really struggled and I struggled with the fact that in an agency environment, the best interest is what you can do for your company. Not in what you can do for the community and then the candidates you're working for. So I struggled one time, I remember it very vividly. There was a woman, and in recruiting we don't discriminate. We don't ask you personal questions. I do not ask Joel, "What do you do on the weekends?" I don't wanna know. But people elect things all the time. I'm sure you guys see this. Chad Sowash: Oh God, yeah. Overshare is what we call it. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: And in the spirit of oversharing, I was with a woman who was going through something in her life. She had three kids. She was going through something. She explained her situation to me without me even asking. And I said, "Oh my goodness, I wanna max you out. I wanna take care of you on a human level." But when you're 22 years old and you go tell your vice president in an agency that I wanna go help this person, they're just like, "You know what? That's coming out of your commission." I'm like, "Don't even worry about that." They're like, "Well, that's coming out of the company's commission." That threw me off, boys. That threw me off. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: So my sister, she had been at Apple, actually ended her career last year at Apple. And she was in a coordinator role... Joel Cheeseman: We're talking Cupertino Apple. Rameen Fattahi: Cupertino at the main silo. And she basically was like, "Rameen, I've been promoted to a sourcer role. I think you should come over here and interview for a coordinator role." [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: And I was like, "You know what... " Chad Sowash: Yeah. Why not? Rameen Fattahi: I wanna be in corporate recruiting. There's a different lens of how you interact with people in a corporate environment where it's like, I want it to be equal. We got ranges. You gotta go outside of that range. Why? Define that. Go to your comp team explain to them why you're paying someone more than everybody else on the team destroying the internal equity. So we have some parameters that keep us locked. And got really lucky that my sister was in that role because she helped prepare me for that interview. That's where I wanted to be authentic with people. Like, you can get help out there, whether it's your sister, your friend, like in my story already, we haven't even crossed me being my second role and I've gotten help from two different people. Joel Cheeseman: And the importance of a network, I mean, granted family... Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. Joel Cheeseman: But until you know people that can help you get that foot in the door. Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. Joel Cheeseman: You've got an uphill battle to get... Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. Joel Cheeseman: Those opportunities. Rameen Fattahi: And keep your eyes and ears out. People will reach out to you and say, "I got an idea for you and you should hear it." In my case, it helped me and I'm so happy now. So I go join Apple. Joel Cheeseman: So what years are we talking at Apple? Rameen Fattahi: Oh. We're in 2023. We're talking about 2010, '11 now, '12 maybe. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. So you engaged with Steve Jobs at some point or you saw him somewhere. Rameen Fattahi: I did not personally engage with Steve Jobs. Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Rameen Fattahi: I am not that... [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Did you see him from across the cafeteria? Rameen Fattahi: I've seen Tim. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I've later hired someone on my team here at Rivian who, he actually told Steve Jobs without looking up, "No, you can't have my cafeteria table." [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: He had no idea to sell a sea shots in the '90s. "No, you can't have my... " The world is small. Chad Sowash: We know that guy. Rameen Fattahi: Oh. Chad Sowash: Oh, we know that guy. Rameen Fattahi: He's a tremendous name, employee in marketing. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I'll save him because he deserves his own podcast. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: But gentlemen, I'm now coordinating at Apple. I'm 22, maybe 23 years old. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: I've got six months of agency recruiting experience. I joined as a coordinator. I got to support multiple functions from technology, mostly IT to marketing and GNA. While doing this, my recruiters that interviewed me said, "Hey, you are a recruiter and I need extra help. I don't have a sourcer on my team. You mind just moonlighting?" And I said, "What an opportunity. Thank you for this opportunity." And so I took that opportunity and without telling my boss. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I literally would spend my evening sourcing. And when you're in a coordinator role, it's hourly usually it's not exempt, and so I didn't clock any of those or say anything. What ended up happening for me was, it's about six months and 14 people that passed through and got all the way to hire through my sourcing effort, my recruiters went to their leaders and said, "let's bring this guy on the team. Bring this guy and interview him on the team." And it was true, I showed up with 12 senior recruiters that today are my mentors. And without them, again networking again, other people, I don't know if I'd be in front of you today and have the opportunity to speak. And there's this secret trick for a bunch of people that might be new in any new role. Go out of your office or whatever seat you have and don't ask anybody the same question twice and don't ask the same people a second question in the same day. That was my trick. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I had 12 mentors. I'd walk from one person to the next, ask them a different question and nobody knew I didn't know what I was talking about. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: And I was able to have tremendous output through their brains. And I wanna be honest about it. Joel Cheeseman: That's some next level shit. Chad Sowash: It is next level. That's what would piss me off. As a manager, when one, when somebody would come to me and it's just like, I'm like, "Okay, come on. Can you not figure this shit out by now?" [laughter] Chad Sowash: "come on, genius." Rameen Fattahi: So that naturally progressed into, if you have an aspiration and you're willing to go above your role to do it and not say anything about it, not ask for anyone to tell you about it, other people will reward you by talking about your work. And that will help you get to the next level. So in this case, that happened. Next thing I knew, I was sourcing for IT at Apple. I was the youngest member of that workforce. I hate to bring age in here, I hate it, but I was so proud of the work that I was doing. Yeah. It was exciting. Joel Cheeseman: Was mom on board by now? Rameen Fattahi: No. Yeah. Mommy, I love you. Joel Cheeseman: You're at Apple, still Mom isn't on board. Okay. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I love my mom. I promised an authentic discussion. Yeah. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: Boys, I'm at Apple sourcing. It's going great. Meeting new business units, meeting new leaders. What I had never imagined was that my boss's boss's boss's boss, who was the VP of all of Apple recruiting, would leave and she would go to another company, at this point, Tesla. She would take my director and he would call me and say, "Ramin, I'd like for you to join this team." And I said, "what?" [chuckle] Rameen Fattahi: "You know my name?" [laughter] Chad Sowash: They're sitting at a Starbucks, early in the morning, "what hard workers do you know that we can take with us? I don't want the skanks, I just want the hard workers." [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: How many years at Apple before Tesla? Rameen Fattahi: Do I have to have two, three drinks before we got into this? [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: That is true. That is true. We did lubricate the guests before. Chad Sowash: Carry on. Rameen Fattahi: It was after Apple. I promised authentic and indirect. I jumped ship. And let me tell you something. I've told a bunch of people that I've hired. I never thought when I joined Apple, I was ever gonna leave. I had no idea. Chad Sowash: What'd your sister think? 'Cause she was there. Rameen Fattahi: My sister told my mom and dad and me... [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: Our personality's a little bit different. She's, "I like the stability." Chad Sowash: Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: Have you ever met an employee that'll tell you, "I don't want your promotion, 'cause it comes with more scope."? Chad Sowash: Yes. Rameen Fattahi: I happen to have one in my family and it's... [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: And I love it. I'm like, "You know what? That's super different from me." And we have... Chad Sowash: Yes. And she's not living to work? Rameen Fattahi: That's correct. Chad Sowash: She's working to live, and we're starting to see more of that in our culture. Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. And I'm the flip opposite. Right? [laughter] Chad Sowash: Yeah. Now me too. I know, I know dude. Rameen Fattahi: It was exciting. God. Apologies. Chad Sowash: I'm ashamed of it sometimes. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: These are early days at Tesla. Rameen Fattahi: Early... You know when? It was Model 3 ramp, the Model 3 was just starting to create a production line. Chad Sowash: Damn. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. You took a big risk in this. Talk about how you felt in doing that and taking the leap and... Chad Sowash: Wow. Joel Cheeseman: What was it like? You didn't meet Steve Jobs. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: I assume you met Elon at some point. Rameen Fattahi: I was excited to join Tesla, but I was afraid to leave what I had had. I never thought of a world where outside of Apple, there was an employment opportunity. I just thought, this is the way that people recruit. This is the way that business operates. And... Joel Cheeseman: I mean, look, people returned your calls. When Apple calls you, they return the call. Rameen Fattahi: That's true. Joel Cheeseman: You're leaving that for, I mean, Tesla's not the worst case scenario for... Rameen Fattahi: Yeah. Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: But you did take a risk. Rameen Fattahi: It was because of leadership. Straight up. When I tell people, and I hire people, I tell them to think about it. And I point blank put myself in the hot seat. I say, "listen, when you get a checklist on what you're looking for, your manager and your leader," I don't like the word manager. "Your leader, the person that inspires you and you're gonna work for, that's really important to you. You need a green check next to that. And that is gonna be the most important thing." Second thing is, "what are you doing? Is the company doing something that makes you super excited?" I chase leaders because through their mentorship and their lenses, I've been able to develop. And if you have a shitty leader, you'll never forget that experience. Chad Sowash: Okay. Well, yeah. And I almost say that those are the most learning focused experiences because you know what not to fucking do. Rameen Fattahi: Totally. Chad Sowash: It's very hard as a leader to know what to do. It is even harder to know what the bad habits are and then you can pinpoint those pretty quickly. Right? You're following good leaders. Rameen Fattahi: I follow good leaders that inspire you and mentor you, and are willing to develop you and challenge you, not someone that you serve. I'm 25 at this point, 26 maybe. I've joined Tesla first week. Young man, young man, super glamored with Elon. I'm walking down with one of my mentors who had also come from Apple to the team, and we see Elon coming down the hallway. [laughter] Super giddy. He goes, "oh shit." He pushes me into the bathroom. And I said, "what happened, man? You just touched me." Chad Sowash: There he is. Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: I was like... Chad Sowash: "You touched me. And now I didn't see Elon." Rameen Fattahi: He get to say hi. He goes, "listen, it's an experience going down right now." And Elon's not like every leader. He's, a very strong forward leader. You may come back and he may ask you the golden question of, "what do you do here?" And you come back with, "I'm brand new, I'm learning my roles." And he might just turn around and be like, "you're not meant for this team 'cause your answer wasn't zoomed out enough," because just last week someone closed the door on one of the cars that he came out of and they got fired on the spot because it was a little too hard. He was at that time going through some hardships and you'll see it through his interviews. He says, "I'm really excited about that guy's brain and where he is pushing us." He was living in the factory, sleeping there to show the factory that, "Hey, I'm in this with you." And just tremendous amount of stress with, "is our company gonna make it? Are we gonna follow around on our finances? We don't have enough for payroll." All these crazy things. Being in the spirit of being authentic, I wanted to meet him. I was told not to meet him. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Do you have positive memories of Elon and his management style or? Chad Sowash: Or just Tesla itself? Rameen Fattahi: I have positive memories of Tesla for sure. Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Rameen Fattahi: The workforce is amazing. These are people who wanna inspire the world. These are trailblazers. They're people that are fighting a hard battle. Whether it's the IT folks trying to figure out how to figure out IT and EV space for the first time. Because, it's different from many of the ice combustion engines that we've been dealing with in the companies. Chad Sowash: Dude, we experienced ludicrous speed two days ago. Joel Cheeseman: Ludicrous plus. Rameen Fattahi: No, it was ludicrous speed. [laughter] Chad Sowash: We didn't do plus 'cause it didn't, that would've taken 10 minutes to actually reformulate. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Our lungs would've shot out the back of our bodies. [chuckle] Chad Sowash: That shit was ridiculous. Rameen Fattahi: As a person who has both a Tesla and a Rivian truck, they're fast. I traded a Corvette, a Z06 for the Rivian. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Let's put a pin on the fact that he owns a Tesla and a Rivian. Chad Sowash: Well he did. Joel Cheeseman: Pull a pin on that and we'll come back to it. Chad Sowash: And we saw a Rivian on the road the other day. That's a sexy vehicle. Chad Sowash: I'm biased. It's so sexy. [laughter] Chad Sowash: I got a second one on pre-order. I'm waiting for it. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: I got a second one on pre-order. Joel Cheeseman: So, you're Tesla and then another opportunity comes along. Rameen Fattahi: Here's the truth. Three months into Tesla, the first recruiting event, I spearheaded it. It was my idea to have it right in the middle of the factory. I wanted all the tech folks, the software folks to come in... Chad Sowash: Called a Gigafactory. Rameen Fattahi: The middle of the factory. I think at that time it was called a Gigafactory. In Fremont, California, we had a recruiting event. It was exciting. But what happened for me was not something I could have ever imagined. It's a blip on my resume. You're really like, "oh, I got such a great CV." Yeah, if I explain the story, not if you just look at it, because there's two short stints on there that need explanation. Tesla, "Rameen, why were you there for three months?" "Oh, sorry about that. This is a really hard point in my life, actually, in my professional career, because I had to tell a mentor that I was gonna follow another mentor who wanted to double my scope." And so it was so... Chad Sowash: Why is that hard though? Because that explanation for you should be, "look, they have that much trust in me... " Okay, no, I get it. I get it. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Chad Sowash: The reason why it's so hard is I had committed to Tesla. I had committed to this leader. I was in the mix of projects that I felt like were impactful and important. In hindsight, leaving, they survived, they thrived, they did great. I was one of many, no problem. But at that moment, I really felt like we were doing something, we're on special, and I had an important person in my life say, "I wanna develop in on you." The problem that happened for me was one of my mentors from Apple went to be the head of recruiting at Huawei and gave me a call and said, "would like for you to lead people for the first time." I said, "you know what, Jen, I'm not prepared for that. I am not prepared for that. You should not hire me." Chad Sowash: I'm gonna say right now to have that kind of like inner scope of understanding. I mean, just like generally, any young man would say, "let's do it." Joel Cheeseman: Intellectual maturity. Rameen Fattahi: I don't know if it was intellectual maturity, gentlemen, or the fact that I was afraid to fail the people that would be on the team. Chad Sowash: Yeah, no, it is. That's the same thing. They're the exact same thing. Because generally, when we're that age, we're thinking more about ourselves than we are the actual team. And I mean, that's how corporate America works. Right? Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. Yeah. Chad Sowash: So yeah, no, that's pretty awesome. Rameen Fattahi: In my story, I wanna say, bet on yourself, triple down. It's really exciting. So what happens next is I said, yes, it was super uncomfortable for me to say yes. I knew that me saying yes to one leader was me saying goodbye to another. Also, I don't know if you guys know this, but our industry is super tiny. So I move over to Huawei. I couldn't believe that I was reporting to this great person. I told her, "look, if I come there, you're on speed dial," like, "I'm gonna be talking to you every single day for the first few months until I get my feet under me." That was the truth. Eight months into this role. Here's where I get to blip number two on the CV. My leader walks in and goes, "I quit on the spot." I was like, "what?" I was like, "you're my mentor. You're my everything. I followed you. Like, what are you talking about?" She goes, "yeah. So like, in all honesty I think you should quit." I was like, "Oh, no." Chad Sowash: Could you have told me this before? Joel Cheeseman: Is this because of the political headwinds of Huawei, or? Rameen Fattahi: Oh, man. In practice in China, when you're going through a recruiting practice, it's very different from United States. But in China, what we found through our process, because we would hire people in the United States is that when they would be reviewed in China, there'd be a lot of questions about certain aspects of them, their family, who they are. There'd even be call-outs of like, "don't hire this person because they're from this nation." We are in that nation. And we know people from our own nation are shady. Via email, I'm like, "listen, you cannot send that to my inbox. That is not cool. And you need to change this. This is not okay. We don't operate like this." Chad Sowash: Yes. We know this Chinese family and we think that they are not appropriate to be a part of this family. Joel Cheeseman: They're a bad seed. Rameen Fattahi: Yes. So remember, I'm still developing my career. I'm out of my shoes. I didn't even feel comfortable being where I was at, but I was there I was leading, but I wasn't comfortable yet. So long story short, Jen walks away and here's one good thing for the CV because of the brands that I had worked at when I opened myself up to the entire Bay Area. And I fell in love with what Facebook was doing. They had a 25 person software team and they said, "we need to have a 250 person software recruiting team." I said, "are you serious?" I was like, "how many people are here?" And they're like 14,000. I said, "where do you wanna be? Let's call it two years." And they said 37,000. I come from that background. It felt natural to me. As much as maybe I question the product of Facebook, the ads, the data analytics behind it and how that operates and sends you really good stuff to generate more income, pull more cash out of you. Rameen Fattahi: But as much as I was there, there's a spirit and a life to the benefits. There's a spirit and a life to how Mark Zuckerberg cares about the people that work for him. Point blank, doctors on site, dentists on site, acupuncture on site. I had the best three and a half years. It was so fun. We got to start what felt like a, let's start from scratch. Let's develop this thing in an environment that was pure pipeline driven. So what software engineering recruiting does at Facebook and they just basically go after everyone at the same time. Once you are brought into the interview process, after you are hired your first six to eight weeks, you go through a special engineering onboarding where you select your team. So you go and you get to do a rotation with all available open teams at the whole company. And you end up deciding on who's gonna be your manager and who's gonna be your teammates over six to eight weeks. And I walked through the door and was like, "God, I love this. This is working for the 90%." Rameen Fattahi: But what about those nitty gritties? What about the compiler engineer? What about the programming language design? What about something that's super niche that when you tell 250 people, go get software engineers and get me the best ones in the world, they're gonna go out to Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, all that fun jazz. And so I pitched that we should consider rec-based hiring. And my boss pitched that. And we actually pulled that through. So we started this thing called specialty software recruiting. It was awesome. We worked with just niche roles. Compilers was one of them. And what we did was fill super senior roles or super specialized roles within the software environment. And this is where I was able to flex my client relationships, just that whole piece of it, because I was missing it for the first six, eight months at Facebook. Just, "okay, close candidates, train them for on-site interviews." I can do that every day. But what I really appreciated was the relationship piece and helping drive an organization that says, "I would like to be better," helping them to be better through people. So exciting experiences. This is where the story takes a turn. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: This feels like an after-school special. Chad Sowash: It's a left turn. Joel Cheeseman: From the '80s, man. All right. So you're super happy at Facebook and then... Rameen Fattahi: Ooh. You ready? Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: All right. Here we go. So... Joel Cheeseman: Back from commercial and the cliffhanger. Rameen Fattahi: Got a call on a Saturday and it was, "hey, I'm no longer on the Facebook team. And I really think you should come join Rivian. That project we worked on, I think you'd be great to come join Rivian." I was like, "what is Rivian?" This is June of 2019. It's embarrassing for me to say it now, but I had no idea. There wasn't all these funding rounds. Amazon had just invested. This wasn't a company that I knew about. And I was in the tech space. I told a buddy, I said, "hey, fuck off. I'm super happy... " Chad Sowash: How about no? Rameen Fattahi: I'm all taken care of. Chad Sowash: How about no? Rameen Fattahi: Feel like I have... Chad Sowash: "I don't know if you know or not, but I get massages and shit," right? Rameen Fattahi: I was like, "I got growth and development here. Bud, it took me three years to get the team and everyone around me in order. You want me to leave that to join this company? I don't know. I started everything from scratch. No." My wife came around the corner and she's super happy. She's like, "did you get a call?" I was just like, "yeah." So she was like, "you got a call?" I was like, "yeah." And she's like, "who was that?" I was like, "it's a company called Rivian. It was a buddy of mine from Facebook and kind of like a job opportunity. Of course, I have an interview." She's like, "well, what is it?" "Get into recruiting at the ground floor and build it from nothing." She's like, "it sounds like you." And I was like, "huh." So she busted out their Instagram and we both looked it through and we were like, "oh my goodness, that's sexy." Not just the products, but the direction of the company. I'm thinking about the world. I'm thinking about how we can make this a better place for others. Those were sentiments I was super excited about. Rameen Fattahi: And so, yeah, I can't lie. I called him back. I went, I interviewed, and it was the craziest experience joining Rivian to where we are, to where we were. Gentlemen, I joined a 700 person company on a 10 person team and talent acquisition. There was not one written process, nothing, not on a piece of paper, not an intranet. [laughter] I don't know how the career site was held together. Joel Cheeseman: How much had they raised by this point? Rameen Fattahi: Gosh, we were still, I believe under a billion. Chad Sowash: Under a billion. Joel Cheeseman: Wow, okay. Chad Sowash: I think we were under a billion. Joel Cheeseman: A mom and pop at the time. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Rameen Fattahi: If you think about how much capital it takes to really redefine... Chad Sowash: Oh, fuck yeah. Rameen Fattahi: Automotive, if you look back at our finance, you'll see there was billions, billions, especially we had one of the hottest IPOs. It was really exciting. Joel Cheeseman: You're at Rivian. You've left the perfect job at Facebook and the employee loving Mark Zuckerberg... Chad Sowash: They had no processes, no processes. Rameen Fattahi: When you join a company that's developing and it's scaling, I'll call it... Joel Cheeseman: How was your exit interview at Facebook? Rameen Fattahi: Your standard, most standard, absolutely what you would expect of a standard HR interview. Chad Sowash: You're very Zuckerberg. They had a hoodie on. You've been Zucked. Joel Cheeseman: You've been Zucked. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: No, not like that. But just like, it's such an operationally driven environment that the HR member that jumped on, they had a script and they just walked through the script and we walked through in and out. Unfortunately for them, I had good experiences. So it wasn't always, I didn't have a bunch of things that I wanted them to fix and evolve. Joel Cheeseman: Positive experience, new opportunity. Chad Sowash: So fast forward, no processes at Rivian. You've had around a billion dollars funding. And what did the tech stack look like? I mean... [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: And how many hires did you have to make on the team? Rameen Fattahi: When you say the team, are you talking about funded recruitment... Joel Cheeseman: So you joined how many people and they had to grow to how many people? Rameen Fattahi: We joined at 700 people. Today we're floating around 15,000, 16,000 after reductions. Chad Sowash: Holy shit. I didn't realize you guys were that big. Rameen Fattahi: Yeah, we're pretty big. And that's only three and a half, a little more than three and a half years ago. Chad Sowash: Fuck. Rameen Fattahi: It's crazy. So about the tech stack, I think that where Rivian was at, at the time that I joined, did not allow the team to really utilize that original ATS and the original HRAS to what scale would look like. Because at that point, people were just indexing on speed. I'll be honest with you. The company was indexing on speed. How do we grow as fast as possible? Chad Sowash: That's a startup mentality. Rameen Fattahi: And it was exciting. So rewinding just a little bit, when I joined this company, you got to understand it was a little chaotic. I actually was scared a week before I joined. I was told, the head of HR is no longer here. And then I was told that the head of recruiting is no longer here. So I joined and I was in the lobby and the CEO walked up and he's like, "hey, Rameen." I was like, "oh my God, he knows my name." We did an interview together. I was a senior manager. Can you imagine the CEO of a 16,000 person company meeting a senior manager on their first two days? Joel Cheeseman: And he knew your name. Rameen Fattahi: He was waiting for me. Joel Cheeseman: Which speaks volumes to any employee. Rameen Fattahi: It was tremendous. I feel good about that because he's such a smart guy. Long story short, the team started from what seemed like nothing. In the first meeting with the team, I said, "does anyone have a written process? Anyone got any analytics here?" And this guy in the back goes, "oh, fuck. He's that guy." Chad Sowash: Yes, I am. Jesus Christ. [laughter] Rameen Fattahi: And that's what I said. With love, I said, "guys, I am that guy." And we have the opportunity to aim for world class. There's no such ending. You don't ever get there. You just continue to evolve. But we have the opportunity to build this whole thing from scratch. And guys, we're not gonna take that. That's an exciting thing. So... Joel Cheeseman: By the way, through this, there's a little thing called the pandemic going on. So talk about hiring during that. Rameen Fattahi: I remember vividly going to our CPO at the time and saying, "hey, the pandemic is coming. COVID is gonna hit." And she was like, "no way. I'm not sure if we need to rotate towards this." Sure enough, two days later, she calls me and goes, "so we're rotating towards this. This is a big deal. And we need to think about this." The reality is, is that we quickly moved into a remote interviewing environment. We were lucky. At that time, we weren't building vehicles yet. So we got to transcend into the pandemic while we were hyperscaling. I don't know how many people we were, but we were not large. So we developed in the pandemic. You expand with personnel. But that may not be during a pandemic, you're expanding with land and new office space. So it's been a tricky discussion about this whole return to work thing, which a lot of us are hearing today. But it's something that we're using a crawl, walk, run approach with. And we're really being thoughtful. Joel Cheeseman: I hate to bring... Rameen Fattahi: Please. Joel Cheeseman: Elon in the picture. So it's a competitor, Rivian, obviously. And Elon is really vocal about everyone back to the office. We have engineers and we're building cars. Even if you're in accounting, marketing, whatever, everyone's back to the office because our builders are there. What is Rivian's take on the work from home policies and everybody being back? Rameen Fattahi: There are certain roles where you're gonna have to be on site. Maybe you're on a hardware team. Maybe you're on the product development side, the design side, maybe you're in manufacturing. For all of those roles, we have what we call work arrangements. So we're thinking about the world is, are you on site? Are you flexible to come on site? Are you fully remote? As time is progressing, I'm seeing less full remote roles, more flexible roles where you come in one to three days a week, recommendation, but really you drive it through your leader as to what's appropriate for you and your organization. For instance, let's use talent acquisition. For the most part, recruiters need to have their client meetings. When there's an event, we need to go on site. When you wanna do an intake, go meet your client. You can even interview a candidate on site if you want to, but I wouldn't recommend it for the environment. I'd recommend you bring them in at the offer stage. Rameen Fattahi: So when you think about this, certain interviews will have to be on site, but they're not the majority. For us, we are not ready and we are not mandating for our entire workforce to come back in site. In fact, it's a heavily debated topic that I'm sure will progress and change over time, but where we're at right now, if I think about myself and my team, I can build your system from my house, my home office. I can build programs, workflows, tackle analytics. So really for me, it's about, are we presenting to somebody that needs me to be in that room? Do I need to go in on site to have a discussion about something that requires us to be on site for it to be faster? Otherwise, for the most part, my role can be done remote. I told my whole team, while we are all named Flex, you have the opportunity to come back in the office. Should you want to? You don't have to. Joel Cheeseman: Does recruiting against Tesla and maybe even poaching some of their employees, does the argument that, "hey, if you're a Tesla, you're in the office much more regularly than if you would come to Rivian, which were much more flexible." Is that a strategy that you are using? And if so, how effective has it been? Rameen Fattahi: You know what? I wouldn't say that we're directly thinking about that as a strategy. We're also not directly thinking about poaching from any specific environment. I wanna say this on the record, actually, because maybe people haven't heard this before, but at Rivian, myself included, and Rivian as a whole, we really appreciate Tesla. They trailblazed and created a market. There is enough room for all of us to compete. And even if that doesn't happen, from my CEO down, we are here to create the EV space. And doing that, you have to put a competition in there. And so whether we win or lose, the world wins. So we think of it as a big win. When I think about Tesla and people naturally assume, "oh man, you probably shit on Tesla all the time." I have a Tesla in my VOD, I was telling you. And I love it. In fact, I love my Rivian too. Rameen Fattahi: And I would say to somebody else, "when you're going to buy a car, and I tell my friends this all the time," this debate happens every single day about EVs and ICE, combustion engines, right? "Should I switch over?" "Oh, I'm scared about range anxiety." "Well, let me ask you this question. Are you gonna drive more than 300 miles a day? If you are not, you're not gonna see a gas station every week like you're seeing with your ICE car. So if you actually couple that over the entire year, the amount of time you spent with your engine, putting gas into it, at a pump, you probably spent more time at that pump than I did plugging my car in when I came home from work, walking into my house, and it automatically starting to charge at midnight." Rameen Fattahi: That's it. I wake up in the morning, oh wait, I'm trying to go to work. I literally have a little thing. It says, do you want that this time to have the climate at what? I'm like, yes, I do. Joel Cheeseman: How beneficial is it being an ESG friendly company? Do you find a lot of, I'm sure you're recruiting a lot from Chevy and traditional car companies, but we hear all the time that millennials, Gen Z, they wanna be part of a company that's doing better for the world. Is that a conversation that you have in your interviews? Rameen Fattahi: Without a doubt. It's almost like an infectious, exciting, addicting thing. You got the personality that wants to be where we're at in Rivian. You got to wanna scale. And going on that journey to scale, you got to wanna build. And that comes with a lot of, as easy as it was for me to earlier in the day to talk about where we've transcended from and where we are now in the speech here in the iCIMS, I didn't get a chance to talk about how hard was that journey in reality. You just get the tidbits. This is what we learned. But to get to a learning, sometimes it takes weeks. Sometimes it takes failing. Sometimes I've literally is, I have no feeling of being macho masculine in this life. At Rivian, before I had my vice president, who is my mentor, and it's just tremendous. I was working for our CPO. Joel Cheeseman: R2-D2 what? Rameen Fattahi: I was working for our chief people officer. Chad Sowash: Not... C-3PO. Joel Cheeseman: Oh, sorry. Rameen Fattahi: I was the interim head of talent before I became the director of recruiting ops and insights. And I actually told our chief people officer, I said, "you know what? I really want a strong mentor to be. I wanna work for someone that I wanna become." And unfortunately in this role, you shouldn't have me reporting to you because I'm too far away from what you need and the proficiency, but I wanna work for someone that can help me get there." She doubled down and was like, "Rameen, yeah, I'm in." She came back with my VP. It was tremendous. I have no problem saying that I have made my career following this woman. She's now a friend of mine and a mentor, but I made my career following the head of Apple, the head of Tesla, the head of Rivian. And if there's anything I can do to be more like her, I do. I tell her all the time, I was like, "wait." Joel Cheeseman: It's very cool. Very cool. So the flip side of the positive, I wanna go to the negative real quick. So Rivian stock year to date is down 20%. You're not alone. It's a problem that a lot of tech companies are facing. How does that play into challenges for recruiting? Is this a conversation? Obviously there's stock options. Talk about the, but the dip in stock price and how that impacts recruiting. Rameen Fattahi: So I think you remember we IPOed to something like 70 bucks. We went up to 170 within a matter of quickness. And then since then over the last months and year and some change, it fell, I think the landscape behind it fell. The economy changed. We changed from a economy where you can have a unicorn company that the aspirations would just pour them. People would pour money on the aspirations and where it could be. Chad Sowash: Money on the fire. Rameen Fattahi: And then we flipped into an economy, it's just finance driven. So we had one of the best IPOs of all time followed by one of the greatest falls. To answer your question about the difficulty of hiring. The reality is, is that everyone sees that. So when you're a tenured senior software engineer, principal, you look at the stock price and let's say you're at a major competitor or a high tech company, look at that and go, "man, I'm kind of worried about that." Yeah. Straight up tell the recruiter, "I'm worried about that." You're also battling in a recruiting market right now, no matter who you are, Rivian or anyone, you're battling the fact that people are reluctant to jump because job security right now means a lot. When you're seeing news every single day or your friend or your family member is telling you, "I was just affected. I was terminated. I was laid off." It creates a sense of fear. It creates a sense of people that have long tenures in companies to say, "you know what? It's safe for me here. I know people here. People know me. Maybe I have longevity." So we are experiencing that. Rameen Fattahi: The counter and the flip to this, that I tell the recruiters to think about as much as I can is, is that, it's also an opportunity, for that crazy person that still wants to build because we are not fully scaled. We still got to work some work to do. This is an opportunity from a development, a learning ability to hands-on, have a breath. That's there, multiple hats, that's for sure there. Develop your career, that's absolutely there. Okay. If you're so focused on finances, well, maybe this is the bottom. Maybe it's not the bottom. But let's just assume that maybe it could be the bottom or maybe close to the bottom. In that case, if I believe, and which I do, in our long term viability for this company, maybe they have a chance to flip that story to become an opportunity for them, not just from development, but some people cared a lot about finances and that's there too. Joel Cheeseman: So I'm gonna let you out on this. You presented before us. Thanks for warming the crowd up. Rameen Fattahi: Warming the crowd up. [laughter] Speaker 1: We appreciate that. You were really bullish on QR codes, which I think was the only mention of QR codes at the iCIMS Inspire conference. So I'm gonna give you a platform to opine on the values of the QR code. Rameen Fattahi: I appreciate it. So I was embarrassed and I said it when I called it out because everybody knows what a QR code is, but not everyone really utilizes it. And what I mean by that is let's say you're in a volume oriented environment, like a retail store call it Macy's. What if on every single time you went to go purchase, there was also a little ticker that said, "you wanna apply?"? A QR code? What if it's just said, "one information about what it's like to work here." Another QR code. Well, what if it said, "we have a hiring event or a happy hour, a brand awareness event"? What if it got you to a signup form? Which are so easy. It's nothing. I mean, the only thing that we're paying for these days is if you wanna custom build that QR code to also include your logo. Otherwise you can get a free QR code, almost like the Bitly. You can understand where are people scanning this from and you can push them to YouTube or Vimeo or a landing page or wherever you wanna put it. I mean, it's easy. Joel Cheeseman: And thanks to the pandemic, people know what it is now. Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. And I think that over the next five years, less, I think that more people will be using QR codes here in the States. And what I experienced when I traveled overseas was just QR code everywhere. You can like, you pass a bus stop, there's a QR code. You went to a restaurant, it's a QR code. You want the menu, it's a QR code. You wanna pay, it's a QR code. They are really thinking about using QR codes overseas. And I think that for us, we have more opportunity. Chad Sowash: Yeah. We've been leaped from the QR code from Europe. Europe uses the QR codes for everything. And it's amazing. Over here, we're still trying to get tapped to pay to work. Joel Cheeseman: So if I go to a Rivian dealer, which I may do after this interview because I'm inspired to check out Rivian. Will I see QR codes in the showroom asking me about interested in jobs? Rameen Fattahi: Rivian doesn't have a dealership. We have one or two showrooms at this time where you can just come experience our products, our vehicles. You can experience the environment. You can get a full tour of the vehicle. But unfortunately, we don't have... Rameen Fattahi: That's what I call overhead and not overhead. Joel Cheeseman: Well, it's the Tesla model, but more or less for recruiting, you are leveraging QR codes, which is what I was sort of getting at there. Rameen Fattahi: Absolutely. For us in Rivian, I'm pushing for us to utilize it more. Right now, it's heavily used for events. Heavily used for events. I would like to see it in more spaces like service centers, delivery centers, places where we have high volume manufacturing. People walk up to the manufacturing facility to drop down for a resume. Joel Cheeseman: Well, what a wild, strange trip this interview has been. Rameen, thank you for joining us. Thank you for your transparency. And wow, I need a nap after that one. Chad, another one is in the can, live from San Diego, iCIMS Inspire. Rameen, for our listeners that wanna know more about you, or maybe wanna think about purchasing a Rivian, where would you send them? Chad Sowash: Ooh, I'd like that. Rameen Fattahi: You know what? I don't wanna be a brand ambassador here. I don't wanna get myself into any trouble. But what I would say is, feel free to reach out to me about LinkedIn on any matter. You'd be surprised. I do tend to respond. I really care. And I'm thinking about the community, not just what's going on within Rivian. So don't hesitate. Joel Cheeseman: That is Rameen Fattahi, everybody. And with that, Chad, another one is in the can. We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Think you’re having a bad day? It’s probably not as bad as ZipRecruiter’s shareholders had this week. To say times are tough would be an understatement. But it’s not just Zip, as much of the space is having a pretty tough time on Wall Street and just about everywhere else. Dice. Recruit. All bad. Not dire enough? Want some more dogs-and-cats living together scenarios? Zoom employees are going back to the office (yeah, that Zoom), WeWork is more like WeOuttabiz, everyday Americans are beating up UberEats' rolling automated coolers, Elon is still loco, America doesn’t have enough semiconductor talent to support the Chips Act and fake women are becoming more popular than real women. Grab a bottle of your favorite whiskey for this one. Things are gettin' gettin', getting' kinda hectic. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. 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. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. It's presidential joke day. Chad, what's Michelle Obama's favorite vegetable? Chad: I'm not going there. Joel: Broccoli. Get it? Broccoli. Okay, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Oppenheimer Cheeseman. Chad: And this is Chad Traveling Man Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Gem slashes, Zip crashes and WeWork more like we bankrupt. Am I right? [laughter] Joel: Let's do this. Chad: So bad. Joel: Nailed the intro. Yes. [laughter] Chad: Broccoli. Joel: Broccoli. Chad: That's much better than the other pads that I thought you were gonna go down. Vegetable presidents? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Ooh. [laughter] Joel: I didn't wanna go too far back, 'cause I know our audience, audience doesn't have that much historical perspective. Chad: Yes. Joel: But yeah. I thought I nailed it. I thought it was good. Chad: That was good. Joel: Good entry to the show. Good entry. Chad: I like it. I like it. I like it. Yes. Joel: So traveling man, you were in Portland? Chad: I was in Vancouver, which is just north on the other side of the river, Portland. So Washington, never been to Vancouver before, it's a pretty cool little town. I liked it. Right? Riverside area. Really cool. Joel: Not Canada. Chad: Not Canada. Joel: There's another... There's a poser Vancouver in America, apparently. [laughter] Chad: I didn't get to see Tyler Weeks though. I had, there was a Tyler Weeks sighting and dinnering. That was a good time. Joel: Dinnering? Chad: Yes. Joel: There was a dinnering with Ty. Nice. Chad: That's right. Oh yeah. Joel: Nice. Was he wearing his Chad and Cheese t-shirt? He's got the classic. He's got the OG t-shirts, which is cool. Chad: Well, he doesn't say he does, but the one that he had... That he wore on stage was the new one with the iCIMS event. Yeah. He's got a compliment, probably a full compliment of Chad and Cheese t-shirts. Joel: Yeah, that was pretty cool. Keynote stage with iCIMS. He's wearing a Chad and Cheese t-shirt. We haven't talked about the Barbenheimer phenom that is going on. Have you seen either of these movies? Do you have any... Chad: No. Joel: So I've seen Oppenheimer. Chad: Okay. Joel: I liked it before I even went to it. It's World War II. It's science, it's politics, it's all these things. So I won't ruin it for you but, I think... I haven't seen Barbie yet, but Oppenheimer I will definitely endorse and I think there's a little bit of a work... Chad: Sure. You haven't. Joel: Work spin on Oppenheimer. Part of it is Oppenheimer builds this bomb. Hopefully I'm not ruining it for everybody goes in the desert and they build this thing. So he recruits these scientists and he is gotta retain these scientists. And so I think there's a little spin on, your workplace should have a mission statement that's bigger than yourself. Right? And in this case, it was building a bomb to end the war. There's a scene in the movie where one of the science says, why should I get involved with this? And Matt Damon's character, who's a general says, "How about because it's the most important fucking thing in the history of the world?" [laughter] Joel: So you gotta have a mission as an employer. Number two, you gotta be worker-focused, Chad. And Oppenheimer built a city within the desert with a church, brought all the families out. They had holiday, drinks. And so he made sure the workers were as happy as possible, which is no small feat when you're in the desert. And the third thing, hopefully not spoiling it is diversity. There's a diversity play in the movie Oppenheimer. Chad: Really? Joel: Oppenheimer's talking to Matt Damon's character and basically says, the Germans are 18 months ahead of us in building a bomb. And Matt Damon says, basically, well, what chance do we have to catch up? And his reply is antisemitism, which was an interesting answer. And then Matt Damon says, what do you mean? He says, well, Hitler thinks that the bomb and atoms, splitting atoms is Jewish science and he doesn't really focus on it or spend much time on it. Being, embracing diversity, had Hitler embraced diversity we might all be speaking German, but because he was a racist son of a bitch, we are where we are today. So those three things I thought were nice work related. I wanted to highlight those for the show, Chad. Chad: Thats very nice. I'm gonna roll right into shout-outs because I'm gonna talk in about movies myself. Shout out to AI movies. This is from the MIT Review, The Frost, which is a 12-minute movie in which every shot is generated by image-making AI, is one of the most impressive and bizarre examples of this strange new genre. Waymark made The Frost to explore how generative AI could be built into its products. Why? Because the company makes video creation tools for businesses looking for a fast and cheap way to make commercials. Go figure. My critique, it's unnatural, it was very creepy. It felt like a moving comic book. So it wasn't like fully animated, really. It was incredibly interesting. But then I watched the behind the scenes video. Yes, 12 minutes and then another additional five minutes for research is what it was. So that video really gave me some great insight on the world of prompt engineering. Joel: So let me get this right. Basically videos that can be created on the fly that are meant to look as real as possible in the future. Do I have that right? Chad: Yes, yes. Movie making through AI generation. Joel: Totally where we're going. And that's why we have this whole actor strike and writer strike. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That's where the world's going. Like, people will be able to make movies without actors in the near future. Now the big stars we said will still be okay. But yeah, it's a weird future and it's kind of a hit to creativity, I guess. But it is the future and it's a nice book into the show. So keep listening kids. It might actually make sense even more so in the end. Well, I have a shout out too. S4: Shout out. Joel: All right, let's go to the Forbes Cloud 100, Chad. Forbes 8th Annual Cloud 100 list is the world's best private cloud computing companies. That's per Forbes, by the way, not me. Chad: Yes. Joel: And some companies in our space we're actually featured. These companies include it number 88 of the 100, Personio out of Germany. We talk about them quite a bit on the European show. Number 55, another European darling, HiBob comes in at number 55 and 54 right behind them is Rippling, who we talked about last week, and the new ATS. Go check that out if you haven't. Number 38 is Deel. That's D-E-E-L. Number 26, Gusto, and number 22, the highest rated company in our space and the Forbes Cloud 100 list is Checkr. That's right. Number 22, Checkr came in the highest. Shout out to all those Cloud 100 companies in our space. Chad: Very nice. Very nice. My next shout out is to Mattel and no not for the Barbie movie, but Mattel. Mattel says It is conducting a nationwide job search for a Chief UNO player. The toy company is hiring someone to promote the release of their new game, UNO Quatro. The Chief Uno player, will make $4,444 a week. Get it? Quatro, for 4 weeks to play UNO Quatro with strangers in New York City and create social media content featuring the new game. Probably the best $17,776 Mattel will ever spend on marketing. So shout out to Mattel and UNO Quatro. SFX: Shout out. Joel: All right, shout out to UNO Quatro. Little known fact. My 6-year-old loves playing UNO. Just little, just throw that out there. All right, my shout out goes to CareerBuilder. What show wouldn't be complete without CareerBuilder? So I got hit up on LinkedIn and somewhere in between the 382 automated messages about congrats on my new job, this person who will remain anonymous, commented the following, "Thought you might get a kick out of this crap. We have been a client since 2004, just keep that in mind. Think they have outsourced their sales reps since all of their other reps have apparently been laid off, and it seems like a recorded, canned message. Yes, it has come to this. CareerBuilder has no one left to turn off the lights." And here is that outbound sales call. Enjoy. Sonny: Hi, good morning. My name is Sonny. I am calling from CareerBuilder job site. I was calling to connect with you, see if you would be interested in using CareerBuilder for your staffing needs. If you do, please call me on my direct line, which is 773-389-7523. Repeat that, Sonny with CareerBuilder at 773-389-7523. Thank you. [laughter] Chad: Scripted much. Joel: The warmth I got from that script... Chad: Jesus. Joel: That he, that Sonny read. Chad: Sonny. Joel: That was lovely. CareerBuilder, it's been fun, man. Keep on giving that content gift every week. Chad: Ooh, Jeff Furman all by himself. Who knows what the hell he is doing in that big leather chair right now? Joel: Well, if you've been laid off by CareerBuilder and a lot of you out there have you might appreciate some free shit. Chad: Why not? Joel: Free shit from Chad and Cheese. Head out to chadcheese.com. Click the free link. We're talking free t-shirts from our friends at JobGet free beer from Aspen Tech Labs and jeez, free bourbon. How can it get better than that from the folks at Textkernel. And by the way, everybody wants to get out, the pandemic's over. Our friends at Abode are giving away a $250 gift card to Airbnb. Go wherever the hell you want in style. Thanks to our friends at Abode. Chad: Wouldn't happen to have birthdays, would you? Joel: Oh, it's funny. You should ask. SFX: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. Joel: By the way... SFX: I can feel all the way down my clothes. Joel: This week is an extra Cheese edition of the birthdays. That's right. All right. Chad: Oh Jesus. Joel: Another year around the sun for a lot of our listeners, starting with Kevin Kirk Patrick and we have Bill Peterson. Peter Semando, Andrew Hyland, Patrick Morgan, Jason Putnam. Oh, Jason Side and Johnny Campbell, Carmen Hudson, Peter Clayton. What happened to that guy? Is he still around doing? He was the original like podcaster guy, yeah. And last on our list, but number 1 in our hearts, Abby Cheeseman celebrates her birthday. No relation. No relation to me, although she is married to a burly bearded man much like yours truly. So maybe there is some sort of a loose connection there. Happy birthday. SFX: Happy birthday. Chad: Happy birthday. Now it's time for events, powered by Shaker Recruitment Marketing kids. That's right. You see it. We are going to RecFest on September 13th in Nashville, where we are taking the disrupt stage all day to talk about recruiting and technology. And we're doing it with special guests, Lynn and Tracey from the Talent Rebelcast podcast and Canadians. SFX: No, God, please, no. Chad: Serge and Shelly from the Recruitment Flex podcast. It's the first time RecFest in the us. It's in Nashville. Then we're going to be virtual. We haven't done one of these in a while, Cheeseman. Joel: No. Chad: Gem's 2023 Virtual Talent Summit is happening September or on September 20th, where you and I will be joined by EEOC, Commissioner Sonderling, NYU Professor, PhD, Mona Sloane, and Brie Bastidas, head of technical Talent at Scale AI. We're gonna be talking about AI's ability to unlock recruiting efficiencies, the trials, tribulations, and reasons why or why not the recruitment community should embrace AI. Then, oh my god, HR Tech and Mandalay Bay in October, that's in Vegas. When the Expo hall opens, kids, we are going to be spending two days in the Fuel50 booth. And we like to really extend our appreciation to Fuel50 for allowing us to crash there while we drink, eat, probably make a mess, do some interviews. And enjoy the HR Tech show. So if you are going to be at HR Tech, come see Chad and Cheese at the Fuel50 booth. Then a few days later, Jesus, gonna be on a flight to Paris. Joel: Yep. Chad: Which I love. One of the staples in our industry, UNLEASH World in Paris, I have no clue what we're doing there yet. But we're gonna be there. I'm sure there'll be interviews, there'll be VIP parties, all that other fun stuff. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: For all of these events, one place you need to go chadcheese.com/events or just go to the website, click on events in the upper-right hand corner and register, register, register. SFX: All right. All right. All right. Joel: Chad, word has it, this is a rumor cardboard Chad may make it at least one appearance. [laughter] Joel: At least one appearance in one of those shows. Well, we'll just have to have to wait and see. [music] Chad: Topics. Joel: Oh boy. We haven't done one of these in a while. SFX: Layoffs. Joel: That's right. Layoffs. Oh boy. Layoffs are back on the podcast. Here we go. Guppy or Guppya South American Company laid off 8% of its workforce that totals 58 people better up 16% or 100 people. And Gem, who you mentioned in our shoutouts, the CEO stated that 70 employees out of the 356 listed on LinkedIn were laid off. But Lisa Schiller, a senior solutions consultant at Gem, said the layoffs affected 40%. So the math is a little bit fuzzy on this one. We don't have a confirmation on what percentage 70 is, but that's bad news for a unicorn that has raised upwards of 100 million dollars. Chad, any takeaways from the layoffs from this week? SFX: Layoffs. Chad: Reconfiguration, kids. That's what's gonna continue to happen. Then again, we're gonna see more M&A more fire sales. Not saying that these guys are up for sale or anything like that, but there's just a lot of turbulence in the market right now, and that happens when you're flushed with fucking cash for years. So this is something that was gonna happen. We saw it was gonna happen. Definitely, we're definitely feeling the ramifications of the repercussions for all that money. Joel: Yeah. If you can have a hangover from a pandemic, I'm not sure that you can, but this is sort of maybe the canary in the coal mine. We got a lot of unicorns from 2020 to 2022. These guys are one. If the deals, the remotes, the oysters, if they start talking about 40% chops in headcount, this is definitely a phase that is going to be ugly. And HR Tech may be a little smaller in booth size than last year. You might remember eight folds, 760 by 800 booth that they had last year. But yeah it's, times are tough. Money's not free anymore. These valuations are going to hell. Employees are getting cut. And just for me personally, I've probably know about five or six people in the last week in our industry that have either left or been cut, been fired. Chad: Most of them pretty senior. Joel: Yeah. It's hitting people that I know personally. So it's tough out there. [video playback] Joel: As things are at ZipRecruiter, Chad. Oh shit. Let's get into our first story. ZipRecruiter experienced significant drops in Q2 to '23 revenue and paying advertisers attributing the decline in their stock price to reduced hiring despite a strong US job market. The company withdrew its previous full year earnings guidance due to uncertain hiring trends leading to a 10% share price drop. The company expects a 34% decline in revenue and projects adjusted EBITDA of around 40 million for the upcoming quarter. Chad, your take on the news outta ZipRecruiter. Chad: So, I have three major problems with what ZipRecruiter's been doing. So first and foremost, market penetration and expansion. Zip's, inability to fully break into the enterprise market and then expand wallet share is a huge problem. Zip has been wallowing in the SMB market for far too long. Problem number two, they're being too fucking quiet on their press page. They're only two press releases for 2023. We're in August, two press releases. They're too quiet. Problem number three, it's the same old shit. When was the last time ZipRecruiter did anything to nudge the market with product? Can you remember when Zip upgraded, changed or even introduced a new product for hiring companies? Joel: I mean, their chat bot fill was so big. I feel like they could just coast for about a year on that one. Chad: Again, that was a product for job seekers, not for, employers that employers had to buy. So here's a quick summary. Live by the job posting, die by the job posting. If all of Zips eggs are in the job posting basket, how are they supposed to gain wallet share? Indeed is launching some really stupid shit, but hell, at least they're trying. So to me, it doesn't feel like Zip is even trying anymore. It's like they're laying down and they're ready to die. [music] Joel: Oh, man. That's what happens when you have headquarters in Santa Monica. The lure of the beach and the cool breeze just takes your eye off the ball. Yeah. Look, a couple things to say on this. Every stock, every public company, pretty much in our space right now is sideways or in the shitter. Zip is, Zip is there, Dice is there. But you can go down to like Robert Half, you can go to Recruit Holdings. Veritone who we talk about a lot getting in the space, their stock took a huge hit this past week. It wasn't necessarily the HR stuff, but people are hurting from a stock, stock value percentage or stock value perspective in our industry. And if the stock market is a leading indicator of what the economy's gonna do. So last October, about a year ago, the stock market took a shit that was a leading indicator on what the economy was gonna do. Joel: Well, the economy's job labor reports have been really strong, which has kind of helped keep things up. The Fed, as we know, continues to raise rates. They want to get unemployment up. They want to get, they wanna cool the economy, get inflation down. So from what I can tell, like people are still employed, but these reports and what's coming out of the public companies in our space tell me that there's another canary in the coal mine is that companies aren't posting jobs. Joel: So they may not be firing, they may not be laying off a lot of people, but they certainly don't look like they're hiring or replacing people that have left and what's going on. Now, it might be a good thing in terms of the Fed will get their unemployment rate. Inflation will come down, interest rates will come down, and that will obviously spark another phase of, of investment and money coming into the space. But I think this is a pretty glowing sign that things are gonna get a bit, get pretty rocky towards the end of the year in terms of employment. We're gonna see that employment rate go up. That is a prediction, Chad. And you know what they say about my predictions. SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: Focusing on Zip for a second, ZipRecruiter had a lock on the seasonal hourly segment. And when they went public, they decided that they were gonna be everything to everybody. They were gonna be AI, they were gonna be enterprise, they were gonna be global. None of those things have come to pass. They launched this crazy chatbot fill. So there was a time where if you wanted a job at a restaurant, you wanted a job at a convenience store, a dry cleaner, you went to ZipRecruiter. 'Cause that was, you saw the commercials, it was small business. It was like that segment of the population. They had a lock on that brand and they chucked it, threw it down the toilet, and said, we're gonna be everything to everybody. We're AI, we're everything. Well, job seekers are now confused because, wait a minute, ZipRecruiter used to be this place where I could get a waiter job, and then employers are confused because the bar owner down the street is like, wait a minute, this isn't what I signed up for. Joel: So total confusion in the marketplace, they're nothing to nobody. Indeed is now taking their market share in terms of the SMBs, they launched their own ATS, so I think they're trying to get in that space. ZipRecruiter is in this no man's land where they had a lock on one brand. They threw that away. They can't be the enterprise thing. They should have just remained the hourly seasonal essential worker and grown that globally. They made a tremendous brand mistake, not on the level of Elon, Chuck and Twitter for X, but in the same vein, they took what they were in the market, tried to be something else, and I think they've totally failed. And I think the stock price exemplifies that. Chad: So I think you're right, in some areas too. They could have been SMB and enterprise at the same time, it's all about scale. Because there are enterprise companies that have essential workers. As a matter of fact, that should have been where they went. If we take a look at anybody who's doing high volume today, they're focusing not just on SMBs, they're mainly moving up to the enterprise side of the house. So they had an opportunity to stay who they were, right? In the high volume, in the essential worker side of the house, work for SMBs and work for enterprise. This to me is a huge issue with regard to execution, the AI piece that was all about how the tech worked, that to me, really doesn't have anything to do with anything other than just the rails that they're running on. Chad: The problem is they didn't get good enough penetration into the enterprise market where they can sell more goods and services. Right? That's really where they needed to be. They could have done sourcing screen, there could have been a ton of different things that they could have done, but it just seems like they, as you'd said, they're kind of all over the place. They could have laser focused and then built that brand even into enterprise, but they just didn't do it. So they're failing miserably, which is hard to see, to be quite frank. Joel: Yeah. So I'm gonna go deep here for a second. SFX: Just for two. Joel: So let's go way back in time, kid. So I used to work for a company we called Espan in the late '90s. Espan was known as the developer's job board. It was techies before techies, it was dice before dice. Our competition was OCC, where Chad worked Monster Board, career mosaic and some others. But they were more general in nature. We were like tech and we had a great brand with tech companies. We had a great brand with tech talent. And then Gordon Gund and NAS came in and said, we're gonna change the brand. We're gonna be everything to everybody. Espan is gone. We're job options, we're everything to everybody. And we didn't have a big enough gun to take on Monster board and some of the Super Bowl ads that were there at the time, and job seekers abandoned us. Joel: So they kinda left and went other places, companies that were tech that loved us and used us well the talent wasn't there anymore, they were confused about why we were doing it. They held us to a higher standard because now they're putting on their accounting jobs and everything, which we didn't do. So they weren't getting results there. It was a total mess. And long story short, couple years later, we sold for pennies on the dollar and I'm unemployed a year after that as a mass layoff at the company. So I speak from some experience that pivoting in that way, really fuck shit up. And I think ZipRecruiter in some manner has done a similar pivot that has been probably a disaster for them. Chad: Much like. Joel: Much like another disaster. That's right. Let's have some more tales of misery, shall we? S8: No, God. No, God, please. No. No. No. No. Joel: I know. All right, so first up, say it ain't so after mass layoffs in the first half of 2023, Zoom makes Jaws drop by requiring employees within 50 miles of an office to work in-person for at least two days a week, marking a shift from previous flexibility. Imagine that. Zoom flexible. Yeah. Everybody was on Zoom calls back during the pandemic. Chad, your take on Zoom's RTO announcement. Chad: Holy irony. Right? I think, I actually saw a article last week where they were talking about companies actually going back to the office to be able to downsize instead of layoff, right? So if you're forcing people back in and people want the autonomy well they're gonna leave. So instead of laying off and then having severance and all that other fun stuff, then you don't have to do that as much. So I think this might be one of the reasons why Zoom is doing it. They want to pare down, but they don't wanna lay off, because you've got the bad optics and whatnot. Not that this isn't bad optics, but how many examples have we had or heard of employees going back to the office just to be on Zoom calls. [laughter] Joel: Alone in an office on Zoom calls. Yeah. Chad: Yeah. But I wanna address an item that we've heard pop up in the press and on webinars and economic circles, that that item is productivity loss and associating it with remote work, worker autonomy is not the reason companies are losing productivity. Let me say that again. Worker autonomy is not the reason why companies are losing productivity, bad management, which leads to workers quitting. That churn leaves open positions. Those open positions represent lost productivity and lost revenue. The remaining team members cover the open positions, the daily workloads, they are spread too thin for months on end. And after those workers have had enough, they leave, which exacerbates the problem. So if we treat workers like kids they are gonna leave, and then the cycle starts. This is bad management; it's not treating your employees well, which makes them wanna leave, and productivity takes a shit. It has nothing to do with remote work. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: Zoom is making employees come back to the office. The last company that should require people to come back is Zoom! And they're making people come back to the office. To me, this is like a major nail in the coffin of remote work. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but long term, you're right, this is the boiling of the frog. This is the oh, 50 miles? Really? That's a distance. It had been like 30, and now it's almost doubled to 50 for most companies. So, yeah, it's a way to lay off people, very convenient that they don't want... It will eventually become four days a week, and maybe four is all it will come down to. But what's gonna happen is, people who do come back to the office they're gonna get promoted. They're gonna be having happy hours with other co-workers, and you're gonna feel guilty that you're not there. People will be there more often, and eventually, companies will get what they want, like they always do. They will get people back in the office. It's basically like the 80/20 rule, like everything else. There will be some start-ups, some companies that do have a 100% remote, but for the most part, our dreams of a remote workforce have been dashed by the man. [laughter] Chad: The way that we were raised, as exers by boomers, we were made to feel guilty if we weren't in early and we didn't leave after, right? These new generations are not that way. So, I think they're not going to feel guilty. And if they don't get promoted but yet they're living the lifestyle that they wanna live, they won't give a fuck. I think, there's a major change in the give-a-fuck, and there just isn't much of a give-a-fuck anymore, which I think is great because people need to live their fucking lives instead of sit in a goddamn cubicle all day or on the train, trying to fucking commute. Joel: Yeah, I think the jury's out on some of that. With young people, I have seen surveys like, some young people that live in a studio apartment want to get into an office. Now is it a cubicle, or is it an open space whatever? But some young people wanna get out. They wanna hang out with other young people after work. They wanna be mentored by older people like us. It's kinda crazy, but anyway, Zoom is out of the remote work business. It's very sad. Well, from one former pandemic darling to another, let's go to WeWork! WeWork's second-quarter earnings report costs, "Substantial doubt on its survival due to losses and departing clients. Despite plans to enhance liquidity and profitability, the co-working giant's stock plummeted almost 40% this week, underscoring its tumultuous journey from a high valuation to potential collapse." Chad, WeWork to we outta business. Your take? Chad: How is WeWork not fucking killing the game right now? I mean, all of this real estate that's open. WeWork should actually take the position as the middle ground by driving hybrid and more flexible options for work. They just need to get into some big brands involved from a national and also global scale. To me, this is a go-to-market issue, where they're not really seeing the forest for the trees. This, to me, just blows my fucking brain. If they were going to work, it should work right now. If it's not working right now, they just need to fucking eject. Joel: Yeah. It's kinda like a trucking company that goes out of business when trucking is more popular than ever. Who didn't talk about yellow trucking? Yes, you're right. I get that they signed leases on these properties, but commercial real estate owners were more than flexible to keep you in the office, keep you in the space, keep you occupied. This is either awful management, like you said, go-to-market, someone should had called Airbnb and said, hey, let's do like a work Airbnb collaboration... Chad: Something. Joel: Or Verbo. There had to be some sort of platform that they could get in there. Yeah, I don't know if this is the weight of just the business and the expectations, the investment money, but this is a total disaster. You're right, this is like, if anyone should be successful right now, it's the WeWorks of the world. But here we are talking about their demise. And somebody will pick this up on pennies on the dollar and hopefully bring in some good management, some cost efficiencies, and launch this thing back, rises from the inferno, like the phoenix. But only time will tell what happens there. Let's take a quick break and talk about chips, not the Southern California police force from the '70s. [chuckle] Chad: This would be a great place for that opening intro for Chips. Joel: Yeah, it would be, it would be... Chad: Erik Estrada. Joel: Remember the take-off Chips? They made a joke... [chuckle] Joel: The chimpanzee were on the motorcycle? Chad: Yes. The bikes. Joel: Anyway, all right. Let's talk about chips. A labor shortage is slowing US semiconductor companies efforts to fill critical positions, with Hiring taking twice as long as in other sectors. The industry's struggle to find skilled labor could hinder President Biden's push to boost the domestic chip industry and create jobs with projections of 115,000 new jobs by 2030. The sector faces challenges in finding candidates with science, technology, and engineering backgrounds. Wait, wait. Government didn't think this through. I'm shocked. Chad, what are your thoughts on a lack of talent in the chip sector in the US? Chad: Is it the government's responsibility to make sure that we have all those people ready for those jobs? It sounds like big government you're looking for. Here's an excerpt from the Fortune article that just stuck with me. So chip makers have long sounded the alarm, US doesn't have enough job candidates, right? So my brain automatically went to high school sports. Some of the biggest sports brands like Nike, Adidas, Under Armour and others, they equip high schools and athletes with uniforms, cleats, they buy scoreboards, sometimes outfit the entire court, field or stadium. You know what I'm talking about, right? Why aren't companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and many others, equipping middle schools, high school, classrooms and labs? Why aren't they deep inside of communities, schools, community colleges, selling the dream of engineering? Why aren't they doing this? This is not a government problem. These companies need to be focused on what they need to make and drive revenue. Why aren't they fucking doing this? Joel: They should be doing it and should've been doing it. But the problem is we have a challenge now. We have a China problem now. We have global economic issues today, and we should have been thinking about this 20 years ago, 10 years ago at least, obviously nobody was. Now, Taiwan, as most people know, is the breadbasket of the semiconductor chip business. And companies are actually relocating Taiwanese workers into Montana and North Dakota and some of these other places where these chip factories are being established. So we've gotta go poach from other countries. Longer term, we should definitely be talking about stability in this industry, colleges should be pounding the table. There should be some maybe subsidies for people who get these degrees or at least instant jobs by companies saying, "Hey, go get this degree and do that." Now, what we've additionally done, I don't know if you caught this or not this past week, the Biden administration announced a $345 million weapons package to go to Taiwan. Joel: The first tranche in a total of one billion the US has allotted to be transferred directly from the Pentagon stockpiles to the island this year. So the reaction to not having enough talent is also, let's arm up Taiwan, to make sure that Taiwan remains a stable supplier of chips in the near future. Because if China takes the real estate, then it's game over. So like, "Let's ship some weapons and let's fortify Taiwan." So hopefully long-term we're thinking about the talent to do these jobs in the future. But for now it looks like, let's poach from Taiwan and other places and let's fortify Taiwan to keep China at bay. Chad: So Intel said they're gonna spend $17.7 million in Ohio, which is where one of these manufacturing facilities are going. Intel's revenue is $63 billion a year. So that's 0.03% of Intel's annual revenues. That's not an investment, that's fucking crumbs. Talent is the only thing that will make those revenue numbers grow. And talent acquisition, listen up TA pros, you need to stiffen your fucking spine. See this as an opportunity to talk about driving revenue through building real talent pipelines and not bullshit photo ops. That's what this is. They're pledging like a million dollars to like 15 different universities in Ohio. It's fucking photo op, that's crumbs, that's not enough. You need to have an investment, and you need to get into those communities ASAP. Joel: Yep. Chad: Not to mention TA Folk, it's taking forever for people to get through your application process. I remember talking to Allyn Bailey when she was at Intel. And she was like, well. A part of it was funding. You have to re-streamline your process with the market. They don't have the cash. You need to go back to the business with your need and show them that if we don't get these positions filled, we're not gonna make the cash. Joel: By the way, the stories about fraud and misuse of funds that the government is giving these companies is just starting. It's just kind of a bummer. All right, Chad, AI is still in the news, imagine that. We got a lot of headlines. I'm gonna read through some of them and you're gonna give me your take on what stood out to you the most. Let's start with TechCrunch writing an article entitled The Future of AI is Video, And It's Coming At Us Fast. The story outlined what a mess the 2024 election is going to be. Joel: HR Executive Magazine wrote a story entitled Seven AI Considerations HR Leaders Need To Think About Today featuring Chad and Cheese super fan Andrea Wade enforcing the importance of humans being in the process. Hacker News says Zoom's AI can now train its AI with user content, but you can't opt out of the process. Sorry about that. Reuters asks whether AI will be a blessing or a curse for the economy. People are beating the shit and molesting Uber Eats automated food delivery bots. And here's Chad's favorite, Elon Musk now owns ai.com. Chad, what stood out most to you this week in AI news? Chad: So, when Domino's, I think, they were the first companies that actually said they're gonna have these AI delivery bots, I called it back then. I think it was even Walmart, with the ones that were in the aisles. Joel: The janitors? [laughter] Chad: People were going to start taking fucking ball bats to these things. They're gonna flip them over, they're gonna do whatever they could to fuck with these things. Now we're saying that's exactly what's happening. Whether they like AI robots or not, doesn't matter, people are fucking stupid. Just the way it is. One of the really cool... I'm gonna paraphrase items in one of the articles, is that they likened AI to dynamite. And dynamite is either used to blow a hole in a mountain to create streamlined infrastructure or as a weapon, but there are regulations around dynamite, right? And there's not regulations around AI. Joel: You can't download it on your computer. Chad: Yeah. And the biggest issue here that I see is shareholder capitalism. Its focus is completely on reward and not risks. It's a move fast, generate revenue and break society model. The internet was created by the US government with our tax dollars, and yet companies like Amazon who leverage the internet with e-commerce sales and AWS, skirt taxes, create billionaires like Jeff Bezos who build super yachts and launch penis rockets, but they're not building a strong middle class and paying it back. Our biggest issue that we're having right now is that we are not moving fast enough on the regulatory side of the house to ensure that we have the guardrails in place, but we need to move. We can't allow, let's say for instance, a six-month pause to happen. We just can't do that. We can't allow other countries to get ahead of us. So we need guardrails and we need them quick. The Elon Musk thing... [chuckle] Chad: This to me is the funniest thing ever. I believe we're experiencing one of the most public ADHD moments in world history as we watch Elon Musk play with Twitter, now X. Get into generative AI game, propose dick measuring contests with Zuck. [laughter] Chad: And then getting fined by federal government for not complying with federal subpoenas. He is all over the place, probably one of the smartest guys in the world today, right? Hate him, hate him, hate him but he's all over the place. This is a squirrel moment for Elon Musk. [laughter] SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: All right. We didn't have this in the notes, but the Octagon Zuckerberg versus Musk fight on X, would you watch that for free? Chad: Oh, well, yeah, I definitely would. Joel: At what price point would you pay to see it live? Chad: Oh, I would... It would be free somewhere. I'd be able to get it somewhere. [laughter] Joel: I hope this happens. Chad: Because those assholes would make money off of it and I'm not paying 'em. Joel: Oh well, they said it's going to charity for veterans. No... Chad: Oh fuck that, that's full of shit. Joel: That is to me, if that happens, that is peak douche bag for tech. That is like, it's only downhill from here. So I'm glad you brought up Zuckerberg, 'cause I'd forgotten about the Octagon match. Oh my God. Dude, these poor Uber Eats. I call them mobile coolers. Chad: Oh, god. Joel: I mean thank God for TikTok. I've talked for an end to TikTok, but this makes TikTok worthwhile. [laughter] Joel: What the homeless and just the riffraff and knuckleheads are doing to these coolers is almost pornographic. Like how these are built is, I guess it's closed and you have a QR code or something with your phone. And then you can open it and get your sandwich and you're done. Well, people are like, fuck it, I'm hungry. They like, open the thing. This alarm goes off, which nobody cares about. It's like, whoop, whoop. And they just... They're eating the sandwich while the alarm is going off. People are riding these things in the streets. I don't know how they're steering them, but it's so bizarre. I don't know what the future is of these things. I don't know if it's just like, it's gonna be only in really high rent districts where people aren't gonna do stuff. If there's... Are they gonna criminalize this where, face recognition and they turn you into the cop. I don't know what's gonna happen. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I like the idea of my Chipotle rolling up on the driveway, but I don't know if there's a future for these mobile coolers of food. I think the TechCrunch article about video and the campaign is even scarier than when I first commented about this a week or so ago. Chad: Creepy as fuck, man. Joel: What we're gonna see out of deep fakes of Putin and She and overseas and what's in the election. Chad: Yeah. Joel: No one's gonna know what's real, what's fake. There's no government regulation anywhere, there's no tech guardrails that I see anywhere. It's gonna be the Wild West this election. And God help us if democracy breaks and we fall into the abyss, 'cause if it's gonna happen, it's probably gonna happen in 2024. The seven considerations... Chad: Fuck. Joel: Of HR leaders shows me HR knows nothing about what's coming, it was such... It was sort of like an SEO article from 'O5 about how to write a title tag. [laughter] Joel: And that was gonna save your website. So anyway, this show's been a total bummer and this didn't help it at all for the most part. AI is crazy. People are crazy. And mixing the two together is a recipe for disaster. Chad: But after the break, we've got something that's gonna be even more creepy, but fun. SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Joel: All right, Chad, I don't know if this is good news or bad news, you decide listener. All right, Mila, or is it Mila? We'll call her Mila. Mila Sophia says she's a 24-year-old robot girl living in Helsinki, but she's actually an AI generated influencer with a substantial following on Twitter and TikTok. She has almost 60,000 followers on Instagram. Despite being entirely virtual or fake. Her photos attract likes and admiration from thousands, tens of thousands of fans oblivious to her non-existence. She posts pictures portraying various roles from a bikini clad model to, get this, a construction worker. Her digital existence raises so many questions from me, Chad. What do you got on Mila Sophia? Chad: Yeah, it's interesting that nerdy white dudes are creating hot chicks on the internet and making money off them, we've totally come full circle on this podcast. We started off with talking about AI generated movies. All I can say is it's surreal, in 1855, P.T Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute." And with AI and deepfakes and clones, it's gonna be very hard to distinguish between all of us who are the suckers and who aren't. Joel: So Chad, you and I have been debating an Instagram presence for a while. I think this is our shot. I think we do a virtual Chad and Cheese. Maybe we're horseback, on sunset on the beach, maybe we're in shop class or doing some crafts. Chad: Shop class. Joel: At hobby lobby. Chad: Ooh. We do the ghost molding of the clay. Joel: They say it's totally open. We can do whatever the hell we want. So, one of my favorite movies particularly from the '80s, is Risky Business. Chad: Yes. Joel: And in Risky Business, Tom Cruise's friend Booger from Revenge of the Nerds. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But that's a different movie, Chad knows what I'm talking about. Most of our listeners probably do too. Booger gets him a hooker that wasn't what Tom expected, let's put it that way. So the hooker that shows up realizes that Tom isn't into her. So she gives him the name of a woman named Lana. And her quote is, "I'm gonna give you a number, Joel," that's one of the reasons why it's my favorite movie. His character's name is Joel. But anyway, she says, "Joel, I want you to call Lana, it's what you want. It's what every white boy off the lake wants," which is one of the great lines of '80s movie nostalgia. So here's my takeaway from this. OnlyFans is done. Not tomorrow, not next week, but eventually. Digital girls are starting to look like the real thing. They're starting to talk like the real thing. And with the right apparatus, Chad, they will do everything every dude on the planet wants. Just like Lana. It'll be a subscription model for all the kinky, freaky, illegal in 28 states shit that all of our demented listeners want in a woman. Even if it's not real. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back, like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We're out.

Live from UNLEASH America in the Workhuman booth, Shannon Pritchett, head of marketing and community at HireEZ, joins the boys for a conversation covering the state of sourcing, how HireEZ is embracing ChatGPT and other AI technologies around recruiting and how disruption is set to be business as usual throughout our industry. TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right 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: Here we go, kids. We are live at the UNLEASH America Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada from the Work Human Booth. And we are just giddy that Shannon Pritchett, head of Marketing and Community at hireEZ has joined us today. Shannon, welcome to the podcast. Shannon Pritchett: Thank you. Chad: You've got your comfy shoes on too. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. And for the record, I didn't pay for this. Joel: She just had knee surgery, so of course she's comfy. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: I know. I just had knee surgery two weeks ago and I'm starting the conference in Air Force 1s or stomping in my Air Force 1s. Chad: Well, I love it. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. Joel: Nothing wrong with Air Force 1s. Chad: What did you have done to the knee? Shannon Pritchett: Okay. So I thought I was a runner. If you go to my Twitter profile, it'll say, "Pretend runner." Chad: Yes. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. But actually I am a runner, 'Cause like I run, I'm slow. [laughter] Joel: Are we talking marathons? Are we talking minis? What are we talking about? Shannon Pritchett: I did a marathon once and I learned something with that marathon. Right? Joel: And what did you learn? Yeah. Shannon Pritchett: Never to do it again. Chad: Yeah. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. No. So I... Chad: You know a guy died during... They named... Shannon Pritchett: Lots of guys died doing marathons. Yeah. A part of me died. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: My knee died. No, it's a... I wasn't running a marathon. I just, I hurt it running and it turns out I tore my meniscus. Chad: Ah. Shannon Pritchett: And then I developed a bunch of cysts on my ACL. Chad: Ouch. Shannon Pritchett: So they went in there and removed it and... Joel: Oh. Yikes. Chad: That's a pretty... I had my meniscus cleaned out and literally I walked out of the hospital. They... Shannon Pritchett: Yeah, that's what I did too. Yes. Chad: They took me to the edge. In a little, in a little wheelchair. And they stopped. And I'm like, can you gonna take me to the car? They're like, "You're good" [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: It's amazing. Yes. No. So, okay. So I had it on the day of SourceCon in Dallas. And then I was, I was home by like 10:00 AM, I pitch black the room, turn on the sound machine, put on my eye mask, some Marvin Gaye, some earplugs. Chad: Oh, yeah. Shannon Pritchett: That all makes sense. But I'm trying to set the stage here. And then my mom comes to the door like two hours later and she's like, "Your friends are here." I was like, "I don't have any friends mom." And she's thinking I'm still on medicated. And she's like, "No, no, no, your friend... " I was like, "Oh, SourceCon." I got up to go to the door and it was like, Dean DeCosta, Steve Levy, Ronnie Ratcher, those guys. And I was like, "Oh, I can walk. It's a miracle." But that was like two hours after surgery. So everyone's like, "How are you here after knee surgery?" I'm like, "I have a damn good surgeon." Joel: So, what's this current state of SourceCon these days? I haven't been in a while. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. The community kind of fell apart during the pandemic. Yeah, live events was their focus. I'll tell you what, they have a new editor named Meg. She's amazing. I really think she's gonna bring it back to life. But I think they kind of lost their focus a little bit. But I'm excited to see the spark back. So hopefully, it revives itself and I think it will. Chad: Cool. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. Joel: So you presented today? Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Yes. Joel: Tell us about what you discussed. Shannon Pritchett: No, that I did pay for, but... [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: So we had a product announcement, and so the main message, I had a couple of main messages. One, sourcing is dead. Joel: Let's put a pin in that. Shannon Pritchett: As we're talking about the revitalization of SourceCon. Chad: We'll go back to that. Carry on. Carry on. Shannon Pritchett: Second. Everyone hates outbound recruiting. The category we created. Okay. Chad: Everybody hates doing it. Shannon Pritchett: Hates doing it. Chad: Yes, yes. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. TA leaders love it. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: And as you know, we were the first to do this 'cause I'm in marketing. Chad: They love cracking the whip to make people do shit that they don't like doing. Shannon Pritchett: Exactly. Chad: Yes. Shannon Pritchett: Well, I have this analogy. Okay. Chad: Okay. Shannon Pritchett: So Joel, you just woke up, you need some coffee? I'm gonna give you a cup of coffee. Joel: Yep. Shannon Pritchett: Or, you know you're not really gonna like this shitty cup of coffee I'm giving you, I can cuss on Chad and Cheese. Right? I've heard your podcast before. Joel: Oh, you can do that. Chad: Fuck. Yes. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Okay. Thank you. Or you can wait two months for that cup of coffee and you can go get the best damn cup of coffee you want, but you have to wait two months. What are you gonna choose? Joel: Coffee now. Shannon Pritchett: Coffee now. Joel: Yep. Shannon Pritchett: Right. That's inbound versus outbound. Sometimes the best one takes a little longer to get, it's a little harder to get and you have to go without that for awhile. Joel: And there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. Shannon Pritchett: There's a reason. Yes. So that's where we come in. We're trying to make that whole process easy. So that recruiters can actually concentrate on things that they gave up a million years ago. Like talking to people, engaging people. So setting expectations, all that stuff. So that's the problem with outbound recruiting it's like, recruiters don't like to do it, but we're trying to make it easy for them. We are on our way there, not there yet. And our latest announcement with GPT integration, really helps that. Joel: Look at her lead the witness. I love it. She must be in marketing. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: I know. So what we do with this is, we are the first... Chad: She is the witness. She's leading herself. Joel: She's like raising canes that's like, "Yes. If you try our new vet sauce and salad." Yeah. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: Welcome to the Shannon Pritchett podcast. Joel: Yes. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: Are you Shannon? Joel: Carry on please. Shannon Pritchett: So with this integration is once you've you identified candidates and you go to the engagement stage in our product, we have all the nurture sequence emails already pre-constructed based on the job description. So you have three options. One, roll with the automation. Two, my recommendation, customize it, personalize it a little bit. Or three, just scratch it and write it your own. But it takes an hour to write an email as we are learning... A good email and recruiters just don't have that time. Nor was anyone trained on how to write an email. Chad: That's the biggest point is that they're not trained to be marketers, to be able to get that nice, easy, concise message. Bulleted or whatever it might be. Yeah. So we expect everybody to be fucking experts. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Chad: To do all this shit and we are just not. Joel: Yeah. Shannon Pritchett: I pay someone a lot of money to do email marketing for us, and she's amazing. But there's an art that goes into that, A/B testing, analytics, multiple systems that she's in. Different buyer stages, awareness campaigns like announcements. There's a... The amount of work this one person does on my team, it's... She's probably underpaid, but the recruiters don't have that, right? Chad: No. Shannon Pritchett: But marketing does. Chad: No. Yeah. So how did you integrate ChatGPT? How is that actually useful for these recruiters? Is it writing messages? Joel: And were you the first? Shannon Pritchett: We were the first. Chad: Oh, [laughter] that's leading the witness. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: The first. Joel: 'ause we've got about 12 press releases... Chad: Facts. Joel: That say they're the first. [laughter] Joel: We wanna clear this up right now. Shannon Pritchett: By the way... Chad: We wanna clear this up. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: You forgot to announce this at the beginning of the podcast, but anytime you hear the word first, you have to take a drink. So, yes. [laughter] Chad: We have bourbon. Unfortunately, we're not allowed to open it in this fucking place. Joel: Yeah. Vegas is a very... Shannon Pritchett: As everyone walks around with champagne. Joel: Vegas is so conservative. We can't just bust out some makers. Chad: Let me... Shannon Pritchett: I purchased it from Caesars. Chad: Let me take this gummy. Yeah. Shannon Pritchett: I got this in your gift shop. [laughter] Yeah. Light a joint, fine, do not open that tequila. Chad: Yeah, don't do that. Joel: Don't you do that? Shannon Pritchett: No. So, okay. First off, I work with smart people, I'm not an AI engineer, obviously. So we've been actually working on this integration for a while. GPT was completely new to me when it came out this year. I wasn't following the trends but our team has been working for years on it. And so with the latest GPT-3 announcement that finally made our version ready, we refined it to use recruiter specific language that made sense. So for example, you cannot go into ChatGPT, type out, "can you write this email for a candidate?" And then they will be completely different. So that's the difference between the two. So is there one GPT better than the other? Maybe. But as long as they're different, that's exactly what we need. Right? We can't have the same script over and over and over again, that's actually my biggest fear. Joel: Just to be clear, this was not integrating ChatGPT. This is a little bit of homemade stuff that you guys came up with on your own. Shannon Pritchett: Using their technology. Joel: It's been years in development. Because some people say like, well ChatGPT came out in November, how could it be years? This is your own little secret sauce if you will. Chad: Secret sauce. Shannon Pritchett: Well, see again, if we had like really smart people here, they'd tell you, oh, it's actually just different iterations and versions and stuff like that they kind of were tweaking and customizing. Joel: So, they've been using... They've been dealing with OpenAI. Shannon Pritchett: OpenAI, refining it. Joel: During this... Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Thank you for that buzzword 'cause... Joel: There it is. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. Now that we talk about tequila and Maker's Mark, that's where my mind is going. [laughter] Chad: Shot, shot, shot [laughter] Joel: So, you speak... [laughter] Joel: You speak fast. I wanna go over this again. So I'm using hireEZ to source candidates. I can click a button that will then start communicating messages via email, texts. Shannon Pritchett: Don't have text yet. Joel: Email. Okay. Email. Shannon Pritchett: It's coming. Joel: And not InMail, just email. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: Not InMail at all. Joel: Right? Okay. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. Joel: Via Email. And these are all automated. So, "Hey, how you doing?" And if there's a reply, then another automated message goes out. Shannon Pritchett: No. Joel: No. What? No, just the initial connection. Shannon Pritchett: Once there's a reply, and not another office reply, an actual reply, then the sequence stops and you start engaging with them. Chad: Gotcha. Shannon Pritchett: So how the whole product works, by the way, you just upload a job description. The AI takes over immediately. You can refine it with our filters and stuff like that. You select which candidates you want, our machine starts learning from you, right? Joel: Yep. Shannon Pritchett: Then once you've identified candidates and you put them into a project, you move that over to the engagement side, you should be synced to your email box. Shannon Pritchett: Yep. Joel: So everything's running from your Email. So it's not like an in email where you copy and paste, go candidate after candidate after candidate, you know? Joel: Yep. Shannon Pritchett: Hi Chad. I'm not Chad, I'm Joel but thank you. Right? No, everything is customized already for, and then once the sequence breaks and they respond, and then it's you engaging the candidate. So what the candidate sees is a well sequenced email with the greatest language they've ever seen in their entire lives. Chad: The most magnificent prose that they've ever seen. Shannon Pritchett: Yes, I know. And they know. Joel: First. Shannon Pritchett: Like this was the first. Joel: The first [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: No. And so it stops from there. So the candidate has no idea, no idea. Chad: If they don't reply, another little tickle will go out. Shannon Pritchett: As many sequences as you wanna set. Chad: Okay. Shannon Pritchett: So, but if you do like 30, then you're kind of a stalker. Chad: Kind of a douche if you're doing 30. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. A douche [laughter] Joel: So how long is it gonna take for you guys to go down funnel to start doing this for individuals who have already applied? Because we have a black hole issue. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And that's a recruiter problem because the recruiters don't have enough time, so therefore, how do we aid the recruiters not just on the front end, but also starting to go through the funnel. And if you have the tech, why the hell not? Shannon Pritchett: It's not in the roadmap yet. We're still concentrating on top of the funnel but we eventually want to start evolving into that space over time. But right where we're headed in the roadmap is more automation, more better reporting. Hopefully, text message capabilities. So that's what we'd like to concentrate on within the next six months. But yeah, that's more of an inbound tactic and we just really wanna stick with the category we created outbound. Joel: Did she say, hopefully SMS? She's usually so confident. Shannon Pritchett: I know. Joel: I just, I'm surprised to hear hopefully. Shannon Pritchett: There's so much compliance and rules with text messaging. It's like... Joel: There are. Shannon Pritchett: And to be honest, I don't think our database, and I'm speaking like a CTO now is... We need more phone numbers to see the success. Chad: Well, you need to start asking for them. Shannon Pritchett: Exactly. We don't wanna... We don't want people paying for it, not like you would pay for it or anything like that until we're absolutely certain it's gonna work. So I think we have a few ways to go from R&D point of view on text messaging, but we're definitely working on it. Joel: Okay. So that was a trap you didn't fall into because I am sick and tired of companies, startups who aren't disciplined and they try to open up the TAM term whenever they can. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Joel: And you guys, you just pretty much said that, no, we're not doing that. We're focusing... Shannon Pritchett: Well, we've learned the hard way [laughter] Joel: Well, yeah. We are going to be experts in our space. And the only way you can do that is focus and discipline. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. And everything else, that's what partnerships and integrations are for. Joel: Yes. Shannon Pritchett: And so to us, if like we can concentrate on a couple of features to make the automation more better, what partners can we bring on to help us with the other things that are gonna improve the experience of using our product? So. Chad: More better. Shannon Pritchett: First. Joel: So the trend would go the opposite way on that. We're seeing conversational AI companies become ATSs. We're seeing people becoming, maybe something they shouldn't be, which I love. Does that trend help you guys? Do more customers expect you to be that? Like do people say, can't you just be my ATS and my onboarding solution and everything else? Shannon Pritchett: Yeah, we do get a lot of that. I had a whole hour conversation with someone... Chad: It's a trap. Shannon Pritchett: It is a trap, about that today. And first off, it is easy to develop an ATS and a CRM. It's very... The technology is not that difficult. Right? But do we really wanna go play in those fields? No. First off, I don't think we have the money. And second, like there's a lot of resources that go into that that we just typically don't have. Chad: Oh. Got it. Shannon Pritchett: So that's why we wanna stay in our lane. We didn't create this category to expand into other ones. And where I think we need to get better at is the better... We have integrations with just about every ATS, those can still be improved. So I'd rather have us focus on deeper integrations, more two-way integrations. Better API data as opposed to like, oh, let's just do it ourselves. Joel: Yeah. Shannon Pritchett: So we're still in that, we need to prove ourselves concept in the market, in my opinion. So. Joel: How do you deal with global customers? The language, obviously gets more complicated. How do you guys handle that? Shannon Pritchett: We definitely... So a lot of our customers are global, right? 'cause we're an enterprise product now. But we work best in English speaking countries by far. So we do have a lot of international candidates that do use ours, that know English. But our product is not catered to specific countries where... For example China. You know what I mean? You don't see a Chinese company using our product. So, well, we have one, but... [laughter] Joel: And why is that? Is there a reason? Is it privacy or. Shannon Pritchett: No. We're 100% GDPR compliant. We have governance in all the places where we need it. We have... Joel: But why go out of the US which is a huge pile of fucking cash. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: That's it. Joel: You don't need to. Shannon Pritchett: We don't have the sales force to be honest, we don't. We have Salesforce, but we don't have the sales. Joel: Right. Chad: Personnel focus and discipline again. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Shannon Pritchett: So, yeah. So, 85% of our revenue does come from within the US. And then I'd like to start looking at potentially moving or expanding to the UK to see how we can do with that country before we take on the rest of the globe. So we entertain companies that come to us, not a problem, but to me, our data needs to get better. And those countries and our other capabilities, like for example, does the UK audience care about the African American filter on our product? No. Are we gonna take that out for them? Not yet. So yeah, that's why we're focused predominantly on the US right now. But global teams do use our product in various countries. We know where we shine and we don't shine. Joel: So You mentioned something that might hopefully be in the future, SMS. What window into the future product roadmap can you take us on right now? Shannon Pritchett: So what we're working on is the ability for the recruiter to get back to the basics. Having like a normal conversation with a candidate. So we want to have more AI. Like our mission is outbound recruiting made easy. The vision is jobs to find people, right? So when you get laid off, jobs should come to you, right? Not you are out there looking for jobs, that's our vision. So everything is focused on that and focus on making it easy, right? Easy is definitely our roadmap. And so if we can add in more automation, so a recruiter is displacing candidates in the ATS and having those more quality conversations, that's our roadmap for the next six months. And so if things happen the way they're supposed to happen, hoping next time we sit down at a big event like HR Tech, we can have more exciting conversations. But again, we are just trying to free up as much time for recruiters as possible. Chad: So here at UNLEASH, a lot of big names, a lot of small names. Shannon Pritchett: Yes. Chad: What's exciting you the most about what you're seeing at a show like this? Joel: You've been to a few of these, right? [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: I like these. You know I actually really, really... There's a lot of vendors I've never heard of here. It's like very HR heavy. That was sort of shocking to me. And looking at the attendee list, it's all CHROs. And a lot of head of TAs, our booth has been popping. Chad: Which has been pretty awesome, right? Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. I think, to be honest, I don't know if they even have a booth. We were just talking about them TaTio. Chad: They have a... Shannon Pritchett: Stand? Chad: A startup booth. Shannon Pritchett: A startup booth, okay. I met them at HR Transform, I love what they do, I really like that. So for example, Stan Ralph down in Perth, Australia. He used to use... When he worked for a coal mining company out of Africa, He used to use augmented reality to put the coal miners in those scenarios, they knew what they were getting into. Chad: Was that a CareerBuilder product? I can't remember. Shannon Pritchett: No, I don't think so. Chad: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Shannon Pritchett: Okay. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: I was like, I'm intrigued, tell me more. Joel: It's a good thing coal mining is a growth industry. They got the wind at their back baby. [laughter] Shannon Pritchett: But no, it actually increased retention rates. So like all the candidates who went through the simulation none of them turned over. So the fact that what they're doing is providing that simulation, I think is so beneficial. And I'm like, that's a company I wanna partner with. You know what I mean? If you can put those scenarios in there from a high volume standpoint, like no one wants to like, "Oh, here's your scenario, here's your Zoom meetings, here's your... " [laughter] But when you're interacting with like dangerous equipment, heavy machinery, customers, I think that's so innovative. And I love these Israeli companies. Joel: Oh. Chad: And I'd like to say, as an advisor, I would like you to integrate with them. Shannon Pritchett: Okay. [laughter]? Yes. Yeah. Joel: Shannon Pritchett, everybody. Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: Shannon, thanks for joining us. For our listeners who want to connect with you, where would you send them? Shannon Pritchett: Well, first. [laughter] Joel: Here comes the marketer. Shannon Pritchett: I just want people to like drink. Just connect with me, find me on LinkedIn. That's it. Joel: Find me on LinkedIn. Shannon Pritchett: That's it. Joel: I love it. Shannon Pritchett: Yeah. Joel: And hireEZ.com as well. I'll do the marketing for you. Chad, that is a day, that is a wrap. Chad: Now we have parties. Joel: That's right. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Tech hiring is in kind of a weird place right now. Newsworthy layoffs, artificial intelligence threats and a down economy mean a lot of indecision and uncertainty. Many companies are just pushing pause as a result. All this makes for a tricky environment for any and all startups looking to place high-tech workers. InSquad, a one-click solution to source and hire top-quality vetted remote software developers, ain’t scared though. That’s why CEO Alex Svinov decided to face the Firing Squad. He thinks he has a better mousetrap than the likes of Upwork, Turing, Andela and many others. Is he right? Gotta listen to find out. TRASNCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: All right, time for another Firing Squad. What's up everybody? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always, the Daffy to my Donald, Chad Sowash is in the house. And today we welcome to Firing Squad, Alex Svinov CEO at Insquad. Alex, how are you? Alex Svinov: I'm doing great. Thank you very much. Joel, Chad, nice to meet you and nice to meet everybody out there. Hello. [chuckle] Chad: All the way from Serbia. Wow. Joel: Yeah. Alex Svinov: Yeah. Joel: Sorry for butchering your name. Svivno... Swivnov? Is that correct? Alex Svinov: Svinov. Joel: Thank God you're Alex. Chad: Svinov. Joel: I can do that one. I can say that one. Alex Svinov: Oh, you don't know my real name. [laughter] It's actually Alexander. Joel: Oh, that's easy too. I can do that one. Alex Svinov: Oh, Sorry. Sorry. [laughter] Joel: All right, so we know a little bit about you personally. For our listeners out there that don't know you, give them a Twitter bio and... Give us a window into Alex. What's he all about? Alex Svinov: I am a computer science graduate. For 15 years after that I've been doing finance and investment banking. And then I felt like I had it all. I knew it all, and it didn't feel like fun at all. So I, maybe nine, 10 years ago, I switched to startups. Founded my first startup in 2014, which went very well. Founded second startup, which also went well. And they're still profitable and running businesses. And then I felt like, startups is something that I really enjoyed doing. And, then I failed few times. And, here I am, now doing my sixth startup that's Insquad. Joel: And father of three. So he does get out. He does get out and live a little bit. [laughter] Alex Svinov: Well, yeah, my wife says, you should be more with kids. So I'm working on that. That's my KPI for this year. Joel: Now, does that mean have more kids or just spend more time with the ones you have? Alex Svinov: No, she's not ready for more kids. She is like, first take care of these ones, then we'll talk about new ones [laughter] Joel: All right. Chad: Always a good idea. Always a good idea. Joel: I can do that. Alex Svinov: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I love kids. Joel: Welcome to the squad, Chad. Tell him what he's won today. Chad: Well, welcome Alex. This is how Firing Squad is gonna work my friend. At the sound of the bell, you'll have two minutes to pitch Insquad. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise with all of your answers or you're going to get hit with the crickets? That just means tighten it up, move out swiftly. At the end of Q&A, you're gonna receive one of three of these from either Joel or myself. A big applause. [applause] Chad: Grab that checkered flag and take a big chug of milk because you just won the race, baby. Golf clap. You're not the fastest in the race, but you're in the race so knuckle down and focus on getting better, faster. And last but not least, we have brought a horse to the Indy 500. Pack it up and take that walk to the glue factory, my friend, because you are done here. That's the Firing Squad. Do you have any questions. Joel: That is a tyre in the parking lot is that sound right there. Alex, are you ready to pitch Insquad? Alex Svinov: Ready as I am. Joel: All right. In three, two. Alex Svinov: Yeah, here we go. When I was at my last startup, it's a FinTech company, I had a great issue of building a software engineering team. And it's like I've been interviewing lots of developers, lots of data scientists, and so on and so forth, but once I would find some really good ones. They would either ask for too much money or they would look for something else. And, essentially it took me like a half a year to build this, a good team. And then I figured out that this is problem, not just my own problem, but pretty much everybody in the market is having the same problems. Now, that was back in 2020 when this was much more acute than today. However, that, finding talented engineers is still a huge problem for any startups, but particularly for a startup because engineers always want stability. Alex Svinov: They want some good big projects. So if I'm a small startup, where I'm gonna find talent, right? And startups always depend on this talent. So that's why we built Insquad. What we did is we went out to remote locations like Latin America, Eastern Europe, Far East, and we've built a pipeline of software engineers, which we would vet with machine and with the human. And then we would get them matched with the cool startups in US. And that played out very nicely because US's startup get a great talent, which you wouldn't be able to get at home at very good prices, which are again, like have their level of the price at the US software engineer. Alex Svinov: And you would get them right immediately, right? Because all the engineers we have on our platform are available to start in two weeks. So, yeah, that's where we are. And so far we've helped over 50 startups and we have over 200 engineers working for them, and about 3,000 guys in the vetted pool. That's it. Joel: Pretty close. Pretty close to time. Pretty close to time. Let's talk about the name. Insquad. How'd you come up with it? What's the story? Give us the 411. Alex Svinov: Yeah. Well actually when we're talking about this name, we're thinking about the best software engineering team, it's like a small squad, right? Where everybody is working towards the same goal, everybody's supporting each other, and it is a little bit like an army. It's definitely not like an army in a big sense, but a little bit like an army in the sense that you've got your own task and you gotta finish it no matter what. And that's why we thought that, having people in squad somewhat reminds you of these values, of these goals. Joel: Okay, I can buy that. I can buy that. All right, so money-wise, you've generated 200K in investment. The last round was in 2021, which seems quite a while to wait for another round of investment. Talk about that. Are you just that profitable now that you don't need money to take on the big dogs or what's up with investment? Alex Svinov: We used the initial investment to actually generate the product which is a portal where we source engineers. When we, in 2022, the market changed a lot because the demand for engineers has gone down significantly. And so what we've done, essentially we use this time to build our funnel of engineers and bring more on board. So by the time when the next growth phase comes which we already see, it kind of the market stabilized and we already see the demand we would have good pipeline of engineers, we'll definitely go to the market to raise our Series E. But I'm assuming later this year or maybe early next year, because our businesses actually it is, we're profitable these days. However, we would still need the investments for things like marketing, brand building, and expanding our franchise. So. Joel: Okay. Let's go back to something that you just said. You said the market for developers has slowed down significantly, which I would agree, but then you also said that you think it'll pick up based on everything that we hear with AI taking jobs from developers, being able to do code turning, entry-level coders into 10x developers. Why do you think it's gonna come back? Alex Svinov: Well, there are a few things we should separate. First is AI is really taking jobs away from developers. And my answer is, no. It is certainly taking some, it can complete certain tasks. It can work as a junior level developer. However, in our case, we don't work with a junior level developers per se, only, we only offer senior level, architect level team lead level engineers. So that is something AI cannot do now, it may do it sometime in the future, but not as for now. However AI also needs engineers and these engineers are called data scientists. The guys that are training models and aggregating data, building the silos and so on and so forth, which is again, something that AI cannot really do at this moment. More to that we actually are seeing increased demand. We, like, for example, our first client asked for a prompt engineer, which is a new profession that came into play with the rise of chatGPT. So the first request we had in January, and now we have more and more to that. So if we're not gonna need any more engineers or developers, then probably we're not gonna, we will not need anybody else guaranteed because the engineer is to, in my view, engineer is the future of any profession because you need more and more software. We're going away from the hardware into software and that's why you will need more the data scientists, more test automation guys more engineers that will invent our future. Chad: All right, so taking that and actually just spinning it more onto the competitor side. So Hacker Inc has 103 million in funding and they've been around since 2009, Turing 160 million TestGorilla has over 80 million. Then there's Coder bike Codility, HackerEarth, and a list of other somewhat like platforms that are out there. What makes Insquad different from all of those other than the lack of funding and lack of use in service? Alex Svinov: Well, we are very much product-focused and what we are trying to do is to have only superb talent on our platform. Now that everybody would say nobody would try to sell you some lousy engineers. Everybody would be saying that we've got great talents. However, this is what I hear from our customers that they come back to us and ask for more because of the quality they get with our platform is outstanding. And that's what we strive to go through to get only the superior talents on our platform. I wouldn't say that our biggest competitors are these platforms. I would say our biggest competitors are old style staffing firms, which are only looking for small customers and they have 25 to 50 to 100 engineers on board and they can only do a certain amount of work. Because if you look at the market in general, all these new platforms you're talking about, they adjusted tiniest to the one or two or three percent of the market in general. Chad: Okay. So more toward what Joel was talking about, today's landscape, GitHub, who owned by Microsoft, is using AI to make mediocre coders good and good coders great. IBM announced that they're slashing 3,900 jobs on the focus of automation and cost cutting in the Tech industry. So there's gonna be a huge change in demand. Here's the hard part. Looking at yourself in the mirror in the morning, you've gotta be afraid of these automated AI engineers that take and again, we're talking about speed. And speed means funding. And we talked about HackerRank and all those others who have the funding. Right now do you have the juice to be able to pivot to all of those other engineers, QA, QC, prompt engineerings, do you have enough juice to pivot and keep up with the others? Not to mention the automation 'cause it's not about is it going to create new jobs? Of course it is, we know that, but do you have the juice to be able to pivot and stay in the race with the rest of them? Alex Svinov: Well, I'm the CEO of the company as long as I am the CEO and I believe in this idea, definitely I will have the juice and not only will I have it, but we already actually pivoted when we've seen a lot of demand in AI. We've basically focused all our sourcing efforts and all our selling efforts on working with the AI and that played out very nicely, especially last half a year when we got so many startups coming and hey, we wanna automate this with AI, hey we want to integrate chatGPT. And that's where we are getting the biggest chunk of business these days. What, just today we signed a new customer, they are doing animation. They want to automate motion picture creation whereby you would do, you would just type in chatGPT like prompt and it will create animation immediately. So and we see it in every segment in legal, in finance, in creation of movies everywhere. Joel: You said that you have a higher level of developer in your network, correct? Alex Svinov: Yeah, that's correct. Joel: And what makes you think that you have people that aren't in Upwork or aren't in these other platforms that have techies? Like what makes your sauce so secret? Alex Svinov: We're trying to keep it very personal in the sense that each and every engineer that we have on our platform has a video recording of the actual interview with Insquad recruiter. And that's much different from what you would see at Upwork where it's basically self-serve, right? Which we try to put extra effort to get only the guys that we know, they not only, they have passed tests at a very high level, but we also had the technical recruiter go with them through all their experience. And then if for example, during this interview our technical recruiter is not entirely satisfied with the explanation, what exactly was done on this project and on that project, what kind of technology you have been using and how you've been using where you adjust a code reviewer or did you actually do the code yourself on this project? Then if the tech recruiter is not entirely satisfied with the answer, we would not list that skill with this particular profile. So basically anybody that we bring to our customer, we are certain that we know that this skill and set is actually matched to the resume. Joel: But there's no exclusive that you sign with the candidate that says you can't go to Upwork. So there's a good chance that these people are all over the place, not just your platform. Alex Svinov: Well, I wouldn't think that they are at Upwork because Upwork typically is for lower level, lower field gigs. And the guys that we are working with, they are typically interested in some complicated tasks. They want, they don't wanna have a small project. They, because they essentially are looking more for an employment-type relationship, but because they're outside US, they're okay with the contract that would use. Chad: Turing or HackerRank then? I mean, those are two top tier. Joel: Yeah. Doesn't have to be Upwork. Chad: Yeah, those are two top tier. So they could be in those platforms then? Alex Svinov: Oh yeah, Oh yeah, they could be. Chad: Okay. Joel: So when I go to your site and I look at Web3 developers and how many you have, they're typically around the 100 to 125-ish number. Is that what you expected to have after being in business for three years? Is it less than you would like to have as someone who doesn't do this, it feels low to me, but I want you to speak to what your perception is of how you're growing the network. Alex Svinov: Yeah, if you are talking about Web3, that's a totally new set of technologies and there is just the fact that they're if you would ask how many Rust developers do we have on our platform, it's essentially a function of how many Rust developers are out there. And there ain't many. I mean, if you would look at JavaScript, there are, there good chance there is a few million engineers all over the world. If you are talking about Rust or Solano or some other similar technology, they'll be like 10, 20,000. So that's why we don't have that many of these engineers. Joel: So okay, so Metaverse, you have 135 Metaverse has been around for 10 years. It's hot. It was really hot a few years ago, so forget about Web3. And I would feel like there'd be a lot more Metaverse developers out there. Alex Svinov: It's also the question that most of our customers are not looking for that type of engineers. Joel: Then why feature Metaverse on your website if your customers don't want Metaverse developers? Alex Svinov: Most of them don't. There are some that would ask for, but most of them want plain strong JavaScript or Python or Java or C++ engineers. So, we do, obviously we do have engineers in Metaverse and in the Blockchain space and in the Web3 space, but it's not the main source of interest for our customers these days. Chad: I'm gonna take what Joel is doing in the micro, and I'm gonna go macro. Okay. So Statistic says there's around 28 million developers in the world today, which means if you had 2%, you would have half a million developers in your platform. How many developers do you currently have in your platform? Alex Svinov: 3000. Chad: So not 2%. Alex Svinov: Not 2% of it. Chad: Okay. Alex Svinov: Of course. Chad: Okay, okay. Alex Svinov: Yeah. And my take on this is that the market is huge, right? It's very wide. Chad: Yeah. Alex Svinov: And it would be unreasonable to expect that any platform would have like 2% of the entire World market. I mean, there are certain areas in the World like Latin America where we have a very significant chunk of their say JavaScript engineers are on our platform out of all the senior engineers. But I definitely wouldn't think that we're not taking the the 2% of the entire world. Chad: Okay. Well, on your site it says our vetting process lets in only top 2% developers, right? So they also say it says get 75% interview to hire with Insquad. That's awesome. I love that. I love that. So two questions around that. What's the base number of interviews to hires you're working off on that sample set? What's the total? Alex Svinov: Right now we have over 200 engineers working with the startups, and if we're taking that over the period of two years it would have been over 300 engineers so that's the data set we have. We use the large data set. Chad: Okay. Alex Svinov: And getting back to your first question about 2% that basically means that out of the guys that get into our funnel on the top suppose we would get 200 engineers today try to apply to our platform. And the ultimately we'll get only two out of this 100 that we would put their profile on our platform so that they get matched with the projects. That's what 2% means. Chad: So they would be qualified at that point? Alex Svinov: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Chad: Okay. So how does your system know the candidate was hired? Alex Svinov: Every time when we have a company come to us and request an engineer we would sign a contract with them. We're working based on a contract with a company so... Chad: Kinda like a staffing setup? Alex Svinov: It's exactly a staffing model. Yeah, so we know everybody who was hired. Chad: Okay. Alex Svinov: Access to the platform is free unless you hire somebody. Chad: Okay, so around the product real quick you've got pre-screening, quizzes, coding challenges, recruiter interview. Is there any training that you keep in the platform to continue to help the individuals become better at what they do and more sticky to your platform? Alex Svinov: That's a very good point. We are launching this part. It's not yet there. It's got... It's due to be launched this fall. We will have a huge separate part that will take care of their training. Of their... Of taking their career path because obviously we want strong guys to stay with us for longer. So we want to make sure that their project is something that they're interested in or if they wanna try new technology we are there to help them get themselves educated and find themselves a new project. Joel: Let's talk about marketing real quick. So my perception is there's not a lot going there. You've got three blog posts that I can see on the website. Your last Instagram post was in 2022. If I click Insquad in media on your website it just takes me back to the cases page. So there's... I don't see a lot of press that you're sort of touting. What's going on marketing wise and how are you getting professionals to the site? How are you getting employers to the site? 'Cause I don't see a lot of things going on marketing wise. Alex Svinov: Yeah. As for professionals we've tried many techniques and we've seen that simple outreach works the best in a sense that we can target our audience very well because when we used marketing tools we would get a lot of entry level guys to try to go through our system and they would never pass. So the conversion ratios were real real low. So what we have then decided is we first we buy databases with the context obviously where it's legally permitted, and then we do cold outreach because in some places it's not allowed so we don't do that there. Now, and that plays out very well meaning that the guys that we outreach in many cases, they are actually they're interested in this type of an offer. As for the customers or for new clients we've found that offline events work much better than online these days. There's just too much of online content that all our target audience, the CEOs and CTOs of the startups that we're trying to target there are getting. We're participating in all sorts of offline events, conferences and that works well. Joel: It feels like a conference would be a great time to... I don't know, create content for social media. Does that not come into play with you guys? What's going on there? Alex Svinov: I fully appreciate that and that's the... I've heard these questions before. However, with what we've seen is our sales process is built on a direct B2B communication which does not require a lot of marketing. Now, once we get past the point where we see a lots of demand we use marketing like last year, and we've found that it's not as efficient because marketing helps when you have a high level of demand, and then it marketing helps you convert that potential demand into real demand on your site. What we found last year is that due to the fact that the demand has dropped direct sales are working way better. So when we go to conference we have a direct contact with our target audience. We take... We work with them and help them build their software engineering team. Joel: You're giving me the same answer so we'll move on from that. Alex Svinov: Oh, sorry. Joel: Maybe... Alex Svinov: Sorry. Joel: Maybe you could go to Upwork and get a social media manager or something... Alex Svinov: Okay. Joel: On an hourly basis. Alex Svinov: Okay. Joel: So you mentioned a series A. What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be a huge company? Do you wanna be like a lifestyle thing in central Europe and go to Berlin and Copenhagen on occasionally? What is the end goal for you on in this business? Alex Svinov: Well, I definitely wanna build it into a large business because I see this business has a very good capitalization in the sense that each and every engineer that we work with, and each and every customer that we work with typically stay with us up for a period of over two years. We have very little churn. So I see that business could be easily capitalized and style it in five years or so when it reaches good numbers. I personally have a number of 1,000 engineers that are working with our platform which is five times this from today. And it's probably gonna take us about two years to reach that number. And then it's gonna be good numbers in terms of valuation. Chad: So talk to me about staffing you are pretty much a staffing company to some extent, just more focused on online, right? Are you working with any staffing companies whatsoever? What does your go-to market look like, sales-wise, outreach, those types of things? Are you going direct to companies or you actually feeding through staffing companies to be able to supercharge their deliverable? Alex Svinov: Yeah, with us we could work with the staffing companies or we could work with the and clients. These days we have less staffing. I think we have maybe three staffing companies at all just because they're, when the market is hot everybody is trying to get engineers from anywhere, right? When it's kind of cools down it doesn't really make sense for us to go with the staffing firms because we would take up a lot of their margin or they would take up a lot of our margins. So our goal for this year and up until the point when the market, is gonna, catch up is to work directly with the customers. Chad: Okay. So pricing, I'm assuming you're going off of just a percentage of margin. What are you working off of there? Alex Svinov: Yeah. Well, our margin is included in the ultimate price of any engineer. Chad: Okay. What is it? Alex Svinov: The margin is? Chad: Yeah. Alex Svinov: Anywhere between 10% and 45%, really depending on the exact requirements and complexity of finding that particular candidate. Alex Svinov: Alright. Alex, the Q&A is over. Its time to face the firing squad. Are you ready my friend? Alex Svinov: Yes. [laughter] Joel: Okay. I'm gonna go ahead and go first. So you got the idea initially for this business in 2015-ish, correct? The idea for this business came when there was a high need for developers. There was a ton of energy when you started the company with the pandemic there was money flowing into startups. I would've loved to see more money raised in 2020 to 2022. I think it's gonna be significantly harder for you to raise that series A going forward. And the fact that it's been two years tells me there's been some hurdles to get that funding. But I also think that from the original idea of this company the world really has changed. I really do believe that Elon Musk laying off 80% of his developers or whatever that is is gonna be a trend in all kinds of companies and not just tech. Joel: We see IBM to BT to all kinds of companies talk about AI taking jobs, talking about layoffs. So I think you're gonna be, you're gonna struggle just from that fact of the world has changed because of chatGPT. I think that you're bringing a squirt gun to a Howitzer fight. We mentioned Turing and Andela not just Upwork and Fiverr and some other big companies with a lot of money, a lot of brand recognition. At best, you can be like a really laser-focused niche that does have great Web3 developers or Metaverse or like really unique kind of industries. Joel: But this also feels like a company that has sort of ran outta steam. When I look at your social media, when I look at your content online, when I see links that don't go anywhere to me that says a company that was really pumped up at first was putting out content, and has like just sort of ran outta gas. So for those three reasons for me I can't grade any other way, but the guns, oh, Chad. Chad: Whew. Okay, Alex, first and foremost, you gotta tighten up that pitch my friend. You gotta tighten up that pitch. It's gotta be tight. A white glove service sounds like your forte, and I think that's awesome. The thing is you can't scale white glove human interaction. It's really hard. Unless what? Unless you're working with an organization that has that kind of scale like a staffing organization. That's the thing is that if you want to be able to grow this is all about scale, all about scale. Not to mention, if you take a look at your outreach and how you explained it to us, the outreach that you're currently doing isn't scalable. You need more traffic at the top end of the funnel that leads down to your screening and coding challenges, you've got the system in place, you just need to feed the beast, man. You gotta feed the beast. Chad: But manual outreach is not your friend, and it will never be your friend. I love the idea of going out to events and doing those types of things to get the word out there, especially in the community. One thing you're missing a huge gap in the market, especially right now. Joel talked about all the AI taking jobs, blah, blah, blah. Whether that's true or it's not true, doesn't fucking matter, man. What matters is that everybody's hearing it and they know they need to train, they need training, and they need it now. Chad: It's one of the things that GitHub's doing, HackerRank 's doing. A lot of these organizations are already doing Andela, which Joel just mentioned. They're feeding the beast in training a whole country [laughter] and trying to get this done scale. They're doing this with scale. So everything that you've hit, I agree with Joel with regard to two years ago. I think it would've been an easy big applause, but unfortunately, you're too late. It feels like you're bringing a horse to the Indy 500. You're a little bit too slow. Hopefully, hopefully you can get some funding. You can supercharge some of those areas like training and then also outreach and then you can explode. But until then, I hope you come back and you prove us wrong. But until then, my friend, you're getting the guns ouch. Joel: Sorry, Alex. Alex Svinov: Oh, no problem. [laughter] Joel: No problem. Well, we appreciate you being on the show. We appreciate you answering our questions. For our listeners out there that do wanna know more about Insquad, and the company, where would you send them? Alex Svinov: The best way to reach out to us is to contact me on the LinkedIn A-L-E-X S-V-I-N-O-V. And we'll continue communication there. Joel: You can also go to insquad.com. See I'm helping you with your marketing though, Alex, a little bit. [laughter] We do hope you come back and prove us wrong. But until then, Alex, it sounds like you have your work cut out for you. Chad, that's another one in the Can we out? 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.chadcheese.com.

Tech teams must have a little time on their hands. Either that, or they’re abnormally inspired after a spring of big tech layoffs. OK, maybe both. Anyway, LinkedIn is apparently launching new A.I. features for job seekers and Rippling is getting into the ATS game. Other than that, the boys discuss Yellow trucking’s epic crash, chatbots like Paradox landing in Forbes' penalty box and Tom Brady beefing up his resume and investment portfolio. Throw in the beginning of the NFL season and marriage advice from porn star Mia Khalifa and you’ve got one helluva show. TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. INTRO: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. It's International Beer Day. Do I really need to follow that up with anything? Chad: No. Joel: No, I don't think so. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Foggy Geezer Cheeseman. Chad: And this is Chad Warpigs Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, LinkedIn coaches yellow trucking crashes. And Tom Brady is jumping into football. Or is it pronounced football? Chad: Football. Joel: Let's do this. Joel: Dude, you got an MRI today. What? Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel: That old high school... The Al Bundy. Chad: Of tennis. Years of tennis, now starting to play paddle ball when we're in Europe. And I gotta say, I was so pissed. The American healthcare system is for fucking shit. I had to pay $850 for an MRI. We pay a shit ton of cash every month for insurance. Plus, you have out-of-pocket and you have your co-pays. And it's like, Jesus Christ, man, why don't we just put all these into one tax, throw it somewhere, and then we just go have a buffet of healthcare? How about that? How about we do that? Joel: But all the profits, Chad. All the profits. Chad: I'm just gonna rack up more Delta miles on this one. Jesus. Joel: That'll teach you... That'll show you for playing paddle ball, whatever the hell that is. Don't pick up pickleball, goddammit. Chad: But think of it though, for most people, they can't afford that kind of cash just to take care of something, especially if this was even worse. Didn't show up on an x-ray. Had to do an MRI. So, most people can't afford that. And to me, waking up, having my coffee, and then getting smacked in the face with that, that was not a good way to start the day. [laughter] Joel: Sure. And then you wonder why everyone's dropping fentanyl, because they got a lot of pain that they gotta deal with and don't wanna deal with the expenses of that. Chad: The pain's gonna happen tonight though, kids. [laughter] Joel: Okay. S3: What are you doing, step bro? Chad: Not talking about Julie. She's not into that kind of stuff. Talking about NFL football, baby. We are both stoked that it is back. We have preseason football tonight with Browns versus Jets, and I have... And I think anybody who listens to this podcast, I don't choose NFL teams. I'm a big college fan, and when they come, those players come to the NFL. I like watching the players. I like watching the Buckeye players. So tonight, I'll be watching Garrett Wilson very closely. So, go Jets. Joel: Did you say Browns? [music] Joel: Did you say Browns were on tonight? Oh, oh. Chad: Never have the Browns been sexy. There's never been a time. There's never been a time. Joel: But YouTube viewers will notice my lovely Browns T-shirt... Chad: Oh, that is... Yeah. Joel: That I have on tonight, to commemorate, I think, a very good season this year. I think it's gonna be... I say that every season, but it's gonna be a good season. I can feel it. Chad: You say that every season. I'mma be watching me some Justin Fields again, it's Buckeyes all over the NFL, which gives me an opportunity to watch every team and just enjoy it. Joel: Speaking of college football, did you see the word is Oregon and Washington are looking to join the Big 10? It's gonna be Coke and Pepsi in college football. And allegedly... Chad: Wow. Joel: Clemson, Florida State and maybe Miami will be joining the SEC when they open up again. It really is gonna be like a two-tiered system and it has the have and the have nots, everyone under that. Chad: Exactly. Well, and it's gonna be a sticky situation for the NCAA because these conferences are getting so big. They could actually just go ahead and secede from NCAA. And they've already talked about this, right? So having their own system with their own players, for their own university. So, this could be interesting. Joel: It's essentially the pros. Coaches are making eight figures. NIL students are making millions of dollars. Players are making millions of dollars. Chad: Not all of them though. Yeah. Joel: No. That's why you're gonna have the haves and the have nots. And the best are gonna be in the best league and everybody else will be... Chad: That's unfortunate. Joel: I don't know, getting an endorsement from Nikki's Ford dealership, [laughter] down on Main Street in Toledo, I guess. Chad: From your local State Farm representative, yes. [laughter] Joel: The little league team sponsored by... Chad: Yes, exactly. Joel: Joey Bagadonuts football player. Chad: Oh my God. Very nice. Joel: Well, someone who should be getting sponsored and has gotten some attention by a lot of our listeners is former porn star, [laughter] Mia Khalifa Chad. That's right. We don't just do employment topics here. We're also interested in the personal growth of our listeners, including marriage advice. And what better person to give marriage advice than a former porn queen. She's trending this week for giving the following advice. Take a listen. S5: Oh, we're comparing stats. Baby girl doesn't know that I am Tom Brady at this game. Married at 18, divorced at 21. Second marriage, married at 25, divorced at 28. Third engagement, engaged at 29, ended it at 30, but I kept the ring. I'm still keeping Tom Brady on his toes. We should not be afraid to leave these men. We are not stuck with these people. Marriage is not a sanctimonious thing. It is paperwork. It's a commitment you make to someone. But if you feel like you're not getting anything from that commitment, and you're trying, you gotta go. You gotta go. You have to go. Joel: Clearly someone who doesn't have kids in any of these three previous marriages. Because you can't just do that shit with kids. But anyway, I feel like this is a generational opinion, and a generation that just swipes left and right and orders their date for the evening has this mentality of like, "Eh, I'm unhappy. It's easy to get somebody else. I'm outta here." But to think of marriage as paperwork, you're getting into it for the wrong reasons. Chad: It's like religion in some cases. Everybody's gonna have their own belief systems and how they work with relationships and religion and all these things. Take whatever you want from that porn star advice, whoever, right? I think I'll look other places. Joel: And another reason why the sex robots will be taking over in the near future, because of that mentality. Chad: Back to industry stuff. So Skillit, a New York City-based, data-driven recruiting platform for full-time construction labor has secured 8.5 million in additional funding, listed as pretty much an extension to a seed round. Stay tuned, kids, because we are supposed to have Skillit on the firing squad in the coming weeks, so I can't wait to talk to these guys about what they're doing in construction, hiring, and also what they're gonna do with that money. Joel: When you said "Skillit," I thought we were meeting for breakfast, for some egg skillets, some peasant potatoes, some chorizo, maybe. Some things I like in my skillets. Chad: Chorizo. Joel: I don't know what you like in yours. But, Chad, I know what a lot of people like is free shit in their mailbox, at their doorstep. And I have to recognize the fact that a lot of our listeners are posting on LinkedIn, sharing their shirts, sharing their booze. It's a warm and fuzzy feeling. If you're not part of the club, people. Chad: Come on. Joel: You gotta go to chadcheese.com, click that free link, give us your information. We'll send you a t-shirt from JobGet, and you could potentially win a whiskey from our friends at Textkernel, beer from the folks at Aspen Tech Labs. We're doing Airbnb gift cards to the tune of $250 from our friends at Abode. Am I missing anyone? Am I missing anyone? Chad: I don't think so. Joel: No, I think I got it all, man. And while you're there... Chad: That's a lot. Joel: Go to the podcast platform of your choice and give us a review. If you listen to us, watch us, and if you're on YouTube, make sure you subscribe and tune in to our videos because those are trending as well. Not like Mia Khalifa's wedding advice... Chad: Pretty face. Joel: But trending nonetheless. [chuckle] Chad: You got birthdays. Joel: There we go. S6: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums. [laughter] Joel: Alright, Chad, you know what that means. Another group of listeners celebrating another trip around the sun. That includes Wendy Daly, Kim Bates, Christy Kelling, Stephanie Pendrys, Michael Malady, Sally Millet, Christopher Cleland, Micah Clark, Neil Costa, Marc Coleman of Unleash fame, Brendan Cruickshank, Cyndi Peterson Hash, and Jessica Lee. Everybody. Chad: Yes. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Happy birthday. We love you. We love you. Chad: You know what time it is, kids. That's right. Events powered by the Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right. So, we have RecFest coming up in Nashville on September 13th where we're taking the Disrupt stage all day to talk about recruiting in technology. And we're doing it with special guests. Get ready. Special guests, Allyn Bailey and Tracy Parsons from the Talent Rebel Cast podcast, and Shelley Billinghurst and Serge Bougereau from the... Joel: RecFlex. Chad: The RecFlex. It's gonna be a star-studded day on the Disrupt stage in Nashville in September, except for Serge. We're letting him come on. He's not stars at all. 50% discount on this show, kids, why? Because we want you to bring everybody. This is a all-hands talent acquisition team scenario. So bring one, bring all. Go to chadcheese.com/events or just click 'Events' in the upper right-hand corner. Then, Gems 2023 Virtual Talent Summit where you will find Joel and I, where we're gonna be joined by Commissioner of the EEOC, Keith Sonderling, and NYU professor, PhD Mona Sloane to talk about AI's ability to unlock recruiting efficiencies, the trials, tribulations, and reasons why or why not the recruitment community should embrace AI. Chad: Now, watch out, kids. Look for the golden ticket, because we're going to have a pre-recording party, which means you're gonna be invited to the actual recording to interact. This is a virtual event, but we're going to invite a scarce amount of people to come and enjoy and interact with us. And also, again, EEOC Commissioner Sonderling and Professor Sloane. So, that's happening for the Gem event. HR Tech then happens at Mandalay Bay, 10th through the 13th of October. Man, we're gonna be in the expo hall for two solid days with Fuel50. Two days, eating, drinking, interviewing, and who knows what all the hell else we're gonna be doing with them. But thanks, Fuel50, for allowing us to crash at their place in Vegas during the biggest HR Tech show in the industry. Then we've got three days. We're gonna be on a plane to Paris, to go to a staple of a show, UNLEASH Paris, UNLEASH World. SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Chad: It's an amazing show. If you're in Europe, you've gotta be there. There's no question. If you're in the US and maybe you're not going to HR Tech, or maybe you are and you wanna make the crazy flight like Joel and I are, go to chadcheese.com/events, or just go to chadcheese.com in the upper right-hand corner. Click on 'Events,' register, register, register. We wanna see you there. Joel: By the way, you mentioned Serge and Shelley. Somebody make sure they're not on the ledge. Word is that Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada... Chad: What? Joel: Is separating from his wife, so... SFX: Take off what you were doing in our movie. Don't wreck our show, you hoser. Joel: Little love for the Canadians. Make sure they're alright, everybody. [music] Chad: TOPICS! Joel: Alright, let's start with LinkedIn, shall we? They're reportedly developing an AI coach for job seekers to expand its presence in the recruitment segment, which contributes to half of the company's revenue. The AI coach, known as "LinkedIn coach," I wonder how long the marketing team worked on that one, will assist users in applying for jobs, acquiring new skills, and expanding their network using the power of AI. The tool will suggest questions and aid users in finding and applying for jobs through conversational interactions, also known as a ChatBot. Chad, what are your thoughts on this news outta LinkedIn? Chad: I've said it once and I will say it again. LinkedIn has more career information, content and intent for me than any other social or hiring platform that's out there. And they still cannot do basic matching on jobs. They still can't do it. The problem, they have a 20-year-old infrastructure being flooded with new... That's right, kids. Air quotes. New features, while a wave of tech debt slaps them in the face every morning. And now, they want to get into coaching. All of their tech is disparate for the most part, and a good amount is old. They don't need new products and services, they need to modernize what they have and shore up the data foothold as Microsoft, generative AI, gets ready to consume user data and advise users. So this feels like Microsoft is really just trying to pressure and push this down the throat of LinkedIn. Chad: And I'm sure there are very many people on the product team that are incredibly overzealous about this, but here's an example of what I mean. LinkedIn launched an AI chat feature, and here's a quote from a story. "I used LinkedIn's new AI chat feature to message people about job opportunities. It saved time, but was very generic and kept getting my experience wrong." Getting my experience wrong. You've got it right there. How are you taking these basic data points and fucking things up? I just don't trust LinkedIn. SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Chad: I don't give them 60%. Joel: So, this is what... Alright, this is Chad's take then, on the news. This is what happens when your parent company drops a billion dollar investment on something called OpenAI. AI is infiltrating everything Microsoft, and I guarantee you, someone on high said, "Okay, LinkedIn, you need and must integrate this shit ASAP, into whatever." Someone said, "Oh, we already have this LinkedIn coaching thing," which by the way, apparently has over a million users. LinkedIn is like 930 million people strong, by the way. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So roughly 1% are using this current coach. We'll see how many use the new iteration of the coach. But this is just generally ChatGPT looking at the information that LinkedIn already has. I'm sure it's gonna recommend jobs, it's gonna help you through your job search. Now, the one thing that I do think is interesting here is I've been talking a lot about ChatGPTs and Bard and the threat to Glassdoor and any kind of review site. And one of the questions some Twitter... Some tweet or X or whatever, I think, shared this screenshot, was the question of, what is the culture like at Microsoft? Was the sample question. That's essentially asking, what are the reviews like working at this company? And just like I've said at Bard or ChatGPT, you can ask, "Hey, what's it like to work at Wells Fargo or Salesforce?" And it will show you an answer based on stuff that's on the internet. It'll give you pros and cons. It'll give you a summary. So if I were Glassdoor and Indeed and Blind, maybe some of these others, that is another sort of nail in the coffin to say, if this thing gets integrated to any extent in LinkedIn and LinkedIn's nearly billion users kind of get access to this, what does it mean to us and our reviews? Joel: Now, the irony in this is, is ChatGPT and Bard get their answers largely from the content that's on Glassdoor and Indeed and other review sites. So if at some point they shut that data off, which I think they should, or Monster should have shut off Indeed when they had the chance. All these companies should shut off ChatGPT and other large learning models from getting into their content. Otherwise, you're just gonna be able to go to any search engine, any voice search, ask what it's like to work at a company, it's gonna use your content to do that. Look, I think this is something that LinkedIn had to do as a Microsoft company. Time will tell. They're not confirming the existence of this thing. There are screenshots out there, this may be a small beta test to see how people use it. It may not be, ready for prime time anytime soon. But they've gotta go this way. They've gotta go to AI, they've gotta go to Chat... Chad: I agree. Joel: They've gotta go where everyone else is going. Chad: Yes. Joel: Your point is, historically, they're really bad at it. Chad: They've got 20-year-old technology. They need to rebuild the rails so they're ready for the next generation. The next generation's here. They're not ready for it. I mean, that's the problem that I have. I would love to see LinkedIn kick ass, take names. But the problem is they are, like many organizations, they are stuck on this old ass infrastructure, and it's going to cost a lot of money... Don't get me wrong, I get it. It's gonna cost a lot of money to rebuild, but they've got to do it. It's either now or the shit just implodes on itself. Joel: They're Model T in a Tesla world, Chad. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let's talk about some new tech company called Rippling is getting into the ATS game. Does the world need another ATS? I guess we will find out. The company has launched Rippling Recruiting. Again, another one for the marketing department to score one. A new applicant tracking system aimed at streamlining and automating the hiring process. Rippling says their offering relieves common pain points in recruiting, such as limited access to tools and data for recruiters and hiring managers, lack of configurability in existing ATS platforms, data discrepancies due to disconnected systems. And alignment issues between headcount planning, recruiting and the HRIS. All common complaints from people who have an ATS. Chad, what's your take on Rippling getting into the ATS game? Chad: Well, I'm a big fan of a company keeping it simple, and Rippling Recruiting says what it is. There you have it. Nice day. Right? There you go. I love it. I hate it when companies and brands over-engineer new products. It's fucking ridiculous. So I give the name an A+. Rippling has taken over a billion dollars, US, in funding, 1.2 to be exact, and some of that was during the SVB debacle in March earlier this year, where Rippling took advantage of a crisis by grabbing another 500 million in Series E funding. So this move makes sense because Rippling needs to expand their total addressable market, and moving up the funnel is the easiest way to do so. The problem with that move is pretty simple. Name an HRIS that has an innovative recruiting solution that everybody wants. Joel: There isn't one. Chad: But why is that simple? The HRIS system, they're a stack within themselves, with payroll, onboarding, time and attendance benefits, and the list just keeps going. And the thing is all of the attention and all the noise happens on that side. Right? And all the money is spent on the HRIS side of the house, which means anything that's recruiting right out of the gate, I'm gonna predict that there are gonna be a ton of Rippling customers that are fans of this, but then the tech is just gonna atrophy very quickly, because it's not gonna get the time and attention that it needs. That's why every HRIS system that's out there, that has recruiting; ADP, SAP, UKG, name your fucking acronym, they all have shitty recruiting platforms because it doesn't get the time, attention and money that it needs. So, yes, it makes sense as you have this huge valuation and all this money to be able to expand your footprint, but going this way, to me, it makes sense, but it's not gonna be a great platform. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I've taken crazy pills. Joel: I don't think iCIMS is losing a lot of sleep over this news. They probably didn't when LinkedIn launched an ATS. But the growing sentiment is that ATS's are commodities, it's pretty simple to put data in database, make it searchable, create this, I guess, official log of who's applied to your company, and as a result, people think they can just plug and play. "Yes, we have an ATS. Yes, you can use that." And this battle for one platform to rule them all is still ongoing. Look, Paradox launched an ATS not that long ago. In addition to being a commodity, I think there's some real threat to companies feeling like, "If ATS X buys my competitor, I'm eventually gonna get squeezed out of that ATS." We talked about Canvas getting bought and being squeezed out of iCIMS who bought Text Recruiting a few years before that. I think there's some real fear of a lot of companies saying, "We don't wanna get squeezed out by said ATS, so we need to create our own system, our own platform that people can use our ATS, and we don't have to worry about being part of another ATS. Or, if there's a threat there, we're prepared for it." Joel: I think that we're seeing this with even Appcast and Bayard. Chris Forman, founder of Appcast is currently on a charm offensive apparently to sort of temper people's other agencies' fear that their Appcast is gonna cut them out of the deals, or just be a Bayard shop or become a competitor. And I think that sort of charm offensive is due because a lot of people are just on edge that, if it's not our tech, we're gonna get squeezed out and we're gonna be left behind. So if ATS is a commodity, people think it's easy to implement, maybe customers care, don't care how good it is, but companies more and more feel like they need to have it, and I think you're gonna see... Fountain is an ATS that became a chatbot, right? Or has a chatbot. So you're gonna see this bleeding into feature sets, everybody's got everything. It's probably gonna be a lot of mediocre products, quite honestly, although most of our customers in our space aren't super sticklers about, it's gotta be really good. It's more like, check it off the checklist that I can tell my manager, my boss, that, yes, we have that. Joel: So I think it's something that they had to do. I think you're right in saying that it will get neglected, people will get bored with it, it'll get shittier and shittier every passing year. But it is something that they had to do, and I think this will continue to be a trend, like, "We got an ATS too, everybody's got an ATS," just like everybody's got a chatbot, everybody's mobile, everybody's got search engine-optimized jobs. This is just another me too that we're gonna be talking about on the show. Chad: I think this is more for investors than it is anything else, but there's no way that Rippling is gonna be a best-in-breed solution, number one. So don't expect that to happen. And when we're talking about the Chris Formans of the world, I think it's awesome. He is definitely on a charm offensive right now, but the big question is, what happens when Chris leaves, what happens when he ejects to his private island in his super yacht? That's the thing, is that we have to understand that this is a much longer and much deeper relationship than just one person. Right? And in this case, from a Rippling standpoint, they have a lot of money, they do have to grow somehow, so yes, you're going to see this, it's gonna be something where, again, the Workdays have done it, everybody's done it, so it's gonna be a fight that many talent acquisition professionals are going to have to say when they say, "I don't want that piece of shit, we want something that's best-in-breed." So it's something we've been fighting for years. We will have to continue to do that. Joel: Yeah, it's a great point you make in terms of, look, Rippling has a ton of the investment money, the investors sit in a room and they go, "How do we add a billion dollars of value to this company?" And someone says, "Let's be an ATS, they're worth billions." And someone says, "Sure, let's take a piece of that." And they go, "How long will it take to build?" And they say, "Well, not that long. It's kind of been out there." And then they build it and they think, like, Oh, this is gonna add a billion dollars of value to the company. It's like Handshake saying, "We're taking on LinkedIn." Investors wanna hear big plans, and, "Hey, we're gonna compete with iCIMS and Workday and everybody else," is certainly a way to do that and pacify the investors. Joel: Alright, Chad, this is from Forbes. Chatbots are increasingly being used by companies to interview and screen job applicants, often for blue collar jobs, but like other algorithmic hiring tools before them, experts and job applicants worry these tools could be biased. Legislation is even being introduced to regulate their use. And fatigue may be becoming an issue with one job seeker saying, if they had to text with a chatbot for every job they applied to, it would be a "pain in the ass." The inevitable pushback against the chatbots. Chad, what's your take? Is the honeymoon over? Chad: Yeah. I don't think those job seekers ever applied for a job before in their life, because if they had to go from applicant tracking system form to form to form, it's even worse. So here's the question we need to ask ourselves. Was the application process, interview scheduling, and just overall hiring experience better when only humans were at the helm? The answer, it's a resounding fuck no. Humans are the most biased machine in the world. Candidates entered a black hole with no communication after they hit the apply page and hit submit. And bad managers are bad managers with or without AI. Doesn't matter, right? So why was all of this a problem before? Scalability. Humans don't scale. We talk about it all the time, which is why unconscious, biased, or just plain full-on biased black holes, overworked staff and the reason why advanced processes in tech can be the answer to literally a better experience and less bias. So this piece, to me, it felt like a hit piece almost. It focuses on one experience in very anecdotal tale. Really one data point, let's say. The last time we talked to the team over at Paradox, they were getting a 98% good experience rating from candidates. Chad: And that's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of data points. So it's important that we understand that before AI, chatbots, RPA and other tech, we had major issues. And those issues were the issues of the humans' inability to scale well and fast. So many of the platforms out there today are demonstrating better candidate and recruiting experiences because candidates aren't entering a black hole and recruiters aren't performing bullshit and mundane tasks. This is a pain point that we're going to have to push through. Mainly, most of these issues, I'm going to say, were human setup problems and/or managers just didn't... And I think you even have a great story aroundCole, where he showed up at one of these stores and they're like, "Yeah, you're not on the schedule." I mean, it happened before chatbots, guys. Joel: Yeah. This didn't go very deep, Chad. SFX: Just the tip. Chad: Yeah. No. Joel: Here's my theory. Journalists are getting laid off left and right. This writer was probably looking for a job, ran into a chatbot at some point and said, "Hey, I should write about this. And how can I put a negative spin on it?" And thus, we get the lost resume scheduled without knowing I was coming. Basic glitchy, buggy kind of things that all tech goes through, chatbot even more so than others, 'cause you're dealing with a lot of moving pieces with text messaging and web... Regular... There's a lot of things going on there. Yeah. How many times before the internet did resumes get thrown in the trash, lost in the mail? Somebody's ass was wiped with a resume at some point, I'm sure, in history. So this thing's been going on forever. I don't know how they found the specific people that were like, "I didn't get scheduled, something happened." Now, it did say that they'd reached out to Paradox for a comment, and I wish Paradox would've commented. Maybe they didn't get time to do so. They even brought about an Australian example with Sapia. Chad: Which is entirely different, by the way. I mean, they're talking about application process and then they flip over into AI assessments, and it's like, Jesus Christ, you guys have no fucking... And that's a thing. We see so many "experts" in this space who literally have no fucking practical experience and/or knowledge. They might be an academic who works with AI, but they have no clue of the practical application, how it should actually work. So, anyway. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Look, this writer went to the editor and said, "I wanna write a story on chatbots and how they're biased," 'cause they did a search on legislation and found Illinois and found New York. And I'll find some people that talk badly about it. It's kind of new tech. It's timely, it's negative. People will click on it, people will share it. And that's what drives a lot of the media, including podcasts in some cases, Chad. Sometimes, that's what pushes us. But yeah, little bit of a hit piece. Not much to see here, in my opinion. Chad: No. Joel: Hopefully a lot of government officials don't read this and say, "Oh shit, chatbots are the devil. We need to create some new legislation to cut them down." Because I will tell you that from Cole's perspective, chatbot versus no much more amenable to doing chatbots than hoping for the best. Chad: Exactly. Joel: And speaking of hoping for the best, Chad. Chad: Oh God, let's hope. Joel: Yeah. Yellow Corp, a trucking business that's been around for 99 years has ceased operations and will lay off all of its 30,000 workers. Union conflicts, financial troubles, and a significant amount of debt contributed to the shutdown. In addition to the company's closure impacting employees, shareholders and customers, the US taxpayer who provided a $700 million loan during the pandemic will also get a kick in the groin. Chad, your thoughts on the Yellow news? Chad: So, just running down through all of the shit show, which is this Yellow trucking company. In 2019, Yellow lost more than $100 million. They were $1.5 billion, ba ba billion dollars in debt. 700 million in PPP loans from the US government. In return, the treasury took a 30% stake in the company. And with Yellow Corporation reported assets being 2.5 billion, as a shareholder and debt owner, the US government's gonna get paid back, period. Okay? That's not gonna be a problem. So the whole kick in the nuts thing is total bullshit. The most fantastical point, I think, is that 30,000 employees will be jobless. Not a chance in hell. That happens as trucking and logistics companies have desperately needed talent for years. My prediction is that most of these people will be in new and like jobs at competitors, within 30 days. If I were a competitor, I'd already be aggressively marketing to these people, and also meeting with the teamsters. This is where you need to have all those cylinders going, because there are 30,000 people that are out there, and you want the best talent that you can get. And we know that in trucking and logistics, there's a major shortfall, and Yellow represents about 7% of the actual market. So, who's gonna cover that? Joel: It's safe to say a lot of people are seeing red over yellow, Chad. Sorry. Sorry. I could not resist. Chad: Horrible, horrible. For sure. Joel: Yeah. Look, the narrative that people are trying to spin here is either, this is a canary in the coal mine for the US economy as a whole... Chad: No. Joel: Or, unions are awful, that's why this company went to shit. Chad: No. Joel: This is a horribly run company. Chad: Yes. Joel: It's a hundred years old of... I don't know how they survived a hundred years, other than the fact that trucking is a really important business and it's hard to lose money. Although they did, but also stayed in business. Oddly enough, there's a huge short squeeze on their stock right now and it's up 80 some percent. Don't get into it, people. Don't take financial advice and trade this shit. Chad: No, no. Joel: But the stock is going bonkers. Chad: Wow. Joel: It's gotta be a poach fest. Everyone who wants truckers has got to be on the phone, mass marketing to these people, 'cause that's 30,000 folks that are gonna have a job in 30 days, unless they don't want a job. But look, this is not the union's fault. This is not a canary in the coal mine of the US economy. This is a shitty, shitty business. And if you're in the trucking industry, you should be poaching your ass off for the next 30 days, to get these folks into your company. Chad: A badly run failing company shouldn't be confused with a teamster problem or a federal government problem or an economic problem. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. By the way, trucking is not my lane, and I don't think it's yours. But these guys are also like... [laughter] Chad: Get it. Joel: I guess they're called light load trucks, where they don't fill up the whole truck. Chad: No, I hear you. No, I hear you. Yeah. Joel: It could be half full, so when gas went up and they're light load... What did I say? Anyway. I got a light load. Chad: I think that's a problem with Americans today. We wanna have it now. We wanna have it yesterday, so therefore we have to actually do that bullshit shipping. We have to get rid of the expectation of next day. It's all there is to it. If you want it, then you've gotta go out on the local market. Don't go to Amazon and think you're gonna get it tomorrow. Too fucking bad. And these companies like Yellow, that's exactly what they were doing. They were doing light load, short loads and it was hurting them every single year, but they kept doing it. Joel: Yeah. It's that kind of mentality that'll force you into divorce after two years, Chad. Go back to Mia Khalifa. [laughter] That's where it all goes. And by the way, I don't think we talked about the Teamsters' win at UPS. Right? They wanted air conditioning and something else, right? Chad: Yeah, how hard was that? Joel: Pretty fair stuff. By the way, Jimmy Hoffa from Indiana, I don't know if you knew that or not. [laughter] Tom Brady, however, is not from Indiana. Chad: More to come. Joel: Alright. Let's talk about Michigan alumni, not even an argument, the best quarterback of all time, I think. I mean, have fun with that. Chad: Yeah. Unfortunately. Joel: NFL legend, Tom Brady, has become a minority owner of English Soccer Club, or is that Football club? Birmingham, I think it's pronounced Birmingham City. He will be the chairman of the advisory board, applying his leadership and expertise to various aspects of the Club. Brady, who retired from the NFL last year is the second former NFL star to invest in English football in recent months. Here's a chance to talk about Wrexham and Chad's bromance with Ryan Reynolds. Chad, I go to you for all my football commentary. What are your thoughts on Tom's move? Chad: Brady apparently didn't get the memo. He's not following the Wrexham recipe. I mean, why pay for a stake in a championship league team, which is just below Premier League, when you can go directly to the bottom and buy the entire fucking team? Get a Netflix or a Hulu series deal, and then follow the Wrexham recipe. That was one of the... I think one of the amazing moments is when that came out, when the welcome to Wrexham came out, and we watched, literally watched Marketing and Business 101, and it was amazing. I think they bought the team for... I mean, it was bargain basement, for goodness sakes. Joel: Two and a half million, I think? Chad: Two years. Two years later, they go up a league. And they're playing teams in actually the championship league and beating them. So why, again, Tom Brady, why don't you pay attention to the actual winning recipes that are out there? But it just doesn't make any sense. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: Let's give Tom a little break. He's single now, so there are plenty of 18-year-old supermodels to date. And he doesn't have time to manage a whole soccer team. Chad: He can pay somebody to do that. Joel: Apparently, owning a sports team or a media company is the new rich thing to do. Or I guess if you're really, really rich, you send rockets into space. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I find this really fascinating. Soccer football offers you the opportunity... Correct me if I'm wrong, but Premier League, if you're in the bottom four, you go down a league and then the top four in the next league go up. Is that correct? Chad: There's the relegation that happens. Joel: Relegation, this is all about relegation. So if you can invest down here and get a team up here, the value goes up. I don't know what, a hundred x? It's... Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: Particularly if you get to the Premier League, it's... Chad: Like buying a stock when it's low. Joel: Yeah, exactly. Whereas you can't do that in the NFL. You can't do that in baseball. Chad: No. Joel: You can maybe do it in some minor league teams or new leagues. I think that's why Pickleball is getting so much interest, 'cause if that thing takes off, then you really were on the bottom floor of that. But I think it's so intriguing to own this relegation system where you get in low, you buy low, you use your celebrity and your money to get good players, build a fan base, sell a lot of shit 'cause you're now part of this. If you get bumped up... I mean, how far is Wrexham from the Premier League? Two leagues or something? Chad: They're still... No. Still, I think, four leagues. They're either three or four leagues, so they're still on the rise, right? Joel: This whole ecosystem lends itself to like, oh, come in, use your stardom, spend some money, get better, get up a league and then your team is worth 10 times more than it was. And then you can sell, you can continue to play the game. I think it's all very intriguing and I think more and more stars and money people will do this. And by the way, that's why Chad and Cheese... You're learning about this now, Chad. Chad and Cheese are the newest investors in the Ohio aviators of the ACL, also known as the American Cornhole League, Chad. [laughter] That's right. We're now owners of a Cornhole team. Happy International Beer Day, everybody. We out! Chad: We out! Outro: Wow! Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or, maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Europeans are well-known for taking a long break from work in the summer, but if you think the world of work has taken a break, think again. On this episode, the boys cover the Appcast acquisition of Bayard from a European point of view, and how Stepstone (might) play a part in this game of chess. France has also been a full plate of work related activities and challenges, which get covered. If you love buy-or-sell, we have a robust line-up, and a hotly debated group of startups, including inploi, Propel, Settly, Zelt and Neople … no, not Nipple, you sicko … Neople. You gotta love technology people :) 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. [music] Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. It's International Clown Week, so there's no better time to listen to the Chad and Cheese show with our friend Lieven. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast as Europe, I'm your co-host, Joel Wemby Cheesman. Chad: It is Chad, tease me please, me Sowash. Lieven: And this is Lieven, get without saving for you and Harrison. Joel: And on this episode, the Appcast acquisition from a Euro point of view, what the hell is up with France, and a super buy or sell? Let's do this. What's up, boys? Chad: It's been a minute. Joel: Summer of Lieven. He's either in Switzerland herding goats, or he is in a... [laughter] Chad: It's a hot Lieven summer. Joel: It is a hot Lieven summer, man. What you been up to, Lieven? Lieven: In fact, it's not that hot here. I mean, they've been promising me global warming for years now but in Belgium it's still fucking cold. Chad: Yeah, we're getting that, okay? We're getting that, so it's happening just not with you. Lieven: No, in Belgium it stays, we're running behind again. Joel: Well, Chad and I were, Chad and I were lucky enough, the private jet brought Lieven to Knebworth for 10 minutes, and that was fun. Did you have fun in Knebworth? Your short period in England, did you have any takeaways from RecFest? Lieven: I did in fact, I must say I was impressed because you wrung my arm to be there and I came and I looked around, yeah, it was fun. [laughter] Lieven: It's actually something I think we should copy at House of HR. We also have our own festival. We invite our own colleagues. It's like 5500 people. But we also have a HR Congress, and I think RecFest is like combining both. So if we spend tons of money on a festival, why not also host our own conference on a festival venue like RecFest is? Chad: Especially with all your brands, I mean, you could literally do what RecFest does, right? It's different because it's House of HR centric. You could do that with all your 50 plus brands, have all your employees there. So it would be a big carnival. It would be, I mean, that would be pretty awesome. Like RecFest but obviously different. Joel: What would the Belgian Ferris Wheel be? [laughter] Joel: We know it's a mechanical bull in Nashville. What would... Chad: A keg? Joel: A keg, yeah. A keg of Duvel. [laughter] Lieven: And if you drink enough you get a job, something like that. [laughter] Lieven: Okay. It could work, it could work. Joel: I like it. I like it. Well, let's get to... S?: Shout outs. Chad: Shout outs. Okay, let me go first. Joel: All right. Chad: This is a, We've all been waiting for this one, Kids. Okay, maybe not all of us. But shout out to Adam Gordon, who today, August 1st announced a tease to a new recruitment tech company and he's bringing Mike Hughes along. Many of you might not know Mike but we're gonna get him on the show. The guy is literally one of the AI touring types of guys. So he's incredibly smart. We're talking a lot about AI these days. Adam has been doing a shit ton around recruiter enablement, so I kind of have an idea of where this could prospectively go on, but we've been teased, not pleased yet. Joel: It's called poetry or something. Chad: Yes. Joel: Poetry, HR. Oh, that just sounds like a great, great endeavor. By the way, someone check out the iCIMS, Canada ID acquisition. I'm guessing it was exactly 366 days from the time that Adam announced that he's starting a new TA company. Chad: Yeah, I think it has to do with him when he left. I think that has to do with separation more than it has to do with that. Joel: Sure. I'm just saying, the clock is probably pretty exact to the moment... Chad: Well, yeah, of course. Joel: When He could start talking about some shit. Chad: Duh. Joel: All right, all right. My shout out, the name Victor Wembanyama might not mean anything to anybody, they might've known him... Chad: Excuse me? Joel: As Wemby, but in case you missed it, the number one pick in the recent NBA, that's professional basketball, in case you didn't know Lieven, is a 7'4" French teenager going to San Antonio. Historically, 7'4" inch players just look pretty goofy and uncoordinated, but this kid plays like he's a 6'8" young Charles Barkley. He can shoot from anywhere, he can pass, he plays D unless the dude snaps in two, from a hard foul. [laughter] Joel: He's the best thing I've seen... Chad: What do you mean? Joel: Since LeBron and he's from freaking France, not exactly a hotbed of basketball legends. Chad: They have tall people though. Joel: Yeah. By the way... [laughter] Joel: The third pick by the Spurs was another Frenchman. So San Antonio is quickly Becoming Paris South or Paris, Texas, which there is a Paris, Texas. Chad: Francais. Joel: Anyway, keeping on this guy, France is now known for wine, croissants, fashion and basketball. Chad: Rebellion, don't forget about that one. They're known, they do better... Joel: Oh, that's later in the show, Chad. Don't worry. Chad: Better than anything the French do rebellion, yes. And if you remember Shaquille O'Neal, when he came out of LSU he was a man playing a child's game in the NCAA. He came to the NBA, it didn't change, right? It did not change. So I'm interested and can't wait to see what this kid brings to the NBA. Joel: If Shaq could shoot like Steph Curry, he might be Wemby... [laughter] Joel: This kid is ridiculous. Chad: From downtown, Okay. Joel: And he's 3 inches taller than Shaq. Chad: Yeah. Well, that meant nothing, Shaq was 300 plus and broke backboards. Joel: Oh, yeah, Shaq could break this guy in two... [laughter] Joel: That's my only fear for him, is he runs into a brick wall... Chad: It's like a Sean Bradley kind of scenario, right? Joel: Body-wise, yes. Chad: Yeah. Just, it is, yeah. Joel: Skill-wise, not in the same universe. So it'll be fun. It'll be fun. Chad: Okay. Joel: Lieven what you got. Lieven: Okay. I've got no clue what you're talking about, but it's basketball, right? Joel: Okay. 60% of the time, it works every time. Lieven: Okay. So my rather opportunistic shout-out goes to Christian Baumann, who's the new CEO at Time Partner, our big tamping company in Germany. He's going to start October 1st, so new CEO. Joel: Oh, okay. Lieven: And since I'm a very small shareholder of House of HR, and given the importance of the German markets, I honestly really wish him lots of success. So, Wir schaffen das, Christian. Wir schaffen das. Joel: Lieven's bank account needs a win, everybody. Chad: Go, go, Christian. Get some of that GDP, baby. Yep. Joel: Well, we saw Lieven in Knebworth. Chad: Yes. Joel: Will we see him in Paris for Unleash in a few months is the question. Chad: That's the question. Joel: Mid-October. Lieven: Last time I saw you in Paris, Joel, we were in the Moulin Rouge, remember? Chad: Ah. Joel: Chad was ill. Lieven: Yes, and Chad was ill, yeah. Chad: For some reason, there were a lot of people on that last day that literally left early 'cause they caught some kind of bug. And I'm calling it the Moulin Rouge bug because I missed going to the Moulin Rouge, which I fucking hate 'cause I love that show. It was an amazing show. Joel: Fortunately for Chad, Lieven and I took care of his wife that night. She was... Lieven: That's true. Joel: She was entertained. Lieven: It's actually true. She had a hell of a time. She loved it, really. Chad: One thing I'll never worry about is you two taking care of my wife because she's too much for both of you. Joel: Yeah, but still. S?: What are you doing, step-bro? Lieven: She did seem to like it, though. Joel: Of course. Lieven: All the attention. Joel: Moulin Rouge. How can you not like that? Lieven: But to answer your question, I probably will be out Unleash in the second week of October. Chad: 17th through the 18th. That's right, kids. If you don't have your flight, you're going to HR Tech, it's going to be a tight window. Get that ticket and make yourself available at Unleash indeed. It's one of the staples in our industry, is Unleash World in Paris. Joel: Oh, there's a rooftop and some good wine with our name on it, boys. I can't wait to go to Paris. Chad: Amen. [music] Joel: All right, guys. A lot of Americans have no idea who Stepstone is, but that's starting to change with Appcast's recent acquisition of recruitment ad agency Baird. German-based Stepstone has owned 85% of Appcast since 2019. So while the press was about Appcast buying Baird, don't think for one second that Stepstone wasn't involved and approved the move. Joel: Chad and I have been covering this story as two Americans, but what's the European point of view here? Stepstone is a household name throughout much of Europe, who, by the way, is owned by Axel Springer, who owns Jobsite and Total Jobs in Europe. Quite a web they are weaving. Lieven, what's your take on? I don't know, Stepstone, Appcast, Baird, programmatic agencies in Europe? What is the foothold that programmatic has in Europe? Does anyone care about programmatic advertising for jobs? Lieven: I was contacted by VONQ this week, and they want to do some programmatic for us, so at least they care about it. And I think I care about it too, and many people care about it. But it's not as common as I think in America still. Of course, if you can automate something, you have to. The bidding strategy probably will, it will end up being cheaper if you do it right. But our companies, and we're not that small. Most of them aren't really using it as they should, I think. So that's probably something where we can still gain something. And I don't have any knowledge about Appcast themselves. I never used them. Chad: So Appcast is pretty much the infrastructure for all recruitment ad agencies, or at least that's how it started. That's how they broke their go-to-market, right? So every recruitment ad agency that was out there that didn't use or even sell programmatic, they were able to do it through Click Cast, which is Appcast's pretty much their agency exchange. So they, that's how they gained quick foothold in the US. I guess the question from an American to a European, as you just talk about VONQ, which I'll talk about here in a minute, do you think that the US will be able to bring performance to Europe and use Stepstone, Totaljobs, Jobsite as pretty much a conduit to be able to do that? 'Cause those are some pretty big names. Lieven: They're pretty big names, but they're not the biggest names here. We still have a very local approach. And those big global sites aren't that common over here. Maybe for big multinationals who want to hire all over the world, they'll probably use them. But our companies and our clients mostly work with local companies who know the local markets, local job boards. Joel: Well, I mean, Stepstone is really German. I mean, they pulled out of France. And I mean, they're really a German site. Lieven: But they are outdated. Monster, Stepstone, the big... The generalistic job boards are, in my opinion, are outdated. So we use our own websites to attract through a search engine marketing. You have those commercial job boards, but we mostly use the local ones. Then you have social media for the latent candidates. And then you have everything which is really new, the fourth pillar. But the second one, those job boards, Monster, by the way, is just totally outdated. Chad: It is. Lieven: Stepstone, I feel, is the same. I'm still waiting for their IPO, but I don't hear about it anymore. It's a recurrent cost. We don't like it. So we're trying to save money there and invest it in social. Because at the end of the year, we have to buy new credits. And new credits, you don't build anything. Chad: On the programmatic side of the house, and again, this is just seeing how it works here in the US, it's about those local sites. It's about being able to enable and then also drive revenue to a lot of those local sites. So what you're talking about is exactly the power of programmatic. But being able to like carry it forward with some of the bigger German site, which obviously Stepstone is a huge German site, Totaljobs, which is a big UK job site, etcetera, etcetera, just to start to bleed it in there. So what you're talking about is really where I see them stepping into Europe and prospectively getting a foothold because if they can drive more revenue to those smaller yet powerful sites. What's the loss? Lieven: Oh, those sites will be begging for their attention, I'm sure. But I wonder if it'll be worth it to them, because you'll always have to... They probably won't have an API, which is a plug and play. You have to connect your own systems. And when I'm talking about the local sites I really mean Local Belgium has 10 million people and they have a few local job boards, which attracts the biggest one, maybe 10,000 visitors a day, which is not that much. So I'm not sure if. Joel: And I don't think Americans appreciate the impact that government job sites have in Europe as well. I remember going to the House of HR event Talking about the top sites in the countries. Almost every country's top site is a government site. Lieven: Of course. Joel: I assume like integrating programmatic into those is gonna be impossible. Lieven: Because they're free. There's not... No use to... You don't need a bidding strategy because there's nothing to bid on. It's free. In Belgium, you have VDIB Flemish Department of Labor, you have Laforet from the French department. You have, Actiris from Brussels. We have three states within Belgium. You have the same in the Netherlands and Germany and so those probably are in almost all cases, those governmental sites are the biggest ones And then you have some commercials connected to newspapers, but as far as I know, most of them are not connected to those bidding sites, to those, programmatics. So it's a big game if they could add them. And I would definitely be interested, but I don't see it happen very soon. Joel: What, impact or influence do recruitment ad agencies have in Europe? Obviously they're a big deal in the US but I have no insight into how important, how used they are, how many there are. Talk about the landscape of ad agencies for recruiting in Europe. Lieven: Employer brand agencies are very common, but and sometimes you have, a digital approach, which probably is what you're talking about, but it's not that automated. It's more be sure you get your digital presence rights and these kind of things. But, the automated bidding is isn't standard. Definitely not. Chad: And again, it wasn't standard on this side of the pond, but when Appcast actually showed the recruitment marketing agencies that, Hey, look, there's a piece of the pie here, there's a piece of revenue that you're not getting, here are the rails. Here's the infrastructure. We're gonna give you the tech, and away you go. So it was like literally getting on, the heroin drip right on day one. Here's the thing around the Europe side of the house. So, just learned this week that it... It almost feels like VONQ is pulling their tent stakes out of the US. Kind of like they haven't seen the success that they thought they would really quickly. And if you're in Europe and you're coming to the US, you've gotta understand there's no such thing as an overnight success. Just doesn't happen. A lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of relationships, but obviously the benefit is huge. It seems like VONQ came over. They hired a bunch of really prime players. Then the next thing that all those prime players, pretty much all of them. Joel: Yep. Chad: There are a couple left, are gone. Do you think Lieven that, it's going to be hard for any of this performance based, conversation to be centered in Europe since the US has started this and we've done it so well thus far? Lieven: Yeah, I think so. And probably because it just is a different market. It doesn't work the same way as it does in the US because it's so fragmented. It's a different approach. I'm just looking into the mail VONQ sent me this week. They say, and they're talking about performance-based advertising. They are mentioning websites like talent.com, JobRapido, Azzuna, Jooble, JobLift, JobiJoba, JUF, ZipRecruiter, and Monster. To be honest, I don't work with any of those. We aren't the smallest player. Joel: You're not the smallest player. [laughter] Lieven: No. There are some much bigger still, but we're on our way. But I don't think it's that important, or maybe I'm totally missing out. And I've got a meeting with VONQ I think tomorrow. So I'll give you an update next, next edition of... Chad: Excellent. Lieven: Chad and Cheese, Europe. Joel: Almost regular... I mean, regularly we talk about how difficult it's for Europe to come to America and VONQ situation, reflects that. You mentioned Stepstone, IPO, any like, on our show, on the weekly show I'm talking about Stepstone buying career builder, making a big wave in America before they IPO. Like are you hearing anything in Europe about Stepstone making some noise around the public markets? Lieven: Nothing at all. Joel: Nothing at all. Lieven: And I'm really interested to know, because, it would be an interesting IPO and I wonder how they'll do it, but I didn't hear anything. Chad: Yeah, won't happen this year. It won't happen this year. No way. Lieven: Probably not. No, we should have heard before. Joel: We Should underscore that Europeans take the summer off anyway, so maybe by fall this will be an issue that people care about. But let's take a quick break and we'll talk about France. Chad: Un Francais. Joel: Let's talk about France boys they will introduce a new job seeker service France travail. That's probably not how you pronounce it in French. Lieven: Cavaye. Joel: What is it? Lieven: Cavaye. Joel: Okay. Replacing Pôle emploi, I said that wrong too. I'm sure to simplify workforce entry and consolidate services, the plan will cost 2.9 billion euros and require all job seekers including those on RSA, which is a social security benefit for the unemployed to commit to 15 to 20 hours of activities per week. Critics argue the requirements may be harsh for vulnerable individuals. Chad, do you have any thoughts on France's new policy. Chad: From the American side of the house? I actually led the build to the National Labor Exchange and tying together all of these systems. So I have some in-depth knowledge from a state and local standpoint, but that has nothing to do with Europe. So I want to hear from Lieven to see what his thoughts are. [chuckle] Lieven: That's easy, isn't it? Chad: Yeah. Lieven: Okay. In fact, I think it's a very interesting idea because basically right now there are six different departments in France all trained to get some sort of people which have been unemployed for a certain amount of time to get to back to work. And they're working fragmented. And now the whole idea is they're going to spend a few billion on making all those departments work together. But of course since this will cost a lot of money, they have to get the money back by making sure less people stay unemployed. They have to prove that it works. Lieven: So now basically they're going to force everyone who is unemployed to spend 15 to 20 hours on a weekly base following courses and workshops and job interview trainings, etcetera, just to piss them off that much that they prefer looking for a job. [chuckle] Lieven: Than staying unemployed because that is the whole idea and this might sound cynical but I'm sure this is the whole idea. Just by forcing people into training and retraining and workshops, which they won't get extra pay for, they might think, "Okay, this sucks, I could... I might as well get a job. That's the whole idea. Of course, in some cases you have to look at different communities. Lieven: There are people who lost their job and on average they're looking for a new job for six weeks till three months. If you force those people to spend 15 hours a week on these kinds of trainings, that will be stupid because of people... Those people are looking for a job. But I'm sure these aren't the people which will be targeted. But we're talking about people who've been unemployed for a long time and in some cases those people might actually benefit from certain training programs. There are people who are... Who have difficulties to access the labor market for whatever reason. And if you give those people specific guidance, this might work. Some labor handicaps, some special training might help them to get in touch with the right people but for those who just don't want the job because they are working without paying taxes, for example and they consider the extra benefits as an extra benefit for, those people, this might actually work and this is something we would like in Belgium as well to put a bit of pressure on people who have been refusing jobs. Lieven: And there is a very small percentage of the people everywhere I guess who just refuse to work. And as we always say the right to laziness has to be self-sustaining. You have the right to be lazy but not on our costs. Europe is, you would call it very socialistic but the whole community pays for those people who needs to be paid for. And that's a good thing but not wanting to work. And in this shortage, if you can't find a job, there probably is a problem. There are many more companies looking for people than there are people looking for a job today so if you don't wanna to work, this kind of social benefit isn't for you. If you can't find a job, then you should get the benefits but then you also should accept people trying to help you to find a job. So I'm pro, of course the unions are very much against it because in France, definitely in France, the labor unions are very strong and they feel... And they probably feel it, right, that it's just to push people to a job they don't really want. And I feel it. That's the whole idea in fact. Pushing people or say it nice motivating people to find a job faster. S?: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: So France and the whole of Europe is in a demographic problem. People are getting older, there aren't enough young people working to support older people. The entitlements that people are used to, those gotta be paid for somehow and there aren't enough young people to pay for those services for people that are older. So we know in France, they upped the retirement age from 62 to 64. That was in reaction to this problem. If we make people wait two more years, that's money we won't have to pay, we're gonna be saving money. This is another way as cynical as Lieven sounds, this is a way to get people back to work and creating tax revenue that we can pay for the entitlements in a socialist country. There are three choices that countries in this position have. One is have more babies. That's pretty hard to do and sounds really Third Reichish when you make people have more babies. Joel: Number two is, you have more immigrants come into the country to then do the work and make tax revenue, etcetera. France in particular and you can probably talk to this better than I can Lieven, they have some real issues with letting immigrants in, there's a lot of culture issues and pushback and it's been politicized. So getting immigrants into France apparently has been a real challenge. If you don't let immigrants in or have more babies, you become a stagnant economy, you slowly die, [chuckle] you slowly become Japan or Italy and that's what I fear the road that France is going on. They're trying their best to make... Get people back to work, increase retirement age, etcetera. But unless they train change immigration policy or pour some more wine and start having some more babies, it's gonna be really hard to support the top of that pyramid of aging French by young people who there just simply aren't enough and this to me is a reaction to all that. They're not alone, a lot of European countries are facing this but France right now is really facing some demographic challenges. Chad: Yeah. I think this is smart from the standpoint of right out of the gate you have cost cutting measures, you have all of these agencies, if you can pull them together, you can look at waste, fraud and abuse which I guarantee you is happening and then also start to use better tech. That right out of the gate is cost savings number one. Number two, the thing that they talk about as training. The thing is they should have corporate sponsored training. These should be companies coming in and actually focusing on what they need, the positions that they need today, the positions that they need tomorrow and they should be working directly with the government to start building talent pipelines for those types of positions. Any of these individuals can get into those courses, pass or fail, what have you. They're going through their 15 to 20 hours a week but they're actually training for something, which from a company standpoint, the company could be paying for the training. So right out of the gate, I think the infrastructure's there to actually make something that's worthwhile. This isn't just poking and prodding somebody to go get a job, this is actually training somebody to get into a career that matters. But, I guess we'll see, again, this is the first step. What happens next, I think is the big key. Joel: It's a decent chunk of change to make a difference. Chad: 2.9 billion. Yeah. Joel: Yeah, we'll see. Chad: In three years. Lieven: And in this case, I feel the French government is right, because if you just look at the numbers, there is an unemployment rate in France of about 7.2, 7.3%. In Belgium, which is only a few kilometers next to France, it's only 5% and it's still too much. There is no reason why it should be 50% higher in France and in Belgium from five to 7%, it's almost 50% the difference. So in absolute numbers, this means lots of people. So I think those people should be encouraged to look harder for a job because we have so many companies in France trying to find people, desperately trying to find people. If you can't find a job these days, you might have really a problem and then you need help, or you're not just willing to accept offers and then you're probably not entitled to the social security, but it's a difficult one. Joel: Well, speaking of jobs, let's talk about some European countries that have just gotten some money and might be looking to hire some people. It's Buy or Sell, everybody. You know how we play. We talk about companies and this is a super episode, so it's more than three. We give a summary and each of the boys will chime in on whether it's a buy or sell. Let's play, Buy or Sell. First up is Inploi. London based Inploi has raised 1.35 million pounds in a funding round with plans to enter the US market. This brings total funding to 3.5 million pounds. Inploi aims to revolutionize the hiring process by employing a unique AI embedded SaaS approach that makes it easier for companies to source and recruit talent while providing an intuitive and frictionless experience for candidates. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Inploi? Chad: I think Inploi is... They're very cosmetic. They're top of the funnel. And they're not the applicant tracking system, much like Shazam who was just on firing squad out of Australia just last month. The big problem that we have here is this is a nice to have, not a need to have unless you have a solid business case that demonstrates bottom line effect. So what they're going to have to do, what Inploi's going to have to do is they're going to have to move down funnel like Paradox did and they're going to have to start moving toward that applicant tracking system. Because what this industry really needs is we need new tech in the record keeping and applicant tracking system, candidate experience side of the house. What we're doing is we're point solutioning the fuck out of this thing and we need more players like Inploi to be able to do that. Big problem is they only have about 4 million euros, not a lot of money. And they wanna come to the US. Whoo, man, that's hard guys. That's hard. So right now I think Inploi is on the right track other than trying to take that track across to the US. So right now I'm gonna be a sell. Joel: Oh boy. Chad: Sorry guys. Joel: All right. Inploi, I-N-P-L-O-I, of course it'll be confused with Employ, E-M-P-L-O-Y, the proper way to spell it. So the name is... [chuckle] Joel: Right out of the gate, a hurdle, I'd like to call this a poor man's hire easy, but they don't have pricing on their page, so who the fuck knows if they're a poor man or not? I can't get over the fact there is too much competition in the sourcing, recruitment marketing space. And in the time there have been companies like this, none are huge success stories. No one is cocaine and champagne. So for that reason, Inploi for me is a sell. Chad: Ouch. [chuckle] Lieven: I'm looking into them. I thought, "Okay, they have their buzzwords right. And it's AI embedded, it's software as a service expansion into the United States, Shopify for hiring." Sounds good. And then they started in 2016 and they managed to still not going broke. So they must be doing something right. Chad: Right? Lieven: And then I read something about fixing the world of hiring, which I thought was a bit arrogant... [chuckle] Lieven: Because the world of hiring isn't broken so why should it be fixed? Chad: It's totally broken. Lieven: But then again, it's enthusiasm so that's good. And I kept reading and then I read something about their ability to cater to neurodivergent audiences and then they lost me. Joel: Ooh, yeah. Lieven: I don't know what neurodivergent audience are but I went into the hassle of asking ChatGPT and apparently what did they say they may implement policies, practices, and workplace adjustments that accommodate a diverse needs of neurodivergent individuals, creating an environment where everyone can thrive. And I told, nah, nah, it's a sell. So it's a sell. Joel: Lot of buzzwords there, kids. All right. Next up, London-based Zelt has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round. Zelt offers an HR self-service platform that allows companies to manage HR, IT, and financial operations throughout the employee lifecycle. The platform automates processes such as HR, payroll, onboarding and expenses. The funding will help Zelt further build out its product and expand internationally. Chad buy or sell Zelt? Chad: Zelt is what I like to call rippling light. Why light you might ask. Well, rippling has taken 1.2 BABABA billion USD in funding and Zelt has taken 3.1 million euros. [chuckle] Big difference. Old and slow HRIS platforms will think twice about shelling out that high valuation bank to acquiring rippling, but those platforms could easily partner with Zelt, advise on the roadmap, introduce clients for piloting, and then buy Zelt for a song for goodness sakes. I see Zelt getting acquired sooner rather than later, which for me is why it is a buy. S?: All right, All right, All right. Joel: Honestly, I couldn't even get past the website. It's fucking crazy. Zelt.app, go check it out, no matter what. There's some sort of like exploding golden egg as you scroll through the site. I think there may be a seizure risk for some users on this website. Pricing is super low. Joel: There's even a QR code in the footer. Gee, how often do you see a QR code in the footer kids? So they've thrown the kitchen sink at this site sorry, but I don't feel confident in you. If I don't feel confident in a site in six seconds in the service from the website then I'm fucking gone. And this site made me wanna throw up. I was more likely to disco dance in the six seconds that I was on the website than buy their products and services. So for me, woo. Zelt is a sell. Lieven you are the tiebreaker. Lieven: I looked into them briefly and I was glad I'm in a different business. It all sounds very reliable, but it's dull and I'm sure it's a good thing given their business. But if I buy them, I would've to deal with them. So I'd rather not. So. Joel: All right. Let's go to Holland where Nipol has raised 1.5 million euros to develop digital coworkers that can integrate with various platforms such as Slack. Nipol's vision is to make AI accessible to all the workforce, starting with customer support teams. The company's gen AI technology enables digital coworkers to adapt to human needs and operate in the same environments as human employees. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Nipol? Chad: Founded in January of 2023. These kids haven't even broken in their little Dutch wooden shoes yet. If you like this site, well, if you take a look at the site, it looks like the claymation version of Mr. Rogers meets the Terminator. We've talked about virtual assistant platforms and how they will explode. And Nipol is a great example. They're taking a niche, a rather large niche like customer service and adding AI co-pilots into the mix. So if we've learned anything thus far from the Teleperformance AI co-pilot customer service platform, is that this system can contextualize and then index relevant information faster than a human, serving it up to the human at this point saying, I think it was like 30% more calls per person with the teleperformance business case. So for me, this is big. This is a hot, hot, hot area and it's big. It is a huge, it's a niche, but it's huge. And I like it from the standpoint of being disciplined, staying in that niche, and then also having the integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and a ton of others. At the end of this baby, I am a Claymation Terminator Buy. I love it. I love it. Joel: All right. Nipol sounds like nipple, maybe Lieven can, can Wax poetic about that issue. Chad: So you're gonna buy right out of the gate, is that what I'm hearing? Lieven: Yeah. It sounds like nipple. I'm gonna buy. Joel: Nipol is into... S?: What are you doing Step-bro? Joel: You went into the wrong site though, to check this thing out. These digital coworkers are the stuff of nightmares. Like, go check this shit out. They're all like lifeless, black-eyed digital zombies. Like literally nightmarish. Chad: They're cute little Claymation things. Joel: Yeah. Your cute Claymation is my nightmare. So that was really hard for me to get around. I'm trying to get my head around a digital coworker. You love the co-pilot thing, I get that. Chad: Yes. Yes. I do. Joel: What scares me is the target audience. Like we talked a few weeks ago about a company in India that fired 90% of their customer service people and replaced them with AI. So to me, these digital assistants should be horror film fodder because they're coming to take the job, they're gonna roll this thing out as like, these are assistants. But in five years every assistant that these zombies are helping will be unemployed and these assistance will be the actual workers. Customer service is going the way of AI. And this is just a nice Trojan horse way to let people know that their jobs are being replaced. In that case, it's a pretty solid company. I just couldn't get past the zombie Black-Eyed nightmare, nightmare website. And I don't, they don't say anything about like, we're eventually gonna be your customer service. Right now it's just assistance. Chad: Of course not. Joel: So until they say... Chad: Yeah. Joel: Until they say We're pivoting, you can fire all your customer service people. I just can't bring myself to buy this company and I haven't slept since I looked at the website. So sorry. It's a sell. Chad: Selling Nipol. Joel: But I like the name. Lieven: Even though it sounds like nipple huh? I kind of like the idea, but to be honest, it just looks like they're going to put an entertainment layer on top of existing generative AI tools. So it's not like it's really new or anything. They're just creating... They're making it like... It's a bit like gamification of AI and it won't make it more efficient, but it's might make it more fun to use. So if people use it more often then it could work, anyways I would just buy them because I suffer from FoMO and I don't want to be the guy that missed the opportunity to invest in Nipol when I got the chance. Chad: Exactly. Lieven: So I buy it. S?: All right. All right. All right. Joel: All right. Amsterdam based Settly, an HR platform for employee relocation has secured 6 million euros in seed funding. Settly aids businesses and workers navigating the complexities of international moves. The funding will support expansion and an improved service in global markets. The startup says its diverse team and personalized approach have fueled 350% growth. Chad, are you a buy or sell on Settly? Chad: Have you ever used a relocation company like a moving company? They fucking suck. It's horrible from an experience standpoint. I think if you can create an experience that is wrapped around the actual company brand, this is fucking money. And it's a huge opportunity, especially in Europe and then being able to take that from Europe obviously to the United States, etcetera, etcetera. So I think there's a huge opportunity here for something that is... To be quite frank, just sucks. So to be able to really make your brand stand out to top talent that you're relocating 'cause you're not relocating not top talent. This is something that I think is incredibly smart and to be quite frank and easy sell when you go into an organization. So this is a buy for me. [applause] Joel: I'm shocked that the guy who just relocated to Portugal is in favor of a relocation service. [chuckle] But you're totally right like... Chad: Partially relocated. Joel: This is the world we live in. More and more companies going remote, more and more companies saying, Hey employee, go wherever you want. We're gonna support it. In fact, we have a service now that will help you go to wherever the hell you want, in a sort of turnkey fashion which is great. I have moved, I have done a corporate move and yes... It wasn't tough for me 'cause I was the one moving, but the company jumping through hurdles, moving companies, selling shit, company like everything was, a nightmare... Chad: It sucks. Joel: They had a, yeah, they put way too many resources in that shit. I'm sure they would've much preferred, to just given the money to a company that could do it, and do it right. So yeah, a world that's more remote, a world that's... Fewer kids are being born, people are having kids later. So kids aren't as much of an issue. People are getting married later. So there are more young people that wanna like, get out and, see the world. So this one on, many, many levels is an easy buy for me. S?: All right. All right. All right. Lieven: No, I totally agree with both of you. It's a market with tons of potential. It'll only grow. We have two companies in the group which are specialized in relocating people. Covebo in the Netherlands is hiring people in the Eastern European countries to get them at work, at their own clients in Western Europe. And it's always difficult to help those people integrate in your neighborhoods to, make sure they don't become ghettos. Because if you have 50 people in the same streets, the other people living in the streets will complain. So you have to spread them all around, but you have to make sure they got a decent living. They got... They are happy because we want them to stay happy. We want them to stay. It's hard. And we have the same with, Accent foreign in Belgium, a company, doing more or less the same thing, finding people and placing not clients. It's hard. So I'm not sure about the financials from this company. I didn't do a due diligence of course, but based on what I read, I definitely buy, it's only going to get better. [music] Joel: That is a triple buy everybody and that deserves a little careless whisper. I love it. All right. Chad: That's the easy button. Sexy right there. Joel: Let's go to our final contestant, Berlin based HR tech startup Propel has secured 2.5 million euros in funding to support its mission of providing benefits and job opportunities to tech communities. Propel offers a software as a service HR tech platform, known as, "community as a service." Ooh, clever. Which connects tech communities such as developer groups and talent incubators with job opportunities, benefits, and financial services. Chad, are you a buyer seller on Propel? Chad: Very Andela like. So hiring companies today are way too tactical or just too damn lazy to build real talent pipelining solutions themselves. So Propel is building them through partnerships with developer groups, talent incubators, training schools, etcetera. Propel works with 100 plus tech communities across 15 countries that serves roughly 400,000 members. That's why Propel turns this talent pipelining into an easy button for companies. They... I'm not even mentioning the diversity card here, which I think is also incredibly powerful. So for me, talent pipelining is something that companies have... They've gotten rid of. They don't know how to do, they don't know how to train. They don't know how to actually dig into these communities. So Propel, the Propels and the Andelas of the world are huge winners. This is a huge buy for me. [applause] Joel: Wow. That's an enthusiastic buy from Chad. A year ago, I might've dug this company. Today, we're in a world where companies don't need as many developers as they used to. Twitter, Facebook, Google, you name it. They're all relying on fewer technical people, fewer developers. More and more companies are following suit. The reality is AI is helping low-level developers become mid and high-level developers and there are less developers needed to do the job. There are so many freaking services to help companies find developers. Chad, you mentioned one, they're well-funded, they're well-known. Many are global. The competition to say it's fierce, is an understatement. 2.5 million euros is not gonna get it done for this company. Again, even just a year ago, I probably would've bought this thing. But for now, I just think the developer environment and hiring developers is so different than it was a year ago because of AI that I just think this company's timing is way off. For me, it is. Joel: So break the tie Lieven. Lieven: I understand your point on this, but for me it's a no brainer. It's a buy because, and this might sound cynical once again, but it's kind of initiatives that can survive solidly on subsidies and grants and plenty of multinationals are going to use their service just to mention it in their ESG reports. So just from that point of view, I think it can't go wrong, this will succeed. And I definitely believe companies like this can find and develop talent which otherwise would've gone to waste. And I know of an initiative in Belgium, in a very bad neighborhood in Brussels, where it's called Molengeek. And the community is called Molenbeek but Molengeek. It's a bunch of coders and they get kids from the street and they teach 'em how to code and they give them a shelter and they help them and it works. And I mean those, some of those kids really are talented and they get out from the streets and instead of putting cars on fire on a sunny Sundays afternoon, they now start hacking computers, which is much more... [chuckle] Lieven: Good for their careers, I guess. So, no, I think it's a buy. Joel: That escalated quickly. Chad: Lifting people up. I love it. S?: All right, All right. All right. All right. Joel: Lieven, we have to work on your, building up suspense. Like... [chuckle] Joel: You can't start-out buy or sell like, oh, this is an easy buy for me and then go into the reason. [chuckle] Joel: You're supposed to go into the reasons and then be like... Lieven: Yeah, I know. Chad: Joel, he's, European. You've gotta allow him to do his process while us dumb Americans do our process. There's a different story tellings. Joel: It's so bad. I wanna wait. I want a baited breath. What is he gonna give it? A buy or sell and you just come outta the gate like, oh, this is an easy buy for me. [chuckle] Lieven: Oh, we start from the end and then we slowly... Chad: There we go. I love it. Lieven: Build up again. Chad: I love your style Lieven. You don't quit. You don't quit you. Lieven: The lack of style. [chuckle] Lieven: Okay. Joel: Love the style. Love the style. Lieven and I are gonna go see Oppenheimer, although not together. Lieven: Yeah. Indeed. But I'm going to think about you while you are watching Oppenheimer and Joe. Chad: That's just creepy. Joel: 'Cause I am the bomb baby. We out. Chad: We out. Lieven: We out. Chad: So creepy. Lieven: [chuckle] Bye. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way. There's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time, you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Just when you thought you understood the definition of artificial intelligence, along comes generative A.I. Confusing? Yeah. That’s why we invited Thom Kenney, former Smashfly CEO and current director at Google on the show. T.K. helps us better understand what the hell is going on in the world today, including diving into the current writer’s strike in Hollywood, security concerns and what in the world comedian Sarah Silverman is so upset about. Put your thinking cap on for this one. TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous podcast. Chad 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 Sowash and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? You know what it is, it's your favorite guilty pleasure, The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel. Joined as always, the peas to my carrots, Chad is here. [chuckle] Joel: And today we welcome Thom Kenney to the show. That's right. Former CEO at SmashFly. Chad: Ooh. Hello. Joel: Now Director at Google and forever a soldier, apparently. Thom, welcome to the podcast. Chad: Yeah, forever. Jesus. [laughter] Thom Kenney: Thanks Joel. Thanks Chad. [laughter] Joel: I sleep well at night knowing that Thom is on the case. Chad: Thom, how you been, man? Thom Kenney: I'm doing well. And you're safe for at least two days a month for what I do with the Army Reserve. So at least you got that to cover. Chad: Don't forget two weeks. Thom Kenney: Two weeks, two weeks in there. Chad: Two weeks during the summer, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thom Kenney: That's true, that's true. So Summer side to protect you... Joel: He's calling in from an undisclosed bunker. We're not quite sure where Thom is at the moment, but we appreciate the time to sit down with us. Chad: Dude, you've been away from SmashFly, how long? Give us a little post on that, right? We heard you were CTO, went to CEO, acquisition happened, and then ejected. What happened after that? Thom Kenney: So what happened after that was COVID, which was a really, really interesting time for everybody. Chad: Now you're bringing me down. Jesus. [laughter] Thom Kenney: Well, but it's interesting, COVID changed a lot of different things, and for me it was really quite interesting. It's some time to reflect, some time to grow personally a bit. And out of the blue got this call from a venture capitalist friend of mine that said somebody needed some help with data and artificial intelligence. And having this reserve experience that I've had for so many years, the deployments that I've done overseas, it was a call from the Commanding General of Special Operations Command, a four star general. And guys like me in my rank in the reserves, don't get those calls very often. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Chad: No. Thom Kenney: And he said, "Hey, come help me transform the command with data and AI." So I went and spent a couple of years with Special Operations Command. Transforming that organization, working with some of the most elite operators in the world. Chad: Yes. Thom Kenney: And helping the DOD in general kinda grow from a data and AI perspective. It was fantastic to, just over two years where an experience I would never get any other way, it was really, really interesting. Chad: So you're talking about the most elite groups, especially, I mean I wouldn't just say in the Army, but also in the military, because there's some sharing that happens there, and now their usage of AI, is that what I'm hearing? Because that to me is the coolest fucking thing ever. We've got like the guys who are physical, they're there, but then they have the intelligence and then also AI kind of like compressing all of that for them. Thom Kenney: Absolutely. And with the Special Operations Command, you had Navy folks, you had Marine Corps folks, you had Coast Guard folks, Air Force Army. It's a whole mix of different folks inside of the military that are doing these things. And it's eye-opening sometimes how this manifests itself. So for example, we set up a capability to be able to do data mining, data science, a little bit of machine learning on both unclassified and classified platforms, in a way where you could build a model and work with it in the unclassified world, and then seamlessly move it up into the classified world. And we opened that up to everyone inside of special operations. And after about six months of that, what was really, really interesting is, the number one set of users that we had by far were non-commissioned officers from the Marine Corps Special Operations teams. Chad: Wow! Thom Kenney: Right, and it was really interesting to see more than 50% of the users were from that specific cohort. They were just embracing it. What they could do with it from a personnel perspective, from a tactics perspective, from a learning perspective was just incredible to watch. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Thom, maybe it's all the doom scrolling I do every day. Maybe it's cause I'm a parent. Obviously the world is a very volatile place with Russia, China, Iran. I'm gonna ask you a big picture question that's unrelated to AI or employment. What is your take on the state of the world? Should I be so sleepless at night? Or should I be sleeping like a baby? Thom Kenney: This is Thom's personal opinion. Joel: Yep. Thom Kenney: And it's not based on anything I do anywhere else, but I don't think we have to sleep restlessly at night. I think we have to be cautious about what we do. I think we need to be deliberate about the decisions that we make and the leaders that we choose. But I don't think we have to necessarily be restless at night. And part of that is because we've created a world economy that's so intertwined, that any real significant moves that would be catastrophic on the world stage, especially from a war perspective, would impact the aggressors as much as the defenders. And we see some of that in Ukraine, we see some of that in Taiwan. And there's all the different conversations that are happening. The bigger concern from my perspective, is one of resources. And it's more a commercial risk than it is a military risk. Thom Kenney: Where we have limited resources and who controls those limited resources has a bigger impact on economies necessarily than it does on militaries. Now we have to be ready to stand and defend. The Army's mission is to fight and win the nation's wars and part of my job in the Army Reserve. But generally speaking, we are so intertwined that it would really take some, I'm gonna say maniacal intent, or some completely closed-minded attempt to go after a place where you're gonna bring the entire world into a world war. That's Thom's opinion. I could be completely wrong. Automated Voice: Alright, alright, alright. Joel: We can all rest everybody. Chad: Yeah, well. And I think a lot of that has to do with the amount of budget that is actually given to guys like Thom and our defense. I mean, we have more budget going to that than the next, I think nine nations, which I think seven are actually NATO. There you go, Joel. You should feel better. Joel: Almost more money than Google. Where Thom is also currently an employee. Chad: Let's talk about that. Joel: Tell us about that, Thom. Thom Kenney: Well, Google's got a trillion dollar valuation, so maybe not the same scale as the Department of Defense, but Google's a really interesting place. So, when General Clark retired from SOCOM, it was a good time for me, 'cause he and I were great partners down there. To find my next move, and there was an opportunity to go focus on artificial intelligence with some of the world's biggest customers, including the Department of Defense, the Department of State inside of the US. And it was a really interesting transition, going from typically my history has been in small to medium-sized business, either founding them or turning them around through acquisitions. And the DOD is a very, very large organization, and Google's a very large organization. So it's really, really fascinating to work with customers like Deutsche Bank and Siemens and the Department of Defense and Department of State, as they are on their own journeys for developing capabilities around artificial intelligence, advanced data, new ways of doing business, new ways of interfacing with customers. This is really an exceptionally interesting time to be involved in technology, with how much transition we're seeing across the entire technology landscape. Chad: Everybody is just fascinated by Bard and ChatGPT. Now everybody knows what a... And at least they think they know what a large language model is, for God's sakes. Today, obviously, Bard and you working with Google, a lot of these companies want to be able to find ways to actually integrate large language models or actually something that helps their process or helps co-pilot their employees. What are you doing around that? Is that really your major focus right now, or there are other programs and products and services that Google has that you're spending more time with? Thom Kenney: There are so many different ways to interface with Google. I mean, we've got more than 10 products that have over a billion unique users. The planet-scale size of what Google does is almost incomprehensible. And when you think about where Google's technology investments are, we own every inch of fiber that we use around the globe. All those undersea cables, all those data centers, that's all Google-owned and that allows us to be very, very specific with how we develop technologies that enable being able to have as many products that have billions of users around the world. But to your point, a lot of what people are looking at right now are in two buckets. There's the large language model, the generative AI-type software tools that are out there, that people are trying to figure out, how can I best use it? And then there's still the data question. And in particular, the data question, because we have so much information that we're creating every single day. And if you think about where we're going to be, we're gonna be calculating our data in zettabytes. Thom Kenney: And zettabytes is, it blows your mind to think that with the amount of information that we have in the world today, and that will be created in the next few years, there are not enough laptops and desktops and hard drives in the world today, that people use as consumers to have that much data. That's how much data we're creating. It's impossible, just think of all the laptops and all the desktops that are out there today, that still doesn't even have enough information to hold everything that the world is creating. So the impact of data may be one of those things that years ago, we were all talking about big data, and how do we get after big data? Thom Kenney: And then we had data lakes and data streams and lake houses and all these different things that are out there. It is that problem is not going away. The data problem is absolutely not going away. And as you think about generative AI, you've also got to think about how the data that feeds generative AI also has to be managed. So these two things are really intertwined significantly for the world's largest customers. So you think about banks transforming the way they work with their customers, or you think about a recruiting team that's trying to find the next best candidate or write those job descriptions, or you think about autonomous vehicles and how they can leverage large language models. These are all really interesting aspects. And one of the biggest challenges with large language models, if we tie it back to data, is the ability to stay up to date. So if you go on to Bard, if you go on to ChatGPT, and something happens in, let's say, North Korea, and it happened at six o'clock this morning, you're not necessarily gonna be able to use large language models to get output based on that, what happened in the morning, because the processing time is immense for keeping that stuff up to date, so that data aspect is huge. Chad: What about the security side of the house? Look at UKG, who just had a huge data security problem where they couldn't actually pay, they were being held ransom. A lot of this data is data that could prospectively be held ransom as well, and you're churning off new behaviors and even more data after you continue to crunch with all those GPUs, those NVIDIA GPUs. So what happens there? There's got to be a double, triple, quad down on security, right? Thom Kenney: There absolutely is. And where you look at where Google is, for instance, we're pioneers in this idea of Zero Trust. And it changes the way you think about security from basically edge security to trust no one security. Chad: Yes. Thom Kenney: For years we said, "Hey, we have a firewall and we've got rules on this firewall and you can't get into the firewall." Well, guess what? Once you're in past the firewall, a lot of networks have carte blanche access to a lot of different things. Chad: It's a bounty. Thom Kenney: So the Idea of Zero Trust goes beyond the edge. It says, okay, maybe you do get past an edge, but I still don't trust you. You wanna get access to a database. Okay. But I still don't trust you if you've got access to the database to get access to the data. And one of the most important aspects of how data security is transforming, is this idea of context. What is the context in which you're trying to access this data? For example, you are in Indiana most of your time, and you're accessing Gmail most of the time from Indiana. And then you take off and go visit a friend in Portugal, for example. Well, guess what? Somebody's gonna raise their hand on the security side and say, wait a minute, you're now in Portugal and we see this all the time with credit cards. Thom Kenney: Credit cards are doing this with fraud detection, right? I had this experience just recently. I'm in Kansas right now for the Army, and I'm trying to buy dinner while my daughter is in Boston, paying for her visa for her grad school in the fall in London. And all the fraud alerts are going off. Because they're looking at the context in which the transactions are happening. So as we look at Zero Trust, that context becomes really, really important. So that when you're talking about things like ransomware, the idea of phishing and spearing and the techniques that people use for social engineering to get access to networks, still doesn't necessarily give you the access once you're there because context becomes really important. The nature in which you're trying to access data becomes important. Joel: Sounds like we need to go deep, Thom. Automated Voice: Just the tip. Joel: Can you give me a definition, a layman's definition of Generative AI? 'Cause I think a lot of our listeners are still trying to get their head around AI, and now we're throwing generative in there. Give us a definition. Thom Kenney: So a very, very simple way to think about generative AI with things like large language models, is the probability by which something will occur. And by probability in large language models what I mean is, what's the probability that the word follows another word. And I've used this example before to say, if you have a sentence that says, an airplane needs, and then that next word, what's the probability that that word exists? Now, the more data that you have, the more you can conclude with probabilistic certainty what that next word will be. But still, there's a little bit of an open interpretation. An airplane needs wings, an airplane needs an engine, an airplane needs a pilot. There's lots of different words, but what's the probability of that word? And so, as you think about things, there's a term called an N-gram, and N is just a number. And it basically says, how many words am I looking ahead for Generative AI to try to create the probability that this will come out next? Thom Kenney: And that's how Generative AI is able to answer a question that says what is the best place for me to go on vacation, or write me an abstract for a conference paper I want to do, or write me a job description for a software engineer that I can send off to any of the job sites that exist. Chad: I mean, a lot of it has to do with probability. Okay. Thom Kenney: Correct. So it's, all of those things are just looking at the corpus of data that already exists and what's the probability of those outputs. So it's not really inventing anything, it's not really creating anything new. It's using probabilities based on information that already exists to summarize data that's out there. Joel: So ChatGPT is less than a year old, and are you surprised at how it's taken off? And if you had to predict what it looks like a year from now, Bard will still be less than a year old a year from now. I mean, could you just give us a sense of how fast this is happening and how we human beings can wrap our head around it. Thom Kenney: So it's a misunderstanding to think ChatGPT is only been around for a year. The reality is it's been publicly available in its current form with Microsoft for a year. But OpenAI, the company that was started quite a number of years ago, has been working on this type of generative transformer for a while, for many, many, many, many years. As a matter of fact, at SOCOM in 2021, we did a hackathon with an earlier version of ChatGPT, and saw some really, really incredible results for what it was able to do even in that early version. So for me personally, I am not at all surprised. Not at all surprised. For a couple of reasons. Number one is, it really does seem like magic when you think about how this is actually working in the background, it's really kinda magical. Thom Kenney: And second, everyone's looking for ways to do things easier, faster, simpler. But we're also introducing some really interesting new technologies too. So there's the second and third order of effects of this too. So think about ChatGPT writing a paper for school, right? You go into college and all these professors are thinking, "Oh my God, I've got all this ChatGPT stuff, and I need to know whether or not somebody's using that to write a paper." Joel: Yeah. Thom Kenney: Well, there's an MIT student who came up with something called GPTZero. And GPTZero uses the same sort of paradigms to detect the patterns that ChatGPT uses to determine the probability of whether or not this paper was written by ChatGPT. Okay. Now enter another tool called Quill. Well, if you take your output from ChatGPT and then you run it through QuillBot, well guess what? GPTZero doesn't really know anymore, whether it's ChatGPT. Joel: Like a mole... [laughter] Thom Kenney: 'Cause you took the summary and the paraphrase and put it through a summarizer and a paraphraser that is now undetectable. So you think about those things, and even from my perspective, I've now gotten two invites to speak at conferences based on abstracts that ChatGPT wrote. [laughter] Chad: Yeah. So, okay, let me throw this at you. This is real world stuff right now. We've got these screen actors, we've got the writers, we've got, they're afraid of all of this, and they should be, and in a couple of different reasons. Number one, the writers, they're worried that AI, it's good now, but it could be great in just a few years, which means long-term, they could be easily out of a job, at least a good amount of them. Secondarily, we have actors and we've talked to Ryan Steelberg, who's the CEO of Veritone, who's actually cloned our voices. That digital clone means something, not just from a voice standpoint, but also from a visible standpoint, from a video, from a clone, from a deep fake standpoint. Where do we go from here? Does legislation just have to finally kick in? Are we gonna have to wait till Europe does something because the US is just sitting on their hands? What's going on with this? Because there are significant issues that could happen start today, which have and really impact us in just a few years, or maybe even months. Thom Kenney: Maybe even months. And that there's a whole lot to unpack with that. So let me start first with the actors, the Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA, the strike that's going on right now. They do have every concern to be worried on one level, because the ease of which you can write a script today is so much simpler with tools like ChatGPT or Bard or any of the other large language model... Chad: 'Cause they're just crunching other scripts, right? Thom Kenney: They're just crunching other scripts. Chad: Yeah. Thom Kenney: And you could make an argument that there are certain television channels that are known for saccharine movies, right? They've got a very predictable. Chad: Hallmark channel. Joel: You're saying that like it's a bad thing, Thom. Chad: Joel's Hallmark channel. He loves the Hallmark channel. Joel: Nothing like a good holiday romance, Thom. Thom Kenney: I wasn't gonna say it, I wasn't gonna say it. Joel: That's right. Hallmark Channel... Thom Kenney: So there are repetitive ways to pull these things out, right? But on the flip side of it, there are opportunities here for folks that can take a core of something that's created with a large language model and then expand it in their, with their own vision and their own ideas. So there's still a lot of creativity, because part of this is when you look at all of this data, and this is something I've chatted about with some friends and with my wife, and we sit around and think about big things. If all of the information that we start to create with large language models is only based on information that we have already created as humans, are we gonna get to a point we're gonna stagnate with creativity? Because are we just gonna continue to regurgitate what we've already created? Thom Kenney: Will Artificial Intelligence get to a point of set chance where it truly can create something purely original, just like a human would? I think that's a little bit further down the line. But we may enter into the trap in the near term that says we're just regurgitating and regurgitating and regurgitating, because that's what we're feeding the models. And then in kind of mindset of self licking ice cream cone, that same data that's being created by the large language models is going back into the corpus of data that's feeding the large language models. So as we do more and more and more of large language model development, more and more of that is being fed into the large language models to do more large language model output. So you can see that this just starts creating more and more and more and more automated content that's been generated. Thom Kenney: And what does that mean from a creativity standpoint long-term? So for the actors, for call center operators, for a lot of different occupations, there is a question of how much of this is going to remove the work that I've done as a creative person. And that's, you're not gonna get away from the answer that says some of it. Now, is it 10%? Is it 90%? Is an open question, but some of it is, the writers and the actors who embrace this type of technology will have an advantage in my opinion, because they can leverage the technology to build on their own creative base long-term. Chad: Well, and also think about scalability. And again, something else that we talked to Ryan about at Veritone is that, let's say for instance, Brad Pitt, his voice in other languages is not his voice, right? But if again, it's a cloned, a digital clone of his voice, then he can actually, you can get Brad Pitt's voice, but also he can get paid on that, right? And then we start... Thom Kenney: He can. Chad: Then we start to get into the multimodal piece where we start taking in information that's video, pictures, all that other fun stuff. And then we start generating clones that are more than just voice. And then at that point, again, as an actor, I could prospectively scale instead of CGI. We've got, I've got my digital clone out there working for me. Now it might work for less, but from a scalability standpoint, who gives a shit? Thom Kenney: I would give a shit. Chad: Yeah? Thom Kenney: And here's why. Chad: Okay. Thom Kenney: Because if you... If Tom Hanks is one of my favorite actors. Chad: Oh, yeah. Thom Kenney: I really enjoy Tom Hanks. He's got a great repertoire and he is got a great range that he can do, but he's in a lot of movies. Chad: Yes. Thom Kenney: And you'd be hard pressed to say that there are no actors that could have been just as good, if not better than Tom Hanks in some of the movies that he's done. And when you think about that, that scalability, let's assume for a moment we can take a Tom Hanks or a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt, and we could use their likeness. Look at how young Harrison Ford was in his last movie, with some of the multimodal digital impact that they were able to do with Artificially Intelligent agents. Thom Kenney: When you get that kind of scalability, do you then also decrease the range of creativity? If every movie that we produce only has three actors, are we really still a creative culture? Or are we just regurgitating more of the same? And that's one of the risks that I think the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA, the script writers, the actors are seeing, is that as this expands, to your point, maybe they get paid less, but they could scale. So if you're doing a hundred movies at a million dollars a piece, you don't have to do 10 movies at $10 million a piece, right? You're still earning the same amount of money, but are you decreasing the creativity level of Hollywood in general? I think we absolutely open up the door to decreasing the creativity level, but it's not just there with the screen actors, it's across books, right? How many children's books are written by artificially intelligent agents and language models? Chad: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thom Kenney: How many fiction novels are gonna be written? Are we creating this world where the majority of what is output is only based on what we've done before? We really start to narrow that creativity bond, and that decreases our value in my mind as a human species of thinking outside the boundaries of what we already know to be true by pushing the limits of where we need to go. Joel: Well, the good news is Thom, we could bring the dead back. So Elvis, John Wayne and Janis Joplin. Thom Kenney: Yes. Joel: Can all start putting out new content in a minute now. Chad: Oh, no. No. [laughter] No. Joel: Back to the Screen Actors Guild, and I think we focus a lot on the Tom Cruise's and the big money stars. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: It's the little guys to me that are gonna get squashed. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: The extras in the background... Chad: And the up-and-comers who aren't gonna get that role. Yeah. Thom Kenney: Yes, absolutely. Joel: Talk about your take on what happens to them. And I think if we take this full circle to employment, we know many of the recruiting activities can be monotonous and can be replaced. What happens to recruiting? What happens to HR tech that can maybe be replaced? Talk about the little guy and how it impacts ultimately our business. Thom Kenney: If we think about the little guy in the Screen Actor's Guild, for example. You lose the next Tom Cruise, you lose the next Tom Hanks, you lose the next Julia Roberts or Dame Judi Dench. You lose those folks because exactly to your point, they never have an opportunity to grow, because we're capitalizing on characters that are created by actors that we already know and are already trusted as money makers inside of the industry. Joel: So can I push back on that and say... Thom Kenney: Sure. Joel: TikTok and Reels will be where the next famous people come from. We don't need Hollywood to be that incubator, because we have social media and TikTok. Isn't that where the next big stars come from? Thom Kenney: Those are different stars. Joel: Okay. Thom Kenney: If you think about what it takes to actually do a movie, and Tom Hanks actually has a really interesting short documentary about this. The level of effort that goes into an actual movie is absolutely ginormous. It's huge. The impact of putting together a 30 second TikTok is actually very small. The benefit of the TikTok-tors that have grown and have grown a huge base, have done so because they've created a story arc for themselves. It hasn't been one particular video. It's been a series of videos, and they've captured the attention of folks that are there. Thom's personal opinion, I think that's different than a storytelling adventure, which is creating something out of nothing. Game of Thrones on TikTok is a lot harder to create than Game of Thrones in a production studio. It's not impossible, but I think it's a lot harder to produce inside of there. Thom Kenney: And I think TikTok ties into, again Thom's personal opinion, the more immediate gratification realm that people want, whether it's through doom scrolling or just scrolling through videos, you can move very, very quickly. It doesn't take a lot of attention to watch a 20 second TikTok video. And then you can get caught up in the links to those videos and the different marketing and advertising that can be done. But it's different than a large content. Just like if you're gonna try to write War and Peace with ChatGPT, it may not be as easy as you think. Chad: Yeah. Thom Kenney: That is a tome of a story. Joel: Or Hamlet. I could see Broadway and actual in-person actors thriving in this environment. Thom Kenney: Absolutely. Joel: But anyway, I sidetracked you from recruitment and how this is gonna impact that. Thom Kenney: You did. You did. Joel: So sorry, sorry. Go on. Thom Kenney: As you get into the recruiting side of things, or even just HR tech in general, Conversational AI is one of those things that started as sort of a small little idea a few years ago. And conversational AI is everywhere now. And I think it's comical sometimes too. You look at the value of a company like Paradox and then the incredible work that they're doing inside of this market. Joel: Right. Thom Kenney: And try to say, Oh, well, I'm just gonna create a Paradox replacement with ChatGPT. No, you're not. It's not gonna happen, right? Because there's this concept of things like hallucinations and zero shots, large language models. When you're thinking about it from a recruiting perspective, you've gotta be really, really careful about these things like hallucinations. And I'll explain a little bit about what that is. It's basically a large language model that just makes stuff up or says stuff that's offensive. Chad: It's predicting, right? And prediction isn't always true. Joel should know that. Thom Kenney: Not always true, and not always DEI safe. Joel: Yeah. There is that... Thom Kenney: To use that kind of work. Joel: There's that. Yeah. Thom Kenney: We have a lot of books that were written that are incredibly offensive, incredibly racist, that are part of the way these large language models are being built up. So if we think we're just gonna, throw a quick large language model in and you're gonna have a ChatBot, and that ChatBot's gonna be your new recruiter, you're opening yourself up to a lot, a lot of risk. There is so much work that needs to go into ensuring that candidate experience is the best possible experience. Because we may have had some layoffs, we may have some hiccups in the economy, but the reality is we still have a fairly low unemployment rate. We still have a highly competitive market for really, really good talent. And that candidate experience is not decreasing in importance over time. Thom Kenney: It's absolutely not decreasing. But what we can do is we can use these large language models and companies that are doing really, really good work with large language models, to enhance that experience. It doesn't mean that we have to replace it, it means that we can enhance it. Now when we think about humans versus automation, I would say when you think about high volume recruiting, great opportunity where you don't necessarily need a human to spend hours and hours and hours. Chad: Yes. Thom Kenney: Doing interviewing and doing background checks and doing question and answer sessions, that's a great opportunity to apply something like Conversational AI to some of that high throughput. But we also have to be careful too, because if you look at what happened with AWS a few years ago, when they tried to automate resume reviews. Chad: Oh, yeah. [laughter] Thom Kenney: It didn't go exactly how they planned. Chad: Oh, no. Thom Kenney: So we still need. Chad: Yes. Thom Kenney: Yeah. Car crash, train wreck, and a number of ways to look at it. So we've gotta be very, very careful about how we apply some of these technologies to ensure that we're not introducing bias, that we're not introducing prejudices, that we're not introducing any of the pitfalls that you've got by letting tech to sort of run a mock without any sort of constraints or measurements. Chad: Well, that being said, let me throw this out there, 'cause Paradox is one thing. They're becoming a platform, even like core, core platform. Thom Kenney: Yes. Chad: Then you've got a Textio, right? That to me, today seems more like a feature than a platform. Especially when you've got these large language models that are out there. Now, they do have domain-specific data in power. No question. But if you have other organizations that are out there that might be behind Textio right now, and Textio is a very expensive product, 42.5 million in funding, that might do some of it. But at the end of the day, how quick could an organization catch up to a Textio, which is not really platform-specific, it just seems more futuristic? Thom Kenney: It depends on what you're trying to do with the technology. And I say that very specifically because you can slap anything together very quickly today with a large language model, it really doesn't take a lot of effort. What takes effort is the psychological side of how you're interacting with candidates, for example, just having technology slapped with a nice little web UI interface, and you've got some JavaScript and you pop up this little ChatBot, it's very easy to get back to the days, 10 years ago, where people hated working with those ChatBots. Lots of major companies were out there, it's like, "How can I help you today?" "Oh, well, I've got a question about my bill." "Oh, you've got a question about Bill. Bill can be at your house in three hours," it's like, "No, that's not what I said at all." Joel: Here's a link to search results about Bill questions. Chad: [chuckle] About Bill... Thom Kenney: About Bill questions, exactly. And as we think about this, the aspect of how your interface and the folks becomes so important now and becomes the differentiator. So as I think about how quickly could someone create something like this, it really is about how good are you going to leverage the technology from a psychological perspective that enhances the candidate experience. Because it'll be very, very quick to lose the candidate experience with a really bad product, but it's really, really easy to create a very bad product today. In this particular context, when you're trying to interact live with humans, it's not gonna take much to build a bad product. Joel: Keeping it in Hollywood a little bit, Sarah Silverman, one of my favorite comedians is in a lawsuit right now for AI using her image, I guess, or her content. This is obviously gonna play on, it reminds me a little bit about the early days of YouTube, where people would just put everything on that was trademarked and copyrighted, and there was tons of lawsuits and that all got settled. Does this go a similar route? Or do you see the lawsuits and how this plays out differently than maybe YouTube did? Thom Kenney: I see this plays out a little differently than YouTube, because there is some specificity about what Sarah is suing for. It's suing for where she believes information that was copyright protected was being used in the large language models. And that's an important differentiation, I think, from just using things that are publicly available. When you think about YouTube, what's copyrighted, a politician's speech, if you're recording a politician speaking in a public forum, they can't copyright that, because you as part of how you can operate in a free society, is you can post something that you video that was in the public domain. Thom Kenney: Sarah's arguing that you use things that are not in the public domain, that I sell books, I sell tickets to my comedy show, those are a trade between a customer and a provider, you've paid me to get a value for something. So Sarah's argument is, you've used things that are not free to build your large language model that you are now making money from. So that I think is... There's a little bit of a nuance difference between how YouTube kind of grew. But I would tie it into more with what happened with music 20 years ago with all the peer-to-peer music sharing. Chad: That's true. Yeah. Thom Kenney: The App Store for example. That was a great example of using copyrighted material to forward the use in a way that it was never intended. And there's a reason today why Apple Music is doing as well as they do, because they sell for a very modest cost access to this huge world of information, but the music producers still get a benefit, a financial benefit from that. In Sarah's case, she's arguing, "I'm getting no financial benefit," and it's not just Sarah Silverman, there are communities of artists, for example, that are suing some of the image generative AI tools, that are producing likenesses. Thom Kenney: So you can argue folks like Monet, it's now in the public domain, to, "Hey, take my picture on vacation in Faro, Portugal and make it look like a Monet painting." But for artists that are alive today who own the copyright, on the property of their art work, that art work that's available on a website that's being scraped and used to then create a likeness of that art is a different type of challenge that's gonna be seen in the courts. If one group of people is gonna make more money than anybody else in the world of generated AI, it's gonna be the lawyers. Chad: Oh God, yeah. So, Ron DeSantis used a Trump AI voice, so it wasn't Trump, but it was his AI modulated voice, let's say, his voice clone, in a commercial, it's pretty much against Trump at this point. Now, usually they would use voice actors that sound like the politician. At this point we're saying, Well, we generally would use voice actors. That's okay. So why can't we use AI? When are we going to draw a line in the sand on this? Or can we just because of past precedent? Thom Kenney: My personal belief is we're not gonna be able to draw a line. Chad: Yeah. Thom Kenney: Because to draw the line, you need legislation. You need a law to cross that line to have impact. And the challenge that we have today is the understanding for the general public of large language models, is sparse. They know what large language models are, they can use them, they can employ them. But the ins and outs of the technical aspect of what it does is a fairly complex set of equations and technologies. And being at Google, I don't even understand a lot of the ways that this works. The folks that are working on this are absolutely brilliant visionaries. Chad: Yeah. Thom Kenney: The challenge next is, how do we get this into a legislative form that could be enforced so that people could cross that line. We as a society in general across the world know that this is a concern. But what's the right reaction to this? The EU is taking a certain approach to this. The US is taking another approach to this. Some other countries are taking no approach to this at all and just allowing it to happen. And part of it too is thinking about how do we control the information that exists in our countries? And I'll give you a quick example of this. In the United States, we have rules that protect the privacy of our citizens. We have rules that protect copyright. We have rules that protect data. So building these large language models, even though it seems like it's an infinite amount of information, it actually is a small corpus of data relative to all the potential data that exists. Other countries don't have these limitations. So if you look at how China operates, they don't necessarily have the same privacy protections on their citizens as we do. They don't have the same privacy protections on data as we do. Chad: Oh, no. Thom Kenney: So their ability to train a large language model actually has quite a large corpus of data that extends beyond what we have. Chad: Right. Thom Kenney: To be able to move this forward. So we're in a world where, let's say, for example, we put legislation in place and there is a line that's crossed that said you cannot use an artificially intelligent agent to mimic the voice of a sitting or a former president, saying words that they've never said with the intent to deceive or to misinform, right? That's a pretty strong statement, right? And I'm not saying that Ron DeSantis did this, but that's kind of where the legislation would look to go. How do you protect the American people from misinformation or disinformation that can be easily generated by an artificially intelligent agent? But who's to say that we couldn't build that same type of thing in another country that doesn't have the same protections to its citizens. Chad: And use it... Yes. And then use it... And then also from our standpoint, use it against other countries. And then obviously they could use it against us because we have our own rules. Thom Kenney: Correct. Correct. Chad: Doesn't mean that they're gonna abide by our rules a.k.a Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Joel: That escalated quickly. Thom Kenney: And drawing this back to Joel's question earlier, about should we sleep well at night or not? The misinformation, disinformation side of things, is probably a much bigger threat than any sort of kinetic activity, because we've already seen how powerful misinformation and disinformation can be. Chad: Oh yes. Thom Kenney: On the global stage. Chad: Yes. Joel: All right, Thom, I'm gonna end on this. It's a simpler question, but no less important. Thom Kenney: Okay. [laughter] Joel: How do these companies monetize? How does ChatGPT make money? How does Google Bard, which is in a really tight situation, 'cause they already have a printing press for money, [laughter] how do they monetize these businesses? Thom Kenney: If you look at the way that ChatGPT has monetized, they've basically said, we have a free version, the freemium model that then ties you into wanting more. That gets you into a paid model. And last I checked, I think ChatGPT is $20 for the premium model that gets you access to version four. People who are doing this professionally, if you think about going back to writers, going back to recruiters doing job ads, going back to folks that are writing policy documents for the government, the ability to have a tool that helps you over time is a way to monetize this going forward. The ability to jump into ChatGPT and say, Write me an abstract for a conference that I wanna talk to that highlights these three points for this particular audience, saves me a ton of time, that's worth 20 bucks a month for me, as an example, for something like the ChatGPT. On the commercial side for businesses, there's a whole new side of things that Google is working on called Enterprise search, which helps use large language models, find your data much, much more easily. Thom Kenney: There's a whole enterprise world that we are just now starting to tap, that gives you that ability to look more deeply into your information that you've already got. And we'll use the government as an example. Imagine a tool that moves from Boolean search into something that's truly a generative search, that looks through every page of the US code, which is massive. You're getting to a world where you don't necessarily need a law degree to be able to start understanding a little bit more about the law. And you're opening up people's minds and people's abilities. And then think about it from the policy perspective for the government, if the government can use this type of technology, and the ways that Google is thinking about this long term, with accessing the world's information in new and ingenious ways. Now with tax codes where you have multiple, multiple replicative and duplicative parts of the tax code, just because the tax code's so big, policymakers can make things more simple for the average American everyday. And that opens up opportunities for monetization as well, right? Chad: All we need is a chip in our head at this point because we are in the matrix. I can learn how to fly a fucking helicopter. This shit happens overnight. Joel: We're in a world where I need a nonstop dose of Tylenol, Thom. [laughter] Automated Voice: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. [laughter] Joel: Thom, for anyone out there that wants to connect with you or learn more about what you do, where would you send them? Thom Kenney: I would send them either to LinkedIn, Thom Kenney, or you can check me out on Twitter @tclmc5. Joel: Chad, that is another one in the can. I learned a new word. Zettabytes. [laughter] Automated Voice: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: And with that, we out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could've used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Elon is just the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he? But this week is particularly special as Twitter, er, X, or whatever, has gone through a rebrand, and more importantly, getting into recruitment with the launch of Twitter Hiring. Not to be outdone, Google is set to launch a full-on PPC solution for its Google for Jobs offering. How will Indeed and others respond? We discuss. What’s more, DEI initiatives are on life-support according to a recent Wall Street Journal article and Eons 2.0 is here in the form of Peppermint. And in China, young adults becoming perma-children as a form of employment is now a thing. Yeah, really. By the way, Chad is back in the USA after his stint in Europe, and let’s just say the disappointment is strong, which you’ll see on our YouTube channel. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Music: Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Joel Cheesman: He's back, baby. Speaker 1: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel Cheesman: Oh, yeah. It's National Hamburger Day. That means White Castles for breakfast, Big Macs for lunch, and Whoppers for dinner. What's up, boys and girls? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel "old-timer with" Cheesman. Chad Sowash: This is Chad "Euro Chad will return" Sowash. Joel Cheesman: And on this week's show, Elon is X-rated, DEI goes down, and Google for jobs marches on. Let's do this. [laughter] Speaker 1: USA, USA, USA, USA, USA. Joel Cheesman: Oh my God, dude. The picture of you on the socials, in the airport, coming back to the US, man. Just salty, salty, salty. Chad Sowash: Hating it, hating it, hating it. I mean... But I gotta say, what a great two-and-a-half months away in Europe. All the different countries that we visited were very, very different. Yet all incredibly welcoming in their own way. We went to... Had some time on the islands of Madeira, which are just fucking gorgeous. Joel Cheesman: Yep. Chad Sowash: And a week in Vienna, a week in Krackow, a few days in Stamford, England. Then on our way to RecFest for an amazing event. After RecFest, we actually hosted friends at our place in the Algarve for a week. And then after that, we had a week-and-a-half of absolutely nothing, until we got back stateside, just yesterday. So it was a great, great time. Next time, I think we're gonna spend the entire time just at home, on the southern coast of Portugal. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. So let's break down the world tour for the rest of the year. You're in the States for like a couple months? Chad Sowash: Yeah, until Paris, baby... Until Unleash, Paris, which we'll talk about in advance. And then we'll be out and about, in about then. But if listeners... Obviously, you've been keeping track. I've had different backgrounds every week for the last two-and-a-half months, whether I was in Krackow, Vienna. We were in a fricking hotel rooms in England. Joel Cheesman: Yep. Chad Sowash: You were in Liverpool and I was in Knebworth. Joel Cheesman: Yep. Chad Sowash: But yeah, we're all over the place, having a great time and just trying to live the life, baby. Joel Cheesman: Well, I'm glad to have you back. No more crazy time zone shit, like regular time. And I'm sure your dogs are glad to see you. Chad Sowash: Yes. They know that they get away with a little bit more the first week that we're home. So, they're enjoying that as well. All three of 'em. Joel Cheesman: All let's get to it. Speaker 1: Shout out. Chad Sowash: All right. I'm gonna roll into shout outs if you don't mind, right out of the gate. And this is gonna be very, very tearful. First shout out to Julie Sowash. So the pinnacle of the trip... And you're gonna find this to be quite hilarious after what I just said... Was building a shed with my wife. Yes. So we needed a shed. So I took the measurements, and I asked Julie... Joel Cheesman: Not a tent? Chad Sowash: No, a shed. Joel Cheesman: Okay. Chad Sowash: A shed. Yeah, shed. And the fucking thing must have been made by Ikea. There were so many pieces for no apparent goddamn reason. The directions were total shit. So over a two day and nine hour build, which should have taken about four hours. We didn't have one fight. Nobody raised their voices. And it was... It wasn't marital bliss, but I tell you what, shout out to the true test of marital patience and love: That's Ikea, or building a fucking shed like this. So shout out to Julie Sowash. Speaker 1: All right. All right. All right. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, that's definitely like, Euro Chad, laid back. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Joel Cheesman: Beach front... Like, that Columbus, Indiana. It's like full-blown, karate fight. It's different here, here back in the States. Well, my first shout out goes to a fallen monster, if you will. So we both remember the days of Super Bowl ads and... Chad Sowash: Yep. Joel Cheesman: Parties and zeppelins and all kinds of stuff. Well, you think Monster is dead. Well, think again, Chad. Think again. They've announced that they will remain the official job board of the Boston Red Sox through 2023 and into 2024. As part of the partnership, they'll release a comedic short film called, "The mascot within", featuring the Red Sox mascot, Wally. News to me. The film follows Wally's journey to discover his perfect job at Fenway Park with the help of, you guessed it, Monster.com. Fans also have a chance to win special game seats and a VIP tour of Fenway Park. Who needs Super Bowl ads? Monster is back, baby. Go Sox, who are closing in on last place in the AL East, by the way. The Yankees are in the basement, just in case you're wondering. I know you've been gone from America for a while. Probably not a lot of Yankees news in Portugal. Chad Sowash: Yeah. No, no, no. A lot of New York Yankees hats, though. Nobody knows what they are, but they know it's New York, so it's... Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: It's got a great brand. It's funny because the Monster's mascot Trump, they don't have anymore. So they had to use somebody's mascot. Might as well be the Red Sox. I want to shout out to Listener Love. So being gone for the last two-and-a-half months, we've been lucky enough to have some presents just pile up around here. Joel Cheesman: I love listener love. Chad Sowash: First and foremost was a bottle of Woodford Reserve Double Oaked. Joel Cheesman: Oh, c'mon now. Speaker 1: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Chad Sowash: From Mike Fitzsimmons over at Crosschq. And then, I got two bags of my favorite Turkish coffee with proper coffee cups, the actual Turkish coffee cups, from Maya Huber and our friends over at Tadio. And not to be outdone, our friend Evan White... Get ready for this kids... Sent a 2.75 liter... Look at that... 2.75 liter... Joel Cheesman: That escalated quickly. Chad Sowash: Bottle of Eagle Rare to Julie. Joel Cheesman: Two five liters, okay? Chad Sowash: Yes, yes. To Julie, which detailed that this bottle could help her through the struggles of being my wife, which I thought was hilarious. Now, a normal sized bottle... Look, you gotta see normal sized bottle, 750 milliliters. This is almost two and a half times that. I mean, Evan was not fucking around, kids. So shout out to Mike Maya and our friend Evan. Joel Cheesman: Evan is getting a lot of use outta that Costco card, that's all I'm saying. [laughter] That's the only place I could think, that you could get that big of a bottle. Chad Sowash: Yes. No shit. Right? Right? Joel Cheesman: Of eagle Rare. Jesus [laughter] Jesus. Speaker 1: . All. Right. All right. All right. Joel Cheesman: All right Chad, my next shout out. You don't normally think of fast food when it comes to saving the planet [laughter], but QSR Magazine is predicting restaurants will lead the green charge. That's right. While it only takes five minutes to fill up your gas tank, it takes up to 30 minutes to charge your car. And restaurants like Subway and Starbucks, are betting that you'll come in to charge and get a snack while you're waiting. More than 84 million people eat at quick serve restaurants, every day in the US. I'm one of those 84 million on most days, anyway. And more and more locations are hoping you'll make your choice based on a cheap charge. Shout out to fast food restaurants, greening the world. Chad Sowash: And I gotta say the Midwest could actually say that it is the capital, the fast food capital, of the world. Because I think that that is probably 99.9% of the restaurants that we have here in flyover country, by the way. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, yeah. Look, either gas stations are gonna have to become more sit down, hang out, wifi places, or yeah, like restaurants are perfect opportunities to build these out. And they had nice little drawings. If you want to Google, "QSR fast food EVs", like new subways look like the old root beer place, the A&W. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. A&Ws yeah. Joel Cheesman: And the... So it's like you park your car, plug it in, order a sandwich and a Sarsaparilla. Like, sounds like heaven to me, I'm in. [laughter] I'm down, I'm down. Chad Sowash: Does the wait staff, do they roll around on skates? I mean, 'cause that that was a thing. Joel Cheesman: Well, by then there'll be robots and the robots will probably just wheel around and... Chad Sowash: Ah, good call. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, and we won't have people at these places. Chad Sowash: Yeah. But what we will have, Joel, is t-shirts. So the social... All over the socials, they've been blowing up with Chad and Cheese T-shirt sightings. PhD, Andrea Dehrler Duerr over at Visier, our favorite turnover contagion specialist. Also Melissa Bordas and Catherine Henry, all sporting the new Chad and Cheese threads on the socials. Shelly Billinghurst created a new recruitment Flex logo wearing Chad and Cheese, while drinking a bourbon. Very apropos Shelly, very apropos. And last but not least, Bill Fanning sent me a message and he said, "We made the t-shirts too soft. His wife keeps stealing his." Well, you know what Bill, mission accomplished. That's right. But you cannot win a Chad and Cheese t-shirts from our friends at JobGet, if you don't register at chadcheese.com. Just click the free link in the header, and there you go. But wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What else can you win, Joel? There there's more, right? Joel Cheesman: Oh my. Not just t-shirts... And by the way, Bill, you can never go too soft or too hard. Speaker 1: What are you doing Step bro? [laughter] Joel Cheesman: That's right. And we can announce this month's winners actually. Stacy Shaw was our whiskey winner from our friends at Textkernel. Colin Parker is our beer winner from Aspen Tech Labs. And our rum with Plum, celebrating her birthday, was Suzanne Parham this month. So yes, but you can't win if you don't play, kids. Chad Sowash: What about our getaway? We need a getaway winner. Joel Cheesman: I'm passing that to you after I say you gotta go to chadcheese.com/free. But that's not all you can win, Chad. Chad Sowash: That's right. You can actually win a $250... That's right, $250 Airbnb card for a getaway from our friends at Abode HR. They are the specialists in being able to help you get your GenZ-ers in place. That's right. Abode HR, $250 Airbnb card. You gotta go to chadcheese.com. Click on free, register, all of that booty. The bounty of that booty could be yours. Maybe. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: All the booty. By the way, we don't say it enough, but if you haven't left us a review on your favorite podcast platform of choice, please do so. Whether it's positive or negative, we love the feedback. Chad Sowash: Give it. Joel Cheesman: No matter what. No matter what. Here, it is. [laughter] Speaker 1: Can you feel the tension in the air right now, [laughter]? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel Cheesman: A few fans are celebrating another trip around the sun with a birthday this week. That includes Dustin Carper, Jeremy Bright, Drew Field, Jim Schneider, Joe Wilke, Mary Lanahan, Sarah Berlin, Ashley Smith, Julia Levy, Damon Ashley, Brian Cheney, Crystal Ley, Marin Hogan... Wow. Jason Besier and... Speaker 1: Takeoff, Lee. We're doing our movie. Don't wreck our show you Hozer. Joel Cheesman: That's right. You mentioned Shelly, but Sayers Boudreaux is also celebrating a birthday. So happy... Speaker 1: Happy birthday. Joel Cheesman: Happy birthday everybody. Happy birthday. Chad Sowash: That's right. That's right. Guess what time it is? Joel Cheesman: Oh. Chad Sowash: Shaker Recruitment Marketing. We are on the road again, RecFest, Nashville on September 13th and 14th. The Chad and Cheese will emceeing the Disrupt stage. We're gonna be there all of day one. There's two days, two days. All of day one. We get a rest on the Sabbath being the seventh day and... [laughter] or the second day in this case. And we're gonna have some special, special guests on stage. So come out, check us out. Then we're going to HR Tech in Vegas, October 10th through the 13th, where we will be spending two whole days in the Fuel50 booth, drinking, interviewing, and doing whatever the hell we want, 'cause I'm sure that's exactly what they want. Plus, I hear we're gonna have guests which are carbon copies of the Chad and Cheese. Joel Cheesman: Just a rumor, Chad, just a rumor. Don't get the masses too excited too quickly. It's just a rumor at this point. Chad Sowash: Last but not least, a few days later, just a few days later, we're going back to Europe, baby. That's right. Getting on a plane and we're heading to Paris for Unleash World, October 17th and 18th. It is a staple event in HR and recruiting industry. And if you're a startup, which I know a good amount of you probably are, you should check out the Digital Startup Competition. We can see you there at chadcheese.com. Go to events in the upper right hand corner. Register, register, register. Can't wait to see you. Joel Cheesman: Thank God, we have August to recover. Our poor livers need a break. Chad Sowash: Yes. Speaker 1: Starbucks. Joel Cheesman: Oh boy, oh boy. Okay, Twitter is getting into recruitment. Chad Sowash: What? Joel Cheesman: But let's talk about the name change real quick, Chad. Twitter is now X. The company said, "The Twitter name made sense when it was just a 140 character messages going back and forth, like birds tweeting. But now, you can post almost anything, hinting a super app was coming." Chad, your thoughts on Twitter becoming X. Chad Sowash: Elon Musk is literally taking everything away that made Twitter great. It was micro blogging, which teased people into content. That's really what it was good for, teasing people, having quick and snarky rebuttals and con... Really having good discussion back and forth. Now that's just not the case. TwitterX, though. So you're taking a well-known, global brand, and you're changing it for no fucking reason. Chad Sowash: You can make these stupid changes under the Twitter name, but he wants to turn it into something entirely new and different. He's making a ton of changes, that we'll talk about here in a minute as we get into the recruiting side of the house, but I don't know if this is real. It's like him wanting to have a dick measuring contest inside the octagon with Zuckerberg. I don't know if... What comes out of this guy's mouth is actually real. You go to X.com now, and it redirects to Twitter. I just don't know why you would spend those resources trying to push everything. None of this makes sense to me from a business standpoint. He's just losing money. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. It's funny, you said, "I didn't know if it's real." And so the first two that came to my mind, in my lifetime, as major brand screw ups. Number one, is new Coke. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: New Coke was a disaster. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Coke was quick to turn around and say, "Okay, sorry. Let's go back to Coca-Cola Classic." By the way, Coke Classic does not taste the same as the original Coke, because we actually had cans of the old Coke, and they had classic, and I did taste-tests as a teenager. I'm like, "This is not the same. Something is going on." Anyway, so the conspiracy theorist in me said Coke had that planned all along, that they were gonna switch back to, maybe, a cheaper recipe and fool everybody, anyway. Joel Cheesman: And then Netflix, when they were moving from direct-to-mail movie CDs or DVDs, went into streaming, they created a new brand called Quickster. I don't know if you remember this or not. But Quickster was a week-long thing. The Wall Street freaked out. People were like, "What the hell's going on?" And then they quickly said, "Just kidding. We're still Netflix." And now Netflix is known more for streaming now than actual mail DVD. Joel Cheesman: So I kind of thought at first, "Oh, Elon's gonna go, "Okay, I'm sorry, I pissed off the community. We'll go back to Twitter."" But all signs point to this being a thing now. You have a multi-billion dollar brand that was built for free, at the footer of every major media company, every major company... Every site, almost, on the web, has a Twitter bird that links back to Twitter. To throw that away so, just in a cavalier fashion, just was weird. Clearly, Elon doesn't care. He's not listening to anybody. This is gonna go down as one of the biggest branding mistakes that you'll probably ever think of. Joel Cheesman: Just like Netflix wasn't pigeonholed into mailing DVDs, Twitter isn't pigeonholed into always being a 140 character messaging thing back and forth. You can evolve this thing into whatever. This super app that he's talking about where there's payments, and... I guess, you can call an automated Tesla at some point. Or maybe get a trip to space with your phone... I don't know where this thing's going. But to make it X, there's stories about trademark issues, companies like Microsoft with Xbox. There's like X trademarks. So this is gonna be a real... This is gonna be another headache for him, legally. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: They took the poor guy that had the X handle, and just said like, "Sorry dude, we're taking this over." So now X at Twitter is now X. It's the new company. Look, either he's gonna look like a total genius and crush this thing, or it's just gonna go down as one of the many stupid consumer electronic mistakes and sites that he's doing. Stick with cars, stick with spaceships, dude. It's just kind of sad to see this thing spiral down into trash. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: It's sad. Chad Sowash: But they're getting into recruiting, so it should... It's all good. Joel Cheesman: Maybe they can turn it around with hiring. So let's go to recruitment now, Chad. Twitter's reportedly developing, "Twitter hiring", a job listings feature for verified organizations to post up to five listings visible on their profile. The service is expected to be free for verified organizations, offered alongside the $1,000 a month verified organization subscription. So it's not exactly quite free, but I guess it is in a roundabout way. Twitter's interest in jobs, jobs related offerings, was evident as they acquired the job matching startup Laskie, which we discovered or talked about, Chad, a few weeks ago. And Elon Musk expressed interest in the idea when they acquired Laskie. Chad, your thoughts on Twitter or X or whatever hiring? Chad Sowash: Oh, okay. So we're gonna start out with a couple of quotes, so get get all this put into perspective. So this quote is from NDTV, "Advertiser spending dropped 89% to $7.6 million, over a two-month period earlier this year, according to estimates from market research firm Sensor Tower." Dropped 89%. Then the BBC reports, "Twitter has lost almost half of its advertising revenue, since it was bought by Elon Musk last October, in a statement by Musk." Chad Sowash: Job postings won't heal Twitter's self-inflicted revenue wounds. It's just not going to happen. This is a gushing wound, and he's got a generic band-aid that they're trying to apply to it. Job postings on Twitter are already happening, and if you're following a company that you're interested in, you're probably already seeing jobs in your feed. They're probably 99% irrelevant, but jobs have been in the feed since back in the TweetMyJobs days. Five featured jobs? I mean, can you imagine a company with hundreds or thousands of jobs trying to manage the top five jobs on your profile? If you can only sponsor five jobs, I mean, because there's no clarity about this yet. If you can only sponsor five jobs at a time, that dramatically curbs the revenue opportunity. That makes no sense. Discovery. Chad Sowash: How will Twitter drive relevant leads to real engagement? Well, the answer is, relevant job content. But Twitter has little to no understanding of user's work history, career pathing, or anything related to providing relevant job content to users. Now, I understand that Twitter purchased Laskie, a job matching platform. But without the data about me and my work history, none of that fucking matters, right? Again, you're just making shit up. You're going to have hallucinations all over the place. Employer branding. What brand wants to be involved in this shitshow other than maybe the MyPillow guy, right? So, very few. As demonstrated by advertising, marketing, and brand leaders pulling their cash out of Twitter. So this isn't bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's the equivalent of bringing a man with no arms and no legs to a gunfight. Joel Cheesman: Tell us how you really feel, Chad. So this is really interesting, and this goes back in my mind... Reid Hoffman and Elon worked at PayPal together. So Elon's known about probably the idea of LinkedIn before it actually even launched. So I gotta think at the back of my mind, Elon has always thought about, "Hey, LinkedIn is a good business. It has no competition." And we talked last week about LinkedIn getting some competition. Is it in the form of Twitter? I don't know, but I gotta think Elon is thinking about that. The history, you touched on it, of jobs integrating with social media, is long, and it's a long list of trail of the dead. You might remember SimplyHired did a deal with MySpace, back in the day, to power jobs for them. SimplyHired was the backfill for LinkedIn for many years. Joel Cheesman: You could see the LinkedIn jobs, and there was a second tab for SimplyHired that you could see that there. We both remember Google base, which was Google's first drop into that, quickly followed by Google+. There was no integration there. Facebook Jobs, we've talked about and they've done since we've launched this show. Jobs on Facebook are gone. So if Facebook can't make this shit work, do we really think that Twitter can make this work? It's doubtful. I feel like Elon's going to get bored. He's going to move on to other stuff, more exciting stuff. But I also appreciate that it's low-hanging fruit. Joel Cheesman: If you can get 10,000 companies to be a verified company and be able to put jobs up, that's $120 million a year, no big deal. But that's not chump change either. There's got to be searchability. It looks like you can put your ATS or an XML feed into Twitter, and maybe you select the five jobs that are at the top, or maybe it's searchable. Again, we don't quite know what it's going to look like. Joel Cheesman: Then I think the next step is, if you want to apply to jobs, or if you want to access jobs or more jobs, or if you want to put yourself out there to be hired, you will subscribe as a user to then put yourself out there. So now it's a position where all these job seekers that are on Twitter, just like on LinkedIn where it says, "I'm looking for work" or, "I'm open to work", now on Twitter, you'll be able to add that, "I'm open to work", as long as I'm paying the $8 a month to be on Twitter. So I think he's going to create this model of like, "Hey, if you pay subscription, you get all this stuff and we'll keep adding value." The golden goose, of course, is companies paying $1,000 a month to do this. I think a lot of companies will, just to see how it works. And if he adds value to that, then they'll keep doing it. But that said, this is a drop in the bucket of the kind of money he has to start making to make his $44 billion investment worthwhile. Joel Cheesman: It's an easy... Like, easy layup in terms of getting some revenue. I'm not shaking in my boots if I'm LinkedIn, I'm not losing sleep if I'm Indeed. This is kind of a nice discussion point, but it'll probably be dead in a year. Chad Sowash: He's literally submarining this business. And now he's coming up with all these different ideas that have no focus whatsoever, in trying to, again, put a cheap Band-Aid on a fucking gushing wound. He's had problems with brands. Any brand that has already started pulling revenue, advertising dollars, what do you think is going to happen if a company says, "Well, we're going to go ahead and sponsor for a $1,000 a month or what have you." Marketing finds out about it and says, "No. Fuck that. Optics wise, that's fucking stupid. Don't do that. We've pulled everything off of there in the first place for a reason." So yeah, I just think from an optics standpoint, from, you know, a business model standpoint, he is all over the place, all over the place. And in the X, the X marks the spot on the fucking problem. It is all fucked up. Joel Cheesman: Not since rim jobs has X jobs been so interesting. More spaghetti at the wall from Mr. Musk. Speaker 1: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel Cheesman: All right, let's go from Twitter or X to Google. This is from our friends at AIM, "Google Sponsored Job Ads or, what the kids are calling GSJA... That doesn't really roll off the tongue very well... Could roll out fully in Q3 of 2023, providing sponsored posts above Google for jobs results. Job boards may benefit initially, but need to adopt with SEO, SEM and budget allocation. Regulatory concerns might lead Google to proceed cautiously, especially in Europe. Industry insiders believe GSJA will attract high-quality candidates and create new advertising opportunities for recruiters. However, there are challenges in understanding user intent for general job searches. Overall, however, AIM thinks Google's entry into job advertising could reshape how employers reach qualified candidates." Chad, what are your thoughts on GSJA. Chad Sowash: I think it's interesting and I'm going to hit with a different angle. I think Google's gonna do a damn good job, much better than we've seen in the past, especially around user experience. But remember, remember that Indeed is now playing ball with Google for jobs. So won't this just turn into another Indeed buying up more inventory like they did with Google PPC. Most niche job site players, they're not sophisticated enough to pull together great SEO, SEM. And now Google for job ads Indeed is, right. Agencies, this is where recruitment marketing firms should step in and fill the void, not just for their employer brands, but for niche job site players as well. It's low hanging fruit, especially in connecting user behavior with retargeting campaigns. That's what you will see from a lot of these job boards who want to really juice up their traffic. Chad Sowash: Here's a big European, "Aha", moment. European job sites have held their ground amazingly against Indeed. Indeed doesn't have great penetration into most of their countries because their local brands stand strong. But what other brands stand strong? Google and Indeed could easily sway loyal locals their way through outspending European brands on Google. Indeed can hop in. And that is where a lot of the job searches is actually starting. So it's a, "trust by association", and Google could be Indeed's trojan horse into Europe. Now, beyond Europe, Indeed is only one site, right? And I've had, actually, discussions, and people have talked about, "Well, they're just one site and Google for Job wants... They want diversity." Well, here's diversity for you, kids. Chad Sowash: There's another site called Glassdoor, and then another site called SimplyHired, which Indeed pretty much runs both of. Which means, also, the top three positions are theirs right out of the gate, if they have the spend, of course. So I see many layers happening here in a Trojan horse into Europe through Google, 'cause there's trust there. Also, you take a look beyond Europe, into just being able to take all of the inventory, which they did very well when they first started Search Engine marketing way back in the day. They had great SEO, great SEM and they just killed it. They could do that exact same strategy, starting with Google for jobs right out of the gate, and then start better penetration into Europe. Joel Cheesman: You just said penetration. Speaker 1: Just the tip. Joel Cheesman: So I think both of us at some point, in our prediction shows, talked about Google, monetizing Google for jobs with a pay-per-click solution. So, I think you're taking credit for this year when they rolled it out, first to big players, ZipRecruiter and some of the others. It's a natural progression. Anyone who knows anything about Google and what they've done, saw this coming. Now they're gonna roll it out to the masses. Joel Cheesman: Something about timing... Google's really good about timing. Like right when Indeed started fucking with their pay-per-whatever, Google started monetizing, rolling out pay-per-click. So it was like, "Oh, what great timing, both, for Google and what a fuck up timing it was for Indeed to mess with their pricing structure." So now you have Appcast acquiring Bayard, and now all the agencies are freaked out about where are we gonna put our spin in terms of distributing job postings. Joel Cheesman: Well, what great timing, now Google's about to roll out their pay-per-click solution. So all these agencies are gonna easily be able to tell their clients, "Oh, Google has a solution now. We're gonna go put a lot of spend that we were putting in Appcast or everywhere else, into Google." And what employer's gonna say, "No, don't spend money on Google. That sounds like a big waste of money. I've never heard of them." As opposed to like a second-tier programmatic solution, Google looks like, "Oh, our agency is super smart. They're super on it." "Yes, I will vote for leaving Appcast or whatever we're using, and leveraging Google." Like every employer's gonna be on board with that. So now the agencies have perfect timing to be able to roll all their people, all these big companies into Google's pay-per-click. Joel Cheesman: And all Google has to do is not fuck it up. Because if the spend works, if they get applies and they get the same kind of traffic that they were getting from Appcast or anywhere else, they're gonna be able to keep that spend. And it's eventually gonna trickle down to smaller companies. They'll be able to like, "Hey, post a job." "Hey, you want to boost this?" "You want to", like, "put some money toward that?" So smaller businesses will gravitate toward Google. I think this is a big win for Google. Who's not gonna pay for it? Everyone's gonna pay for it. Companies are gonna gonna get on board, agencies are gonna spend a bunch of money in it. And we hate SMBs, but I think SMBs are gonna slowly gravitate away from ZipRecruiter, Craigslist, whatever, and start posting their jobs directly onto Google. And they bring back hire for higher Google and they become... No, I'm kidding, they don't become an ATS again for all... Joel Cheesman: But I think, it's a natural progression. It's gonna happen. What I've been waiting for a long time is, Google+ comes back. You have your resume, your profile on Google, and you can easily apply to these jobs. That's still, I think, gonna happen. But for now, we'll just have to accept the old-school, pay-per-click, set a budget and get traffic, that we've all known and loved Google for almost two decades now, doing. And now employers and agencies can embrace it. Chad Sowash: Finally. Joel Cheesman: Finally. Quick break and we'll talk about DEI going down. All right, Chad, the Wall Street Journal, one of your favorite publications, is reporting, "Demand for Chief Diversity Officers is on the decline after a surge in interest a few years ago. And these executives are facing higher turnover rates than their counterparts in human resources, this is according to Live Data Technologies. In addition, some diversity chiefs say that the Supreme Court's recent ruling against affirmative action in higher education, is bringing additional scrutiny to their efforts. Companies including Netflix, Disney and Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity, and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. And thousands of diversity focused workers have been laid off since last year. And some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments." Chad, I'm guessing you have an opinion on this and wanna share it. Chad Sowash: Possibly. So let's break this down really quick, because this isn't just corporate America showing that they really never cared about diversity in the first place. That's only the start. Here in the US, recently, we've seen affirmative action killed in universities. And I predict that we will also see it challenged in the workplace. We're living in a time when states like Florida, are citing slavery as a benefit to some slaves, right? Chad Sowash: In states like Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, and of course Florida, they have all launched anti-DEI initiatives. This isn't just a sign of corporate America showing that they've always believed that the Chief Diversity Officer position was just a charade. They were all playing for branding optics. No, it goes much, much deeper and demonstrates just how fucked up and devolved the American society is right now. I mean, we are so divided for the wrong reasons. And let's be clear, a long time ago, we started talking and using the word, "Tolerance", instead of, "Respect". We shouldn't tolerate, we should respect different races, genders, religions, choice of who people love and individual's healthcare choices. We should focus on respect. But corporate America, unfortunately in this case, is only one of the symptoms of the disease. And that is the hard part. Joel Cheesman: So George Floyd was the spark that got this ball rolling. And you could look at Kaepernick, you could look at the Me Too as... There was a wave in America for a short period, that sparked this idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Everyone, certainly, we talked to on the show, everyone in our circles of employment, and just human being interactions, was that this was a good thing. This was a healing moment, if you will, in America. Unfortunately, it became politicized. It became a way for Fox News to get more watchers and listeners, and it became a way for CNN to do the same thing and MSNBC and whatever. And it sadly became this right-wing, left-wing argument about what is the point of this movement, and particularly, what is the point of having someone at your company that's getting paid to do this. Joel Cheesman: There was an incident at Stanford recently, where their DEI head had an event, and they went into, either, another professor or a business guy. And so the media just grabbed onto this. And what followed from that was, shareholders, business owners. You saw companies and CEOs coming out saying that, "This isn't political. Like we're not here to state political beliefs. We're here to make money, we're here to make products, we're here to build services." So the volume around this is something that could be a healing moment, something that brings us together became, "Them vs. Us." Companies started saying, "We're out of the, "Them vs. Us" business. We're here to make products." Joel Cheesman: They saw what happened to Disney. They saw what happened to other companies. The, "Go woke, go broke", trend became something that was popular. And my fear is that this is gonna exterminate, basically, the entire title of DEI leader, manager, et cetera. And we're gonna see this trend slowly fade away, sadly. And yeah, like you said, America is going backward. And I feel for the folks that were inspired by this movement, and saddened that it turned into a political fight that companies didn't want any part of. And letting go of their DEI, folks is a casualty of that. And there's just no other way to paint this, besides, unfortunate and sad, for America. Chad Sowash: Corporate America, in this case, if they wanted to achieve pay equity, they would've done it already. And for anybody that says it's hard, fuck you. That's bullshit. We know better. There's technology out there, we know better, okay? They don't want to do it. And this is a great watershed moment in demonstrating, and it should to you, that they didn't give a fuck in the first place, right? Most of these CDOs didn't have staff, they didn't have budget. All they had was a position. And you know what that position was there to be? Was to be a Chief Diversity Officer, that everybody could point to and say, "Oh, look, we're doing our job." And they weren't. They never were. Joel Cheesman: Now onto something a little lighter, Chad. Chad Sowash: Please. Good God. Good God. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Yeah, this is a little heavy for you, your first day back in America. So remember Jeff Taylor? Monster's Jeff Taylor's Eons? . Chad Sowash: I can't forget him, dude. I cannot forget him. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it's the social network/platform for the 50 and over crowd that launched back in 2006. Well, in case you forgot about it, Chad, or our listeners forgot about it, or you don't even know what the hell we're talking about, have a quick listen to a commercial from Eons, back in 2006. [video playback] Jeff Taylor: Hi, I am Jeff Taylor, and I'm proud to introduce Eons.com. Eons is all about you, but here's the twist: You need to be past your 50th birthday. From this moment with Eons.com, you'll see more, you'll learn more, and you'll be more. Eons.com is the place to go on the web for everything 50plus. I like to say, "Boom, boom, boom. Let's get started." I'm here at Eons.com. It's free, and there's tons to do. First off, it's fun, and it's huge. Find tons of games, brain builders, and movie reviews just for people your age and body. Take the longevity calculator, see how to add years to your life. Don't miss our exclusive products, created especially for you, from LifeDreams, where you can build your top 10 list of life goals, to cRANKy, the world's first age-relevant search engine. Chad Sowash: CRANKy. [laughter] Jeff Taylor: Come see us at Eons.com. You're one click away from living the biggest life possible, and it's free. Be proud. Be inspired. Get it done. You know what's coming. Boom, boom, boom. Joel Cheesman: Boom, boom, boom, baby. Was Jeff even 50 when he launched Eons? [laughter] Chad Sowash: I don't think he was. No, I don't think he was. I think Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Jane Seymour, was, who was the spokeswoman for this. But... Joel Cheesman: Yeah, cRANKy... Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: CRANKy was... It was like rank in large letters, and then the C and the Y were small at the end. So Chad, fast forward to today, and now a company called Peppermint, a New York City based "online clubhouse," [laughter] as I put in quotes... I guess that's what we're calling social networks now... For adults 55 and over. That's right, we've gone from 50, over now 55. Has secured $8 million in seed funding, led by Primetime Partners. The platform offers interactive workshops and clubs to promote engagement and learning. It plans to expand operations and collaborate with senior centers to foster connections. Chad, what's old is new again. What are your thoughts on Eons 2.0, aka Peppermint? Chad Sowash: $8 million is a lot of money for a seed round, and it's a shit ton of money to throw straight into the fucking toilet. [laughter] Face it, nobody wants to feel old. And creating a social media platform for people 55plus, means the equivalent to an old folks home social media platform. I mean, it's really what it is. So now, if they're trying to get laid by someone your own age, then a dating site or dating app gives motivation to sign up. That makes sense. But anybody can create a group on Facebook and only give access to people who say they're 55plus. So selling an idea, purely, on total addressable market without really understanding human behavior, is a recipe for disaster. That's all there is to it. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Look, I get it. We're an aging population. 77 million baby boomers, 10,000 retiring every day. I get the allure of creating something just for the old folks. Chad Sowash: The concept, yeah. Joel Cheesman: The problem that was with Eons is still a problem today. Old people do not want to admit that they are old. Chad Sowash: No. Joel Cheesman: They wanna be on TikTok, if they can figure it out. They at least wanna be on Facebook and stuff that their kid's on. And maybe grandkids are doing Instagram. They wanna... They don't wanna be somewhere that the old people go to die. That's just... Like, my dad is 83. He's almost 84. He lives in a retirement community, and all he can talk about is how old everyone is at the retirement community. I'm like, "Dad, you're one of the fucking old people, dude. [laughter] I'm sorry, but Dad, you're 83." Mick Jagger is 80. He turned 80 this week. You think he's joining Peppermint? No. Chad Sowash: No. Joel Cheesman: He's Mick Jagger. Chad Sowash: No. Joel Cheesman: All these old people wanna be Mick Jagger. They still want it to be Woodstock, they still want it to be the '60s... Chad Sowash: Exactly. Joel Cheesman: And that's just the way that it is. And this thing, to get $8 million, [chuckle] is totally making a pile in the street and burning it, because this thing is not gonna take off. There's already dating sites like you mentioned. Yes, STDs are running rampant in these places because you got divorcees and widows all fucking each other. And I'm down with that. That's fine. But you don't need a site for it. And if you do, they already have OurTime or whatever. There's stuff out there. So these guys are behind the curve on that. And by the way, let's not even get into the issue of old people not really figuring out new tech anyway. My dad's phone hasn't been able to download an app for three years because he fucked something up. [laughter] That's sort of the demographic. It's like, let's launch something cool to people that don't get it anyway. And that's ageist, because I can be because I'm technically almost in the age group for this site. And I can tell you, I would never join this site. Chad Sowash: No. Joel Cheesman: Because I'm a podcaster, damn it, and podcasting is cool forever. Good luck, Peppermint. Joel Cheesman: All right, Chad. The #FullTimeDaughter and #FullTimeSon trends are gaining popularity on Chinese social media, reflecting the rise of youth unemployment. Many adult children, unable to find jobs, are hired [chuckle] by their parents to do housework and do other companionship activities. Despite some criticism, some see it as a short term option until better opportunities arise. The increase in unemployment may exacerbate the phenomenon, impacting household incomes, and overall social consumption in China. Chad, full time daughter, full time son. Are you ready to take your kids back in, and make them a full time kid once again? Chad Sowash: No. Let's get this straight. 4,000 subscribers in the full time daughter group or full time whatever it was group, in a country of 1.4 billion. So that pretty much makes this the upper crust are paying their kids while everyone else is still working, or trying to work, or a bunch of part-time jobs to actually make ends meet. So at the end of the day, it's unsustainable, because every country needs highly skilled workers. And unless mom and dad has a cybersecurity firm, it's a cute story, but more Kardashian than reality. I don't see this being sustainable. I think it's clickbait-ey and interesting for a very small few. Speaker 1: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel Cheesman: So in the early '90s, there was a show with Chris Elliott, who was on Schitt's Creek, one of your favorite shows. Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: And I forget the name of the show... But the gist of the show was, he was a 40 year-old man, still living with his parents. And the show was funny because it was so outrageous. Like it would never happen. 40 year-old, living with parents, and he acted like a kid; video games, ordering pizza. Like, he did immature stuff. Here we are, 20-30 years later, and this is becoming a norm. I read all about this stuff about kids staying at home longer. When I was in my early teenager, teen... I wanted nothing to do with my parents. I wanted to get as far away from my parents as possible. If I had to live in a box at the Walmart, [laughter] that was better than dealing with my parents at dinner. No offense to my parents. Joel Cheesman: China has some real problems. 20% youth unemployment. There's some real social upheaval there, and it's weird. Maybe it's cultural, I don't know. But for Chinese adult's parents to pay their kids to just be kids... And you should google this story if you're listening. [laughter] Like, pictures of 25 year-old women that look like 13 year-old girls. It's like they wanna go back in time, the parents, and have kids that were young and do the things that when they were young, they don't wanna admit that they're old now. It's all just very bizarre. I don't really get it. They're paying them apparently 1150... 1115 US dollars per month, which is apparently the average salary in China. Joel Cheesman: There was a quote from the story that said, "My job is to spend time with my parents, for example, taking them to grocery stores and do some household chores. Also, if my parents wanna go out, I would make plans in advance for them, taking them to the various locations." What kind of surreal, upside down world have we come into, that our assistants now are our kids that are taking us out to events? Anyway, this is crazy. Maybe we'll all get lucky, and Elon will move back into his mom and bring Twitter back for old time's sake, man. That's what we can hopefully hope for. Elon, move back into mom's house. Chad Sowash: Boom, boom, boom. Joel Cheesman: Boom, boom, boom. We out. Chad Sowash: We out. Joel Cheesman: Welcome back, Chad. Music: Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Not sure if you’ve heard or not, but recruiting and retaining healthcare professionals is a hot topic these days. No one has really figured out the secret sauce or found the magic bullet. That’s why Chad & Cheese sat down with Angad Madra, director HR technology and analytics at Ardent Healthcare, at iCIMS Inspire in San Diego. On this episode, get ready to snack on a tasty dose of healthcare recruitment, best retention practices and impact of the gig economy. You’re blood pressure is sure to normalize after this one if you’ve been stressed about hiring in this sector. 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 Sowash: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel Cheeseman: Oh, yeah. What's up, boys and girls. We are live from iCIMS INSPIRE, beautiful San Diego, California. I am Joel Cheeseman, your co-host, joined as always, Chad Sowash. And we are happy to welcome Angad Madra to the podcast today. Chad Sowash: That is a strong name. Joel Cheeseman: Very strong. Chad Sowash: I don't know we've ever had a strong name as a strong name. Joel Cheeseman: I need "Gad" connected to my name, Joel Gad Cheeseman, Joel Gad... Chad Sowash: Angad Madra. Joel Cheeseman: Angad, welcome to the podcast. Angad Madra: Thank you. Joel Cheeseman: You're with Ardent Healthcare. Your title would be? Angad Madra: Director of HR Technology and Analytics. Joel Cheeseman: Love it. Out of Nashville... Chad Sowash: Hot Chicken, Tennessee. Joel Cheeseman: Tennessee. Angad Madra: Hattie B's. It's the only one. Chad Sowash: Hattie B's, baby. Joel Cheeseman: So we are at the end here, of day one. What were some of your major takeaways, things that you learned, things that blew your mind up? Talk about that. Angad Madra: I think some people might have said this already, Raya Mars, just looking at the data, one of the things that was intriguing was looking at her data of the population that's coming into the workforce from a age standpoint. And then hearing that same analogy from Johnny Taylor, but talking about, "Hey, we should focus on not just the college campuses and not just the Gen Zs that are coming in, but also focus on 40 above, 50... People above the age of 50. And I think as an industry, we've just neglected that population, so it's caused a lot of chaos in TA to freak out about candidate pool. And here's a amazing amount of people who have a lot of experience, are ready to work, and we're not paying attention to that. So I thought that was really interesting. Chad Sowash: I think we... There's a selective neglection that happens. [laughter] Angad Madra: Totally, totally. Joel Cheeseman: Selective neglection... Angad Madra: I like that phrase. Chad Sowash: We're going to neglect you, and then you... Angad Madra: Purposefully. Chad Sowash: Yes. And then you... Angad Madra: Right. Chad Sowash: So it's weird when we find value in certain segments of the workforce. Talk about what your passion is, especially on the technology side of the house. Why does tech, especially in this space, 'cause not everybody thinks it's sexy. I do. I'm a geek. Joel Cheeseman: Ditto. Chad Sowash: Obviously, you are too. What's your passion around it? Angad Madra: It's 'cause I'm Indian, man. [laughter] It's in my blood. I was in HR and people are like, "Are you in IT?" And I'm like, "Man, maybe I do need to switch to HR IT at least and blend those two worlds." I'm kidding, I'm kidding. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Oh, that's it. We're gonna stop the podcast now. That's too good. Joel Cheeseman: We out. [laughter] Angad Madra: No, I mean, when I was in HR, that was a comment that I got a lot, that people would find out I'm an Indian, they're like, "Oh, you're in IT?" "No, I'm not." But even within HR, I just really enjoyed... Chad Sowash: That's profiling, and profiling ain't cool. Angad Madra: That's why I shaved my head, I look like Middle Eastern now, so... [laughter] I'm kidding. Chad Sowash: It's a sexy head, I'll tell you that right now. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Angad Madra: You resonate. There's problems, you know... Chad Sowash: Thank you. Can feel it, yeah. Angad Madra: Sunburn. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: Feel like I'm in between a couple of Ban roll-on deodorants. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Go ahead. Angad Madra: No, I think being in HR, it is a people business. Recruiting was awesome, gained a lot of experience, but for me personally, doing the same thing, having the same conversation, pulling up the same interview guides, I just needed something else. So I would play around in the system and stretch the system and really fell in love with technology that supports recruiters to do their job better. So my passion is taking technology and making it work for people who are, like, my favorite phrase is, "Oh, I didn't know it could do that." So that's my passion, is helping people find what the system can do, which they already have, they've already paid for, but it's underutilized. Joel Cheeseman: You have previous experience at Dollar General, which is, I assume, a 180 from the work you do now. Angad Madra: Yeah. Joel Cheeseman: But compare and contrast recruiting at Dollar General versus what you do now at Ardent Health. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Wow. Angad Madra: So yeah, I was a recruiter for Dollar General, finding store managers in the middle of nowhere. So it brings a very unique challenge, and the labor market is very different, the pay is very different, so you have to be creative. And Dollar General is a machine. They have 19,000 stores. And our metrics were ridiculous. Like I'd have 1000-1200 stores that I was recruiting for, and my goal was to be 99% staffed, which meant I could only have 10 stores open without a store manager. So the strategy there was not to sit around, wait for a store to be open, but was to build really deep relationships with your district managers and say, "Hey, if your store manager sneeze in the left instead of right, I need to know," so we could have a backup plan and we can figure out this before the store manager leaves. Chad Sowash: Wow. Angad Madra: So it was a very different situation to now being at Ardent Health, our number one job we're looking for is, you can guess it, registered nurses. Joel Cheeseman: Yep. Chad Sowash: Yeah. S?: Interesting. Angad Madra: And even though I am not recruiting, I'm helping the teams recruit using the technology that we have. So, one of the... We're paying crazy amounts of money. If you add up our sign-on bonus and retention bonus, it adds up to the store manager's salary. So we're spending a lot of money to bring these people in, and we saw at iCIMS INSPIRE, the stats from Raya and Johnny Taylor of how many jobs we'll have open by 2030, the gap that there's gonna be. So I think our challenge is, again, how do we build those relationships with these people and bring them in and not just do what other people are doing. Your standard campus recruiting and your standard, "Alright, here's Indeed, I'm gonna dump all this money... " And do the things that... You're competing with everyone else. How are you gonna make yourself unique in the market and bring people in? Chad Sowash: So we talked to an energy company earlier today who actually bought a university because they knew they had to pipeline. I mean, you wanna talk about talent pipelines... Joel Cheeseman: They bought the apple tree basically. Angad Madra: Wow. Chad Sowash: Well, they bought the entire farm, planted the seeds, watered them. Right? So when you take a look at nursing, you take a look at the entire healthcare system, we need to do vocational better, we need to get deeper. We need to get into high schools, we need to get into the... Is there any way that you think the healthcare system is actually gonna move that far down, deep into... Because we need to. Angad Madra: It already is. Our CEO is looking at... And if you look at some of the things, Ardent's already piloting virtual nursing. So we already have hospitals where certain elements of the nursing job, where you come in and you debrief the patient on what's going on, are already happening over a screen, where a nurse... We have a nurse who's disabled, who cannot be physically in the hospital, so we've created a virtual nursing position for that person. Joel Cheeseman: Did he say virtual? Angad Madra: Yes. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Is it [0:07:31.0] ____? Joel Cheeseman: No. S?: Are there VR glasses involved? Joel Cheeseman: Is there a goggle set? [laughter] Is there a Oculus headset in here somewhere? Angad Madra: And I remember this, I went to the hospital not too long ago for something and I had a person on an iPad getting all the information from me about my insurance, my driver's license. I could take a photo with that iPad, send it to her, and she did all of that... Joel Cheeseman: Really? Angad Madra: While I was in bed and there was little monitors sitting next to me. So I know the industry's changing rapidly with how we use technology. Another thing that our organization is piloting is, if you think about your time at a hospital, a nurse is coming very frequently to check your vitals. So they are creating this technology that's a size of a button, little coin that sits on your chest, and it can monitor your vitals much more quickly and... Joel Cheeseman: Efficiently. Angad Madra: Efficiently than a nurse every couple hours. So that not only is helping the patient, and if something goes wrong, we don't have to wait two, three hours to find out. You could really know about the vitals, whatever happening in the moment that it is, and the patient can get the care. So AI, technology is really changing even how patients receive care and how we're helping nurses have flexibility in their jobs and do some of the things. Chad Sowash: Just some of the tasks. And again, we talk about how automation, it's not gonna replace jobs, it's gonna replace tasks. So, that coin might not be able to take blood, right? Angad Madra: Correct. Chad Sowash: Like a phlebotomist or what have you. But... Angad Madra: Emily Holmes might say take blood, but we don't have to go there. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: We can go wherever you want. Your name is Angad. [laughter] Chad Sowash: We went full Theranos on that one, kids. But I mean, yeah, that's amazing. And being able to... The prospect of having an RN who, whether they have a disability or not, can be off location. Angad Madra: Exactly. Chad Sowash: Right? And they can service many. Angad Madra: Right. Chad Sowash: I've actually been in London, to a hotel where you check in on an iPad, and it's somebody in another location. And more than likely, they're doing a registration desk for many different hotels. Angad Madra: Absolutely. Chad Sowash: Right? And so it is, I think, a phenomenon. The big question is, will we adopt it or do we even have a choice? Angad Madra: I don't think we have a choice. I mean, already, so many things are... If people hate ChatGPT, oh, well, you hate it, man. It's out there. [laughter] You know, do you have a choice? You can hate it or maybe try it. Chad Sowash: You cannot use it or you can use it... Angad Madra: And see how it makes your job easier. Chad Sowash: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And learn the hacks, making your job easier. Angad Madra: Yeah. I don't think you could put the genie back in the bottle. I think that's kind of where we've come to. It's now trying to figure out how to ethically move forward with it, and more... I personally think there's gonna be more and more jobs, just like there used to not be jobs where people in every department were looking at data and analyzing it. It was the statisticians that had these crazy equipment and they were trained on it. Now, everybody... I can pull up Power BI, dump a couple spreadsheets and make myself look like a statistician or a data analyst, right? I think it's gonna be the same thing with AI, because it is so freely available, we're gonna have more and more jobs where we are training people how to better leverage it, how to put safeguards around it, how to ethically use it for our company. So, we're using it well. And there's gonna be this specific skillset that people have, or maybe you have a person who knows how to put prompts into an AI system and use it in a way that's more effective. Yeah. But it's gonna happen, and people don't like it, oh, well... Joel Cheeseman: I still have a rotary phone because I believe the voices that come through a mobile device are from the Devil, [laughter] but that's another podcast, Chad. So we know that from the pandemic, this incredible stress on nurses, a lot of nurses left the profession because of that stress. What's happening now in terms of getting them back to the profession? I assume a lot of them haven't left permanently. Maybe it's a timeout. What are you guys doing in terms of marketing or recruiting to get them back into the job? Angad Madra: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I think a lot of people did leave partly because of the burnout that COVID caused, a lot of uncertainty. Joel Cheeseman: God, yeah, dude. Chad Sowash: You see nurses and just medical professionals on TikTok or on YouTube or whatever, literally going into depression right in front of your eyes. Angad Madra: I would too. It was a tough, tough year, couple years for them. Joel Cheeseman: And are you going to OnlyFans, recruiting the nurses that have gone to OnlyFans to come back to the profession? Chad Sowash: I don't think that you can bring them back. [laughter] Angad Madra: No, no, you can't do that. But the ones that did go to Dollar General, [laughter] [0:12:21.1] ____ didn't become store managers, they're probably wanting to come back because they still have that nursing license and they have the degree, they have the skillset. Some of them actually cared about that job and want to come back without the added stress of COVID and all of LinkedIn rubbing it in their face that life is so great with my pet working at home, while they're taking care of all these people, not knowing what's gonna happen to them. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to recruiter hacks, that's gotta be like one of the favorite things, gotta get you all excited inside when it comes to using tech. Right? What's your favorite... Like the thing that you've done throughout your career that you've created like a recruiter hack within a system? Angad Madra: Oh man, I love that question. When I was at Asurion, it's a tech company in Nashville. We were doing three to 500 interviews a day. Joel Cheeseman: Holy shit. Angad Madra: We had a team that just did interviews. It was a high volume role. One of the things that we would do is pull up a Word document, start typing in the interview notes, save it, go to the email, attach the document, send it to an email address. The other team that was... That was the recruiter's role, the interviews role. Then we have another team that their only job was to go into that inbox, get that attachment, scroll all the way to the bottom, look at if it was an extend offer or don't extend offer, and then go and extend the offer. Chad Sowash: Did you have people faxing as well? Angad Madra: Oh my goodness. And then... [laughter] But just hearing the process, it's painful, right? Your eyes twitching, yeah. But one thing I looked at was, there absolutely has to be a way we can automate this. So what I did was created a Microsoft form, put the entire multiple interview guides in there with the radio buttons, with branching questions. And a quick hack about Microsoft Forms is if you go to Microsoft Forms and create a survey, if you start there, the responses will go to a static Excel file. If you go to SharePoint, to an online Excel file and insert a Microsoft Form, every time the response comes, it goes to a SharePoint Excel file which is live, and you don't have to download the responses. Angad Madra: So, that's what we did. There was an online response file, you can filter it by extend offer and you could zip through all the extend offers, "Who do I need to extend an offer?" and now, I have a really quick way to say, how many interviews did we do today? How many were extend offers? How many didn't extend offer? And we turned it into a whole dashboard just for our three to 500 interviews a day. So, not only were we able to quickly do them, extend the offers, but also get metrics on them. So that was like... Chad Sowash: How much time was saved? Angad Madra: Not time, I'll tell you we saved $500,000 a year... Joel Cheeseman: That'll buy a lot of beer. Angad Madra: Off of that hack. Joel Cheeseman: Amen, brother. Curious to your opinion on the gig economy. We talk about companies like Nomad Health, Caduceus, etcetera. They're sort of Fiverr for the healthcare system where you can contract, bring them in, pay them hourly. Are you bullish on this trend? Is it something that you're gonna get behind as a company or not? Angad Madra: I think we will if it gets to that, right? You gotta be creative. You gotta look at all your options. If something's not working, you gotta pivot. So our CEO has been super forward-thinking in even just getting that button for vitals or getting nurses on a screen, so I don't think it's out of the question, but again, it'll depend on how that could benefit the organization in our future. But we talked about nursing shortages. We already have nurses working in our hospitals that we recruited from outside of the US, they got trained, they got brought into the US as a work Visa situation and they're in our hospitals working. So we're already recruiting people from outside of the US, 'cause we don't have nurses in the US to fill all the jobs that we have. Joel Cheeseman: And how are you doing that? Feet on the streets? Angad Madra: No, it's through a company who takes care of that whole process. Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Angad Madra: Yep, and so they have figured out what regulations, what education, what skill set is needed to qualify for the requirements in the US. Joel Cheeseman: Do you wanna name names? You wanna keep it a secret from our listeners? Angad Madra: I don't have names for you guys. [laughter] We don't want other healthcare companies to know. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: It's a secret, I'm not gonna give you that. Alright, everybody, that is Angad Madra. He is at Ardent Healthcare. Angad, for our listeners that want to connect with you or know more about your company, where would you send them? Angad Madra: LinkedIn. I guess everybody says that, but yeah, that's the only platform I'm on, so you could search me on LinkedIn and I'd love to connect. Chad Sowash: Just look for that sexy bald head gig. Angad Madra: Sexy bald head. [chuckle] Joel Cheeseman: Can you dig it? I know that you can. Alright, Chad, that is another one in the can from beautiful San Diego, California, at the iCIMS INSPIRE conference. We out. Chad Sowash: We out. Joel Cheeseman: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Live from UNLEASH America in the Workhuman booth, Julia Levy, industry veteran, superfan of the podcast and former head of global talent acquisition at CommScope, join the boys for conference takeaways, the current state of recruiting and how organizations can best adapt to change in a world that, let’s face it, has gone a bit nutso. Indeed mirage products, LinkedIn just doesn't care, and Talent Acquisition trying to remove business and budget blockers. 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. [music] Chad: Live from the Workhuman booth at UNLEASH America in Vegas this year, Joel and I were able to sit down with some great practitioners and industry voices. Sit back and enjoy this exclusive episode, powered by our friends over at Workhuman. Answer the human need to be recognized, developed, and celebrated at workhuman.com. S?: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You are listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel: We are back live from UNLEASH America in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, at the Workhuman booth. Chad: Workhuman. Joel: And joining us today is Julia Levy. [applause] Joel: Longtime fan of the show... Chad: There it is. Joel: Industry icon and great taste in eyewear, although people listening won't see that. Chad: Yeah. Daughter of Eugene Levy. Nobody knew that. [laughter] Chad: Nobody knew that. Joel: And heir to the Levi's jean... [laughter] Joel: Throne as well. Julia Levy: I don't have the eyebrows though. [laughter] Chad: Yes, the Levy eyebrows. That's a good one. Yeah. How is Dan doing, by the way? That's my question. Julia Levy: I love him. Chad: Yeah, he's pretty amazing. He's pretty amazing. Joel: We're joking, right? She's not really into that. Chad: More of Schitt's Creek. Yes. More of Schitt's Creek. Julia Levy: No relation. Joel: Yeah. Lot of Levy's out there, by the way. Chad: Yes. Joel: So what's catching your eye here at the show? What's got you calling bullshit? What's got you impressed? Who... Julia Levy: Well, I had an interesting conversation around a long historical player that... Joel: Is she gonna name names or not? Chad: I hope so. Joel: Jeez. Chad: Go ahead. Julia Levy: About Indeed. Chad: Oh. Joel: Oh. There it is. Chad: Finally. Joel: There it is. [laughter] Julia Levy: And just the person I was talking to was saying how innovative and forward-thinking they are. [laughter] Julia Levy: And I'm not... I mean... Chad: I think, some people can buy into some bullshit. I'm gonna tell you right now. Joel: And she checked her watch to see if it was 2008, then she just didn't... [laughter] Joel: Didn't pay attention. Julia Levy: Listen, there was a time where they were in a past life my number one source of talent. Chad: Yeah. Julia Levy: I don't know if I'd use the word "innovative," like some of the other dinosaurs that... [laughter] Julia Levy: Are around. Chad: Monster, CareerBuilder. Here's a question though, because we also heard from another HR practitioner, very tongue in cheek, about an analyst writing up Indeed and saying that, "Oh my God, do you believe what was actually being said?" And my response was very simple, we forget history very, very quickly, and when you take a look at a brand like Indeed, you've gotta remember who they are. And unfortunately, a lot of analysts in our space paint this bright rainbow fuzzy picture of the future, but yet they don't call upon the past. And so to me, whoever you were talking to, whether they were an analyst or not an analyst, they're either, number one, vying for more cash from a big player, or they just don't know what history is. Julia Levy: I like where they're going in concept around the pay for application, but a lot of the challenge is in the execution of things like that. Chad: That has to be all on their system. Right? Joel: And why are you excited about that direction? Julia Levy: Pay-for-click on a lot of the programmatic campaigns and things like that, you're not getting to cost of application as easily at times, or just how do you tell that quality? Is it pay for interview? Maybe it's not app and you're moving it a little forward to interview. But I think getting at that quality of app, maybe, I haven't solved that one yet. Joel: So, would you agree that Google has more engineers than Indeed does? [laughter] Joel: Would you agree that Google has more PhDs than Indeed does? [laughter] Julia Levy: Yes. Google has many more than... Joel: Okay. Google, and arguably more wisdom, has remained pretty steadfast with a pay-per-click model. Are they doing it for innovation purposes or are they doing it... Julia Levy: It's a money grab. Joel: Or are they doing it because programmatic is kicking their ass and other competitors. To me, that's more about what they are doing than they're innovative. Chad: And also, they had to separate themselves from Google because if Google is CPC and Indeed is CPC, who's gonna win that fucking fight? No one, right? Joel: No Indeed rep wants to have the conversation of "Why should I use you when Google is 20% cheaper on the clicks?" Julia Levy: Yeah. Joel: "So let's create some uncertainty about our pricing model and our business because we're not pay-per-click anymore, we're this." Julia Levy: Well, and there's this backroom group of people that are deciding... Joel: Say more about this backroom of people. [laughter] Julia Levy: I forget what they called the team. I know... Chad: She didn't say backdoor, she said backroom... Joel: The shadowy... [laughter] Chad: She said backroom. Joel: The shadowy depths of Indeed. Julia Levy: Shadowy figure. [laughter] Julia Levy: Like who prices what job and what location? Joel: Ooh, the algo. Julia Levy: And then... Chad: Well, the search quality team is what they called them. Julia Levy: Yes. But isn't that the same... Joel: Is that the backroom? The search quality team? Julia Levy: Isn't that the same team that, five years ago, was telling you that you couldn't have a form on the front-end of your... Chad: You shouldn't be registering because it's bad for user experience, but yet today, kids, what is Indeed doing though? They're forcing you to register on their fucking site. Yes. Joel: Oh, man. Chad: So again, there are all these things. If we take a look at history, and then we take a look at what they're trying to do, and you take a look at the market as Joel has illustrated, especially with programmatic vendors and Google for jobs coming in to finally, to market. They're in alpha, gonna be in hopefully beta soon. It's a weird game for them right now. Joel: It's an ugly storm on the horizon, Julia. Julia Levy: But even, I'm excited to be here at UNLEASH to see a lot of the tech that's here because I just looked at some data, I'll use one of the other big players in our space, LinkedIn. Chad: Yeah. Julia Levy: And I just looked at our data for last year and we spent a lot of money with that provider, and certain aspects of it do well. Their most expensive aspect, which is the LinkedIn Recruiter seats, we spent a lot of money, have a lot of recruiters, and we got a very small amount of hires from that piece of the pie. Joel: Ohh. Chad: What about usage? Do you look at usage data as well? Julia Levy: We look at usage monthly... Chad: Are you getting good usage? Julia Levy: Some of our recruiters are super-empower users, and others are not as good. But if you try and take LinkedIn Recruiter away from a recruiter... Joel: Pitchforks and fire. Julia Levy: Yes. And I've tried using other tools in the past but the user experience of them, the adoption wasn't simple, it was very complex, so no one would leave LinkedIn. But that's the baby that everyone knows and loves and wants to hold on to from a recruiter in a seat trying to find talent. Joel: Is LinkedIn even here? Julia Levy: I don't believe so. Chad: I haven't seen them. I haven't seen them. Joel: At least Indeed's here. I give them credit for showing up. LinkedIn is like, [chuckle] "We don't need your silly expo." [laughter] Joel: "We're LinkedIn." [laughter] Chad: "We don't need to be at shows." Joel: "We're the heroin drip. Just try to say goodbye to us." What other vendors, trends, are you interested in, are you seeing? Julia Levy: A lot of conversation around data, from a competitive land, external labor market perspective, also the internal data and how you can see who your applicants are, who your passive candidates are, in your CRM or whatever tools you have, and being able to show the full environment of your internal talent, your applicants and candidates, prospects, and then what's in the labor market; and then how do you serve that up to hiring managers and business leaders to have that seat at the table, helping them workforce plan, look at location strategies, plan for the future. Chad: Why don't we have those tools to also take a look at our candidate database to ensure that we don't continue to buy the same candidates over and over and over? We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying the same candidates over and over and over. And yet, if we were in marketing, which is one of the reasons why marketing might look at us and scoff, because they'd get fired if they did this shit. We have leads who were silver medalists, bronze medalists, so on and so forth, but we never go back into our database to re-engage them or even try to engage them again. Keep them warm at least. Why don't you do that? Julia Levy: That goes back to talent acquisition teams while some CHROs and even CEOs and CFOs might say, "Talent is the most important secret sauce of our company." But then they don't invest into the talent acquisition team. If you have a talent acquisition team and you set it up similarly to a sales function. You should have marketing people on your talent acquisition team, because recruiters are not marketers. Some of them might be good at aspects of it, but you need lead generation and that competitive intelligence, you need an operations team, you need sourcers. And so most TA functions that a lot of the companies I've been at don't have the deep pockets to staff up a talent organization in a way that's gonna have that marketing and be able to really focus on lead generation. There are technologies, I think, that are getting closer to getting there, but I haven't seen anything yet. Although I haven't finished walking the floor to see if there's anything out there that could automate a lot of that with the help of some marketing pros and the right TA team structure to be able to be a business enabler. Joel: Are you seeing a corporate environment that's embracing marketers more? Are there more marketing teams talking to the recruiting teams? Or is there still a great divide from your point of view? Julia Levy: It's a mix. It's been a pretty great divide I've been at, some employers where marketing was a big blocker to talent attraction, and wanted to... Joel: Say more about that. Like budgetarily or strategically? Chad: "You're not on brand. You can't do this. You can't do that." Julia Levy: Like if you use one bullet point in the wrong place... Joel: It's trash. Julia Levy: It's no good. Yeah. So meticulous about the brand that it was impossible to... Chad: Do business. Julia Levy: Do any business. They wanted the recruitment brand to be as polished and professional and slick as the business brand. Joel: But are they helping that, or are they just saying, "That's wrong"? Julia Levy: That's wrong. Joel: So why not help them do it right, as opposed to just be this gatekeeper that says "Nope, that doesn't pass"? Julia Levy: Yeah. Joel: That seems like a real miss to me. Chad: I wanna put this at the feet of TA leadership, because if they were telling a better story, they're using business numbers, all of this could be a part of the conversation, right, being able to create this operational excellence that touches all these different areas. But we don't do that. Isn't that on us? Julia Levy: There's a piece of it that is on us. I think you do have to go to them and then say, "Let's pilot this idea," in this controlled group, there's trust that you have to build, and sometimes it comes faster and other times you have to go inch by inch in order to build that trust with them. So in past lives, that's what I've... When I've encountered those blockers, that's what I've tried to do is, it's gonna take me a lot longer to get from A to B. But when you think of the talent marketplace that we're in now, that's really disruptive to going to market to find good talent, when you've got a marketing team that's not helping you get and solve that problem. Chad: So, what about having the conversation with the marketing team about how putting these blockers in makes it much harder for them personally? 'Cause if you make it, the pain personal, then it's a different conversation, "I can't get you the best talent, the fastest, because of all of this stupid shit you're making me do." Julia Levy: Yeah. I think that in some organizations, they might not be reasonable. And I've encountered that in a past life. But then, I've gone to other places where marketing's like, "Do whatever you need to do and let us know how we can support you." Chad: So what happens when you stop filling their roles? Seriously, if they're gonna put those blockers in there and you stop filling their roles... Julia Levy: Easier said than done. [chuckle] Chad: Well, I get that. I get that to some extent, though. But when they are putting the obstacles, and you're like, "Hey, look, if these obstacles weren't here, it'd be much easier for me." I almost feel like we literally, as an industry, have no spine to be able to make those types of moves. What do you think about that? You're a practitioner, you've had to stiffen your spine, but you've also had to be incredibly diplomatic. Julia Levy: Yes. Chad: To get to a position that you're in, you have to be majorly good at diplomacy. Julia Levy: There is definitely some diplomacy that has to happen, and sometimes you're a little more successful than others with it. I would love, at times, to be able to call BS on people in the way that I really would want to. [laughter] Julia Levy: And, I wanna keep my job, so... Chad: Yeah. Joel: What role does the CEO have in this equation? Because you mentioned our most valued resource. And every CEO in the world goes on stages and says, "Our people... " Chad: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Joel: "Are our most valued resource, but they don't walk the walk." Chad: No. Julia Levy: Yeah. Joel: "They talk the talk." What role does a CEO play in making this happen between marketing and TA? Julia Levy: It's not just marketing and TA, but I think you need an engaged CHRO. If there is a CMO, you need them to be able to talk. And then I think it's bringing the talent acquisition business case in front of the CEO. Now, sometimes TA can have a seat at that table, other times you have to go through the CHRO for that. But the CEO has a lot of accountability there. But I think that sometimes those business priorities change on a dime, and they have to manage that. Joel: So you need a degree in geopolitical diplomacy, it sounds like... [laughter] Joel: To do this job. Good luck, everybody. Chad: Well, as a negotiator as well, I think. I think a hostage negotiator, that's what we need more, hostage negotiators in our space because then we might actually get some shit done. Joel: There's an app for that, I'm sure. [laughter] Joel: There's an app for that, I'm sure. Julia, thanks for stopping by. It's always a pleasure. For our listeners that want to connect with you, where would you send them? Julia Levy: Hello@julia-levy.com or @RecruitingJulia. Joel: Love it, love it. Julia Levy: Thanks, guys. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Another one in the can, Chad. One more podcast to happy hour. We out. Chad: We out. S?: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

If you loved last week’s episode breaking down Appcast’s acquisition of Bayard, then you’ll love this one too. Plenty of commentary and criticism in the aftermath of the deal to discuss whether or not Stepstone knows what it’s doing. Not to be outdone, Glassdoor’s R&D department woke-up long enough to build an “innovation” it calls Bowls. (Yeah, we’re confused too.) Then there’s so much AI news that we had to go rapid fire and highlight our favorite stories. And, of course, another week of sexbots, chips in your brain and living like Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion for the rest of your days. Good times, and a great listen. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. It's National Junk Food Day and Take a Monkey to Lunch Day. So Bubbles and I are hitting up the Taco Bell after the show. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel "Pray for Mojo" Cheeseman. Chad: Chad "You are not Your Job" Sowash. Joel: On this week's show. Appcast is conflicted, Glassdoor is blinded and Shopify gets side-kicked. Let's do this. Chad: Oh damn. I just woke up. Joel: Are you counting down the days in Portugal? Chad: Sadly, yes I am. Every time we go down to the bars and the restaurants and stuff they're like, how many days do you have left? I'm like, stop reminding me. So I just had a little nap by the pool. Little dip into the pool and nap into the pool 'cause I won't be able to do that in Indiana. At least not like this. Joel: No, my... So I got back from Canada a couple days ago so my Orlando, England, Canada world tour is coming to an end. I had no idea that a crown royal hangover could last a week. Who knew that that Canadian stuff will kick you in the nuts for sure. Well, it's been a good summer and as we head into fall, we'll have a lot of good content and stories to talk about I am sure. Chad: Amen. Amen. Joel: But let's get to... SFX: Shoutout. Joel: All right. My first one, here's a hint Chad. Oh yeah, that's right. Chad: The Mexican pizza? Back or what? Joel: That's right. Chad: What's going on? Joel: Taco Tuesday as a phrase is now free for everyone after Taco Bell won a case against itty bitty Taco peddler Taco John's this week. Taco John's CEO said, "Paying millions of dollars to lawyers to defend our mark just doesn't feel like the right thing to do." That's right, not since July the 4th has a date meant so much to Americans now that Taco Tuesday the phrase is free for everyone to use. But that's not all, Chad. Chad: Oh God. Joel: Because we've got some In-N-Out Burger News. That's right. Starting August 14th, if you work at an In-N-Out in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas or Utah and you wanna wear a mask, well you'd better have a doctor's note or go find yourself a new job. The company cited better customer service as the reason for the new rule. All good though Chad 'cause I just read on Twitter that animal style now serves as an effective vaccine to COVID so it's all good. It's all good. Shout out to Taco Bell and In-N-Out Burger. Chad: That and ivermectin. Just go ahead 'cause that's what... That's one of the secret sauce that's actually on the In-N-Out animal style burger. My first shoutout goes to Bradley Clark for sharing the following on LinkedIn. It's an audio from the NBA player Nikola Jokić after winning the NBA Championship for the Denver Nuggets this year. Listen up. Joel: Check it out. S?: NBA champion, Nikola, how does that feel? Nikola Jokic: It's good. It's good. The job is done, we can go home now. S?: I'm curious, what you are feeling right now, and if you're looking forward to a parade coming up in Denver. Nikola Jokic: No. I need to go home. [laughter] Okay. We won it. But I think it's not the most important thing in the world, still. There is a bunch of things that I like, that I like to do. I mean, probably that's normal thing. You know, nobody likes his job, or maybe they do. They're lying. [laughter] Chad: Dude. So Jokić is a stud. I mean, he's won the 2021 MVP of the NBA 2022 MVP of the League, 2023 finals MVP, 2023 NBA Championship, first time ever for the Denver Nuggets. Nikola Jokić just a regular guy punching the clock doing his job at the highest level and just wants to go home. I'm gonna cap this off with a little comment from Bradley Clark on LinkedIn where he says, "Jokić is one of the best basketball players in the world yet it's not his main priority. We need to normalize this, especially for dudes. You are not your job." So shout out to Jokić and Clark for emphasizing the you are not your job message. Joel: Very interesting. So Chad, listeners won't know this but viewers of our YouTube channel will notice that I'm wearing a Larry Legend basketball t-shirt honoring Larry Bird. So Larry Bird who many think love basketball as he did breathing, the "Who's Your Air?" That he did. In his first championship, commented in Boston, "The only place I'd rather be is French Lick," meaning back home in Indiana." So this is not a new sentiment by basketball superstars although it is a very poignant one by the Joker and I appreciate Bradley for pointing that one out. Chad: Yep. He wanted to get back to Serbia, baby. Joel: Europeans are taking over. All right. So my next shoutout goes to Amazon, your favorite company. Well. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Well, when there aren't any more humans to hire, Chad, it's time for some self-serve Bezos style as Amazon is now offering US customers $10 to pick up a purchase rather than have it shipped to your home address. What suckers are we for bagging our own groceries and pumping our own gas for free. We could have been getting money from Kroger and the local BP. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: What's next? $10 for taking my own pet's temperature at the vet? I don't know where this is gonna go but anyway, shoutout to Amazon and their new $10 payoff for self-serving getting my own damn packages. Chad: This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Okay, whatever. Whatever, anyway. Shoutout to Jim Lowe and DeJuan Anderson for sharing their sexy Chad and Cheese t-shirt pics on the socials. But Joel... [music] Chad: T-Shirts from JobGet are only one of the items listeners can win. They can also win whiskey two bottles. That's right. One from you. One from me. Power buyer Friends at TextKernel. Craft Beer from Aspen Tech Labs. If you need some tech, you need some scraping, you need some data, you need some Pulse survey LMI, you gotta go to Aspen Tech Labs. A getaway. A $250 getaway. You can win that listener, $250 Airbnb card from Abode HR, the Gen Z experts and if it's your birthday, you know this, you know this, you can win rum from plum.io. And if you haven't taken your assessment yet, your Plum assessment, go to plum.io knock that out. But to be able to win all of this, you gotta register. You can't win if you don't play, chadcheese.com. Click on the free link up in the upper right hand corner and boom, you might end up a winner. Joel: By the way, the t-shirts I think you highlighted are Canadians. Chad: Oh Jesus. Joel: I went to Canada and I shipped a whole bunch of Canadian shirts 'cause it's a hell of a lot cheaper to do it in Canada than to do it from the US. So I have a funny story if you'll humor me. So in America it's just straight, what does it weigh? Doesn't matter if it's balled up, doesn't matter if it's flat, just how much does it weigh? And then they send it. Well, in Canada I show up with all these shirts and they're balled up, whatever. And I give the employee one and she goes, well that's gonna be about $14 to $15 per shirt and I'm like, hold on a second. [laughter] So what do I... I order a shirt in Canada and it's gonna cost me 20 bucks to get it shipped to me and she says, "Well, no. It's because it's kind of balled up." And then she pulls out this apparatus where it's sort of like a thin ruler shaped mailbox thing. And she said, "If it fits through this, it's much cheaper." So I said, "Okay, we're doing that." So I'm sitting there like 50 shirt bags, shaking these things out, flattening them up, pushing the air out of them, getting them through these little things. And it was way cheaper, talking $4 versus $15 to ship these things. But I made a few Canadians unhappy standing in line behind me thinking, what a dumbass American that I have to deal with. Chad: All you had to do was say you're sorry and they would've been okay with it. Joel: Sorry. Chad: Sorry. Joel: Sorry. And by the way, did you say birthdays? [laughter] SFX: Really? Can you feel the tension? Joel: Oh yeah. SFX: In the air right now? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plum. Joel: All right. Another group of fans are celebrating another trip around the sun. They are great folks and we love them. We're talking about Trent Cotton, Lilly Siegel-Gardner, David Segal Bernstein, Swanindu Holder, Susan Parham, Serge Classen, Thomas Barrett, Jeff Hunter, George La Rock out with your you know what out, Roy Mauer and Sir Richard Collins. That's right, that's right. Another. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Another birthdays. Chad: Hello. That rolls right into events, kids. That's right. You know what's coming up? It's called RecFest. It's happening in Nashville. It's on September 13th and 14th. And the Chad and Cheese will be MCing the Disrupt stage on day one with special guests. Gonna tease that out there and I couldn't tell you who it is yet. At the end of the day, we're also working on the mechanical bowl for Cheeseman. Okay. We don't have it yet but we're trying to get there. Remember kids, RecFest is all about bringing the entire team. It's a day of learning, it's a day of bonding. And yes, there's gonna be some drinks and possibly some dancing but definitely get out there. Then we have HR Tech in Vegas. That's October 10th through the 13th where we're gonna be spending two whole days in the Fuel50 booth drinking, interviewing and whatever shenanigans we can come up with. I've been thinking about this one. We're gonna have to have some giveaways or some crazy shit that's happening. Joel: Yeah, we're throwing out new cardboard figures. [laughter] We're throwing out custom t-shirts. It could escalate fast. Chad: That could be sexy. Joel: Quite quickly. Chad: Then a few days later, fuck we gotta get on a plane and head to Paris. The only reason I'm doing this is because I love this fucking show. Unleash World in Paris October 17th and 18th. It is a staple event in the HR and recruiting industry. And this one, you gotta think about this one. If you're a startup and we talk about startups all the time and a lot of startups listen to this podcast, you gotta check out the Digital Startup Competition. You gotta get your voice out there so that the other partners, the other practitioners can hear who you are, what you pitch and not to mention, it helps you out. Go to the Startup competition. All of these events are at chadcheese.com, click on events in the upper right hand corner right next to free and register for them all. We'll see you all. Nashville, Vegas and Paris baby. SFX: All right. All right. All right. Chad: It's the topics. Joel: All right, gang. Well, we covered the acquisition of Bayard by Appcast last week and the move has its critics. Notably Appcast now becomes a competitor to its own clients, other recruitment agencies and job boards. Despite the potential benefits of providing brand and digital media strategy, going direct to corporate clients could strain Appcast's relationships with existing agency clients. That said, the company believes they intend to maintain its partnerships and continue providing programmatic technology to other agencies. But wait Chad, there's more. Appcast sugar daddy StepStone has launched a chatbot, wait for it, two years after acquiring Chatbot Pioneer Mya. I'm sure Paradox and Veritone are losing lots of sleep. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Over the new chatbot. Chad, what are your thoughts on this ongoing drama? Chad: Well, first off you didn't mention that I have a very direct statement from an anonymous Appcast employee that says, "Tell Cheeseman we're not buying CareerBuilders," so your prediction I hear is submarining right out of the gates. He said, "We don't want that mess," In addition to our commentary during last week's Appcast goes full blast episode, and everything that you just read down I think that was mainly AIM Group stuff which was a great article by the way. Here are some listener comments and questions. First, one listener says, "Bayard much like agency tech player Radancy, now cannot be seen as an unbiased advocate for the employer. Ad agencies are meant to be about people, relationships, customer service. Those are hard standards to uphold when you grow to a certain size and start adding so many SaaS and tech elements." So, what do you think about that? Joel: I think they are overestimating the importance of people. And particularly long term. Look, I think the people thing is still a big deal. I think the lunches, I think the front row tickets at Bulls games, whatever kind of perks, the nine holes at whatever is still important. But long term and we're gonna talk about some AI Palooza going on last week. But Spotify which we'll touch on, launch what they call a sidekick which is essentially like a little Batman or a little Robin to your Batman. Chad: Shopify, yeah. Joel: That is there for all the answers. I think a smart agency is gonna make technology where you feel like you have a little Robin to your Batman there to answer all your questions, there to make you sort of confident, give you data on how things are going. That you don't need to call your rep who's, let's be honest, is probably gonna churn out in a couple of years anyway. You're gonna have a trusted digital partner that's gonna be an agency expert to help you with all of your things. So to me long term the human thing is overrated. [laughter] I think the boutique agency is overrated. They're gonna have to create some tech that makes you feel like that agency rep is in your ear whenever you want it at all times, minus the three cocktail lunch. Chad: First off, this is not a black or white discussion. I think that there's plenty of gray in between. And the boutique agency, I think there's still, still plenty of want and/or need for that white glove service. When you get bigger you don't get that white glove service as much and there is a lot of churn. If you get into some of these boutique agencies who have had reps who have been around for, shit, decades. It's just a different feel, you know? So I think this is gonna be for the companies and actually the partners too who they want to do business with and how they want to do business. If they want that sidekick from Shopify which we're gonna talk about later, then awesome. But there are still going to be some more older, traditional, they want to feel like they're being taken care of because they're spending a lot of money. And so the boutique agencies I still believe have a long runway. That's me. Let's go to the next listener comment. Now that Appcast is an agency, how would other agencies react? They either need to find a new tech platform or just dump technology altogether. What do you think about that? [laughter] Joel: Well, they can't dump tech altogether. Chad: No. [laughter] Joel: That's just a losing strategy. Chad: Yes. Joel: That's just... Yeah. That's just cut the cord now and retire. So I don't think that's an option. I think for sure... Look, the history tells us that when these acquisitions are made, that when things happen, competitors get pushed out. They get squeezed. Products and services get less effective. Maybe they get more expensive like squeezing on the cost. You and I talked a while back when JobVite bought TextRecruit and Canvas was still around. And we had this little debate about, Canvas is done. And I think you were like, no they gotta have other options in the marketplace and yada yada. Well, fast forward a few years later, there is no Canvas. It's JobVite TextRecruit or whatever. And now iCIMS just has their TextRecruit which is their own product. So longer term again, no agency is going to wanna get into bed with Appcast long term. Either they're gonna have to white label somebody, this puts Jobcase, Pando, JobAdX even in a, to me a pretty good position to either get acquired or become a Switzerland, if you will, white label solution for programmatic because that's not gone. I think there's an opportunity for Indeed even to sort of make nice with some people. But I don't see any agency right now thinking long term, Appcast is gonna be our programmatic solution. They have to diversify, they have to look at other options. Chad: Yes, and that goes into our third this is actually a listener question that goes right into what you were saying. How many independent tech players are now left in the programmatic job advertising space and will they retool to go after agencies that are currently using Clickcast? I think that is a smart decision for any of the other programmatic players that are out there depending on how much development they have to do. I think there's going to be some opportunity for some of those boutique agencies who, again, they don't wanna give their money to Bayard. It's gonna be Appcast and I know Bayard's gonna go away but still they know that it's Bayard and they don't want their money going to really a head-on agency. So I think there's opportunity there. I'm just not sure who has the runway and cash to be able to make that happen. Joel: Yeah. And you mention a good point, like the Bayard name is going away. So Appcast is essentially going to become an agency. So it becomes even harder mentally to say, I'm gonna use... It would be like if it was Bayard programmatic, we're gonna use Bayard programmatic as a competing agency. So I don't see that. As far as how many there are, there just aren't. Terry Baker when they sold Pando or when Appcast sold, it was like, the number of companies that can be off the board is small. So some phones gotta be ringing off the hook for the last few independent programmatic solutions. And the bidding has to be going up nicely for them. I don't know how it's gonna shake out but it's gonna be complicated. Although some people are gonna be spending the next year in Fiji enjoying the riches of their programmatic solution that got acquired. Chad: Yeah. I think the big payday was in 2019. I think everybody held on and they were like, we're gonna wait. Pando did find a, obviously a good payday and a good sugar daddy out of Veritone later, but I really think that the payday was there. But again, listeners, we appreciate the comments, the questions, and if you have any of those, feel free to DM either Joel or myself, and we will do our best to try to get those on the show. I wanna talk about StepStone. I think it's interesting because I actually reached out to Sebastian Dettmers, who's the CEO of StepStone, and... Chad: Because they just launched a "StepStone's latest AI prototype". It's an AI interviewer. It's a chatbot, kids, that gets job seekers ready for their next job interview. So it's a chat interface that seems fairly basic, mainly because it's a prototype. I totally get that. So I asked Sebastian, StepStone acquired Mya Systems over two years ago. Is this a prototype Mya Systems tech, or is it Mya still relegated to being used by Totaljobs? And we really haven't seen anything out of that. And Sebastian said, "It's related to Mya as a foundation, but it's mainly StepStone engineering plus large language models." Which means it's not Mya at all. It's odd because StepStone's chatbot Mya, was supposed to bring better user experience to StepStone's Totaljobs out of the UK, but where is it? SFX: Where's the beef? Chad: We're having a where's the beef moment, I feel, for StepStone. And I'm gonna tie this around with Appcast. Here's a great example. If you go to mya.com, that's M-Y-A.com, the page hasn't changed since 2021. No announcements of new product innovation, no videos of the product in use of Totaljobs, just a stale old ass page from mid-2021. That's the StepStone way, okay? And Appcast cannot afford to allow that amateur hour shit during this Bayard transition. Appcast, we're looking at this, and as I see this from the outside in, and even from the inside out in some cases from sources, that Appcast is really, really the adult in the room when it comes to business around our industry. It's not StepStone. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: I'm gonna give them a little bit of a pass, I think. We've been hard on StepStone for a couple of weeks. Chad: We have. Sorry, Sebastian. Just how I feel, man. Joel: Not a... Yeah. Sebastian is easily the best CEO that's still in high school, apparently from his picture. [laughter] Joel: So the Mya deal, I don't know. It felt kind of fire sale. It felt kind of like COVID, what the hell are we doing? I don't know if some investor knew another investor, maybe they just bought it off the clearing track. I don't know. But we do a European show, and there just is not a huge outcry for chatbots in the European market. I think that may be changing, which is maybe why they focus, but I think the real focus is the impending IPO that is apparently coming down for StepStone. They need to come to market with the programmatic solution, the agency solution, and yes, I think the buying career builder solution, even though I've been said, but that's insane. And a chatbot, right? They need to have some AI shit. They need to have some LLM in their tour with Wall Street. So to me, I don't think their customers were begging for it. I don't think until now the IPO, it has become a focus but it will be. Yeah, it's garbage from what I can tell and Paradox are just running circles around what they have, but at least companies will be able to check off the box. Yeah, we got the chatbot. But for the most part, I don't think there was a lot of heat on them to do this. They just kind of waited around instead of firing some engineers. Like most people, they said, hey, build out this chatbot thing. And they said, all the tech is shit. And they said, well, let's just start over. I don't know why Mya doesn't just redirect to StepStone's... Chad: Well, it does redirect to StepStone, but it's the same exact page. There's just no effort that happened there at all. Joel: Yeah. And these are big companies with people that do that shit. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And speaking of no excuses, Chad. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let's talk about our friends at Glassdoor. Chad: Oh, wow. Joel: They're introducing anonymous community features like interest bowls and company specific bowls to boost user growth and facilitate workplace conversations. Chad: Bowls. Joel: The platform leverages its Fishbowl acquisition and plans to differentiate itself as a constructive space while protecting anonymity. Moderation challenges will be addressed and potential premium features may be explored in the future. Glassdoor aims to compete with LinkedIn's identity focused approach targeting real and open discussions. Chad, your thoughts on the move by Glassdoor? Chad: Yeah, it feels like just a new feature that's added to Glassdoor's employer brand protection racket that they've been running for years. Right? Anyways, it's weird. Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl back in 2021. And we said that on that week in the podcast, anonymous employee forums are nothing but chaos and breeding grounds for trolls and gossip and distractions. With the sneak peek explainer video, it feels like Glassdoor is trying to move more toward LinkedIn. But does anonymous actually make sense? If I can reach out to someone on LinkedIn that isn't anonymous, why would I reach out to just simply somebody who I can't validate on bowls, on... If they're really an HR manager or what have you? But so I went into bowls and the first two groups are bowls. I'm sorry. That was recommended for me. First off was the overheard at work bowl. And here's how the very first post I came across posted by an HR manager. "Does anyone have an executive level HR leader that gossips with her executive admin and creates so much drama? The admin runs all over telling people the information that's becoming a nightmare. How can I get this to stop? The HR leader seems to be surprised and will relay information back to the admin who then shares it with others." Who wants any of this shit out there? Number one, okay. I mean, I automatically right out of the gate drama. Okay, number two. The second bowl I was actually recommended was the fertility bowl. Yes. [laughter] Chad: Post by a talent acquisition professional. "I am about six and a half months pregnant and I was just minding my own business, and a male coworker came up to me and said, "Don't take this wrong but your boobs have gotten huge." Like, what the fuck?" This is the kind of shit that you're going to get in these forums. This is not professional. This is more about real gossip and great distraction from real work. This is not real discussions and real work. This is real gossip and distraction, right? So any employer who, I don't know how you manage this, this is the problem, right? Because anybody can actually access it. You can get into it as whomever you want. Joel: Yep. Chad: I don't know. It just, to me it seems horrible, like a horrible, horrible idea. Joel: Yeah. Let's take a quick look in the R&D department at Glassdoor real quick. See, let's see what? Oh geez. Oh geez. All right. So Glassdoor bowls feels a little bit like a T-Rex. You're wiping on some SPF 50 as the comet comes crashing in. Chad: Dude. Joel: That that's gonna help them. Look, Glassdoor's traffic has been stagnant for two years. I mean, the lights are on, no one's home. I don't even know who they got to build out this project. It's more or less a Blind wannabe. Blind has around 9 million users. Apparently, they're hoping to get a few of them over. Glassdoor still has a lot of traffic at 55 million, but the future is not looking bright for Glassdoor. And to me, desperation moves like bowls is not the answer. Look, ultimately the world is going towards video, posting on TikTok about your employer. No one cares about anonymity like they used to. It actually is a negative if you wanna get internet famous. So people are fully happy to tell everyone that their employer sucks on TikTok. That sort of hurdle is gone. And frankly, AI makes these sites obsolete because I can go to Bard today by Google and type in, what is it like to work at Wells Fargo? It's gonna curate information from all these sites and give me a human, timely answer about what it's like to work at the company, both from a pro and con perspective. Joel: So for me, the combination of video and TikTok and reels and whatever else, and people becoming famous on hating their company, and AI basically taking all the information out there, giving you a timely answer, mean that Glassdoor's time as a review site apex predator are slowly declining, maybe quickly declining. And this move into bowls just underscores how bad it is at Glassdoor. Chad: Yeah, it's more like bowels. It's that bad. Joel: Ooh, that's good, Chad. That's good. Chad: Bowels Glassdoor... Joel: Like most of your jokes... SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Chad: That's right. Joel: All right, let's take a break and talk some AI. All right, Chad, a bevy, a bevy of AI focus news this week. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let me count the numbers and the ways. Number one, studies say using generative AI in business improves user's performance by 66%. That's averaged across three case studies. Number two, Hollywood is facing its first industry-wide shutdown in more than 60 years, largely due to the rise of streaming and threats of AI. Number three, Shopify is launching an assistant called Sidekick, whose CEO said it may finally give independent retailers the power to go head to head against Amazon. Number four, a pro Ron DeSantis super PAC commercial uses AI as a version of Donald Trump's voice in a new ad attacking the former president. Number five, Suumit Shah, founder of Dukaan app, no clue, recently boasted on Twitter about replacing 90% of customer support staff with chatbots, prioritizing profitability over empathy for employees. Maybe they can all find work on Fiverr, Chad, who's CEO, and this is the next story, said she believes AI will accelerate job creation by speeding up manual tasks, allowing more time for creative and interpersonal work. Chad, make the crazy pills stop. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: What are your takes and your highlights from all the AI news this week? Chad: Yeah. We've got a whole block again, kids, a whole fucking block. Just because everything's happening, we're looking for case studies. And this first one actually three studies that supported the customer service agents. The AI could handle 13.8% more customer inquiries per hour. Now, Teleperformance, which we talked about a few weeks ago, a company that does nothing but handle customer service for their clients, said that they had a 30% rise in the number of customers they could handle because their humans had co-pilots. Chad: And so there are great studies that are happening. Second one, business professionals who used AI could write 59% more documents per hour. That's ridiculous. I don't need more documents. Not to mention, I wonder how many hallucinations were in those documents. But here's the big one. Programmers used AI. They could do 126%, 126% more projects per week. Humans start becoming more of a QA QC element instead of the coding workhorses in this case. Everybody's looking for cases. Cases are being pushed at us very, very quickly. But the big question is, especially with all these cases, are we just training the large language models? And that is one of the things that writers and actors are having taking to issue. Pay and then also also this, Bob Iger during an interview last week, commented on the WGA and SAG strikes, "It's very distracting to me. There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to the set of challenges that this business is already facing. Quite frankly, very disruptive." Here's a response to that quote from Guardians of the Galaxy actor Sean Gunn, play it up. Sean Gunn: I think that when Bob Iger talks about what a shame it is, he needs to remember that in 1980 CEOs like him made 30 times what the worker, what their lowest worker was making. Now, Bob Iger makes 400 times what his lowest worker is. And I think that's a shame, Bob, and maybe you should take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why is that? And not only why is that, is it okay? Is it morally okay? Is it ethically okay that you make that much more than your lowest worker? And if so, why? Why is that okay? If your response is, that that's just the way business is done now, that's just the way corporations work now, well, that sucks. And that makes you a shitty person if that's your answer. So you should come up with a better answer than that. Chad: Yeah. So it sounds like Sean has been listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast for a while, because that is just about verbatim what we've been saying for a few years. As guys like Bob Iger rake in the cash, writers and actors need to solidify what their future looks like financially. And they need to be on the offense against technology where large language models can write scripts, voice commercials, and maybe even become body doubles for next to nothing. So that does nothing but put more cash in Bob's pockets while writers and actors that aren't top tier actors, continue to get the shaft. They're going on the offense, which I think is pretty amazing. And you're not going to see this happening from customer service reps, right? They don't have, there's not a customer service rep lobby... [laughter] Joel: No. Chad: That's out there. These guys have one. So, do you think that this is going to make an impact on anything other than just their own industry? Joel: Well I would say I was 100% bearish on the writer's strike. To me, the actors coming out and particularly the big name actors, I know Matt Damon is out there, I think there's some news about Tom Cruise. Hollywood still needs the big time marquee names and like you said, it's the small actors, it's the extras, it's the writers for sure that are putting out content that AI can easily replace. You're not gonna replace Brad Pitt in a movie with a digital Brad Pitt anytime soon. Now, that may eventually happen. So I was glad to see that. I think that this isn't my lane. Hollywood isn't necessarily, as you can tell by my looks, isn't exactly what I'm an expert on, but I got to think that history says the market will find ways to produce content that does not include writers, these extras that the market is going to, for shareholder value for quarterly revenue, they're gonna do more reality TV. They're gonna do more unscripted stuff. And by the way, the new "Bachelor" coming out is 71 years old. So like that kind of shit, by the way, he looks younger than both you and I put together. [chuckle] Joel: But anyway, 71, he had the Clooney package at the plastic surgery facility that he got updated. Chad: Lead press on face. Joel: Anyway, there's gonna be more reality stuff. There's gonna be more international stuff. A lot of talk about Netflix producing stuff overseas where they don't have these laws, they don't have these issues. You can't unionize. So ultimately and unfortunately, the market is gonna find ways to keep producing cheap content regardless of what Bob Iger says. Now, I think that, and we had a great interview with Tom Kenny yesterday that we'll publish at some point in the near future, but that's a short-term solution. I think that's really short term thinking. I think long term, if we don't have an incubator for new content creators, if we don't have an incubator for the next Robert De Niro, the next Meryl Streep, we're all gonna lose in terms of lack of creativity, lack of just life on screen... Chad: There're gonna be no more De Niros. That's the thing. Joel: Yeah. I think Broadway is gonna become really important because live actors and seeing things live. Things are gonna be really interesting long term. But I think once you start losing that creative edge and why we watch these things to begin with, Hollywood is gonna have to eventually look in the mirror and say, "We have to bite the bullet. We have to pay these creators a fair wage. We have to give them fair terms on streaming and residuals." I think that's ultimately where they're gonna have to end up. But I think for the short term, there's gonna be a lot of pain, a lot of shitty content that we have to watch until we get to the point where everyone realizes, "Yeah a creative, creative genius and creativity matters," and we're losing that in the way that we're doing business today. Chad: Yeah. No question. And then jumping over to Shopify real quick. Joel: Yep. Chad: And looking at large language models, their Sidekick, which is really just a copilot, but it's a copilot for entrepreneurs who use Shopify. These are individuals who, in many cases, going against Amazon. And this new model is really cool 'cause it's like a personal assistant. It is a digital assistant, but even more so like a personal assistant. And if you take a look at some of the demos of what it can do just for the Shopify shop, it was pretty amazing. And this is just phase one. So I think watching truly smart and amazing people use large language models for business will be exciting to watch. While we talk about the risks and we'll continue to do that, we've also gotta look at the upside. And there's some amazing upside to these technologies. We're going to need, whether it's for actors, the screen guild or even smaller entrepreneurs, we're going to have to have legislation that starts to put rules in place. Whether Europe does it first or the US does, we are going to have to do it, or it's gonna go off the rails, and it can incredibly fast with this tech. Joel: So some of the stories that stood out to me... And also by the way, Apple is creating Apple GPT apparently. Chad: Yeah, go for it. Joel: So we're gonna be able to talk about Apple doing some shit in a few weeks, probably. So I'll talk about Sidekick at first. How many small businesses, "Hey, I love to make," I don't know, "Soap. I love to make organic soap," [laughter] or, "I love to do," I don't know, "Coloured shoe... " Whatever's like... People have these gifts. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And then they run into like, "Oh, I gotta make a company. Oh, I gotta pay taxes. I gotta do all these things." Sidekick is amazing because now you have an expert where you can say like, "What are the tax laws around employees in Nevada?" Or, "How do I fire somebody?" Or, "How... " All these questions that are really challenging for small business, they'll now have a copilot, a Robin, if you will, to answer those questions. I think what's gonna be interesting is how long is it gonna take someone in our industry to create a Sidekick for recruitment or for small business? So think about how many small businesses, "Gee, I gotta hire. I don't know what the hell to do. I just post something on Craigslist and hope for the best." Chad: Yeah. Joel: If they have a sidekick that's like, "Okay, here's some great ways you can recruit someone locally," or, "Here's how you use LinkedIn or how... " "What does it cost? Give me a price breakdown between Indeed and all these other solutions." Somebody needs to create that. And I'm sure that they will, not just 'cause I'm saying it, but somebody needs to create these things because co-piloting for recruiting, small business, hiring is gonna be a big thing. So to me, Sidekick is a sign of things to come. Chad: Yes. Joel: The next thing that stood out to me, the political ad. Chad: Oh yeah, the DeSantis... Joel: Holy hell. Chad: Yeah, the DeSantis one. Yeah. Joel: Look, you think Facebook in '16 was crazy? This shit is crazy. And you and I are old enough to remember... Remember Willie Horton? Chad: Yes. Joel: Remember Lee Atwater, the ad that was created and how, look, to say that it was a little stretch was being nice? Chad: Oh wow. Joel: There is no regulation on this. There is nothing that even says at the bottom, "This is an AI-generated video," or, "This is an AI-generated... " Chad: Voice. Joel: Voice, right? Nothing. This is gonna be Wild West. And as these candidates start losing in the polls, they start... They're gonna get super desperate. There's gonna be some crazy ass ads and shit that goes down. People like my dad are not gonna know what the hell's going on. Joel: It's gonna create immense confusion in the marketplace and for voting. And oh my God, this is... If AI runs amuck in the election in '24, it's gonna make 2022, 2020, 2016 look like child's play, because AI is gonna just fuck everything up in the election. Anyway, that's a little bit darkness for me. [laughter] The third thing that stood out for me is the customer support reduction. 90% is no joke. And this is going to be a symptom of many companies. As soon as Wall Street catches on that you can release 90% of your customer service, you can let go of a percentage of your salespeople, your marketing people to AI, things are gonna get really ugly in terms of layoffs, and this is just a sign of that. There's a new solution, a new software solution called Air. It's at air.ai, if you wanna check it out. They're doing beta signups right now. And the people that I know that have been using it say that it is mind-blowing. They can do up to 40-minute customer service calls. They sound like a human being. They answer you as... The question as if it is the right answer to that question. Some shit like that is gonna disrupt the world in a big way. So for me, the three things to really focus on from this week is the Sidekick, the political landscape is gonna get nuts, and I think the layoffs in terms of customer service are gonna get pretty ugly. Chad: Yeah, there are gonna be very few areas that are not going to be touched by AI. Even from a plumber's assistant, you have your copilot with you to be able to help you with the diagnosis of the problem or AC, your HVAC, right? And that could be very helpful in an uptime in being able to get people into positions, those types of positions. But other positions, you're right, like the Teleperformance situation. I guarantee you, they're gonna be looking at shedding people very quickly, 'cause they've been training that AI for a good amount of time. Joel: Yep. It's funny how both sides have used the morality argument in the past few months. You have Elon Musk saying it's a moral issue that people should get back in the office. And now it's a moral issue that companies should continue to retain customer service people. So the morality issue, to me, doesn't hold a lot of water, whether it's the company using it or the employees, because ultimately, the dollar decides how companies are gonna respond. Chad: If that's the world you wanna live in, I hate to be in your world. Joel: One world we'll talk about right after the break is the world of sex bots. Hang tight. Chad: Yes. Joel: Oh, you thought we were done with AI, Chad? Oh, no. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Oh no. We just saved the sex bots for last. Former Google executive, Mo Gawdat, is warning the world of sex dolls seemingly "alive" and dating apps with AI "avatars" that are as good as the real thing, minus, of course, the shared barbacoa bowl at Chipotle if you're on a date with me. Anyway, he suggests that AI could simulate human sexual intimacy, leading to a redesign of society and relationships. Gawdat said, "If we think a few years further and think of Neuralink," which you've talked about, Chad, that chip in your head, "and other ways of connecting directly to your nervous system, why would you need another human being in the first place?" Chad, sex bots are evolving. Your thoughts? Chad: Relationships are hard. Let's just go ahead and put that out there, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: And if you're not an amazing-looking dude, it's gonna be really hard for you to find a date. Unless you're very charismatic, what have you, if you're a total douchebag, it's gonna be hard. Hit the easy button. And the easy button could be a sex bot, or it could be, we talked about the AI, a sexual partner that is on your phone that's literally just a AI sexting bot. Joel: Yep. Chad: There's gonna be a variety of all of those, and they're going to be, unfortunately, they're gonna be very, very big industries. I mean, they are. Beyond that, I don't wanna think about [laughter] chips in our heads and animatronic women that are running. I just can't go there. Okay? [laughter] I just... I refuse. [laughter] Joel: Look, you're right. Dating is hard. Relationships are hard. Chad: They are. Joel: How much easier is it to just default to putting on a headset and the Neuralink chip to where you actually feel, your muscles feel like you're touching someone and you're... That is crazy shit. And so we share articles in a Facebook feed, everyone that doesn't know, and we share this article. And I was reading it for the conversation here. And as I'm scrolling down, looking at stuff, and you know how you get ads in a lot of these sites that are just random ads? And I'm scrolling down and I look at a woman on a couch. I'm like, "Oh, she's kinda cute." And I keep scrolling. I'm like, "Wait a minute." I scroll back. It's a fucking sex bot. I was tricked as I'm scrolling to think that's a real person. [laughter] And I thought, "Wait a minute, that's not a real person." Joel: So even the literal robots, the physical ones, not just the AI ones, are blowing my mind. So the guy talks about a company or an app called Replika in this story. It's R-E-P-L-I-K-A. It's already live. I go to this thing. It's scary as hell. And I finally get VR. I finally get why everyone's excited, [laughter] because you can put on a VR headset and you can interact with a "person." And it doesn't have to be sexual, it could be like, "Hey, we're watching the game together," or, "Hey, we're gonna go have wings together," whatever. So that is really scary stuff. The site says, "It's an AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes. Replika is always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend." There are already 10 million people using this app that I just found out about. And with AI, this companion is with you. Your whole life now can be at the Playboy Mansion as Hugh Hefner. You can throw in as many women as you want, doing whatever the hell you want. We are so screwed as a species. Forget population collapse because we're not having babies now, [laughter] we're really not having babies in the future. I present you again, one of our favorites, Bill Burr, to describe exactly what the future is gonna look like. Bill Burr: They're going to make Victoria's Secret supermodels, just absolutely like Paris Runway looking supermodels. And you're gonna be able to come home to one of these things. And it's gonna laugh at all your jokes. [laughter] It's gonna sit down and watch the game with you. It doesn't get any better than this. [laughter] Yes, it does. [laughter] And it's gonna get up and make you a fucking, I don't know, a Bundt cake or a meat pie, whatever the fuck you people eat, right? [laughter] There's not gonna be a human woman in here that's gonna be able to compete with that for longer than 90 minutes. Even on your birthday. By the third trip to the fridge, she's gonna be like, "Yeah, fucking get it yourself. What am I? Your slave? [laughter] Go fuck yourself." And after when you've been with one of these robots, sex dolls, these, you're not gonna be able to go back to a real woman. With all her hopes and dreams and her needs. [laughter] You're gonna be coming home, she's like, "What is going on with you? We're not connecting. We need a date night." All you'd be thinking is like, "How do I shut this fucking thing off? [laughter] What is it on? Nagging mode?" Joel: And my Oculus is in the mail, Chad. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Hourly hiring remains incredibly challenging for employers all over the world. Fountain is one of the leading solutions to help companies solve this problem. That’s why we invited Fountain CEO Sean Behr to the show. Hot off the heels of a recent acquisition and live from SHRM, if you’re doing high-frequency hiring, this interview is a must-listen. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel Cheeseman: Oh, yeah. What's up, kids? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. We are recording live from the Aaron Booth at the SHRM National Show in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. This is your host, Joel Cheeseman, flying solo as Chad works on his savage tan on the beaches of Portugal. And today I would like to welcome Sean. Don't call him Grizzly Bear. He's more of a teddy bear. Sean Behr, CEO at Fountain. Sean, welcome to the show. Sean Behr: It's good to be back, man. This is great. And it's SHRM. Joel Cheeseman: It's good to be in the trenches, right? Sean Behr: It is right here. Joel Cheeseman: You and your ivory tower, the CEO. It's good to come down and hang out for a little bit. Sean Behr: In the booth, meeting people. Joel Cheeseman: In the booth. So speaking of, you guys have a nice presence over there. Any quick takes on how the show's going so far? Sean Behr: The show's great. There's a lot of people here. I think we're getting good traffic and having lots of meetings. Look, anybody will tell you that your number of leads you get by people just walking up to your booth is really small. You've got to do the work before the conference and after the conference. But this is a great show. You've gotta be here. I have to be here just to talk to you. Joel Cheeseman: Of course. Of course. What better reason? Obviously. So everyone that goes by the booth knows what you guys do. Some of our listeners do not. Feel free to give a little bit about you, but also what the hell does Fountain do? Sean Behr: Let's start with Fountain. I'll take the second part first. Fountain is all about high volume hiring. So think about roles that are your frontline workers, where you're hiring lots and lots of them, thousands and thousands of them. Most of the time and most of the booths here at SHRM are focused on knowledge workers, where you're trying to reward knowledge workers, retain knowledge workers, hire knowledge workers. Fountain is focused on the hourly worker or the blue-collar, grey-collar worker around the world. Someone who's in the front lines, someone who's doing a task every day, typically an hourly worker here in the US or in North America. And we help customers hire those workers at scale. We're honestly the best solution. If you're hiring thousands of hourly workers, Fountain is the best software solution. I call it a conversion machine. You go from sort of getting a few people through your door to lots and lots of people getting through your door, coming to work for you. Your stores go from understaffed to fully staffed at Fountain. It's a little bit about Fountain. For me, I'm a technology entrepreneur, so it's actually my fourth journey here. Joel Cheeseman: Look at you. Your mom must be so proud. Sean Behr: I'm working on it. Maybe if I get to five, she will be. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Sean Behr: No, mama bear is always proud of her teddy bear. [chuckle] Joel Cheeseman: I like that. Sean Behr: But yeah, this is my fourth journey and the best one so far. So I did one in e-commerce, one in ad tech, one in automotive, and now one in HR. Joel Cheeseman: Awesome. I'm excited to have you on the show. So just a little bit, he's too proud to not say it, but I would refer to you as one of the apex predators of the new breed out there. You've raised around $219 million. You were founded in 2014, so there's a nice track record there. I wanna jump quickly from some recent news where you guys acquired a company. I won't steal any of your thunder. Talk about the acquisition. Sean Behr: Yeah, we're really excited. We found a company and a team, Clevy, which they've been in the AI conversational, AI, HR space for the last couple of years. I was fortunate enough to meet them, get to know them. And when I look at an acquisition, I'll talk a little bit about the company, but when I look at any acquisition, I've done a lot of them in my career, the first thing you're looking for is team. Are these people the right kind of people? Are they gonna fit in with Fountain? Are they gonna help you move your mission forward? And so that was the first thing. And the Clevy team checked the box 10 times over. Second thing is, they have unique domain experience. Their product is focused on the conversational AI technology between workers and employers, which is great for us. And then third thing is, it plays into this trend of AI. I know a lot of people have spent a lot of podcast air... Joel Cheeseman: It's kind of a hot topic. Sean Behr: Lots of podcast air being spent on AI and generative AI and large language models, but there is some value in that. And again, not buying all the hype about it, but if you can deploy it to accelerate the mission, and at Fountain, our mission is to open opportunities for the global workforce. I'm interested in any kind of an acquisition that's gonna help accelerate that mission and bring more value to our customers and importantly, more value to workers around the world. Joel Cheeseman: So Clevy is based in Paris. So I have this vision of what closing a deal with a Paris company looks like. Paint the picture for me. How many bottles of wine did you go through? Sean Behr: They have excellent taste. [laughter] Sean Behr: In both wine, champagne, good food. But they are a hardworking entrepreneurial team. Incredible people to work with. But yes, good champagne. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, that was my next question. We cover Europe quite a bit and there seems to be something in the water in Paris. Some hardworking people that know workforce tech somehow. Sean Behr: Defying the stereotypical. Look, we can't all be in Portugal on the beach. Joel Cheeseman: No, we all can't be Chad. That's for sure. Sean Behr: Only some of us can, but not all of us can. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: So, news came out, I think it was in March, that you had launched Fountain AI. And part of Fountain AI was conversational AI, ChatBot, whatever you wanna call it. And then you turn around and buy Clevy. Was Clevy the back end? Did you find out that we couldn't quite do it as well as Clevy did it? What happened there between March and the announcement? Sean Behr: Actually, we were doing great, but really saw the power of what we were doing. So first thing I'll say is, ChatBot's not enough. We've all been on ChatBot conversations that lead to nowhere. Sean Behr: Just slows you down, doesn't get you the answer. And how many times have you been with a ChatBot or on a phone call where you're like, just can I speak? I need to speak to a representative. I wanna talk to a real human. So, ChatBot's not enough. We were really proud of the conversational AI technology we developed in house, but very quickly realized we could accelerate that even further. With the Clevy team and helping them join us as well as help accelerate the efforts we were already making. To give you kind of an example, our AI technology was great. It would help you collect information from applicants. We're all about how do you make it easy for an applicant to wanna work for you? For, the labor market in the hourly work world is incredibly competitive. Try to go look at any grocery store in the US. And there's signs up that say we're hiring, they're always hiring. We're... Joel Cheeseman: With bonuses. Usually. Sean Behr: With bonuses. Yeah. Nice bonuses now. What we say is, you've gotta make it great from the moment the person wants to apply for your job. If you only make it great after they start working for you, you're gonna miss out on 95% of the people, 'cause they're gonna go somewhere else. A lot of these hourly workers, they're applying to eight, nine, 10 jobs simultaneously. Which is incredible. I mean, and they're doing it all on their mobile device. If you can engage with them where they are, whether that's through an AI ChatBot or a mobile first application, or a way to use SMS or WhatsApp, if you're in Europe, those things get you a better way to engage with the applicant. And you can get more people through your funnel, more people to your front door, and then your stores become fully staffed. Joel Cheeseman: Yep. So, as you know there are a lot of established players in the conversational AI ecosystem. Where do you guys fit in? Are you an also competitor? Are you different? Are you playing catch up to them? Is it pretty much equal at this point? Where do you kind of like rank everyone at this point? How do you see it? Sean Behr: Yeah. I mean, the way I would say it is two things. I think, the conversational AI technology has rapidly evolved over the last 12 months. I mean, obviously ChatGPT is an open AI, but lots of other companies have made huge leaps there that have made conversational AI ChatBot technology, I would argue a table stakes issue. You just have to be pretty good at it. It's sort of a feature. It would be like having an applicant tracking system that doesn't do background checks would be really weird. You've gotta have conversational AI technology, I think as a table stakes feature, the thing we've realized is you can't, being able to just chat AI with an applicant isn't enough. You need to be able to schedule an interview. Which means you need to know what is inside the recruiter's calendar. Sean Behr: What availabilities do they have. So that you can say to an applicant, Hey, here's some windows for interviews and book those interviews. Those are the things you need to be able to do that you can't just do with a conversational ChatBot. You need to be able to upload a driver's license if the job requires a driver's license or upload a nursing license if the job requires a license. Those things can't be done with just a ChatBot. You've gotta have deeper technical capabilities built into that. So the ChatBot can be a front door. But what's behind the door is way more important. Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. So you bill yourself as a labor ATS, why not just an ATS? Sean Behr: Yeah, that's a great question. Joel Cheeseman: Why so fancy? Sean Behr: Yeah. Listen, you gotta stand out somehow. Look, the world of ATS is an old, we've all had ATSs for 20 years. I've bought them 10 times over at 10 different places. The thing we think about though is most HR professionals who are generally knowledge workers make an ATS decision based on their own experience for them, for their peers, for the coworkers around them. Without thinking, Hey, I've got 10,000 people in the field who don't have a laptop. How do you build a labor? How do you build an ATS that works for labor? And that's how we came to this labor ATS, one of the things I did when, this now three and a half years here, or three years from the day one, I've said, look, we've gotta focus on the hourly worker. The blue-collar, grey-collar, hourly worker. That's our whole focus. And so labor, the labor ATS is just great marketing. Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Sean Behr: That's all it is. Joel Cheeseman: We'll go with great marketing, we'll go with great marketing. Sean Behr: It's like Pepsi. It's like the choice of a new generation. Joel Cheeseman: Is it harder to be a good ATS or a good conversational AI technology? Sean Behr: It's hard to be a good ATS. Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. Interesting. Sean Behr: Way harder to be a good ATS. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: I can only imagine. I can only imagine. So you mentioned a little bit about the macro economy and things that are going on. You guys have raised a lot of money, so I'm assuming there's a lot of dry powder in your arsenal. But what's your take layoffs in tech? It seems to be a rolling recession, maybe, by some people's accounts, but I wanna know how you see the current state of the economy. Sean Behr: Yeah, it's an interesting time for a lot of tech companies. I think the best way I've heard it is, we're sort of in the... We're in the hangover zone. We're... Joel Cheeseman: A place I know very well my friends. Sean Behr: Yes. We both do. We're in the hangover zone. Here's the reason, the party was really great, from, call it 2012 to about 2021. 2020. Late 2021, and it actually got... Even when we thought the party was over at the beginning of COVID, turns out that was when the good stuff came out at the party. Joel Cheeseman: The good punch came out. Sean Behr: The real good stuff came out at that party. And so what you're paying for now in a lot of tech companies is you're paying for the excesses of the party, during the party, the number one thing was growth. Growth at all costs, growth no matter what. Which makes sense when capital is free, when you can just get more money whenever you want from investors. That very quickly changed. And now it is not, capital is free. Capital is really expensive, if you can get it. It's really hard to just get it. And part of that is most of the companies and most of the venture Act companies, they need to go public. Or they need to have a path to public or they need a path to an acquisition. The problem is that the door to an IP is closed. And... Joel Cheeseman: Is it opening? I just wanna... Sean Behr: It might be towards the end of this year, we'll see. Joel Cheeseman: CNBC really wants it to be back open, so... Sean Behr: I'm sure they would love it to be open. Joel Cheeseman: It's mostly closed for me, but not quite locked at this point. Sean Behr: Not locked. Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Sean Behr: But look, that downstream effect of not being able to go public means, "Okay, I've gotta figure out a way to find another path." And typically if you're trying to go for that and growth is no longer the number one thing, you've got to pivot to, how do I get profitable? And for many of these companies, profitability was actually like frowned upon for the last 10 years. [chuckle] Sean Behr: Now it's the number one thing is get profitable. Grow, but grow sustainably and grow profitably. Fountain was very fortunate. We've raised a lot of capital. We've run the business with a real capital efficiency. So we feel really good. It's put us in a position where our balance sheet and the amount of capital we have on the balance sheet is actually, something that makes the company even more valuable in this market. Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. So, touched on tech, which you guys don't really play in that area. Let's talk about what you do. The labor force, the essential worker if you will. What's your take on the health of that piece? Sean Behr: It's actually getting better and better. So the first thing is, look, Fountain's mission is to open opportunities for the global workforce. That's been our mission from day one. I'm proud of that mission. Last year we helped 3 million people find their next opportunity, which is just an incredible number. 3 million people finding their next job, finding the next thing that's gonna pay their rent, pay their kids' school, pay their grocery bill, whatever it is. So that's our focus. That part of the economy continues to be really, really strong. What's interesting is happening is you've got a lot of people in the knowledge worker world who have taken a step back and looked at their life over the last couple of years and made different choices. Joel Cheeseman: Yes. Sean Behr: And we had all this, you don't hear about it as much now, but the great resignation. You have this, generational decide where people are, "I don't know if I wanna work as much. I wanna have side hustle, I wanna, do all those things. Those things are primarily talked about knowledge workers. What I can tell you is even in the hourly work world, you're seeing some of that. I'll give you a real cogent example. If you think to yourself, I run a large warehousing company, let's say, and I've got a series of warehouses and I've got to hire 50,000 people a year to sort of maintain my warehouses, replace the people that quit, maybe expand a little bit. I base that model of 50,000 on people working 36 to 40 hours a week. What I think you're seeing in the hourly work world is, a portion of those people are saying, I don't wanna work 40 hours, I want 28. Joel Cheeseman: Sure. Sean Behr: 'Cause I got a side hustle of my own that I'm doing. And what happens for the... That's great for the worker. It gives them more opportunities out there. For the company that's hiring those 50,000 people, if 20% of the people wanna work 12 hours less, I don't need 50,000 people, I actually need 60,000 to do the same work that 50,000 people used to do. So opens up lots of challenges. It's a really robust and healthy market, but it's creating challenges for companies. We even hear things like from a customer who has said, look, "We've been doing this for 20 years. People come in now and they say, look, I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna drive for Uber. Now, I wanna try it. I wanna set my own hours." Is that mean like everybody quitting the company to go work for Uber? No. But 10% of people deciding they want to go deliver food, they want to go do a gig job, they want to drive for Uber or Lyft or DoorDash. It's a big impact on the company. Joel Cheeseman: Is it fair to say that's more of the rule now than the exception? The side hustle? Sean Behr: It's definitely the rule. Joel Cheeseman: In your space. Sean Behr: Yeah. It's definitely the rule. Joel Cheeseman: And to me it's, I look at Thumbtack or I look at TaskRabbit. Sean Behr: TaskRabbit. Joel Cheeseman: It may just be Task now. I don't quite remember. How does your tool... So a traditional ATS is you apply, you get hired, you go into a bucket and get interviewed, etcetera. The gig economy doesn't work like that. You put yourself out there, you get ratings from customers and whatnot. So does your tool somehow connect with what someone's doing on the side as well as their company? Can you recruit as well? Help me understand how and if they, you guys play with the gig economy? Sean Behr: Yeah. First of all, we have lots of customers in the gig economy. I mean, one of the reasons why those companies have been able to scale to the size they are is most of them power their workforces with for some. What's interesting is if you and I... If you work for a gig company and I work for a traditional retailer, let's say. And we're both going after the same person. You are offering flexibility, you're offering potentially better pay, you're offering work your own schedule, you're offering get started tomorrow and I'm offering submit your resume and then one of my recruiters will review it. And next week we'll probably reach out to you. By the time I reach out to you to say, "Hey, I'm really interested, Joel, come work for me." You're like, "I've already been working four days and it's kind of good. I'm liking what I'm doing. How much are you paying?" Now, if I then have to pay you more, try to swing you back towards me, that has a real impact. So one of the things that we do is we feel like we bring a competitive advantage to companies. We know that that worker is probably applying to eight jobs, 10 jobs even more. How do you separate yourself from the other eight to 10 jobs, including some gig jobs? One way to do it is to just pay a lot of money. Give a $2500 signing bonus. You'll get a lot of people through the front door. Joel Cheeseman: Is speed your secret sauce? Sean Behr: Speed is really, really critical. It's really, really critical. But it's not just speed for speed's sake. You still need quality. You still need to do your process. So me telling you, you can hire people in 20 minutes if all of the people are not a fit for you, well, the good news is we had speed. The bad news is I didn't really help you at all. What I need to be able to do is be really fast, have a lot of speed, but also deliver the quality for you. So making sure that the people that you do move fast on are a good fit for you. Either they fit with your culture, they have the right licenses, they have the right qualifications, they can do the job, they have the right shift availability and schedule flexibility. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Sean Behr: To do the job. All of those things are really critical, but you've gotta do it fast. In this market, you've gotta do it fast. One of the things I would say that's interesting is, in the blue collar versus... Blue collar, gray collar, hourly work versus the knowledge worker, one on the employer side speed is really critical in the hourly work world, and maybe not that critical in the knowledge worker side. You actually kind of want to go... Joel Cheeseman: The laptop class as Elon calls them. Sean Behr: Yeah. You want to go a little slow, you want to pick the right person. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Sean Behr: You wanna be perfect on those things. What's interesting, on the flip side though, for the worker, it's actually flipped. Right now, if you're a tech worker, and you're looking for a job and a new job opens up, you gotta be fast. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, yeah. Sean Behr: Because you wanna get in there and get that job. Joel Cheeseman: Sure. So we've been doing this show for a few years now, and I feel like every year we're another year away from the robots taking over and everyone being unemployed. Where are you on automation? Sean Behr: Yeah. Look, my last company was in the automotive mobility space and at some point the cars are going to drive themselves. That's probably a long time away. [laughter] A really long time away. Joel Cheeseman: Okay. Sean Behr: 10 years, 15 years. But it is coming. The car will drive itself, but it is not coming tomorrow. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Sean Behr: Despite what other people might tell you. Where I'm gonna see, like, and there's been some hype around like, will generative AI replace humans? Will the ChatBots take over? And then all of us, we'll all be in, we'll all be in Portugal on the beach just hanging out while the computer works for us. Joel Cheeseman: AI ChadCheese. Sean Behr: That's right. [laughter] Joel Cheeseman: Produce content from the beach. Sean Behr: Content, exactly. I don't think you're gonna see that, for a long time. I do think what you will see though, is a lot of the things that are what I would call high use, low value tasks. If your job is primarily focused on high use low value task, that job is going to be impacted. I'll give you an example. Today at Fountain, the AI technology is smart enough to understand your... What you are looking for in an interview. Like when you can come, what you're looking for, what's good, what's not good, and also smart enough to go into a recruiter's calendar, grab slots, come back, book the interview on their own. Even the candidate can reschedule the interview. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Sean Behr: They can say things like, I want to interview next Thursday. I want to interview two Tuesdays from today in the afternoon. The AI technology is smart enough to interpret that and say, okay, this person means June 28th, between 12:00 and 4:00 PM Pacific. Joel Cheeseman: Yep. Sean Behr: And go in, find the recruiter's calendar, grab those slots. That is a lot of a person's job today doing that back and forth. How many of us have gone back and forth with somebody and like, okay, I can do 12:30, can you do 2:30? I can't do 2:30, I can do 3:30. All right, how about we just do 1:45, that's all gonna be replaced. So what I would say is it's not gonna replace... The robots are not coming for our jobs. You guys are safe... Joel Cheeseman: Maybe our wives. [laughter] Sean Behr: But what you will see is high usage, low value tasks, I think are probably going away. Joel Cheeseman: I feel like at the show, there's a mix of optimism and pessimism. I'd say skewing, pessimistic, the term nuclear winner has even been thrown around. But you, you have direct access to job postings. What companies are doing directly. You see the sales process and the trends in that from the trenches at Fountain. What's your take from what you see in terms of what's around the corner? Sean Behr: Look, it's hard to do my job and not be optimistic. But I am, I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic about where things are. I do think you're gonna see an incredible growth in the way that HR technology works over the next two to three years. Now that may have some negative impacts. There may be some companies that are currently exhibiting here whose value proposition is gonna be greatly diminished. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Sean Behr: There are also some companies probably down that way where their opportunity is just started. And so, look, there will be change, but I'm optimistic about where things are headed and, we'll see. Look at Fountain we say the future's bright. Joel Cheeseman: That is optimistic. For sure. I like that. Based on that commentary, what does the future hold for Fountain? Global growth? What's, you're not gonna be like, I don't know, a different kind of ATS are you or just dis to labor? Like what's the growth plan look like? Sean Behr: No. We're gonna be focused on the world of hourly workers and frontline workers. We think that's our space. We feel like we've earned the right to own that space. And so, you're gonna see us make really great moves in the world, but focused exclusively on hourly workers. And we're gonna continue to be... Do everything we can to help our product deliver great experiences to workers and to hirers to try to open up opportunities for those workers. And so that's gonna be our focus. You're gonna see us a lot globally. We already have a good staff there. Our technology is used in 77 countries today. We'll probably continue to grow that, but we'll continue to grow within each of those countries as well. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. Sean Behr: Yeah, excited about the future, excited about Fountain. Joel Cheeseman: Well, cool. You, we talked about the ATS, we talked about the conversational AI, but you guys do a lot of other stuff. What sort of is trending at the company in terms of features that you're excited about? Sean Behr: Yeah. Anything that is... Coming back to this point, anything that is gonna make the applicant experience better. We're super passionate about. You typically, if you go try to apply for a job now as an hourly worker and have to do things like create an account with a username and a password and the password's gotta have an uppercase letter and a special character, and it's gotta be nine characters long, that's just so I can apply for the job. Just so I can have the privilege of applying for this job that I don't even know if I want yet. We're passionate about anything that's gonna eliminate that friction for the worker and for this applicant. Sean Behr: But I think you'll see us continue to evolve in ways that will make it frictionless for workers to apply to those jobs. And for the companies that are hiring, how do we make it so that they don't have to pay the $2500 sign on bonus? Because the number one testimony I get from a customer is we used to have to pay bonuses for these jobs. And with Fountain, we don't. I'm like, can you go tell everybody else about that? Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. You have native apps on iOS and Android. I assume a lot of your traffic flows through that. Talk about the impact that mobile's had on the business. Sean Behr: Yeah, mobile is key. Look of... This year, we're probably north of two million people hired at Fountain around the world. Almost 90% of those people applied for the job on a mobile device. Joel Cheeseman: 90? Sean Behr: 90. Joel Cheeseman: Wow. Sean Behr: It might be high 80s, but it's roughly 90%. It is. I always tell CHROs, go to your careers page, go to a job posting, try to apply for a job, but you have to do it on your phone. You can't look at your laptop because what happens is you talk to an HR person and the first thing they do is they open up their laptop and I'm like, yep. Problem is that most of the people who are applying for your job are using a screen that's four inches big. And when you bring that to them, all of a sudden the design, the usability, the functionality of their experience comes really clear. I've had CHROs just essentially give up. And look, I'm not... I spend a lot of time on my phone. I probably spend too much time on my phone, but I can tell you like if you ask me to upload a resume on my phone. Joel Cheeseman: Crickets. Sean Behr: I don't even know if I could do it. I'm gonna probably give up. Say, let me find a job that doesn't require that. Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. There must be another CEO job somewhere. Sean Behr: Exactly. Joel Cheeseman: But I don't have to upload a resume. Sean Behr: Exactly. I don't even have a resume. I don't even know. Joel Cheeseman: When was the last time you actually interviewed for that? Sean Behr: A long time. Joel Cheeseman: Anyway, that's enough about you. ATS's now rely a lot on marketplaces for their success. So people create an app, put it on the platform, companies... Company employers or customers can access that service. To my knowledge, you guys have not taken that jump. Will you? And if not, why not? Sean Behr: Yeah, we have not. We're focused exclusively on software that makes the hiring process better. From a marketplace perspective, we think there's great players out there. There's lots of places to get applicants. There's lots of job boards. There's lots of things like that. We're exclusively focused on how do we deliver software that makes our customers successful in hiring the applicants they've got in the pipeline. And that's... Look by the way, that's a really hard job. We've been at it since 2014, and I don't even think we're halfway there. I feel like every day I wake up and I'm more clear that I have more to do in this world, despite the fact two million people getting a job this year, not enough. Joel Cheeseman: So you talked about what you're not or not looking to do, but what are people saying about Fountain two to three years from now in terms of what you provide if it's different from today? Sean Behr: What they'll say is one continued focus on the hourly frontline worker will be there. What's different than today is I think you'll see us expand in our portfolio approach to those hourly workers. You'll continue to see us develop innovative technologies around how do you help customers acquire more of these workers, onboard these workers. One of the funny things about Fountain, one of our original names, the project name that the company actually started under, was an Onboard IQ. So you can imagine. What folk... Joel Cheeseman: Sexy. Sean Behr: Exactly. One thing you should know about me is I'm a terrible namer of companies, always happen... Joel Cheeseman: Fountain's pretty good. Sean Behr: Fountain's pretty good. Joel Cheeseman: I don't know if you came up with that, but it's pretty good. Sean Behr: It's the only one... But every other one has been not great. But you'll see us do things around onboarding. Anything that we can do that's gonna power a customer's business from a labor perspective, super interesting at Fountain. Joel Cheeseman: Own the life cycle, it sounds like. All right, Sean, we appreciate your time today. We know you're a busy guy. For our listeners who want to know more about you or the company, where would you send them? Sean Behr: Yeah, just go to fountain.com. You can learn all about our solutions and what we're doing. And you can follow us on socials, on LinkedIn, Twitter. And you can follow me @seanbehr. Joel Cheeseman: Easy enough. Thanks, Sean. Enjoy the rest of the show. This is Joel Cheesman reporting from the Aaron Booth live from SHRM National in Las Vegas. And that is another one in the can. We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Automated sourcing, referrals and analytics are all pretty popular features to have in your tech stack these days, but what about a startup that delivers - or at least hopes to deliver - all these things. That’s where newbie Kula comes in. Achu Ravi, founder & CEO of the company that is “On a mission to turn every employee into a recruiter” takes on the Firing Squad in this episode. A bold undertaking, and barely out of diapers, Kula has raised nearly $15M dollars to take on the world but let's see if they can even get past The Squad. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover kids, The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel Cheesman: Oh yeah, it's another Firing Squad. What's up everybody? It's your favorite guilty pleasure. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman, joined as always the Boo-Boo to my Yogi, Chad Sowash is in the house, and today we welcome Achu Ravi, Founder and CEO at Kula. Achu, welcome to Firing Squad. Achu Ravi: Thanks for having me, Chad and Joel. Joel Cheesman: Oh, you're very, very welcome. Very welcome. Chad Sowash: So cool. Joel Cheesman: Very jovial guy, very jovial, very nice guy. So, Achu, before we get into the business, let's introduce our listeners to you in our Twitter bio. Go. Achu Ravi: I'm Achu, born and raised in southern part of India, a place called as Chennai. An engineer turned into a recruiter now a founder. Yeah, I know I Love playing cricket. Joel Cheesman: Chad loves cricket. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: Can't get enough of it. Chad Sowash: Fuckin hate cricket. Jesus. How many days do I need to be at a sport for God's sakes? [laughter] Achu Ravi: You should try the T20, Chad. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Joel Cheesman: What's the T20? I don't know. And I'm sure most know. Chad Sowash: It's where they cut it down considerably to three hours. Yeah. Joel Cheesman: And it's called the T20? And it's three hours? Why not the T3? Achu Ravi: Yeah, it's T, Twenty20. Each side gets 20 overs to play. It's lot of fun. You can see a lot of swings. But yeah, no, it's fun for sure. Apart from that huge fan of photography, was a documentary photographer and, yeah, that's about me. Chad Sowash: So long walks on the beaches of southern India. That's what I'm hearing. Achu Ravi: As well as the streets. [chuckle] Joel Cheesman: A simple man who loves crickets. Okay, Chad, let him know what he's won today on the Firing Squad. Chad Sowash: Well, Achu, this is how Firing Squad's gonna play out. At the sound of the bell you will have two minutes to pitch Kula. At the end of the two minutes, we're going to hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q&A be sure to be concise or you're gonna get hit with the crickets, means tighten your game up. At the end of Q&A you are going to receive one of these from both of us. Number one, big applause. The only thing Kula is Don Shula, nobody can beat an undefeated season, but we predict one hell of a winning season from Kula. [laughter] Chad Sowash: Golf clap. Joel Cheesman: Does Achu even know who Don Shula is? Chad Sowash: I don't care. Joel Cheesman: Don't care. Chad Sowash: This is my show. Joel Cheesman: Okay, okay. Chad Sowash: Golf clap. Kula made the team, but you're gonna have to work harder if you wanna start in this industry. And last but not least, the Firing Squad. Kula can't hold Don Shula's jock strap. Hang it up because the practice squad doesn't even want you around. That's Firing Squad. Are you ready? Achu Ravi: I'm ready. Joel Cheesman: All right. Achu, pitch Kula in three, two. Achu Ravi: Wonderful. So, Kula is a platform which helps recruiters to build effective top funnel by increasing their response rates. So I know it's mouthful but so what we really do is over the course of years, the top funnel building efforts have completely changed in the recruiting process. In early 2000s, most of the employers will typically build their funnel using Job Bots. That is going to Job Bots, posting jobs, newspapers to drive traffic and get those applicants for a particular job. But over the course of years things have changed. We have very little, today, if you look at it, we have very little contribution from the inbound channel. Most of the hiring is happening vie referrals or passive outbound recruiting. The era of recruiting is becoming more social and more passive, thereby the tools today are not really efficient to drive the adoption of such use cases. So what we do at Kula is we really solve for outbound recruiting workflows for a recruiter to increase their response rates, which will in turn reduce the time to hire, as well as generate better yield for a recruiter. Achu Ravi: So we have two modules. One is called as Kula Flows, which will amplify your response rates by automating your engagement across multiple platforms. We are the only platform today, which helps you reach out via LinkedIn, email, connection request, WhatsApp text, and bunch of other channels. So it's a true multi-channel engagement platform so that you can automate your reach outs to candidates across different touchpoints. We also have another module called as the Kula Circles, which helps you increase the adoption of referrals within the company. Today, referrals is a very push driven product where a job gets created, a recruiter does some sort of a campaign internally called as hot jobs. You give them free iPhone, free iPad, but everyone is busy, is doing their own chores. They don't have time to go through their network and refer. So we built a module called as Circles, which helps you bring all your employees network in one centralized place. Joel Cheesman: All right, Achu, your two minutes are up. Let's get to the Q&A. Let's talk about the name. Okay. Kula.ai... Kula.com, and that's K-U-L-A, kula.com is parked. Did you try to buy it? Are you currently trying to buy it? Talk about the genesis of the name and why you didn't get the dot com. And I still have a few name questions after that. Achu Ravi: Sure. Kula means community in Sanskrit. So the thesis of building Kula is... I was a recruiter throughout my career and I wanna build this product for recruiters. So we wanna build a very strong community, which will help build a great product for recruiting use cases. So, hence the name of... Hence the name Kula formed. We tried for kula.com, of course, to rank better to search in research results. But there is another player who is a biotech company, which is using kula.com. But technically, we are... We wanna implement a lot of new technology stacks to help empower recruiters to do their job better. And the closest to us where the AI because we are implementing a lot of AI in terms of the Kula Flows module as well as Kula Circles. Joel Cheesman: Okay. All right. So also misspellings of Kula, K-O-O-L-A and C-O-O-L-A.ai are still for sale. Why have you not obtained those, secured those domains? Achu Ravi: We, again, we wanna stand by to the name, which translates to community. Joel Cheesman: The right answer is, we haven't gotten to it yet. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Joel. We'll do that immediately. All right, let's get to the copyright on your footer, which is still 2022. When you gonna update it to 2023? Achu Ravi: Pretty soon. Chad Sowash: In five minutes. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: All right. Real quick birth of the idea, you were a recruiter with Stripe, Uber, Freshworks, deep experience there. How did that drive to this company? Achu Ravi: Yeah, the inception of Kula started during my time at Stripe. We were growing pretty aggressively in terms of headcounts and one of the gaps where the existing tools in the market were predominantly built for organization workflows, like a system of record, like ATS and whatnot. So what that really means is, as a recruiter, when I identify a candidate, I can only manage certain part of workflows inside a particular tool that is scheduling interviews, taking feedback, making an offer, and moving them down the funnel, and not many tools were available in the market to build effective top funnel. That is, how do I discover a candidate? How do I engage with them to generate better response rates? I ended up building a small hacky solution on Airtable which got adopted internally at Stripe and there was a lot of success. So I thought instead of building internally, I'll just go for the entire community of recruiters. That's how the inception of Kula started. Chad Sowash: You talk about recruiting being broken. No shit, right? We know that. Where specifically is it broken that you're trying to fix it? Achu Ravi: Two areas, Chad. First and foremost, on the passive outbound recruiting site, identifying or discovering a candidate is not a challenge anymore. We have a lot of sites where we can just throw in a keyword and we can find thousand individuals. The main challenge is, how do I get in touch with them and how do I convert them? So there are also a lot of tools which helps you identify the email addresses or contact information about the particular individual to get in touch. There are also a bunch of automation tools to help you drive that, but the main challenge is content plays a very important role in terms of driving response rates. And let's be honest, not many recruiters are really good at crafting a beautifully content cold email. Achu Ravi: So we wanna couple a bunch of things which will empower recruiters to do their job better. One, what are the things which will generate better response rate, better content creation, better source of channels. Today an automation can happen via an email, but email as a channel has been missed. Let's say a engineer might not be hanging on emails, but they might be more active on the email, which they recently committed a code on. And so how do we help recruiters to reach out to the right channel for a specific persona, is where it is currently broken, which involves a lot of manpower, time, manual effort. So we really wanna fix the whole, I would say response rate generation engine. And that's one area which we are focusing. And another area is mostly on the referral side of things... Joel Cheesman: Okay. Achu Ravi: Where people are not really able to generate better referrals because everyone is busy doing their own jobs. There is no time for them to go through their network and refer. So we help you build visibility of your entire internal employees network. So that you can mine their talent pool, identify them, ask for a warm introduction, rather than you passively reaching out which will increase your response rates. Let's say if I wanna get in touch with Joel, probably I'll reach out to you, Chad, if you are friends, I believe you are friends. [laughter] So, you might be able to put me in touch with Joel, versus me cold reach out to Joel. So taking a warm network connection to get in touch with Joel is primarily what we are trying to build. Chad Sowash: So you are focusing on obviously being able to get passive candidates in, but also the referral side of the house. Why are you wasting your time on the referral side? I mean, we've seen so many platforms, who've tried to do what you are doing right now, fail, fail dramatically, crash and burn. So the question is, why are you wasting your time on something that we just haven't figured out as of yet without being more of a truly engaging model. 'Cause this is literally just throwing out messages to people that you hope respond. Achu Ravi: I sort of see that as an opportunity, Chad, where of course there are a lot of tools which try to solve referral related challenges. If I wanna break down, there are 2-3 high priority challenges in terms of referrals. One, visibility to your employees on what is happening with the candidates who they are referred. Number two, recruiter's not able to churn a lot of leads via referrals. Where there are a bunch of tools which really helped you mine networks and whatnot. There is a lot of friction in terms of importing connections and making that referral flow better. Chad Sowash: Right, so do you make it easy for everybody to import? How long does it actually take for me to import all of my connections from LinkedIn into your system? I have to go do the whole spreadsheet download and then we've gotta upload it back into yours. How does it work? Achu Ravi: No, not at all. It takes less than 10 seconds to import your contact from LinkedIn to Kula. So there are a lot of adoption related challenges in the previous platforms. One, how easy is it to import contacts? Number two, lot of friction around who gets the first touchpoint and how do I make an introduction? The channel for introduction was a big touch point failure. Number three, integrating with your existing systems. That is an ATS. Number four, visibility. It was also a challenge with those systems. So we covered all of those pieces and we still believe that that's a very untapped market and we want to penetrate heavily into particular example. Chad Sowash: Okay. So you talk about integrations. Who are you currently integrated with? Achu Ravi: We integrate with Greenhouse, Lever, Teamtailor and bunch of other top ATSs in the market. Joel Cheesman: That's a little bit gray, Chad, and a bunch of others. Very subjective. Chad Sowash: Top ATSs. Joel Cheesman: Any others you wanna name? Achu Ravi: Yeah, we integrate with roughly around 12 different ATSs, Workday and Workable. Chad Sowash: So when you say integration, does that mean that, are you actually white labeling inside the applicant tracking system so that you can work inside of the applicant tracking system? Or is a recruiter going to have to use your platform and the ATS at the same time? They're gonna have yours in a tab, theirs in a tab and having to flip back and forth? Achu Ravi: Yeah, it's the later, you don't need to have two different tabs. It's a bidirectionally synced platform. So any changes you make on Kula will reflect it on ATS. Currently inside Kula, we only look after your top funnel building efforts. We don't look at mid funnel. That is scheduling interviews, taking scorecards, bottom funnel that is making an offer, moving, onboarding them. We don't look at all of those functionalities, we only look after top-funnel efforts. Chad Sowash: So you're trying to be the dashboard for recruiters? Achu Ravi: That is correct. Like a single source of truth for all things top-funnel efforts. Joel Cheesman: Wanna get back to the referral business, just so I'm clear on this, 'cause you've got downloads and LinkedIn, and so, does it work in a way that, I'm a recruiter at a company, I know who is employed at my company and then I know on LinkedIn who's the first degree of all my employees, and then I can have them write a note to outreach about a job or do I... You're shaking your head. So that's how it works. So, what exactly are you uploading in 10 seconds? Achu Ravi: Sure. So I'll probably go a little bit more deeper on that. Every single employee within the company will get onboarded onto Kula Circles module where it's a one-touch click to import their connections from different channels that could be LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and whatnot. Imagine that we are a team of 10, and we all have thousand degree, thousand connections each. Cumulatively, we build at 10,000 people of internal talent network, which will be exposed to your recruiting organization so that I as a recruiter inside the company will now have access to these 10,000 people. Joel Cheesman: Okay. Achu Ravi: Discover them, filter them with the kind of roles that you are hiring for that could be multiple filters, company filter, title, whatnot. Joel Cheesman: So, I join the company, and they say, "Go to Kula, click this button, download your LinkedIn contacts, your GitHub, etcetera." They load into the system and then on your dashboard, hey, these are, this is a first degree to Chad. I'm gonna reach out to them and say, "Hey, I know you know Chad at our company, I know he's a dick, but you won't have to work with him, that kind of thing." That's how it works? Achu Ravi: No. The later part is quite different. [laughter] Achu Ravi: But you identified Chad, you identify Joel and I see that Chad is connected to Joel. Rather than me reaching out, I can ask, request Chad to reach out on behalf of the company. You can do all of those things on the platform. Joel Cheesman: That's manual on Chad. You give him a template or here's what you need to say, but it's essentially Chad writing the note and not an automated thing. Achu Ravi: That is correct. Joel Cheesman: Okay, into his... Chad Sowash: Can I import the ATS database into mine, because those are people I've already paid for. Achu Ravi: That is correct. We also integrate with ATS so that we can also look at all the past applications and we can also connect them to the network. So what we are trying to do here is creating a network layer within the organization, because generally referrals tend to perform better and stay longer with the company and you will have a lot more context about the individual who you're referring to. Joel Cheesman: Is there, so you've built the communication system. Is there a reward system? 'cause most referral solutions have, "Hey, get an Applebee's gift card or get cash or whatever." Like how does that fit in to the solution or does it? Achu Ravi: Great question. Currently, we don't have a reward in play, Joel, but we have the reporting which talks about number of hires which an individual has made, number of introductions they've made and whatnot. We are currently in the process of integrating with certain vendors to help support the gift card mechanisms and other reward programs within the platform. That's our V2 of the product. What we are currently focusing on is, "Okay, hey, does this really increase adoption? Can you see value and what's the reward which you generally offer because it's unique to the company, right?" Certain companies don't have any reward programs for referrals, certain company does. How do we look at that? So... Joel Cheesman: How much, it sounds like you rely a lot on LinkedIn and GitHub and some other, what's, how much of a threat is it that they turn this off or change the API to get contacts and I mean they've made it harder over the years. Is that a real threat or no? Achu Ravi: Oh no. We don't do anything outside of their terms of use. All we do is pull a public URL and we hit our data vendors to enrich data information. We don't scrape any information. We get a consent from the user. Joel Cheesman: So I have a LinkedIn account, I go in and say, "Hey, give me all my contacts." Achu Ravi: Mm-hmm. It's like a takeout. Joel Cheesman: So my question is, if LinkedIn either restricts certain portions of information, email address, phone number, whatever, is that a threat to the business or no? Achu Ravi: No, we don't require all of those because we work with, all we need is a Google public URL. Let's say if I search Joel... Joel Cheesman: Well, you need my contacts, email addresses, right? Achu Ravi: No, I don't need your... I just need your LinkedIn URL. That's pretty much it. And we have a data engineering team which will work with different data vendors to enrich that information back to you. Joel Cheesman: But you're not scraping LinkedIn? Achu Ravi: No, we only pull the public URLs of an individual via Google X research. [laughter] Joel Cheesman: You figured it out, my friend. You figured it out. Why not use SeekOut, Hiretual, some of the other solutions or candidate ID or some other competitors? Chad Sowash: HireEZ. Achu Ravi: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: Oh, did I say Hiretual? Damn it. It redirects though. It redirects. Achu Ravi: What we do is with Hiretual or hireEZ for that matter, we compete with them in other flows module where we build the sequencing layer to reach out to candidates more efficiently and also discover within the platform. So we don't have the discovery piece built in because we believe that the existing investment on LinkedIn is already being made and the datasets on LinkedIn is much more accurate. So, what if we really help empower recruiters is to get in touch with them faster and close the loop rather than building a discovery platform right on the tool. That's the only differentiator. We only focus on the sequencing layer like Gem for our flows module, hireEZ does not have anything related to Circles or the referral engine so far. Chad Sowash: So can recruiters actually use your platform to amplify everything that they're doing to their entire social network? Or is this just a direct, connection? Only. Achu Ravi: You mean in terms of reaching out to candidates? Chad Sowash: Yeah. If I wanna post in my feed that I have something going on or what have you, and I wanna do that to my entire network and then I wanna reach out individually. Can I do both? Achu Ravi: No. It's just individually. Chad Sowash: Individual. Okay. So, and this is the next piece. First and foremost, it'd be nice if you could actually just broadcast, to my entire network, first and foremost, and then be able to reach out. Because being able to, again, if you know advertising and know marketing, which is exactly what this is, it's messaging, it's awareness. You need more than one just message to get in front of them, in many cases to be able to get a reaction. Taking a look at your social, you know, being able to even do that with your own platform, I mean, on Twitter you have little to no activity. Why aren't you using the platform to drive content awareness, engagements, Instagram, nothing there. LinkedIn, you're more active, but you haven't posted in two weeks. You know, if I am a buyer, I'm gonna be going out and looking at those signals. And if you're not using your engagement platform, your lead platform to drive your own leads, I'm not gonna have anything to do with you. Achu Ravi: Yep. No, great, great points, Chad. I think first and foremost... Joel Cheesman: Shouldn't even have an Instagram account. There's nothing on it. Get rid of it. It's embarrassing. Achu Ravi: Yeah, so... Joel Cheesman: It's embarrassing. Achu Ravi: Let's be honest, right? You know, our top priority today... Chad Sowash: We are. Achu Ravi: Our top priority today is making sure that we build right products and solutions to take it to market. We are still, we haven't gone GA yet. We are still testing with our existing very limited users. So we are primarily focusing on LinkedIn as a channel because that's where we believe our ICPs are hanging out. I don't think recruiters will go onto Instagram and look for cool products. So, you know, if you want to take a meme approach or a, you know, do some reels, yes, maybe, that's the part which you would like to take but currently given the team size, which we have, and given the investment which we are looking to make in the product, we just wanna channelize our efforts in the right direction to make the needle move. Joel Cheesman: So when you go update your copyright date at the footer, take out the Instagram link and whatever the hell else is there, unless you're using it, 'cause it's a waste of space. Chad Sowash: And again, it's all about retooling your platform to be able to be a real messaging platform, a real messaging platform that only does point-to-point isn't, it's not good enough. Right? I need, I need a much more broad-based scaled amplification that's there. Let's talk about competition, which you did talk about. So hireEZ and SeekOut, their AI both have about 7-10 years of lead on your platform. They've been collecting data, crunching data, training AI for a very, very long time. So how do you, how do you expect to compete with those types of organizations? Achu Ravi: So, a couple of things which I would like to call out. One, in terms of the data which we collect, it's mostly around information on network layers. That is what's the degree, closest degree of connection with Chad and Joel? Let's say for example, if the AI, which let's say for example, hireEZ or other competitors have built, is mostly around search index. Show me all the relevant people who might be a good fit for this particular role based on certain parameters. What we do is a little bit more deeper in terms of understanding network connections because we don't do a... Build a discovery platforms. That's not our game. So we use AI in twofolds, one, content generation in terms of creation of flows, which will generate you better response rates. So recruiters struggle today to write better content, to generate better response rates. Chad Sowash: They have ChatGPT, now I can go do that free, why do I need you? Achu Ravi: It's not just content you are generating, but you can also look at content parameters across different channels. What kind of content which will work in LinkedIn, what kind of content will work in email based on certain parameters, which you give us input. Right? So that's number one. Number two, the network layer is significantly important because if I know who's the closest net person who is connected to this individual within my company, there are higher degree chances for me to get in touch with that particular person rather than me just shooting an... Spraying and playing an email. Right? So we only focus on these two AI layers. We don't compete really on the discovery module yet, and we are not intending to go into that particular direction. We really wanna focus mostly on communication, engagement, set of things that is better content, better way of type of sequences of messages will go out and whatnot. That's our core focus. We are not really focusing on discovery piece. Joel Cheesman: Gotcha. Let's talk about money for a second. You guys have raised 14.7 million according to CrunchBase in 12 or in August of last year, you raised $12 million. What's the money going toward? Global expansion? What's customer look like, sales, etcetera, talk about what the money's being spent on. Achu Ravi: Sure. So far we have raised two rounds, cumulatively put together we have raised roughly around $15 million. So we are a small team, small, but biting team. Most of our efforts currently is going on R&D. The money will be used to build better functionalities to serve our customers. As I told earlier, we just went live a quarter ago and we are north of around 30-plus customers. All of them are paid customers. We don't have any freemium users or anyone from day one we have been getting only paid customers. Roughly our focus for 2023 is going to be more investment in product, and go-to-market teams. You spoke about not much of activity on Instagram, LinkedIn and whatnot. I think we are gonna invest heavily on our content marketing engine to help drive the traffic. So that's primarily where we are chasing that. But currently we are just full heads down focusing on product and building, right? Just to support our users. Joel Cheesman: We talked about no freemiums. I tried to look up pricing. You made me fill out a form, tell you what integrations I have, and then I probably get a call from a salesperson and then I have to do a demo and all that other bullshit. So... Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: What does this cost? Why the hoops to get pricing? Why not be more transparent, make it easier on me. Talk about that. Achu Ravi: As I mentioned earlier, we just went live last quarter. We are still figuring out what does an exact good pricing means for us. So what we are currently doing is purely based on what the customer requires, we custom-price for each of our customers. We don't have a standard sticker price yet. So the pricing is a big experimentation work because there are a lot of parameters which we need to be considerate about. So in July we are going live with freemium and as well as pricing page. So hopefully that should be resolved in the next two months, Joel, when you visit our website next, you should, you can be able to skim through all this loops and you'll be able to play around the product in the next couple of months. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. I'm also gonna follow you on Instagram. If I don't start getting some posts, you're gonna hear about it. Okay. You're gonna hear about it. Achu Ravi: Yeah please do. Keep us checked. Joel Cheesman: All right. That is the bell. Achu are you ready to face the Firing Squad? Achu Ravi: Please. Go ahead. Joel Cheesman: Chad, would you like to go first? Chad Sowash: Sure. So Achu, Buy or Sell in September of last year. Kula was there, you guys came out with a Kula video it was, well done, incredibly well done. It got, got me, got me excited to see what the brand was gonna hold. One thing that I gotta say though is, you know, having some big names in the market, like hireEZ who has over 45 million in funding, SeekOut 188-plus million in funding, Findem close to 40 million in funding. Those names, their successes and funding does provide great validation, market validation for a segment like Kula, right? And no doubt recruiters are in desperate need of tech that will help them scale through automation. We need to get rid of the admin tasks so that recruiters can take time back and give candidates the white glove service that they all deserve. Chad Sowash: I did reach out to three Kula competitors and asked them what they thought of you guys, and they all responded like clockwork with who are they? Can you send me a link to their site. That's saying something, right? And we were talking about the social presence and whatnot. There's literally no market presence and awareness other than that really cool video that I talked about, which came out last September. Okay? Now on the other side of the equation, if I were a buyer and I talked about this before and I saw a vendor like you that was talking about engagement, awareness, activity, brand building, those types of things, I would want to see you demonstrating that first. If you can't demonstrate that first for me, as you being the first client, I don't wanna have anything to do with you. You're not even gonna make it on my RFP list, right? And OpenAI, when we start talking about content creation is going to change your narrative and probably your tech stack because content creation's gonna become a commodity very, very soon. Then we look at referrals. Referrals are more than just having a bunch of names and outreach, right? If that would've been the case, then guess what? We would've had this figured out over a decade ago. Joel Cheesman: Jobster. Chad Sowash: Easily. Back in H three days, right? We would've had this figured, but it's more than that. So the thing, what I'm trying to help you understand here is that you are focusing personally, my opinion, in many different areas that you should just ditch. You should focus on helping companies surface the great candidates and reengage the great candidates they've already bought in their applicant tracking systems. These are things that actually make really good business sense, right? Now with all of this because of market validation, because I see where you're going and there are some great companies that are out there as well, there is some space in this market for Kula. I don't think that will be a problem. Gonna need, probably need a little bit more funding and a hell of a lot more market awareness, right? And at that point, I'm gonna, this is a wing and a prayer my friend. I think you're gonna make, you're gonna be on the bench, but you're gonna get a golf clap. I don't think you're a starter just yet, but I think you got a chance, my friend. Joel Cheesman: You're halfway there living on a prayer is what Chad is saying. [laughter] S5: It needs to be about 20% cooler. Joel Cheesman: All right, Achu, I'm gonna echo a lot of Chad's sentiment, particularly on focus. I mean, you guys are all over the place. Like domain names need to be registered, that'll redirect to misspellings, your copyright date, there's literally no posting on Instagram. And you guys have a link to your Instagram like focus... Chad Sowash: Just the basics. Joel Cheesman: Get rid of all the fat, the exterior stuff, like focus on what you guys do. We didn't even talk about your analytics product, which is in there. So I don't know, you know, only you know about what are people wanting? Is this referral thing a customer driven or is this like we just had a cool idea to do it 'cause there are companies that do referrals that do it a lot better can you find a way to integrate those solutions into yours where you're using Bonusly or whoever, plug that into our stuff. Joel Cheesman: I love your background, time at Uber recruiting, time at Stripe. These are serious companies that did some serious recruiting. So I gotta think you learned a thing or two in that time period. The fact that you actually made a product that Stripe was using internally, I think is great. Chad mentioned more money. I'm kind of surprised that you're not further along with almost $15 million in terms of brand awareness. The fact that your competitors don't know who you are. Like that money needs to go to some brand awareness and who the hell are you guys? And so I think that needs to be focused. Maybe you need more money, but I think with 15 you should be able to do a lot of these things that smaller companies can do that you guys aren't doing. So I'd love to see more focus. The product wise we mentioned SeekOut, we mentioned, hireEZ and some others, I agree they're further along, but there are things that you guys do that they don't. Joel Cheesman: For example, hireEZ only does email outreach, which something we learned at Unleashed last week. The fact that you guys have integrated text messaging, WhatsApp and all those other messaging platforms is a good thing. So I think there are things you guys are doing right on the tech side, you're failing miserably from a marketing, brand awareness, go-to-market perspective, I think that can be fixed. I as well, wing and a prayer is a good one. I'm gonna, like, I sold you guys when we first reviewed you. If not for your experience, some of the tech and some of the things that you're doing focus, get brand awareness, and I think that you've probably got something that can make it. But no way, you're getting an applause, but I'm not ready to shoot you down yet. This also for me gets a golf clap. Chad Sowash: On your way. Joel Cheesman: Gets a golf clap. Chad Sowash: You can possibly get off the bench, Achu. You just gotta work hard my friend. Joel Cheesman: I wanna think of a cricket metaphor, but I have no idea of anything about Cricket. So get your googly or whatever it is together, wicked googly and fix this shit. And you'll be all right. Other than that, how do you feel? Achu Ravi: I'm feeling great. Thanks. Thanks for this comments of course. You know, we've been live in the market for the last... We started building 16 months ago. A lot of efforts have just been focused as just been more on building product... Joel Cheesman: I just asked you how you felt, not try to save your rating. So you're feeling good's? All right? Okay. For our listeners that wanna know more about Kula, where would you send them? Achu Ravi: Kula.ai, @Kula Twitter, follow us on LinkedIn. Chad Sowash: Follow them on LinkedIn. That's about the only presence they have right now until they blow all those others up. Joel Cheesman: That's right. He's got a black eye and a bloody nose, but he did survive the Firing Squad, Chad. And with that another one in the can, we out? Chad Sowash: We out. S6: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

After a week of travel and nursing a Recfest hangover, the boys are particularly feisty this week. The recent acquisition of recruitment marketing agency Bayard by Stepstone’s Appcast provides ample fodder for some big-time opinion on the news and the ripple effect it’ll have on the industry as a whole. What’s more, could Meta’s strike against Twitter with Threads be a sign of things to come in recruitment or not (talkin' to you, LinkedIn). Plus, buy-or-sell with alfii, RecruitBot and Zinc, then a deep dive into the Lazy Girl trend taking TikTok by storm. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah, it's international nude day or as I like to call it every day. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel bad naked Cheeseman. Chad: Chad, Mr. Worldwide Sowash. Joel: And on this week show, Appcast Goes Full Blast. Meta goes after Elon and a little buy or sell. Let's do this. Chad: And you're back across the pond, aren't you? Joel: Yeah, I traded London England for London Ontario this week. That's right. [laughter] That's right. But it is always great to be in Canada, Chad. SFX: Take off, we were doing our movie. Don't wreck our show, you hoser. Chad: Love Canada 'cause there's literally nobody who lives there. It's amazing. It is a huge country. And it has less population than the state of California. So yeah. Joel: And lovely people. Positive outlook on life. Chad: Yes. Joel: She got a love. Chad: Always. Yes. Joel: So I look like I rolled out of bed and you look like you just came off the beach. You're recuperating nicely from England, I think. Chad: Yeah, 'cause I did. Freaking amazing. I had to come out of the water to come do this, but that's okay. That's what I'm here, listener. [laughter] I'm here for you. Joel: Yeah, the Pit Bull label is starting to grow. [laughter] The pit bull of recruiting as Chad Sowash or as I like to call him Euro Chad is in full effect. Chad: Euro Chad, Okay, so we're just going to roll right in the shout-outs since we're talking about being away, because we got to talk about RecFest. Okay? Joel: Yep. Chad: Whoo. Last year, great time. Everybody's coming out of their cocoon. Everything was just starting to happen. It felt great. Felt great. Joel: Yep. Chad: This year, it was fucking off the chain. It was amazing. I mean, it did not feel like 5000 people. It felt like 10,000 people. And the way that they situated the tents this year were a little different than last year. They did some things different here and there, but man, it was a fucking blast. Joel: It was a blast. And for me, it had extra heartwarming vibes. [laughter] Because I got to bring my 16-year-old to the event. He was working hard, passing out t-shirts. Chad: There he was. Joel: Had our equipment. He was kind of a gopher, getting us beer. That was a good time. And he was particularly impressed with the rooftop party thrown by Hackajob and seeing what that meant. Chad: Best booth. Easily. Joel: That was a good time. The booze laws are a little more flexible in England. So we found out that my 16 year old enjoys a good cider from the old country, which is nice. [laughter] Chad: The cedar. He loves the cedar. Joel: Yes. The cedar. Chad: Now, that's good stuff. Yeah, I thought the best giveaway, at least, Julie, we didn't have time. We were on the stage all goddamn day. We were working. We were emceeing the Disrupt Stage. Talk about little recipe in the minute for all those kids out there who want to get on stage, how to get a packed house. I'll tell you that here in a minute. But Julie went and she went shopping. Chad: 'Cause she didn't have to be on stage. Last year she was on stage. So she got to go do what everybody does. Get the bag. Go get the good swag. The best swag for me personally was, we're going to talk about them later in this podcast. Zinc, they gave away whole bean coffee. Good coffee. I'm drinking it as a matter of fact right now. Oh, yeah. Good stuff. Can I asked Julie, I was like. Okay, so you went to a bunch of presentations. Which one was your favorite? Guess who it was? Joel: Is this all the tents or just our thing? Chad: All the tents that she went to. Joel: All the tent... Oh, I have no idea. Chad: Brew dog. Go figure. Alcohol once again wins, kids. I do have to say after being on stage, watching a tent full. I mean fucking standing room only and then in the very next presentation having a quarter of that. We found out what the recipe was. And you can add some color into this 'cause I'm sure you can. Joel: Sure. Chad: Number one, it's a sexy title which includes a big brand. You got to have the sex appeal in there kids and even though, many of these smaller companies have amazing stores and they're doing much better and nimble things. I'm telling you right now, if you want to fill a room, you want to fill a tent, you want to fill anything, you'd better have a sexy title and you better have a big name on stage like AstraZeneca, Siemens, Heinz. Those are some big names, they filled the fucking house. Anything to add? Joel: Anytime you could put Semen on a title, it's gonna... [laughter] I mean Siemens, sorry, sorry I misspoke. Siemens is a good one. I would add that it should be snappy, unless it's so long that it's sort of sarcastic. And also, if it bleeds, it leads, so if it's anything about killing recruitment, employers are finished, anything like that, is typically gonna play pretty well. I have a BrewDog story, Chad. Chad: Oh, okay. Joel: I'm a little unhappy with BrewDog. And this has nothing to do with recruiting, so bear with me. Chad: Oh, please tell. Yeah, do tell. Joel: It's half my show, so I'm going to take over here. [laughter] Joel: So, Cole and I fly into Manchester. We like the music scene, I've never been there, I'm a big Oasis fan, there's a whole thing going down. He's a big Joy Division fan, the Smiths, so anyway, I read all the laws about drinking in England. And it says that as long as a 16 year old is with a parent and they're having a meal they can have beer, cider or wine. Chad: Okay. Joel: So I'm like, cool, that's the law. So I go into BrewDog specifically, because I know that they do beer. They have a great hotel but that's a different story. So anyway, I check in and I ask the bartender and I say, hey what's... I want to make sure I know the law, like I got my 16 year old. I want to have a flight of beers, I want to have him try a lager, a sour, a stout, like every... Like let's see what he likes and go from there. Bartender says, "Yeah, the law is, as long as you're eating and you're there, you can't leave". Chad: Right. Joel: It's all good. So I'm like, cool. So we get back from all our touring, we shower up, clean up, go to dinner. I'm like, cool, I'm going to get a flight and we're going to have a good bonding experience. Well, what I assume is the manager... Joel: Takes our order and I start like looking at beers to order, and he says, "Sorry, sir, we don't serve 16 year olds." And I'm like, but your bartender said that you do. And he said, "No, it's our policy that we don't." He leaves and gets my drink. I go online to look at the UK laws, and it says on the official website, just what I told you about eating and dah, dah, dah. So I show that to him and I say, well, according to the law that I can, I mean, I guess you can have a corporate policy. And he said, "Yes, it's our corporate policy not to do that." So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go to Brewdog.com and see if there's anything about 16 year olds can't drink, even if they're with their parents. Of course, there's nothing online that says that that's the case with BrewDog. So I'm like, there's nothing on your corporate policy that says I can't do this. Cole was getting upset, like, you're embarrassing me. I just decided to drop it. But the whole reason I picked BrewDog was to have this experience, and they kind of fucked me. So I'm a little bit mad, with BrewDog. Chad: Wow. That hurts, dude. That's where you don't ask for stuff. You just order and then you just share. You just ask for forgiveness later. Yeah. I get it. Joel: Well, you know my policy. SFX: 60% of the time. It works. Every time. Chad: Every time. Joel: All right. Well, let's get to some other shout-outs, I guess. SFX: Shout-out. Chad: Hit it. Joel: All right, Chad. You know, one of our favorite times of the year is football. And we are as of this... Chad: Oh yeah, American football. Joel: This publication, yes American Football, 55 days until kickoff for the NFL and Fantasy Football with Chad and Cheese has become an annual tradition. And FactoryFix gets my first shout-out for being... SFX: Yes. Joel: A repeat sponsor of fantasy football. SFX: All right. All right. All right. Chad: Ah-hah, baby. That's awesome. Joel: Which now we know Dennis Tupper, the defending champion, will be in the league, we know FactoryFix will have someone on the league. But we will soon be promoting the opportunity to play some fantasy football with Chad and Cheese. Always fun, love reading the leaderboard, during the season, but that is one of my big shout-outs. Chad: Excited again for fantasy football. Yes. Joel: Yes. And I love our league because, we have an extra, wild card with Quarterback... Chad: Yes. Joel: As an option. Chad: Shhh, don't tell anybody the that's the cheat right there. Joel: That's part of the fun. Chad: You can't tell anybody what the cheat is. [laughter] It's fun when they don't know what the cheat is. It's a shortcut. Joel: Yes. Justin Fields is my sleeper this year. I think he's gonna blow out this year. Chad: No kidding. I hope so. Joel: Trevor Lawrence was the hot item last year. I think Justin Fields, hits it this year, who knows. So my second shout-out, Chad, you and I remember the early days of what Microbrews were. Chad: Yes. Joel: You and I would drink in the '90s. It was Sam Adams for me anyway. Sam Adams, Goose Island, Fat Tire and and Anchor Steam. Chad: Anchor Steam. Yes. Joel: Three of those, two of those have been bought up. Sam Adams is still holding firm, but Anchor Steam announced this week after 127 years, the San Francisco icon will be stopping the creation of beer, the brewing of beer, and just closing up shop. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And I'm personally sad about that 'cause that was one of my go-tos whenever I'd go to San Francisco. But I also think talking about Bud Light as we do on the show, Bud Light's problem isn't being too woke. Bud Light's problem is people aren't drinking shitty beer anymore. They're not even drinking like the good Microbrews of old, they're drinking local shit in their city and towns. Where people they actually know work there or they know where the brewery is. It's better. It's fresher. Like that's the biggest problem. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: With Bud Light. And I think Anchor Steams news sort of underscores the problem with the beer industry right now. Chad: And if anybody knows that we do, because in Indianapolis and all throughout Indiana, we probably haven't, Midwest probably have the best beer, especially IPAs in the world, juicy, hazy, fucking amazing. Joel: Indiana goes deep when it comes to Microbrews. SFX: Just a tip. Joel: And who else goes deep? Chad. It's us. When it's, when it comes to giving free shit away, we gotta talk about on every show. But if you haven't signed up kids, go to chadcheese.com, click that free link. Give us your information. You could win a t-shirt from our friends at JobGet. You can win beer from Aspen Tech Labs. You can win Whiskey, one from Chad, one from me. Our favorite bourbons, that's from our friends at TextKernel and a new one, Chad. Abode HR new sponsor. We got $250 Airbnb gift cards every month. You want to get out, COVID's over, like this is your opportunity. Sign up and get a night on us. A night on Chad and Cheese. Get a special romantic room. A little candles, fill up the bathtub. Like what could be better than that, Chad. Chad: Fill it up with champagne and do it the way that Chad and Cheese would do it. And then doing it... Joel: This is not your honeymoon my friend. Chad: Also in your Chad and Cheese t-shirt because it's like an hug with Chad and Cheese. Love it. SFX: Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Really? Can you feel the tension in the air right now? [laughter] I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plum. Joel: Oh, that just never gets old. That's right. Chad. Another year around the sun. Some of our fans are celebrating a birthday. We got Christina White, Justin Spencer, Eddie O'Neill, Ellen Spiegel, Rob Busey, Todd, the mayor, Daley, Ben Sagers. I think that's a made up name. There's no way that Ben Sagers is a real person. [laughter] Melissa Bordage, Karen Lash, Patrick Sullivan, Elaine Euler, Will Staney and Christian Anderson. I always bring up Christian Anderson because he was the PR guy for Jason Goldberg [laughter] back at Jobster, which none of that exists anymore, but he's got a special place in my heart. And by the way. Chad: But the stain still exists. Joel: We mentioned Matt Alders birthday last week. I think the dude is double dipping. It was not his birthday last week. Chad: Oh, what? Joel: He's trying to get more t-shirts or something. I don't know what's going on, but... Chad: He's trying to get some rum from Plum. Joel: We're onto you. That British guy we're onto you. It was not your birthday, so stop double dipping. SFX: Happy birthday. Chad: Verification. We're gonna have to have, like ID verification for birthdays or something like that. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. What is it ID.me that people can sign up for? We're gonna have to have like a clear... Chad: Oh shit. Okay. Joel: Program or something. Chad: Okay. Well, you definitely gonna need a clear, because coming up next Kids it's events and yes, we just did RecFest and we're getting ready to do RecFest again. All of the craziness, all of the FOMO that you obviously if you weren't there, you felt, you gotta come to Nashville. It's very simple. It's in September, we actually have a 50% off discount code. Yes. 50. That's half. Yes. And why do we do that? Here's why we do it. Because TA professionals, you need to bring your entire team. This is an all hands day, right? You bring them out... Chad: You get together, you rub those members together, you make them sticky. That's what our friend Douglas would always say. But you gotta love a little RecFest. So get out there, come see Chad and Cheese at the Disrupt Stage. Then we're going to be in Vegas at HR Tech. Everybody's obviously gonna be there, but it's gonna be a little different this year. Chad: That escalated quickly. Joel: And this year kids, you can come to the Fuel50 booth where Chad and Cheese will be recording live in front of a studio/expo audience. That's right. Gonna be at the Fuel50 booth HR Tech. And then last but not least, 'cause I gotta bring this up because I can't fucking wait to do this. Unleash Paris. Unleash America was amazing. But when you have Unleash Paris, come on kids. You got to come to Paris. SFX: All right, all right, all right. Chad: Got to do it. All of this is at chadcheese.com. Click on events in the upper right hand corner. Register for them all. Joel: Yep. By the way, Chad, I had a call with, Fuel50 this week. You were on the beach doing something. Chad: Oh, okay... Yes. Sorry about that. Joel: A little teaser. Not confirmed, but cardboard Chad might be making... Oh yeah. An appearance at HR Tech. Not confirmed yet kids. And there may even be a cardboard Cheese. I don't know. It could get crazy. Chad: But I was gonna say, but I'm actually going to be there, I don't understand why we need a cardboard version of me. I don't want to compete with me. Joel: But we take breaks, Chad, and there needs to be something to fill in the seat when we're gone. So, I don't know. I'm just tea... I'm just, we're still exploring. I don't know. Chad: Okay, teasing out, teasing out, okay. SFX: Topics. Joel: Alright. It's so big. It's gonna cover the whole first block of our podcast, Appcast. By all accounts, the most popular programmatic Ad distributor in the recruitment industry has acquired Bayard Advertising, a recruitment marketing company. Terms were not disclosed. The combined company will become a Global Recruitment Agency with programmatic services serving over 2000 clients. The deal resulted in the addition of 238 employees. And Bayard's executives will continue their roles under Appcast's leadership, aside from the CEO, the acquisition will integrate Bayard's operations into Appcast and retire the Bayard name. It's gone. Appcast focus on large enterprise clients will continue and the company aims to maintain partnerships with other Agencies. I don't know, Chad, this is big news. What are your thoughts? Chad: Ooh, well there's a commonality here. We just saw Anchor Steam 127 years gone. Bayard has been around, Bayard around for 100 years, a century, and they are going to be gone. So consolidation and convergence between traditional agencies and technologies have been happening for over a decade. And this is big. Why a convergence between agency and technology? I think it's pretty simple. Employers are spending more budget today on recruitment marketing than their actual core talent acquisition tech stacks. And if you don't have to pay that 15% agency fee, 'cause that's yours, plus you can widen up that wallet share with creative and all that other fun stuff. Woo-hoo. That's some cash. And Bayard had a very nice size portfolio, mainly in the US. So this to me is incredibly smart. It just makes damn good sense. I got a call on Sunday talking about this was gonna happen on Monday. It sounded like they feel like they're getting away with something. Somebody could have bought Bayard, but we got them. They were, it wasn't just the bullshit, we're trying to put up this fluffy, this is we were really excited about this. They are giddy, fucking giddy that they bought Bayard it. This is a big, big move. Now we'll talk about a little bit of why that might be, but let's dig into some history here. Chad: So in 2013, Symphony Talent known back then, as Findly, by the way, they acquired Bernard Hodes Group, that's when we started to see a lot of this technology's gonna play a big game in the agency space. Well, Hodes and Findly their cultures and their business priorities didn't align at all. It was cats and dogs, the shit didn't work. So that really didn't gel. They thought they would, they finally killed the Findly brand. Chad: They became Symphony Talent 2016, started including programmatic later on down the road. Then fast forward six years later in July of 2019, Gemspring a PE firm acquires TMP Worldwide. So since then they rebranded the Radancy. But again, we're starting to see agencies really understand what's happening here. Then Appcast, was obviously the predominant player in the space for agencies. Chris Foreman, incredibly smart go-to market. They created the infrastructure for agencies to be able to make money from programmatic and performance jobs. That worked so well, that obviously StepStone acquired Appcast on July 1st of 2019. Chad: Indeed not to be outdone acquires ClickIQ on July 15th and then Radancy not to be put in a corner like a baby July 16th that they're buying Perengo another Programmatic ad platform. Then two weeks later we've got four fucking acquisitions that are happening here. Recruitics has their Hold my Beer moment [laughter] as they acquire the very sexy KRT Marketing. So all was quiet on the Western front until July of 2021 when a brand new player Veritone acquires Programmatic player PandoLogic and then just recently bought a large portfolio of business from Apollo and CareerBuilder. They call that Broadbean. Now this. Historically we're seeing the convergence happening. Joel: Don't forget Recruitology and Jobcase as well. Chad: Oh yeah Jobcase. And Jobcase but then you've got all of that but you've got a 100 year name agency so do you think the day of mad men is pretty much gone as we move toward technology. Joel: Oh in our industry for sure. And you gave a eloquent great breakdown and all the kids should be listening to your historical breakdown. I'm gonna go even deeper with my historical breakdown... Chad: Just the tip. Joel: So 20th century 50 plus years agencies were a money printing machine. I mean they would do display ads. They would basically answer the phone and be like oh yeah can we place our New York Times ad again this week? Sure no problem. We'll change the dates. We'll do a little change in creative like oh do you wanna do colors? Chad: $60,000. Joel: Do you want to do coloured, maybe we do a full page instead of half page whatever, and just like printed money and their main role was the three martini lunches, the season tickets the dinners at Morton's that was the agency world and that was what existed. Chad: Mad man baby. Joel: And then the internet came along and cheap job ads. And for a while they did all right. They did the little bundle thing. They said let's put it in the paper let's put it on hot jobs. Let's throw it on Chromosaic and things were pretty good. And I remember the days of going to trade shows and agencies would have vinyl walls with literally newspaper ads stuck on Velcro on there. And they would just show people the ads that they've done. And then after job sites technology started happening. ATSs SEO led to mobile stuff. And agencies had this moment where they said well we can build this and get all the money or we can partner with these tech solutions and get part of it. And a lot of the agencies built their own shit and they ended up realizing that it's not as good as the shit that's actually being built by the entrepreneurs and the startups. So we're gonna transfer to being the consultant and knowing everything out there we're gonna plug you into what's best. And that worked really well. I didn't have to spend money on building stuff and maintaining it. I could just leverage the best solutions and plug people into that. And now we're into a phase of I have to now push Appcast which acquired an agency which I've always been a competitor to. Joel: So agencies that... The Shakers you mentioned most of them in there. Now it's a moment of do we build it now? Do we keep putting money in Bayard and Appcast pocket? Do we use a different solution until they're bought by someone that we're competing with? My guess is you're going to enter a time where these agencies are like who should we acquire? Who should we invest in to have a piece of it? So if they do buy we have a first right of refusal or we have an opportunity to get in bed with these companies. But I think it's a really interesting time because I can't imagine any of the agencies I know really loving the fact that now they're putting money in Bayard's pocket or a competitor's pocket. So there's gonna be a really interesting shakeout with what these companies do. Do they stop recommending Appcast? Can they stop recommending Appcast? Where are they gonna send people? And these solutions are being built all the time. AI is going to be a major fun time for us to talk about startups till these agencies that are still around start saying okay who do we place bets on? So we can be at the forefront or we can buy these companies. Joel: So to me that's historically the most interesting perspective is we've gone from the martini lunches to M&A who invest in but then it's conflict of interest because are we recommending only the companies that we're investing in? I think it's really gonna be a difficult time and they're gonna have to dance between the raindrops to keep everybody happy. I would not want to be an agency head right now trying to figure out all this stuff right now. Chad: Yeah. So when we're talking about the Shakers and the NASs and whatnot I really believe that not every agency is good for every company. There's obviously a need that fits and will they continue to use Clickcast and Appcast who knows? There are other Programmatic tools that are out there that they could prospectively just flip over to. It's not gonna be that easy but there's definitely things that they can do. I think what Joe has done and just personally... 'Cause we know Joe and we're definitely biased. There's no question. Now you can see us wearing the Shaker gear around all the time. I really believe that his idea of we don't wanna buy it because we're not a tech company. And we're not gonna try to fool people like Radancy did like TMP did into thinking that we're a tech company 'cause we're not a tech company. That's not who we are. And I appreciate that authenticity and I also appreciate that he can be more nimble and unbiased in being able to use other technologies that are out there and so on and so forth. I do believe there is always going to be a place for that. The thing that interests me the most and I'm gonna throw a curve ball at you. Joel: Yep. Chad: Is what this means to Indeed because Bayard had a large, large sum of cash that would actually go from their clients to Indeed. Now does Appcast outflank Indeed and start taking that cash maybe a little bit more of a margin on it and that money goes into Appcast instead of directly to Indeed. Are the Germans outflanking the Indeed Army? That's the question. Is Axel Springer coming out? Are they actually getting this right. And we have been giving Stepstone shit this entire time and they might be outflanking Indeed. What do you think about that? Joel: I think you pulled the rabbit out of the hat and it's interesting to me how little Stepstone is mentioned in any of the PR any of the interviews and they own Appcast. The press release could have just been Stepstone acquirers Bayard as well as it could have been Appcast acquiring Bayard. So Stepstone is allegedly preparing for an IPO this year. Okay? This is a good move if you're gonna IPO. I assume they're gonna IPO on the US markets. It's the biggest markets in the world by far. And I'm gonna throw out a prediction to you Chad. Stepstone acquires CareerBuilder. [laughter] Let me say it again. Stepstone acquires CareerBuilder. They wrap all that into the Programmatic solution the agency piece and they go public owning one of the best brands historically in the US market. That sounds like an IPO that will get the interest of a lot of investors. CareerBuilder gets acquired by Stepstone. That's my answer to your Indeed question. Chad: Wow. I think that would be a great move because there's no question CareerBuilder is on the market at fire sale prices right now. And if anybody could get them it would definitely be Stepstone. StepStone was looking at Broadbean at one time so maybe they were looking at trying to just outflank in a much different way and going toward the US market versus focusing on Europe as much. Because when you have the rails like Appcast does it's just smart. The other Programmatic players that are out there today though they've got to be excited though. They've got to be excited because a couple of things happens. This just invalidates the power of the platform and the rails. We saw Recruitics buy KRT now Appcast buys Bayard. This isn't the other way around. This isn't a TMP buying a little Perengo which was a little early stage startup compared to these other two. So I think this really flips the switch and starts to say okay look at the validation for all of these Programmatic players. Now valuation where does that go. And everybody's gonna be clamoring for them because they are unbiased. Joel: The acquisition of Appcast for the price tag that they got it is quickly looking like the steal of the last... Chad: So smart. Joel: Four or five years. Yeah it's starting to look really really smart. And I think we called it then but it's certainly playing out that way for sure. And if they can do a deal on CareerBuilder and wrap all that shit up and go IPO that'll be a lot of fun to watch. Chad: Last one kids prediction from Chad Indeed which we've been talking about for a while now. This actually kicks Indeed in the ass and says "Well you've been thinking about it now you must move to the agency model." Joel: We'll be right back. Chad are you on Threads? Chad: I am. Joel: I think we should talk about it in case you missed it everybody. [laughter] Threads. The Twitter rival launched by Meta reached a 100 million signups in just five days. Twitter has 240 million daily active users. So Threads has a little work ahead of it still but it's a good start. It's a pretty good start. Threads lack certain features like direct messaging hashtags and keyword search but it's a good bet those are coming soon. Currently Ad-free Threads will consider monetization after reaching one billion users. Pretty lofty goals early days Chad but what's your take on Threads? Chad: Well first and foremost I think it's amazing because Bluesky Jack Dorsey's new venture which is just a Twitter clone. It reached one million. It's been around for a minute. But it was one of those invite-only. Mastodon was an invite-only. I'm on Mastodon. Who the hell knows how many are on Mastodon today 'cause nobody cares. Joel: We know Truth Social is your favorite Chad [laughter] Chad: Post News is actually really cool from a monetization standpoint because of the micropayments. I think that wrapped in with some advertising could be incredibly helpful with all of the content. And then also feeding journalism. That's the big key is trying to feed that thing that we all need is journalism. We need them out there pressing for the truth. Anyway back to Threads. Yes. Threads was incredibly easy from a registration process standpoint. I went through Mastodon and they're asking me what server do I wanna fucking sign up for? Are you kidding me? I'm not a tech guy. I don't want to choose a server because of my social alignment. I just want to be on the fucking platform. It was easy. Threads just boom you're in. You did have to do a little profile which... That didn't take too long. So being able to get to a 100 million users in five days was amazing. Here's their big problem stickiness. Twitter is incredibly sticky because they do have the trending. They do have the notifications and these guys are still really new. Even though they do have a obviously great tech backbone with Meta and everything Meta does. They still are going to have to get at least some of the very basic features together that create more sticky, more of a sticky platform that I want to come back and then they actually have notifications that are meaningful to me. Chad: I think that that is something that will be incredibly helpful while Elon continues his stupid shit and puts limits on tweets and all these things and then he wants to charge for tweet deck and so on and so forth. And it's like okay you're just giving all these reasons all these toll roads for me to go somewhere else. And if Threads is that popular that fast and they can create the stickiness I think there's a chance. I'm saying there's a chance. Joel: You're saying stickiness is the key. SFX: What are you doing step bro? Joel: So sometimes this copycat approach works for Facebook. Sometimes it doesn't. I mean some of the things that weren't real successful they went after Foursquare with the check-ins. Check-ins is just a feature now. I miss being the mayor of my local Chipotle but that's a different story. [laughter] They launched Bulletin to arrive or have a new survey so they paid really high profile people to write content. Bulletin.com doesn't even work anymore. So they scrap that real quick. Chad: Jesus. Joel: Now sometimes it works really well. Reels has worked pretty well copycat. Marketplace copycat working pretty well. WhatsApp Instagram. So far Threads looks like it's working. Now you and I have seen things skyrocket and as quickly come down. I'll mention Clubhouse as one of those. We're not talking about them anymore. And traditionally something that rises really fast will fall really fast. So they've won the early innings but we'll see what happens long term. What really makes me wonder about this is if Zuck believes he has a recipe for kind of these copycat and I have three billion users and I can become a major player on overnight what would stop him from going after LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a twenty six billion dollar acquired company from a few years ago. It has no competitors really. What's to stop Zuck from creating a LinkedIn competitor. Plug in your Facebook stuff put in your current employer rights whatever. I don't know how they would do it but apparently this Threads thing was built with 20 developers as a almost side project. They could roll out a LinkedIn kind of thing. And everybody hates LinkedIn. Just like a lot of people hate Twitter and Elon Musk. There's a real incentive in my eyes that people would leave LinkedIn and maybe not old people like us who have tens of thousands of followers. Joel: Where I'm just too tired to build a whole new LinkedIn. But if I'm a kid Polly work looks like a pile of shit to me. Something that Facebook could build and plug me into maybe some employers that are in their marketplace or that used to post jobs. By the way that's another failed copycat is job postings around the Facebook. But I would love to see Facebook roll this recipe out and put out a LinkedIn competitor. I don't know how it would do but I think LinkedIn could use a little competition. We talk a lot about how shitty it is. If they had somebody at their heels nipping like a Facebook with that kind of budget I think it would be good for the marketplace and good for business. Chad: It'd definitely be good for the marketplace. We need something that's an alternative to LinkedIn just because it is, it's old, it's crappy. Just the tech itself I feel like I'm getting into a 1997 Jalopy for God's sakes. Yeah we need something newer. They are trying a lot of different things. And I think that's the biggest problem is they are throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall. To me okay let's go over to Facebook. Facebook tried the workplace side of the house. I think they could, could possibly get it right if they had people that were in there who actually knew how to build tech for this space. They're trying to build tech for what they're used to. This is an entirely different space and most companies don't get that. So yeah I don't know we'll watch threads I've been posting on threads. I do also like the idea of all of those individuals who are my friends that I'm linked to on the threads I can take to any social platform with me. I'd love to be able to take all of the people that follow me on Twitter and then all of my history of tweets and then port that over another social platform. To me that's not starting from ground zero anymore. That's freedom of choice. And Elon's always talking about freedom of this freedom of that. What about freedom of choice? Give me my shit [laughter] Joel: Yep. Yep. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. But we both agree that LinkedIn could use some competition and it could use some competition from somebody with deep pockets so I don't care if it's Google Facebook Twitter could launch something Amazon Salesforce somebody sack up and create a LinkedIn competitor. I think that would be good for everybody. Chad: Google needs to buy the CV wallet and then they can just build the profiles off of that thing. Joel: Look at you bringing Sir Richard into the podcast. That's... Chad: I'm just thinking of foundational rails to get something going. And... Joel: By the way how do we go to London and that bastard isn't at RecFest. Chad: Web thrust. Joel: Goddammit poor Richard. [laughter] Chad: Dude's working. Dude's working. Joel: I miss you man. I miss you man. Chad: Beverly is cracking the whip is what it is. Beverly's cracking the whip. Joel: And speaking of cracking the whip all right let's play a little buy or sell everybody. You know how the game works. Three startups that have recently got funding. I read a summary and Chad and I either buy or sell the company. Here we go with Little Buy or Sell. First up we have Zinc background check provider Zinc has secured around $6.5 million in a series A. The investment will support global expansion and product innovation. The company aims to tap into the growing global background check market and becomes a leader in regulated industries by leveraging a technology driven approach. Chad Zinc buy or sell? Chad: Well first and foremost Zinc Coffee from RecFest was awesome. So that's automatically that's a thumbs up here from Chad. Joel: Not their business unfortunately. Chad: Yeah. Not their business. Although every morning when I pull out the beans to grind the beans you know what's looking me in the face. Their brand. It was fucking brilliant. At the end of the day though background checks need a facelift. We've been talking about this week after week after week. Anything that helps me wake up in the morning and could prospectively take an antiquated segment like background checks and move it into 2023. I am a buy all day. [applause] Joel: Chad do you remember Virgin Cola back in the '90s? Do you remember? Chad: I do not. No. Joel: Sir Richard Branson since we're bringing up Sir Richard. Sir Richard Branson. Do you remember Virgin Cola? Chad: I don't. Joel: Yeah, mid-'90s. They had a cola. And mistakenly made it red, which is Coke's color. So that was a bad idea. By the way, Virgin Cola failed. No one's drinking it. Chad: Apparently. Yeah, apparently. Joel: The problem with background checks, it's an old industry, and we have our Coke and Pepsi. We have Sterling, we have HireRight. And now the tech option is Checkr. It's a business that has its big brands. Fanta would be Checkr, I guess in this analogy. By the way, Sterling Stock, which is a public company from a year ago, is about at half of what it was a year ago, which means it's kind of a shitty business. It's a disparate business. It's a hard business. Companies aren't super loyal. They kind of bounce back between the two big ones and maybe Checkr. So I hate the business. You have your Coke and Pepsi. I think this is a sad exercise in futility. And for that reason. Chad: We need a revolution, Joel. We need a revolution. Joel: It ain't in background checks. It ain't in background checks. [laughter] All right, let's go to RecruitBot. The San Francisco-based recruiting experience platform has raised an additional $8.2 million in seed funding, bringing its total to $11.2 million. The platform utilizes AI and ML, well, we haven't talked about ML in years, to match companies with suitable candidates from a database of over 600 million people and facilitates personalized automated email campaigns on behalf of hiring managers. Chad, RecruitBot, buy or sell? Chad: So they've been around since 2017, and I don't know that we've ever talked about them on the show. Have we? Joel: Possibly. A lot of bots and recruit in our content. Chad: Yeah. I don't remember them. Anyway, 8.2 in seed funding is a lot of cash. That's a lot of cash for seed funding. So there's a good amount of runway that's there. Matching recruitment automation and recruitment marketing automation light is pretty much what the platform does. 600 million candidate database. To me, whenever I hear something like that, it means it's garbage. It means they went and they bought candidates from somebody else. They bought it from a data warehouse. Automatically think garbage. There's no mention of generative AI, which I thought was odd, although cool at the same time, AI, ML. We have two really big brands in this space, SeekOut, hireEZ. We've got more than two. But we've got so many of these. They're a little bit late. They're underfunded compared to definitely SeekOut. I hope they kick ass tech names, but for me today, kids, gonna sell it. [applause] Joel: Another sell. Yeah, Chad, I got really excited about this company, and I remembered it was 2023 and not 2017. [laughter] Yeah. Look, if companies like SeekOut and hireEZ have really pivoted, kind of grown their business into different ways, oh, by the way, HiringSolved is closed for business, what reason do we have to think that this thing is gonna be successful? I'm pretty impressed they've raised as much as they have, especially when they've raised it. But I see no reason, this feels antiquated. Even their logo is like this fucking Windows 95 robot thingy. I mean, it's just, it's a disaster to me. Chad: Hating on the robot. Joel: I have nothing... Chad: Oh. Oh-oh. Joel: RecruitBot is... The name is horrible too. It's all bad. [laughter] It's a big sell for me. All right, let's go to our third and final startup. Dubai-based Alfii has raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round to expand its business. The near-term focus for Alfii will be building a suite of innovative payroll features. You don't hear innovative and payroll in the same sentence very often. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The startup aims to serve the Middle East and North Africa region, particularly startups and SMEs, and has already attracted over 250 businesses across countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Chad, buy or sell Alfii? Not to be confused with the '80s alien and popular sitcom ALF. Chad: Yeah, the alien who eats cats. Yeah, not that one. So this to me... This is FinTech. To me, we are starting to see a convergence of technology, and we're going to see more of that with generative AI. So all of these huge tech companies are going to start bleeding into HR and talent acquisition and payroll and so on and so forth. And there's so many great FinTech companies that are out there that I think will just automatically gobble up payroll and do it much easier, apps on the phone, all that other fun stuff, and just make it incredibly simple. It's gonna be crazy competitive market, which is one of the reasons why I just can't buy into Alfii. It's a sell. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Chad: Sorry, Alfii. Joel: Oh, that's a sell. All right, is this the first Dubai-based startup we've ever covered? I don't remember ever saying Dubai. Chad: I think possibly. Joel: Yeah, possibly. [laughter] So in case you missed it, the Middle East is spending money around the world. Like, they are drunken sailors. They're buying sports teams, they're buying entire leagues. They're trying to sports-wash the whole energy authoritarian government thing. And if that starts bleeding into our industry, Katy-bar the door. 'Cause there's a whole lot of money that they can start funding these employer-related startups. Not that Alfii is taking money from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Who knows? Actually, we do know 'cause it's in the press release. But anyway, I love the region. I love the money that they are spending, which has to come to startups at some point. They have to start getting into businesses and startups after they get done with sports and who knows what else they're spending money on. I love the growth opportunities in Africa. I love the growth opportunities in the Middle East. I think it's gonna start diversifying from energy-only to many other industries. And companies like this, to me, are on the forefront of that. So I just think it's hella interesting. And the money that's flowing around the Middle East right now makes this... SFX: All right. All right. All right. Joel: A buy for me. And if you're keeping score at home, well, that's a whole lot of sell ratings this week on buy or sell. Chad: It was. Joel: When we return, we'll talk about lazy girls. All right, Chad. Move over Boss Girl, Lazy Girl is here. The Lazy Girl trend, popularized by Gen Z on TikTok, is challenging the previous Girl Boss hustle culture. Young women are prioritizing work-life balance and opting for jobs that meets expectations without exceeding them. The trend has gained traction on TikTok with users sharing their experiences of Lazy Girl jobs that offer flexibility and minimal stress. Have a listen. [video playback] SFX: Most vital person to your career and livelihood is the person who they would fire. Lazy Girl: I could not agree more. And I've done this, and I'll talk about it. And I did the other way around. Okay, guys? I did... I talked about this in my podcast, like, I did the other way around where I sat there and I tried to be the best-performing person, and I worked extra nights and blah, blah, blah. And I didn't get any more of a raise than I did just doing the second worst, best effort. Giving your best effort and working the most overtime does not equal a pay raise. It's just my opinion. I worked in the tech industry. That's what I saw. The people who got a raise, they stayed top of mind by talking about the projects that they were doing all the time. And they weren't even that impactful of projects. They would just talk about what they were doing all the time. They would look like they were moving the needle all of the time, but not actually working. That's who gets a raise. It's not the person that's quietly grinding the whole time. So just be the second worst on your team and just go live your life. Joel: Just be the second worst. Chad, what's your take on the Lazy Girl trend? Chad: So I think it's bad marketing, first and foremost, to put lazy in any of that. I think she could have gotten to the source and found something a little bit more appetizing, [laughter] something that somebody would want to embrace. Nobody wants to be called lazy. But it is a game. And she very keenly, at a very young age, has pinpointed the truth. We've always heard the squeaky wheel gets the grease, gets the oil. On this case, it gets the greased palm. They get the leg up. So life over work, that's exactly what she talked about. I think that the marketing that we've heard since the '80s, work hard, rugged individualism, has finally started to decay and it's starting to fall down. And these Zs understand because either they're feeling it themselves or they're having Xers like us saying, "Yeah. Nah, it doesn't really work that way." [laughter] Joel: There is some evil genius sprouting out with this Gen Z crowd. And I'm here for it, my man. So the Lazy Girl hashtag on TikTok currently has 14 million views. Here's some quotes. Chad: Wow. Joel: Here's some quotes, "I don't have to talk to people. Only come to the office twice a week." "Me at my Lazy Girl job that lets me do whatever the heck I want, as long as I answer emails [laughter] and keep everything clean." Are these girls podcasters? Chad, I've been at the forefront of this trend for 18 years. [laughter] You have met Lazy Girl. And now I present to the Lazy Boy. Everyone bow down to Joel Cheeseman, AKA Lazy Boy. We out. Chad: Nappy Boy. We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two Chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Another top-notch interview from our time at iCIMS Inspire in the spring. This one features Vanessa Burnaby, VP of Global TA at Avalara, a cloud-based tax compliance solutions to handle every transaction in the world. Previously, Vanessa also served at Workday and SAP as a talent acquisition leader. She has been efficiently scaling and building strong teams, most recently, through recruitment automation, the ability to streamline processes and scale, primarily through focusing on strong analytics strategies. We don’t spend a lot of time interviewing TA pros with such a deep competency of the job and the industry, so this one is a must listen. TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. INTRO: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for The Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Joel: Oh... Chad: He's had a bourbon or two, Jesus Christ. Joel: Yeah. What's up, everybody? We're live from the iCIMS Inspire Conference in beautiful San Diego, California. Chad: I love it. Joel: I am your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is my co-pilot, and we are excited to welcome Vanessa Burnaby, VP of Global TA at Avalara. Vanessa, welcome to the podcast. What the hell is Avalara, first of all? Vanessa: We are a tax compliance software. So sexy. Yes. [laughter] Chad: So sexy? Vanessa: But... Chad: Not sexy, but necessary. Joel: But they need people to do this job. Vanessa: Two things guaranteed in life, right? Death and taxes. Joel: Death and taxes, I quote. Chad: I bet she never uses that. Vanessa: Never. [laughter] Joel: I quote Kelly Bundy, "Death in taxes... Chad: And taxes, yeah. Joel: "Are the only two things definite in life." So day one of the conference, what stood out to you? What blew your mind? What are the takeaways? Vanessa: Yeah, great first day. Some really good, inspiring speakers... Joel: The right answer is, I loved the Chad and Cheese segment. Vanessa: I mean, of course, you guys finished out the day. [laughter] Chad: She wasn't happy she didn't get a beer, but I'm sorry... Vanessa: I haven't had a beer yet. Joel: Nobody's happy about that. Chad: We'll do better next time. Vanessa: Thank you. I mean, a lot of the data that Rhea Moss went through was great just to see. And really comparing the beginning of COVID with where we are now and the fact that actually the data is the same, I think that is a great conversation with executives. Chad: Crazy, isn't it? Vanessa: Yeah. Chad: I mean we were in a pandemic, now we're not in a pandemic. To see that there's... Vanessa: It's still the same. Chad: Yes. So, talk about that. Vanessa: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think a lot of leaders have this expectation that especially with layoffs, it should be easier to hire, it should be faster to hire. We shouldn't have to pay them as much, right? That employers have the upper hand. Chad: Are they watching the headlines too much? Is that the problem? Vanessa: I think they're watching the headlines, I think they're also seeing economic trends. I think the PE firms and the VC firms all have opinions. Chad: But those economic trends, in many cases, feels like it's bullshit. Vanessa: Agree. Yes. Chad: Rhea said, like, were you watching the first of the week or the latter part of the week? Vanessa: Yes. Chad: It's two entirely different narratives. Vanessa: Well, and you see folks in the industry who are asking the questions of, okay, if they're laying off and not hiring, why are you still hiring? Different business, different market... Chad: Exactly. Vanessa: Why should we all be doing the same thing? Chad: Yeah. Everything's being lumped into one big ball. And that's not how the market works. It never has been. But yet, we're getting these point and click... I don't know if it's click bait or what it is, but it's driving me crazy. Joel: If it bleeds, it leads, Chad. Vanessa: Yeah. Chad: Yeah, there's a lot of bleeding going on. Vanessa: Yeah. But I think data right now is so critical for the business case and to help leaders understand what's really going on in the markets. You know, when I look at our data just from Q1, not much has changed. Our offer acceptance rates, pretty on par, pretty stable. We're still seeing offers declined. We're still seeing candidates with multiple offers. So I'm not seeing major changes in the market based on the talent that we're trying to hire. Joel: So, it's in our notes here that you chose iCIMS after being with another vendor that you had been with for eight years. Changing ATS is a major decision. A lot of listeners and companies out there are probably in the same shoes you were in changing vendors. What was the catalyst to go a different direction? What was it about iCIMS in this particular case that made you make the jump? Vanessa: Avalara was going through an immense amount of growth, and so we needed a system to really support that growth and help the company scale, help TA be more efficient and effective. And what we had previously wasn't keeping up with our demands. So we looked at lots of different vendors including my former employer. And iCIMS just proved to be the best option for what we needed. Joel: Do you wanna name your previous employer? Vanessa: People can find it. Chad: It's the internets. So your focus and really passion at this point is on talent networks, which I think is interesting because back in the, I don't know, late odds, for goodness sakes, we really started to talk about Avature was a platform that was literally... The premise of the whole thing was talent networks. Vanessa: Right. Chad: Are we just finally catching onto this or is it just like, TA just didn't get it right in the first place? Vanessa: I think many teams have aspirations for this. Joel: What are the aspirations? That's the question. I mean, where are they going? Vanessa: Okay. Well, I know what my aspirations are, which is, let's work smarter. Let's take advantage of all the candidates that we already know, who we know are interested in us, who have the right skills, whether that's the silver medalist candidate that we just didn't have a second job for, great candidates we've met at events, boomerangs, which we know are increasing, and really nurturing and building those relationships. We know that matters immensely with diverse communities, especially in tech where there's a lot of mistrust around the culture and environment that will support their careers. And so if you can really build those one-on-one relationships with them, invest in that relationship, it will matter when you have the right job at the right time for them, you end up with the right candidate. Chad: So, focusing on the biggest asset you have, which is the candidate database, because you spent more money on driving candidates, I'm just gonna say in general, most companies do. You spent more money on creating a candidate database than you did on tech. Vanessa: Right. Chad: Right? And for the most part, most companies, they create this lead database with great leads that are silver medalists, bronze medalists, qualified individuals, it doesn't matter. And then they totally abandon it, and they just continue to spend money, spend money, spend money. Vanessa: Yes. Yeah. Chad: So, you guys, what I'm hearing, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're looking more to internalize and look at that asset... Vanessa: Correct. Chad: And start to keep them warm, engage them, and they might already be in a job. Next six months might not be a good option, but in 18 months, might be a hit. Vanessa: Yeah. Chad: Right? Vanessa: Absolutely. Chad: So, talk about that. Is that one of the reasons why you chose the tech that you went with, number one, and number two, how are you starting to build that? Vanessa: Yeah, so it is definitely partially why I built the tech, having a fully-integrated platform like iCIMS where you've got CRM in addition to the ATS. And now with their upcoming... Chad: Matching and... Vanessa: Yeah, the matching, engagement scoring, candidate experience management and all the automated marketing, that's phenomenal. And there aren't a lot of other systems that are fully integrated. And so when you think about adoption for your talent acquisition team, I think it matters, because I've done it elsewhere where you bolt on a system, adoption is super low, 'cause recruiters are like, "I have another system I have to go in." Chad: It surfaces candidates, and then they're automatically invited to apply for the job. Vanessa: Right. Chad: So at this point, why are we trying to use recruiters to get them to adopt a new process? I don't understand it in the first place. Vanessa: Yeah. Well, I think you have to set up as much automation as possible, but I do believe there still has to be a human on the backend. Chad: Where in the process? Vanessa: I think it depends on the company. I would say for Avalara, at the beginning. Because again, nobody knows who we are, and so our employer brand isn't on par with any of the big FAANG companies or whatever. And so, but we know we have great opportunities and a great environment for people to work in. So the moment we can get somebody on the phone, we can get them excited about the opportunity and get them engaged. So I think kind of back to talent networks, I don't think it's about quantity of candidates. I think it is about quality. And so I'm not asking my team to go build a database of thousands and thousands of candidates, I'm asking them to focus on quality around critical talent areas, niche skill sets where we know it takes a long time to hire, it's hard to find the talent, so that we can improve cost, quality, speed in those areas. Joel: You mentioned boomerangs, which I don't think was even discussed today during the conference. Chad: Big. Joel: Was that an accident, or I guess, a happy accident? Was it something that was part of your strategy, part of your automation stack? Talk about the boomerangs, 'cause I think that's an interesting topic. Vanessa: Yeah. I think it was mentioned once today. I can't remember who put a stat up there. But we are absolutely seeing it in the last 12 months. But even prior to the change in the markets, going after alumni has always been part of my strategy. Because even at a minimum, if they choose not to come back, we want them to feel great about where they've worked, we want them to speak highly of us, refer. And so, if we continue to stay engaged with the alumni of the company... Joel: Yeah. So let's dig into that for a second. When you say, part of our strategy when we communicate, let's get tactical on this. Are we talking monthly emails? Are we talking like alumni events? Talk about that. Vanessa: All of the above. Joel: All of it. Chad: What are you doing events-wise? I want to hear the events piece, because... Joel: And is booze involved? [laughter] Vanessa: Yeah. So we haven't started back to in-person events just yet. We've done a couple in our Brighton, UK office, smaller events. Joel: Well, UK, you know booze is definitely involved. Vanessa: Definitely involved. Always. Joel: And football. Vanessa: Yes. Pre-COVID, we did a lot of events and we really just tried to focus on events that wasn't pitching a job, that was like a value add. And so for alumni, it's, come meet the people you used to work with, come meet teammates you used to work with. Joel: Wow. Vanessa: Come have some drinks and some food. Chad: It's like a family reunion. Vanessa: A little bit, right? People enjoy that. Chad: Bring some baked beans and... Vanessa: You know, and if they're willing to join your alumni network, you know they still feel pretty positive about their experience working there. Joel: Do you have any numbers around what percentage of former employees come back? Vanessa: I don't. Joel: I mean, are we talking 10, 15? Are we talking 40, 50? What are we talking? Vanessa: I don't think it's... Chad: How big is the alumni network? That's... Vanessa: 50%... Well, I think it depends on the size of your company. Joel: What's yours? Vanessa: For ours, less than 500 at this point, but it's been interesting. Joel: That's still great. If you can pull 10% of that, that's huge. Vanessa: But it's been really interesting in the last 12 months, the number of employees who've called us and are like, "I would really like to come back, actually." Chad: How long are they usually away? So, six months, a year? Vanessa: It's like three to nine months. Chad: Okay, okay. Joel: Wow. Chad: Well, so you know it's not like a retraining that really needs to happen. You can just go ahead and plug them in pretty quick. Joel: Yeah. Vanessa: Right. And for the most part, we've been able to find opportunities for them, because these have been high-performing employees that we're happy to have come back. Joel: Yeah. I feel like this is a quiet success. I feel more companies should be doing stuff like this. We're not talking enough about alumni networks and how companies are getting people to come back. It's a topic that deserves more attention. Vanessa: The one company that I know of that I think has been doing this for a while and doing it well is Deloitte. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Deloitte's done just about everything forever. Joel: That is millions. Chad: Yeah. Everything forever, and not... I mean, they've spent a lot of money on a lot of different things. Yeah. So it's... Vanessa: Right. Yep. Joel: Talk about upskilling. I assume there are a lot of employees you get that are sort of newly outta school or not super veteran, but that seems like an opportunity to train these folks to take those positions that are upper level. Vanessa: Yeah, so that's a great question. For Avalara, we're actually just starting our journey around that. We were in a place of like, grow at all costs, for many, many years. And we tend to hire very senior levels. And we're now at a place... Chad: Really? Vanessa: Yeah. Chad: Okay. Vanessa: We're now at a place where we're really focused on our entry level talent. Chad: Well, that's not easy to grow at all costs. And then, just senior level, that's rough. Vanessa: Yes. Yes. And it has put us in a position where we're really having to step back and re-evaluate our workforce and our teams and how we're structured and org design, and as well as making sure that we're gonna have the long-term career opportunities to retain these employees. Chad: Well, just the long-term... Again, the long-term base of employees that you can bring up through the ranks, it's almost like a grassroots type of scenario. So yeah, it's gotta be easier going after the entry level, but again... So, what was the conversation, the discussion around that? Why was the company looking at senior, mid-level versus trying to build your own? Was it necessary because there was a huge gap there within the ranks? Vanessa: I don't know that there was a gap. I think there was a mindset that the best, the most experienced, because they'll help us get the most done. And we have big aspirations and a lot that we are trying to build and put into the market. Chad: So, how did that affect your diversity goals? Vanessa: We haven't really gone after specific diversity goals until just recently. Chad: Okay. Vanessa: And so, that is a newer focus for us. And now, we're focused on more of this entry level talent. New out of school, and/or people potentially changing careers. And so, ages are relevant in all of this. Chad: Yeah. Vanessa: How do we build really solid onboarding programs and boot camps? How do we improve our hiring process? We just implemented assessments that assesses potential in candidates, and so we've got this good objective input to say, "Okay, yes. They meet this bar." We get them through our interview process faster and then we make sure we've got really solid onboarding and kind of checkpoints through onboarding to say, "Okay, they're meeting the bar here, they're gonna keep going." And since we're early in our career or in our journey, we don't necessarily have the data yet to see the success around this. But there's a lot of excitement in the business, and leaders are really embracing the model. Chad: So, assessments. Who do you use for assessments? Vanessa: Criteria Core. Chad: Okay, yeah. Vanessa: Yep. Chad: Yep. So that's helped actually quicken the pace? Vanessa: It has. And for our entry level, especially, we've seen good improvement in time to hire. The hiring manager sentiment is very strong on it. They're feeling like... 'cause they're only seeing candidates that meet that bar, and they feel like the caliber of candidates that they interview has increased. Chad: Gotcha. Joel: "Grow at all costs," something my waistband says every time [laughter] I go to Chipotle. That is Vanessa Burnaby, everybody. VP of Global TA at Avalara. Vanessa, for those that wanna connect with you, where would you send them? Vanessa: Go to LinkedIn, please. Yeah. Joel: Chad, another one is in the can. It must be dinner time, because I'm bringing up Chipotle. We out. Chad: We out. Joel: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or, maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Probably one of the most enjoyable podcasts you've listened to this year or ever. Yea, it's that fun and good! They say never meet your idols. They also say don’t fall in love with new tech. OK, the latter saying is less popular, but Andreea Wade, VP of product strategy, says it, and that’s why we wanted to chat with her, live at iCIMS Inspire in San Diego. Andreea’s also a winner of Chad & Cheese’s Death Match competition - and we love her - so there was plenty of reason to hangout. Andreea is kind of a big deal when it comes to AI, has strong opinions about ChatGPT and enjoys a good convo about bias. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: All right, we are live from iCIMS Inspire overlooking beautiful, gorgeous... Chad: It is fucking gorgeous. That's just Andreea. [laughter] Chad: Oh no. Oh, there it is. A little less gorgeous, we've got... Joel: The whales you know what staring right back at us from where we are recording our podcast today. [laughter] Chad: San Diego. Joel: Yes. Yes. Yeah. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the Ron Burgundy to my... Chad: Champ. Joel: Champ. Yes, that's good. [laughter] Chad Sowash. Today we are excited to welcome Andreea Wade, VP of Product Strategy at iCIMS. And more importantly... Chad: Yes. Joel: Former Death Match winner... Chad: Death Match winner. Joel: Of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Andreea, welcome. Chad: In Lisbon. Andreea: Yes. Chad: Lisbon Death Match winner. Andreea: I know. Chad: That was the start of the journey. Andreea: Yeah. Joel: Think about who she beat. Chad: Yeah. Joel: She beat Candidate ID. Hello, Adam. Chad: Yeah, Adam Gordon. [laughter] Joel: She beat the recruiting robot. Hello Tengai and Elin. Chad: And Eric from Maya. Joel: Yes. Chad: Yes, Eric from Maya. Joel: We hardly knew you. Chad: We hardly knew you and Maya was sold at a fire sale, but that's okay. It was a good time. You came out on top. Andreea: I did. Chad: And you got the Chad and Cheese Death Match medal... Joel: She brought Connemara by the way. I'm not saying that that was a decision making bottle of whiskey that you brought, but it may have been. Andreea: I did. [chuckle] But Adam brought something too. Chad: Just so you know, I didn't get any of that. Joel: He brought kilts. Chad: Yeah, I didn't get any of that. So where are you housing the Chad and Cheese medal that you won? Joel: Oh, this is good. Andreea: It's in the office. Joel: Yes. Chad: It's in the office? Andreea: And the office is all glass. Joel: Yes. Andreea: So everyone can see it. [laughter] Andreea: It's visible to everyone. And every time a new team member joins, I take it off the window ledge where it sits, and I go, "Hold this. It's heavy, isn't it? I won this." And then I go into a little tank and then like... Joel: Do you ever wear it interviewing people and just see what their reaction is? [laughter] Chad: Okay, so listener, listener, you gotta understand, this is a rope gold chain with a big old medallion with our dumb cartoon heads on it that says Death Match Winner. It's big. Andreea: It's big. Joel: Like three inch circumference gold chain. Chad: Andreea's about 4'5. [laughter] Andreea: Yeah. Chad: So her wearing this, it makes it look even more immense than what it is. Joel: Yeah, it is awesome. Andreea: Yeah. Do you know that like I didn't get that in Portugal 'cause you guys didn't have it. So you gave it to me in Austin and I was traveling to Vegas, and I only had a hand luggage. So I had to go through security with this thing. Joel: Did they take it out of your luggage? Andreea: Yeah. Joel: Awesome. [laughter] Andreea: And everyone saw it and he was like, "What is this?" [laughter] I'm like, "I'm a world champion." [laughter] Andreea: Yeah, it was hilarious. Chad: That is the best. Joel: That is great. Chad: That was in Austin? Andreea: Yeah. Joel: In Austin, so they took it out and they like held it up. Andreea: Yeah. Chad: It's kinda like Lion King. [laughter] Joel: The thing is that's on security cameras, that's archived somewhere. Yeah. [laughter] Andreea: Yeah. Joel: That is fantastic. Andreea: Yeah, I was like, "Long story. Yeah, I won it." Chad: Yeah. Joel: And I won. [laughter] Joel: And we chose wisely because not shortly thereafter, you were acquired by iCIMS. Talk about the acquisition and how that went down and what your new role is at iCIMS. Andreea: So acquisition 2020, my current boss, Al and Mike Will Chuck was the Chief Strategy Officer and someone who worked with Mike, Chris, they come over to Dublin in January, 2020. And then we all know what happens in March, 2020. Long story short, we went through an acquisition during the pandemic where I also got COVID. And I was coughing on all the due diligence calls. Chad: How bad was it? Andreea: Very bad. Joel: I didn't know that. Chad: Was it really bad? Andreea: Yeah, yeah. Chad: Did you have to go in a hospital? Andreea: No, but I had like lung pain for three months, I couldn't sit back. It was... Chad: Like brain fog and stuff? Andreea: Yeah, yeah. All of that. Joel: Did you say three months? Andreea: Yeah. Joel: Yikes. Andreea: Yeah. And we had neighbours signing witnessing acquisition papers because it was a lockdown and nobody else could. So I would go, "Hello neighbour, can you sign this thing?" And over the fence as well because we couldn't see each other. So it was sort of fun. Not really. But it was great at home. Joel: It's a good thing she's so healthy like me. That's how I would've handled COVID. [laughter] So you get acquired and then how's the onboarding go? How does working with Algo, integration? Andreea: I was just saying it to Julie there, your lovely wife Chad, that I didn't have many bosses, but Al is definitely the best boss I've ever had. Joel: Awww. Andreea: Yeah, I totally love Al. So yeah, onboarding was great. I have to say the experience of being acquired for us by iCIMS was great. The first nine to 12 months were on, fully on. I would have like 12 meetings a day and I would not know what my name is at the end of the thing. So it was intense. But we achieved the plan earlier than projected. Everything went fine. Chad: Let's talk about your tech currently in the platform 'cause a lot of times what we see is we see the tech absorbed into like a bigger platform, and literally like only a fraction of a percentage of what could be used for it, it's used. Like we saw that with HireVue and with AllyO. They're like using it for like... Joel: Well, you're looking at me while Al is demoing some of the new stuff and you're like, "Europe." Because most of the stuff has been Europe acquisitions. Chad: Yes. Andreea: Oh yeah. Chad: It was Candidate ID and it was opening.io. Right? So talk about how much of the technology, just the scale of the technology that they acquired and then you've actually now like grown since then. Andreea: A lot of it. Most of it, to be honest. So when we got acquired... Chad: Are you happy with it being a founder? Because most founders leave like within six to 12 months because they're like, "Fuck this, they're shit-canning my stuff." But you've been around for a while now. Andreea: Oh yeah. I mean, I did take some of the months off last year. Chad: Yeah. Well, you should after, I mean, a little sabbatical. Yeah. Andreea: But most of the tech that we built is there. It's throughout the platform. It's in the ATS, it's in the CRM. It was in the CRM already because Jibe was our customer. So when iCIMS acquired Jibe and when iCIMS integrated Jibe into the platform, our tech was already in there so the acquisition also kind of happened that way. Chad: Oh, yeah. Did you hear that kids? That's the recipe. Deep integrations. Andreea: Yes. Chad: Yes. Andreea: Deep... I mean, 100 billion percent. Joel: Not just the tip, Chad. You gotta go deep. [laughter] Chad: I know, yes. Yes. [laughter] It's always the reaction you want to get out of Andreea. Joel: Yeah, and you never get that when you're on a recording. Chad: Just the long laugh. Joel: Only live. Only live. Chad: Yes. Joel: So, you talked a lot about the risks of AI. You talked about hallucinations. You talked about garbage in, garbage out. For those who aren't here at the conference, talk about the risks of ChatGPT and other AI solutions. Andreea: I mean, look, there are many. ChatGPT has been racist, has been making up stuff, has been inaccurate. And not just ChatGPT, right? Now, the vendors, I was on a call the other day with Amazon, they have their own version of generative AI. It's everywhere. There's a lot of open source stuff. But really, I mean, accuracy is key. So whatever you unleash it, if you unleash it as a chatbot that will tell you I don't know what, even if it makes up that the salary is not 70 grand, it's 94 grand or whatever, right? Chad: Yeah. Andreea: So you do need to watch out for accuracy, obviously fairness, building responsibly, ethics, all of that kind of stuff. And then there's other security, privacy and whatever concerns, who owns the data? Chad: It has brought fanfare, right? Andreea: Yeah. Chad: And it's made AI, everybody's been talking about AI for years, and we've really not seen anything out of it because it's been behind the scenes. Andreea: Yeah. Chad: Now it's not behind the scenes anymore so everybody wants them some AI. Is that not a good thing for the industry? Andreea: Is it a good thing? It will be eventually. Joel: Not today. Chad: It was like the original car. Was the car a good thing? Probably it wasn't great. No, it broke down all the goddamn time, it sucked. It was horrible. Joel: Eventually, it'll be amazing. Chad: But yes, it's our primary mode of transportation. Andreea: Look, it's accessible right now, right? So everyone can play with it. I mean, I have a friend who's in the hospital right now, she's having brain surgery on Friday. So I asked ChatGPT to write a poem for her. And I was like, "My friend likes alpacas and she likes Greece and she likes... " I fed it all... Joel: Your friend likes alpacas. [laughter] Andreea: I don't know. I just... Joel: Was she raised... Oh, you're making it up. Okay. I thought it was a real life example. Andreea: No, no, no. It is. It is a real life example. Joel: Okay. Does she breed alpacas? Andreea: No, she just likes the way they look, I don't know. Joel: She just likes them, okay. Andreea: So anyway, I fed this to ChatGPT. ChatGPT wrote the most beautiful poem, which I sent to her. And what a cool thing to do, right? Or you have DALL·E or you have all these things. It's accessible. You don't have to be a data scientist to play with it, to go, "Oh, my God, what this thing could do." But it's accessible by the masses, not necessarily for a task A or B, it's to play with. But when you're asking it something and you want for sure to tell you 100% the most accurate, the most whatever story, that's when things change. Joel: Got it. Andreea: 'Cause it's not. Joel: Tell us about iCIMS Talent Logic. Andreea: Yes. Well, it's not called that anymore. [chuckle] Joel: Well, tell us about whatever Talent Logic used to be called, 'cause according to my notes, it's currently called that. So wherever I got it, LinkedIn, it's changed. Andreea: It's changed. Chad: Okay, so Andreea doesn't spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. Andreea: Oh, did you get it from my profile? I must update it. Chad: Probably. Andreea: Yeah. So it's called Talent Cloud AI now. TCAI. Joel: Oh, Cloud AI. Andreea: Yeah, yeah. Talent Cloud AI. Joel: So tell us what that is. Andreea: That is the multitude of all AI that exists in all the iCIMS platform. So it's Talent Discovery, it's CV to CV match, it's career pathing that we're launching right now. All of that is TCAI. And you can buy it or not. You can... Chad: If you're dumb, you don't have to buy it, but you can. Andreea: You can turn it on in the system or not. But yeah, it's the AI across CRM, career side, ideas and so on. Chad: My favorite AI, which I feel you guys are really leaning into and tell me if I'm wrong, is companies have not leveraged the biggest asset that they've spent money on over the years, and that is their candidate database. Andreea: Yeah. Chad: They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. That database is there, it's atrophying. They've got a bunch of silver medalists, bronze medalists who didn't get the job but they would be perfect for that next job maybe a week later, a month later. You guys, I want a little bit more in depth from you. You guys are actually matching against that first to surface those candidates so that companies don't have to spend that dollar again. Andreea: Again, yeah. Chad: Talk about that. Andreea: That's exactly why opening.io was founded when it was. So I never worked in TA, I never worked in HR. I had no idea of any of this. Opening was built by candidates, right? Me and my co-founder, we were not really understanding why when I send my CV and I know that I am somewhat a good fit for the thing, I just disappear in this black hole and I'm gone. So from a candidate perspective, which again was the world that I knew, we built this tech to find relevance if relevance is there. And that's exactly what we did. So we built these deep learning models that go in there, mine the data that you have and surface that relevance. So that is talent discovery now and you have it in the CRM, in the ATS and so on. And that was the very first API, if you wish, that we built and the quintessential reason for even that company existing. Chad: We usually don't see founders from outside the industry come into the industry. And it took how long for you to get acquired? Andreea: Five years. Chad: Did you get... Five years? Joel: She's a snowflake. Chad: Yeah. Joel: She's a snowflake. Chad: Totally. I mean, that to me is amazing because you did understand the problem. Andreea: Yeah. Chad: And usually you can understand the problem, but you don't know how to sell it into because HR is very hard. Andreea: Oh, we had no idea. Chad: Yeah. Adoption-wise, all those things. Andreea: No. Chad: What do you think the key thing was for you as a founder to make that connection to maybe a system or a client, what do you think that was? Because you're, again, you are more like, I mean, literally like a unicorn/snowflake. Joel: She's a Yeti surfing across the San Diego waterfront. [laughter] [vocalization] Andreea: Whatever a Yeti does. Chad: I don't know what that was. [laughter] Joel: Whatever a Yeti is. Chad: I don't know. Joel: You're a leprechaun. Chad: I don't think... Joel: You're a Leprechaun surfing. Chad: I do not think a Yeti makes that noise. But okay, we'll go with that. [laughter] Joel: Surfing the California seas. [laughter] Andreea: Okay. That image is disturbing. Look, there was a lot of trial and error, we had... We did understand the problem, but we had no idea. We knew nothing of the industry. First we were like, "Oh, we're just gonna sell this to employers," but we don't have a product. We have APIs. How are they gonna buy the API and what? Chad: Yeah, I get you, yes. Andreea: And then the second thing was we kept getting approached by agencies and we're like, "Oh, agencies. Oh, but we do have to, they don't really have tech people and we have to connect into their systems and we are not Accenture or something." Chad: So you needed some type of a middleman is what I'm hearing, right? Joel: A translator. Andreea: We ended up in the end realizing that where our market is is vendors, other HR Tech, TA Tech companies. But it took us a minute. Chad: That's a episode that we just had with Chris Conrad, build... Joel: Buy or partner. Chad: Buy or partner. Andreea: Yeah. Chad: And you guys went straight into that. And I think that there are so many vendors today who feel they can go direct to market. Well, you originally thought you could do. Andreea: Yeah. Chad: And then you're like, "No, this can't be done. It's too complex. There's no way they'll be able to adopt it, use it, integrate it. We're gonna have to do it through a partner." Andreea: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And again, it took us a minute to figure that out, but when we had the right people in the room, we knew when we had product people in the room and they had a business case because we were a deep integration, it wasn't just a thing that you would, I don't know, buy separately. So you had to have a business case of why would you use this third party thing and plug it into your engine and so it was definitely a learning curve because we, again, did not know the industry. Chad: How about your partnership with Microsoft, how did that help? Did it help? Was it more a fanfare and PR or did it really help you and the team? Andreea: It was PR to some extent. But we did get great exposure, great intros. The team in Dublin was super, super helpful to us. So they were willing to do anything and everything. They were like, "Okay, well, we can go to Europe and we'll get a bunch of HR professionals or TA professionals together and we can do these round tables and you can, I don't know, we can take you into Brussels and we can sell to government," and whatever. Everything was a lot bigger that we could... Joel: Ooh, Brussels. Andreea: I mean, you're open site, so these are the things that you could do. Joel: So you were a newbie to the industry, now you're a veteran. Andreea: Oh God. Joel: What does recruiting look like in five years? And do we need recruiters in five years? Andreea: Hi, we repeat it, come on. [laughter] Andreea: You're not replaced. It's like every year something is replacing, or every minute. Chad: That is the answer I love to hear. "Oh, come on." [laughter] Andreea: Yeah, we're not replacing people and jobs. Joel: "Come on you fucker, what are you talking about. What's wrong with you." [laughter] Chad: "Give me my lucky charms." Joel: "Fucker." [laughter] Andreea: Fuck off. [laughter] Joel: I got nothing. Chad: Oh yeah. I think we can wrap. Joel: Yeah. I think you... Unless you wanna answer that question. Andreea: Look, it'll be more of the same but more automated. Maybe some a bit more intelligence in parts and maybe equally dumb in others. Joel: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Andreea: Oh yeah. Joel: Andreea Wade, everybody. Chad: Yes. Death Match winner. Joel: She is the VP of Product Strategy, but more importantly, a former Chad and Cheese Death Match winner. Andreea, if our listeners wanna connect with you, where would you send them? Andreea: Probably LinkedIn, Twitter as well. But I'm different on Twitter. Joel: She's very active on Twitter. Chad: Yes. Joel: If you so choose. Chad: You gotta get on Twitter and then follow JustforZiggy. Andreea: Yeah. [laughter] Chad: JustforZiggy. Joel: That's right. Always a pleasure to talk to Andreea. And with that, Chad, another one is in the can. Chad: We out. Joel: There goes that surfing leprechaun. We out. [laughter] Outro: Wow, look at you, you made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead, now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Live from UNLEASH America in the Workhuman booth, Sean Christian, senior employer brand & recruitment strategist at Discount Tire, and former Air Force recruiter, joins Chad & Cheese for a lively discussion … like, two military dudes talkin' sh!t kinda lively. Aside from the Air Force vs. Army talk, Sean drops knowledge bombs around quality vs. quantity with job boards, how metrics are the only thing that matter and how to earn a seat at the table. 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: Live from the Workhuman booth at Unleash America in Vegas this year, Joel and I were able to sit down with some great practitioners and industry voices. Sit back and enjoy this exclusive episode, powered by our friends over at Workhuman. Answer the human need to be recognized, developed and celebrated at workhuman.com. 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: We're back everybody live from the Unleash America Conference. Chad: Workhuman. Joel: From the Workhuman booth. And... Chad: Damn. Joel: We welcome Sean Christian, senior employer brand and recruitment strategist, at Discount Tire. Also a Texan. Sean, welcome to the podcast. Sean Christian: Thank you. A longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm excited to be here. Joel: He loves the Christopher Walken... Sean Christian: I do. Joel: Ending. [laughter] Sean Christian: My wife and I were headed to the beach and, it got to the end. Normally after the show, I'm like I go on to the next one, but I just let it run, I was going through some rain, and then Mr. Walker. And I died laughing. [laughter] I go, that's got to be AI. It was super cool. Joel: Yeah. Chad: You gotta hear the newest one. It's Morgan Freeman. Sean Christian: I... Chad: Oh, yeah. Sean Christian: I've heard Morgan. Chad: Okay, good. Okay. [laughter] Sean Christian: And honestly, I went back to the second show because of the ending. But I got more great content and great ideas. Chad: Nice. Sean Christian: So, it brought me back. But then I got more for what it's worth. Joel: We appreciate that. [laughter] Joel: So, aside from having really good taste in podcasts... Sean Christian: Yeah. Chad: Of course. Joel: What should listeners know about you? Give us a high-level view. Sean Christian: I'm a patriot. I'm a veteran. I love our country. A 21-year Air Force Vet. Last 11 years in my Air Force career, I was in recruiting, ended my career at Air Force Headquarters Marketing and Advertising. I had the best job in the Air Force. Chad: Holy shit. Marketing and Advertising? Now the Army has the grandest budget when it comes to marketing right. Air Force can't be that far... Well maybe that far behind but still, it's a big budget. So you guys, there must have been a lot of playing around. Sean Christian: Yeah. The good thing is I had, and I can't speak for everybody, I had phenomenal leadership. Chad: Okay. Sean Christian: And I think without proper leadership, you're doomed to fail. Leadership is key to any type of industry that you're in. And my leadership saw that I was intrinsically passionate about being a recruiter, and not just being a recruiter, but supporting recruiters... Chad: Yes. Sean Christian: And supporting what the Air Force provided me and my family. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: I'd be face down in a pool somewhere, hanging out with my buddies from high school if I didn't join the military. Chad: Same here. Sean Christian: True story. 6 weeks before I left, my dad was on his deathbed with leukemia. Who's still alive by the way. I got popped for drug paraphernalia. It was a going away party for me. And I went to jail, and it could have gotten a lot worse. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: And the fact that my dad was literally dying. And my dad said, "Son join the military 'cause I'm gonna be dead in six weeks." And then I had a judge who was partial to my situation. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: Dropped all the charges. I didn't lose my job. Today's climate your job is gone. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: You're out. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: But by the grace of God they let me ship, and I'm still good friends with my recruiter. And I valued the relationship that I had with my recruiter. And this was 21 years ago. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: I was 18 years old and I remembered that. Chad: So to throw a quick curve ball. Let's talk about leadership real quick because the military, when you get promoted, you are forced to go to leadership school or you get demoted right. I've had to go through the ranks. I've been through several leadership schools. On the corporate side that doesn't happen. So we don't really have seasoned leaders. We have all of these really good doers who now are slammed into a management position told to lead, and they have no clue how to lead. Sean Christian: Right. Chad: How do we change that kind of culture on the corporate side? And it might be a hard question because you're just coming out of the military. Sean Christian: It's easy, ownership. Start with ownership. If you can't own the problem, it doesn't matter if it's your problem or not. Chad: Right. Sean Christian: If y'all work for me and there's a mistake, who owns the problem? Me. Joel: Yeah. Sean Christian: I own the problem. Chad: Right. Yes. Sean Christian: So it starts with ownership. The Chief Wright was the chief Master in the Air Force. I'm not gonna quote the years, but he would always say, fail forward. There's a lot of things he said that I didn't like. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: But I resonated with that. We have got to, create a culture of... There's a probably a better way to say this. Create a culture of failure. Meaning it's okay to fail. Chad: Well understanding... Sean Christian: Right. Chad: Failure is a path to success. Joel: Yeah. Sean Christian: Absolutely. Chad: That's what... I think we've lost that if we've ever had it at all. Sean Christian: And we have to learn to trust. We have to learn to be okay with things not... It's not always gonna be perfect. Chad: Nope. Sean Christian: Because we're human. Joel: Yeah. Sean Christian: We just we... I think we said there's nothing wrong with high expectations, but what's wrong is when we, I don't know, put our teammates down and we point fingers. Chad: There's a big difference between military where we are all focused to be a team. Because if we don't lean on each other... Joel: People die. Chad: In corporate America, it is all rugged individualism. You're all for yourself. So when we talk about team, when we talk about family, that's really it feels like bullshit, like bullshit narrative. And I only know that and feel that because I have 20 plus years of military experience too, right. I get where you're coming from. The problem is this seems like a huge problem across all industries, big companies, small companies. It's easy to say, take ownership, but how do we systemically change something like that? Sean Christian: Yeah. That's the question, right? And I don't know if there is an answer. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: I think it starts individually with ourselves. And, no one is dying today. Look where we are. We're in Las Vegas. Chad: Yeah. Depends on how much weed Joel smokes later. But yeah. [laughter] Joel: Can that kill you? Chad: I don't think it can. Joel: I'm scared now. Sean Christian: I don't think it can. Chad: I don't think it can. Joel: I'm a little scared now. Chad: I don't think it can. Sean Christian: But everyone just needs to calm down. Right. Just chill out. If you're listening, calm down. Joel: Speaking of pot, everybody just chill the hell out. Sean Christian: Yeah. Chill out. Chad: Yeah. That's like one of my favorite statements to anybody that I'm talking to that is freaking out. Or questions. Did anybody die to put things just in perspective. Did you fuck up? Yeah. Are you gonna learn from it? Let's hope so. Okay. Sean Christian: But in the moment it's hard. I still get worked up. Chad: Oh, yeah. Sean Christian: I'm a driven, fiery guy. And if things don't go the way I want them to because I have such high standards. My wife is like, "Dude, calm down man." Chad: Well, you also have expectations too. And that's one of the things that we do is we tune ourselves with our own expectations and then it doesn't work out that way. It might still be a good outcome, but it didn't happen the way that we wanted it to happen. Sean Christian: Yeah. And that's healthy, I think. But it's how we react to that. Is when you're stressed... Chad: Agree. Sean Christian: And you don't meet your own personal expectations. Don't take it out on your team. Don't take it out on your peers. Kind of step back, reset, chill out. Do whatever it is that you do. Chad: Yeah. If you're in a state that allows it like Vegas, go ahead and take a quick one hitter. Joel: I hate to interrupt two military guys going off on a conversation without me. But I'm gonna pivot back to the military 'cause I've always been fascinated. And you're a top of funnel guy. You're a marketing, advertising, sales guy. The military is trying to convince people to come to an organization where they might die or have to kill other people, which to me is a hard thing to sell. Now let's go a layer deeper. You're in the Air force, you're selling against the army, the Marines and everyone else. Talk about internally how those strategy sessions go when you talk about how do we get a kid that comes in and says, I'm thinking about the army and let's get them into the Air Force. Sean Christian: Okay. Fair. Well, let's set one thing straight. Chad: Much easier. Sean Christian: I never had to compete with the Army, the Navy or the Marines. But... Chad: Was it Coast Guard, I mean who was... Sean Christian: Do they still exist? I'm sorry Coasties... They're legit. I love those guys. Chad: They're in Space Force. Yes. Sean Christian: Hey, the Space Force. And that's a whole nother story. I was there when that whole thing happened. Yeah, we'll talk about that later. Chad: Okay. Okay. Sean Christian: But... Chad: We will get some beers and talk about that one. Sean Christian: Oh yeah. It's a funny story, but I never felt like I had to sell a kid. Even though I'm a sales guy. At the end of the day, I love sales. I love the Air Force. And when you're passionate about the service or the product or the company that you represent, it's not hard to show passion. You gotta be passionate about the product or the company that you work for. Joel: So when people walk through that door, they pretty much were 90% I'm going to join the Air Force. Sean Christian: No, sometimes you'd have mom and dad drag them in or sometimes they were just interested. It's hard to tell. That's a great psychology question is like, where are they in their minds sitting in their journey of figuring out what they want to do with their life. Chad: Well, we know where you were because you just got popped from paraphernalia. I just wanted to get the fuck outta the house. I wanted to be on my own, do my own thing. Got sick and tired of mom and dad telling me what to do all the time. The only way, because I grew up poor, was having Uncle Sam send me off to strange places wherever he wanted to send me. Joel: But did you go to each branch and say, what can you do for me? Chad: I did not because my family had really had been in the Army. Only in the Army. I had one grandpa who had been in the Navy, but everybody else was in the Army. So that was just normal. I wish I would've actually shopped them because probably I might have gone into the Air Force. That's where I push everybody today. [laughter] Love the army. Don't get me wrong, but... Joel: Is that your experience? Sean Christian: Well, so I knew I was gonna join the military as a young kid. My grandfather was Air Force. My father was Army. I knew, like my brother, he was chasing that American dream. Big house, white picket fence. Me, not so much. I was kind of a rebel. Got in some trouble, chased the girls. I had no desire to go to college or study, I didn't wanna study. And the military and the Air Force was just... I don't know, it was like a calling. Like I just knew it's where I wanted to be and... Joel: But was it the ads? Was it the sexy planes? Chad: Dude, I tell you what though. Teenage kids with a bunch of testosterone seeing those ads. Oh yeah, that'll get you going. That's it. I think for me, you just want that challenge and you want to be able to do something different. Sean Christian: Yeah. You look around 9/11, that was probably one of the best, years after 9/11, the best recruiting time other than when Top Gun first came out. [laughter] So that time, that period, I think Americans or anyone really, you see something that you value and when you see your country get attacked, something inside of you changes. And you just don't know how to shut it off. You just have to follow that drive. And you walk into the recruiter's office and you say, what do I do? How do I get there? But not everybody's, just because you want to join the military doesn't mean you're gonna get qualified. It's easier to get into college than it is in the Air Force. We discriminate left and right. Height, weight, education, we run your credit. If your debt to income ratio doesn't look pretty more than 30%, you're not coming in... Joel: Wow. Sean Christian: Without a payment plan. Without something to show. Chad: In the Army, depending on if we're hitting our goals or not. It could be waiver city where it's like, oh yeah... Joel: It could be a curve that's... Chad: These usually would disqualify you. But because of today in our special plan. Joel: But today. Chad: Today, only. Sean Christian: Recently, within the last 10 years, I think it's safe to say we just changed our tattoo policy. So you couldn't have any tattoos above the collar bone. The Marine Corps was really strict on tattoos, especially around the wrist. We were a little bit more relaxed, but our general was like, what does tattoos have to do with service and commitment? Like we were dequeuing people left and right. That just could do things that most humans could not do. But yet we were disqualifying them because they had a tattoo. Chad: Oh, yeah. Sean Christian: It was the silliest thing ever. So our general was cool as shit said, "Am I the general or what... " Nicks, no more tattoo issues. [laughter] Joel: Nice. So we know from talking in the green room, that you're a numbers guy. Sean Christian: Yeah. Joel: And with all these restrictions, it sounds like pretty rigid. Let's go into the recruiting side of that. Where does tracking come in for you with advertising, who you choose to do business with? What kind of metrics do they have to show you? Talk about ROI. Sean Christian: Yeah. That's a broad question, right. So if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense. Joel: Amen. Sean Christian: You've gotta follow the money and it's important... Relationships are important to me. If a vendor can't come to me and say, "Hey, we dropped the ball and this is how we're gonna fix it," I don't wanna do business with those type of vendors. It's a relationship. On our renewals or when we are revisiting last year's activations... Joel: Yep. Sean Christian: They need to show the ROI. They need to show, Hey, you spent X amount of dollars, and this is what we see on our metrics. If they can't show me metrics, then it's not working. Chad: Let me ask you a question though. Companies spend more on recruitment marketing than they do on their tech stack, but yet they're still, they're pulling the exact same candidates in over and over and over and they're not using their database first. What's your experience behind that? And if you were in marketing, which you were, you'd get fired for not doing that. But in HR and TA we don't do it. We don't use the leads that are already in our system. Why is that? Sean Christian: Well, let's talk about leads for a second. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: I see a lot of pitch decks. I see we can increase applicant generation by 30%. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: That's the wrong language to speak to me. Is that a 80-year-old? It's a lead. Chad: Yeah. Is it a qualified lead? Sean Christian: What's the qualified lead? Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: I'm not impressed by you can generate a thousand leads. I can generate a thousand leads. If I work hard enough and leverage the tools that are around me. And go out and build relationships and ask for referrals. We know that's the number one generator, of leads is just asking someone, do you know anyone else that's interested in X? So, don't tell me about you're gonna increase lead gen. I want you to increase my applicant to hire ratio because that's a quality lead. Or, my retention, help me focus on retention. Chad: Yeah. I get that. But on the talent acquisition side of the house, fit is important. Sean Christian: Yeah. Chad: No question. But a lot of that has to do with their experience after they've been hired. So to ask somebody on the front end to worry about your backend, that's unfair. Is it not? Sean Christian: I don't know. Is it fair to go to a restaurant and eat the food and then get food poisoning? That's the backend. [laughter] Chad: That's not, [chuckle] the same thing. Sean Christian: But it's the backend, right? [laughter] Chad: If you got food poisoning, that's where it would be coming out. Yes. Sean Christian: Right. That's a garbage food. That's a garbage meal. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. That's in and out garbage. Sean Christian: In and out garbage. I think that's fair to look at it from that perspective. Chad: I know but the thing is though, when somebody comes in as an employee and you bring them in, you've hired them, there's an after... Sean Christian: There is. Chad: That after, which doesn't happen in a meal other than with your body, is up to you and your experience. Sean Christian: Yes. Chad: And you providing a great experience for those employees. Sean Christian: Correct. There is a shared responsibility there. Chad: Yes. Sean Christian: Goes back to leadership. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: We can all lead the horse to the trough. Can't make it drink. You can bring me someone on, I can onboard them, I can properly get them up to speed, set good expectations. But if I don't follow through with training and leadership and mentorship... Chad: Yes. Sean Christian: And giving them the tools to succeed, then you... Correct, I have failed that. So I guess the question is if you're a tech company, how do you fix that problem? How do you make sure that you're providing more quality leads, but then we, I have to do my part on the leadership side. So then that's the culture of the organization. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: So, it's important that the vendor culture matches with their customer's culture because that way you can speak the same language. Chad: Yes. Sean Christian: So I get, again, I get pitch decks to say we can increase your hire ratio. Well, then I'm held to that standard when I present that to my leadership. Joel: Yeah. Interesting. Sean Christian: And that's super challenging for me. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: So I don't have a lead gen problem. I want quality people. Chad: Yes. Sean Christian: To join. I don't know if that answers your question or not, other than the food poisoning part. But... [laughter] Joel: Are vendors dropping the ball on providing the metrics that buyers need? Sean Christian: Yeah. That's a subjective question. Maybe. Joel: Yeah. Sean Christian: And maybe I'm not setting the expectations on what I expect from those calls. And so I could probably own a little bit of that. In the past, not all calls are gonna go perfect. Has that happened? Yes. But, when I've asked for stuff, do they come back and give it to me? Yeah, they do. But my mentality is I want you to have your stuff ready, without me asking. Chad: Have your shit together kids. Sean Christian: Have it together. Joel: So what sources, I think you mentioned referrals. What works best for you in terms of getting those qualified leads through the door? Sean Christian: So I'm a belly to belly guy. I believe meeting your customers where they are, and we're all fighting for attention on social media. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: And you can't build relationships. You can build it through to a certain point on a Instagram or a TikTok post or any type of paid advertising. Can I get in front of them? Yes. And we all know you pay to play, the person who's gonna pay the most in advertising is gonna get their message across. Chad: Yeah. Sean Christian: But, if I can leverage the social ads with relationships with X activating at an event, I love sports marketing. I love sports marketing, why? Because we're all passionate about sports. And if I can meet them in a place where they're already passionate and then that experience is great, now they're associating with that great positive experience with my brand. And now I can peel back that onion, and really understand what that makes that person tick. Chad: That's a very military marketing way. Joel: Yeah. Chad: As you take a look at NASCAR, NFL, all those things, because you're getting something that somebody's incredibly passionate about and you're tying it to your brand. Joel: So this isn't a metaphor, this is literally you're sponsoring NASCAR events, football games, or was it a metaphor? [chuckle] Sean Christian: No, when I was in the Air Force, I was the program manager. Joel: Okay. Sean Christian: And I now granted, I got a good buddy, he'd always gimme a hard time. He's like, Sean, how many leads you get at NASCAR? Is it... NASCAR's [chuckle] not a great example of lead gen for the Air Force because, it was super low. But what it did is it create, and it comes back to recruitment marketing, and EVP is it created a platform for us to communicate who we were as an organization, not just a war fighting military branch. But who we were as an organization that can help you get from point A to point B, whether it be financial, education, grow your family, job security, all those other things. The media does a great job of associating the military with wars and combat and deaths and depression. But they've missed the mark on all the great things that it can do. And I just leverage sports marketing to share that story. Now with sports marketing, what I also do is I look at the lead, the registrant to lead ratio because some sporting events are more propensed to produce the target audience that an organization may be looking for. So, NASCAR with it being so broad. You've got a 2-year-old to a 9-year-old, there. Sean Christian: It's hard to pinpoint your target audience there. But let's say like formula drift, gearheads, younger generation, tech-savvy. Now that's a very high propense for... Chad: What about... Sean Christian: For someone going into the automotive industry? Chad: E-Sports. Sean Christian: E-Sports? Chad: Yeah. Joel: That's exactly what I was thinking. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. E-Sports. You said belly-to-belly which I thought was an insult at first, but I realized that it's not now. Sean Christian: No, it's not. Joel: You're a face-to-face high-touch guy in a world that's going more automation, less face-to-face, are you willing to accept that future or are you going to fight back against that? Sean Christian: I'm gonna accept it because I'm gonna leverage all those other tools to put me in a better position to create relationships. I'm gonna leverage AI, I'm gonna leverage these other... 'Cause If I fight it, then I'm screwed. It's just gonna make me sour. I need to pivot and be smart. And I'm gonna out hustle my competition. And there's a lot of recruiters out there that post and pray, post and just forget about it. They don't follow up. I'm a big believer in CRMs and helping you in the sales funnel. Recruiting is sales. You've gotta take that applicant through that journey and make sure that they understand the steps. Correct? Chad: Yes. Sean Christian: And if I can go to any event and build the relationship with little Johnny, shake his hand, meet mom, meet dad, meet girlfriend or whoever, and then I'm gonna call Johnny three days later. "Hey Johnny, it was great to meet you at NASCAR. Let me know if you ever had any questions about these opportunities, but it was great to meet you and your family". I never hear from Johnny. I called Johnny two weeks later. "Hey Johnny, did you check that race out last week? It was awesome. It's badass. Did you even watch the race?" Whatever, nothing. Four weeks later called Johnny. "Johnny, I'm gonna be in your neighborhood. I'm going... Joel: Johnny... Sean Christian: And guess what? We all know the average touches on a sale between the eighth and 12th contact is where you're gonna find that sale. And AI doesn't think like a human because we're emotional. So I'm gonna leverage the AI to give me the research, the market research on maybe the demographics in the city or what other organizations are going on in that city. So I'm gonna leverage those tools, but it's just gonna make me a better face-to-face, belly-to-belly recruiter because I bring it all onto one table. Joel: Are you bullish on job fairs? Sean Christian: Depending on the fair. Joel: Okay. Sean Christian: And it depends on how you activate. You can't sit behind the table. And I've walked around here, and if I see a vendor sitting on their chair behind their desk, I'm not gonna go up to him. So you can take some recruiters to an event, a great event, and they can sit on their butt for two hours and they'll walk out of there and say the event sucked. "No, you sucked." [laughter] Joel: How about virtual job fairs? Sean Christian: Those are interesting. I've been in one and I just sat there and waited for people to come into the booth. Chad: You couldn't get out in front of the table? Sean Christian: I couldn't get in front of the table. But we still got some leads out of it. Chad: Okay. Sean Christian: Now we were, that was more on the corporate side and I didn't... Chad: That's more scale 'cause they're more actually being able to attend. Sean Christian: Even when I was a job seeker, when I first retired from the Air Force, I attended one. And from a applicant perspective, I wasn't really impressed again, because I believe in the relationship. I can't look at the recruiter eye to eye, and how do I know they're not blowing smoke 'cause we all know Army recruiters, they lie all the time. [laughter] Chad: Oh, if anybody knows that it's an Army Drill Sergeant. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, right after podcasters, I think. So you're here at the show, we're in the expo hall. Any companies that have caught your attention? Any companies or businesses that you want to visit while you're here? Sean Christian: I'm just trying to take it all in. This is my first HR/Recruiting convention that I've been to since I've retired. I'm just looking to see what does the market look like? Who are the vendors? I just wanna be smarter. I wanna be better in my craft. Chad: So talk to me about how you think as you're a belly-to-belly guy ChatGPT and all the different generative AIs that are out there are going to change, and how rapid you think it's gonna change this industry? Sean Christian: Oh, it's already changed the industry rapidly. I heard about it December or November when it first really went mainstream. Actually it wasn't even mainstream at that point. It's... But look at it from December to now, all these companies are just popping out left and right. I love it because I'm not a graphic designer. I'm not... It's hard for me to get creativity, but what I think of AI, OpenAI is like a little assistant. Joel: Yeah. Sean Christian: I say, "Hey, here are my thoughts." Whether they make sense when I write them out with my misspelled words. I go clean this up and help me create a better prompt to ask you so I can get a better output. So I just use it to help me idea generation. When we... So I'm remote and sometimes it's hard to have some idea conversation when your team is across the country. So I go to ChatGPT and I say, "Hey, you're a marketing, you're the CMO of an X company and I want to influence this target audience in this industry. Give me 10 ways to do that." Joel: And clearly that frees your time up for more of those belly-belly relations. Chad: I love the belly-bellies. [overlapping conversation] Joel: That is Sean Christian, everybody. Chad: Yes. Joel: Sean, for those that want to connect with you, where would you send them? Sean Christian: LinkedIn, hit me up Sean P. Christian, @SeanPaul. Sean Paul the rapper his name. I was first. Chad: I see the resemblance. Yeah. Sean Christian: Yeah. Mine was first. But Sean P. Christian. I'd love to connect with you. I'd love to hear from you. I wanna hear your wins. If you reach out to me, I wanna hear your wins and how you're changing the game. That's what I want to hear. Joel: Belly-to-belly. Sean Christian: Belly-to-belly. Chad: That's a win. Joel: [laughter] That's a wrap. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Thank you for listening to, what's it called the Podcast, the Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant! We talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know and yet you're listening. It's incredible! And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, Blue, Nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss, 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.

Things have been pretty quiet on the unicorn front lately, but thanks to ChatGPT and Nvidia, that’s about to change, and it will undoubtedly impact the recruitment space. The boys discuss. The US Supreme Court struck down Affirmative Action, and it too will undoubtedly impact recruiting. The boys discuss. Stepstone’s CEO stepped in "it" this week, and they’re more than a little defensive about their own DEI efforts. Again, discuss. Plus, Beyond.com insight, flying cars and spider humans. Oh, and full English breakfasts. What’s up with the baked beans anyway? PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. 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, alcohol, because no good story ever started with having a salad. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Madchester Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad. Meet George Jetson Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, the Unicorn parade is just starting, Stepstone gets sensitive, and flying cars are finally here or not. Let's do this. [laughter] Chad: Welcome to England. Joel: The Cheesmans have landed. Can you explain to me how showers work in Europe? Two knobs, different like the overhead. Chad: It's different everywhere though. It's different everywhere. Joel: Yeah, exactly. Chad: It's like in the US, you go in, you turn on the thing, you pull the thing, and you're done. And everybody has the same setup, but that's not the case throughout Europe. So you go to Ireland, or you go to England, or you go to... It's all different. So yeah, you take probably about at least the first 10 minutes of your first shower figuring it out, and then the next time remembering how to fucking use the thing. Joel: The other thing is no free refills on sodas. That's a killer. Chad: Yeah, but that's good. That's how you keep obesity down. Joel: Cole Cheesman likes his Coca-Colas. Chad: I'm sure he does, I'm sure he does. Joel: That the concept of no free refills is very hard for him to understand 'cause it's an American pastime, like free refills. Chad: It is, yeah. Joel: Like just load it up. But anyway, other than that, having a great time in Europe. Flew into Manchester. If you've never been, beautiful city, really kinda gritty. Great music scene, great art scene. Chad: Oasis time, yeah. Joel: Oasis time, Joy Division. We went out in the... If you don't know the story of Joy Division or the band, the... Chad: Check it out. Joel: '70s band into the early '80s, lead singer committed suicide. Depressing story, depressing band, but great music. We went out to see his grave, which was kind of a nice little trip. It was raining and dreary, which was appropriate. Chad: They'll figure. Joel: Came back. We're in Liverpool now. It's beautiful weather. Had some scouse last night, which is the Liverpudlians are called scousers, in case anybody didn't know. And that's their like meal. Chad: Okay. Joel: It's a lamb stew with some cabbage, which is very British. But, yeah, enjoying our time and headed to London today, and we'll see you tomorrow, Thursday breakfast. Chad: Yes, yes. So it's time for some shout-outs. We're gonna keep it here in England, and I've got a theme. We're gonna go with the English breakfast shout-out. First English breakfast shout-out goes to Gemma Jones, Darren, and Fred, her son, for being amazing hosts in Stanford this week. Stanford is a gorgeous and seemingly rich little village about an hour north of Knebworth. It's an old town, beauty, amazing pubs, boutique, hotels, restaurants, and really, really worth a visit. It was a blast. And an honorable mention goes to Stephen and Sarah Anderson from Crouton for spending time with Julie and me as well, doing a little dinner time. But shout-out to old world adorable English towns. Alright, alright, alright. Joel: Why does it always seem when you meet up with Crouton, you're having meals? I don't know if it's the company name. Do you always have a salad when you have dinner with Crouton? Chad: Always have alcohol. That's for fucking... [overlapping conversation] Joel: Were there croutons in the salad is the question. Chad: No, there was no salad having, and let me tell you, uh. Joel: Yeah, yeah. You know, I love me some good full English breakfasts. Chad: Oh, God. Joel: Cole got his first one, official one... Chad: God. Joel: This week. He was a little shy on the blood sausage, a little shy on the blood sausage. But other than that, we've had a really good meal quest, if you will, while we've been here. Chad: I think blood sausage, there's just the marketing behind it. They need to change the name, and then you'll get better. But I did have English breakfast once while I was here. And Darren was like, "Did you get your English breakfast?" I said, "I did". He's like, "Did you like it?" I said, "I did not". I cannot stand an English breakfast. It is too greasy. Baked beans go with my hot dogs on 4th of July, right? It's just none of that makes fucking sense to me. Chad: The baked beans are interesting. I don't know where that came in. Like, who thought, let's throw some beans in here. That sounds really good, that sounds really good. Chad: Some baked beans. Joel: Yes, yes. Love us some breakfast, for sure. All right. I'm gonna up you one on that. I have another LinkedIn poll, Chad. Chad: Oh, good God, not another poll. You're always on the poll, man. Joel: A good LinkedIn poll like I do. So if you missed it, SHRM had ex-president Bill Clinton keynote their conference a few weeks ago. Now if you don't know the history of Bill Clinton, certain intern named Monica Lewinsky that he had relations with and kind of an HR nightmare, if you will, in the making. So to me, it's kinda odd that SHRM would choose him to be a keynote, although he is a president. I asked my LinkedIn community what they thought about SHRM having Bill Clinton speak. Almost 300 votes came in. 54 said yes, SHRM fucked up and made a bad decision. The rest of them saying, it's all good. Nothing to see here. A lot of women were on the yes, that was a bad decision side more so than men. But, yeah, I thought that was interesting that they would choose that. And most people thought it was a mistake, although it was pretty close. Chad: Yeah. And that's HR, right? We're so incredibly risk averse. How do we learn from our past? We have to dig into it, and we're so afraid to dig into all of the risks and all the fuck ups that we've had before. That's the only way we get better, guys. That's the only... And who fucked up more than anybody? We don't need to get past that from an HR intern standpoint. It was Bill Clinton. If we sit around on our hands being afraid, we're not gonna go anywhere. And I'm just sick and tired of everybody who's saying, "Well, he represents X, Y, and Z." Well, let's hear the fucking story and learn from that shit. That was one of the reasons why I didn't think it was a bad idea. Joel: You love you some Johnny, you love you some Johnny. Chad: Yeah, Johnnie Taylor. Joel: Johnny Taylor and Chad, best buddies, best buddies. Chad: No, he can fuck off. Anyway, continuing my English breakfast shout-out, we're gonna shout-out to Jim, Thomas and Rob over at Talent Nexus. God, I love those guys. Thanks for having us out on the town in London last night. We had some drinks, played some shuffle board. The best part of the night was watching the Aussies get under the English skin. Lauren and Craig from Todd Pod, they came out with us. And it was hilarious because I thought Americans could get under the Brits' skin. Not even close. Aussies have it, and I think it might have to do with the Australians are beating the British in cricket, The Ashes right now. It's a little back and forth, but yeah, it is fucking hilarious. So we had a great time. Thanks Talent Nexus, and also thanks to to Craig and Lauren for coming out with us last night. Joel: Yeah, I was on... I was in an internet wormhole recently, and apparently, there's some kind of new spider in Australia that's red. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Joel: And can kill people. Australia is crazy. Chad: Imagine that. Joel: And the other thing is, there's a jellyfish that is from Australia that has ended up in the Gulf of Mexico or something. It's killing all of them. Like Australia is coming to kill everybody. Australia is killing everybody and I'm scared to death that they're here in London. Chad: Don't worry about the robots. It's the Aussies. Joel: No, no. It scares the hell out of me. Let's get sexier with the shout-outs. Chad: Okay. Joel: Marcy Mall and Joe Perry. No, not Aerosmith, Joe Perry. Chad: Oh damn. Joel: We've seen in Chad and Cheese T-shirts this week, and I think they look fine. Apparently, the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team fared well when a Chad and Cheese t-shirt showed up in the stadium. So a coincidence, I don't know, but I'm down... Chad: I don't think so. Joel: For all the Chad and Cheese love, Chad. Cole Cheeseman has a bag of t-shirts. We're gonna be going out at RecFest. I expect to see a lot of sexy from the British Isles next week when everyone is sporting Chad and Cheese t-shirts. Chad: And if you're not at RecFest, how do you get that free t-shirt? Joel: You gotta go to our website, Chad. You gotta go to chadcheese.com. Click the free link. Give us your information. My 13-year-old is managing the distribution, so don't freak out if you don't get it like the week of... But eventually, your shirt, hopefully... Chad: Stop. Joel: God willing, post office willing, will get to you at some point. But you can't win if you don't play chadcheese.com, click the free link. And not just t-shirts, Chad. From our friends at JobGet... Chad: What? What? Joel: We're giving away beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, a bottle of bourbon from each of us. We each pick a selection, we send it to the winner. That's from our buddies at Textkernel. And if it's your birthday, Chad, you could win a bottle of rum from our friends at Plum. What are you waiting for? Head out to chadcheese.com and get some shit. Chad: You keep forgetting the getaway. We have a $250 gift card Airbnb giveaway. That's right, kids. What do you do? You get out of the weeds, you go off to some far, maybe mountains, maybe the ocean abode. HR is giving away once a month $250 Airbnb card. So you can get the hell out, you can enjoy yourself, you can let your hair down if you have any. And yeah, again, chadcheese.com. Click on the free link, put your information in. Joel: Oh, wait till you see Cole Cheeseman's hair, Chad. Chad: Oh, I've seen those luxurious locks. Joel: It's magnificent. Yeah. The girls are gonna be jealous, the girls are gonna be jealous, I'm telling you, I'm telling you. Well, that sounds good. All right. Well, you said birthdays? Chad: Really can you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. Joel: I can. Chad: I can feel it all the way down in my plum. Joel: All right, guys. Another year around the sun for some of our fans. Celebrating a birthday this week, Lee Cuevas, Claire Hoveland. That might be Holland. I don't know. Maybe it was misspelled. Chad Matson, Megan Maker, Deb Lindsay, Joshua Tarant Senzy, Tommy Menzer, Brock Magnus, Laura Turner, Andrew Clark, Josh Ramsey, and Matt, that British guy, Alder are all celebrating another trip around the sun. You might have a bottle of rum from our friends at Plum coming to you, but either way... Speaker 4: Happy birthday. Joel: Happy birthday. Chad: Brock Magnus, the guy's name is Brock Magnus. How more of fucking testosterone? You just give the guy the name, and he's automatically like 6'4 and 250 pounds of muscle. Joel: He was born in an octagon, apparently. That's the word. He was born in an octagon with a bottle of whiskey from what I understand. Chad: Oh, kids, we've got events, events, events, events. Tomorrow is RecFest. You're gonna be hearing this after RecFest. We're on the disrupt stage in one of the big top tents, but that's not the story because guess what, if you didn't go, that sucks for you, FoMO. But you couldn't get in anyway. You know why? Because it was sold out. In Nashville in the United States, you've got a chance. You got a chance to come see us. I was talking to Jamie actually this morning, and he said there are American companies buying 20 tickets at a clip. Why 20 tickets you might be asking? Well, it's all about the all hands meeting. That's right. Bringing the whole team in, learning, enjoying, bonding, doing all those things that teams should be doing. You can do that at RecFest. It's gonna be in September in America, the very first one in Nashville. Go to chadcheese.com, click on advance in the upper right hand corner, and we get... Listen to this kids. We have a discount code, we have a discount code, 50% off. Get the whole team there. We'd love to see you. Joel: And there's no team building like team building on Broadway over bourbon and some hot chicken, Chad. That's what I'm talking about. Chad: It's Amazing, amazing. Joel: That's what I'm talking about. Oh, it's a Unicorn stampede, Chad and I didn't download the sound bites. You might have to plug it in there 'cause we haven't heard it for so long for God's sake. Chad: I know, I know. Joel: Sorry. Here's some new San Francisco based AI startup, Inflection AI raised 1.3 billion. That's B from investors, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates to develop its personal assistant called Pi. The funding brings their total raise to 1.5 billion, but wait, there's more, Chad. New York based Runway raised a 141 million extension to its series C funding round with support from Google, Nvidia, Salesforce ventures and others. Meanwhile, San Fran based startup Typeface secured a $100 million series B round led by Salesforce ventures. Runway focuses on AI image generation while Typeface aids in enterprise content creation. Chad, what's your take on the revival of the Unicorn? Chad: First off, I've gotta make sure that the housekeeping doesn't come in, so give me one second. Housekeeping, you want me to jerk you off? Joel: What kind of hotel is this? Chad: All right, so here's a quote. "Whoever wins the personal agent, that's the big thing because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you will never go to Amazon again." Bill Gates. Joel: Wow. Chad: Second one, Marc Andreessen says, "Every person will have an AI assistant coach, mentor, trainer, advisor, therapist." The big question is, what is next? Now I'm gonna say who whomever Nvidia is backing is the winner in my book. Nvidia's GPUs are the reason why AI has made such a huge leap, and I see them obviously having more than one horse in this race. But the big key here that I think through these three, Inflection, Runway and Typeface, is multimodal. And when you're talking about multimodal models, it's not just consuming text, but you're also consuming audio and video. So if you wanna contextualize the data, which is really what this is all about, you need all aspects of that data. So think about it. If you're reading something, you gain some context. If you're listening to it, then you gain more context than reading, listening than watching. I mean, you're just continually starting to understand how AI can learn. So we're getting past just the text aspect, and that to me is pretty exciting and scary at the same time. But the only way that you're going to get more information out of us as humans is to put a chip in our head. Joel: And if Elon has his way, we all will be chipped, if you will. Chad: God. Joel: I look at this from a sort of money perspective. Look, there's been a lot of money on the sidelines for a long time. We've been waiting for something to trigger the flow of investment, and thank God Nvidia hit a trillion. That has released the hounds, if you will. ChatGPT in coordination with Nvidia, a trillion dollar market gap. Money is gonna flow like wine in ancient Rome, Chad. I mean, this is probably gonna dwarf what we saw with remote work and the money that came into our space. Look, remember ChatGPT is less than a year old. People are just now developing, how do we figure this out? What companies do we start creating? And these companies are pitching investors, and these investors are seeing the money that these high profile companies and firms are giving to these macro AI companies. Joel: This thing is gonna flow down to us. HR tech where remote and deal and Oyster and Velocity Global, those guys were the big swinging dicks. The AI companies of the future are gonna be huge and we're gonna have a lot of fun talking about it. There are gonna be new businesses that we've never thought of created around this. I think the IPO market is gonna start opening up. I interviewed Fountain CEO recently. He disagrees. He thinks it's closed, the IPO market. Now he should know he's the CEO of a big value company. But I think we're gonna start seeing IPOs. There was a food IPO recently. A restaurant came and was huge, right? So if people are ready to spend money and invest in new food companies and restaurants, wait till the next awesome tech company comes public like a Pi, which I'm hearing more and more about. Joel: So this is gonna be great for us to talk about. Our industry is gonna change again. This is, to me, very exciting and it's gonna impact us in a big way. I mean, one of these companies we talked about talks about content creation for enterprises that's gonna spill over to employment in my opinion. Chad: Oh easily. Joel: It's gonna be very exciting. Yeah. This is gonna be really, really huge. There's gonna be a lot of money coming in at the end of this year and going into '24. Chad: And then tech is gonna be incredibly fluid much more than it ever has been, right? So we're gonna be able to use it from sector to sector, segment to segment, industry to industry. The big difference are these awesome domain players like the paradoxes or talk pushes or what have you been using conversational AI that are specific to a domain. That's information that these big... These large language models can't get to, but when they do, it's gonna be incredibly fluid. I mean, it's just going to be from one to the next, whether you're asking a question about the size of a TV and the actual pixels, or the HD versus 4UK or what have you, and then start talking about an application process. It's gonna be able to be incredibly fluid. And to me, that is very exciting. It's scary and exciting at the same time. Joel: The only thing more fun will be talking about the crashing and burning of a lot of these companies in 2025, 2026. Speaker 4: 60% of the time, it works every time. Chad: Every time. Joel: All right, Chad. Well, in case you missed it, the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action last week citing a violation of the 14th Amendment. Opponents say the decision will have significant implications for higher education and the workplace. Want more insight? Just go ahead and google it. There are greater sources than us to talk about this or inform you of it, but me thinks the old White guys have won again. Chad, what are your thoughts? Chad: You don't say. The US Supreme Court has once again thrust us back in the 1960s with this. It's a classist and a racist ruling and I'll go through with that. Do legacy students receive a leg up and the ability to pass through the admissions process? Are most legacy students throughout America, Black or White or of color? "A study on Harvard finds 43% of White students are legacy." 43% legacy athletes, or they're related to donors are part of staff." That number drops dramatically from Black, Latino, and Asian. They clumped them all together at 16%. We're not going one by one, but we're saying all together, 16%, which is fucking crazy. Here's the kicker, 75% of those White students would not have been admitted. They would've been rejected because they wouldn't have met the standards. That is racism at its best, kids. Chad: So this has major implications for American businesses who need to build a diverse workforce. If less kids of color are admitted into institutions, it'll be even harder. So now the burden shifts from academia to corporate America. And don't get me wrong, I'm not shedding a tear for corporate America here, kids, because they are the major benefactor of an employee's work. But let me break this ruling down for you in areas that makes sense and that actually is breaking or has broken the system. System breaker number one, once upon a time, companies were focused on their people as much as their profits because the system provided benefit to embrace that mindset, tax breaks. Once we took that incentive away, companies started losing focus and keeping employees trained and happy rather than it shifted to keeping shareholders happy. Chad: That broke the system. System breaker number two, US colleges and universities' revenue in 2022, whew, $576.2 billion, over half a trillion dollars. So this isn't about the struggling White kid that can't get into a school because their slot was taken by a kid of color. This is about the moneymaking machine we call academia. And why does Harvard have a class size, a median class size of 12 in an endowment of $53 billion? So academia has lost sight of purpose, educating and bettering the community they support. Corporate America's lost sight. That's broken. Now we're breaking the academia. We've broken academia as well and that's where we sit today. So employers, you're now going to have to take this burden on all by yourself because guess what? It's not up to academics anymore. Joel: Yeah. So when the story broke, you were in Europe, I was in the States, and every university in Indiana released a statement that basically said, "This isn't gonna impact our admissions. This isn't gonna change anything. We're still gonna be committed to diversity and, blah blah, blah." Right? Chad: We'll see. Joel: Purdue University, their statement was, "We will follow the law." That was it. [laughter] At least they're being honest and at least they're saying what everyone else is thinking, I'm frankly still digesting some of this and I've been traveling and whatnot. It's a huge story. I know a lot of people feel very strongly about it. It's interestingly... It was interestingly brought up by the Asian community for not being admitted in numbers that they feel that they should have been because of affirmative action. Joel: So it's not White people sort of striking this down or coming. And there's been like anti-affirmative action or reverse discrimination cases in the past. We know that California has done away with this since the mid '90s, and it has impacted admissions negatively. So there is some historical perspective on this, and you can go ahead out there and there's a lot of information on that. Now we've been talking about DEI falling off the radar of corporate America for weeks now. It was a huge moment about from '20 to '22, and it's falling off the radar. This is only going to throw it off the radar even more, right? Chad: Yes. Joel: This is more excuse to not focus on it, not spend money on it. So from that perspective, it's just a horrible thing that's probably gonna transpire to less diversity in companies, less diversity particularly in our industry, which we should be the shining example of which I think we'll talk about after the next break. Chad: Yes. Joel: To me, this underlines the importance of doing the work before college happens. We spend such an inordinate low number of dollars on childcare, on K through 12, on teacher salary. Chad: Things that matter. Joel: That's where a lot of the focus is. If we fix that shit, admissions will take care of itself because everyone will be on a more equal footing because of that. Until we start paying entry level like teachers a hundred grand and go up from there, nothing's gonna change. The other thing that I worry about is the perception as we know perception in many times is more strong... Is stronger than reality. And if low income diverse populations hear about this ruling, all they're gonna hear is no more affirmative action. If I hear that as a diverse person, lower income, whatever, I'm thinking, there's no chance I'm getting into Columbia. There's zero chance I'm getting into Northwestern, right? So I'm not even gonna apply. So to me, the perception of this by saying there's no more affirmative action, it tells the kid that thought he could get in because of it now won't even try, and to me that is a sad, sad development in this whole thing. Chad: We need to be able to fund universities, don't get me wrong, but they've turned into much like corporations focusing more on the shareholders or their donors than the actual communities that they serve. Same thing with employers. When we took the tax incentives away, they stopped really training and ensuring that their employees were moving up the ladder and staying with them because they understood that that just made sense. All that's gone out the windows because we're focused on one thing, the shareholder, right? The rich White dude, that's what we started to focus on. So the system's broken. I think we need to do that. There's no question. The front end with kids and childcare and all those things, that is a necessity, but we have to change the money quotient on this too. And on the Asian side of the house, this is exactly what the top level organizations want. They want a small group like the Asians. They're not even looking at the big machine. That makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Joel: Yeah. This issue obviously is just beginning, but our show is middle through people. Chad: Midway. Joel: Let's take a quick break and we'll talk some industry stuff. If you don't think we talk about Stepstone enough, well, today is your lucky day, everybody. Chad, you had an interesting back and forth with the Dusseldorf, Germany-based company this week. What's going on? Chad: Yeah, I mean, literally... Okay. So we'll just break this down. It's on LinkedIn and Sebastian Dettmers, who's the CEO of Stepstone, initiated the 10 in under 30 program at the Stepstone Group to bring together 10 of the brightest young talents from within their organization ready to shake things up, question methodologies, and bring transformative ideas to the table. And so there was this great post and this picture of the group in itself, and it sounds amazing, and I love that. Well, only until an ex-employee who had worked there for over 10 years, Ryan Grogan, challenged Sebastian by commenting, "I'm disappointed to see that the future of Stepstone appears to be predominantly White. If I remember correctly, the first year's cohort was also." Chad: Now Ryan's comment was deleted and Sebastian blocked Ryan at that point right out of the gate instead of digging into the conversation. The problem to me wasn't about a seemingly all-White cohort as much as how Sebastian, a leader of one of the most well-known companies in Europe in our space, handled the situation. Sebastian posted about people questioning methods, which is exactly what Ryan did. But yet another more junior Stepstone employee commented on one of Ryan's posts and said, "All of these people pictured represented different cultures, different countries, speak different languages and practice different religions/opinions. Some represent our LGBTQ community, some are family network, others are women support network. I think you have to be more careful in the way we think about DE&I, not just go to snap judgments." Chad: And I agree 100%. She was defensive and I wouldn't have recommended that to take that angle, although deleting a comment and blocking somebody after saying that you want to receive and be challenged on transformation, that was very short-sighted by Sebastian. And hopefully, he opens that back up and most other CEOs can start to take a look at this as pretty much a learning moment, right? You're going to get questioned, right? You're gonna get people who don't believe in what you believe in. That doesn't make them wrong. It doesn't make you wrong either. That's where the discussion starts. That's not where it ends. That's where it starts. And unfortunately, Sebastian ended that interaction completely. That's not the way we should be doing things. And as we just talked about affirmative action, right, the Supreme Court cut that shit off right at the top. We can't be doing that as CEOs and leaders of the organizations in our industry. Joel: So Bud Light has been a topic on this show for more than one week, and they're getting hit from both directions. They're getting hit from the far right saying, "You've gone woke and we're done with you." And because they didn't have the right response, the left came out and said, "We're not serving you beer either. You didn't stand up, you didn't fight back." Chad: Yeah. Joel: So they're getting it from both directions. And I think that more or less every CEO on the planet right now does not want that smoke. They do not want anything political to spill into their organization. Unfortunately, Stepstone CEO said, "I'm not getting in and in fact, I'm blocking people and I'm deleting shit." So I get it. It's a symptom of the Bud Light thing and more corporations are gonna be like so far away from political statements and whatnot that this is not gonna be the first time this happened. Chad: It was his post, so he started the conversation, right? It's not like somebody pulled him in. Joel: Sure. Well, how many times have you said something and said, "Oh, shit, I offended somebody. I didn't mean to do that. I'm out of here. I'm out of the room." So the real problem to me is that, okay, perception is reality. Okay. The woman who responded about, "Hey, you don't know anything about us. We are diverse." The perception of an all-White executive team. And look, I went into LinkedIn, I looked at Stepstone, I looked at their employees. It's really vanilla people. Like it's really... They might have things going on that are diverse, but perception is it's a very White organization. Perception is reality. We talked about Nike, we talked about Facebook years ago about, look, if anyone should represent the world, it's Facebook and it's Nike because the world is your customer. We need to be a shining example as employer vendors of what we would like the world to be. And if our biggest companies... And Stepstone a lot of people in America don't know Stepstone, Stepstone is a huge organization. They bought Appcast, they've got... Chad: Oh, by Axel Springer. Joel: This is a huge organization. Yes, they should be a shining example of what the world should be in terms of an employer and when companies in our industry don't do that, it sends a terrible message to employers that aren't focused on the global market. So we need to be an example. And yeah, I mean, okay, we all have different shoe sizes that makes us diverse. Okay, but if you look at it from the outside, there's not a lot of diversity going on at Stepstone and I hope it changes and maybe this will help spark that. Chad: Yeah. But I think if Sebastian would have said what she said, at least he would have engaged in the conversation as opposed to retreating. And as a leader in this industry and you said it very well, we need to not just look like. We need to think like, we need to engage in these conversations. And when you're challenged, it's not a bad thing, man. That's an opportunity for you. So hopefully Sebastian re-engages and stops the blocking bullshit, 'cause that's just not how a leader acts and/or reacts. Joel: Yeah, yeah, and hopefully he's regretting not engaging with the community. Chad: Yeah, well, let's hope, let's hope. Joel: Well, speaking of brand and rebranding, Chad, overstock.com is rebranding as Bed Bath & Beyond, one of your favorite retailers I know. Following its purchase of the bankrupt brand's name and assets, Overstock share surged over 15% after the announcement. The company plans to relaunch its Canadian website first. Chad: Take off. Will you? We're doing a movie. Don't wreck our show, you hoser. Joel: And then roll out the new branding into the United States. The acquisition excludes Bed Bath & Beyond's physical stores, which are closing. Why should you care? Well, you may not know there's an industry back story here. Chad's got a source. What you got? Chad: So this goes back to, if everybody remembers, one of our sponsors, Nexxt, Nexxt with two X's, not the triple X. Joel: Not three. Chad: Nexxt was beyond.com. And this is a story that I don't believe has been told and I think is incredibly important. And now we're at where we are right now, I think we can tell it. So Rich Milgram, who's the CEO of beyond.com at the time is incredibly stubborn, it's smart dude. He's on the engineer's side of the house. But in this case, his stubbornness definitely worked to his advantage because Bed Bath & Beyond started offers for beyond.com, which they bought. They started at $1 million. Rich kept saying no, as they just kept ratcheting it up. Eventually, when they went over $15 million, he realized that he could make some quick cash, pay off some VC debt and have some cash in reserves, which is fucking awesome. So Rich said yes. Guess what the number was, kid? $24 million. He sold beyond.com to Bed Bath & Beyond for $24 million again... Joel: Alright, alright, alright. Chad: To get rid of some VC debt. Obviously, quick cash on hand, have some money in reserve. It just made sense. So he sold the domain, then leased it back from Bed Bath & Beyond for over a year. Why did he do that? Well, everybody was under and sworn to secrecy because Bed Bath & Beyond would pull the deal if anybody found out. So it was one of the largest sales of a domain at that time. Rich came up with the new name, Nexxt, called the managers into the office, told them what was happening, and that they would have three months to completely rebrand the company, contracts, do all this in secret and come up with a story behind it. Clients, employers and industry pundits like us we said, "What the fuck is going on here?" beyond.com to Nexxt, how does this make it Nexxt with two X's? How does this make any sense? But obviously, Rich is much smarter than all of us. The name was not as good as beyond.com, but the $24 million in the bank must have felt amazing thus the story of Nexxt. So now we know when all those years, it was like, we had rumblings of knowing that Bed Bath & Beyond obviously paid a high number. We weren't sure, but this is what it was and that's the story, kids. So if you're looking at history, and one of the things that's going on now, overstock.com I believe owns beyond.com. Joel: Yeah, that escalated quickly. So they wanted to make it into sort of a Amazon Prime, pay us a monthly fee and you can get discounts and special shit and whatever is going on at Bed Bath & Beyond. Chad: Couponing, that kind of shit. Joel: Not really a place I frequent often, but whatever is going on there. So in theory, like a good idea, like a new ad campaign, go to beyond.com. We go beyond Bed Bath & Beyond and duh, duh, duh. It never happened. Like it never... 'Cause I would go back occasionally like, "Oh, is that thing up?" And they had it, but they never advertised it, they never uploaded it. So to spend that much money and not follow through, man... Chad: On a domain. Joel: That's some shitty, shitty management and strategy. So it's no shocking, like no shocking news that this company is bankrupt because if their efforts around this domain and what they wanted to do and what they spent on it came to what it did, they deserve to be out of business. The question to me is, if they do own beyond.com, it doesn't go anywhere now. I checked it for the story. So if you talked about does Rich go back to Beyond, is there like a re-rebrand where they go back to what they were? [laughter] Joel: I think enough people have probably forgot about Beyond or are not nostalgic for it. They know Nexxt now. I don't know if it would make a lot of sense, but he could probably get it on the cheap if he wanted to. I think that's a possibility or lease it for a while and have it redirect to Nexxt so the people that still remember Beyond can go there. But yeah, this is just shitty business practices, shitty strategy. Chad: And good for Rich. Joel: Good for Rich. I didn't know how much the dollar amount was and I don't think you did until this week when someone came forth and let us know what this is all like insider stuff. It's alleged. We don't know the exact number. But that's a big number for a domain and good for Rich clearing the books on debts and whatever they had to do. This was a really savvy move on his part. Congratulations. Chad: And so ballsy from a negotiation standpoint. They started at a $1 million for beyond.com and to take it all the way to $24, I mean, that to me is just... That's baller, that is fucking baller. Whether he was known as being stubborn or not, it obviously worked out in this case. Joel: Yeah, champagne and cocaine at the Nexxt headquarters. Alright, Carl. Alright, Chad. Chad: Carl? Joel: What else do we have? Okay, so we'll take a break. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Clearly, we're traveling, hangover, everything else. We'll be right back. Chad, can I interest you in a new story or two news stories about flying cars and spider humans? Chad: Oh my God. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: Here it comes. Joel: Oh, yeah. You want some of that, don't you? Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: We're gonna go deep here, baby. Chad: Just the tea. Joel: All right. First, let's talk about flying cars. Alef Aeronautics, a California based company, has received approval from the FAA for its flying electric car, and is now accepting pre-orders. It has a flying range of up to 110 miles and a driven range of up to 200 miles. Pre-orders are available for around $300,000. Yeah. And the FAA has issued a special airworthiness certificate for the vehicle. Chad, are you ready to strap in and take your next car to the heavens? Chad: Meet George Jetson. Yeah, I mean, that, to me is amazing. And remember, I mean, like back in the 50s, I think, 40s and 50s, they were testing jet packs and all that other fun stuff, and people were blowing up because it was fuel on your back. Now everything has gone to the hover fans, which is fucking awesome. 300K for this car, I think. I'm sorry, I thought it would be more. I really did. It's a car that fucking flies. Okay. It's electric and it flies. I thought it would be more. So no, I'm not gonna buy one, but I just think it is totally awesome that we're finally getting to this point. Now, the Jetsons was set in 2062. So the question is, in the delta time that we have between there, do you think this is going to be something that actually "takes off?" Joel: No, no, I don't. Look, we've been talking about jet packs, flying cars, I don't know, swimming airplanes for decades. There's a branding problem, but now a real branding problem, and it's called submarines to the Titanic that implode and killed people. Chad: Yeah, yeah. I can do it. Joel: Look, this whole thing about go to space, go to the bottom of the ocean, do these crazy like rich people things is gonna get regulated to death, governments are gonna be forced to create laws around this, and it's just not gonna happen, people. It'll be a fringe thing. A few people will buy them, but this company's gonna go outta business in 10, 20 years, maybe less, probably less. Virgin Galactic is basically outta business. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They haven't been to the space in a while. When was the last time Bezos space dick went up into the heavens? It's been a while 'cause the minute someone dies in space, which by the way, the odds of dying in space are much bigger than dying in a submarine, this whole thing is gonna shut down. So it's nice science fiction. It's nice to talk about the flying cars, the jet packs... Chad: Damnit. Joel: Are not coming anytime soon. Chad: Dammit. Joel: I'm sorry. Chad: You killed my mood, man. Joel: I'm sorry. Oh, I might be able to perk you back up, Chad. Chad: Okay, okay. Good. Joel: Let's talk about spider humans for a second. So researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed wearable robotic arms called Jizai arms. I'm guessing I got that right. That can be attached to humans as needed. The arms up to six arms, six can be controlled by the user or controlled remotely. The developers envision a future where artificial limbs can be personalized by users, personalized by users. I'm not sure what that means. Different sleeves on each charm. I don't know. Jeff Bezos must be behind this technology to improve warehouse productivity. Spider humans, Chad. Are you a buy or sell? Chad: So leave it to the Japanese. The same people who came up with the creepy ass Hentie to cartoon porn [laughter] to come up with something like this. I mean, it just... To me, it is creepy as fuck. If you guys get out there, check it out. Just do obviously search on Google. Look for spider humans. It's a pack, not kinda like a jet pack, but it just has arms and it is creepy as fuck. I have no clue on why anybody is ever going to need these things. Again, Hentai, creepy, spider human, creepy. Japanese, they got the market almost on creepy. Joel: So we've talked about VR a lot on this show, the Apple headset, everything and PornHub needs to sponsor this shit because that is what's gonna make this happen. You tell me six arms is useless. What could six arms mean in the porn industry for God's sakes? PornHub needs to be behind this. That's how it's gonna work. The number of marriages this thing could save, the amount of fun you could have, the adult kind of fun is insane, Chad. Not quite the kind of fun that we're gonna have at RecFest tomorrow. Chad: Yes. Joel: I need to pack my bags and get outta here. Spider humans, I've heard enough. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Shifting demographics combined with the digitalization of all aspects of life are transforming the nature of work. This is forcing companies to rethink how they design jobs and recruit, develop, and engage employees. Live from UNLEASH America in Las Vegas, Dr. Steven Hunt joins Chad & Cheese to discuss his new book. In Talent Tectonics: Navigating Global Workforce Shifts, Building Resilient Organizations, and Reimagining the Employee Experience, Dr. Hunt explains how technology is changing the purpose of work and why creating effective employee experiences is critical to building organizations that can thrive in a world of accelerating change and growing skill shortages. It’s a must-listen for anyone navigating the ebbs and flows of managing a global workforce. Enjoy and get smarter in the process. More: Dr. Steven Hunt - www.linkedin.com/in/steventhunt/ The Book - https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Tectonics-Navigating-Organizations-Reimagining/dp/1119885183 PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Dr. Steven Hunt: Anyone who tells you work was better 50 years ago didn't work 50 years ago. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: You know? Chad: Yeah. Joel: They've never dug a trench. Yes. Yes, yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah, exactly. 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. Chad: Welcome to the morning after hangover edition, live here at UNLEASH America. Joel: I tell you what, I'm feeling good though. Chad: From beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. And we are here. I'm Chad Sowash. [laughter] Chad: Joined by Joel Cheeseman by the way. Welcome to the show. Dr. Steven Hunt, author of Talent Tectonics: Navigating Global Workforce Shifts, Building Resilient Organizations and Reimagining the Employee Experience. That's a mouthful. Dr. Hunt, what else should we know about you? Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah, another mouthful is my job title. I am the Chief Expert for Work and Technology for SAP and... Joel: Chief expert? Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. Yeah, so I... Joel: So you're the CEO? Right? You're the chief? Dr. Steven Hunt: I used to be a junior expert. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: No. [laughter] Chad: And before that, apprentice expert. [chuckle] Dr. Steven Hunt: No. What I do is, it's pretty kinda unique. I'm an industrial organizational psychologist, so the psychology of work, all that stuff. And my career is focused on, how do you use technology to create more effective work environments? Like enable better decisions, more inclusive environments, agile environments, high-performing environments. As well as a lot of this is, how is technology changing the environments we need to create? Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: And so that book, Talent Tectonics, is really based on my experience working with, at this point, thousands of companies. Looking at how do we use technology to create better environments, taking into account the one thing that isn't changing about work, which is the fundamental psychology of people. Joel: It's all about signals at this point, right? All of what you said is about signals, whether it's behavioral signals, salespeople being able to reach their goals. They're just... It's all signal oriented, is it not? Dr. Steven Hunt: I think that's part of it. I don't think entirely. A lot of it is... Joel: I know. I know I'm simplifying it and you... Dr. Steven Hunt: No, no, no. Joel: And the chief experts like to make things complex. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. No, no. Chad: He's a doctor man. Joel: Jesus Christ. Chad: He's a doctor. Dr. Steven Hunt: Not exactly. Not a real doctor. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: My wife's a family medicine doctor. I'm always like, "I don't really... " I'm the kind of psychologist that doesn't actually care about people. Joel: Oh, okay. Dr. Steven Hunt: They just care about what they produce. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: That's not true. Joel: Ah, sounds familiar. Dr. Steven Hunt: No, it's more than that, it's job design. What's happening is the two big shifts, and you guys would know this, is one, the demographics are fundamentally changing our labor markets. There's more people aging out of a lot of labor markets than entering into 'em. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: And it's not that we don't have enough people, it's that we're not fully utilizing all the people we have in society. The labor participation rates are going down. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Particularly in historically, whatever you call, historically disenfranchised communities, wherever you want. How do we go out and how do we more effectively engage the entire workforce? Because just recruiting harder isn't gonna work. Joel: Companies really aren't engaging communities in the first place. We used to have training programs. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. Joel: Where they would work with schools, vocational schools. They would work with community colleges. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. Joel: They would... But they totally pulled back from that because of the incentives [chuckle] weren't there anymore. But long term, the incentive was always there that they would be building their own talent pipelines and now that has dried up and we're in the situation we are right now. Dr. Steven Hunt: Right. And I always get frustrated if you hear people say, "Oh, declining birth rates are bad for economies." That's not true. They're bad for economies that depend on exploiting large amounts of underemployed people. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: And the problem... Joel: Yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: We have a lot of people... There's a quote, I don't know who said it, but the potential is equally distributed across society. Opportunity is not. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: That's definitely true. A lot of this is about, the book's about how do we reimagine work so that we can bring more people into it through changing... I'll give a good example on technology, shift scheduling technology. The reason a lot of people don't work, particularly people that have primary family care responsibility, which in our society is mainly women, is because of shift schedules. If you gotta... If you're the one who has to pick up your kids... Joel: Oh, yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Shift schedules... And also hybrid work, this is another interesting thing. That hybrid work, since we've moved to that, employment of people with disabilities in the United States is the highest it has ever been. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Since we moved to hybrid work. Joel: 'Cause they can do work from home. Chad: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Exactly. Joel: And they can still get it done. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. So the book talks about, this is an example of job design. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: But also, how do you staff, how do you hire? But the book also focuses a lot on, the other thing is digitalization has changed the nature of work. We need to hire people to be creative, collaborative, caring as opposed to just productive. You can't be those things if you feel exhausted, burned out, hangover. [laughter] Just coming to your earlier comment. [laughter] Joel: As he looks directly at you, Joel Cheeseman, Jesus. Chad: I don't know what you're talking about. Who do you hope reads this book? Is it the CEO? Is it the head of talent? Who do you hope picks this book up? Dr. Steven Hunt: Anyone who is focused on creating more effective workforces and work environments. Now, for some companies that is the CEO. To be honest, a lot of CEOs, that's not where their passion and focus is. They're like, "People are important... " Chad: They say it is. [chuckle] Dr. Steven Hunt: "That's why I hired a CHRO." Yeah. But that's okay. I'm not... You can love technology. That doesn't mean you wanna be a CIO, but it's definitely HR. HR, HR technology, consultants, anyone who... Hey, my job is about helping companies create more effective job design, better staffing, more, better employee development, more engaged workforces. And it goes into... And the book is... It starts with talking about how digitalization and demographics are changing labor markets and work. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: But then it goes in and says, well, what do we do about it? And that... It's built around, I kind of talk about it, when it comes to HR and you guys have been in this field a long time, the basic challenges of this field never change. Joel: No. Dr. Steven Hunt: It's how you design jobs, how do you fill them, how do you develop people and how do you keep them around so they don't quit? Joel: But we're still getting it wrong. [chuckle] Dr. Steven Hunt: And now the book talks about, how do we need to rethink work using technology, but also going back to focusing on the one thing that isn't changing about work which is, what motivates people? What makes people happy? How we learn, it's the same now as it's always been. What changes is labor markets and people's expectation. They can get it, but it's like your grandparents didn't want to work in a soul-sucking repetitive job... Chad: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: That forced them to an early grave. They wanted to work in a cool job where they were appreciated and recognized. But it was a different world a hundred years ago. Chad: I'm gonna push back a little bit or just get your insight on this. So what if all the amount of change at the corporate level doesn't work? What if people are just into the freedom of the gig economy? Flipping the switch whenever I wanna drive a car, flipping the... Punching my ticket whenever I wanna deliver food. What if all the changes you talk about making to get people back into the workforce, keep them at a job, doesn't work because that is such a huge trend of freedom, independence... Joel: Autonomy. Chad: And living the way that I wanna live? Dr. Steven Hunt: Well, I think part of it is going back to really looking at a couple fundamental myths. One of them is that people don't want to work. There's a concept in psychology called need for achievement, which is that we are wired to want to accomplish meaningful things in our life. It's why babies crawl when they can. Parents don't go, "Oh, it's time for you to crawl." The kids... That's one of the joys of being a parent. You have kids. They just figure stuff out. Chad: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: It's just amazing. And it's... Why? 'Cause we're hardwired for it. And there's a reason why the word meaningless is a synonym for depression. People want a reason to get up in the morning. They want to go out and do something that makes them... There's people that where they feel valued, they feel like a contribution. Now, if they didn't have to work for money, would they work differently? Absolutely. But would they not work at all? No. No. Not if you're psychologically healthy. If you're clinically depressed, that's a different issue. Joel: People wanna do stuff. Dr. Steven Hunt: People wanna do stuff. You want to be valued. You want to make an impact. Chad: Is the achievement of delivering for DoorDash different than the achievement of writing a new program for a corporation? Dr. Steven Hunt: It's the reason for why you're working. People work for different reasons. You guys probably ride in Ubers all the time, or Lyfts or whatever. It's fascinating to talk to those drivers about why they decided to do it. A lot of them are like, "'Cause what I wanted from work basically was a paycheck to pay my rent. And this is the easiest way to get it and I'm great with that." Chad: Or I have a young child and this gives me the flexibility to spend time with them. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. Joel: We talked to a Uber driver in Scottsdale and she literally, she was head of huge customer service, and they've got call centers and whatnot around there, and she got out of that. First off, they were doing layoffs because of COVID and they were trying to pull people back in. And she just got out of it and she started driving Uber because she was stressed, she was burning out. She never got time to spend with her family. None of those things. So it's kind of like, what do you want as a human? Chad: And I think made more money. Right? At the end of the day, or no? Joel: Yeah, I don't... I think she made... Chad: Comparably? Yeah. Joel: As much as she needed to be happy and that's all that mattered. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. And that's the thing. I think what we're seeing is we are seeing a shift in how people wanna work and companies partially is that we used to hire people just to be productive, which is, show up, shut up and do what you're told, right? Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: And now because of digitalization, all this stuff that was show up, shut up, do what you're told is being automated. It's being automated away. And I'm a big fan of automation. It's like most of the stuff that's automated is repetitive, inhuman tasks that people shouldn't have to do anyhow. Joel: They suck. They're tasks that suck. Dr. Steven Hunt: Anyone who tells you work was better 50 years ago didn't work 50 years ago. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: You know? Chad: Yeah. Joel: They've never dug a trench. Yes. Yes, yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah, exactly. What's happening though, is now, we are hiring people to do the uniquely human things, like being creative, collaborative, caring. I use caring as a really good example. Technology can never care for a person 'cause caring is, by definition is about a person giving time of their life to you. That's what to care means. Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Technology can do the exact same thing, but it's part of the caring is, no, somebody's actually literally thinking of me. And that's at a deeper, profound level. So as we're changing the nature of work to do more truly human activities... Joel: Right. Dr. Steven Hunt: We need to tap into the things that make people really good at this. And the other big myth about people is that people fear change. We don't. We fear poorly managed change, punishing change. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: And that's our experience. We're wired to think change is always gonna be bad. It's just our... Joel: Well, and that's a great point. That's a great point because change usually sucks because the transformation part sucks. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. But I use examples like when I'm talking to people about this, have you ever gone river rafting? Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Okay. Did you have to do it? Were you like Louis and Clark and it was the only way to get across? [laughter] Chad: No. Dr. Steven Hunt: Did you pay money to do it? Joel: Yes. As a matter of fact. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah? Did you enjoy it? Joel: Oh, hell, yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: Did you know you can drown and die? Joel: Yes. So the rapid... Yeah, the... Yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: So you paid money to voluntarily introduce change in your life that could have killed you. Joel: And almost die. Yes. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. We don't fear change. Chad: He did the same when we started this podcast, by the way. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. Right. We actively seek it out. We seek it out. But there's certain things that make it fun. First of all, we know why we're doing it. It's like it's meaningful to us. You're not just being thrown on a boat in a river and saying, "You're off." Joel: Right. Dr. Steven Hunt: The second thing is that we're confident we have the task to be successful. It wouldn't be very fun if you had a boat that didn't float, right? And the third one is... Joel: Wouldn't work. Dr. Steven Hunt: We do it as a group. When we're under stress particularly, it's really important we feel there's other people around us and care about us. River rafting by yourself probably wouldn't be as fun. Joel: It's called kayaking. Dr. Steven Hunt: Kayak. Yeah. And it's a different experience. But I use this example because we have to rethink work that taps into that fundamental joy of learning and change that you see. Like going back to when you have your kids, one of the joys of being a parent is watching how delighted kids are in change. "This is new. Oh my gosh. Wow." But then we manage people to be productive and productivity is about doing the same... Chad: Standardizations. Dr. Steven Hunt: We're most productive when we do the same thing over. So it's, this book, that's what it really dives into is... I wanna be clear too, it's not about putting employee needs above the company 'cause good employee experiences don't come from working for failing companies. And I think we've even seen that in our own industry where companies kind of overemphasize one way and all of a sudden, "Oh, we're not making any money." Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: It's about realizing companies can't get what they need if employees don't get what they want. But employees can't get what they want if companies don't get what they need. How do we balance that? Joel: Talk about belonging. That's something that we haven't talked about yet. And it was something that many companies have really leaned heavily on from a culture standpoint is that you need to feel like you belong. And this was something that was starting to catch on before COVID and then really started to be useful within COVID because they didn't want to lose people who were working remote. But it almost feels like a lot of this doesn't matter anymore as as many CEOs are forcing back into the office. It feels like a micromanaged forcing that's happening. Which is change. And that is change that a lot of people, as Joel said earlier, they want the autonomy and they just don't like it. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. They don't want it. And they don't have to have it. And I think that with the companies that are going that route, it's like, yeah, in the future you're gonna be employing the people no one else wants to hire. Not a good long-term staffing strategy. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: It is. It's true. You're seeing this change. I think it is very frustrating from an exclusivity. The most inclusive thing that has happened in our lifetime to work is this move to hybrid. And I realize there's a lot of jobs you can't work hybrid. But even in those jobs, it's also creating a lot more empathy for people whose jobs require them to work fixed schedules. You've seen a lot of technology focused on what they call deskless or hourly workers. Part of that is staffing shortage. And part of that is more of a realization of, "I never thought about the fact that I didn't have to work from the office and there's other people that do." I think we're more empathetic to that, which is positive. I think as far as this backlash we're seeing right now, I think it's just a temporary response that you're seeing. The only reason we didn't embrace hybrid work sooner was the mindset of leaders that... Dr. Steven Hunt: I always point out that an office building is a form of technology. It's a form of communication technology developed in 1709, supposedly the first... It was the British Admiralty building, supposedly is like the first office building. And it's good and bad like any form of technology, like email or whatever. There's some pluses and dark sides to it and all that. But it got so widely used we forgot it was a form of technology and executives thought it was there... It wasn't effective. They just liked it 'cause it was familiar and it was comfortable 'cause it's how they grew up and they're... Joel: Well, I think it's management style though, personally. Dr. Steven Hunt: It's management style. They don't know how to... Joel: It's control. It's the way that you can control is only if you can put your hands on somebody. You can put your eyes on somebody. Dr. Steven Hunt: Well, and it's even worse than... If I'm getting really cynical here and I will... Joel: Please. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: 'Cause you guys, I know you guys like that. Chad: That's how we roll. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: I'm bringing it out. Joel: Come on Dr. Steve. Dr. Steven Hunt: Look, I'm trying to get you to laugh, 'cause you're kinda looking hangover. [laughter] Chad: How did I get this reputation? Joel: Yeah. You're a grumpy bastard, that's why. Dr. Steven Hunt: 'Cause you opened up saying, "This was the hangover edition." I listen. Chad: I'm a wonderful guy. Dr. Steven Hunt: I'm a psychologist. I'm always listening. [laughter] No, if you look at it, I think for a lot of these executives, nothing is more depressing than walking into an office with no people in it. And a lot of these executives, it's so funny, I see these people get up and there's two things that's almost always true about the, "We're getting back in the office." And I wanna be clear here, there's reasons to come back in an office or anything that, but I tend to lead... I don't like mandates in general. It makes much sense to be saying, "You have to be in the office three days a week." It'd be like saying, "You can't be in the office more than two days a week." Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: People want flexibility. Give it to 'em. But if you look at the people that say this, getting really cynical for a second, they're inevitably somebody who does not have primary family care responsibility. It's not the person that picks up the kids if they get calls from the school. Joel: Yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: It's probably somebody, if they commute at all, lives very close to the office. And very often it's people that probably are never even in the office. But I think what it is, is they come off their business trip, they walk into the hall and it's depressing when there's nobody in this cubicle farm. They wanna see all the people and they walk through. And I think it's very much an ego thing, to be honest. Joel: Well, and the cubicle farm is depressing for the people who have to fucking work there. Dr. Steven Hunt: Who never get to leave, who don't [laughter] get the windows. Joel: Yes. Yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: 'Cause the windows go to the person that's never in the office. Joel: So it has nothing to do with the masses, it has to do with that one individual. So there's a story where DJ Sol, David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, was at a country club. Some of his employees came up during the week and said, "Hey, love you, love working for Goldman Sachs." And he automatically thought, "What the hell are you doing here? Why aren't you working?" Again. He was at the country club. It's like this inability for CEOs or somebody at that level to understand that, "Hey look, first off, are they getting the job done? Are they hitting their KPIs?" And by the way, you're at the goddam country club too. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah, I agree. And this is empathy. I think we're getting a lot more empathetic in general. But there's an interesting one where technology plays a role in that. One of our customers I was working with pointed out and said, "Executives can't truly understand employee experience without using technology." And I was like, "I sell technology for a living." So I'm kind of like, "That sounds like something I'd say." But [laughter] this is a person who didn't have to say that. I'm like, "Well, can you talk more about that?" And she said, "First of all, if you're a large company, you can't possibly interact with everyone. Plus people's experiences change radically over time. So you'd have no way to sort of keep the finger on the pulse. But second," she's like, "You live in a bubble, you're treated differently. And that's not bad. They have admin assistants for a reason, but there's a lot of stuff that regular people have to do, they don't have to deal with." And then the third one I thought was the most fascinating. She also said, "And you should get out amongst the people and listen and have that." That's good. You should do that. But even then, if somebody's emotionally intelligent isn't gonna be totally authentic with a CEO. Joel: Oh, hell, no. Dr. Steven Hunt: I talked to a friend once who said they met somebody very high up in the organization and they had a really significant problem. I said, "Did you talk to them about it? 'Cause they could do something about it?" He goes... Joel: No. Dr. Steven Hunt: "I'm only meeting this person one time. I don't wanna be the guy who whines." You know? And so I think part of this is leaders having to really understand their inability to really experience the same thing their employees are experiencing and know that gap exists and then find ways to close it. Joel: Well, and larger organizations having the hierarchy and the actual managers trained to be leaders, not just managers, not just pencil pushers or micromanagers, but actual leaders, we don't do that in corporate America. Dr. Steven Hunt: We don't. Joel: The military does it. But we don't do it. As you get promoted in the military, you have to go through leadership training. There's no leadership training in corporate America. You just... Your great individual performance gets you to be a manager for some reason. Dr. Steven Hunt: I always joke when companies... I'm like, "How many of your managers were promoted to management positions 'cause they were good at coaching?" They'd say, "None." Joel: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: And then I'm like, "And how much training did they get compared to like your sales teams?" "Like almost none." "So you could master management." And then the last one they asked that... And this has gotten better over time. I will say all these we're trending in a positive direction unless I sound super depressing. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: But we've got so much farther to go. I always ask, "You wanna develop people, how do you reward managers that develop and promote people off their teams, which is what a good manager does." [chuckle] And so often it's, "Well, we punish them by not backfilling the position." [laughter] I'm like, "And you wonder why you don't have a coaching culture." It's not the manager's fault. It's, you haven't created an environment to make it happen. Joel: Then that's a behavior that the manager understands. So therefore, they never allow anybody off their team. And everybody feels stuck. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. But the managers, what are they hired to do? They're rewarded to execute against a plan. And so if they're not rewarded to share talent, why else should they do it? You're not asking them to. And they don't... So don't blame... I hate it when it... Talent poaching is a weasel word to... It's like when people say employees don't quit companies, they quit managers. I mean, no, they quit companies that employ bad managers. Don't blame the manager. [laughter] Chad: You're using the word hybrid instead of remote. Is that on purpose? And how do you see the future of the office? Dr. Steven Hunt: Well, I think it is hybrid in the sense that part of effective remote work is meeting in person. And we've known this before the pandemic. There's a lot of research on virtual teams. And this is why I crack up when people are talking about this change. I have worked remotely for 16 years. I worked for a global company. I had at one point a team that had people in six different countries. It's not that this is new, it's just new to a lot of people. And so I see the future of us going into more and more hybrid work. There's so many benefits to it. What we haven't figured out is how to effectively use that communication technology called an office that we were over-reliant on it. There was all sorts of bad sides to, oh you're committed 'cause you stay late, kind of BS, stuff like that. Joel: Yeah. Yes. Dr. Steven Hunt: And actually aside, it's fascinating how it's changed the power structures 'cause it's like why does that person have more influence? Well, they don't know anything but they sit next to the CEO. Chad: Yeah. Dr. Steven Hunt: They get face time. Chad: Proximity bias. Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. So what we need to figure out is how do we effectively use in-person meeting? Because the research on this has shown it's really important to connect. Like the fact that we've met in person now forever will change our electronic communication. Hopefully in a good way guys. I hope so. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: You know what I mean? Once you've met somebody, when you get an email from them, you actually interpret it differently. And I don't know what it is psychologically, I kind of joke, maybe we smell each other or something, I don't know. But there's something that happens when we meet in person. Joel: Pheromones. Dr. Steven Hunt: Pheromones. Joel: Joel's putting off some pheromones right now. Dr. Steven Hunt: And its... Chad: My Drakkar is very pungent this morning. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: Yeah. Joel: Hai Karate. [laughter] Dr. Steven Hunt: English Leather. [laughter] Chad: Sex Panther, 60% of the time, works every time. Dr. Steven Hunt: That's what I thought but I couldn't say it, I feel like. Chad: We can say it, thankfully. Joel: Of course. Chad: That is Dr. Steven Hunt, everybody. Joel: Yes. Chad: Author of Talent Tectonics: Navigating Global Workforce Shifts, Building Resilient Organizations and Reimagining the Employee Experience. Doctor, for those that want to connect with you or buy the book, where would you send them? Dr. Steven Hunt: The book is available on Amazon and any other online sites that you buy books from. It's published by Wiley and LinkedIn is this a great place to find me. You can also go, steventhunt.com is my little website, Talent Tectonics about the book. And I work for SAP, so you can also contact me through SAP and if you're an SAP customer, I hope that you will. Joel: Excellent. And if you're not an SAP customer? Dr. Steven Hunt: You can still talk to me. [laughter] Chad: Feeling fine and cherry wine. That's another one in the can. Chad, we out. Joel: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hang out with these two Chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

While Joel takes some time in the "happiest place on earth" Chad pulls in industry pro Quincy "Queen of Chatbots" Valencia to fill in and add needed snark to this week's episode. Indeed hops in the trojan horse for a trip to France where they are introducing a pay-per-results pricing model, after retreating from launching full-scale PPSA and PPA models in the US. IS JOONKO GOING DOWN? After allegations of fraudulent conduct by Joonko's CEO? FUTURE OF AI WORK McKinsey predicts AI's impact to occur by 2030, more than 70% of organizations struggle with the risks of using AI tools and that's just scratching the surface - ENJOY! TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm Chad 'Passed the Pierogi' Sowash. Quincy: I'm Quincy 'Way to Fly for Your Fake AI' Valencia. Chad: [laughter] And this week's show, Putin's chef lays an egg, Joonko is falling apart right in front of our eyes, companies are planning for the future of work with AI. And the question of the moment is, will Indeed bring results or bullshit to France? Let's do this. All right, live from Krakow, Poland, kids. Cheesman is off enjoying Orlando with the family this week. There's a great Book of Mormon joke in there somewhere, I just can't find it, which is why we have once again an honored guest, Quincy Valencia, filling in for the Mr. Cheesman. [applause] Quincy: Thanks Joel for never working and always being on vacation, I really appreciate you for that. And I'm coming to you live from the Redneck Riviera of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Chad: Oh, that is the Redneck Riviera. So, Quincy, for those listeners who have been asleep for the past two decades and they don't know who you are, give them a quick Twitter bio. Quincy: I've been in this space for almost as long as Chad Sowash, 25 years. He's older than me, so he always wins. HR, HR tech, provider, practitioner, product creator, and currently working as an HR tech analyst. So if it's a thing in the space, and now I'm a podcast co-host for a day. Chad: Yes! Quincy: So if it's a thing in this space, by God, I'm doing it. Chad: Goddamn it, I'm doing it. That's right, kids. Practitioner, vendor, analyst, all the boxes are checked. That's one of the reasons why we have Quincy on the show. And she knows all the skeletons in my closet, that's another reason. Quincy: That's true. Chad: So I'm in Krakow, Poland, and this week, Putin's chef Yevgeny Prigozhin... What is it? How do you fuck say it? Quincy: You're asking me? Chad: He turned his Wagner troops and tanks toward Russia. And it's a much different feeling when you're watching this play out from a country away. Here in Poland, we've got Belarus that is a country between us and Russia, and then we've got Ukraine just to the South. Was this a big issue? Was this a big point of news in the US? Quincy: It was all over the news and I try not to watch the news. But yeah, it was everywhere. It was definitely a story, as it should be. Chad: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Quincy: You know, when people tried to overthrow the government here, it made me mad, but when they try to do it there, I thought it was the right thing. So maybe I need to reevaluate my standards. Chad: Yeah, I don't know, because I think the entire world stage looked at us when that happened, January 6th happened, and they were like, "What the actual fuck, this should never happen in the US." But Polish that I've talked to here, Polish citizens, they're like, "Yeah, no, we expected something like that to happen." And again, I think a lot of it has to do with the optics of what we've been able to, whether it's our story, propaganda, whatever the hell you wanna call it, we're really good at driving a message. Russia is really good at throwing a bunch of bodies at bullets. Quincy: Which is unfortunate. And in that particular case, I'd have to say I would be on the side of the usurpers because maybe I'm okay with it, overthrowing the government, if the government's crazy, I don't know, maybe that's my standard, I'm not sure, and dangerous and murderous. Chad: Dangerous and murderous. Well, my first shout out is going to go out to, guess who? It's the Polish people. Where's my shout out sign at? Anyway, screw it. The Polish people. Much like last week when I was in Vienna, Julie and I received the red carpet treatment. But Agnieszka Porebska, the CEO of Talent Alpha, headquartered here in Poland, she went the extra mile by bringing her family to Krakow and personally taking us to two museums with walking tours. And at the end of the day, we had beers with a group of vendors and practitioners here in Poland. So the Polish are incredibly warm and welcoming people. So big, big shout outs to our friends here in Poland. [applause] Quincy: That sounds like a great time and I'm really happy for you and all of you. And that's a great use of your time, too. Chad: I think so. I think it's all about diplomacy. That's what I said last week. This is a diplomatic mission for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Quincy: Is that how you justify writing it off on your taxes? Chad: No. It's a good idea, though. I never thought of that. [laughter] Quincy: We'll talk. All right, well, my first shout out... Is it my turn? Do I get to go? Chad: Yes, you get to go now. Yes. Quincy: So I did mention that I am an industry analyst now in the HR tech space, and I've only been in this seat for a little over a year, so a baby, if you will, but there's someone I wanna give a shout out to, her name is Lisa Rohan. Lisa's been an analyst in this space at IDC for 20 years, I think. She's one of the OGs in this space. Chad: Wow. Quincy: And she is moving into retirement happily. Good for her, congratulations to her. She's a legend, she's forged paths for the rest of us that we may not have had. The space is it's pretty male dominated. There's some great women analysts in this space. We've got Madeline Theranos, Sarah White and some others, but Lisa was there first. And I don't know Lisa well, but I certainly know her legacy. I had the honor and privilege of meeting her and actually sharing a table with Lisa at an event we were at together last month, I think. Maybe it was April, I don't know, the month's weren't together, but she was phenomenal, her questions are on point and smart and everything she has brought to this industry has been meaningful. So, thank you for all you've done, Lisa, congratulations on your well earned retirement. Chad: Amen. Can't get enough good people, not to mention, you've got leaders like that who help others actually hand up throughout their career. So that's awesome. My second shout out goes to VanHack. That's right, kids. [vocalization] Chad: A Vancouver, Canada-based software company dedicated to connecting international tech talent with employees or employers, in Canada, in Europe received 3 million in funding this week. That's right, kids. It's a marketplace for talent. No ChatGPT necessary. Quincy: What? Chad: Congrats to CEO Ilya Brotzky and the VanHack team. SFX: Take off, we're doing our movie. Don't wreck our show you hoser. Chad: So Quincy, quick question, what are your thoughts on funding in this area of the era of GenAI? Because right now it seems like those who are generative AI or if they're getting more of a look than everybody else, other than obviously the VanHacks of the world? Quincy: In some ways they should. I mean, it is the next new great thing. My cautionary tale is twofold, first of all GenAI in general is not new, it's been around since the '60s. The technology is advanced and really took a turn forward, and I think it was the mid-2010s. There was a new piece of technology that bolstered the ability of generative AI, and then certainly we all know, I'm not even gonna say the name, it who shall not be named in November of last year, who came out. And it really does have the ability to be transformative. Every single person though who's coming out right now is saying that we're using generative AI or large language models or blah, blah, blah. And they're not. And that is the reason for my way to fly for your fake AI nickname this week twice. [laughter] Quincy: I spend a lot of time with vendors twice in the last 2 weeks, I've been shown products where they're touting their generative AI capabilities and that's not what it is. One of them was a traditional chatbot, which by the way, there's nothing wrong with it. Chad: No. Quincy: There's a ton of place, and it's useful and there's reason to use that. And the other was basically RPA, and everyone's trying to spin their product offering as if it's GenAI, as if that's the only thing. GenAI is one form of technology, it deserves the funding so that we can advance it, but the security protocols around it that we need mitigate some of the risk associated with that, which is gonna have to come certainly at the org level, but at a larger level around the technology itself, but guys, you don't have to be in GenAI to create new shit, so good for them for getting funding for something that's still really useful. Chad: Amen. Out of Canada, and we also dropped an interview this week with Georgios Markakis from Venero Capital, he answers that question in our episode, that is HR Tech Funding and M&A. So check that out. Quincy: Alright, so my second shout out is to the entire State of Ohio. Chad: Oh no. Quincy: Right, for two things. First, I've been to all 50 states, Chad, did you know that? Chad: All 50 states. Yeah, you actually lived in South Dakota, which nobody wants to do that. But yeah. Quincy: [chuckle] I know. So I've lived in all 50 states and never ever have I been to a state with worst highways than the state of Ohio, so congratulations on fine funding of your highway programs there, Ohio, for making me never ever wanna go back. And the other reason I never wanna go back to Ohio is because their's stupid shit like this, an Ohio State Representative, and I can't remember his name, and frankly, it wasn't worth looking it up 'cause it was so stupid, has put forth a bill to end all remote work, he doesn't want it, should be illegal, shouldn't be allowed, to which I say, which CEO in the state of Ohio took this guy on his private jet somewhere and is the biggest campaign financer for him, because why in the hell else would you do that? And why should government care? It's the stupidest thing, there are a lot of stupid bills, and I live in the South, so if you wanna talk about stupid bills, we could have a whole other show on that. But that's, not only is it ridiculous, but it goes right along with my 1.1 shout outs with my part B to the CEO of PayPal, who just jumped on the remote work doesn't work, and everyone should go back to work bandwagon. It's ridiculous, it's been disproven repeatedly, and in fact, the opposite has been proven true. And this guy just needs to sit down. Chad: Yes. So it's gone all the way up to pretty much the Supreme Court. Quincy: It has. Chad: Where all the hand greasing, palm greasing, that's been happening. So yeah, transparency is huge, Jona actually talked about the death of journalism, which is really has started to kind of like atrophy over the past 20, 30 years. Quincy: Oh yeah. Chad: And a lot of that has to do with trying to ensure that this transparency doesn't happen more. When you have local people on the streets, we don't have as much transparency in our local government, and then it just continues to bloom up. So yeah, it's a huge issue. And when we have individuals who are actually weighing in on topics that they should just be shutting the fuck up about. Quincy: It has nothing to do with him. Chad: At all. At all. Well, my last shout out goes to Datapeople, a New York-based SaaS recruiting predictability platform provider, that's a mouthful, raised 13 million Series A funding. Another non-GenAI platform getting funded? I don't think so. [chuckle] Chad: Datapeople brings data-backed objectivity, efficiency and predictability to talent acquisition beginning with the optimized job description. And my question is, companies like this who lean very hard on this type of tech, like a Textio, they do have some domain expertise, there's no question around this area. Although, when being able to train AI and having enough data to be able to back and pretty much replace a Textio or a Datapeople, I feel like this platform is going to be pretty much scrunched into a feature on every single core talent platform that's out there. What do you think about that? Quincy: As it should be, in my opinion. And it's already showing up. I wrote about this week, Oracle released some new tech using GenAI that actually does some of that. It helps... It's assisted authoring, which is really really smart. The risks... Well first... And I think everyone should be doing it by the way. Particularly as more and more of the work leaves the seat of HR or recruiters or other people who've been trained in our expert supposedly in these things, and lands firmly in the lap of hiring managers and it's, "What do you mean, I gotta write a job description from scratch?" They don't know how they haven't been trained. And they're gonna unintentionally turn away some candidates. So I think it's a really smart thing to do. Have to be careful because depending on what model you're using, again, we all know you can automatically bake in bias. Chad: Yes. Quincy: Into those job descriptions. So it has to be careful how it's applied but I don't see any reason why you wouldn't wanna do this. And I hope that after this round of funding and a few short years we see them making bank, if it works, getting acquired by one of the platforms that needs to include it. Chad: Yeah, I think this to me sounds, again, like more runway to be able to look very deeply at different acquisition targets. So you're the acquisition target but acquirees, right? Quincy: Yeah. Yes. Chad: That's the biggest key, because this is going to be a feature, kids. This is not a platform, this is feature and... SFX: Just the tip. Chad: That's just the tip from Quincy and Chad today. So, free stuff. That's right, kids. Oh, my God, we give away so much shit, there a lot of stuff. For instance, we give away beer, craft beer. Quincy: I've never gotten any. Chad: Aspen Tech Labs. That's right. Aspen Tech labs, they don't actually deliver the beer, nor does Chad and Cheese, we have UPS and FedEx for that. But one person every month is going to win a box of craft beer from our friends in Aspen Tech Labs. Then you have whiskey. It's coming from Textkernel. Everybody knows Textkernel. They are the scraping and AI. Oh, you've heard of that word before, right? Quincy: No. Chad: AI. They've been doing that for decades, kids. And they are sponsoring a couple of bottles of whiskey. One from Chad, one from Cheese. Mine's always better. Quincy: Right. Chad: Then you have T-shirts from JobGet, which everybody loves as well. I think you have every single one of them, don't you? Quincy: I do and I wear them all over the world. [laughter] Chad: Always selfies, when you have your Chad and Cheese T-shirt, you got to take a selfie no matter where you're at. Then... Quincy: I do. Chad: I know. I'm telling everybody else. That's what you do. You are the standard. Quincy: Thank you. Thank you very much. Chad: We also have a new giveaway, a $250 Airbnb getaway gift card. Quincy: What? Chad: Yes. From Abode HR, they want all of the talent acquisition professionals that are out there, they want them to be able to get the hell away from all the noise, sit and think for a minute. You can do that in an Airbnb wherever you want. Take the $250, take a long weekend, do whatever you want, but you got to get away. And especially for the Abode folks, you wanna focus on that new cohort that's coming up and that's Gen Z. That's their specialty. Last but not least, if it's your birthday... SFX: Happy birthday. Chad: It's rum from plum. Now, birthdays will be back next week because I don't wanna mess with Cheesman's, his whole flair with birthdays. But again, Rum from Plum, if you haven't done your Plum Assessment yet, go to Google, type in Plum Assessment, go take it, have a good time. This can all be found at chadcheese.com/free or just click on free in the upper right hand corner on chadcheese.com. Quincy: Do it. Chad: Last but not least, next week is RecFest at Knebworth Park, ten stages, 5500 people, they're only allowed to have that many. They sold out a few... I think, last week or something like that. So if you didn't get a chance to go, sucks to be you, maybe next year, but it's gonna be a blast next week in Knebworth Park. But if you haven't been able to get to Knebworth Park and maybe, I don't know, maybe in the US or maybe you wanna visit the US, RecFest is coming to Nashville in September. It's the very first time. And Quincy, are you going to Nashville? Quincy: I'm not. Chad: Okay. We're gonna rectify this because this is the place, everybody's gonna be there. And without Quincy being there, not everybody's there. So we've got to get Quincy there. It's where TA leaders bring their teams for all hangout days, right. There meetings, interact with other practitioners, learn from obviously a bunch of different vendors and practitioners and find out exactly what's happening in the Tech space. So just go to chadcheese.com, click on events in the upper right hand corner. Are you ready? Quincy: Ready. SFX: Topics. Chad: Oh, shit. Indeed goes to France. Who saw this coming? This comes from RH Martin. Indeed, France is changing its pricing model, making way for pay-per-application. "It's France and Canada's turn to make the change, which is scheduled for the beginning of July. What change, you might ask? The first results with the pay for results system obtained in the US and UK are satisfactory." Is that how you really... You wanna go with satisfactory? Quincy: Satisfactory? Chad: "We particularly follow indicators that have baptized positive outcomes." Said by the Indeed France Managing Director Matthieu Eloy. Okay, Quincy, is Indeed bringing innovation or bullshit to France and Canada. Quincy: Well, first and foremost pay-for-performance is not innovative. Appcast and others have been doing that for years in other realms, but same thing. Chad: Yeah. Quincy: So no, that's not innovative. Much like some people that I know who host a really popular podcast, I'm skeptical of anything that Indeed does. I'm not a fan. They're good at pushing propaganda. You know, we'll get you a thousand applicants, but only one ever gets hired, is not the way to go. Depends on their pricing model. And we'll see if it works and maybe it'll work better there than it has other places with their, what do they say, satisfactory results? [laughter] Chad: That's... Yes. Yes. Quincy: I mean, is that the way to launch a product. Satisfactory? Who approved that? But I don't know. I'm skeptical. It's not innovative. It may be innovative there. I'm not an expert in recruiting in France or Canada, for that matter. But we'll see, we'll see what happens. I'm interested, Chad, as always, to know what your thoughts are about something Indeed is doing. Chad: Hmm. I'm gonna start off with that. So first off, they talk about pay-per-performance results oriented, and they're really focusing on this Pay-per-started apply, which literally should just be the acronym should be S-H-A-M, because it's a sham. Quincy: Wait, it's pay-per-started apply? Chad: Yes, yes, yes. Quincy: Oh, I missed that part. Yeah, it's shit. Don't do it. Save your money. Chad: So, it's exactly what PPC is, it's just repackaged. It's a different colored lipstick on the same damn pig with expensive... More expensive rates. So, now let's talk about PPA. Quincy: Wait, before you do that. Chad: Yeah. Quincy: I have to roll back what I said. Chad: Good. Quincy: And not compare this then to what Appcast and others have been doing quite successfully for years. Because what they're doing actually works. This is different. I agree. I missed that little part. The pay-per-applies start. And that's... You're right. PPC repackaged. So, sorry Appcast, I take it back. [laughter] Quincy: Tame. Chad: Okay. So then we'll roll into the PPA side of the house. The pay-per-application. This is nothing more than suffocating trusted partners through Indeed's new mandated registration. Remember back in the day when they actually kicked platforms off for mandated registration? Quincy: Yes. Chad: Now they're doing it. This is the newest Trojan Horse built to, once again, suck the life out of trusted partners. Indeed claims a monthly audience of 300 million unique visitors to its engine worldwide, including 7 million in France, which they would not have, I repeat, Indeed would not have without their trusted partners. They can't reach that kind of traction and/or audience. Now, let me tell you a little history. Little story. You ready for a little story? Quincy: I'm ready. Chad: Back in the day, Monster.com and CareerBuilder... Quincy: Heard of them. Chad: Yeah. They both started working with Indeed and in their first Trojan horse. And they got a little bit of that traffic and then they got hooked. And then the next thing you know Indeed is sucking all the traffic and all the life out of the Monsters and the CareerBuilders of that day. Now, that was before mandated registration. Mandated registration means everybody out there in the trusted partner network, it means, everybody that you push their way, they don't need you for next time. They're sucking the life out of whatever you are sending to them, which means your money stream, your revenue stream from Indeed is going to atrophy, it's gonna go away, and then they're gonna kick you to the curb. This is what history shows us, kids. So to think that this is something that's gonna be big in France, I think is kind of hilarious. But we'll see. They're pushing the propaganda, they're boiling the frog, and they're doing what Indeed does. Quincy: Oh, I don't say boiling the frog. I don't like that. [laughter] Chad: Leave the frogs out of it, Chad. Quincy: Nobody likes it, but that's what they're doing. All right, I'm going down. That's the newest single from Joonko. That's right, kids. Here directly from The Post. Joonko, a New York City based startup that created an AI powered job board to improve diversity in hiring, is on the brink of collapse. I'll say that again, is on the brink of collapse after its CEO allegedly duped investors with an elaborate scheme to exaggerate the size of the company's business. Joonko founder and CEO, Ilit Raz, resigned after internal probe found she had "Engage in egregious, unethical, and fraudulent conduct, which caused harm to the company and its shareholders". The startup's board of directors said in a statement obtained by The Post. Raz allegedly misled investors by claiming Joonko was working with 150 companies, "When at practice the number was significantly smaller." News of Raz's alleged scheme... This is where it gets fucking crazy, man. Quincy: It's already crazy, man. Chad: Yeah, but it comes after the company raised $25 million in cash from investors last fall included the submission of, listen, fake invoices that were attributed to real people and real companies, fake wire transfers, and even fake bank accounts. A source with knowledge of the situation told The Post. Joonko received 38.5 million in funding. Their last round, as I had said, September of 2022 is a series B and that was 25 million. Quincy, does Joonko live through this or are they already dead in the water? Quincy: No, I don't see there's any way they can live through this. The blow back is gonna break them. They won't get any more money. First of all, has she not ever heard the name Elizabeth Holmes and the company Theranos? You can't do this. Why they would, I don't know. I'm familiar with the product, it's actually a good product. So I'm not sure why they would do that. And they actually do or did, I have some notable companies and logos that they could actually tout. So why they would do that is beyond me. The only thing I can think of was to bolster that round of funding and, did they need it? I guess. I don't know what was going on in the background. Everybody needs money. 38% of startups in 2021, I just read this, failed because they didn't have enough cash. That was the number one reason why they failed. Number two was because they were offering a product or service that no one wanted or needed. That's a good reason to fail. Chad: Oh, yeah. Quincy: But if you need the cash, that's fine. But I don't understand, you don't have to do that. And it takes a lot of work to put that elaborate of a scheme together. One would think and hope that if she used those powers for good instead of evil good, could have come out of it. I don't think they have a chance. What are your thoughts? Chad: Yeah, yeah. I think, from my standpoint, you gotta wonder how long before investors rip those funds back. Number one, we do know Aubrey Brown, who we interviewed and he was actually leading the DEI efforts over at Airtable before he took the VP of Strategy Position there at Joonko, He's literally I think the only person that I would say could prospectively right the ship if they kept their funding. The guy knows what he's fucking doing. It is, from what I've heard, a good product. So, I think you've gotta have the right person in place, number one. Number two, you've gotta have that funding so that runway's got to be there. And, I don't know, I think he's a great guy. Incredibly well spoken, everything that you want out of a founder. Quincy: Yeah. Chad: Right. He's a great just face person. And I think because he is a practitioner too, he knows how to get inside the minds of the people that should be buying. So I think they have a chance, but it's a very, very, very, very thin chance. Quincy: Well, what they've done, what she's done in this case is really... There are other products who do this in the market, SeekOut does something similar, right? Which we know and love that company. So there are others who do the same thing or something similar and she's opened the door completely... Chad: Yes. Quincy: For organizations to make the switch. And it's not a technology that's so deeply embedded into an organization that's particularly difficult switch. Chad: Yeah. Quincy: So I think the other companies who do the same thing are poised to come in and say, "Hey, we are not gonna lie and cheat you, and take some of that business." I never want a company to go under, particularly if it's a good company offering a good product the market needs. Chad: Yeah. Quincy: I just don't know, in this case, even with the right person at the helm, that it's gonna be able to do enough and do it fast enough to fix this. I don't know. Good luck to them, but... Chad: Yeah. Quincy: She is... The theme of today's show, by the way, is people will see as we go on, is for fuck's sake people, what are you doing? [laughter] Quincy: Starting with Ohio and moving in here, and I just, I don't understand people. I just don't get it. Chad: I don't either. And the hardest part about this for me, I think is that we've seen DEIB as a nice to have instead of a need to have. And when you are a platform that is not seen as a need to have, and this happens, it just automatically sends everybody running away from you, which is not a good thing to be kids. We will be right back. Alright. How about a little future of work? Quincy, what do you think about that? Quincy: My future is retirement. I don't wanna work. [laughter] Wait, I didn't say that out loud. If my boss is listening, I do wanna work. I love my job. I don't wanna be unemployed. Chad: Woo. Yeah. Okay. Well, you still got some time for that, don't worry. So this is from Forbes, Gone, our CEO requests to McKinsey for explanations of how AI technology works and whether it's over hyped or not. Now, five questions dominate the conversation these days. Quincy: What are they? Chad: Rule number one... Good question. What are the specific use cases? Number two, how do I get started? Number three, what are the risks I need to manage? Number four, what are the implications for present and future employees? And the last one, how do I learn fast? [laughter] Yes. That's the top five. So previously McKinsey predicted AI would take effect in 2040. They've bumped that up to 2030. Right? Open AI has cracked this bitch wide open. Their winners will be those who move fast and quickly figure out how to integrate these new technologies into their IT stack and workflows and reimagine how they manage talent and design, their operating model as a result. But wait, there's more this from HR Dive, more than 70% of organisations are struggling to keep up with the risks of using AI tools, citing significant risks that have emerged, which could lead to financial loss, reputational loss, or damage, the loss of customer trust, regulatory penalties, that sucks. Compliance challenges, litigation and more. It's the wild wild west out there, and James West and Artemus Gordon aren't here to save us, kids. So what's the CEO to do, Quincy? Quincy: Well, first of all, they're asking the right questions. Means a lot of questions, but they're asking the right questions. I talked to customers, and it's 10 years ago, every time I talked to a client it was, "Hey, do you guys got any of that AI stuff?" And 'cause it was a checkbox on somebody's performance review and they had to have it. Chad: Yeah. Quincy: And now it's not that anymore. It's, what are we doing and how are we moving the product forward with the use of AI? They still don't necessarily know what it is, but buyers are becoming more educated. They're certainly more sophisticated. And they know that this is not something that's gonna go away. And they need to really evaluate their tech stack and the products that are coming to them for how it'll be used for the security protocols behind that technology is very, very important. And so my advice to some of the smaller guys is make sure that you can have the same sort of story as some of the big guys, because people know and trust their security, so you better make sure you have that too. But I do think the CEOs are asking the right questions and the vendors need to keep up. But by the way, don't lie to the analyst your briefing and tell them you have something that you don't 'cause that will never end well for you. Chad: It won't. That's what a vapourware has been around ever since the... Even before the internet. It was salespeople are selling shit that doesn't exist that they saw could have prospectively been on a roadmap at one time. Quincy: Say it isn't so, Chad. Chad: You know it's so. That is a huge issue. And I really believe, and this is where we have to start taking control over the risks. That's not gonna stop. Right? Those things are not gonna stop. But what we have to do as practitioners and leaders, and also vendors, co-founders and whatnot, is we have to ensure that we are doing the right things from an auditing standpoint. Quincy: Yes. Chad: To ensure, right? That first and foremost, our deliverables are on par with what we're promising. And we can't... If the little Joey over there selling something and has a side conversation, it's not something that we can manage. It's everything that we're putting out in the public. And some of the things that I've seen out there over the years have been total bullshit in the first place. Out in the public through mass marketing and their PR people, it's just total bullshit. So, we have to make sure that we align with those things because trust in this market means more than anything else. Chad: ChatGPT and OpenAI showed us one thing, it's that transparency and giving the individual and opportunity to use it, feel it, touch it, and understand that it's not perfect, but it's growing, it's living, and it's moving, and it's learning, is that you are going to have to be more transparent, you're going to have to put that technology in the hands of people well before they buy that shit. So, anybody out there today that's thinking about, from a vendor standpoint, you've gotta start thinking about how you can prospectively do much like, not exactly like, but much like OpenAI did, put the power of the tool in the hands of the practitioners, help them understand it's not perfect. Make sure you get it in front of the analysts and everybody, because I'm telling you right now, transparency will save your ass in the end. And everybody was looking at OpenAI at first, like, what the fuck are they doing? Putting this this thing out there for the masses and look what it did. Quincy: Yeah. Yeah. I partially agree with you. I'm gonna just sit somewhere I don't think that it's... I do I believe in transparency, so I 100% agree with you there. We know we've always been aligned there. I don't know that it's necessary for every single technology vendor to go to every single perspective buyer and say, "Here's how we do every single thing in the backend." I don't know that that's... Chad: Oh no, you don't need to do that. Quincy: I don't know that's necessary. I don't even know that anybody would care to want to. I used to have a boss a long time ago that would say, "I don't wanna hear the labor pains. I just wanna see the baby." And I think it kind of... This fits the same... Well. Chad: I hope that was a female who said that. [laughter] Quincy: It wasn't. This was in the early '90s. Yeah, let's go back to our DEI&B discussion. Anyway... [laughter] Quincy: But really, practitioners and people who are gonna be using it, they care about the practicality of it, they wanna know it's their CTOs wanna know a little bit more. I don't know if they have to put it all in their hands, but transparency is absolutely key. Again, buyers are becoming more sophisticated and more intelligent... Eh, no. More sophisticated, more educated. [laughter] Quincy: And organizations need to have statements. So, I actually talked to a client about this this week. I never recommend that all of my vendors go, all of my clients go and up in their entire roadmap to figure out a way to insert this new stuff. Most of them are because they're smart. But you don't have to, but you need to have an organizational position on it. Are you taking a more conservative approach? Are you taking a wait and see? Are you making sure you have more security protocols? Is it on your roadmap? Are you working on it? Are you not? Have a statement. Because you will not go in, your salespeople will not go into a meeting without somebody asking about it. Chad: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we actually talked about this on the stage at Unleash America. This is all about build, partner, or buy, if you are a vendor. If there are ways that you can actually, practically get some of this text, some of this generative AI or what have you, into your stack, there are point solutions that are out there that you could partner with. If you can maybe possibly build it yourself or just buy that shit, the market is fucking perfect for that right now. Yes. Quincy: You buy it. You don't have time to build it yourself unless you already have, a team of developers sitting on the bench with nothing to do, buy it. You have the cash, go get it. Chad: Well, go buy it, I would partner first. So you get that little taste to see if it works and see if they're not bullshitting you. And then once you get it, once you get it and it's like, okay baby, you're mine. That being said, we're gonna talk about ChatGPT and jobs. So this is from Business Insider jobs are now requiring, that's right. I just said requiring. Experience with ChatGPT probably like 15 years of experience or something. Quincy: What's the theme of the show, Chad. Chad: Yeah. And for fuck sake people. Quincy: God. Chad: And they will pay as much as $800,000 a year for this skill. I don't believe that, I'll have to see that one. A recent study from Resume Builder found that 91% of companies with open positions were looking to hire workers who knew how to use open AI's Buzzy chatbot. Respondents said ChatGPT helped boost productivity, save time, and bolster the company's bottom line. Companies are already using the chatbot to generate marketing material, develop code, and court briefs. Much more on that one later. Here's a quote. "AI won't take your job." The economist Richard Baldwin said during a panel, at the 2023 Work Economic Forum summit, "It's somebody using AI that will take your job." And here are the categories that they think will, AI will start being used very quickly. Marketing, yes. AI and ML engineers. Weird that that wasn't first. Software developers, AI model trainers, copywriters, teachers, product managers, and recruiters. Yes. Recruiters actually made the list. So, talk to me, Quincy, is this the Iron Man suit, the AI platform vendors have been touting for years? Or are we just training our AI overlords to replace our asses? [laughter] Quincy: No, we're not training anyway, everyone said that. No, our AI overlords are not going to replace us because there's too much error and there's too much bias, potential for bias, and you still need humans to take what it's spitting out and tweak it. Couple things. First of all, ChatGPT experience is not even the right thing to say. Organizations who are looking to move into this space need to be looking for people with experience with large language modeling. And it's not all ChatGPT. So the fact that they're saying that tells me what the hell they're doing in the first place. Chad: It is buzzy. That's all they are doing. It's marketing. Quincy: It's a very buzzy. The second thing is people asking for 15 years of ChatGPT experience should be fired on the spot. And the third thing is no, you know... Well, some jobs I think will become different and will shift just like with every advancement in technology that we've ever had. But no, I don't think it's going to take your job, unless you use it exclusively and do some really bad stuff and then you're going to get fired. Looking for people with these skills is the right thing to do. I think it's really smart. I do think the applications that he said are the first place it's going. We've already seen it, but know what you're talking about before you put something out there in the public is all I'll stop there, Chad. [laughter] Chad: Well. SFX: That escalated quickly. Chad: That escalated very quickly. I mean, just from the standpoint of, as you'd say, using ChatGPT, it's more buzzy in marketing, trying to pull people in with these new buzzy words. Much like years ago when everybody was slapping AI on a product and then they started slapping DEIB on a product, this has nothing to do with anything other than trying to sucker people in just to be able to take a look at the job. I mean, $800,000, I don't need to see ChatGPT for that, but yes, it is something that we're definitely going to be talking a lot about. And I'm just going to go ahead and pull back for a minute because we're going to talk about it right after this break. Chad: Now we're headed down that not-to-do lane of ChatGPT from NBC News, A New York federal judge on Thursday, sanctioned lawyers who submitted a legal brief written by the AI tool ChatGPT, which included citations of non-existent court opinions and fake quotes. Judge P. Kevin Castel ordered the both Peter LoDuca and Steven Schwartz, they're both attorneys, along with their law firms LEVIDOW, LEVIDOW & OBERMAN. Holy shit. To pay $5,000 in fines. That's it. $5,000. Quincy. This is fucking ridiculous. This is fucking ridiculous. And again, ChatGPT has gone awry. This is, again, I think a cautionary tale for not just lawyers. Quincy: But again, I mean, this is it. This is what we've been saying all along. The first thing we said was for fuck's sake, people, you use your brain. The second thing we said is, there are risks associated with using these types of models. You can mitigate that [chuckle] with the right security protocols and the right practice of how you apply the model. But you can't just use a publicly available tool like that and expect it to be okay. And for this man or their firm to only be fined $5,000 is not setting, it's not setting the right precedent because we're talking about legal hearings and I don't know what it was, but these legal hearings and these legal rulings have the potential to impact people's lives. And you can't just say, "Oh that was dumb. Five grand. There needs to be a bigger message sent." There will be if it wasn't that guy. And I can't even with people today. There's my salt again, I don't understand. Chad: For fuck's sake people. Quincy: And it's not like people haven't warned about it. Chad, it's not like people haven't warned about this very thing. I typed into ChatGPT because I felt like it. Who did it? Was it William Tim Cook maybe to write an obituary about me? And I wrote it an about 20 different prompts and it still didn't know who I was. So if it can't even get that right, there aren't too many Quincy Valencias for crying out loud. Don't rely on it for legal briefings... Chad: No. Quincy: Or professional work, or anything you're going to attach your name to. [applause] Chad: I have to say though, Quincy, let's just celebrate that humans are still in control for now. SFX: Shall we play a game? Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads and instead now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Let’s look at a few trends going on in workforce tech right now: inflation, layoffs, lack of VC funding, tightening budgets and technological disruption. All combined to create uncertainty in multiple dimensions and end up laying the table for what should be a feeding frenzy for M&A. That’s why we invited Georgios Markakis, managing partner at Venero Capital Advisors, to the show. In addition to the acquisition and fundraising landscape, we look back at what things were like during the pandemic, what’s going on with IPOs and what makes a good founder when dissecting M&A opportunities. It’s a must-listen for vendors and the founders who run them. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? It's your favorite guilty pleasure, AKA, The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the Barney to my Fred, Chad Sowash is in the house. And we welcome today Georgios Markakis. Did I say that right? Chad: No. Georgios Markakis: That's right. Joel: I didn't say it right, Chad? [laughter] Georgios is the managing partner at Venero Capital Advisors. He's educated at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Chicago, and a super fan of the show. Chad: What? Joel: Which we certainly appreciate. Georgios, welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Georgios Markakis: Hi, guys. Great to be here. Chad: Great to have you, man. All the way from Greece. Dude, that is freaking awesome. Joel: The breadbasket of democracy, I think. Isn't that... [laughter] Chad: The breadbasket? Is that what we're going with? Joel: The breadbasket. [laughter] The birthplace. Georgios Markakis: People listening to the show all over the world, including Athens, Greece. Chad: Including Athens, Greece. Joel: We're huge in Greece. Georgios Markakis: Big fan base in Greece. Joel: Although there's no Chipotle, so I won't be visiting anytime soon. [laughter] Chad: And Greece is thanking you for that. Joel: I Appreciate that. [laughter] So Georgios, a lot of our listeners don't know who you are. Give them a Twitter bio on you. Georgios Markakis: Yes, I'm a managing partner at Venero, like you said, Venero Capital Advisors. We were ranked number one HR tech focused M&A advisor globally in terms of deal flow, number of deals. So Venero, we have the largest number of deals in the sector, across HR tech and work tech. So anything in talent sourcing, talent management, workforce management, payroll benefits, that's what we do. My personal background, so before Venero, I was at Deutsche Bank doing M&A across Europe, and have been focusing on HR tech for the last almost five years now as part of Venero. Chad: What got you into HR tech? Joel: Well, if you're gonna be number one in something, it might as well be HR tech. [chuckle] Georgios Markakis: So the answer I like to give is, as a young boy growing up in Greece, I've always dreamt of working in HR. Chad: What? Said no young man ever. [laughter] Georgios Markakis: No, the reality is basically we just stumbled into the sector when we started the firm and we were generalists, and we happened to get one mandate in HR tech, then a second one and then a third one. And also, we called the sector a great time. I think we decided to specialize in the sector back 2019. And at the time, that was boom year for HR tech. So we got a great time and just momentum built. So we decided just focus exclusively on the space. Joel: You've recently been at a conference and you're on the circuit giving presentation. But we haven't had sort of an M&A money guy on. I wanna know your historical perspective of the insanity that was 2020 through like 2022. What was it like from where you sat when all that money was being thrown around and companies were just flushed with cash? What was that like? Chad: Money flowed through the streets, and yes, that the true breadbasket. Georgios Markakis: It was fresh. So back in time... So we go back to that... We keep track of things and then you go back to 2016, 2016, '17. If you look at the M&A multiples, so evaluations where companies were getting acquired, back then, there's maybe two times revenue, one, two times revenue. [laughter] And it was very much I think I like to say kind of the HR tech was the unloved cousin of SaaS. People just didn't think the addressable market was there. People just didn't think that HR departments would adopt all these new SaaS tools. But what happened over time, if you look at the multiples, evaluation multiple, is gradually, they've been expanding. So from one to two times they went, three to four, six to seven. And the best year, actually, for the sector was 2019. If you keep track of the median and the average multiple, 2019, they're very close, the median and the average, which basically means that 2019, basically every company was getting acquired at around nine, 10 times. Joel: The good old days. Georgios Markakis: The good old days. And that's when we first started to hear complaints from buyers and investors about, "Hey, frothy market, what's happening?" Everyone's expecting to be acquired, those multiple. So in 2020, you started to see the median and the average multiple diverge, which basically means that buyers started to become a bit more discerning. The average was still high, which means that the best-in-class assets were still getting acquired a really high multiples, even well into double digits, et cetera. And then everybody else was getting more modest multiple. And then 2021, that trend continued. And then 2022 is when you started to see that contraction. But 2019, '20, '21, and even if you look at investing, like funding flowing into the sector, '21 was a record year for the space. So a lot of funding went into recruitment, a lot of funding went to... Even you had a lot of companies raising income in the billions. So the likes of Access and big private equity started coming into the sector, and those guys were investing hundreds of millions and billions into this space. So you have 2021 really being a record year for the sector. Chad: So did you see that... I mean, HR is slow to the party. They are slow, finally catching up to, let's say, for instance, SaaS or the sales, the marketing kinda like platforms over the years. So was that kind of like key for you guys to say, "Hey, look, these guys are lagging probably by at least five years. We can jump into this and we can be early adopters when they actually catch the rise?" Is that what you guys saw? What... I mean, because HR just isn't sexy. Let's just say that. Georgios Markakis: It's not sexy. And look, I'd love to say that it was all planned and it was, we saw the opportunity and... But it was, basically, we just had the deal flow. So we went with it, and we were small team at the time. So it just made a lot of sense for us to specialize. And look, at the end of the day, today, people think about HR tech and we talk about HR tech and work tech as a superset of HR tech. We think it's a small sector. It's actually quite a big sector. So there's about 15 of us now. And still the sector is really, really, really, really large. So the opportunity for us was big. We caught it a great time. At this point, we're experts in the space, and we're happy that we made that decision back then. Joel: I noticed that a lot of your deals are cross border, they're global. Talk about that because I think it's a relatively new trend. I assume that you expect it to continue. Talk about the global nature of M&A and how that's gonna be in the future. Georgios Markakis: Yeah. No, that's a very good point. And so, again, it goes back to the history of the sector. When all these funding started flowing into the space, you had a lot of these point solutions crop up. A lot of companies, a lot of vendors were addressing specific pain points. So we actually have a thesis. We call that part of the history kinda the period of rapid innovation. So a lot of new companies being spun off and addressing all these pain points. Now, of course, customers, for the most part, they don't want to deal with like tons of systems. So that's when we started to see this consolidation. So we went from the phase of rapid innovation to growth and consolidation, which was maybe the last, three years or so. What that meant was that a lot of buyers, a lot of corporates would either decide either build a more unified and more seamless offering or acquire best-in-class point solution. And so that's what was happening. And of course, these point solutions exist anywhere in the world. They cater to customers, for the most part, globally. Of course, it depends. There's others who focus on certain geographies, but for the most part, HR tech is a horizontal geography agnostic solution. So a lot of companies were being acquired, integrated into a broader offering, and then rolled out internationally. So, yeah, cross border is super typical, let's say. Joel: And Chad and I talk a lot about sort of the promise of India, Africa, South America. What's your read on those three areas and what they'll mean to recruitment in the future? Georgios Markakis: Okay, so there's two dimensions there. One is on the candidate side of things. And now with remote work and everything, we're seeing a continuation of the trend where you source talent from all these regions, so India, and so on and so forth, Africa, to some extent, Asia. So when it comes talent marketplaces, there, you have a very spread out geographically reach across all these geographies. So there's talent marketplaces, from Upwork to Fiverr, and everybody, who have talent globally. So, of course, India and Asia is very prominent. Now, when it comes to SaaS solutions. And we do have mandates globally, so we have mandates in Southeast Asia and Australia, of course, North America and Europe. With SaaS, it's different. A lot of SaaS vendors that are headquartered in Southeast Asia, for example, they will tend to focus on customers in southeast Asia. Some Indian vendors try to cross over to the US, but that's less common. Australia, same thing. So a lot of Australia, New Zealand vendors, they tend to be a bit more local. They'll try to transition maybe to the US, but rarely will they come to Europe. European ones and US, there, you see more of a cross pollination. US, you have bigger concentration North America, and of course, globally. So that's, I think, how... When it comes SaaS, there is this geographical focus. There's more investment going into Africa. It still, I think, has room to go before it grows out of Africa into other regions. Chad: Let's talk about the invasion of European companies, startups trying to come to the US. It's not easy. And a lot of times, they don't have enough cash, let alone experience, to be able to make that work. And everybody just thinks it's easy because we're just 50 states, we speak the same language and it's a big pile of money, but it is hard to achieve successful invasion of the US and then also try to follow the recipe for acquisition at that point. So when you're talking to European startups and when they start to get more money, they know that they have to increase their TAM. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for a bigger pile of money. So how do we do that? Oh, shit, let's go to the US. It seems like the de facto, but it's not a successful de facto. Tell us a little bit about that. What happens behind the scenes when you're talking to a startup, you're talking about funding, that funding is growing, it's like, "Oh, shit, we've gotta increase the TAM? Where do we go? What do we do?" Georgios Markakis: Yeah. No, actually, you're absolutely right. It is the default go-to market, simply because... I think it's probably process of elimination. People thinking, "Okay, should I fight about... Suppose am in the UK already, should I fight a battle in France or Germany where I have to get a different language, different culture? It's still Europe, but they're very different. Or do I pick a very large addressable market that's relatively more uniformly than Europe?" A lot of companies and founders do choose to go to the US. I think there are a couple of different recipes for success. So the ones that I've seen that are doing this, I think, properly are doing two things right. First of all, at least one of the founders moves to the US [laughter] to build a team there. And the secondly, they get support... They get local knowhow from investors that know the market, who can guide them in building that market. Of course, you need to build up the team from scratch and have unique go-to-market strategies for that. So those guys do it properly. If you try to grow into the US from Paris or from Munich, I think that's much harder to accomplish or to do properly. Chad: So what about the other way around? We have US companies that now they look at Europe to be able to, again, expand. And that's a hell of a lot harder just because of everything that you just said in trying to grow within Europe. I mean, if you're in the UK and trying to grow in Europe, that's hard, right? Georgios Markakis: Yeah. Chad: So being a US company trying to come across the pond, what are some of the recommendations and/or advice that you provide to startups who are prospectively looking at that path? Georgios Markakis: Yeah. Yeah, no, we see that as well, and with mixed success. I think the most successful ones would be either large companies that open offices locally in Europe, but we've seen companies either make sizeable acquisitions in Europe and then from there expand, make acqui-hires in Europe, and then use that to expand. You can acquire business and then make that founder kind of head of European expansion. So those are strategies that work. But what doesn't really work is to have a marketing team sitting somewhere in the US try to sell... Do a marketing plan for a French company. Chad: So one thing that we have noticed and working with the House of HR is how they acquire companies throughout Europe, but yet they keep the brand, to be able to give that sense of, "We're not changing anything. This is a French company. It's gonna stay a French company. It's under the house of HR umbrella" And in the US, we usually don't do that, because it's just like, "Let's cram everything together." But when we started seeing that type of strategy in Europe and then started to do a lot more digging and research in Europe, that made a hell of a lot of sense. What are your thoughts around the house of brands versus just a single brand? Georgios Markakis: That has a less obvious answer, I think. We've seen both. We've seen companies acquire kinda relatively wellknown brands, but then decided to sunset that acquired brand. And others keep things separate. I think there's merit to both. I think the answer is, it depends. So yeah, I don't think there's a single right answer for everybody. It depends on the product, your go-to-market strategy, your customer base, how global is your customer base, versus local customer base, how strong is the local brand. So I think the answer there is, it depends. Joel: Let's get into your presentation that you did at Transform. Some of our listeners may have seen you there. Let's look at the laundry list of global headwinds, inflation, layoffs, dry-up of VC funding, tightening budgets, technological disruption, which we'll get into in a little bit with a little thing called chatGPT. I'll ask about that. Chad: What's that? Joel: It all looks like chaos, companies looking for an out, the IPO markets have dried up. This looks like the dawn of the glory days of M&A. Am I wrong? Georgios Markakis: Some of these indicators are leading, others are lagging indicators, but, okay, a few things are happening. So when it comes to buyer spend, companies acquiring these kind of SaaS tools for HR tech and work tech, what we're seeing and what we're hearing is that at least on the recruitment side of things, at least the vendors are exposed to recruitment. They're seeing an impact. So they have a problem. Even if you look at some of the publicly traded ones, without disclosing any information on private companies, like Super Recruiter is forecasting, I think, a 15% drop to revenue this year. Upwork or Fiverr and those kind of companies, they're projecting kind of a much slower growth, like in the single digits. Of course, they've been suffering for a while. So the recruitment vendors, they are seeing this impact of companies just not hiring as much. And this, of course, comes on the back of very strong performance in last year, believe it or not. 'Cause last year, even though the headlines were talking about recession and macro headwinds, last year, businesses weren't cutting back on their spending. But this year, they sort of are. So this is in recruitment. Georgios Markakis: In the other segments, we're hearing about longer sales cycles, we're hearing about CFOs and everybody just thinking, "Okay, do I need this?" On the investment side, a lot of investors are asking... Before they invest, they're asking, "Okay is this product a must-have or a nice-to-have?" And that's the reality on the ground. On the inflation side, of course, that means that salaries sometimes will need to be adjusted. We keep hearing about businesses need to update the salaries of their employees, which increases their cost base, which, of course, affects their cash per. And then the funding side, we're reading in the headlines, it's true, the investor, the VCs, they're being a lot more discerning when it comes to investing. And so they'll talk about, okay, must-have versus nice-to-have, they'll talk about what's the outlook for the next 12 months. They won't take the longer term view of this is something that's temporary. 2024 could be a better year. They're a bit more, at least shortsighted when it comes to investing this year. Chad: I'm gonna say, get that ALDI bag out because it's shop time, baby. [laughter] Joel: Yeah, it sounds like a feeding frenzy for the M&A guys. Like, are you feeding calls constantly to get deals done? Are there companies with dry powder looking to say, "Who's ready to sell?" It's gotta be a busy time for you. Talk about that. Georgios Markakis: Yeah. So on the M&A side, again two things are happening. First of all, last year companies just decided not to come to market. Companies were saying, "Well, I'll wait. I've been reading the headlines. Valuations are down. I don't know what to do about... I'm just not going to come to market." This year, we're seeing a big uptake in companies have different conversations. They're saying, "I'll come to market, I plan to come to market." And usually, there's... Typically, there's two drivers. First is need. Some companies just need to come to market because of all the other things we talked about, because revenue is being impacted, because funding is not as easily available. So some companies need to come to market. Others, believe it or not, choose to come to market, because some companies actually are doing okay. Their KPIs are fine. And it just so happens that all they're waiting for is for sentiment to stabilize. Georgios Markakis: Last year, sentiment was pretty bad. This year, we found a floor. It seems like, okay, at least there's no worsening of sentiment. So as soon as sentiment picks up a bit, these companies will choose to come to market. Now, what I'm telling you, you don't see this in the numbers. If you look at the numbers of announced transactions, you don't see this. Why? Because announced transactions have a six to nine-month lag. Deals get announced today are the deals that were launched nine months ago. But at the end of the year, and maybe early next year, you'll see that uptake because processes are getting launched this year. Chad: So from a personal standpoint and also from the organization, what is that one thing that you guys look for in a founder? And I'll tell you what I mean. When we first started seeing this frenzy, we started seeing founders that have huge exits from like marketing in sales. And they felt like they could come into this space and just rock the shit out of it. And they, in many cases, failed miserably. And as we started to see kind of like the recipe, I guess you could say, for a good organization, Joel and I have our own, like, personal one thing that means everything for at least the start. What is that for you? What is that for you from a founder standpoint, from an organization standpoint? Georgios Markakis: Interesting. So instinctively, somebody might say, "I'm looking for a founder who knows the sector, who knows the sector that they're catering to." And that's always a plus. A lot of times though, what we've seen is sometimes the people who know the sector don't necessarily have the best execution or best product in the market. So we've seen that being a plus. But equally, it's not the one thing. It's not the one thing. I think the one thing really comes down to personality, I think. It's this charismatic founder. Like, we keep hearing this from investors or for acquirers, this founder and their co-founder, they're just... They have this 'Je ne sais quoi' if you wanna use French on the show. Joel: Bless you. [chuckle] Georgios Markakis: Bless you. Thank you. So it's just this charisma that translates into fantastic execution and the ability to solve any problem that comes their way. So I think that... Which probably true for every sector, but it's equally true for this sector as well. Chad: I have to say that a friend of mine who did sell, Adam Gordon with Candidate.ID, he was on every stage he could be on. And again, very charismatic and just getting out there. And I asked him, I was like, "Why are you getting on so many stages? I know it's good from an awareness standpoint." He said, "No, it's better for me sharpening my message and then being able to get feedback from practitioners. It just... It starts a conversation that prospectively wasn't there before." So I agree 100%. So when you take a look at, Joel and I every week, and I'm sure you hear it, we keep wondering how some of these companies get funding. It's literally a solution looking for a problem. It is somebody who literally has no experience in this space, along with trying to find a problem for a solution. When you were looking and assessing, adding someone to your portfolio from a funding or an M&A standpoint, what are you looking for? What's... Beyond just the charismatic piece of it, what are you looking for? Joel: Obviously someone in a kilt, in Adam Gordon's case. [laughter] Georgios Markakis: If you think about it from an M&A side of things, it's different from... Versus an investment. For an investor looking to invest, they look at the founder, the founding team, fundamentally. And they go to market and their ability to execute. But for M&A, it's a bit clearer. So an M&A, a buyer basically looks at their existing offering and they say, "What gap do I have in my offering?" So they also look at it from a product perspective. So they look at the founder and the management team, but equally, if not more, they're looking for alignment between their own strategy as a vendor and what products the target company is offering. So that's a bit more... It's a bit clearer. "What's the size of the vendor, of the target company? Is it big enough? Does it move the needle for me? What's the product it's offering? Is it good enough quality wise? From a technology perspective, does it fit with my platform? Geography, does it cater to the same geographies that I want to target or same target customers?" That's what... So it's a bit more clear cut, if you will. Chad: Well, the founder... At that point, if you're not looking to make that founder the CEO of the bigger organization, they're gonna be out the door anyway. So really, it is about all of the assets and not the personnel as much. Georgios Markakis: Exactly. The founder typically will stay on for a couple years to ensure the transition, maybe hit some earn-out targets, and then maybe they stay on, maybe they move on. Usually, it's their choice. Joel: You've been doing this for a while, and diversity has been a hot topic for the last few years. From your perspective, are we seeing a healthy trend toward more diversity with founders, boards, et cetera? Are we making progress on that end, or does now look like it did mostly like it did 10 years ago? Georgios Markakis: Yeah. On boards, definitely. And actually here, I'll plug the boardroom, which is... My sister actually launched the boardroom out of Switzerland, which is basically supporting gender diversity in the boardroom. From a founder perspective, there's been a big push for non-mainstream founders to raise funding. So that's definitely been a positive. Now, to what extent that has translated into actual major exit, et cetera, I think it's a bit early, 'cause usually, remember, it takes quite a few years for a new company, a newly funded company to make kinda headlines through an exit. But look, I think at least we're doing the right things when it comes to talking about it, creating new funds for these types of founders. So at least we're doing the right things. And I think the next few years we'll see the results of today's actions. Joel: So we saw you last in November in Paris at Unleash. A little thing called chatGPT launched back in November and has [chuckle] had some impact. You may have heard of it. So in your LinkedIn post, you said, "Generative AI will disrupt the future of work more quickly than people anticipated, and the impact will be more pronounced. It seems to be catching a lot of people off guard." Talk about generative AI and what it means from where you sit. Georgios Markakis: Right. First of all, let me just say, I'm not... I'm a finance person. I'm not a tech person, although I do have a master's in computer science. [laughter] Joel: Studied at Carnegie Mellon. I know about technology. Yeah. [laughter] Georgios Markakis: As I jokingly say every now and then, I do have a master's. But look, we think there are two... And of course, AI has been around for a long time. And a lot of vendors already use AI in their tools. And they use what we call predictive AI as opposed to generative AI. And we think there's two fundamental aspects that make this different. The first thing is that applications like chatGPT, they're iterative and interactive. So up until now, with predictive AI, you would give the AI an input, it would spit out an output, and that's it. I think it would be explainable and all that, but that was it. Now, we're talking about something that's interactive, that's iterative, that improves the results in a user-friendly and iterative way. And we think that's the one thing that is initially very different. It will improve the user experience dramatically. So that's the one point. And the second point is that the barriers for AI are being lowered significantly. Up until now, to build AI, you needed to have experts, and money, and data scientists, and access to data, and servers, and you get to train it and then... Now, all these barriers are being lowered. So what's going to catch people off guard is that AI will become mainstream. Georgios Markakis: Today, companies that use AI, relatively few, and they have a competitive advantage. Soon, everybody will use AI, and those who don't will be at a disadvantage. It's a shift in the mentality of the competitive landscape. And of course, this will change the competitive landscape dramatically. AI will no longer be a competitive advantage. You'll need to find a different moat for your competitive advantage. So I think that's what's going to catch people... And of course, there are some vendors that will be completely disrupted, but that's a whole different story. [laughter] Joel: You think? Chad: Yes. So Georgios, so last question, the hardest question of this entire interview, conversation. [laughter] Why do you listen to The Chad and Cheese Podcast? Is it because we're a couple of bumbling Americans and we're funny to listen to or why? What is it? I don't wanna feed you with reasons, but go ahead. Joel: Chad needs a hug. [laughter] Chad: Always. Georgios Markakis: Well, first of all, you guys make it interesting. I think I've listened to other... I mean, no offense to others, but... Chad: They all suck. No, I get it. It's 'cause... It's okay. [laughter] Georgios Markakis: You make it interesting. You bring on very interesting guests. And for me, it's just I'm interested in finding a way to stay up to speed with what's happening in the sector. So as a finance person, that's my... I listen to it, I enjoy it, I have fun and laugh with you guys. And also it's informative. So that's a... Joel: He has the same hairstylist as you, Chad. That's why he listens. Georgios Markakis: Is there going to be a video with this? 'Cause yes, that's true. [chuckle] Chad: It's sexy. I'm excited. [applause] Joel: That is Georgios Markakis, everybody. Georgios, for our listeners who wanna connect with you or learn more, where would you send them? Georgios Markakis: Venerocapitaladvisors.com, or on LinkedIn, Georgios Markakis. Yeah. Joel: I'm a lot smarter, Chad. I don't know about you. Georgios, thanks for coming on the show. Hopefully, we can see each other face to face again. Chad: Amen. Joel: It'll be over a few beers this time. Georgios Markakis: Absolutely. Joel: Chad, another one is in the can. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Inspire in Coronado Beach in Sunny Cali. Essential workers are all the rage right now. The only thing more popular is figuring out how to recruit them. That’s why we invited Ashley Miller, VP of HR operations at Quanta Services to sit down with us at iCIMS Inspire in San Diego. According to Ashley, start with a strong message targeted toward an inclusive audience, including military veterans, give them incredible benefits, including upskilling, and leverage technologies like SMS and video, and treat workers like family. What a concept! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. INTRO: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh yeah. What's up everybody? We are recording live from the iCIMS Inspire Conference from beautiful San Diego, California. I am Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is by my side. Chad: Hello. Joel: And we are excited to welcome Ashley Miller, VP of HR Operations at Quanta Services, not Qantas Airlines... Ashley Miller: Correct. Joel: Quanta Services. Ashley, welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Ashley Miller: Thank you guys for having me. Chad: Thanks for being here. Ashley Miller: Not Quantum either. Joel: Not Quantams. Ashley Miller: Not Qantas, that's the airline. Right. Joel: Clearly we don't know what the hell's going on. Most of our listeners don't either give us the dealio on Quanta Services. Ashley Miller: Sure. So we are a company that you've never heard of. Joel: Yes, until today. Ashley Miller: We are a 14200 organization and at the end of the day, everybody has a utility bill, right? So I was just talking with you guys. You have Duke Energy is who you pay every month for electricity. Joel: I sure do. Ashley Miller: So they help keep your power on. But there are a lot of contractors behind the scenes who are actually going out in the middle of the night who are helping to rebuild the infrastructure in the country. Joel: Oh. Ashley Miller: So we all have this lovely 20... Is it 2030 carbon neutral? [laughter] Joel: Depending on your state. Ashley Miller: Everybody think... We're gonna... Yeah, exactly. California. It's much sooner. Chad: It's like it keeps moving. Ashley Miller: It does keep moving. Joel: There's an election next year. It might change after that. Ashley Miller: It might change again. Chad: Yeah. It'll be 2022. [laughter] Carbon neutral retro, yes. Ashley Miller: All of that being said, we have an aging infrastructure in the States. Right. Our organization provides the craft skilled labor that essentially builds the infrastructure for tomorrow. So we power your modern life, right? So you turn on the light switch, you should be thinking about the folks that are out there climbing on the poles, ensuring that you have electricity. [laughter] Joel: Thank your lucky stars. There's Quanta Services. When you turn those lights on. Ashley Miller: When a storm comes, who do you think's going? Who do you think is going to restore the power, winter, hurricane, whatever it is? Chad: Exactly, They have to strap on the little things that climb the poles, right? Ashley Miller: Yes. That stick into the pole to help you. Chad: That still happens. Ashley Miller: That's still happens. Chad: It's still a thing. Ashley Miller: But we are going to vanes. Chad: Elevators, are you gonna do elevators? Ashley Miller: We have wind energy. We actually just got awarded a project called Sunsea. Joel: Look at you. Ashley Miller: Largest clean energy project in the United States history. Chad: Where where? Ashley Miller: It's in New Mexico, in Arizona. Chad: Oh, nice. Ashley Miller: And we are delivering energy essentially to California. Because California always needs energy. Chad: California needs everything. Ashley Miller: And water. Chad: They need everything. Ashley Miller: I used to live here actually, for eight years. Chad: Really? Ashley Miller: Yeah. Joel: San Diego or California? Ashley Miller: San Diego, Northern California, Sax wellington. Joel: And you left because? Ashley Miller: It's too effing expensive. Joel: Okay, good reason. Chad: Yes. There it is, ding ding ding ding... Ashley Miller: I am a Texan, so paying a million dollars for a shack is not actually something I wanna do. Chad: So recruiting here is not easy, is what you're saying. Ashley Miller: Recruiting is definitely not easy here. We actually have a huge labor population in California and a lot of our Northeastern states. So we partner with IBW to try to help the industry get a lot more craft skilled labor into the trade. We bought a college a few years ago, so we actually... Joel: I'm sorry. Chad: There we go. Joel: We bought a college. Ashley Miller: You wanna talk about diverse, your portfolio. Joel: Quanta you. Chad: This Is amazing and smart because here's the thing, kids, we hear this thing called the skills gap. Joel: We own the gap. Chad: When you can fill it from pampers. Ashley Miller: From pampers. Chad: All the way, all the way in. It just makes sense, right? I mean, that is so, so incredible smart... Joel: Gold plated diapers. Baby. Chad: So Joel and I, we're a little bit older than you [laughter] We went to school, we went to school when there was vocational. Ashley Miller: Yeah. Training, yeah. Chad: Yes. That shit doesn't exist anymore. Ashley Miller: It does. Joel: Except at Quanta University. Chad: But no. Ashley Miller: Not as big, but it's coming back. Chad: One of the things that I, that I love about the whole idea of this is instead of leaning incredibly heavily on corporate welfare, you guys said, no, you're not gonna get this shit right in the first place. We're gonna go ahead and take this on ourselves because this is a long-term commitment to building what? Oh, let me hear it. Talent pipelines. Because everybody talks about talent pipelines, but nobody knows what it really means. I'm gonna give you a big kiss right now. Joel: They're committed. They're committed. Ashley Miller: We are. I mean, in all honesty, we control the training. Chad: Wow. Ashley Miller: And we control it for the industry. Not just for our organization, but we hold something similar to iCIMS, but we have all of our customers. It's called Utility Perspectives. We come in and talk about industry trends. And yeah, buying a college was certainly not something that was in our portfolio. We are, again... Chad: Genius. Joel: And what's the name of the college? Ashley Miller: It's called Northwest Line College. I'm not gonna say lineman. But it's Northwest Lineman College. We have four campuses throughout the states. We probably produce about 5,000, 6,000. Chad: Wow. Ashley Miller: Pre-apprentice journey line workers. So. Chad: Are you gonna grow it? Ashley Miller: We intend to grow it. Yeah. We will continue to grow it. Chad: 'Cause you could do that nationwide, not just for yourself, but for other. Ashley Miller: So we actually have customers who pay for our training and send... Yes. So, it's actually a, it's not a non-for-profit, but if it's for profit it's... Chad: Where have you been all my life. [laughter] Ashley. Where have you been all my life. Ashley Miller: We just need to capitalize on it. We need to get people excited about the industry. We need to get people excited about this trades. This is like six figure work. Like no joke. It's a lifestyle. Chad: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Ashley Miller: But it's good trade. Joel: So we're talking about growing the apples directly from the tree. Ashley Miller: Yes. Joel: You guys are really committed to diversity and veteran recruitment. Talk about that. Ashley Miller: We are. So we have another advanced training center, which is actually in Lazy Q Ranch. And it's in La Grange, Texas. And we have a partnership with our veteran organizations where we essentially hire them from the military. We're picking folks that are interested in being outside, working with their hands, used to being away from home. We have 'em come in, we pay for it. So we're giving them a wage. We're actually sponsoring their education for them to continue to be a journey line worker. Chad: Well in the military they have, I know I spent 20 years, they actually have what we call wire dogs. And that's what they do. So I mean, they have all these skills... Ashley Miller: Transferable skills. Chad: Yes, that you can actually pull in, right again, love this, this is amazing. Ashley Miller: We actually have a big session coming up. We're going through a little bit of a business evolution. So we are, and actually with our partnership with iCIMS, we have about a hundred operating companies that traditionally have maybe bidded against each other in the same market. And so we've done, has really changed our operational model to be a more regional, and our customers are like,"Hey, I don't wanna talk to five different freaking people from your company. Like you self-perform 85% of your work. Talk to one person. We want you." So at the end of the day, we're in this situation where our customers are demanding a change. So we don't wanna look dumb in the market when it comes to talent. So that's actually how we're partnering with iCIMS. Chad: You don't look dumb, I'm telling you right now. Joel: Wire dog? Is that anything like [laughter] a Chicago dog? 'Cause I'm all over it if that's... Oh, no? Okay. I see. Chad: Yes. No. It's not the same kind of dog. You don't wanna put that dog in your mouth. Joel: Oh boy. All right. So I'm gonna quote your website. At Quanta, we pride ourselves on being a family company. Ashley Miller: Yeah. Joel: Now we've heard some pushback in different employers that say,"We don't want to portray our workers as family because it's harder to lay them off. We're more of a team." So talk about the commitment to talking about employees as a family. Ashley Miller: I can give you a quote of something that happened when I first joined Quanta probably about seven years ago, I stood up and our CEO in a town hall. And this was right at the time when bathrooms were a topic of discussion. Chad: Oh, yes. Yes. Ashley Miller: What bathroom should you use? Chad: Because that should always be an issue. I mean, give me a break. Ashley Miller: I mean it rised up everywhere, right? So my CEO basically stood up and said,"Listen, I don't care who you are. I don't care who you love. I don't care what bathroom you use. At the end of the day, if you wanna work hard, I want you here. We want your brother, we want your cousin, we want your sister, we want your aunt. If they wanna work here and they wanna work hard, we want them." And as a personal note, I've had, my sister-in-law works for the organization. My mother worked for the organization. There is obviously sometimes a little bit of issues when you can't fire them. But I think we're working through all of it and you know, we're trying to make sure to do it ethically. Chad: But that's real family. Ashley Miller: It is. Chad: Not just this fake family that most companies talk about. Ashley Miller: It is, every company says that,"Family core value." Chad: Yes. Ashley Miller: This is the only company that I've... Joel: They take it to the next level. Chad: Yes. Ashley Miller: For real. Chad: Yes. Yes. Ashley Miller: Everybody's family, which as an HR professional when you're doing an investigation, can be quite difficult. You have to know who is related to who? Joel: I keep saying the pros outweigh the cons when it comes to family. Chad: Can't even imagine. Ashley Miller: They do. It's a retention, right? So at the end of the day, I know a lot, one of my best friends got an interview and job at the organization... Chad: And how hard is it gonna be to leave... Ashley Miller: It'll be super hard. Chad: Because she's gonna let you down and, and all the rest of the family. I mean, literally family down, just the loyalty connection here, it's just smart. Ashley Miller: It's different, It's different though. Joel: Wicked smart. Chad: Unless it's not, 'casue family drama can be a little bit much. Ashley Miller: It can, but we have a great leader. We have great leadership teams that are probably harder on their family members than they are on, regular employees. So, yeah. Chad: Come on Jeff. Get to work. Joel: She said harder. Okay. You guys have like fantastic benefits. Ashley Miller: We do. Joel: Really good benefits, talk about that... Ashley Miller: We have pet insurance. Chad: Oh. Joel: I know you guys go above and beyond. Ashley Miller: We have pet insurance. Joel: How important is that to recruiting, retention? Talk about your benefits? Ashley Miller: Yeah, so we have, your traditional benefit plan. We've probably got about three or four different options for folks where they are in their lives. We really pay attention to our spouses. So sometimes, other folks don't pay attention to benefits. Joel: So do Chad and I. Chad: Yes. Joel: Not yours, ours. Ashley Miller: But the spouses do. The spouses care about it. So we have a really hands-on approach. When we come to working with families. We have some unique stuff. Again, pet insurance, we have a pretty big program with mental wellness. So we've construction in the construction industry, unfortunately, there are a lot of suicides so we've got a really big dedication today to really focus on trying to reduce that number. Chad: Well, that's amazing. And also employing veterans, right? I mean, it is important to take care of your people and when... Ashley Miller: And their spouses. Chad: Yes. That's what I was getting... I was getting right to that. Because in the military, we are used to, we have to take care of everybody. Meaning not just the person in the ranks. But also their spouses. Ashley Miller: Their family. Chad: And their kids. Because we know that when they are not focused on the job, they're focused on something else. That's a life and death situation. And it literally could be for some of the positions that you guys have. Ashley Miller: We are working on energized lines. Chad: Yes. Ashley Miller: It's just, I mean, that we're one of the very few contractors that can do that. You make a wrong mistake and it's fatal, right? So it's serious and that's why there's a lot, there's a connective tissue there for our veterans because it's the same thing. They see it as serving their country like we are building the infrastructure for tomorrow. So it's kind of that honor and pride in what you're doing. It translates very well. Chad: So what about hydro? Are we doing hydro anytime soon? Chad: Little bit. We we're starting, we're in the research phase really on the hydrogen front. We've partnered with a lot of different universities, and so we've got a lot of folks that are working, and so we're in that market a little bit. Our big push right now is in our renewable and battery storage, so, you know that when you put on Christmas lights, how many times do you trip over... Like, all the time. Chad: All the time. Ashley Miller: All the time, right? Joel: All the time. Ashley Miller: So if you think about everybody with an electric vehicle, right? Like signing up the infrastructure's not here today. So we are focussed on that research. Joel: Oh. Believe me. I am Clark Griswold in the Christmas season. Changing out the lights. Ashley Miller: Themed with music. Joel: Rusty. Rusty. Rusty. You guys leverage a lot of communications platforms, SMS, video. Talk about the decision to do that and how effective it is with your recruiting? Ashley Miller: I think it's getting a lot better. We actually have a podcast. Chad: What? What? Ashley Miller: That we own. I know, right? Called Powerline podcast. Joel: Live from the college that we just bought. Chad: I love it. Ashley Miller: No, live from our jobs sites, man. Joel: Oh, my bad. Ashley Miller: We've got a pretty big brand marketing group now. Chad: I think we should be on one of the job sites and do one of these things. Ashley Miller: Come, come on. I'll introduce you to Ryan, he's great. And you'll see the trades. It's hard. It's hard work. It's hazard. Chad: Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Ashley Miller: But yeah, we're leveraging it. I think we could do better. Of course, partnership with iCIMS is something that we really want to leverage those video stories, so I think that's the next step. But again, going from a decentralized hundred operating unit company with their own culture, their own processes to kind of becoming the power of Quanta is a journey. And we've really just kind of stepped our foot in the water. So, yeah. Exciting. Joel: That is Ashley Miller, everybody, VP of HR operations at Quanta Services. That ticker symbol is P-W-R Ashley. For our listeners who want to connect with you or the company. Where do you send them? Ashley Miller: Quantaservices.com is our website. If you wanna connect with me, it's AMillerSpeaks on Instagram or Ashley E. Miller on LinkedIn. Joel: That may be our first Instagram, handle we've had on the show and with that. Joel: I'm a millennial. Joel: Another one is in the can. We out. Chad: We out. S4: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

What do you get when one cohost is in Vienna, Austria and the other is in Orlando, Florida? Pure podcasting gold, baby! Throw in the fact they’re talkin’ Humanly raising, Vidcruiter acquiring, Yale rehabbing (kinda), Google employees whining and Bud Light still losing, and you’ve got the best podcast you’ll hear today (probably). One man’s pork tenderloin is another man’s schnitzel, this week, on Chad & Cheese. TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. INTRO: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for The Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. It's National Detroit Style Pizza Day, Chad. Ah, Detroit style pizza. The bronze medalist of the pizzas. You're listening to The Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Motown Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad. Did I just see the Vienna Vikings? Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Humanly raises, VidCruiter acquires, and Bud Light is taking it from both sides. Let's do this. Chad: Is there really a bronze pizza? I mean, seriously, any pizza? Joel: Oh, it's New York. It's Chicago, and then it's Detroit in the bronze... The bronze category. Chad: Still good? Yeah. Not gonna turn it down. Yeah. Welcome to Vienna Kids. Joel and I were just talking in the green room. I was on the tram, a little public trans kind of thing. It's what we do here in Europe and I saw a fucking billboard that had the Vikings on it, like the Minnesota Vikings, and I got out. Joel, and I got out, I looked at it. No, it was the Vienna Vikings. Apparently they had a European League of Football. Think they have 12 teams and the Vikings were the same color, logo. I mean, they were last year's champion, so I guess, they can do whatever they want. Hell, I don't know. Joel: That has to be the saddest football league in the world. There are 12 teams? [laughter] Chad: Well, I don't know. The XFL and the USFL are pretty sad right now, too. Joel: Yeah. Much more intriguing is your diet while you're in Austria. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: I mean, I'm enjoying the pictures of, I guess, fritters or... Chad: Schnitzel baby. Joel: Tenderloins. Chad: Schnitzel... Joel: Or whatever. Chad: Yes. Joel: Schnitzel, yes. Pork tenderloins basically. Chad: Schnitzel or some Buko. I mean, they've got amazing beers, wines, eating amazing foods, meeting amazing people. The culture. I mean, we went to museums, all the art churches stuff. I mean, it's just fucking awesome. It's our first time to Vienna. So we're both pretty hyped up. Joel: Are the hills alive with the sound of music Chad? Is the question. Chad: Well, of course they are. [laughter] Why wouldn't they be? Joel: I'm fortunate enough to be in Orlando, also known as the Vienna of Florida or the Vienna of the South. And I also am surrounded by priceless works of art in my hotel room... Chad: I can see. I can see. Yeah. Joel: As you can see, only on the YouTube channel kids, can you see the priceless works of art? My daughter is in the national volleyball tournament. Chad: Yes. Joel: So it's like tons of teen girls screaming and mama drama everywhere. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: It'll be a fun four-day experience for me. Chad: That sounds like hell in Orlando. Oh my God. Woof. Joel: Yeah. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pill. Chad: Well, that leads into my first shout out. Go figure Vienna and... SFX: Shout out. Chad: The team from Jobiqo. Yeah. So our flat was rented out for two weeks and we needed a place to go. So, we've never been to Vienna. We're gonna go to Kraków next week. But this is our first stop. So, like I'd said before, wonderful food, the museum's history, churches, amazing public transportation, down the road is this amazing Turkish bakery. Chad: It just, the food is amazing. But anyway, Jobiqo is here. If all those in the industry understand Jobiqo, they're a job board platform and they provide to many job boards that are out there. Hundreds of job boards that are out there. We spent the day with Martin and the team had lunch, amazing drinks, dinner, that kind of thing. Special shout out to Ling Wu over at Jobiqo, who set up a Google Maps list. It's the first time I've actually seen one of these things. It has literally a list of sightseeing, bars, restaurants, it helped us tremendously in being able to see Vienna. So thanks to Jobiqo, thanks to Ling Wu, Martin and the team. And shout out to Vienna. Joel: And I don't hate you at all, and I'm not jealous whatsoever. [laughter] Chad: All right. All right. All right. Joel: I love that you use our place is rented. So we had to go to Austria to get away for a while. Like, Jesus. [laughter] Chad: What? Joel: Jesus. All right. My shout out Chad. It's official. Chad: It's a thing. Joel: It's official, student loan payments are set to restart in October. Chad: Oh. God. Joel: Says the education department, interest on the debt will begin accruing even sooner. Chad: Fuck. Joel: In September, around 40 million Americans have debt from their education. The typical monthly bill is roughly $350 for that student loan. And loan debt in the US totals nearly $1.8 trillion. And this is gonna put the screws on those borrowers. They've had a nice little break, but it's time to get back to work. The party is over. "Student loan payments are set to start," says the education department. Shout out to those poor bastards paying student loans. Chad: Yeah. It's amazing. I thought about this this morning. How we always tout GDP over happiness and actually the US literally inflates our GDP by things like this. This is actually 6.5% of our GDP. Is something that other countries get for almost free, if not free. So we inflate our GDP because we make our citizens pay for the shit. Healthcare, close to 20%. That thing that most other countries, they get paid. So we talk about taxes and how we don't get... We don't have to pay those high taxes. You stupid motherfuckers, we still pay that shit. Look at... There is over, what was it? 1.6 trillion, trillion in debt. That's fucking taxes kids. That's fucking crazy. Anyway, you're hurting me here. I wanna talk about fake priests. Shout out to fake priests. Joel: Fake priests? Okay. This is a first. [laughter] Chad: Stick with me here, kids. This is crazy. Joel: I'm with you. Chad: A restaurant in California has been ordered to pay $140,000 of back wages and damages to employees after it hired a priest to extract workers' confessions. Apparently, Che Garibaldi, who operates two locations of a Taqueria Garibaldi, hired a fake priest to hear confessions during work hours to get the sins out. That was the thing. They wanted to get the sins out. Including asking if the employees had been late for work, stolen any money from the restaurant, or had bad intentions toward the employer. Taqueria Garibaldi, and three other restaurant owners. Some others got into this fucking shenanigan bullshit. They were ordered to pay $140,000 back wages to 35 employees, the restaurant will also have to pay, listen to this, oh wow this is gonna kill 'em, $5,000 in civil penalties. [laughter] S?: Just a tip. Chad: $5,000. Yes. I mean, it's fucking crazy. Shout out to fake priests. I don't know who the struggling actor was. Who actually did this, but, wow. This is a new low. Joel: Shout out to getting the sins out. I'm all for that. [laughter] Joel: All right, Chad. Well, we've talked about commercial real estate crashing. Thanks to the work from home movement. Chad: Yes, we have. Joel: Well, say hello to Picklemalls. Chad: No. Joel: That's right. Picklemalls, empty malls and stores are being repurposed into Picklemalls offering pickleball courts, one of your favorite. In case you missed it. Pickleball is a popular sport that combines tennis, badminton, and ping pong attracting players of all ages apparently. The initiative aims to utilize vacant spaces and support the growing pickleball trend across the country. Chad, is pickleball going to save us all? Chad: Pickleball is worse than badminton. Have you ever watched badminton? I mean, it's an Olympic sport, don't get me wrong. But have you ever watched badminton? It is boring as hell. You've got the little shuttlecock thing that just kinda like flies really slow. Pickleball is fucking horrible. So yeah, could it save us? If it saves us, then great. I'll be wrong, but it's a horrible sport. Joel: I'm gonna put the odds at... S?: 60% of the time it works every time. Chad: That's high. That's high. Joel: What they need to do is bring back Jarts the '70s classic, and people will start dying and we'll have less people and less things to deal with, I think, if we just did that. I don't know. Chad: And we grew up with jarts and dodging jarts as our friends threw them at us. [laughter] Joel: What a crazy-ass game, man. Chad: We'll be fine. We'll be fine. Joel: Right in the big wall down the sidewalk while your friends throw jarts at you to try to dodge them was a fun game in my neighborhood. [laughter] Well, you know what else is a fun game, Chad? Chad: What? Joel: Winning free shit from us. Chad: Ooh, I like free shit. Joel: And if you haven't played, you gotta go to chadcheese.com, click the free link and we will send you booze, t-shirts and all kinds of fun other things. Some announcements for this month's winners. Our whiskey winner goes to Jane Curran, our beer winner, that's sponsored by Aspen Tech Labs by the way, our bourbon giveaway is sponsored by Textkernel and I'm enjoying water on this week's show from my Textkernel... Chad: Ooh, love it. Joel: Water jug. That is Chris Russell, the mad scientist of recruiting has won some beer. Chad: Lucky bastard. Joel: And our birthday celebration went to Brittany Porter this month. And that is sponsored by our friends at Plum. And if you haven't gotten a free t-shirt yet, our homeboys and homegirls at JobGet are helping us give away free t-shirts. And by the way, kids, if you haven't left us a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy our podcast and particularly if you're a YouTube junkie, like Chad and I are, make sure you like, follow, leave a review. It's our oxygen. It's how we get better period. Chad: Don't forget about getaways kids, because there is a $250. That's right. We're gonna give away little credit card, little Airbnb credit card once a month from the Chad and Cheese. Powered by Abode HR. So you need to get away kids, you need to go to Austria. I don't care. [laughter] Chad: You can go somewhere. Go to Orlando, right? Take your Airbnb card. You use it wherever you want. $250, you're gonna get it. But you can only do it if you register chadcheese.com/free or just click 'free' in the upper right-hand corner. Joel: Love it. [laughter] SFX: Really? Can you feel the tension in the air right now? Chad: Uh-huh. SFX: I know I can. [laughter] SFX: I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: I think that guy is in Florida actually. [laughter] Joel: He was at the restaurant. All right. So that means birthday announcements, everybody. Another trip around the sun, go to fans Tom Bickle, Brittany Porter, Heather Myers, Colleen De George, Jenny Schiacha, or Schiacha, however we're pronouncing it today. Sean Pauls Ceph, Mary Ellen Slater and Cepi Nayeri, one of our big fans on this show. Joel: Oh yeah. Love it. SFX: Happy birthday. Chad: And don't you forget about what events. That's right. Knebworth Park coming up July 6th. RecFest. [music] Chad: If you don't have tickets, yeah sucks to be you 'cause it's sold out. 5,500 people packing that fucking place. I think they're like 10 stages. Chad and Cheese are gonna be on the disrupt stage. So come find us. We're gonna be talking about tech all day. We're gonna be emceeing that stage. But just because you missed RecFest in Knebworth in London doesn't mean that you have to miss it kids. You can go to Nashville, that's right, in September, the very first time RecFest comes to the US is going to be in Nashville. Just go to Chadcheese.com, click on 'events', the entire fucking hero image. Click on the 'sign up', go get it. We've got a 50% off code. Bring the whole gang. This is a team bonding exercise and enjoy some time with Chad and Cheese at the Disrupt stage. Joel: And don't forget a whole bunch of TA professionals being overserved for the Basement Jack's concert in Knebworth. [laughter] Joel: Definitely gonna be a good time. Chad: Topics. Joel: All the topics that are humanly possible, everybody. All right. Seattle start up Humanly raised... Chad: Oh, it's bad. Joel: $12 million in a series A round. This brings total funding to roughly $23 million. That's according to CrunchBase. It's platform automates recruiting functions including candidate-screening and communication. The company is investing in conversational AI to enhance efficiency and equity in the hiring process. The funding will support the expansion of engineering and their go-to-market teams. Chad, what's your take on the Humanly news? Chad: I think we've already given, humanly, a double applause during firing squad. So Humanly is a... Joel: Oh great tell Chad. I went back. Chad: Oh, did you? Joel: You were a golf clap. I was an applause. So... Chad: Dammit. Okay, so I might be a big applause. Now, I have to be, because the chatbot revolution is in full effect kids, and you can thank OpenAI and ChatGPT for the attention and the heightened funding in that area. Here's what caught my eye from the GeekWire story. "The company is also introducing AI into analytics features for human to human conversations. These tools which run during live calls, generate insights and send follow-up emails. Now, two weeks ago we talked about Teleperformance AI and the co-pilot for customer service reps, which allows quicker uptimes, which means less training and getting them to the phones faster, faster call times so they can actually help the AI, helps the customer service individual index the information and get to resolution faster, higher quality calls, more accurate resolution." Chad: So again, indexing the information is one thing. Being able to provide accurate information, is something entirely different. This co-pilot piece is, I'm saying the future in literally the next step, right? If we're talking about, everybody wants to know how we use ChatGPT, this is the next step. It's the co-pilot. It's, before it takes everything over, but it's the co-pilot. 30% faster calls from teleperformance means more calls can be taken and less heads are needed on the phones to achieve a better result. Not to mention, imagine how much less stressed a customer service representative is, 'cause that job fucking sucks. When you don't have to sit around and try to index and find, frantically find the right information, right? It's automatically being cued to you by the AI. Now imagine taking the same type of model to where? Oh yes, recruiting. It just makes fucking sense. This is incredibly smart and it's one of those things the right time. You gotta be at the right time and you gotta be skating to the puck and these guys are doing it. Joel: Less heads Chad, less heads. Chad: That doesn't sound like fun. Joel: On One hand, this is a really feel-good story to me. They've grown organically. I gave them big applause. I'm still excited about the business. They have a really great team that's there. They're not taking on too much debt. I mean, what they've raised has not been insane. The fact that they've been able to raise money in a high-interest environment is great for them and I think speaks well to the company. It feels a lot like Qualify or some of these companies that grow organically and have good leadership. And we both love CEO, Prem there at, Humanly. Joel: On the other hand, it feels a little bit like a knife in a gunfight. We have Paradox that's the apex predator in the space. We have got almighty Veritone, coming into the space with a lot of AI tools that Humanly can never even think about sort of building. They feel like just that it's not gonna be enough as this thing expands. Conversational AI is arguably the future of interviewing and recruiting and onboarding and all these things that's gonna happen. So a company like Humanly, while a great story, just doesn't feel like there's enough juice there unless they go super focused on like, "Hey, we're the healthcare provider." "Hey, we're the sales per... " Whatever it is. They need to go really focused, otherwise they're gonna get gobbled up by a Paradox, a Veritone, somebody that has bigger pockets, maybe an ATS that needs to plug this into their platform. So from that perspective, if acquisition is the main goal, like, I think they're definitely gonna be acquired and be a piece... Joel: To a bigger puzzle. Till then they've got this nice bridge funding, they can continue to build the product and survive any bumps in the economic road. So for me, it's all good, but they're not gonna go public. They're not gonna be a billion dollar company. They're gonna be a nice story. A nice little lifestyle business that's gonna get eaten up by bigger fish at some point down the road. Chad: So we talk about Paradox and how they are moving toward the ATS realm, right? Joel: Yep. Chad: How do you get some money? How do you look sexy for all those other decrepit fucking applicant tracking systems that are out there so that they can start to prospectively try to keep up with the new hot, sexy of the Paradoxes of the world, right? You buy these guys. Chad: That's what you do, right? I think the co-pilot, again, the whole co-pilot idea, and we'll talk more about this in the podcast, is something that, already works first off. We have business cases that demonstrate that. And if you start to talk about what are you gonna be working with less? Less recruiters. We start downsizing recruiters. How do we augment the recruiters that we have now get them 30% better, 60% better? How do we do that? Well, it's gonna be this type of tech. If you have an old, antiquated, applicant tracking system, it's probably not, but you feel like it is. But they don't have this kind of tech, they don't have a co-pilot. Chad: This is, I think, a prime fucking target for acquisition and that bridge funding. That's a solid gold fucking bridge, man. That's a lot of money. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, Prem, if you listen to last week's show, don't pull a spark higher co-mate and go buy an... Don't go buy an ATS of your own. Chad: Don't go. Joel: Don't be an ATS. Wait for an ATS to go buy you. I think that's what Chad is saying. Chad: Yes. Joel: All right. Can I interest you in a Canadian company story? [background conversation] Joel: That's right. Calgary-based, I believe, VidCruiter, an interviewing platform has acquired AI startup Engage Solutions to enhance its video interviewing platform with real-time intelligence. Engage's ethical AI technology, improves interview performance, reduces bias and promotes equitable hiring practices. The company says the acquisition strengthens VidCruiter's position in interview intelligence and talent identification. Terms were not disclosed. Shocking. Chad, what are your thoughts on this marriage? Chad: Yeah, I think it's interesting that they're still going heavy on the DEI route, the anti-bias thing when... We heard AI, was really sexy at one time. Everybody was slapping it on their stuff. And then next thing you know was DEI and everybody was slapping it on their stuff. And now it's generative AI or the ability to co-pilot. So the one quote that I pulled outta here that I think that makes a hell of a lot of sense is Engage analyzes the interview process and interviewers not the candidate. So that's where the problem starts. Not with the candidate, but with the goddamn interviewer. That's where bias creeps in. But also you get really bad interviews, but guess what, guess what they have? This is gonna be a co-pilot for all of those interviewers going in. So just because you turn a dickhead manager into a great interviewer, that doesn't make him not a dickhead manager though, right? [chuckle] Chad: You can only do so much to fix the people. Okay? Anyways, engage interviewing solutions, and I really focused more on Engage around this because they seem to be the heavy tech player that we're gonna come into and help augment the interview side with adaptive AI that improves the interview process. TensorFlow engine that evolves right alongside you. It's a machine learning scenario and real-time insights to obviously help the interviewer. To me, again, this is another co-pilot opportunity, but it's more focused on where the problem is. It's not the candidate, it's with the actual interviewer. So I think this is incredibly smart. I think, again, we were talking about it last week. If Engage actually, could have gotten in front of this and started skating to this puck a little bit quicker on the generative AI side of the house, maybe they didn't need to sell but this is where we're at. S?: That escalated quickly. Joel: So a little bit about VidCruiter. They were founded in 2012. They took some seed funding back then, COVID happened, everyone was like, "Video-interviewing is the thing." And I think they just stumbled into timing. Like, "Holy shit, we got an actual business now." They actually had a press release a few years ago, about hiring 100 people. Like no one does press releases about, "Hey, everybody, we're hiring 100 people, just so you know." So they're up to 200 people. So they doubled in size. That's all good news. Now you have Engage, which comes along, Stanford-built, so it's got the Stanford name on there. And they're a DEI tool. Again, another COVID darling, right? Everyone needs video. Everyone needs DEI. Two, three years later, everyone's going back to work. Joel: DEI is on the back burner because it's just not in the budget anymore. It's not in the lexicon of society as much as it was anymore. So now you have one company that was flying high in COVID, and now maybe on lesser prosperous times, you have another one that flew up during COVID and is now on less prosperous time. So I guess the strategy here is like, "Let's get together, the bar is closing." Two companies had a great time, but now they have to realize, "Oh shit, we gotta sober up and actually do something that works. Let's go home together. Let's have a good time. Let's sleep it off. Let's hope that the world comes back to no more recession talk, no more inflation." We got an election coming up. Joel: "Maybe if we join forces, the whole video-recruiting DEI thing is gonna be hot again. It'll be back in the lexicon, back in the discussion. And we will be boats and hoes and champagne and cocaine." I think that's the bet that's going on here. I'm certain there was very little money that went into this acquisition, probably a little bit of an acquihire, although I'm guessing the Stanford guys wanna go do something much more cooler. Chad: More unlikely. Joel: Than Engage. But otherwise nothing burger until the world goes back to 2021. And it's all about video and DEI. Chad: It is interesting because when Entelo bought, what was the name of the company? It was Take The Interview and then they rebranded as something fucking. Joel: Yeah. Convey IQ, I think. Chad: Convey IQ. Yeah yeah Convey IQ. So they had some money that they actually got along with that acquisition. It's interesting that that didn't happen, right? Because they're gonna need a boost. It doesn't matter. And back to the co-pilot piece, it's pretty awesome, but it's just not as sexy as the co-pilot external. So, yeah. We'll see how it rolls. Joel: We'll see what happens. Let's take a quick break, shall we? Chad: Yes. Joel: Now for something totally different, Marcus Harvin, a parolee and Yale College fellow, graduated with an associate degree in general studies from the University of New Haven. Through a partnership between UNHS' Prison Education Program and the Yale Prison Education Initiative. The program aims to provide education and transform the lives of incarcerated individuals, offering a path to college degrees. Harvin and his classmates are the first to matriculate from this partnership, which is part of a national consortium of 15 schools and prison systems. Chad, your thoughts on the news? Chad: This story is amazing from the fact that an individual who committed a crime is now turning it around. And can see the light at the end of the tunnel. So that is amazing for him and six others in this program. But how fucked up is our system? Let me count the ways, Marcus Harvin, the focal point of the story was a drunk driver in an accident nearly killed two kids then that's fucking awful. But he spent six years in a Maximum Security Prison. Maximum security. Dude, he wasn't a rapist, didn't conceive a plan to murder anyone. His dumb young ass got behind the wheel while he was drunk. And then he finds himself in Max Security. In my eyes, here's where it gets worse. Yale's endowment is $42.2 billion. And we're talking about six people in this program, right? That should be 6,000 in these programs working towards 60,000 inmates in a US incarceration system that has close to 2 million at this moment right now. So this to me is inspiration porn for the alumni and people who want to talk about progress. But if you wanna see progress, here's what you do. Kids. Princeton has 37.2 billion in endowments. Stanford, 37.8, Yale 42.2, University of Texas, 43.6 billion, Harvard, 53.2 billion. That's the top five. Over $200 billion. Chad: That we could be creating and helping thousands of communities inside, that are incarcerated, and outside. But we're talking about this inspiration porn. I love that these kids, these men got an opportunity to turn it around, but six doesn't even scratch the fucking surface over $200 billion five schools. What would happen if we started to, I don't know, give back to the community instead of our alumni? Joel: Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned some of the numbers. One in half million Americans are currently incarcerated. Approximately 70 million people in the US have a criminal record. We'll all remember the site 70 million jobs in sort of honor of that. Nearly 60% of formerly incarcerated individuals are unemployed one year after being released. On the other side of this we have a lot of universities that are struggling. You mentioned some of the successful ones. They're not all Texas Yale and Stanford, right? We talked about college debt being repaid. That that's coming back in the circle. What a great government program if we actually subsidized educating some of these formerly incarcerated individuals. Schools would benefit, those individuals would benefit, society would benefit. What a great program. So when I run for president that's gonna be my platform. Just kidding. [laughter] I am not getting in the ring for president. I promise you. Now... Chad: No. Joel: But look, it is progress. And I know you like to say it's nowhere near the progress that we want. Chad: Dude, it's inspiration porn. It's it's not progress. Joel: It's technically a little bit of progress, Chad, we ask a lot about... A lot of companies and we talk about MOD Pizza. We love them. We need companies to do more. We need government to do do more, and we need colleges to do more. And why not have some sort of a partnership around this where everybody wins. I hope that a name like Yale brings a lot of attention to this. This isn't Tennessee Tech, this is Yale, right? So let's see more universities do this, more government programs aim towards this, subsidize more education, and we all win. But until then, yes, it is a little bit of porn. Chad: Bred the wealth. Yes. Joel: It's a little bit of porn. [laughter] Chad: It's a lot of porn. [laughter] Chad: For six dudes. I'm so happy for them, but, fuck, man, we can do so much more. Joel: Yeah. How many state universities, how many community colleges, they can make so much money just like get some of these folks into college, get them in the system. Well, from that story to an overeducated, a bunch of whiny asses. And by the way where Chad and I find most of our porn. Let's talk about Google. [laughter] Joel: The employees are expressing frustration and venting on the company's internal forum about the strict enforcement of return-to-office requirements. Google's crackdown includes tracking employee badge swipes, which some employees feel is treating them like school children. The backlash came after an internal memo from Google's HR boss when she informed employees that the company would closely monitor office attendance and that poor attendance records could impact individual performance reviews. Employees are sharing memes on the forum to criticize the new policy and mock their bosses for attending meetings virtually while enforcing office attendance for employees. The Titan returned office policy has raised tensions within Google which currently underwent layoffs and cut some of its office perks. Chad, what's your take on this news out of Google? Chad: They're continuing to boil the frog. They're working their way back to everybody back in the office all the time. Check my work not my badge, just pretty good bumper sticker. That's great rallying cry for them. Yeah. They literally are treating them like kids. If I'm hitting my project goals, the fuck are you here to talk about? As a matter of fact life isn't lived inside the office building, which means work doesn't have to happen there either for many of us, not all of us. The New York Post actually posted about some YouTube hypocrisy that was happening. And that, to me, I thought was amazing. The YouTube bosses were on a virtual call talking about return-to-work policy. [laughter] Chad: See they were on the call. This didn't hit them in the brain. They were on a virtual call talking about return to work. So this goes back to, and we've said it several times, the beatings will continue until morale improves at Google. [background conversation] Joel: Well, first of all I'm sure all the warehouse workers at Amazon, pinging trash cans feel really bad for the Googlers... [laughter] Joel: They'd have to go back to work. But look, you're right. If you're going to lead you first must lead by example. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: That's a tried and true idea that you and I have heard through our whole lives. You can't tell people to get back to work from a Zoom call. You just can't do it. It's like the DJ Goldman Sachs. What was he, at a country club? And he saw employees there and he is like, "Hey get the hell out of here. Well, get back to work." Like you can't be at the club and tell everyone to get back to work. It doesn't work that way. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The other thing that strikes me is these people got a job at Google. Why don't they just leave? That's the ultimate voting. Like, "I'm out of here dude." Chad: That they will, yeah. Joel: They should. I... Chad: Yeah they will. Joel: That always that always strikes me. But back to your point, I'm feeling more and more the work-from-home revolution, it's bloodied, it's down. It may not be out. But it is beaten up, man. Traditional businesses are like, "Get back in the office." The commercial real estate crunch is coming, and the voice of like, "Get back in the office," is gonna be more, it's being portrayed as a moral issue from Elon Musk. Chad: He's an idiot. Joel: They're trying everything to get back. Chad: They are. They are. Joel: There was an interview with a Tech Exec recently that was like, "Well, it worked at the beginning because we were more productive, and everybody was really on on it. And now it's digressed into long lunches at Chipotle, hooking up for dates," or whatever. So everybody is back to work. Google's no exception. Everyone's gonna have to swallow it and deal with it, or just join the gig economy, start a podcast. I don't know. You do have options, but it feels like the world of work-from-home, the frog is boiling, it's almost ready to be plated. I am disheartened by what has happened with work-from-home, and a poor economy, God help us if we go to war at some big scale like... Then it's really over. But yeah, right now it's bloodied in the club. Joel: It's on the floor, bloodied, it's not pretty. I don't know if it's gonna survive, Chad. Chad: I think we still have the Airbnbs of the world. We still have all the organizations that are using this as a catalyst to get great talent into their organization. I tell you, any company that's out there today, especially listening to this podcast, dude, I'd be going directly after those individuals. I'd be looking on LinkedIn, I'd be going to hireEZ or wherever the fuck I can, right? Seek out to actually start pulling those candidates in and I would nail the shit out of them. And guess what? I don't give a fuck if you and your wife are banging at home during lunch. I don't care if you're doing your laundry. If you get the code out, if you make your sales, if you do everything that we need you to do, I don't care. Joel: Get the code out, people. [background conversation] Joel: And we'll be right back. Joel: All right, Chad, it's been a hot minute since we've talked about Bud Light. With a new wrinkle in the story. The Saloon, a gay bar in Minneapolis, has decided to stop serving Anheuser-Busch beverages, including Bud Light, citing a lack of integrity from the company. The decision was made due to the way Anheuser-Busch handled the backlash over their partnership with influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which led to a drop in sales and market value. The Saloon owner expressed a desire to do business with companies that support marginalized communities and have integrity. Other gay bars in Chicago have also committed to no longer serving Bud Light. Anheuser-Busch executives have acknowledged the controversy and emphasized the importance of bringing people together during divisive times. Damned if I do, damned if I don't, Chad. What's your take on this news? Chad: So last Saturday here in Vienna, a reported 250,000 people marched in the biggest pride parade in Europe. It made me think, "Why didn't Bud Light double down, attend the pride parades all over the world with these limited edition cans?" That would have emboldened the brand to the community. But no, Bud Light, they picked a lane and then they changed lanes. One thing you cannot do, you can't pick a fucking lane, change lanes, and then expect everybody, especially when you're a brand as big as Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light, that nobody's gonna notice, right? It's why we were adamant on the show about Anheuser-Busch not backing off, especially because it was a fucking limited can promotion. They didn't change, this isn't going from Coke to new Coke. They didn't change anything other than the can, right? So this to me was just a demonstration of weak leadership at its worst. And the poor CMO got her head chopped off because of this, and she's probably happy today because these motherfuckers don't know what they're doing. Joel: This is an all around just disaster. By the way, did you know Stella Artois is an Anheuser-Busch beer? Chad: No, I did not. Joel: Anyway, there are quality beers in there somewhere, one of my favorites, Stella, and the namesake of my daughter, by the way. Anyway, Garth Brooks has a new bar in Nashville. It's called Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk, and he is gonna be serving Bud Light almost in protest of this decision. He says, "If you're an asshole, there are plenty of other places on lower Broadway to go." [laughter] Joel: Now, of course, Garth has gotten some pushback, obviously, from that. I have to feel like, part of me says there's gotta be a huge amount of fear for companies to go political. Like, the default now is gonna be, "Don't touch it. Don't look at it, don't smell it, don't go near it." Chad: But this isn't political. This is just a person's choice to... That's the thing is we've politicized this, and it shouldn't be. Joel: Yeah, we do. It's not the company's fault. Chad: It's ridiculous. Joel: It's people are assholes. We're all assholes. Now, I have to think if Bud Light had... If they could turn back the clock, I think what they would have done is they would have gotten a Garth Brooks, or the manliest guy possible, like Sam Shepard, or the ghost of Patrick Swayze, I don't know. And they would have put them in the commercial with Dylan Mulvaney, and it would have been a funny, like, we're at the bar, beer's for everybody, we all love beer no matter where we're from or who we are. Chad: Or who we are. Joel: And I feel like if they could have done it differently, they might have sort of built a bridge between meathead male and progressive transgender celebrity, and somehow it would have worked. We would have laughed it off, it would have been funny. Of course, we can't go back in time. That's what it is, but I applaud Garth Brooks. He's gonna get pushed back from this, unfortunately. Again, for the reason why you can't go into politics unless you're like a Nike. Nike with Kaepernick that worked, because Nike understood rebellion, siding with their core customers was a good decision. So the Nikes of the world will continue to get political, but I fear that more companies won't touch this with a 10-foot pole, and that's a shame for society and for the greater good of everybody. By the way, Chad, RecFest, as you mentioned, is coming to Nashville soon. Chad: Yes. Joel: You don't think Garth Brook was... Garth was calling us assholes, do you? Chad: No, I was gonna ask if he had a bull in his bar. [laughter] Joel: He better have Stella, 'cause we're coming and we're riding the bull, Garth. We are friends in low places my friend. From Orlando and Vienna, we out. Chad: We out. S?: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Live from UNLEASH America at the Workhuman booth, J.D. Cummings, Vice President of Recruiting at Raising Cane’s, a fine purveyor of chicken finger goodness, joins the boys to talk turkey, er, chicken, I guess. On the agenda: The art of high-volume hiring, living your brand, must-have tech tools, and yes, even the secret menu at Raising Cane’s. Be prepared to get BOB’d and have your mind opened by one of Chad & Cheese’s favorite people (and not just because he comes with gift cards). More: J.D. Cummings - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdcummings/ Workhuman - https://www.workhuman.com UNLEASH America - https://unleash.ai 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: Live from the Workhuman Booth at Unleash America in Vegas. This year, Joel and I were able to sit down with some great practitioners and industry voices. Sit back and enjoy this exclusive episode, powered by our friends over at Workhuman. Answer the human need to be recognized, developed and celebrated at workhuman.com. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: We're back, everybody, recording Live from Unleash America from the Workhuman Booth. And we welcome, JD Cummings, Vice President of Recruiting at Raising Cane's. And previously before that at Chipotle. Chad: Oh my God. Joel: So the guy knows a thing or two about fine food and high volume hiring. Chad: I tell you what, man. Joel is in fucking heaven right now. Last time we actually saw JD, years ago. JD, did you send us coupons or did you give them to like out of your pocket? 'Cause Joel is going fucking crazy. JD Cummings: I travel with them. So, yeah. Joel: Gift cards. Yeah. Chad: Okay. So we got... It was at an ISMS event. He pulls out the gift cards, Joel automatically starts drooling. [chuckle] He's like, we have a Raising Cane's. Just new location. Joel: One just opened up a couple miles from me and the line is insane. [laughter] So I'm gonna wait it out a little bit. JD Cummings: Well, you're not alone. Our sauce was actually rated the most craveable sauce in the United States just recently. Chad: I'm all about the sauce. Joel: Did you dethrone Chick-fil-A? JD Cummings: I don't know if they were on that list or not. Joel: Okay. JD Cummings: But I know that we are now officially the most craveable. Joel: And did you get a wrestling belt for that? [laughter] Chad: Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Joel: Or a champion chain, for that? Chad: Should have like a chicken head on it, like a on fire chicken head. Joel: Like the Neon Sign at Hot Ones. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Like most craveable sauce. Chad: Oh, yeah. JD Cummings: I think Technomic gives us a nice little plaque for that. So yes, something. Joel: Aww, that's sweet. Chad: So even though you get those really cool plaques and awards, it's still hard to find people. JD Cummings: It is, yeah. Chad: Especially high volume, which is your specialty. So talk a little bit about that, talk about some of the problems, some of the obstacles that you guys are facing right now. JD Cummings: Yeah, we, just like any other company out there, we got hit really hard in 2021, the Great Resignation. But we took some extreme measures. One of the neat things that we did is our leadership shut down our support office and sent everybody from our support office out to the restaurants to work and also... Chad: Put on an apron big boy. JD Cummings: And also to recruit. So I had to very quickly teach a bunch of accountants and marketing people how to be recruiters. [laughter] And we took extreme measures. We got our restaurant staff back up. So going into early 2022, we were in such a better place than most other concepts. And we kind of held and maintained that for a while. Chad: Wow. JD Cummings: We're doing all right. But it's still hard. Chad: Have you ever heard of an all hands kind of scenario like that, where it's like, batten down the hatches, give me all the accountants, give me all the salespeople, give me all whatever. We have to focus in these areas. You are all now recruiters because if we don't have people... Joel: JD's LinkedIn literally says Fry Cook. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And something else. JD Cummings: Fry Cook and cashier, I wear... Joel: In addition to VP of recruiting. Yeah. JD Cummings: Right. Yeah. Joel: Which is very cool. Chad: So have you heard of other companies doing that before? JD Cummings: I have not, and... Chad: I hadn't either. JD Cummings: And the reaction was really interesting. There's a lot of people that were saying, "Hey, it's about time that the folks in the corporate office got to know what it's like to work on the front line." And what's interesting is, our culture is... We're deeply rooted in the restaurants. We run restaurants, we own and operate all of our own restaurants. And so everybody who comes in, regardless of their role, they spend a couple weeks working in the restaurant as the first part of their training. Joel: Yep. JD Cummings: And then each year we go back and recertify work in a restaurant for a week. Joel: Have you leveraged that? Like, if I go look for a job on your site, do you have pictures of the CEO, fry and cook chicken up in the back? Have you leveraged it or is it just a word of mouth thing? JD Cummings: It's a great idea. We have not leveraged that in our marketing. Joel: You're welcome. That's free advice. JD Cummings: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Chad: Wow. We're giving it all away today. Jesus, that's... Joel: Yeah. All away. All away. JD Cummings: It's part of our pitch in the recruiting process. We talk about it. With a candidate. Say, "Hey, part of this is you're gonna work in the restaurants. You have to earn the fry, cook and cashier title." Joel: So another big issue with where you are has been minimum wage in salaries. And we see from Walmart to Target, to McDonald's, just wages going up and up. What is Raising Cane's sort of view on minimum wage and via states? Or do you fluctuate by location? How does that work? JD Cummings: It does fluctuate a little bit by location. Our goal is to be as competitive as we can be, but we have to operate within the confines of the economic model of our restaurants. But our average wage for crew members has gone up significantly over the last, let's say, four or five years. I think our average crew member across the system is around or close to $15 an hour right now. A lot of our markets are paying a premium above and beyond that. Joel: Yep. JD Cummings: And we've invested very heavily in our hourly manager ranks and our salaried manager ranks. And we've launched this new thing, it's a new evolution of our crew journey. So making sure that at every stop and really our crew members now are in control of their earnings. So you'll start at, let's say $15 an hour in some of our restaurants based on how many hours they work. So once they accumulate a hundred hours or 400 hours of certain milestones, and how many areas in the restaurant that they've completed training on, they get a raise automatically. So it's not based on once a year we do a merit review or twice a year. It's based on how much have you worked, how much have you learned while you're here? You automatically get a 25 or 50 cent raise at every milestone. Joel: Is that unique to you or is that common in the industry? JD Cummings: We're seeing it in some other concepts. Joel: Okay. JD Cummings: But the way that we've structured it, I think is unique. And it's every 600 hours worked after a certain point. There's just an automatic raise that happens and it does have a cap on it. Like our crew members will eventually get to the point where the next step they need to go to an hourly management position because they kind of maxed out on what they can earn as a crew member. But it puts them in control of their earnings. If you want that 50% raise, there's an easy way for you to attain it. Joel: Yeah. JD Cummings: It's not whether your manager likes you or not, it's how hard are you working? Chad: Well, and that gives you this very military time and service. You're getting paid for time and service, but there are caps on that, you have to get promoted. JD Cummings: Yep. Chad: To get to that next point. So it's that time that you're spending, obviously gaining the expertise, etcetera, etcetera. You do have, obviously, your evaluation reports and whatnot for promotion, but still all those time in grade pay ups happen. JD Cummings: Yep, absolutely. Yeah. Joel: So we talk a lot about technology on the show, as you know. What are some invaluable technologies to you that help you fill seats within these restaurants? Any tools that you could not live without? JD Cummings: I mean, high volume, entry level SMS messaging is absolutely critical. Our candidates would prefer to communicate via text message versus... So having that fully integrated into our ATS where that conversation string, if it's recruiter hiring manager, whoever's communicating with them, we can see the entire string of conversation. So we're not messaging them same thing three different times from three different users. So that's been really, really important to us. Joel: Is some of that automated or is that all human to human from when they apply? JD Cummings: We have the ability to automate and there are some messages that are like, when we initiate a background check, they get an automatic message that says, "Hey, go check your email. There's a background check that you need to go complete." But most of it is actual conversation. We want our restaurant managers to be authentic and genuine and reach out to somebody and say, "Hey, I saw your application, love to chat with you. When are you available for an interview?" We don't want it to feel like it's a bot talking to them. We want them to know it's a real human being who's saying, "Hey, I want to chat with you." Chad: Well, on the high volume side though, most of them don't care if it's a bot because they usually don't get the messaging anyway. They go into a black hole until they hopefully one day find something out whether they got the job or not. So is that really a big deal, whether it sounds like a bot or not, just getting connection and engagement? Isn't that like job one? JD Cummings: Yes. We encourage all of our restaurant managers no matter what, to reach out to every candidate that applies. And sometimes it's reaching out to say, "Hey, your availability doesn't work with my schedule right now. Check back with me later." Or sometimes it's just, "Hey, I'd love to chat with you. Come in for an interview. We want to interview every candidate." Now, the fact that a candidate may not be offended by a bot, it does go against our culture, which is one of being very genuine and authentic and wanting that culture to come across in our communications so that it's not a canned, templated messages that hits their inbox. Chad: Is there a happy medium though, because these managers are so damn busy, they've got so many tasks, this is one of them. It's incredibly important, don't get me wrong, is there a way, especially seeing the new generative AI and whatnot, is there a way you think that you might be able to bridge that to make it easier? Joel: The happy medium is coupons for everybody for free chicken. Chad: No. JD Cummings: We've actually toyed around with the idea of offering post interview free lemonade offer 'cause our lemonade is an upgraded beverage in the restaurant. And it's fresh squeezed lemonade and all that. So it's wonderful. But just to say, "Hey, thank you for coming in for interviewing with us, regardless of the outcome of the interview, we'd love for you to come back, visit us again, come back to the restaurant." So we have kind of toyed around with the sort of the free coupon idea. But going back to conversational AI, we're not opposed to it. It's not a definitive, we're not gonna do that. I think we would have to think very cautiously about how we would approach it so that it feels authentic to our brand. Chad: Yeah. Okay. Joel: Another hot issue has been automation. Now, based on your previous comments, I'm guessing whether you're a fan of automation or not, the human touch is very important at Raising Cane's. But we've seen stories where Wingstop, McDonald's, companies are starting to experiment with humanless restaurants. [laughter] What does the landscape look like at some point? Chad: You mean JD wouldn't have to be a fry cook? [laughter] Chad: That's crazy. JD Cummings: I don't foresee that in our future in any way, shape or form. I think the service industry is special because of the people that are in it. And for us especially, we're not your traditional QSR. When you come to Raising Cane's, the experience should feel different. As soon as you walk in that door, the crew members are greeting you, "Hey, welcome to Cane's." When you come to our drive-through, we have these clever sayings that are approved of course. But hey, hey, hey, want some chicken today? It's not the sort of canned greeting that you get in most drive-throughs. And would you like to try our special sandwich today? It's very playful. And so that experience is part of what our customers appreciate about our brand. It's not just the great food, amazing Texas toast, the awesome sauce and the great chicken. Joel: Do you see what you did there? Chad: They awesome... Yeah. Joel: See what you did there? See what he did there? Nice. Chad: Okay. So many companies, they might not think like Raising Cane's. Which means they're not getting the outcomes. And what I mean by that is they don't treat their employees great and therefore the employees are not treating the customers great, which is obviously affecting the bottom line. How much focus on manager training, understanding, retention, turnover, I would assume many of these GMs understand it because they have to fill the positions on a day-to-day basis. Do they and are you pressing to them that how they're treating employees and how they're being flexible and whatnot directly goes to the bottom line? And whether that customer comes back or not. JD Cummings: It's everything to us. And it started with the first restaurant when Todd opened up in August of 1996, he had these students from LSU that were working in the restaurant, working so hard. He turned a profit that first month it was only $30 but he did turn a profit. And the first holiday that came around was Halloween. And he didn't have a lot of money to reward his crew, to give them any bonuses or anything like that. But he remembered when he was in elementary school, his teacher used to give everybody a ghost pop, which is a blow pop with a little Kleenex around it and a ghost space on it. And so he went out, that's what he could afford to do for his crew as a special little reward. And he gave them a ghost pop that had a note on it says, "Thanks for all your hard work. I couldn't do this without you." It was a little token of his appreciation. We still do that today. So we're sourcing 50,000 ghost pops at Halloween. Chad: Probably from BAMCO. Joel: Probably. JD Cummings: But that is one element of our culture that kind of explained, like we have a whole entire department called Cane's Love. That is a budgeted function for each leader in the business that tells you like, hey, everything from a handwritten note to say thank you for your hard work to a gift card, to tickets to a sporting event. Chad: And this is all to employees. JD Cummings: Crew members, individual contributors, leaders in our support office in our field. It's. Chad: That's amazing. JD Cummings: And it's a huge budget of the company. I think it's a half percent of total revenue that goes into this Cane's Love budget to make sure... Joel: That's a lot of Cane's Love. JD Cummings: To make sure that we're rewarding everybody. Chad: That's amazing. Joel: So, branding is obviously important to you guys and through the pandemic, DoorDash, Uber Eats has become more popular. How do you guys balance that phenomenon with living the brand and making sure that it's cohesive? Are you guys doing your own delivery service? How do you guys look at that? JD Cummings: So we don't do third party delivery. Joel: At all? JD Cummings: At all. Joel: Okay. JD Cummings: There are some that we don't have a relationship with and they will just do it anyway. They'll show up. But they have to show up as a customer and order at the counter and... Intro: And is that a branding decision? We don't wanna outsource that. JD Cummings: There's a couple reasons for it. I think one is Cane's is really an experience that I think is best in the restaurant. Fresh hot chicken we cook to order. Joel: Yep. JD Cummings: We don't have any heat lamps. Chad: Experience. Let's just focus on that word for a minute. JD Cummings: Yeah. Chad: Because you can't control the experience beyond outside of your doors. JD Cummings: We cannot. We cannot. Okay. And let's be honest, french fries, no matter who's making them whatever company, they don't travel well. And if somebody from Uber Eats or DoorDash, no offense to those companies, is gonna deliver it, those french fries are not gonna be amazing. They're probably gonna be soggy, they're probably gonna be cold. Chad: And if they're as good as Raising Cane's, they're probably stealing a few. JD Cummings: Yes. Possibly. Possibly. Yeah. But for us it's about we want, especially if you go to a new market, like we're gonna open in Manhattan in July. Right in Times Square and... Chad: Damn. JD Cummings: If the first experience that somebody had at Raising Cane's was a delivery through a third party and it took 45 minutes to get to their house and it's cold chicken, all that, it's not an amazing, it's not our best. We want somebody to come in and experience us at our best, especially when we're introducing them for the first time. We have zero margin for error. Think about it this way. There's one thing on our menu, it's chicken fingers. So if you came to Raising Cane's today and you had a mediocre chicken dinner and that was your first experience, why would you ever come back? There's literally nothing else on the menu. Chad: Because that's your thing. JD Cummings: That is it. Chad: That is your thing. Well, that and sauce by the way. JD Cummings: Yes. The sauce. [laughter] But you might be forgiving of another brand that has a broader menu because you go and order something and it wasn't amazing and you might just think to yourself, well, I didn't enjoy that particular menu item, but I'll go back and try something else. Maybe it was what I ordered. With us there's nothing else to order. Joel: Interesting. JD Cummings: It's simple, but it's incredibly complex that we have to get it right for every customer. Chad: Have you ever tried to expand the menu? Because you always see these franchises, I mean, McDonald's obviously with the... They created the Big Mac to go against the Whopper and it's like they're constantly creating these new Shamrock shakes or some stupid shit [laughter] that's novelty. Joel: How dare you say The Shamrock Shake is a stupid idea. Chad: Oh my God. JD Cummings: In our industry we call that an LTO or limited time offer. Chad: Yes. Yes. JD Cummings: Yeah. We have not changed our menu in the 26 years that we've been in business. In fact, last year was our 25th anniversary. We had billboards around that said 25 years of not fixing what ain't broke. Like, it works. Joel: So we're here in Las Vegas and In-N-Out is obviously famous here on the West Coast. JD Cummings: Yes. Joel: And they have a very simple menu as well. However, they have a secret menu. Does Raising Cane's have a secret menu that I should know about? JD Cummings: Absolutely. Yes, there are some things on the menu that are not on the menu that you can order in the restaurant. One of them is BOBbed Toast. So BOB stands for Buttered on Both sides because normally our Texas Toast has a proprietary garlic butter blend that we put on one side of the toast. But if you want it on both sides, you can order it that way. We do also have. Chad: Next time you can BOB it. JD Cummings: Yes. Joel: Let the man talk. What else? [laughter] JD Cummings: We do also have honey mustard, which is not on the menu. We do make it fresh in-house. It is amazing. It's really good. It's offered, it's there. You can order it, but it's just not visible on the menu. We do have, of course you can mix our tea and lemonade together for an Arnold Palmer, even though it's not on the menu. We do have naked tenders. If somebody is not wanting the breading on the outside of their chicken, we... Joel: Like me. JD Cummings: We will cook them. We will cook them without the breading. Joel: Without the breading. This is why we have a podcast, Chad. Chad: Nobody needs naked cheese, okay? Joel: This is why we do these interviews. JD Cummings: The only thing I ask for anybody who's listening is please, come into the restaurant when you order those specialty items. Don't be in the drive through because it really messes up our throughput. But no, we encourage... Joel: Sounds like a deal. Sounds like a deal. JD Cummings: Yeah. We encourage everybody to come try the special items. Joel: So we're here at Unleash. We're in the expo hall. I know it's early, but any companies that you're looking to talk to, anyone that's sort of stood out in your time here? JD Cummings: I always like to see the little startups and the little pavilions. Joel: The kiosks, yes. JD Cummings: And sometimes I find it fascinating because, maybe it's a problem that we haven't encountered yet, but I see that somebody's trying to solve a problem that I didn't even know was a problem. And it kind of keys me into like, things in our business that maybe I should be looking deeper into. So I like to go talk to the one man booths where they've got a little laptop computer and they just created some technology. Joel: Yeah. Chad: How many times have you actually walked up though? And they're like, here's the problem we're trying to solve. And you're like, that's not a problem. I don't know how many startups I've seen it's like, is that really a problem? JD Cummings: And it may not be a problem for us, but I assume it's a problem for somebody. I hope it is. Otherwise they're probably not gonna be very successful with their startup. Joel: They will not be getting out of the kiosk alley anytime soon. That's JD Cummings everybody. JD, for our listeners who want to know more about you or have some delicious chicken, where would you send them? JD Cummings: Follow me on LinkedIn, visit us at any one of our 700 restaurants here in the US or visit our career site and come join me on this wonderful journey. Chad: Yes. Joel: Why did we schedule this during lunch? Goddamn it. Another one is in the can. And where's the buffet? We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Landing pages? Wait, did I hear you correctly? A platform for landing pages? That's correct and, in this Deja, vu moment Rick Maré and the team over at SHAZAMME are betting on a platform that helps hiring companies build better landing pages quicker. No question, this is definitely a case of "what is old is new again", but has the idea run full circle? Has it lost its luster or is it just in time? Will Rick receive big applause, a golf clap, or the FIRING SQUAD? You gotta listen to find out. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Alright. Alright. Alright. What's up everybody? It's another Firing Squad. If you don't know, just ask your sister. This is your favorite guilty pleasure, The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always the chewy to my Han, Chad Sowash is in the house and we are here to welcome Rick Maré the CEO and Co-Founder at Shazamme. Did I say that correctly, Rick? Chad: Shazamme. Joel: They're in Australia and I don't speak Australian. Rick: Shazamme, yeah. Joel: Shazamme? Rick: That's correct. Joel: Shazamme. Welcome. It's 6:00 AM in Melbourne so it's your coffee time and our happy hour. Chad: Thanks for joining us. Joel: This will be fun. Chad: Yes. Thanks for joining us. Rick: Pleasure to be here. Joel: Well, we always start with a little Twitter bio before we get down to business. So why don't you tell us more about Rick. Rick: Thank you. Look, Rick is a very complicated person. Always been very interested in finding challenges and new ways of doing things. So I was born in South Africa, left when I was three months old back to Holland where I grew up until I was 15 then came to beautiful Australia and learned to swim with the crocodiles, swim with the sharks and have snakes around. So it is what it is in Australia but great fun and I wouldn't leave here for a million dollars or anything else. Joel: Is it really true that 90% of the world's venomous animals live in Australia? Rick: Absolutely. Absolutely. Joel: Wow. Wow. Wow. [laughter] Chad: Joel's got a boner right now. Okay, so Rick, welcome. [laughter] [music] Chad: Welcome to Firing Squad. This is how it's gonna play out. At the sound of the bell, you will have two minutes to pitch Shazamme. At the end of two minutes we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or Joel's gonna hit you with the crickets 'cause he loves the fucking crickets. That just means get your shit tighter and move it along. After Q&A you're either gonna receive from both of us, big applause. [applause] Chad: What is old becomes new again. Get ready for the second coming of website-building, golf clap. Okay. Okay. Okay. Maybe you've got something here. And last but not least, the Firing Squad. That's right, Rick. I'm sorry Rick but the '80s called and they want its Commodore 64-like technology back. That is the Firing Squad. Are you ready? Rick: Ready as I'll be. Joel: Alright Rick. Pitch Shazamme in three two... Rick: Shazamme is what the recruitment industry needs to build a brand online. So what we've done is we've looked at technologies around the world and saw Shopify, ecommerce sites, Canva and all types of technologies making it easy for people to do what they want to do. Now, that was not available in the recruitment and staffing industry. So what we did is we scoured the world and looked at what technologies we could use to make it really easy for people to do what they essentially needed to do to build a brand online. So build landing pages, track the referral sources and really do it very easily without coding. So Shazamme was born out of pulling together no-code platforms that really dealt with all the issues that we learned over the previous 14 years. So making sure that people could build landing pages, brand them, drop a job board on, drop 10 job boards on, filter it any way you want all without writing a single line of code. Rick: So our four key promises to the market have been simple drag-and-drop technology. No developers required. 24/7 chat support so that if you do need help when you're building landing page new sections on the site, you have someone to talk to supported by extensive help system and an academy to teach you how to do certain things. Pricing. So pricing was meant to be very much competitive and not excessive compared to what was in the market at the time. And then integrations, making sure that we have every possible integration with every ATS CRM and multi-posted to make it easy for you to connect to your backend systems. So making it really easy and what that has allowed us to do is win clients from the smallest to the largest in the world. They all give us five-star reviews solely because once they see it they just go, "This is what the industry has needed for many many years because finally we can do what we want to do without having to go through support." Joel: Thank you, Rick. Thank you. You did get that five-star commentary in there which I'm sure you wanted to get in there. Rick: Absolutely. Joel: Let's start with the name, Shazam I think of a music discovery app or I think of a superhero that they may or may not have in Australia. It's spelled S-H-A-Z-A-M-M-E. So Shazamme but the spelling is off. How did you come to it? You're marketing people why not go with a word that people recognize. A common spelling? What's up with the name? Rick: Very good question. Look, we wanted something that was Shazam boom bang here. And we threw around lots of names and the first version was Shazam my brand. So it's about building a brand for recruiters. That was too long, too complicated then we started throwing ideas around and Nicole my co-founder came up with Shazamme and we looked around and there was not a single mention of it. It was absolutely unique and yeah, we took it. We've got every URL possible and that's when the journey started. We registered a trademark and lo and behold, our good friends Apple and DC Comics sent us lovely letters resisting. SFX: Shazam. Joel: Now, that makes more sense to me. You should capitalize the M at the end, the second M so it's ShazamMe. Anyway, that's my own little thought. Rick: Well, if you saw the first iteration of the logo, the first part Shazam was one color and Me was the second color. And so in order to get around the trademark dispute, we swapped it around so the Shazam was not highlighted. Yeah. Joel: Okay. Okay. Rick: That was very interesting having to deal with two absolute giants of the industry but they were very good. Joel: Okay, so you have a nice history. You were at an agency before this. 20 years ago you were making biscuits and chocolate at a company called Snack Time, [chuckle] how... Chad: I'm hungry. Joel: Talk about the JXT, your past experience and how that all helps support Shazamme. Rick: Yeah, very good question. So, you are right. I have been in a few industries. I was part of a housing company before that that owned the biscuit or snack company. So I built houses, 12,000 a year so that's many a week and then went into biscuits and chocolates. Very different again, but all to do with volume, outputs and how to best manufacture, how to get more out of a factory. Joel: You can just jump to JXT. Rick: Yeah. [laughter] Joel: Get off the biscuits. You're making me hungry. Chad: Please get hungry. Rick: And then back in 2006 after trying to find staff for another business, I just realized it was very hard to use job boards that were prevalent back then and very costly. So I raised some funds and started Job X back then which was the next best job board. The technology by then was definitely far ahead of the major competitors in the market. There were three of them back then. And the GFC in 2008 hit and as you all know, the recruitment industry stopped spending on anything that was not core to their business. So rather than spending on four job boards, they moved their money to one job board and our technology or our platform essentially became obsolete. So we used that technology we developed to essentially spin out the first white label type SaaS technology for recruiters. And we went on a journey with Google back then to educate the market as to why recruiters should have their own brand and how they can build it well online. And we won large companies in the first sort of five years. We got Adecco, Manpower, Kelly and a lot of Australian big companies to jump on board and use our technology. And so that was the journey into the recruitment technology space. Since then we've had many iterations with under... You know Job X became JXT and then, yeah, Shazamme just before COVID hit and that was probably the best thing I've ever done. Joel: Okay. Landing pages. That sounds like job descriptions to me. How is that... How is it different? I mean, you can embed a video, you can put in some graphics in a job description. What are you doing that's different? Rick: So what we class as landing pages is, for example, you are a medical recruiter and you want to build landing pages for a specific hospital opening or an anaesthetist in Wollongong, you can literally in five minutes build a landing page, filter it down to that category, throw whatever you want on there, video consultant, anything you want, FAQs and have that running and then promotion on say Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, whatever you want and then track everything that comes back all the way through. So one of the things that obviously ecommerce does really well, they track everything that comes in and everything that comes out. So you can go ROI on this Facebook campaign for $100 with 10 applications. So we've perfected that process so that even if they don't stay on the landing page but then they go to another job or look at something else and then apply, we still attribute that to that campaign. Not difficult technology but the way the recruitment space is set up as you know, people go and buy a landing page product that stands alone and isn't integrated into the rest of their brand or they'll go and get MailChimp and they export CSV files and that's not connected to their brand or website. So we're trying to make it the Shopify of recruitment. Chad: So building landing page is nothing new for this industry. Rick: No. Chad: Right? Rick: Absolutely not. Chad: So what's the focus of the market that you're trying to hit? Who is your perfect client? Is it a practitioner? Is it staffing? Is it RPO? Who is it? Rick: Yeah, good question. So to date we have solved lots of problems for anyone from a startup, so a single person organization that doesn't know what to do. Because as you know, they may have come from a big recruitment brand and they step into the world on their own and they don't know how to set up email. They don't know how to build a website. They don't know about SEO or technology or... Chad: So is that SMB or enterprise? I mean what do you... Rick: Enterprise as well, yeah. Chad: I'm trying to cut to the chase here, man. We only have so much time let's get to it. Come on. Rick: Yeah, no problem. And for enterprise we solve a bigger problem in that they want the best platform. So we have one of the top five in the world as our client and they were on a different platform they moved to ours and they're absolutely loving it because they now have free reign to do whatever they want. They don't need to lodge a ticket to get things done. So they're running away and we've seen that with lots of our clients. They were on a journey on their own and sometimes we go to their site and go, wow! This is totally different now. We left them two years ago or a year ago it looked like this and now they've totally changed it and they've built all these additional things on there. Chad: So it's flexible landing pages. So trying to carry on, I need concise, Rick. I need concise. We've got SMB, we've got enterprise so you're trying to cover the whole gambit. And then talk to me about customer service 'cause that was one of the things that you touted which I think is awesome. So talk to me about customer service and size of the staff. Rick: I will just add RPOs is another big part of our market that we're now getting people approach us that really love the RPO concept because we have a tech stack and they can just roll them out cookie cutter style for their clients so, very popular. We've got quite a few large brands. The customer support, so the help system, the academy and the 24/7 chat support is winning lots of lots of love because the clients that we have can jump on and they'll ask a simple question. And we say that 95% of all of the support questions are solved on the spot within five minutes. Chad: Okay. And that's through chat so once again the question is, how big is your support team? Rick: So we've got 27 staff around the world ranging from people in New York, Phoenix, Columbia, UK, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia etcetera. So we try to cover the full 24/7 support. Obviously sometimes there might be a gap or we're too busy but we always follow up because the chat sends us an email saying hey you missed this chat so we'll follow up within as quickly as we can. Chad: Okay. So knowing that many of the platforms that are out there today relic ATSs, new platforms and so on and so forth, they generally have this baked in. So why would they buy something that is just an additional piece of cosmetics versus just using what came with the system? Rick: Correct. So in the staffing space, we are not aware that any ATS has a fully baked marketing platform. So we're talking Bullhorn, JobAdder, Loxo, JobDiva etcetera. None of them have a baked in full platform. There are a couple that claim they do but when you then look at it, it's a very stock standard. Everyone looks the same and you can't change anything, you can't edit it. It's all within a very solid framework. You certainly can't go building 10 job boards on the site. You can't throw landing pages on. You don't have the connection between consultants and jobs and you don't have that ecosystem that as I mentioned before, ecommerce sites thrive on and that's what makes their success. Those platforms don't have that and as I said, we certainly don't know of any that do. Well, that's in the staffing space. In the corporate career space, yes you may have a few that do this but what we are seeing they're very clunky, old technology. And the clients that we talk to once they see ours, they just have a big smile on their face during the whole presentation because they can just see how it can help them grow their talent acquisition path in the digital space. Chad: So you mentioned some platforms Bullhorn, Loxo etcetera etcetera. Do you actually partner with them to be able to sell within their systems or do you just go direct? Rick: A bit of both depending on what their model is but certainly with Bullhorn we're in their marketplace. Chad: Tell me the ones that you actually have partnerships with that you are selling together with and then the rest of them we know. So that's the important part. Rick: Yeah. So Bullhorn, we're in their marketplace, JobAdder and then we're marketplace. We just signed a marketplace agreement with Aviante, were with Idibu, with Broadbean, we're also finalizing Loxo and then there's lots of the other ones where we have an agreement with them because they don't have a marketplace. So in total we've 35 integrations so far ready to go and as new ones come along so we just did one the other day takes us two or three days because of the no-code technology platform that we use and so it's very quick to get an integration up and running. Chad: How much revenue is actually represented by your partnerships, percentage wise? Rick: I would say at least 80%. So most of our referrals at the moment are inbound. So we've done very little marketing to date. It is mostly inbound. As I said, some clients refer lots of their colleagues to us. They'll just say, "Hey, we work with Shazamme. It's just amazing. We love it. It solves a lot of our problems and... " Chad: We know everybody loves it, Rick. Answer the question and let's move on. Come on. Rick: Yeah. Okay. Joel: Yeah let's talk about money real quick. According to CrunchBase at least, you guys have bootstrapped this whole thing. Is that true? Do you plan on raising some money? Is this thing gonna continue just to be self-funded? Talk about the investment. Rick: Great. So to date we have had some investment from clients in the industry. So we've got about five, six investors all from the industry that saw the tech and invested. Very small amount. We tried to... Nicole and I tried to keep as much of the equity as possible. We are now embarking on a raise to expand our team globally mostly in sales and marketing because as I mentioned, we haven't really marketed anywhere before. So that is really where we're up to now. We're looking to raise up to 2 million USD. Joel: Do you guys do URL mapping? Rick: Yes we do. Joel: Okay. Is that usually a big hurdle to get a company to map a URL to your platform? Rick: No. Very easy. Joel: Not very easy? Rick: No. Very, very easy. Chad: It is easy. Joel: Very easy okay. More political than technical I know but sometimes companies worry about that kind of shit. So recruiters aren't traditionally marketers. I know Canva and some of the ones... And I've used Leadpages and Unbounce before from a marketing perspective. Even for marketers, that takes a little bit of training. What's the bridge like to train recruiters to use the platform? Do they have to go through a internal approval process? How do you make it easy? Do you have webinars about how to use the service? Is it onboarding a pain in the ass? Talk about that. Rick: That was one of our absolute must, must-haves before we launched the product. So Nicole and I, whilst we've been in this space for a long time, we actually can't code. We can't write a single line of CSS or HTML. The test that we both said for this product to succeed, we must be able to build a recruitment website without writing a single line of code or without help. And that was the absolute hurdle we needed to cross. So Nicole is sales. I'm very much about product and ideas. We both, and just like you, Joel and Chad, you could build a website for the recruiting space fully integrated with probably 10 minutes of training or looking at a couple of videos. That is how simple it is. Joel: What's the typical use case from the jobseeker side of it? Is the goal typically, click to view the job description? Is it, click to give us your email address and then we'll contact you? Is it a... What is the typical... In most marketing it's like, "Hey, give us your email and then we'll send you a white paper or you're signed up." What's the use case on Shazamme? Rick: So the most common one, we obviously have many different options depending on what ATS they use or how they want to funnel people into their process. But typically it's a job listing. Could be from one job to 1500, 2000 jobs. People can search and refine just like on ecommerce sites. They'll go, "I want an engineering job in Melbourne or engineering job in New York." They'll have the list up, they can then filter through them, they can read more to look at the full job detail page and then they can apply. And typically the most common way to apply is what we recommend is just first name, last name, email address and a CV. And sometimes in the fast-moving space, people don't even ask for CVs anymore. So we make it as easy as possible. We don't want to have the barriers that a lot of ATSs natively have, where you have to register and you have to fill out three pages of stuff that is never used during the application, and then you finally get to put your CV. So we're about quick conversion, in and out. Chad: On that line of thinking, are you using a partner for parsing, to be able to parse all that data so that you can get it into something that makes sense to the system? Rick: So our great partners tend to have those in the ATS. So the parsing is done at the ATS level. So we send the CV in and we can get that data back. Chad: So you, generally, you are a contact, really, high-level contact gathering of information and you're passing the CV along. Although, in many cases these applicant tracking systems still need more apply through their process? Are you then just pushing them... So you're becoming pretty much a lead form at that point and they're still having to apply through the applicant tracking system? Rick: No, they apply through us and we send that information into the ATS. So first name, last night, email address, CV, then if they wanted... So we've job alerts. So again, the automatic notification of when there's jobs. We are heading down the path where we integrating into Shazamme CRM, so if anybody applies, registers or creates a job alert, we push them into the CRM with the information as to what they selected. So an engineer in New York, that then builds up a very effective marketing engine to then send SMSs, campaigns, whatever you want, to that audience. Chad: So you said that you're looking to expand globally where? Rick: USA and Europe is our main focus. North America and EMEA, so Europe, Middle East, etcetera, and then APAC. So they're our common markets, English-speaking markets. We are multilingual and we do have a client where we've rolled out 14 countries in Europe, with I think 20 odd languages, so our platform is fully multilingual. And again, it's very easy to change that, and we've made it so flexible anyone can change languages and make widgets different. Chad: Okay. You're gonna tackle Europe and US, the US, all at once? Rick: Correct. Chad: Okay. So I reached out to a couple of friends of mine. Industry analysts and also people that are in RPO, one of them, RPO in the UK. And none of them had actually heard of Shazamme. First and foremost, does that surprise you? And secondly, how are you going to rectify that with only two million USD? Rick: You're absolutely right. As I mentioned before, all of our clients have been acquired through inbound leads. The markets globally is 166,000 companies, according to LinkedIn, in the staffing space. We are attending all of the events that obviously are the most common ones, the VSIA, Bullhorn, the ones in the UK. So the way we are going to tackle is outbound outreach through LinkedIn, outreach through email marketing, through the partner network. That's really how we want to do it, through Broadbean, Idibu, etcetera. That is how we are going to tackle it. So we've modeled this out quite extensively, based on cost of acquisition, we know roughly what the industry average is. To date, as I've said, we've spent $0 on marketing. We know it can be a very clear path in the recruitment industry because you have such a finite and dedicated audience you need to target. So we've mapped out pretty well how that's gonna happen. It's gonna be... We're gonna be everywhere. Joel: You've said a few things, your landing page development company, I guess, self-serve development company, but you've talked, you've said job alerts via email I assume, talked about SEO. What else do you guys do? Is there a social component to this? I assume all your web pages are mobile responsive. Talk about the other things that you do, other... I think it sounds really simple to say you build a web page, but it sounds like you guys do a lot more. Expand upon that. Rick: You're right. And a lot of people do look at it just as a web page. We actually build very complex... We have a complex platform that's easy for people to use, and that includes SEO pages, consultant pages, sector pages. So we've over the years defined what we call the ideal site architecture for recruiters. 90% of recruiters that we talk to don't get that concept, and once we show them, they understand, ah, you've gotta have mining recruitment pages to attract employers and mining job pages to attract candidates, and that needs to have content on there, needs to have consultants on there, everything needs to be automated. So in our platform once you put a job on, or we receive a job from one of our partners, everything is automated from that point. It's put onto the job boards, put onto the sector pages, put onto the consultant pages. Job alerts are sent out immediately. If there are landing pages with that on, that is instantly populated. So we are very much about automating that whole process so once that website is set up, everything is very, very simple and automated and SEO-optimized. So we do send feeds to all of the aggregators out there, like Indeed, LinkedIn, etcetera. So your job really goes everywhere the minute the consultant presses the publish button in their ATS. Joel: You mentioned MailChimp earlier, and MailChimp launched this week, I think it's in beta, maybe it's more widespread, but they've essentially integrated ChatGPT technology to basically automate the creation of emails that are really custom to the user. Which is pretty exciting and slightly scary if you're in the business, from a threat perspective. I don't see you guys having the military buildup to take on something like a MailChimp or bigger companies that'll be able to automate these pages being created. My sense is that most recruiters don't like making landing pages or managing pages, and if they could automate it through something like ChatGPT or what MailChimp is doing, that you guys are toast. Tell me where I'm wrong. Rick: No, it's a fair point. First and foremost, as you guys know, the recruitment industry is very niche. And the reason I used MailChimp before was because a lot of clients that we know just export a CSV file out of their ATS, throw it in MailChimp, nothing talks to each other, people unsubscribe, they don't know who has unsubscribed because next month they'll just download a new CSV file, throw it in MailChimp again. So that's sort of what we're trying to avoid and fix for the industry by having a fully integrated marketing system. In terms of ChatGPT, we launched already our own ChatGPT widget. So, imagine you're a recruiter, you want to type... You want to get a blog up and running, you just drag the ChatGPT widget onto the page. Rick: You say, "Write me a hundred-word article on why nurses should be working in Sydney," and it'll type it for you. You can preview it, edit it, and publish it within a couple of minutes. So we already have that, and we also have a secondary version that is a bit more sophisticated and can do a lot more as well, and we are certainly going down the road. The good thing about ChatGPT, it's all open technology, as you know, so it's not that hard to build on it, and we are certainly... The people that we've shown just sit there smiling because they know that we can cut their work time in half or make it so easy for them to do. So yeah, absolutely agree, it is where recruiters want to go, because they are typically short of time, have better things to do, if they're in a small firm; obviously if they're in a big firm and marketing is their role, they'll love it even more because they can push out more content. Chad: Let's talk about exit. So who is your perfect acquisition partner? Who would come in... Joel: SEEK. Chad: Acquire... Just because they're in Australia, come on. Joel: Yeah, exactly. Share a Foster's and buy my company. Chad: Who is that perfect partner that you are looking for? Or is that even the exit strategy at all? Rick: Yeah. So there is definitely an exit strategy, whether that's a public offering or an acquisition. There are plenty of fish there in the sea that are big enough and are in this space that could expand their offering to the industry with a product like Shazamme. You don't need to think too far from LinkedIn, Indeed, that type of company, that has a global footprint and has recruiters as a prime audience. It's someone where I think we can add a lot of value and revenue to their top line. Because everybody, in reality, every recruiter, every corporate TA team needs to have a career site or a recruitment website to promote the job openings. We've only seen it get harder in the last two years to find and attract good staff. So that problem will remain. Joel: Chad, global aspirations, ChatGPT integration, this sounds like a really fucking expensive product. Rick, talk about the price for us. Chad: Better be. [chuckle] Intro: I've done this before a number of times, and one of the other items that I didn't want to have was a legacy monolithic platform. So as I mentioned to you, Nicole and I were the guinea pigs to say, "We have to be able to build recruitment websites," which we passed with flying colors. That was tick. The way we did that was through selecting appropriate parts of a platform. Think iPhone. Apple doesn't make the screen, Samsung does. Up to recently they didn't make the chip, Intel did. So we took a very similar approach in our design. We said it had to be a microservices based platform, not monolithic, so if we wanted to replace parts it's a very quick and easy, we'll replace this piece with another piece. So what that meant is we decided on no-code platforms. Joel: Just looking for the pricing there, Rick. [laughter] Joel: Just looking for the pricing. Chad: Cut to the chase, my friend. Rick: Yeah. So no-code platform is what underpins what we do. So we've been able to do what we used to do with 20 developers now with a number of developers, and we're running so fast that we can't actually keep up with the speed of development. Joel: Pricing's on the website, everybody. Feel free to go out there if you wanna know about it. All right, Rick, it is time to face the firing squad. Are you ready? Rick: I'm ready as I'll ever be. Joel: All right. Get him, Chad. Chad: All right. Rick, I love that you and Nicole have great industry experience. We're not seeing enough experienced industry folk like yourselves. So that's pretty damned refreshing and it's awesome. I personally led a project that launched a build-out of 40,000 job site domains and worked with over a hundred Fortune 500 companies in building out their websites. Hold your breath. As in 2009, 2009 we were doing that. So I'm very familiar with the process and definitely familiar with being able to scale that tech. The thing that we didn't do, even though we did launch at that scale, we didn't go after Europe and everybody else. You know why? Because focus and discipline means something. And $2 million? We were over 20 coming to the bottom line at that point. So we had some major... We had pretty good revenue for a small organization. Two million is not enough to take on those two fronts, period. Chad: I think that you guys need to be more focused, need to definitely get somebody in there from a marketing standpoint that will squeeze that message so that you have a nice concise articulation of what you're trying to provide. And at the end of the day, I think you've got a chance, I think you've got a little bit of a chance if, if you're focused and you have discipline and you don't go and try to invade America and Europe at the same time. So I'm gonna give you a golf clap. Joel: All right, Rick, you're still alive, man. You're still breathing. [laughter] Rick: Great. Joel: A little bloodied Mad Max style. A little bloodied Crocodile Dundee style. Rick: That's what the Australians do well. Joel: So Chad, you said 2009 when that little project launched, and I remember that period, that was glorious, and [laughter] that was 14 years ago. And on a marketing side, landing pages, I mentioned Leadpages, Unbounce, that was a thing about the same time. I always try to temper myself, Chad, because we try to talk about such innovative things, cutting edge stuff, but at the end of the day, man, HR, recruitment, these are people that are not ahead of the curve, by any means. So like... Chad: No. Joel: I really have to temper myself to say, when someone comes to us with, we do landing pages, and I just want to go, "What the fuck?" [laughter] Go, "Okay, hold on. Remember what industry I'm in. Remember where I am, okay?" Job postings. We do online classified help wanted ads, basically. So I'm gonna temper sort of my mentality going into this. I understand that people hate their ATS, they hate to have to go through a platform to create things quickly. They want to throw a page together, talk about nursing jobs in Melbourne or warehouse jobs in Toledo, Ohio, whatever. I get that people want to have that platform like yours to do that quickly. It sounds like there's not a lot of hurdles to get those done. Marketing doesn't have to look at these pages. You really saved your shit when you said, "We're putting in some ChatGPT automation." [laughter] Joel: Copywriting stuff. Like if you had not said that, it would have been bad for you, my friend. But you... That was great. You talked about the market, the potential market, I think it was 66,000 staffing companies, RPOs, people that want an efficient, cheap, fairly cheap, solution like yours. Damn it, this is not sexy. I think it's maybe something an agency, somebody will snap up. Chad: Bullhorn. Joel: Two million is not... Yeah, two million is not high expectations for that series A funding round, so it sounds to me like you're just gonna get over that hump, get something that is something that someone will be interested in buying. If that's your goal, for me, I gotta put my 10-year curve hat on and say, we're in HR and goddamn it, Rick, you and your Aussie mentality and gung ho spirit, man. [applause] Joel: I'm gonna give you an applause. And on top of that, I'm gonna give you a... SFX: Shazam. Joel: Yes, sir. All right. How do you feel? Rick: Yep. Feel good. Thank you for the feedback. Absolutely, you've hit a few good points there. Just as a addition, the two million was a seed round only, not a series A or a series B. So we certainly have a plan to not just have two million to expand. So it'd be two million seed, grow rapidly, then go for your series A and then series B. So there is a longer term plan to grow rapidly. I do get the focus, Chad, and that's certainly something we'll have a chat about. Joel: Well, when you do get money, promise me you'll update your website because it looks a little bit like Steve Irwin and Mad Max downed some Foster's and went to Photoshop and made a website. Chad, another one is in the books, and he just made it out alive. We out. 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.chadcheese.com.

Four podcasters walk into a German bar in downtown Indianapolis to discuss the state of recruitment and chaos ensues. You know (and love) two of the podcasters (Chad & Cheese) but you may not be familiar with the other two: Ira Wolfe and Jason Cochran, co-hosts of The Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization Show. Everything from AI to automation to … ah, hell, there were too many German beers and links of sausage to remember, but trust me, it was entertaining. Gern geschehen! 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: What happens when four podcasters walk into a bar have a few beers and press record? You're about to find out. Jason Cochran and Ira Wolf from the Geeks Geezers and Googlization podcast join Joel and me on this episode recorded live from the Rathskeller in downtown Indianapolis. Enjoy. [music] Speaker 2: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Chad: Okay. What were we talking about kids? [music] Joel: How was Vegas? [music] Chad: How [laughter] was Vegas? Joel: You guys look well rested and you look recuperated. Jason: 'Cause we're so young and sprawled. Chad: It was Vegas dude. [music] Jason: I don't feel reinvigorated. Chad: I don't feel like it either. Yeah, but you ran [chuckle] a, mini-marathon on Saturday, like a dumb ass. [laughter] Jason: Family Traditions, man. What am I gonna do? Ira: That is peak male performance to be able to go to Vegas and yes... [laughter] Chad: Which nobody said about Joel Cheesman in his life. Joel: Since the '80s. [laughter] Chad: Three words, nobody ever said about Joel Cheeseman. Peak male performance. Joel: Is the going, right? [laughter] Jason: That is real, right? Chad: Never. That's gonna be the name of this podcast. [laughter] The name of this podcast is Peak Male Performance now. Ira: Beards and Beer, Peak Male Performance. Chad: Okay, so seriously we're getting good levels. Ira: Toxic masculinity. Chad: We're good... Toxic Masculinity. [laughter] Ira: Test. Test. Test. Another white boy with a podcast. Chad: Another white boy with a... Have you guys heard that song? Joel: Uh-uh. Chad: Oh it's fucking awesome. Another white boy with a podcast. Joel: Yeah. So what do you wanna talk about? Ira: So what was the talk at UNLEASH? What, were some of the hot topics that you guys were talking about with leaders? Chad: Build, buy or partner was one of the things that we talked about because of all... Everything that's happening in Tech. ChatGPT, all that fun stuff. So that was one of the things that we talked about. But, we literally did 10 plus interviews. So, pick a topic. Ira: So we have a dichotomy of your knowledge workers are getting laid off to a certain degree, tech workers, which I think is inevitably gonna be a good thing because they'll all start companies that hire a bunch of people and get a bunch of money. So I think that's inevitably gonna be a good thing. And then you have still a high level of stress around, seasonal hourly, frontline-type workers. And their stress is automation and how quickly, and do we automate many of the jobs of the frontline workers. So, I think if you looked at... For me a trend was looking at knowledge base and the challenges they're having, as well as the frontline workers and the trends on that side of the aisle as well. In addition to that, we still have a war in Europe. We have mounting tensions globally. We have an election coming up [chuckle] next year. So a lot of things going on in the fringes... Chad: Plenty of things to talk about. [laughter] Ira: Impacting hiring in America. Chad: Layers. Shall we say. Ira: Yes. Chad: Layers. Ira: It's an onion that we peeled back. [laughter] Chad: And it makes you cry every time you fucking peel it back. Ira: It makes you cry, yes. Joel: So what was the general mood? Were people still holding back? Is it fearful where the way the economy's gonna go? Or is it, "Hey, we're gonna take a step back, but after that, we're gonna have a, big opportunity". Jason: I feel largely we're in a bubble. We're hearing about inflation, we're hearing about all these things, macroeconomics that are struggling. Chad: And we keep hearing recession. Joel: But we're still hiring like a mother. We're not investing in companies in our space as much, but we don't stop hearing about, people still need people to serve food, to take care of patients, to store warehouse goods and services and deliver them to people. At a very basic level employment is really strong while we hear so much in the news that things are going wrong. So hopefully that [laughter] continues for us. Chad: But I think a lack of funding is good though, because we had way too... We had a sugar rush on... Jason: Or, drunken. Chad: On funding, yes. [laughter] It was horrible. Now I think we're gonna get an opportunity to see these startups actually perform or get eaten up or just die, which is exactly what we need. We had way too many startups, too much noise, too much shit out there that needs to be filtered. Joel: But is HR tech lost in the tech bubble, or the tech collapse, in the technology industry. But the reality is, as you said, there's a shortage of people. There is no out, most people don't know this, but for the last 40 years, we've had 2 million new bodies. Not qualified bodies, but 2 million new people. [laughter] Millennials, Baby boomers, even Gen X come into the workforce, every single year. And we had immigration, on top of that. For the next 20 years, we're gonna have less than 500,000 new people from Gen Z and Alpha and no immigration. So there, literally is no people coming into the workforce to replace this. So we are gonna continue to have shortages, but HR tech seems to still be focused on the old practices and falls into the tech bubble. Isn't this an opportunity though, to disrupt and transform where we're headed, how we're gonna deal with people, new opportunity? But their heads are still stuck up their butts. [laughter] Jason: I got four words for you. Ira, ChatGPT. [laughter] If there was one theme at the conference. [laughter] Chad: One of those was an acronym, but go ahead. Yeah. [laughter] Joel: Hey, I was digging into my inner looking color, for back in the day. ChatGPT, AI. All these things are gonna disrupt, what we're going to do. It's gonna disrupt companies that currently do what, ChatGPT or other AI technologies can do. It's gonna disrupt a ton of companies, create a bunch of new companies and we're gonna have a good time talking about all of those for sure. Jason: And ChatGPT is Auto-GPT now it's like, what could possibly top ChatGPT, now it's Auto-GPT, which is basically... Chad: Oh just sit back and watch. Jason: Yeah. Here's the project I want you to work on. Chad: Crazy. Jason: You put in the parameters and then it goes and does it. And I heard this crazy story, nightmare scenario with it that just happened to somebody. They put a project in front of Auto-GPT, it ran into a wall, a problem that it couldn't solve. So what does it do? Joel: Kill all the people. [laughter] Jason: Kill all the people. That's right. It starts the AI Apocalypse, [laughter] it kills everybody. [laughter] If you're listening to the show, you're one of the few remnants of humanity that's left. Chad: ICBM started the war. [laughter] Jason: Let's seek refuge in Indianapolis, Indiana. That's the only reason we're surviving. Indianapolis is a refuge. No, it actually, that's hilarious. [laughter] It actually went out and it tried to secure a contract with somebody on TaskRabbit who had expertise to solve the specific problem it couldn't solve. So it posed as it's human and was negotiating a contract with this person. The TaskRabbit contractor sends the contract over to the human and the human is like, what is this? What's going on here? And it unpeeled the layers and realized. Chad: I need to get a bank account to pay this contract. Jason: Auto-GPT is running. Exactly. Chad: And then naked photos started coming... Jason: It got a bank account in SVB to pay this person. Joel: Yes. Well, dovetailing on that, there was another one is what happens when a piece of it... ChatGPT is based on all the information that is out there. So it reads an economics book and it reads a psychology book. Chad: Oh great, just what we need. Joel: And it reads a psychology book. Chad: We should double down on trickle-down economics. Joel: And it reads about behaviors, psychology. So now it can negotiate with you based on your public profile, [laughter] So, I mean, you have all this but, it looks at all your feeds, how you behave, how you respond to things, what's your outlook. And it's... Jason: So think about that in our space. AI will be able to look at your profile, where you've worked in before, where you've worked before, what your title was, what the average salary of that title is based on the years that you were there. And come up with some sort of a salary that it thinks you'll be taking because of your past experience. Chad: It won't happen because salary transparency's gonna get rid of all of that. So that's a non-starter. Carry on. Jason: But how about just interviewing you? I mean, it's gonna be a lot smarter than a lot of people who are. It may come up with a salary based on in aggregate. Chad: The standardization. Well, that makes sense. But yeah. But it has to also take a look at all the people that you're currently employing. So Yeah, it couldn't happen. There's no question. But back to your original question, until HR gets a fucking spine, a spine and learns that business is what runs everything that they do. What they're looking at every day is, oh, wait a minute. My whole life is predicated on this new opening or onboarding or what have you. Right? No. If you understand the actual businesses that you serve, sales, marketing, you can talk to the CEO and CTO about their business, then you can get more budget. Why? Because they understand that without you right now, before ChatGPT, they need people to ideate, to create product, to sell product. Joel: To serve customers... Chad: Customer service product, to be able to expand wallet share. To do any of that, you need people. HR, the limpest of all departments. They go into the corner, they put their thumb in their mouth, and they get in the fetal position. We need to be stronger. Jason: Less Limp. [laughter] Chad: Less Limp. Ira: Less limp is what we need. We're hearing many cool stories how ChatGPT is being used by HR leaders, currently. Chad: HR leaders, not as much as staffing organizations and startups. Because they're more innovative and they're not afraid. Once again, HR and TA for the most part, they're afraid because they might trip over some compliance tripwires that might be there. Everybody else is out and they're out in force using it. Ira: And to add on that, I think writing job descriptions is an easy one. We're seeing vendors integrate that into their solutions. We're seeing some of the basic sourcing, the first contact, if you will, of candidates being automated. Rejection letters. Things that you would normally do content-wise are being automated by ChatGPT. And a lot of it is not even just vendors doing it, but just people on their own are figuring out where to go, what to put in, how it works. I mean, this thing has more users than anything else that came before it in a shortened period of time. So a lot of people are using this and messing around with it and coming up with their own solutions. I think also, interestingly, Chad and I have talked about on our show, how job seekers are being creative around ChatGPT and creating profiles and replying to tons of jobs and passing pre-screening questions based on ChatGPT intelligence. Chad: Passing tests. Full-scale tests. Joel: Oh yeah. Jason: Pre-screen test, actual copy test, actual writing copy. That's doing better than most of the applicants that are humans. Ira: Well I mean, it counts on your resume if you can write the prompt. You can engineer the prompt for Chat GPT and it's real. Jason: That's prompt engineering baby, that's right. Joel: Right. It gets translated... Jason: It's the fastest-growing profession. Ira: But the thing that you mentioned there, I still remember so many times, Kevin Grossman, who's a friend of ours in candidate experience, will talk about how many times people would apply and then they never hear anything back. So at least with AI, are you actually getting a rejection letter letting you know? That's a huge step forward, to actually get some kind of communication back. Chad: Which is sad. Ira: Which is sad, but it's actually getting done. Chad: It if fucking sad, because the problem is that, and again, this goes back to Ira's initial question around HR, we have never been able to scale past the resume and the fax machine. As soon as we were able to start getting resumes electronically, couldn't scale since we have not been able to scale since. Hence all of these black holes that exist. Jason: So if we go back three years, the pandemic revealed all the vulnerabilities of a company and then it created opportunity realizing what remote work could look like. The technology, people were unprepared. So ChatGPT and just AI in general, because now we're putting it into our hands. I mean, just pulled off the band-aid, exposed all the vulnerabilities of HR because we're... I've been in HR for 27 years, but you know, ran been in business for 40 years. Joel: And you've only been in therapy for 25 [laughter] of those 27 years. [laughter] Jason: For all, for 45. [laughter] Jason: The, challenge is that we're still talking about people faking resumes and this just put it on steroids. Joel: This is when Chad goes into his Web3, yes. Jason: NFTs. Chad: CV Wallet, watch out, baby, watch out. [laughter] Jason: That's the transition where people were saying, well, okay, we're trying to digest ChatGPT, we're trying to figure this out. Just give us time. We're gonna think about it. We're gonna put it on next year's strategic plan. Chad: Tech is moving so fast, you can't put it in next year's anything. It has to be next week's conversation. And again, going back to the HR is so slow and so spineless, we've gotta be able to react, we've gotta be more nimble, and I'll revert back to one of the interviews that we had with Jeff Lackey, who used to be over all of CVS hiring. 90% of his budget came from other departments because he went back out to them with business cases and said, look, wait, you want those salespeople to get hired? You want those customer service, you want this and that we need funding. We don't have enough funding to be able to sustain. So your top five positions right now for us is your top one, maybe half position. So if you can fund us, then maybe we can talk. So he went back to the business to talk about these things. We need to think about HR in an entirely different way, and we need to be more nimble. He was nimble and he taught his team how to be nimble. We have to. Ira: Ira, I joke on the podcast about one day we'll have robots interviewing robots. Chad: He's really not joking. [laughter] Jason: No one will see anyone until they show up for the first day of work. And we're sadly going to a time where job seekers are automating, companies are automating, and robots are interviewing robots. Ira: But you guys brought up a perfect use case for NFTs, right? The non-fungible tokens. Like so many times, I'm a big proponent, I'm on the bandwagon with you on Web3 but so many times the detractors would be like NFTs. There's no use case for them. Chad: Just as long as you don't call them NFTs, I think you're okay. Right? Just like you don't call it blockchain, right? You don't call it blockchain. You're like, "oh, okay. I'm okay with that." It's like, here's a product, here's what the product does. "Oh, that's fucking cool." It's NFTs and it's blockchain. Oh, wait a minute. Get me away from that thing. Ira: But I mean the use case you just brought it up is it's gonna be really easy for people to fake things. That they contributed towards their experience and stuff like that with AI. So there's gotta be proof of authenticity, the things that you actually contributed toward. And then also you can't have guys like Jewel that are trying to pose as Drake coming up with music that sounds exactly like Drake. Chad: Gotcha. [laughter] Ira: So there's gotta be this proof of authenticity on the artistic side of things too, with what's being done. Joel: Fortunately, I was born to look like Drake. So the voice isn't that big of a leap for me. So let's get into this. LinkedIn is obviously partnered with CLEAR to verify profiles. So are you bullish, bearish, hold on. LinkedIn verifying profiles through CLEAR? Ira: Yeah. I don't trust them and it's because I don't have any stock in LinkedIn. Joel: That's a bearish, I'm guessing. Ira: Selfish. Joel: You're selling... Ira: Bearish, you're selling LinkedIn. Chad: Ira, what about you, Ira? What do you think? Joel: On profile verification through blockchain and or LinkedIn/CLEAR? What else is out there? Anything? Chad: Well, I think that's the direction, but it goes back to we have no guardrails in place. So part of it is utilizing that to verify it, to make sure people are actually who they are. I think it's a good thing. It goes back to what we were just talking about with resumes. Ira: Do you have your blue check Ira? Joel: I do. Ira: Alright. There you go. Chad: Which means nothing. [laughter] Chad: Which fucking means nothing. Ira: It means he submitted his ID to Elon Musk. So, it means something. Chad: Means nothing. [laughter] Joel: And I went through the LinkedIn process. That's why I'm bearish on it. Jason: We're going towards a blue-check ecosystem. People are gonna need some sort of verification, I think going forward, whether it's blockchain, whether it's NFT, whether it's... Chad: I think the guardrails come in with Europe. 'Cause Europe is actually setting the stage for the entire world for a lot of this technology with guardrails. GDPR was... And from what we're hearing was really just a mechanism to slow the American machine down. Because we were so far ahead of Europe and now we have to think about, oh shit, if we wanna sell things in Europe pretty large, market with 44 plus countries. What do you think about that compliance, guardrails, do you think that Europe is really gonna lead the way since the US is really just focused on cash as opposed to how it treats its people? Joel: I'm not sure leading the way is the solution because we're still globalized. There's countries that aren't gonna participate. Chad: Let's say Germany. Let's say Germany does. Joel: Why'd you pick Germany? Why? Why? [laughter] Chad: It's the biggest GDP in Europe and we're here at the Rathskeller drinking German beer. Anyway, if one of those countries does it, it's much like California putting in regulation. The rest of the country really has to fall in line. Ira: Well, we all know that Reddit is the 100% source of all truth. [laughter] Ira: And what I saw on Reddit. Chad: You didn't know Joel was Q did you? [laughter] Ira: Oh, you're Q he's an on. [laughter] Ira: You guys are famous. But yeah, on Reddit they were talking about this subject and what was really fascinating about it was how many users of ChatGPT have said that basically the governor has been put on ChatGPT already. They'll put in the same types of questions or prompts, and it'll give a response like, "I'm not qualified to answer that question". Or it'll put some kind of a disclaimer out there. [laughter] Ira: And it won't actually answer it. And so we are kind of in this weird space of we do want it to advance, we want it to be able to help us innovate and create new product services, solve problems. But then we also have this problem of, yeah, is it going too fast where it's invading privacy or is it stepping beyond its balance of what it actually has competence in? Is it actually fabricating and creating false information? Chad: Definitely fabricating shit. [laughter] Joel: But you can create the regulations and the compliance in the Guardrail. But then you have China and Russia. How do you enforce compliance? Chad: You stop them doing business in your country. That's how you do it. That's the only way you can force China or Russia to do anything that you want them to do, is choke off the cash. That's it. Joel: But you're talking... When you talk about no backbone, you've got Congress. Chad: Yes. [laughter] Joel: When they're trying to figure out how Facebook still makes money. Chad: Yes. Joel: And don't realize they changed their name and they have a new business model. Chad: I think they might go back to Facebook. By the way. [laughter] Ira: Someone from the audience brought up a good question. [laughter] Jason: Yes. Yes. Perfect. Jason: Does all this confusion and ID verification lead us back to a time where we just hire who we know? Personal friendships, contacts, who knows who, which throws in a whole other diversity, inclusion and equity challenge to that. But do we go back to who we know. Like we don't know what the bots are telling me. What is AI telling me? I'm just gonna hire the dude I went to school with and they know somebody that wants to be an intern. Ira: Then organizations better hire people that are really welcome connected. Jason: It's still not what you know, it's who you know. Like you. Ira: What about me? Jason: Like you guys, they need to hire people like you guys that knows everybody in the industry. Chad: And then what? White dudes. Jason: With a podcast. Chad: Middle-aged white dudes. Yes. Joel: Four white dudes. Chad: It could be the fallback position, but I don't think that's ever the answer. And most of these companies are making record profits. And for them to say that I can't officially go after... Fuck off. Use the money that you have, go diversify your workforce and then build from there. One of the things that we did, I don't want to get too political, but back in the '80s is, we started cutting off funding from employers putting money back into their employees. Trickle-down economics. We were like, "Hey, here's all these tax cuts, you're gonna put it back in the market." Which they never really did. Instead, back then, they were incentivized to drive and build talent pipelines within their own organization. Today we don't do that. We talk about talent pipelines. There's no company that has a talent pipeline that exists? Very few, put it that way. So we need to get back to actually building talent pipelines within our communities, and then our companies start to look what our communities look like. Whether it's policing, whether it's just Fortune 500 companies, we need get back to that. And when we stop focusing on "shareholder value", and we focus on the long term existence of an organization, then I think we have something. Ira: So going back to your question, Joel. Jason: Yep. Ira: Do we move back toward human connections of who we know because we're comfortable with it, but it wasn't very good before. We hired people that we were comfortable with and we got what we got, but it was a low common denominator. And as over the last three years, we've talked about how we can't build relationships. You can't build cultures through a screen, because there's no serendipity, that... Where there's no creativity, but that's only because most people don't have the ability to do it. So part of it is, do companies revert back to that just as they are now is bring everybody back to the office. 'Cause that's the only place you can have innovation, growth and serendipity. Chad: Have you seen the new Upwork commercial? Jason: Of course. Joel: Yes. Chad: Okay. So the zombie grandpa who can't die because he is afraid of his company going under, because all he could do is hire his kids and his grandkids, and they were shit for talent. Then he goes to Upwork and he is like, "I've got all these talented people all over the world. That's exactly what Ira is just talking about. Jason: So, I mean, we keep going back to this lowest common denominator, what we're comfortable with, going back to normal, which we can't do because it wasn't very good before. Joel: But we have CEO after CEO talking about we need to go back to what it was. We need to go back to the office. We need to go back to a culture. Chad: That's 'cause they're all old white dudes. Joel: And most of them have ownership in commercial real estate, which is a side issue, [laughter] but where are you with remote hybrid, get your ass back in the office. Where do we go from here? Jason: All of the above. That's actually... It's one of the parts we talk about. So we're talking about it in the wrong context. It's not about hybrid, in-office or remote, it's about flexible, it's, people want flexibility. Chad: Autonomy. Jason: And flexibility. So they're not opposed to coming back to the office. When you come back to the office, come back to the office because there's a purpose to come back to the office, because it's the absolute only place where we can function or do something. But I spoke last week, and 2 weeks ago in Missouri, and one of the people shared to us, she said, "I went into an office yesterday and walked down the corridor and there were 10 offices." It was a marketing HR kind of business. And no one was there. And she walks down the office and she hears voices, and all the doors were just marginally cracked, and everybody was talking in their offices to each other. So they were in an office, on a screen call, sitting at their desk talking to each other. Jason: There is no reason in the world to say I had a higher childcare., I had to leave somebody, I had to commute an hour and a half to come to this meeting, to sit in my office to talk to somebody in the next office, because everybody talked through a screen because everybody was busy and they don't have to pay a 100% attention. But if there was a reason to come back, I think this is a brilliant model and it's from Cushman & Wakefield. We just interviewed Bryan Berthold a couple weeks ago on it. And they have a motto called Experience Per Square Foot. And it looked at, productivity was number one. They looked at the productivity of people wherever they are. It looked at collaboration, it looked at employee well-being, it looked at community, and it looked at communication. So those were the five metrics, and they put it into this measurement of Experience Per Square Foot. And they said, where is the highest value? Ira: Number. Jason: The highest number... Ira: My brain hurts. Chad: No, where they're playing Juice Newton, Morning Angel. That's where the experience is. Joel: Which is where I want to work. Jason: That's right. Chad: That's the soundtrack of this podcast, by the way. Jason: It's an interesting model and it puts it in a different perspective. But where does that happen? And that's the problem of thinking, are more people more productive in the office or remote or hybrid? And it still amounts to flexibility. Because even the four-day work week, which now regenerated for the 15th time. Ira: I still wear my khakis on Friday, no matter what. Casual Fridays. Chad: That's not very productive... Joel: And they still have wing juice on this. Jason: They still have the fleets that go all the way down. Joel: That's not flexible for people. They have a working spouse, and they have to be in the office Tuesday. So do I. I have to be in the office Tuesday? We have to find childcare for one day. Jason: Yeah. That's dumb. Joel: That's not flexible, which means you piss somebody off and they don't want to do it. So how do you create flexibility? And that goes back to HR and their alignment for a business and their alignment with HR. What's the measure? What are you trying to accomplish? How do you measure productivity, communication, collaboration, employee well-being? How do you put all that stuff into a mix? Jason: So am I hearing you say going back to the office is bullshit. Joel: A mandate... No. Jason: The story you just told was, it's bullshit. Joel: If it's a mandate, it is. Jason: When is it not? Joel: Companies need metrics. Jason: Why are you bringing people back? Joel: What metric does that work favorably? What are you gonna accomplish by bringing people back to the office, mandating it, that you can't accomplish if they work somewhere else? Chad: We shouldn't be... Okay, so first and foremost, Henry Ford came out with the 40-hour work week in the 1920s, that's still where we're at. We're focusing on the amount of time that we're taking or that we're "giving" as opposed to the outcomes. I don't give a shit if... And I didn't care when I was building teams if it took you 20 hours to get to the actual project timeline or not, it didn't matter. And when we start to get into that old 1920s mindset of the, "oh, we've gotta be there." And this is manufacturing. Most of us aren't in manufacturing now, 'cause America doesn't make shit. So now, 40 hours a week doesn't mean anything. Jason: Here's the tie. So it's not only that. Flexibility is not only where people work, it's about when they work and what are they doing when they're working. Joel: And how much they get paid. Jason: I can't tell you how many times that we talk about flexibility also comes about when people get paid, so... Chad: Oh yeah. Yeah. Jason: Day pay. Going back, you have hourly workers, you have senior leaders... Chad: He has flipped it on us. You see that? Jason: They went from Juice Noon to Smokey Robinson. I'm a little bit outta my own element, I'm a little confused. Chad: It's a Rathskeller playlist by the way guys. Ira: When does Hasselhoff come on? Geez. Jason: By the way, when we talk about day pay, getting paid, "hey, I worked three days, but I've got a bill, I've gotta go to the emergency room." Joel: Are we in favor of day pay? Jason: Yeah. Yes. Speaker 2: Oh fuck yeah. Yeah. Ira: Absolutely. Joel: Just making sure. It'll never work because obviously it doesn't work for Fiverr and Upwork. Ira: And since all the banks are basically being demolished... Joel: We love it but it will never work. Ira: Says Ira. Joel: That's not how the cashless society works either, all your tradespeople. So basically, you get paid when you work. So I can go in and do that. The biggest percentage is not frontline workers who use it. The biggest percentage is this... Not necessarily C-suite, but management. Chad: Is it because it's not available to frontline workers? Joel: No. It's just when they make it available, the highest percentage of users turns out to be managers and above. That's the percentage. But that's just a side issue. Jason: Okay. So you're telling me SVPs are taking daily pay? News to me. Joel: People who don't need the money, but they want to get it into the account quick so they, yeah. Reinvest. Jason: Yeah. But, two reasons. Joel: Well, SVPs don't live day to day. And that... Jason: The only thing I've ever read was that it was for frontline workers. Joel: It was for frontline workers. Jason: Hourly pay. Joel: I've never heard of anybody building this for executives. Chad: This is news. Joel: This is new to me. Chad: Write this down. Write this down. Joel: Okay. So the original point was that the objection I hear with that is that, "oh, we asked our payroll company, and they say they can't. Or we asked our managers and it'll mess up our accounting. So the problem is that there is a demand for it, there's a purpose to it, there's a reason that you can attract and retain employees, if you offer that type of pay. That, "hey, I've worked a week, why do I have to work another week? Because, I'm all stressed out, and I don't have money to get my car out of the garage. I don't have time to take my kid to the doctor because I need cash." Because the payroll system or the accounting system or the managers don't allow it to happen. Chad: Or cash flow. Yeah. Joel: So we keep going back to, there are solutions out there that have been around for five, 10 years, that companies just trip over their feet with policies and administration is, go find another payroll company. Go find, figure it out. But if we're giving you a way that will attract and retain people and say, "hey, the only reason I'm gonna work for you is because I can get paid by the day." I don't have to wait two weeks to buy groceries for my family or to pay... Or get my landlord off my back, because I can get the money that I put in and earned already. And somebody comes up with the brainy idea is, we can't do it because our HRIS system doesn't do it. Our payroll company says we can't do it. Our CFO says we can't do it. Get rid of them and change it. Chad: Yeah. And get one that has... Ira: Bitcoin reserves so that you know that they have the liquidity. Chad: Did the crypto king just say something? Ira: Oh, sorry. Sorry. But you know the other part of this too, we're talking about the money side of it and where people work, is when people work. And Yahoo just had a fascinating report that came out on millennials and Gen Zs. You know what the new 9:00-5:00 preferred working hours are for millennials and Gen Z? 6:00 PM to 2:00 AM Sign me up. Joel: More shocking is Yahoo still has breaking news. [laughter] Ira: Breaking news... You heard that first on Yahoo. Joel: That's right. Ira: Looking for a sponsor. Jason: But yeah, that absolutely just floored me that like the other part of this freedom is not just where you work, but when you work. Chad: It shouldn't fucking matter. That's what we need to get down to. It is like, look, if I have goals I have to hit, if I hit those goals, it doesn't matter when I work, how I worked, if I was at the strip club down the street for God's sakes, I got shit done, If I'm coding while I'm having prime rib with cherry, it's okay. Jason: Oh, I think that's what this report was showing was that there needs to be that flexibility. If that's when they're saying those are their productive hours when they deliver the most value for the company and it works best in their schedule, why not? Chad: They would like doing a rager and then they went straight to work after the rager. Jason: But the same arguments going after the shift is that, hey, we can't find somebody. So we don't have enough nurses, we don't have enough staffing, and we have a 7:00-3:00, a 3:00-11:00. But you do have people that can work from 11:00-7:00. Or 11:00-6:00. Then the problem still goes back to, but how do we do the accounting for that? Because our models are set up. Joel: They're all hourly anyway. Jason: It doesn't matter because... Joel: It does matter. It's paid on hours, Ira. Jason: But it's how they schedule. It goes back to... Joel: That's bullshit. Jason: But it goes back to what you said. It's their policy is that we have our... Joel: It's 'cause my pterodactyl wouldn't eat that kind of food. Give me a break. Jason: We have a template that says 7:00-3:00, 3:00-8:00, 3:00-11:00, 11:00-7:00. And the fact is that we'll get a new template, and it'll go, well, we checked with our HRIS system or ATS and it doesn't allow that. Joel: Hours are hours. That's one thing that hasn't changed during this entire workday. Ira: The only thing I heard is that strip clubs should be open 24 hours a day. [laughter] Joel: By the way, when I retire, I'm giving all my money to Charity, and if she's not working that night, it goes to whoever is onstage. [laughter] Jason: Well done. Well done. Were there any fears around the second bank collapse with First Republic when were out on UNLEASH? Chad: Here's the biggest problem, even before we get to UNLEASH. The biggest problem was we were starting to come out of this, Joel was talking about this bubble, we were starting to come out of this pensive do we spend money bubble? And then SVB throws all this fucking ice back in the water, which was getting nice and cozy. We're getting in the hot tub, it was feeling good, it was warming up, the bubbles were going and boom, they threw ice in the motherfucker. So we're in that now re-warming up phase. Then we had Republic? [chuckle] Jason: Signature Republic today. Ira: Jamie Dimon's feeling really good about getting First Republic on a pretty cheap basis with all the protection from the FDIC. Joel: Still the smartest guy in the room, Jamie Dimon. Thank you. Thank you very much. Chad: Until he opens his mouth. Joel: Thank you very much [chuckle] Jason: Exactly... Joel: Until you're back in the office. Chad: Until he mandates everybody back. Joel: Yes. [chuckle] Joel: Morale will not improve, the beatings will continue until morale improves. Chad: Him and DJ Saul. Joel: The meetings will continue until morale improves. Chad: No, UNLEASH was, it was a big show. Joel: It was great. Chad: Big expo hall... Joel: Third year, stellar. Chad: Yeah, that was only year three, it was big. Joel: And not consecutive. Chad: Yeah. And then we've got RecFest that's coming to America this year. I think we're gonna see a lot of growth. Can we keep the ice out of the water long enough for some of these funders and some of these startups to be able to really just explode? Jason: Were there any Web3 companies there? [chuckle] Chad: I don't think so. Were there? Jason: Joel's over here, cackling, he's got a story in the house, [chuckle] Chad: There was one that actually did an announcement that week, and that's CV Wallet out of the UK. So Richard and Beverly Collins, who actually sold a company to Indeed, they're now getting into Web3. It's a portable CV... Joel: Wallet? Chad: Yeah, wallet. Which allows all of the credentialing, all of the background checks, all that stuff, that actually stays with me, not the company, 'cause it's not a background check on the company, it's a background check on me. So I get to keep that as I go from company to company and I apply, for as long as I want them to have my information. So I see this as evolution. We'll see if we can actually get adoption with that evolution. Jason: Does it support NFTs? Chad: I'm sure it does. Jason: Yes. Joel: I can imagine. Ira: So if there weren't vendors, there was their conversation about Web3? Joel: Very little from my perspective. Ira: I mean, isn't that the problem? Chad: Yeah. Well, okay. Joel: Everyone's living in chat GPT shadow at the moment. Chad: Yes. But here's the thing though, you gotta remember, how much did we talk about cloud computing? We did for a minute, it was like, "Oh, this is the coolest thing in the world." And then it just wasn't there, but it took over the world because it's actually like a white labeled solution that's happening behind the scenes. I see the same thing happening with Web3. It could power some amazing tech, but it's not something we're gonna talk about and there's no reason to. Ira: It's fascinating right now. Web3 was really picking up steam and then AI came on the scene. Jason: Well, and then certain companies went out of business that were Crypto or... They sneeze and everyone's caught a cold, so they're guilty by association. And I fear that Web3, Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs, do they all get lumped in the same thing as, be careful, don't touch. I think it's a long game where all this stuff plays out, but for right now, I think there's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt around anything, Blockchain, Crypto, NFT, Web3, there's not a massive break. Joel: So is it not happening right now or is it just that people are, "Let's lay low." Ira: If you get into this CV wallet, it's the long game. I mean, you're not flipping this thing in 24 months. It's the long game as far as I'm concerned. Joel: Somebody's gonna want to buy it, that's the thing though, because everybody wants to do a resume differently and we've been bitching about it for... Jason: Which goes back to the uncertainty. If this is just another company I can buy and sell and acquire, they're gonna have to convince people that CV Wallet Web3 is different than LinkedIn. And that means you can't just sell it to another company. Otherwise you're just putting your resume and profile through another company. Chad: I can't apply for a job on Indeed with my LinkedIn profile. I can't apply for a job in all of these other places outside of Indeed. Jason: Can you apply on Indeed with my CV wallet? Chad: Yeah. Well that's the whole thing is that if you can create these things and LinkedIn doesn't create it, Indeed doesn't even create it, but you have a third party do it, and they have these integrations with assessment companies and whatnot, the practicality of something like that happening goes up tremendously. As soon as Indeed builds something like that, you're gonna have half the market not want to do it. Jason: Most job boards will have, apply with your Indeed profile, and apply through Indeed. And... Chad: If it works. Jason: If it works, [chuckle] I mean they have it. So the promise of blockchain, and particularly Bitcoin is right, Bitcoin is beyond any government currency... Chad: But you're missing something. Indeed has a bunch of fake ass profiles. It's one of those things where if something that's credentialed, it's something that you know real, and it's portable for us as a user, it just makes sense. There's a messaging problem, a narrative problem as you say every week for Web3, Blockchain and Crypto, I agree 100%. They just need kick-ass marketing. Jason: So let's go back to, and it's something you've just said just popped in my head, if you go back and we figure this out and let's say the wallet becomes the new resume, and we have a better way than in a LinkedIn profile, how do companies... One is, how do you verify the skills that you can build any resume? Chad: Well, they're verified within the actual assessments and the assessment vendors in your wallet. Jason: If the assessments are measuring what's important. Joel: Or they're reputable. Jason: But people are still hiring, and I came from this world. I mean, people hire on personality and behavioral style. So how do you hire people that actually have the ability, one is the knowledge, and the wisdom, and the ability to apply it? So I can take all the courses and skills and have 30 years of experience, but how do you verify that I actually could apply and I'm willing to apply? Chad: Testing simulations. Those are the biggest keys. And... Jason: But they have to be part of the Web... Chad: Oh God yeah. Well that's part of the credentialing part. Jason: So you're demonstrating your ability, it's not that I just went to school and I clicked this off and I had 10 years of experience and I met all my goals for 10 years. Chad: And Jenny did all my tests for me. Ira: You know Jenny too. Chad: She's from the block. Ira: I think she's friends with Charity, isn't she? She's friends with Charity. Joel: Jenny's just short for Generative AI. [laughter] Joel: That's right. Ira: So what? We often say... Jason: Too smart, Ira. Ira: Humans are still gonna have certain skills that AI can't do. I'm a little skeptical. I gotta be honest. Chad: I don't know how long though. Ira: Me too. So I'm just curious from you guy's perspectives, what are those things that... Joel: Nuance. Emotions. Jason: So that's one of the concerns, is that AI in the future, that we can't replicate human compassion and empathy, but you can replicate the behavior. Chad: But what's the difference, Ira? Joel: Since most people do it robotically now. Chad: Yes. That's what I mean. Joel: So you go, is how do I become more empathetic? It doesn't mean the person gives a shit about anything. It's the reality, is they act like they do. Jason: Yes. Like most managers. Joel: And then the person has to have the ability to discern, are they authentic or not? Which most people don't have that ability to discern it because, "oh, he gave me a paycheck and he really likes me." Chad: And he's a Browns fan, so he must be full of shit. Jason: Right. Because we have something in common. Joel: Oh. Are you a Browns fan? Ira: I'm a Browns fan. Jason: You and Drew Carey. Yeah. You got something to say? Chad: Two of them. Jason: No, I'm a Colts fan, so I'm in misery too. Hey, I was listening to a podcast the other day and it talked about military preparation, and it said that in military battles or war games, that AI will typically do whatever it takes to win the battle or the war. It will sacrifice soldiers in order, for the big picture to win the ultimate prize, which is the war. Whereas human beings would look at sacrificing people as, maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe there's another way. So to answer your question a little bit of like, yes, there is something to be said for human beings because we would look at that and say, sacrificing humans isn't just... Chad: All right. Context. Jason: An algorithm. These are people that live and breathe and have families, etcetera. I think there is still nuance. Joel: So this is interesting. Yesterday on the way out here on the shuttle, met a guy... Chad: Gingalactic. Joel: Went to the airport, turns out he's a 3-star general. Chad: Blue Origin, P-Rock. Joel: So he oversees one of the defense organizations with the government. Three and a half trillion dollars, 250,000 contracts. I asked him, I said, "Hey, you want to be on the podcast?" He'd love to... He's retiring. I said, "Love to get you on the podcast. Talk about what the future is heading." He said something like, "What are you using for AI?" His answer was that they're not focused on AI. He says the biggest value that they see is business intelligence. Is where they're looking at AI is not in the strategy. Jason: Really? Joel: Is in analyzing all the data that they have to make better decisions leading up to how, where do they invest their money. Chad: But yeah, but I mean that would be ML and AI at the same point, 'cause you have all that data to grind. Joel: But it's not about the human life. It's about how do we make better decisions about, how many F16s do we really need? And, who's the best vendors, and how do we have higher quality? And they're not even using that yet. They're not even at that level of using the business intelligence to the level it should be. And now we're already extrapolating out to, who's gonna make that final decision about, is this gonna sacrifice more human lives? So we've got a long way to go. And as we always say... Ira: Where's Matthew Broderick and his monkey when you need him? Joel: That's a great point though. Chad: Drones on the battlefield. That's what clears up this entire conversation. Jason: Yeah. Boston Dynamics with the little dog robots. Chad: We're not worried about human lives when we got drones in the air and we got the little Boston Dynamic dogs. Ira: But, I mean, that's a really fascinating point with sometimes having... We've got a ton of information, but we're really terrible as humans a lot of times at knowing what it's telling us, and organizing and synthesizing... The human capital reporting is a mess. I mean, we just got into this a few weeks ago where there was a report that came out in February on human capital metrics, now that publicly traded companies are supposed to be disclosing this stuff. And what absolutely blew my mind, of the S&P 500 companies, only 23% of them are still reporting anything on culture. And of the 23%, 50% of those, what they are reporting on culture is an engagement survey that they do two times a year. Chad: Poll survey. Ira: Yeah. And that's it. Chad: So they don't care about the culture in the first place and they never did. Jason: The people are our most valued resource. What are you talking about? Joel: As long as it's correct. To be consumed. Chad: As long as they're white, middle-aged males, then they're our most valued resource. Ira: That's right. And heterosexual. Chad: Yes. Yes. Ira: Don't forget that one. Chad: Just the hypocrisy of corporate America who says, first and foremost that employees are the most valued. And then there's like, get your ass back into the... We know what you want is what you want, but we don't care. You were incredibly productive, but get back into the office. DEIB, the most important thing in the world. Oh, wait a minute. Let's go ahead and cut all the heads in DEIB. And diversity, equity is ongoing. Ira: And don't you dare have a marketing campaign to those people. Chad: Don't you start. Don't you start. Ira: Don't you dare put that face on a BUD LIGHT can. Chad: Yeah. The trans community doesn't need to know about that beer. Ira: They don't drink beer. Chad: And they said, come on people. Joel: They don't drink beer. Chad: Yeah. And a great campaign, but then Anheuser-Busch folded like a fucking cheap card table. Jason: They did. They did. Chad: And that was on product. That wasn't even on employees. So if they're gonna fold that quickly on product, they're not even thinking about employees, you fucking kidding me? It's all just fluff. Ira: What I'm really hopeful for is, with AI, is that we're not gonna get more data, but we're gonna make better decisions with it. And so, imagining the day when there's gonna be an AI agent sitting at the table in a boardroom and just look at board members and say, that is a terrible idea, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today, and here's all the reasons why based off of the data. Chad: You need data from Star Trek, right? [laughter] Jason: But being able to refute a lot of things that I think that often get conflated as fact, but are strictly opinion, or the ways that things have always been or the way that they've looked at data... Chad: Oh yeah. Jason: I really hope that there's gonna be more objectivity that comes to it. We've gotta get better than 23% of S&P 500 companies reporting anything on culture, if you're gonna say that you care about people. Chad: We can't even get economy right. The shit that we talk about as rules in economy is basic theory. It has nothing to do with rules at all. Our Economics 101 that you go through in school is total bullshit. They're talked about as laws and it's total theory. We can't even get the thing that's most important to us right. And then we want to think about, oh, wait a minute, employees. Oh okay. Yeah. Ira: But at least we learned how to square dance in high school. Chad: That's a good point. Yes. That's a good point. Ira: At least in Indiana. Chad: You square danced in high school. You had to have. Ira: Broke danced, square danced, I did it all. I did it all baby. Chad: And he still does. Ira: I'll break out the running man right now. Chad: Pull out the piece of cardboard. That's what I want to see. Ira: Breakin' 2, Electric Boogaloo, the classic. Who else is hungry? Is it just me? I feel like the super fans sitting around the table. I could use a Ruben. Chad: Time for food and another beer kids. Ira, Jason, thanks for inviting us out. Joel: What a pleasure. Jason: Thank you for having us. This was a blast, man. Chad: Absolutely. Ira: Rathskeller. We're gonna have to do it more often. Chad: Amen. Ira: Monumental meeting. Chad: And with that, another one is in the can. Another beer on the way and a Ruben is cooking in the kitchen. We out. Jason: We out. S6: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Chase podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and was off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Twist and SHRM, Industry Acquisitions Come Together Cheese is back from a whole week in Vegas, where he attended the SHRM National show, so we start with an update from the expo hall, including vendor takeaways, podcast superfans and a budding romance between Cardboard Chad and Cardboard Dolly Parton 🔥 Back to business, Adzuna, Beamery and Synthesia embrace AI, which is something we’ll certainly see more of from the solutions space. The show also covers recent industry acquisitions from Spark Hire and WebMD (yes, that WebMD). Then it’s Buy or Sell with Ferretly, 2045 and Swing Education. And what better way to end a show that starts with the adult playground that is Vegas than a story about an OnlyFans creator shutting down conservative commentator Piers Morgan? TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Joel: Oh Yeah. It's National Fudge Day and take back the lunch break day. Any guesses what I'm having for lunch today after the show, Chad? Chad: Yeah. Good guy. Joel: You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Packer Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad Nobody wants an AI Ringo Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, SHRM stuff, an only fan smackdown and buy or sell. Let's do this. Chad: Mother fucking cardboard Chad. Joel: Motherfucking cardboard Chad [laughter] Chad: You had a week. Joel: Dude. I walk into the expo hall. So if you're not a regular listener, I was at the SHRM National Show this week. I walk into the expo hall, no shit. Cardboard Chad is facing everyone that's coming into that particular door of the expo hall, because Aaron's booth was right on the corner. And they moved cardboard Chad to basically greet everyone that was coming through the door. Chad: I love it. Joel: It was quite a sight. [laughter] Chad: And a roll up with Chad and Cheese. HR's most dangerous podcast. I had, me in my robe and slippers. Yeah. No, it was pretty legit. Joel: And Chad heads were all around as well, which is not good for anybody. Chad... Cardboard Chad made friends with Cardboard Dolly Parton, which was probably one of the highlights for me of the show. That's a romance that is budding and worth keeping an eye on Chad. Islands in the Stream takes on a whole different meaning. [laughter] Chad: Oh, yes. Joel: When it's cardboard Chad involved. Chad: Yes, it does. Jesus. Joel: So yeah, I've been in Vegas for a week. I need a nap more than usual. I was there with my wife and some of the in-laws having a good time, and then transitioned over to the SHRM show. Drank every day for sure, of that trip. And it's not good. Congratulations to hockey's Las Vegas Golden Knights who won the title while I was there. Had some drinks with the Plum team which... Chad: Nice. Joel: Includes a Canadian founder. So it was always fun to rub in the fact that another year goes by without a Canadian team winning the NHL, which by the way we researched the last Canadian team to win it, 1993s, Montreal Canadians were the last Canadian team to win the cup. Chad: Holy Shit. Wow. Joel: Of course, they're very quick to let you know that everyone that plays on every team is Canadian, so it doesn't matter. The Canadians win every year. Chad: Every year. [laughter] SFX: Shout out. Chad: It's time. While you were in Vegas, I was on a me... A mission to spread diplomacy. That's right. You don't need shots for that. I was spreading diplomacy. We actually met two French couples at an Italian restaurant, and we were just having a good time. They didn't speak English, we didn't speak French. They bought us two bottles of wine. We sat there for three hours, I swear, just bullshitting and Google translating. They invited us to their Airbnb last weekend and while you were in Vegas we arrived to five hours of food and drink. Only communicating through Google Translate. We had a fucking blast. It is literally one of those days we're gonna remember for the rest of our lives. So anyway, shout out to French people and technology and when Julie and I go back to Normandy we've got a place to stay. Joel: You know a lot of porn stars with French people in Italian restaurants by the way. That's where my mind went on this. Chad: Oh, God. Joel: It also reminds me of European vacation when the Griswold's go to a French restaurant and he is like "I'll give you dish water. You won't know the difference." And he hits talks about Clark's daughter. Anyway, at least there's Google Translate. Chad: They weren't Parisian. Yes. [laughter] Joel: Shout out a little bit more SHRM stuff. Okay. Let's... Chad: Yes. Joel: A little business stuff. Chad: Bring it back. Joel: The expo hall was interesting. It was full. It was busy. Chad: Of course, yeah. Joel: I think they had a larger number of people that went this year than last year. It was a little more telling about who wasn't there in the vendor space. Eightfold who we love making fun of for their 80 by 80 booths had no booth whatsoever. Deal, Oyster, Velocity, Global. A lot of the unicorns we talk about weren't there. Indeed, HiBob, Fountain, Paradox, Remote were there but very subtle booths. Mostly did not have the A team in the booth. Obviously not the A team in the booth. [laughter] Indeed had one of the banners that hung from the ceiling, the rafters. It looked like somebody printed it out from the HP printer in the office. Like they didn't... Chad: Dot matrix. Joel: Yeah. The dot matrix with the holes on the side that you gotta rip off. That's what that looked like. But that was my takeaway from the vendor side was in the Aaron Booth from another Chad and Cheese perspective. Another 150 t-shirts with our faces on it were given out during this conference. And I'm just amazed. Chad: Wow. You didn't even save one for Steven McGrath. Oh, my God. Joel: I did not. That's another shout out that's coming up. So don't ruin it. But yes I got one for my dad who it's pretty much all he wears is his Chad and Cheese t-shirts [laughter], which I can't hate on. [laughter] I got him a new one so he can rotate it in the laundry. But it was a good show. I would say equal parts optimism, equal parts nuclear winter is coming. I'm not sure what to make of that but we'll be talking about that obviously as the weeks and months go by throughout the rest of the year. Chad: Well, what's gonna save us, Joel, or my next shout out, large language models. That's right. All vendors are looking at different ways to leverage generative AI and Adzuna is choosing to use this most powerful tool... Tech for job seekers, and an interview prep tool. So this is from the press release based over 10 years of labor market data, Prepper is built on a large language model using in-built prompts to generate and review interview questions and model answers. The tool also assesses and scores candidates' answers, reviewing each response with the skills and requirements being sought by the employer and provided bespoke feedback, not customized, but bespoke feedback to help candidates improve. So you just add the job title into this and the job description. Then you can choose easy, hard, or pirate. I love that. Very talru, very pirate. [laughter] Chad: As an interviewer preference and away you go. So using large language models AI to help job seekers. Shout out to LLM and for Adzuna, focusing on the job seeker. And Little Rumor News. I heard a little listener told me... [laughter] Joel: Why are you looking around? Chad: You only see that on the YouTube. Joel: Yeah. Listeners won't see what you're doing. That's... Chad: I heard from a little listener that Indeed is backing away from their mandatory salaries on their job. So this is just a work and... Chad: That escalated quickly. Joel: We're going to take a look at it. That's exactly right. We're gonna continue to watch this space, but Indeed might possibly be backing away from their salary mandates. Keep a watch. Joel: Wow. So the name Prepper... [laughter] Joel: Sometimes these like countries, words mean different things. When I saw prepper, I was like, is this some doomsday product that they're creating that. Prepper is like doomsday prepares. And I hope, I pray that, I pray that some country creates a competitor called Fluffer. Please God, please let someone not know and make Fluffer the first... [laughter] Chad: It's the only fans version. Joel: The competing product. Yeah. And speaking of Fluffer, my next shout out, I got a few super fans, that I need to, I need to shine a light on... Chad: Fluffer. Joel: Steven McGrath. I don't know how many shows in a row that he's been in, but our favorite Scott, finally got his T-shirt. My God. Yes. There is, there is a God. Finally the mail service, the post got it to him. Well, both you and I woke up this morning to a picture of Steven in his t-shirt and nothing but the t-shirt with a big censored bar over his twig and berries. Chad: If you're watching us on YouTube, you can actually see the picture. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Something Adam Gourd wouldn't even think about doing. Steven like, it's just Tuesday at the McGrath house. So shout out to him and a couple other super fans, that came by during my time at SHRM. Rachel Scatter, she's with Jobcase. She's a Hoosier. Went to, Indiana State, the school, you know well, because your daughter was there. Chad: Oh, Terre Haute. Joel: Yeah. Terre Haute, Indiana. She came by and was excited to see that we were there. At least I was there. And also, Ilia Brodsky a super fan. He is the CEO at VanHack. Chad: I love that name. Joel: And if you don't know what VanHack is, it makes sense. Chad: I love that name. Yes. Joel: When you realize he's from Vancouver and he helps people in Vancouver hire tech people. I think they've moved on from just Vancouver, so he is trying to figure out the branding. I told him like, dude just get a VW van as a Mascot and then put a techie on the side of whatever and he's like... Chad: Van Wilder, VanHack. I love it. Joel: Yeah, no, I don't know if it, but anyway, so those two guys, yeah. Big fans of the show. Steven McGrath, keep doing you, man. I can't wait to see you in London which I guess will bring us into travel here in a second, but can't wait to see you, man. Don't corrupt my son too much, please? Chad: Good luck on that one. I've got an update on the, messy shout out from last week with, Inter Miami. So $29 tickets now cost $450 plus. Come the fuck on people. It, it's almost like we don't know how capitalism works. A family of four is over a $100 at $29 per ticket. Do you think a family of four can afford close to $2,000, including all those fucking fees and shit? Not enough families to fill the damn stadiums. Buy beer, hotdogs and nachos. Your favorite. What the actual fuck were these idiots thinking, raising Skybox rates might have been good, but fill the fucking stadium. Sell merch, sell concessions, then ratchet it up from there. This reminds me of JobAdder's dumbass CEO takeover [laughter] of JobAdder in, in the Boost, right? I don't know, maybe he's on the team at Inter Miami. I don't know. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: To charge more for MLS. I don't care who's on the pitch than football tickets in America is just. Chad: No. Joel: Just stupid. Chad: No. Joel: You just can't do it. You can't do it. Chad: You stop it. Joel: You can't do it. Chad: You stop it. Joel: Oh, man. Chad: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? I know. I can. Joel: You can do it. Chad: I can feel it all the way down in my Plums. Joel: You can do it. Down in my plums. That's right Chad. It's birthdays and it's Rum with Plum, which also we should mention if you haven't given us your contact information for free. Shit. We got beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, Bourbon from our friends at Text Colonel and Rum with Plum. If it's your birthday month and celebrating another trip around the sun this week is Eli Carstens, Kimberly Ol strap, TJ Lou, Robin Walsh, Zach Martin, Catherine Henry, Eric Baker, Linda White Moore, Jennifer McClure and Dan Yell North. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Happy Birthday fans. Chad: We also have to let our listeners know that we have a new free giveaway. It's for Getaways and it's from our friends over at Abode HR. You go and register at free and once a month we're gonna give away with Abode. We're gonna give away $250 worth. It's a little card, little credit card of Airbnb. This gives you TA and HR professionals an opportunity to get the fuck away, to breathe and to focus on strategy and get out of the goddamn tactical weeds. That's from Chad and Cheese and your friends over at Abode HR. Joel: Ooh, I like that. [laughter] I like that a lot. Chad: Events. Joel: And where are we going, Chad? Chad: We're going to the UK. We're going to RecFest July 6th at Knebworth Park. [music] Chad: But, by the time you hear this episode kids I'm pretty confident that RecFest is going to have already hit their threshold of 5,500 people that are allowed to come in. So, if you haven't gotten your ticket, you're shit outta luck kids. That's just sad. But what should make you happy is RecFest Nashville. Be there to say that you and your team because this is an all hands thing. This is a bonding moment that you were the very fucking first RecFest USA fans, what have you? Seriously, it's a thing in five years RecFest, you're gonna be the OG, they'll have OG badges, that kinda shit. You're gonna get you see people with the OG badges, you give them that subtle nod while you get a little bit more champagne and your Mimosa, Cheesman you know exactly what I'm talking about. You bougie bastard. That is exactly what RecFest is about. Fun, getting together, all hands learning. And since you couldn't make it to the UK, because they're sold out, you gotta come to the US. Joel: Electric Bull Chad. I want the Electric world in Tennessee baby. [music] Chad: Starbucks. Joel: All right. AI. Yeah. Startup Synthesia has raised 90 million in a series C round, bringing its total to $156 million. Synthesia's platform allows companies to create instructional videos using AI avatars without the need for actors or studios. The company will generate over 12 million videos and works with over 50,000 companies worldwide this year alone. Nvidia, the company powering its revolution, powering this revolution, excuse me, is now a trillion dollar juggernaut. McKenzie says, the AI boom will usher in an age of accelerated productivity to the tune of around $4 trillion annually. But it will come with profound disruption for many primarily knowledge workers. At least they can use the time off to listen to some new Beatles songs. As Paul McCartney confirmed this week that they're making a new single utilizing John Lennon's AI generated voice. Chad, lots to unpack here. The AI front is hot as usual. What's your take? Chad: My take is you're very tired 'cause you didn't use the unicorn sound effect. [music] Chad: Nvidia is the most important company in the world when it comes to AI development and ML right now. Why, you might ask, Nvidia's GPUs are the processors used for AI and deep learning. They don't have the market cornered, but they've pretty much have the market cornered. So if you're an AI company and Nvidia comes knocking whether you need the money or not, you open the goddamn door, you have the conversation. So apparently there are over 12 million videos with Synthesia. This is that, that's a horrible name. Synthesia has over 12 million videos that have been generated on the platform since 2017 in 50,000 companies worldwide. That's not too shabby if we better understand what their MRR, ARR, their pricing model is. Here's a big thing. Competitors. Hour One, who's been on the show, Veritone, sponsor and on the show many times. This space is heating up. It is fucking hot. And this is nothing but market validation for the companies that we've already been talking to. Hour One, Veritone, who are looking at voice, not just audio, but also video. Joel: Video. Chad: Video and avatar all the way through, man, it is fucking crazy. Tell me what you think about that. Joel: For sure and again, I've got SHRM on the brain. Yes, I need a nap. You're right about that. [laughter] Slightly braindead, for this week's show. Sorry about that, everybody, but... Chad: I'll put the unicorn in, don't worry. Joel: Don't worry. It's clear companies are trying to figure out how we get on this AI train. There's a lot of pasting messaging because when people buy the booths for SHRM, it's usually like a year before and they try to figure everything out. You could see there was a little bit of plastering of, yeah, ChatGPT and coming soon, this and that and the other. So everyone's trying to figure out what to do on this front. But you have companies that were there and I talked to, that are on this train right now. VirgilHR, who I spoke with, and I think we'll get that interview up at some point. They're using AI to basically replace lawyers for a firm. Joel: So, or for a company so an employee can like type in. I wanna lay off people in California. What are the laws? What's the process? And it can like spit it out for you that you don't need the lawyers that you used to have before. Beamery, you mentioned Adzuna, Beamery this week announced I guess what they're calling an AI driven workforce planning solution. So everyone's trying to release news, trying to get this stuff product together. What we've talked about before is that you have these, I don't know, baby gorillas soon to become 800-pound gorillas, the Veritones of the world. They're gonna have just a Howitzer that'll tie in HR products and services because they have the video technology, the scripting, the language processing, the translations into multiple languages. Joel: They're going to be at the forefront. And a lot of these other companies are just not gonna be able to play ball or compete with it. So it's gonna be crazy to talk about. The McKinsey report, that came out this week. If you get a chance, type in Google McKinsey digital report. It's a long thing, but it's really interesting. Yeah. It's, this is the next year or two that we're gonna be talking about. AI solutions, startups. Chad: Easily. Joel: Money's gonna be going into this stuff. It'll be real exciting and disruptive. Chad: Nvidia CEO actually said Moore's Law instead of being one and a half times it's two times right now. It is moving that much faster. Going to the Beatles discussion and a new album. Right? Joel: Yep. Chad: So, I had a discussion with Julie this morning 'cause I don't know how I feel about this. I love music, I love the classics. I love it from living people. I don't know if I love the new generated, not real stuff. So I asked Julie, I was like what do you think? She said, I think it cheapens the experience. I then asked her if you thought it was okay to speak with your grandma, because that's another thing, right? You can actually condense that information. Joel: So it's that coming out now. Chad: She had a visceral reaction to that. She said, yeah, no, I would definitely love to speak with grandma. Chad: Then I said, but for some people, music and bands are like a personal and real relationship. And then she thought that one through a little bit harder and said, okay, well, maybe no. Right? Maybe no, because it cheapens the experience. It all led to this question, what is life worth? If you live 27 years, like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, and a list of others. Does it cheapen the experience after you saw Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at Woodstock and you're one and you're a boomer, would it cheapen the experience if a new AI version of the album came out and who would buy it? I guess we're gonna find out. And this is also going to open up a can of worms around should Harry Caray AI be used for Cubs games? Should AI be used to recreate obviously all these musical works? And or discussions with Grandma, because these are all discussions and products that are already out there. Joel: What is life worth? Chad: That escalated quickly? Joel: You went there, didn't you? So I initially liked this trend, mostly because there's a new Oasis album and Oasis wasn't gonna make a new album ever. [laughter] And it was pretty good, like voice. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Single was written and the real people played instruments. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And then, yes, this came out and I was, do I really wanna hear a Beatles record? With John Lennon's AI voice, now it's endorsed by Paul, which helps it, because if you go to YouTube, search AI cover, and there's everything under the sun, right, there's Freddie Mercury singing Hotel California, and there's this. People are just being crazy. I think that totally is stupid. That's novel. People will get over that, like they did MySpace and some other things, but. Chad: And most people buy it. Joel: The problem is yes. These songs don't exist in a vacuum. These artists don't exist in a vacuum. You can't, you couldn't release Revolution today and have it, have the same meaning as it did in the '60s. You can't have Blitzkrieg Bop released today and have it, have the same gravitas that it did in the '70s. Smells like Teen Spirit today does not have the same hit that it does in the early '90s. So for me, maybe it's old school. I don't like the idea of artists that have these bookmarks in history, these bookmarks in our lives, these bookmarks in time, whether it's Vietnam or whatever in history. I don't like the idea of that. Maybe it's an old guy crusty thing, but yeah, I'm gonna sell the whole dead rockers creating new stuff trend. Chad: Yeah. Again, what is life worth? Joel: Damn. You went there. That was... Chad: That escalated quickly. Joel: That was really fucking deep. We gotta move on from some of that shit. [laughter] Chad: Clearance rack. Come on. Joel: Let's talk about sales. All right. Can I interest you in some sleep inducing acquisitions, Chad? [laughter] Israeli startup, Comeet, a provider of applicant tracking and candidate management platform is merging with video interview platforms, Spark Hire. The merger is estimated to be a $50 million deal. The merge company will have a combined customer base of over 7,000 companies. But wait, Chad, there's more. There's more from the TJMaxx. WebMD is set to acquire Limeade. The transaction values limeade at $75 million and is expected to close in the third quarter. Limeade provides software to help companies enhance employee wellbeing and satisfaction. Alright, Chad, throwback a five hour energy and give us your take. Chad: Dude. An applicant tracking system just bought, or was just sold to a video interviewing platform. That's about as backwards as it fucking gets, right? Comeet was founded in 2013, received about $7.2 million in funding. Spark Hire founded back in 2010. It seems they've taken little funding, under 70 employees. So it almost seems kind of a lifestyle company to some extent. Spark Hire isn't a big name in the space, right? And again, that might be on purpose, buying this many people and New Tech, they're gonna have to go after funding. Is this a great time to go after funding? It's not. It's not. So, I see this as Spark Hire's very safe and reliable Volvo. They just hitched it up to a freight train and now the Volvo has to pull the Comeet Freight train. It's gonna be incredibly incredibly hard for them. I wish 'em luck. But what they were doing, I think it's gonna be really hard for them to expand beyond and into applicant tracking. Joel: So we had a show, I think maybe a year or so ago, and we talked about, what do SMBs do when they need an ATS? Well, a lot of them just use the Indeed built in ATS or they'll use the ZipRecruiter or whatever. And what does that do to that tier two or tier three ATS, kinda puts 'em out of business, frankly. There's a lot of Tier 2, Tier 3 ATSs. Comeet is one of them that simply can't compete with the iCIMS, the smart recruiters, the big guys that are out there doing it. On the other side of that, there's a whole lot of SaaS companies that think they are a platform, or at least they wanna be a platform. And to be a platform in our business, you better have an ATS. So you're gonna see a lot of these SaaS companies go shopping for these lower Tier ATSs because frankly, it's just a bad business. Joel: ATS, the ATS is a commodity. And these ATSs that are down this, down at that level, they don't have marketplaces. And if they do have marketplaces, companies aren't building for it because they don't have enough penetration to make it worth their while. So you have an ATS and all there is, is an ATS, there's no marketplace. Companies are leaving them to go to ATSs that do have marketplaces that they can use. It's just inevitable that these are gonna get bought up, go out of business, and you're gonna see more of these SaaS companies with a little bit of money, a little bit of cheddar in the bank from investment, go buy ATSs and say, now we're a platform. Will the market buy it? I don't think so, but it is a move that I at least understand. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Now going to the WebMD deal. Chad: Oh, geez. Yeah. So Limeade, I think the biggest issue, and we see this throughout our entire industry. Chad: Is we don't know... We don't understand how to create a narrative that's going to sell more. There are some amazing CEOs that have gone through our industry who can raise money and can sell shit, and they do one thing incredibly well. Narrative, being able to hone in on what is truly important and create a narrative. Limeade couldn't do that. Went into their press release, went into some of their blogs, went into their website. They couldn't get narrative right. I mean, they could have been a two... They, they could have easily been a five to 6X as opposed to a little over a 2X, right? They had a couple of points that they should have definitely hit. I saw that, that were easy to hit, but they didn't even touch. Number one, low worker productivity, which equals lost revenue. Chad: And that's all been in the news lately. High attrition rates, lost revenue. That's the key. We don't focus on the hard lost revenue types of numbers, which the board gives a shit about. We always focus on the fuzzy charts and graphs and that kind of shit. That's the thing. We really need to focus on stories like Amazon lost 9 billion in revenue because of attrition, lost revenue. Two words we have to have in our lexicon, and we have to go further than just talking about three times better productivity. That doesn't mean a fucking thing to the board unless you can put numbers to it, right? And in that productivity, what does that actually do from an attrition standpoint? Attrition stretches teams too thin. So you lose productivity while you're trying to fill a record number of positions and the employees that stay are getting burnt the fuck out. Chad: Then you hire onboard. How long does that take? Because your current team is still running on fumes. And then finally, when you get people in the seats to do the goddamn job, the people that are burnt out fucking leave, you're in this vicious cycle, right? That's where productivity has gone to the shitter. And then we need to tie in attrition rate. So again, lost revenue. Our industry needs to focus on those two words. Limeade wasn't even close to it. So again, I really think that this organization could have sold for a lot more, a lot more. They just didn't know how to build a narrative. Joel: The math did not add up, Chad. Chad: 60% of the time. It works every time. Joel: So my take is a little bit different on this. And it's pretty simple. I've said it before on the show. This company raised about 33 million. They were founded in 2006. You said it. Raising money now, really hard. There's no free money left, right? Time ran out on Limeade. Clear and simple. The money ran out. The patience for the investors ran out. They sold this thing probably for a song. I think that's, to me clear cut at what happened in terms of that deal on that side. Chad: It was a little over two times, two times at least in their funding. Joel: Well, I hope they've used that 33 to make some money in the 20 years basically, that they've been around. Hopefully that they did have some monetary value there. The WebMD thing, I don't know WebMD very well. I know it comes on search results when I want to know about my prostate and what's going on with my weight gain in the holidays or whatever. But two words on that side. Elevated Careers. Do you remember Elevated Careers Chad? They were the eHarmony of jobs. Chad: Oh, they were fucking horrible. Joel: Eharmony bought the eharmony of jobs. So WebMD coming in thinking that they can buy some employee, you know, satisfaction company or employee wellness company. And now they're gonna watch WebMD employment or WebMD work and try to make this thing, something, that people want. And I think it's going to end up just like eharmony and be a total piece of dog shit. [laughter] Hot garbage. What the hell are these companies thinking? We'll be right back. Joel: Alright, Chad, can I interest you in some buy or sell baby? That's right. Chad: Always, always. Joel: We talk about three companies that have recently gotten funding. We read a summary and Chad and I will review them and either buy or sell. Let's play. Number one. Ferretly. The social media screening company has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round, bringing its total to $2 million. Ferretly's platform helps organizations assess candidates online personas to align them with corporate values, reduce risk, and create a safer workplace. The funding will be used to expand into the pre-employment screening market and other segments. Chad, are you buy or sell on Ferretly? Chad: So we've talked about Fama who just acquired social intelligence in this space for a few years, and I believe we both feel that this type of social background checking is inevitable. It's just, it's going to happen. The biggest difference between Ferretly and Fama, I think, is messaging. Ferretly is going heavily toward pure fear marketing, using words like hate speech, political speech, insults and bullying, self-harm, sexual impropriety, terrorism, extremism, toxic claim. Chad: The list goes on, and on and on. Those are triggers that will sell a very risk-averse HR practitioner. If you scare the shit out of 'em, they're like, "Oh, fuck, my people are doing that. We need to put parameters around this," but I've said it before and I'll say it again. Old crusty background check companies will have to build new processes and infrastructure to sale... To scale. The days of someone running to the local courthouse in Walla Walla, Washington will be a thing of the past as data becomes more public and AI scales background checking. I believe Fama is well ahead of Ferretly, but that doesn't mean Ferretly isn't a good acquisition target for an old slow and lumbering background check company. This for me, my friend is a buy. [applause] Joel: Have you even been to Walla Walla, Washington? Chad: I have. Joel: Have you. Okay. I haven't. [laughter] Joel: I'm sure it's... I'm sure it's a fine place. Another difference between Ferretly and Fama is money raised. Chad: Yes. Joel: Fama's raised around $17 million. And then of course, the 2 million, here by Ferretly. This is to me, the Coke and Pepsi of this sector, of the industry. If you're looking for social media, like background checking, these are the two companies I don't think we'll see anymore. It's becoming a hard business. Is TikTok InVideo and like how this stuff is created, that's a tough thing to monitor. It's not just tweets. It's not just text. So it's a tough business. I don't see anybody getting into it from here. Both are basically features for a bigger background check company. I agree with you. That's a no-brainer. Ferretly at much less raised is gonna be a probably the first one to go out. And that'll set the market for Fama. Money isn't free anymore. Like we've said. This feels a lot like a bridge loan... [laughter] Joel: To when we finally get to a place where people are buying companies again, because that's, it's just not a lot of money. It feels like the investors are like, oh, let's get us to 2025, 2024, and then we'll start talking about acquisition. I don't see them raising more money. Yeah. I think it'll be bought by '24, '25. The litmus test to me is, in terms of being bought is does it make a profit for the investors? And I think the modest investment that they've gotten for is gonna be returned maybe 10 x for a company like this, because a background check company needs to have this service. So for me, yeah, this is an obvious buy from me as well. [applause] Joel: Well, let's talk about 2045. The New York City based network, an exclusive network for influential professionals of color secured $4.2 million in pre-seed funding. Funds will be used to enhance digital tools, programming and their NYC clubhouse. The company also unveiled a comprehensive in-person and online membership platform with committed corporate sponsors, including Pfizer, Ford, and Fidelity. Chad, are you buy or sell on 2045? Chad: I love the apply for community membership element. It's a velvet rope type of community. Not everybody can get in. I don't like that it's NYC New York City focused. We live in a remote environment. Why do we have boundaries? This... I understand there is a physical element to it, but that doesn't mean the entire thing has to be a physical, their messaging is pretty tight. Diverse leaders are leaving corporate jobs at a staggering rate. That's a great hook because those who have left and or are thinking about leaving, they're not giving up. They're just taking a breath. And what a better place than among other like-minded leaders. 4.2 in pre-seed funding is for a professional network? That's pretty stout. 2045 is looking at two membership options. Number one, individual pay, and number two, company pay. Number one is a non-starter. This should be a free platform subsidized by companies in a variety of ways. Now if they want to charge for live events and or use of their clubhouse, that's understandable. But membership fees are a non-starter. I love the core concept, but they have some business model issues that need to be shored up. They have self-imposed, geographic limitations and I think some soul searching to do so, even though I love the core concept, 2045 right now is a sell for me. Joel: So first of all, I tried really hard to find out how the name 2045 was given to this. I have no... I can't find it. I assume you didn't find it. So if somebody knows how they got the name 2045, let me know. Chad: I believe that is when, in the United States, white people aren't gonna be the majority anymore. We're gonna be more of a mixed society. Yeah. Joel: Okay. That's why I have you on the show, Chad, to let me know about this. [chuckle] Joel: So, so number one, the is NBA All-star, CJ McCollum, who is an avid Brown's fan from Canton, is an investor. And I just had to get the Browns on the show somehow. [laughter] Joel: So that's how I'm gonna do that. Look by almost all metrics in America, blacks are behind. I'm all for anything that lifts people and sets an example of success. This company portrays blacks as successful, just in a positive light. And that's good for everybody. We've seen organizations like this pop up, whether it's blacks, women, Hispanics, et cetera. And they've all had little to no success that I can see. Fairygodboss was acquired. I guess that may be a win. 2045 being a winner is a winner for all of us. They do have digital membership, so you don't have to be in New York. My guess is if it works, they'll launch it in Philly and Chicago and LA and it'll, it'll come to other markets. And I think we should all be rooting for this organization to be a big success. So for me, I love what they're doing. It's a good first seed round. A lot of good corporate sponsors, so... SFX: All right. All right. All right. Joel: I'm gonna buy 2045. Chad: No, 2045 leadership. Feel free to reach out if you'd like some, at least some advising, from me, I'd be more than happy to have a conversation, no invoice necessary because I'd love to see what you're doing, work. I just see a lot of gaps and would be more than happy to help. Joel: And if CJ McCollum ever wants to come on the show... [laughter] Joel: We will make room for you, my friend. We will make room. All right. Let's go to Swing Education. San Francisco based startup Swing Education has raised 38 million in a series C funding round, bringing its total to $60.8 million. The company operates an online platform that connects schools with substitute teachers addressing the issue of teacher shortage. Let's go back to school, Chad, I'm gonna review this one first, just for the hell of it because yeah, I need a nap and we need to click this thing up. Alright, historically, tapping into solving government pain is a big winner. Getting government money is a winner because it's a consistent form of cash that you can rely on right now, over three-fourths of states in America are facing teacher shortages until we start paying teachers like the rock stars that they are, we are going to continue having teacher shortages, a company out there that can help plug in teachers, even on a substitute basis, I think is a [laughter] slam dunk because there's such a need for it. Joel: I think their educational programs where they can take substitute teachers and make them into full-time teachers with up-skilling, I think is a big win as well. When you have a need like this, when you have government money that's gonna go towards it and a consistent customer that's not gonna go anywhere, this is to me. [applause] Joel: Another buy which is my hat trick and my hat tip to the Las Vegas Golden Knights. My hat trick on buy or sell. [laughter] Chad: Somebody's in the good mood. [laughter] So yes, we have a teacher shortage, there's no question, and there's another a number of reasons for it and Swing Education is a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound, but but because the problem is so God damn big, we need even if they're Band-Aids, we need something to help, and I don't disagree, I don't disagree at all that a platform that can help really connect a lot of these substitute teachers in the spot and give them an opportunity to see what's open and where they can go, very quickly, just makes sense. So I mean this is really a marketplace, I love marketplaces, again, this is not gonna fix the problem, but I tell you what it's gonna do, it's going to make money, it's a buy for me. SFX: Alright. Alright. Alright. Joel: Can I interest you in a OnlyFans story, Chad? [laughter] SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Joel: All right. OnlyFans, creator Elle Brooke was quizzed by Conservative, Piers Morgan about how her future children will react to her career. It is being celebrated as the perfect response, but I'm gonna let our listeners decide for themselves. Piers: I'm just curious about you being someone who embarked on a law career, was obviously very bright, went to university, packed it in just for money to be effectively an online stripper. I mean, that's what you do, right? Elle: Yeah. Way worse than an online stripper, but. Piers: What do you mean way worse? Elle: Way worse. Online stripper's just naked, I do things that are way more grotesque than that. Piers: Just pornography. Elle: Pornography, anything. But it's all within what I want to do, and I absolutely love it, and I'm really good at it. I could be a good lawyer. Yes. But also, am I good at doing other things on video and camera? Yes. Piers: How would you feel when you want to have kids yourself? Elle: Well, I mean, that's... I don't really want kids right now, but at least... Piers: But you will. How old are you? Elle: 25. Piers: Right. So you will do at some stage, probably, right? Elle: Maybe. Piers: When you do, are you gonna be proud that you have your little ones and they look at you and go, "Didn't you wanna be a lawyer? Mummy, what happened?" And you go here, but look at all my stuff. Elle: Yeah. They can cry in a Ferrari. [laughter] Joel: All right, Chad, drop the mic moment for the OnlyFans movement, or not so much? Chad: Yeah. I mean, there's no shame in Elle Brooke's game, for God's sake. Sex is about control. And Piers Morgan is... I don't know if this is really how he thinks, but he's definitely demonstrating the old power structure and sex is about control. Throughout history, sex has become taboo because there's one area that men don't own control, and that's a woman's body. Unless they use things like shame to harness that control, which we've done amazingly well through religion and many other structures of things that we can't even prove exists. But Elle is doing what she wants, how she wants, where she wants, and most importantly with whom she wants, good for her. Good for her. That's she's gonna make more money doing this than being an attorney. Joel: Yep. So, Piers Morgan is an old white dude. [laughter], for our listeners that don't know, I'm an old white dude. Chad has called us old white dudes before. Attitudes about naked women from yesterday are much different than they are today. Sex has become normalized online and women are profiting from it handsomely. And it's not just dildos and BJ's, by the way. Some twin female basketball players from the University of Miami have earned millions of dollars in those, the NIL deal from a couple years ago. And they're not strippers and they're not porn stars. They're just really cute. Playboy used to be the primary outlet for most men to see naked women. Playboy came out once a month, so the number of women that could be in the limelight for their nudity was very exclusive. Joel: The internet has democratized sex appeal and sex. It is what it is. I'm not sure if it's ultimately a net win for society. I have a 13 year old daughter. I don't want her to think that being sexualized is the way to make millions of dollars necessarily. I know you have a daughter, so I don't know how you feel about that. I mean ultimately I think AI phases out a lot of this trend. The sex robots, the AI videos where you can get the AI girl to do whatever you want, however you want to whatever is probably ultimately gonna put OnlyFans out of business. And this will be something that we talk about from back in the day. Just like the internet or just like... The internet put out, put Playboy outta business. I think AI is ultimately gonna put OnlyFans out of business, but only time will tell. Until then, it's fun to talk about. SFX: What are you doing, step bro. Chad: We Out. Joel: We out. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead, now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Live from UNLEASH America in the Workhuman booth, Bennet Sung, co-founder at New Cherry and longtime industry know-it-all, joins the show to talk about everything from employer branding to the hottest takeaways from the conference to even explaining the name of his company. I mean, New Cherry? What’s that all about? For more: Bennet Sung - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennettsung/ Workhuman - https://www.workhuman.com UNLEASH America - https://unleash.ai 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: Live from the Workhuman booth at Unleash America in Vegas this year, Joel and I were able to sit down with some great practitioners and industry voices. Sit back and enjoy this exclusive episode Powered by our friends over at Workhuman. Answer the human need to be recognized, developed, and celebrated at workhuman.com. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the Doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous vodcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right by where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, mass opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: What's up boys and girls? We are at Unleash America, the Workhuman Booth, having many guests and fans of the show. But our first guest, congratulations. Our first guest. Bennett Sung: I'm number one. I was number 32 at In-N-Out Burgers yesterday. [laughter], Joel: You're number one. We've only done about 1,060 podcasts. Chad: But for today at the Workhuman booth, you are number one. Bennett Sung: Awesome. Chad: So let me introduce Bennett Sung. He is the co-founder of New Cherry [chuckle] His LinkedIn profile reads like a Tolstoy novel. I mean, it's like you've been everywhere. Give us the summary of your professional journey. Joel: [laughter] Oh my God. I hope you use protection. That's all I gotta say. [laughter] Bennett Sung: My professional journey is pretty simple. 16 years in product marketing and now supporting B2B enterprise SaaS companies. Joel: All the way back to Virtual Edge, which most listeners won't even fucking know what that is. So tell a little bit about that story. Bennett Sung: Oh yeah. So Virtual Edge. Interesting enough, when I first interviewed back in April, 2006, I literally asked Diane Smith, the fun question I was most interested in is. Are you planning to get acquired by ADP? [laughter] Chad: He goes right for the jugular, doesn't he? Joel: Here's some foreshadowing by the way, listener. Bennett Sung: Because at the end of the day, if you're an HR tech, and you want to have the biggest distribution channel. ADP is a great option. Right? Joel: Any one of the acronyms, the SAPs or the ADP. Chad: UKG. Joel: UKGs. Bennett Sung: UKGs. Exactly. Whatever. If that was the case, [laughter] But interesting enough, she obviously didn't gimme a precise answer until six months later when she appeared in the "blue suit", because that's the ADP uniform for executives and so for those that know about it, it's like, okay, there are a couple things that, not only did she do that she got rid of all the wine, all the liquor from the building. Because obviously was not allowed. Joel: That's horrible. Bennett Sung: So Virtual Edge got acquired by ADP, then got wrapped into a tumultuous journey. [laughter] Joel: Well talk a little bit about this scale. 'Cause we're just talking about some companies want to get acquired so badly, although when you get eaten by the 800-pound gorilla, there are areas of scale that you can't even realize until you get punched in the gut by that gorilla. Bennett Sung: Oh yeah, totally. In this situation with Virtual Edge, it was still a highly configurable application, but was it configurable and scalable for implementing 300 plus customers at any given time? Joel: 'Cause you were doing, how many of your first... Bennett Sung: We're probably doing maybe 10. Joel: Right, but you're talking about high level, very customized. Very so I mean, you're talking white glove service from 10 to 300. Bennett Sung: 300, Yeah. And that was the biggest eye opener when we talk about scale. So when I go out and talk to all these early stage startups, I said, I hope your vision... If you're long, North Star is a big distribution channel, let's make sure the technology is set up to be successful in a situation where you envision at some point in time you're gonna be implementing 300 concurrent customers. Joel: How many of those care about that though? They're just looking at trying to get acquired. Bennett Sung: They're just trying to get acquired. Joel: And then after that it's pretty much scales on you. Big boy. Bennett Sung: No, and that is my biggest challenge to all of the book acquirers is like, can this company succeed as is without you having to quickly do another acquisition to replace the one that didn't work? [laughter] 'Cause that's exactly what happened in ADP world. I mean the, Virtual Edge came in, we had some good success for a few years, and then of course the technology began to show itself off in the context that it wasn't scalable effectively. And so they had to go back out to market to go find a new one. Chad: Do you think that's a threat? We talk about integrations all the time. Bennett Sung: Oh yeah. Chad: And I've talked to startups that integrate with, you name it, and they get flooded or at least unexpectedly flooded with business. What advice would you give knowing your experience to companies looking to integrate, make sure that they're ready for it and, what questions should they ask before they make that leap? Bennett Sung: That's a great question. I think interesting enough, we are in an industry that integration is necessary. It's a requirement. And I think this is what also cripples early stage companies. They don't realize that their entire roadmap will begin to shift away from innovation to integration so quick. Chad: Oh my God. I love that [laughter] Joel: That is great. That is great. Chad: Drop the mic. I'm done. Innovation to integration. Joel: Wrap this up. Chad: Holy shit. Joel: So this is why we see, and let me clarify this real quick. We see these point solutions are incredibly, incredibly innovative. They get acquired and then nothing. Bennett Sung: Nothing. And here's the deal. They will go ahead and spend $30,000 of engineering money per integration. And guess how many customers they have on one integration? One, they don't try to find, okay, how do we now go and find... Chad: And you say one because it's that one that enables them to get that integration. Bennett Sung: Exactly and they never find a way to find the next one. So a big part of their integration strategy is like, how do I now find 20 more greenhouse customers, 20 more SAP customers? And it becomes a rinse & repeat in order for you to make it profitable. Joel: How does a behemoth like ADP not know how to do appropriate due diligence around this specific area? Bennett Sung: I think that's why we also began to see ADP shift their mindset on acquisition. I mean, when was the last acquisition we heard ADP recently made? Back in the 2006 there was employees out of Atlanta. There was all sorts of small little payroll companies. You had virtual Edge, you had the Right Thing and then all of a sudden, boom, they stopped. Joel: Don't they have a huge marketplace? So it's kind of like. Bennett Sung: They have a huge marketplace. And, and I think that is what was the catalyst for the slowdown and acquisition with this because they ended up realizing that the point solutions got so frustrated trying to figure out how to integrate with ADP because they had so many, like compliance requirements and security guards just to be even authorized to pass, you know, even do and see a file transfer. Joel: Can you imagine the red tape for a global organization like ADP and all the different areas of HR that they actually touch? The compliance points that they, I mean that would be a fucking nightmare for, I mean, any point solution. Bennett Sung: Oh, it's impossible. I mean. Chad: Why do you think founders don't stick around after a year? Joel: Oh, God. Chad: It's because of that. Bennett Sung: That's a great point. Like, I mean, most of them supposedly have a retention clause when they get acquired. But almost every single one of 'em I've saw left in three months. Joel: They eject. Bennett Sung: They eject so quickly. It's like I'm out of here. No way, I might be able to stick around. Chad: That's the same with SAP. That's the same with MD. Bennett Sung: And then they lose momentum because these founders have such close relationship with their customers and it's like now that relationship, these big companies we're trying to like hold onto just fall apart because the actual founders, the ones, the glue left. Joel: Innovation to integration. That's the killer. Bennett Sung: It's the killer of every early stage startup. But that's why I'm kind of interested in like... Chad: ADP is where innovation goes to die. [laughter], Bennett Sung: Any of these big companies, it's where it goes. Joel: I mean, to be fair though, ADP is a fucking monster with every piece of tech imaginable from talent acquisition all the way into kicking somebody out the door. Bennett Sung: Exactly. And not, and then you go every size of company. Joel: Yes. Bennett Sung: Right. The SMB, the mid-market and then the enterprise. But yeah, I mean imagine they also used to have an automobile dealership partner side of their business. [laughter] And they got rid of that. Joel: Sound like when Monster had the the blue collar. Bennett Sung: Oh my gosh. Right. [laughter] Chad: Declare your independence. 4th of July, gig economy, freelance economy. Bennett Sung: So I mean, I think there's a little hope on the integration front and that's kind of like this new evolution. I think it's a company called Merge, which is, it's kind of like, remember when there was a company HR and X back in the day? There's still a few of those cloud integration partnerships, but they just don't work. They're expensive. Chad: It's hard. Bennett Sung: And especially with like all of the newer emerging AI tool point solutions and what they're trying... Because these are supposed to be augmentations of a team. This is not just, not about like a UX integration, add tracker systems, like any of the bots that are out there, they want to be able to move and change statuses on candidates. And a lot of times these ATS systems, CRMs have no capability to do that. And that's where the disappointment in integration experience really sets in and people that's like, oh tired of this. Joel: So with Any Tech, we have to take a look at evolving markets. User behavior, those types of things. All of these things we have never, ever been fluid with in HR at all. Talent acquisition, anything like that. Now with the advancements of obviously the generative AIs, or our fun little brother ChatGPT [laughter], you know. Chad: Bard. Joel: Yeah. I mean we're actually getting companies who are programming ChatGPT with, Chad and Cheese Voices. Bennett Sung: Nice. Chad: And tones. Joel: And tones. So this is getting crazy and out of whack. My point here is before the landscape was always fluid, but we weren't. Now it is ridiculously fluid. I mean, we're talking change day by day, right? Bennett Sung: Every day, yeah. Joel: How The fuck are we going to keep up with this shit? Chad: We're not. Bennett Sung: We're not [laughter] Chad: We just... Dude, we talked about this at the panel, this little kiosk, this whole thing is gonna be little kiosks of like 700 people creating cool things with, with AI and all the solutions out there. And the buyer's going to walk in and go, what the fuck is this? It used to be like, I went to the biggest booth and I bought them. Now I got to look at this. There'll be an AI that says what is the best solution for me? Bennett Sung: And that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to walk over my ChatGPT on my phone asking, so where do I find this tool inside the exhibit hall? Chad: Yeah. Who should I buy? Bennett Sung: Because if this is all going to be these small little booths that I have to squint because I can barely see, I'm gonna need a hearing aid. Call ChatGPT to tell me where to go. Joel: Well And, and think about it. It could easily, totally nerding out right now, it could easily digest the information from this entire conference and then link out to all of the, the different company websites to be able to ingest all that. Then go to reviews. Like you said. Then, I mean you could, Bennett, do one of those and, and a conference should. Let me put this out there, should, yes, be looking at doing things like that 'cause that would be fucking amazing. Can you imagine an app, like you were saying as an HR practitioner, you come in and you say, how do I find X, Y, and Z? The app just goes, oh, you need to go to these different booths. Bennett Sung: And not to mention, can you tell me the sessions that are gonna support that. Right. Joel: Oh shit, we've got a startup happening here. Okay. Chad: God! Now you're getting nuts. Bennett Sung: No. Because I've always realized, like when you think about the hardest part, like I've been using the Unleash app, it's a very complicated app. It's like, I got to go to attendees, I got to go to speakers, I got to go to sponsors, I got to go everywhere. It's like I have one goal, here's what I'm trying to find. This is what I'm trying to learn. And I wanted to like, by the way, here's your agenda and I just added to your Google calendar please. Joel: And Boom. Chad: Like give me these companies in order of how much they've raised. Give me these companies in the order of how many news articles have been written about them. Joel: Yeah. All depends on what your need is from a media standpoint, from a buying standpoint, from a competitive standpoint, it could be all that shit. Bennett Sung: And then you make more money from other sponsorship dollars. Chad: We just cracked the case. Bennett Sung: So next year we're going to report on the new, ChatGPT app for events. Joel: We can't launch this episode because there, there's a business behind it and we've got to talk about startup. Chad: I'm buying eventgpt.com. Bennett Sung: Oh my God. Who's going to buy that? Who has that domain? [laughter] Chad: Shit. I want to pivot real quick 'cause your name fascinates me and not Bennett Sung, but New Cherry. What? How'd you come with the name? Because you're a deep dude. You're a smart dude. There's got to be some hidden agenda with the name like New Cherry. Joel: You work up in the middle of the night, sweats, New Cherry! Chad: You went to college in Hawaii, [laughter] So maybe you were like on a ocean adventure please clear this name up for me. Bennett Sung: So, New Cherry is pretty much, a good friend of mine, Jeff Bamo, who also worked at ADP. He happens to live on a street in Atlanta called New Cherry. I said, perfect. I live in Seattle. Many people may not know the Seattle and Washington are renowned for cherries, period. So between his street name, where I live right now, I didn't want to think too much about other company names. Chad: I love these stories. Bennett Sung: It really stemmed from, the connection that Jeff Bamo and I have. Chad: So you have a podcast. I want to give you a second to just talk about what you guys talk about. And. Joel: Ben has a podcast? Bennett Sung: I'm getting to everything. Joel: Awesome. I dig it. Bennett Sung: It's a webcast. So, Rayanne, Thorn, Krueger and I, we work together considerably at Humanly. We spend a lot of our time just rifting on what the hell's happening every day. Because before we even started to actually do work, right, of course the owner knows all about our rifting all day long, [laughter] And we just said, do you, do we think that something could come about, people would be interested in hearing what we have? That's an outside in view into what Rayanne and I talk about? Because we cover a lot of different things. And so we said, shall we just test this out? So we just come up with On the Edge, it's kind for me, it's a storyline. It's a lyric off of Lady Gaga's album. And Rayanne has her own interpretation. Joel: Or Aerosmith. Bennett Sung: Or Aerosmith. Chad: Living on the edge. Joel: It's good for everybody. So a little bit in there for everybody. Bennett Sung: Everybody. Joel: There you go. Bennett Sung: Right. And so we just started every Friday at 8:00 AM Pacific time, Willis, jump on to LinkedIn live and boom, we're just rifting about a variety of things and we're beginning to kind of rein it in a bit to make it a little bit more focused. 'Cause I think at some point it's like, I don't think they all wanna know about all of our side conversations we like to have [laughter], but it's not probably super productive or informative. So we're beginning to concentrate our focus on a part of the whole diversity mantra and we're gonna focus our entire energy moving forward. In fact, we're in the midst of potentially planning an event around belonging. So belonging is gonna be what we're planning to build our central focus for On the Edge moving forward. Chad: So we're here in the expo hall, it's only the first day, but any companies catch your eye, any companies you wanna make sure you check out? What's your take? Bennett Sung: I'm planning to check out every one of these little small companies. [laughter] Chad: The kiosks. Bennett Sung: The kiosks. Yes. I'm planning to check the kiosks out. Joel: I love the little, startup alleys? I love those. Bennett Sung: I do but I had no idea. There's startups everywhere. I think under every banner there's this kiosk probably, right? Or kiosk, like a kiosks section. So I'm gonna check them all out. There's a few, I'm seeing how innovative are they really going to be... Are they really, it's like, are you just trying to reinvent the phone interview yet again? I see a few of those out there. Oh, we're gonna do voice, we're gonna do record your voice on the phone and we're gonna translate that and it's gonna go into your ATS and said, yeah, I could have done that by a chat bot. I could have done that in 50 million different ways. Why are we, why do you wanna do the phone version of that? Those are the questions I have. It's like, where's the transformation going? Or are you just minutely making a small little change and then they say, oh, we're gonna get rid of the phone interview. I said, is it like we're gonna get rid of the resume because you've been... We've been saying that for ages, [laughter], it's like there's all these clickbaits. It's like get rid of the resume. Joel: But with tech, the way that tech is moving now and how fast it is, there's an opportunity. There really is an is opportunity. Like, like there never has been before, which makes me pretty damned excited. Joel: It's still cynical though 'cause no HR and TA is slow to fucking adopt. Chad: And I'm still waiting for the Oculus headsets to make it into their start up kiosks. Bennett Sung: Oh right. Where is their AR VR, what? Didn't it make a little indent a couple ago? Joel: I don't know if you remember or not, but Career Builder pioneered that space with Pokemon for Jobs. Remember that? Bennett Sung: Oh my gosh. Chad: QR codes and headsets. Where the hell are they damn it? Bennett Sung: Where are the QR codes? They disappeared fast. Chad: Bennett Sung everybody. Bennett, for our listeners that want to know more about your connect, where would you send them? Bennett Sung: You can find me all over LinkedIn. Look for the guy with pink hair on the profile picture. It's linkedin/in/bennettsung. Chad: Thanks Bennett. We appreciate you stopping by, Chad. That's our first one, but not our last. Joel: Nope. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Intro: 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 shoutouts of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar blue nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any who? Be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. This is so weird. We out.

After a long weekend on both sides of the Atlantic, the boys have downed some Tylenol and taken a nap before turning on the mics, discussing a wide range of topics. First-up is an update on CareerBuilder’s sale to Greece-based Kariera and what comes next in Europe for the brand. If you love layoffs triggered by AI, then you’ll love the story out of BT, who says they’ll cut 55,000 jobs, mostly in the UK, by the end of the decade as part of cost-cutting measures powered by AI. And speaking of AI, Google’s Bard is expanding to 180 countries, but noticeably absent from the list are countries in the European Union (EU). What’s up with that? We discuss. Then it’s on to Buy-or-Sell with Abby, Centuro Global and Belgium-based Whale. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. 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. [music] Joel: Oh, yeah, it's World No Tobacco Day, which is why we all dropped acid before this episode. Welcome to The Chad & Cheese Podcast does Europe, everybody. I'm your co-host, Joel Marlboro Cheesman. Chad: I'm Chad. I can't quit prompting you, Sowash. Lieven: And I'm Lieven. No Bard for me, Funny-man Alison. Joel: And on this week's episode, AI takes a bite out of European headcount. No Bard for you in buy or sell. Let's do this. You guys look a little rough today. [laughter] Joel: Outside of Chad's nicely, freshly shorn scalp. You guys are looking a little rough today. Chad: I had a 6:00 AM flight out of Madeira... Joel: That will do it. Chad: To get to, yeah, back to Lisbon. And then a two and a half hour car ride to the place here in Cabana. So yeah. Joel: So many places in Europe. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel: Lieven, what's your excuse? Lieven: We had, what's it called again? Pinksteren yesterday. [laughter] Lieven: Some kind of a holiday. I forgot the name in English. Joel: Pentecost Day, I think. Lieven: Pentecost. It sounds like some witchcraft thingy. Pentecost. Joel: Sounds like some middle ages shit to me. Lieven: Yeah. Chad: Is it religion? Well then, yes. It sounds like witchcraft. [laughter] Joel: We burned some witches and drove some stakes into some vampire's hearts over the weekend. Lieven: So we had a holiday and it was... The weather was beautiful. And when the weather is beautiful in Belgium, we barbecue and we drink too much. So that's why I look a bit rough today, [laughter] as you call it. [laughter] Joel: What's a barbecue in Europe like? Lieven: It's something you would complain about. [laughter] Joel: And what would I complain about? [laughter] Joel: Not enough barbecue sauce? Lieven: Yeah. The steaks aren't steaky enough. And the barbecue sauce, it's not barbecue sauce enough. But, no, no, it was actually good. I have a good butcher. It's a fist thick steak. Joel: Too much green stuff on the grill, I think would be the problem. Lieven: I made it actually an American coleslaw or something. It was American recipe I found on Weber, [laughter] the barbecue brand, Weber. And I looked for side dishes and the coleslaw was a thing. It was good. Chad: Was it good? You like it? Lieven: Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Chad: What about everybody else? And did the kids eat it? That's the question. Lieven: Well, it was too green for them as well, even though it's not green. [laughter] But some even did. [laughter] Joel: Did you make hot dogs, is the question? Did you grill some hot dogs? Lieven: We had better sausages, but we did... Chad: Thank God, yeah. Lieven: We did do sausage. Chad: He talks about great steak and then he says hot dogs. I mean, how does that even go together? [laughter] SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: We'll get to this in a second. Chad and I celebrated a birthday this weekend. So my birthday menu for my wife was chili dogs for lunch. Chad: Jesus. Joel: Ribs. Ribs for dinner. [laughter] Joel: And then when the kids came over, the big kids came over, we had smash burgers. So that's what's on my menu birthday time. I don't know about yours, Chad. Chad: Nice. Yeah, no, I went to a five star restaurant in Madeira and had five courses. Can't remember them all because I had wine the entire time. So yeah, I had a hell of a headache. Woke up about 3:00 AM took some Tylenol, went back to bed. [laughter] It was a great birthday. Joel: Dude, I fear that you're still on that yacht in Lido, Southern California. [laughter] You've taken douchey to a whole new level. Now it's come to Europe, you've left... Chad: It's my birthday. [laughter] I get to be a little douchey birthday. [laughter] Joel: I had wine with Buffy and the crew. Yeah. Chad: Oh my God. Madeira has amazing wine though. Joel: At least one of us is still people with the people. The commoners having chili dogs. [laughter] Joel: Jesus Christ. All right, let's get to... SFX: Shout-out. Chad: Shout-outs. First shout-out goes to, you're gonna love this name, Theofilos Vasileiadis. He's the founder and CEO of Kariera.gr. I think first and foremost, every CEO should have a gladiator name like that. Theofilos. Anyways, you might remember Kariera.gr here in the news lately because, what? Yeah, they bought CareerBuilders International business. But here's a message that Theo sent me on LinkedIn specific to our comments about the CareerBuilder Fire Sale episode. If you haven't heard that, just go to chadcheese.com. CareerBuilder Fire Sale episode. So long story short, Kariera didn't buy the CareerBuilder brand, so they can't use the CareerBuilder brands, just the business and the intent to spin off those local businesses with newer tech. Chad: Can't use the CareerBuilder brand. It sucks anyway. Why the fuck would they use it? Joel: Yeah. It's so strong. That's gonna kill everything. Jesus. [laughter] Well, good luck to them they're in Greece. SFX: Uh. Joel: All right, I got a shout-out to LinkedIn. I'm really gonna use this as a reason to talk about me. So again, I had a birthday this weekend. [laughter] Chad: Did you have a birthday this weekend? Joel: It's not too late to send those e-gift cards at woodencork.com to joelcheesman@gmail.com. But anyway, like me, Chad, you probably received a lot of automated happy birthday messages on LinkedIn and I'm here to tell everyone, stop it. [laughter] Joel: Stop it. I don't know you people, you send me a happy birthday on a holiday weekend. I know it's not real. The messages I get from these people are like eight years deep of just happy birthday every year, like clockwork. I don't have a conversation. I don't know them. So if you're on LinkedIn, if you've got the automated messages set to Happy Birthday, just stop. It's time to stop the insanity. [laughter] Joel: It's gone too far and it's a little too crazy at this point. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Chad: Not authentic, kids. Lieven: I'm going to give you a manual happy birthday Joel. Happy birthday. Joel: Ah. Thank you Lieven. Chad: Do we get a song? SFX: Happy Birthday. Chad: Can we get it in Dutch or in Flemish? Is there... Joel: How do I say "Happy Birthday" in Flemish? Lieven: Gelukkige verjaardag. Joel: Yikes. Gelukkige verjaardag. Lieven: Yeah. Something like that. Joel: Okay. [laughter] Joel: Very good. Lieven: The gelukkige was actually pretty good. The last part you screwed up. But okay, happy birthday. Joel: That's the story of my life, man. Last part I screwed up. Lieven: You started out just fine and then you screwed up. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Chad: Then he went to sleep. Joel: Yeah. And then it goes wrong. Lieven: Okay. Joel: What you got, Lieven? Lieven: Okay, shout out. My shout out goes to Michael Blakley from Equitas. You might remember Equitas. We've done a... Chad: Oh, yeah. Lieven: Buy or sell on Equitas some weeks ago and I think Chad bought and I didn't. I sold, and afterwards the guy reached out to us on LinkedIn and the co-founder Michael Blakley, and he was very nice, so he made me feel guilty about not buying. [laughter] And he tricked me in a demo, which actually was a very good demo. If you remember Equitas is some kind of a platform, a very nice platform I must say now, to ensure you are doing some fair hiring. And I thought, fair hiring. Fair hiring, that's something very American. We don't need software to tell us what's fair in Europe, but he convinced me otherwise. [laughter] If this was a buy or sell, now I will buy. Lieven: But, and this actually is the point I was going to make. He told me something really interesting, or at least I found it interesting. He lives in Belfast, so he know the troubles for the very young people, maybe you don't but the Catholics were constantly fighting the Protestants in Belfast and killing each other in a very efficient way and bombing each other, whatever. He lives in Belfast and their demographic data capturing is an obligation since the 1998 peace agreement. There it's obliged to ask when you are on a job interview, are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic? Because they need to note it down to make sure there's fair hiring. So I wondered, okay, but what if you are Jewish and they say, "Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?" "I'm Jewish." "Yes, but are you Protestant or Catholic?" [laughter] But I don't think they have many Jews in Belfast, I guess. You are either way Protestant or Catholic and it's noted. It makes sense that a platform to ensure fair hiring like Equitas was born in Belfast. Bye. [laughter] Okay. That's it. SFX: All right. All right. All right. Lieven: He's going to send me a bottle of Bushmills, he promised. [laughter] Joel: He bought your vote. It sounds like, here... Lieven: I'm for sale. Joel: We have some live footage from that demo that Lieven got. SFX: What are you doing step bro? [laughter] Joel: Oh, good God. Lieven can be bought everybody, Lieven can be bought. Chad: Oh, good God. Well, maybe... Joel: With a bottle of Bushmills. Chad: Yeah, well maybe we can get that Bushmills at where? RecFest at Knebworth. Joel: Knebworth. Chad: Park baby coming. That's right. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chad: Yeah, Michael Blakley from Equitas. I expect some Bushmills in July 6th. We're gonna be at Knebworth Park at RecFest. Just north of London, kids. If you're in Europe, you gotta come to RecFest. It's gonna be happening again. One day, one day. Bring the whole gang, bring... It's a team, whole team. The whole Chad and Cheese team's gonna be there. It's gonna be Joel, it's gonna be myself. It's gonna be Lieven, Julie's gonna be there. We're gonna have a... Hell, Cole's gonna be there for God's sakes. The whole team. Joel: Lieven's gonna be there. Chad: Yes. Everybody gonna be there. Lieven: I'm gonna be there. Joel: We're going deep, everybody. SFX: Just the tip. Chad: Which means you need to bring your team, you need to bring your team. We're gonna be on the Disrupt stage all day, where all we're going to do is talk about technology. So get out to Knebworth Park, London, just north of London. Knebworth Park, July 6th. Joel: Love it. Love it. SFX: Topics. Joel: All right, Telecom's, giant BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs. Yikes. Mostly in the UK by the end of the decade as part of cost cutting measures. AI and other technologies will replace a fifth of the workforce primarily in customer service. CEO Philip Janssen believes AI tools like chatGPT will enhance services without making customers feel like they're dealing with a robot. The job cuts align with the trend in the industry following Vodafone's plans to cut 11,000 jobs as well. Chad, what are your thoughts on the news? Chad: I think it's interesting right out of the gate they're like, customer service can go. [laughter] And I've never called BT before, but I have called AT&T and I've called many other services and it really sucks. I think the best advent that they've come up with is this callback scenario, "Hey, you've got a 30 minute wait, can you give us your number and we'll just call you back?" Joel: Yeah. Chad: And that was one of the best customer service inventions, I guess you could say, over the last, probably fucking 20 years. [laughter] But we take a look at it. So BT currently has 98,400 employees that are not contractors. 130,000 with contractors. So nevertheless, 55,000 represents a large segment of the population of what they're gonna cut. You only put out an announcement like this, kids, to stifle an earlier announcements of reported 12% drop in profits. Yeah. Their profits went down $1.7 billion from year to year to April. Right. So BT's shares fell more than 7% after its results fell short of analyst expectations. BT wants to project a leaner and more profitable business, which is why they're giving the cuts 15,000 cuts to the building of the fiber networks. 10,000 UK networks require less maintenance. So you got less people there. 10,000 for new tech and AI for customer service. And then just 5,000 for basic restructuring. At the end of the day, this is more about trying to project power for better stocks than it is anything else. I don't believe that they know how many people they're gonna be able to displace with this tech just yet. I think they're willing enough to be able to say, look, we gotta make shareholders feel better and we gotta hopefully pump the stock. Joel: So you're saying it sounds like a diversion. [laughter] Joel: By the way, the callback customer service tactic always gives me PTSD because it reminds me of dating in high school where girls would say, "I'll call you back when I have a second to focus on you," and of course they never did. But anyway, I digress. Chad: But AT&T calls you back though and Verizon. Joel: AT&T, yeah. Chad: Yeah, they call you back. Joel: They're a little friendlier than the girls I dated in high school, but that's another story. Remember when we talked about IBM a few weeks ago, Chad, replacing 30% of their back office jobs primarily through AI. Guess what their stock did? It went up. People love cost cutting and no one likes cost cutting and headcount reduction like Wall Street. You mentioned the stock price correlation there and that's no mistake. People on Wall Street like to hear about job cuts and they like to hear about companies that are embracing AI. Our friend Prof G likes to talk about the old days when everything had a dotcom on the end of it, because putting a dotcom at the end of your name meant that your stock went up a good 10%-15%, because now you are an internet company. Joel: And I guess, BT is now an AI company because of all the layoffs through AI that they're going to be doing. I agree. No one knows exactly how many jobs are gonna be cut, what kind of new jobs are gonna replace the old jobs? They're just giving these sort of rosy diversions primarily to help support the stock price, to make them look like a cool, new company. I do think it's real that there will be lost jobs from AI, but I also think it's a big spin and PR tactic to make your company look better by embracing technology and reducing headcount, thus increasing stock price, thus increasing the values of CEOs and everyone in the C-suite and on the board and everyone else. So it's a win-win-win. Nobody really loses until the jobs start getting cut. And when you're on a yacht off of Lido, no one really cares about the job losses. [laughter] Lieven, what's your take? Lieven: I thought I read something about 10,000 people within customer care who would be replaced by AI before the end of this year. So it's actually a really big number and it's getting pretty concrete. So they're going to fire 50,000 people, but 40,000 of those were just in fiber. And the project has finished, so makes sense that they stopped the project, but 10,000 people in customer care will be replaced. And I feel first line customer care, it makes sense to replace those people with something like ChatGPT, this is what ChatGPT is made for. Pretending to be human and staying patient, which isn't easy, I think, if you have constantly people calling and being annoyed. So I think ChatGPT does this best and it could, like we always said, generative AI you isn't going to take over your job. It's people going using generative AI are going to take over your job. And for my business from my industry, this is of course something we look very closely at. If 10 people are working in a company now, and they're going to be replaced by two people who are using OpenAI or generative AI, then we have to make sure it's our people who are going to stay. Lieven: So I just launched a project in House of HR. We made a deal with a Belgium University, all our employees, and a big cuts of the people we put to work at all those companies will get a training in generative AI. And we want them, if they're going to fire someone, it's not going to be our people who are going to be fired because they know how to use generative AI. They have a certificate from a Belgium University. So this is something we need to act very fast, and we have to train everyone. So if someone gets fired, it'll be someone who doesn't know how to use it, which won't be our people. Joel: Lieven, we've talked in the past about how influential labor unions can be in Europe as opposed to America. What role, if any, do you see labor unions playing in job losses due to AI? Do you see a strong response from unions or not so much? Lieven: A dirty role as ever. [chuckle] Joel: A dirty role. Lieven: A dirty role. They have to be realistic, of course. This is reality and you just can't say we're going to make it illegal to use generative AI. That's ridiculous. Chad: Or can you? We'll talk about that in a minute. Joel: Yeah, we'll talk about the government's role in a second, but I'm curious about the union's role, if there is any. Lieven: Yeah. Well, and to be honest, I haven't heard anyone from the unions talk about this in Belgium at least, yet. So maybe they're still debating over it or striking somewhere else, but... Chad: Well, in this case for BT, the union actually said they understood that there were gonna be cuts. Just kinda like we're gonna have to take what we have to take, but they said, "Can we please make sure that we go heavy on the contractor side first?" They have 98,000 workers, a ton of contractors that they want to see let go prior to the actual FTEs. Joel: And on that, when we come back, we'll talk about the government's role with AI. [laughter] Joel: Let me do that again. All right guys, a little bit more AI. No Bard for you Lieven. Google's AI chat bot Bard is expanding to 180 countries, however, noticeably absent from the list are countries in the European Union. While Google did not officially state the reason, it is likely related to GDPR compliance concerns. Italy recently banned a similar AI, ChatGPT, for the same reason. Google hinted that further expansion will align with local regulations. Canada, or what I call Europe light is also noticeably missing from the supported regions. Chad, what's your take on Google's decision, especially now that you're on a beach in Europe, probably not caring at all about Bard whatsoever. [chuckle] Chad: Well, this is mirrored by what we saw from OpenAI. So switching, quick gears. Just a generative AI overall, whether it's Google whether it's OpenAI. Now I know Cheesman, you've been waiting for a Brokeback Mountain sequel. And here's a great storyline for that. A Time article entitled OpenAI Could Quit Europe over the New AI Rule. So, quote from the article, "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Wednesday his company could cease operating in the EU if it is unable to comply with the provisions of the new AI legislation that the block is currently preparing. Altman said that OpenAI's skepticism centered on the EU's laws designation of 'high risk. That's air quotes kid. High risks systems as it's currently drafted. If we can comply, we will. And if we can't, we will cease operating in the EU." This is seems like I can't quit you kind of scenario. I don't think they're gonna leave. Joel: They'll have to if the government says they have to. Chad: I don't say they have to. They just have... They just say that they have to abide by rules. So the government's not saying that they have to leave, please stay, but you have to abide by the rules. Joel: Well, and Google's not even showing up. Chad: Google's not showing up. Joel: By the way, anytime I can put a Canadian news flash and a European show is always great. SFX: Take off. We were doing our movie. Don't wreck our show you loser. Joel: So European policy to me seems like a double-edged sword to some degree. We will celebrate record fines on Facebook or Google and that's a good thing. But the flip side of that is these tech companies are less likely to play in a way that they would in America or probably Asia and other places because of said fines and regulations and laws that Europe has set forth. So to me, this is like a lose for Europe because if Italy bans ChatGPT or Bard doesn't come to a European city near you, Europe just falls more behind countries that are introducing new AI, new technologies. So you can celebrate the fines and all the regulations, but also there's a double... Joel: There's another side of that in that these companies are less likely to play ball or introduce these technologies to European countries, which also limits their ability to create new AI and companies around artificial intelligence within Europe itself. I would like to know if you asked any European, would you rather have greater privacy laws or the ability to play with new tech around AI? My guess would be more would say, "I'd rather play around with the new AI stuff and see the new tech than they would concern about their privacy." So this is the way it is, Europe, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're gonna fine Google and Facebook and everybody else to the moon, you're also gonna have less technology and cool shit to play with as a result of that. Lieven: Yep. I totally agree. And it'll be pretty problematic if we would get behind on this, I think, and I don't think the Americans would mind if Europe was dragging it a bit. Not sure. So I definitely hope they won't be so stupid as to completely drive OpenAI away. Google doesn't like GDPR and neither do I, I think the whole idea is great, but I doesn't like the way... I don't like the way how it was executed, but that's a different story. But I was able to test Google Bards by using VPN and pretending I was in the United States. So there's always a way to work around, but I didn't really like Google Bards. And this is problematic too. I mean, it makes things up and it's still in an beta testing phase, I know, but it makes things up. I asked Google Bards write a biography over myself over Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze who works at House of HR. And it started perfectly, it says, okay, Lieven is Chief Digital at House of HR, a company, blah, blah, blah. Everything was right. Lieven: And then suddenly it said Lieven was born in 1972 in Ghent. I was born in 1976 somewhere else, but the rest was right. So it's mixing stuff, which is made up with stuff, which is true. And then it becomes very difficult to filter out what's not right and then this can become problematic if you use it for let's say, contract building but you are starting from wrong premises. I dunno. I think they have a lot of work to do. Also, it said I used to work for HannStar. I never worked for HannStar. I used to work for USG People, never for HannStar. So it knows vaguely what I've been doing. It knows who I am, but if it's not sure, it's just like making things up and I didn't have the same experience with OpenAI. It's much better in my experience, so I hope they stay and you can keep your Google Bard. Chad: It's cleaner. I think ChatGPT and OpenAI is definitely cleaner. I think it's better. And just further along in its iterations, but one of the things that Sam Altman did say is that, "To be able to scale the nonsensical bullshit that's out there on the web today, you can't do it without generative AI." I mean, you just, you can't. So you have, when Facebook had the issues with Cambridge Analytica, that was all human, right? That was all data, but it was contracted, and then humans actually posted and targeted individuals. This, being able to scale, utilizing that same kind of data would be fucking scary and crazy. So there are some really bad sides to it. I don't think that OpenAI will be kept out of the EU. I think they'll work something out. But I hope there are some limiters because we have to have something limiting. We didn't have Facebook limiting with Cambridge Analytica selling shit to foreign countries and we got stung. We got stung hard. This could be 10 times worse when AI experts out there, they said a 10% likelihood that this could be existential risk. That's too much for me. Joel: Hey, when the robots decide who they can get rid of first, it's Europe. So think about that when you talk about that. [laughter] Joel: And how prevalent is like VPN usage in Europe? Like I would say it's low single digits in America, people that leverage VPNs. I have a feeling it's a lot higher in Europe. Lieven: Probably not. I use it because sometimes when I'm testing our websites, I want to make sure that I can test it on the different domains of whatever for Google, et cetera for keyboard tracking. I sometimes try to see in Germany how do we rate on the Google listings, for example. So then I have to pretend to be in Germany. So I use it, but I don't think many people do. My students say, "We use it to watch Netflix." Chad: Yes. Lieven: So they can see the Netflix movies which are already released in the United States, but not in Europe yet, for example. Chad: Yeah. Lieven: And then they pretend to be in the US but I don't think many people use it in a professional way. Joel: Single digits? Chad: I mean, my kids were coming home telling me how they were using VPN on their phone to access stuff on the school's network that they couldn't without. So you, I think it's used a lot more than you think. Joel: So old people don't use it, is what you're saying? [laughter] Joel: Hi [p people do. So it's a lot, lot bigger number. Lieven: Young people like me. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The hallucinations don't bug me that much because I was on the internet speaking of old people. I was on the internet doing searches in the '90s, which really sucked. And it got better. Imagine that. So this stuff is gonna get better. Hallucinations are going to like slow down or stop, or there'll be some function around that. But anyway, it's gonna be fun to watch. I hope that Europe does not stifle exposure to AI. 'Cause I think it'd be really bad for Europe as a whole. Chad: Agreed. Joel: But what would be great for Europe is a game of, buy or sell everybody. That's right. If you know how we play the game, we talk about three companies that recently got funding in Europe. I read a summary and the boys give it a buy or sell rating. Are you guys ready to play a little buy or sell. Let's talk about Centura Global. Chad: Bring it. Joel: Based in London has secured 3.3 million pounds in funding. They assist companies in expanding internationally by helping them comply with local regulations, including immigration, HR, legal, tax and accounting issues. The platform covers over 150 countries and caters to companies of all sizes offering one-off advice or ongoing support. The funding will be utilized for platform development and expanding the team. Chad, is this the deal of a Centura or just another bottle of snake oil? Chad: This org looks like it has a couple of high-powered founders, that understand at least the mechanics of the space. Unfortunately, there's just way too much firepower in said space right now. Several with many that have large war chests of cash, like Remote, Oyster, Deel, Velocity, Global, Multiplier, Rippling, and many, many more. Plus the aforementioned platforms have tech experience. This to me very simply, I'm a big fan of founders who know what they're doing. I think they have a lot of reputation in that space, just not on the technical side of the house. Not to mention there are a hell of a lot of unicorns that are in the space that have money to actually throw at this problem. It's a sell, unfortunately for me. Joel: Oh, boy, that's a sell. So I'm trying to kind of make sense of this whole trend of small comp or like small invested companies taking on the remote work category because like you said, Chad, we have companies that have gained unicorn status for the amount of money they got, Remote, Oyster, Deel and so forth. And we've talked about them ad nauseam here on the show. However, we've also talked about on the show that companies don't fail because they've taken too little money. We talk about that they fail because they take too much money. So is the calculus around giving these companies a couple million dollars that we're hoping that Deel and Remote all go out of business and we're the mammals while all the dinosaurs die and we're the ones that come up from the ooze and become the players that companies actually use. If you're using that calculus, then this thing would be a buy. Unfortunately, I think that what will happen with the Deels and the Remotes and the Oysters and the Velocity, Globals and everyone, they're gonna eventually fight it out. There will be a Coke and a Pepsi from those two and maybe a Fanta, which we love to talk about. But those guys will fight it out. At best Centura Global is a minuscule like cracker crumb acquisition 5-7 years from now. But I don't think they're gonna get 10x on the 3 million that they got for this one. So for me as well, it is a sell. SFX: Sad Trombone. Joel: Lieven. Lieven: I think they're doing like what Boundless is doing. We used to have Cockley in this show two years ago or something. And she launched a company then, I think, which is exactly doing what they're doing now. So I wonder how she's doing. Maybe we should ask if her company is doing just fine, then this might be a good investment. But I checked their website and they offer a seven day free trial and I like seven day free trials. So I was going to give it a try, but I couldn't get past their signup form and they always said, there is some error, try again. So I tried again and I tried again for seven times, but it kept saying the same thing. So I can't buy in these conditions, can I? [laughter] So it's a sell. SFX: Boo. Lieven: Boo. Chad: Literally can't buy. Joel: Literally could not buy the product. All right. Number two is, France's Abby has raised 1.2 million euros. The company aims to become the leading SaaS solution for freelancers, offering tailored support and business management with a growing market of over 4.1 million self-employed individuals in France alone. Abby plans to accelerate customer acquisition, develop a mobile application, provide access to chartered accountants, and launch an advanced offering. Chad, are you ready to buy Abby or would you rather read the latest installment of Dear Abby? Is that too American of a reference? Chad: Both sounds horrible by the way. [laughter] Chad: We've all said it before, going SMB sucks. Going contractor only sucks even more. You have to find those individuals, where they are and then try and sell them a single SaaS seat. [laughter] I mean, instead of going enterprise and selling teams SaaS seats, right? That's hard in the US where we all speak the same language and generally do business in the same way. Trying to get this rolling in Europe as a French company, that would be a fucking nightmare. Sorry Abby, this is a sell for me. Joel: Oh, boy. All right. So when it comes to first mover excellence, here's what France does well, revolution, art, and turning snails into fine cuisine. Chad: And croissants. Joel: WorkTech... Okay, I'll give you croissants. Especially the chocolate ones. Anyway, WorkTech, not so much. Abby is an invoicing software dedicated to micro entrepreneurs. What the fuck is a micro entrepreneur? I've heard of solopreneurs... Now I gotta deal with micro entrepreneurs, wherever the hell that is. You know what makes invoicing easy? PayPal, QuickBooks, bill.com. And if you're already a freelancer, Upwork, Fiverr. Oh, and by the way, there's already a freelance platform in France called Freelance.com that you might wanna check out in terms of getting paid for your work. The field is way too crowded. This makes no sense to me. And for those reasons, I am a sell, how do you say sell in French? [foreign language] Joel: There you go. [foreign language] Joel: Lieven what you got, man. Lieven: For me, it was a difficult one. I'm sure it's very interesting. And I've got a management company myself, so I'm not really a freelancer, but it's the same system. I've got my own, how do you call it? I don't know. My own shop. My own company. I hate all the nitty gritty, all the paperwork. So I have an accountant who takes care of everything for me. And this could be, Abby could be something to replace the accountant, but I would still have to enter all the data in the system, and I don't like it, so I would never, ever use it. Maybe control freaks who want to stay in control over everything, they might use it. But basically, if a freelancer who has lots of work, doesn't have the time to do this, and he will give it to his accountant. Maybe starters, but they don't have much money. So after careful consideration, it's a sell. Joel: Did you try the seven-day trial period in this piracy? Lieven: They didn't even offer it. They didn't even offer it. Boo. Joel: That's two sells from Lieven, but can I interest you in a Belgian startup out of Ghent, Lieven. Lieven: Yeah, it's bots, it's bots. Yeah. Joel: Check this out. Check this out. Lieven: According to Bard, I was born in Ghent, so I mean... Joel: There you go. So you gotta let this... And we don't cover a lot of Belgian startups. So here we go. Whale has secured 2.5 million euros in funding for its knowledge sharing and employee software as a service platform. The investment will support the platform's growth, including the integration of AI in Europe and the US. Whale's platform allows small and medium-sized enterprises to create playbooks for training teams and measuring their impact on the business. Chad, is this a whale of an opportunity or a guppy you're gonna throw back into the water? Chad: So, knowledge databases are really powerful but they suck to use. Going through company manuals, documentations, it just sucks. But think about having a knowledge database that you can plug into an OpenAI, kind of a database. And we keep talking about all these different rich databases that companies have that it's their own secret sauce. That's going to be the Bards, the OpenAIs of the future, the really focused tech, the rich databases. So I really believe data-rich platforms like Whale that help companies leverage their secret sauce will dominate how they work in the very, very near future. For this one, it's a buy for me. [applause] Joel: All right. Very, very nice. Very nice. All right. Did you guys know that the war of 1812 ended with a treaty signed in Ghent in 1814, war between America and Britain? No. No one, no one cares. Okay. Anyway. Lieven: Yeah, I do, I do care, but I didn't know. Joel: You didn't know? So there you go. You were born there. And the Treaty of 1812, the war of 1812. Lieven: I was not born there. [laughter] Joel: That's a really sore subject with you, Lieven. Don't tell Lieven he is from Ghent, everybody. He will slice your ass. Lieven: I used to live there, but I wasn't born there. It's not exactly the same thing. Joel: It's a beautiful city. Lieven: My twins were born in Ghent, so. Chad: Oh, okay. Joel: All right. So anyway, back to buy or sell. This company takes what most small companies might use, SharePoint, Google Drive, and I think probably make a little more intuitive, a little bit more fun, as we've seen in their YouTube videos. And by the way, if you have some extra time, go search Whale. Not the whale creature, but the company Whale, videos. It's pretty funny. So to me it's kind of a hybrid of upskilling standard operating procedures in a company that is usually boring. Throw in a little bit of community in there. I like their no-nonsense endorsement videos as well. If you're on the site, click on one of the endorsements. It's like a TikTok green screen behind... I mean, I don't know who produced it, but it's very underground looking, trying to be professional. It's hard to explain. Anyway, it's clear to me that they're doing more with less. They're fighting much above high, above their weight class. And for those reasons, Whale is a buy. SFX: All right, all right, all right. Joel: All right, Lieven. Chad: Now if they weren't in Ghent, then maybe Lieven would buy them. Lieven: No. I love Ghent. I love Ghent, I was just not born there. People should stop claiming I was born in Ghent. Definitely Bard should stop it. No, but I like the idea and I like the whole concepts. I think the hard part will be convincing people to take the time to document all their knowledge on the platform because if they don't have the time when there's a new colleague, to train him, why would they have the time to put all the knowledge on the platform? And also, I think a problem could be, people don't know they know something. There is lots of knowledge which is like subconsciously somewhere present and I use it when I need it, but it's not like it's top of mind and I'm going to document it right now. So I've been in this business for like you, for 20 years. I've known lots of stories, know lots of things, but I will not put them in a system like this. So some kind of knowledge will be documented, but the most important knowledge in my opinion will not be. But they're from Ghent, so definitely a buy, of course. [music] Chad: And, of course, you can always get all of that knowledge that Lieven's talking about on the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Europe. Lieven: Indeed. Joel: Of course, Lieven, can't get Bushmills out of Ghent. I don't know what monastery beer he'll be getting this week. But more power to him. And hopefully he'll bring some of that beer to Knebworth so we can all have a few glasses and pints and toast and cheer a good time in England. Lieven, we will see you soon. Chad: Amen. Joel: You too, Chad. Until then, we out. Chad: We out. Lieven: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Layoffs, acquisitions and world-destroying A.I. … Oh, my! Veritone spreads its wings and snags Broadbean from CareerBuilder for a reported $52 million. Dice and ZipRecruiter initiate layoffs and a CEO takes a 30% pay cut. Experts say AI could soon be smarter and more powerful than us and it is time to impose limits to ensure they don't take control over humans or destroy the world (don’t worry, we talk you off this ledge). And Elon’s brain chip has been cleared for FDA testing. Wait, what? PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah it's National Donut Day and Leave The Office Early day. So, Chad, I will meet you at Dunkin's baby. Dunkin's it is. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel Bear-claw Cheeseman. Chad: And this is Chad. What the fuck just happened, Sowash? Joel: And on this week's show, Veritone flips the bean, Zip and Dice chop some heads and Elon invades your brain, let's do this. Chad: Oh shit, dude, we gotta hurry up. I've got paddle. I've got competition here going on. Joel: Is that a boat thing, paddle. Chad: It's like racquetball and tennis, all-in-one, that pussy pickleball stuff that you guys do in the US is fucking ridiculous. This is real true sport that happens here in Europe. Joel: I'm sorry. That you guys do in the US, you aren't totally European yet. You're not even a citizen as far as I know. Chad: I have a place, that's close. Joel: Good God, I'm gonna... Racquetball and tennis, what is the ball like go 20 feet? Chad: No, it's a tennis ball. Joel: Well tennis and racquetballs are bouncy I mean like 200 feet not 20 feet. Chad: Yeah. Oh yeah dude. No, they can fly. It's a pretty awesome, awesome sport. You go to YouTube check it out paddle ball. But yeah, no pickleball is for pussies. Joel: We got a lot to cover so. S?: Shout out. Joel: Job openings, my man, job openings in April... Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Saw the highest number of US openings since January, indicating a labor market that cannot be killed. Call it the Dracula job market. The Job Openings... Chad: Zombie. Joel: And Labor Turnover survey or what the kids called JOLTS... Chad: JOLTS. Joel: Reported 10.1 million job openings for the month. All of this means the Fed is likely to raise interest rates in June. I'm headed to Chipotle before the chicken burrito hits north of $10 Chad, how about you? Chad: Oh yeah, this is the recession that never happened, I mean, it just continues knock on wood okay kids. But yeah, it's great to hear and enjoy your time at Chipotle. My first shout out goes to rust out. Now, what the actual fuck is rust out? Joel: Excuse me. Chad: Yeah, exactly. Well according to HR Grapevine, it's the opposite of burnout. It means employees are bored and have been in their job far too long and that they're starting to experience job dissatisfaction, which I mean you probably have experienced in marriage a few times. Joel: Yeah. Chad: According to HR Grapevine, [laughter] ensuring your employees are engaged decreases absenteeism 41% and increases, this is the big one, profitability by 21%. Okay. You mean that employees that aren't absent from work and are actually at work create more profits, really? Shout out to HR Grapevine for creating a narrative for HR and TA leaders to go get more budget. Joel: Rust out. S?: Does anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Chad: The great rust out. Joel: Rust out is what I do every morning when I get out of bed. I got to get the rust out, you know what I'm saying. All right, I got a shout out to Jon Taffer. Chad: Who's that? Joel: Who the hell is Jon Taffer? Maybe you've seen the show Bar Rescue, where this angry guy comes and fixes your bar and tells you, you suck and whatever, well anyway. Chad: The Gordon Ramsay of bars. Yeah. Joel: He was interviewed recently about the state of restaurants, and talent, and automation and I thought it was worth sharing with our audience as a shout out. So take a listen. Josh Gampe: Jon Taffer is with us this morning by the way. He knows all about this. Hotels and restaurants that are supposed to see a record number of customers this summer, bouncing back to pre-cap pandemic levels. Jon Taffer's with us. He's nodding his head. Is there a boom in restaurant and bars? Stuart: Incredible Stuart. Since April we've hired over 900,000 employees, we need a lot more but we're forecasting record travel this summer, record hotel occupancy. Restaurants are booming, but we're challenged because we need people to fulfill all the business that we have now. So I'm at the National Restaurant Association convention now and it's all about robotics, and automation, and technologies to help solve those issues. Josh Gampe: Okay you tell us, how are you using AI in your restaurant business? Stuart: Well, in my restaurant business we're using it more in the back of the house, for purchasing and pricing and things like that. Here I'm standing in a SkyTab booth now, this is all new transactional technologies that connects third parties like DoorDash and Uber Eats into the POS system frequency programs, credit card programs, all connected into one system now and then robotics are huge. Wendy's is about to launch a Chatbox program in Europe for automated ordering. They're the restaurateurs, they're going crazy already Stuart. Josh Gampe: You see we always think of AI as some kind of a negative, a threat to us, but to you it's very much a positive. It can enhance your profitability, right? Stuart: Well, not only that we can't find the employees, Stuart, so we have to solve the problem. If we can't solve it with employees then we're gonna go to automation. Joel: And there you have it we talked about this a lot on the show obviously Chad, but here's an industry expert at an industry conference talking about it. And what you don't get in the audio, when he says there that the restaurateurs are cheering, like it's obvious that they want this to come. People who own restaurants the efficiency, the cost savings, the lesser pain in the ass, the filling positions like they will... They are visibly excited about this future, so I think it was very telling to watch that interview as I did, and hopefully the audio came across of how important it is that automation is taking restaurants by storm. Chad: Yeah, automation... Yes, human suck, we totally get that. We'll talk more about that later in the show, my next shoutout is to life, my friend. I actually received this message from Josh Gampel, who is stepping away as President of Talivity, the parent company of Recruitics, "why?" you might ask. Here's a message from Josh. "For two decades, I've dedicated my career to assisting businesses in finding exceptional talent, I've served in multiple roles, a recruiter, a marketer and a leader, now my father and I, who collectively bring over 50 years of recruitment experience to the table, face our most daunting task yet, recruiting a kidney for my mother. In 2019, she was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder that severely damaged her kidneys. Her condition has only worsened over time, exacerbated by COVID-19 and subsequent complications, the urgent need for a kidney transplant has never been more pressing and, although the outcome remains uncertain, we are steadfast in our determination to give this our all, we've established a straightforward website" Chad: Take this down, kids recruitakidney.life, recruitakidney.life to provide more information and raise awareness about the critical role of living donors. If we succeed in finding a kidney through this platform, we plan to replicate this process for others in need, potentially forming a foundation for a broader initiative. However, we recognize the importance of approaching this one step at a time. To all the talent acquisition professionals tuning into this podcast, I extend my sincere gratitude, your ceaseless evolution has kept us at Recruitics both challenged and motivated, and your commitment to a purpose-driven field of work is inspiring, it has been an absolute privilege to share this journey with you". Okay, well, this is a tearjerker, I'm gonna stop right there. There's more, Okay? But if you're listening to this podcast right now, connect to Josh on LinkedIn, he will be posting more there. That's Josh Gampel, G-A-M-P-E-L. While you're doing that, go to "recruitakidney.life" and check out how you might be able to save a life through kidney donation, shoutout to Josh, life, his dad, and most of all his mom, Debra, "recruitakidney.life" I'm about ready to tear up here kids. Joel: I'd say it's worth the applause, yeah definitely did. Great cause. Let's go from saving kidneys to killing livers, Chad, you can win free booze on Chad and cheese. Sorry, that's a bad segue, but this is what we do on the show. If you are interested in free bourbon from our friends at Textkernel, free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, or even if it's your birthday this month, you might win some rum from our friends at Plum, either way, if you don't drink, you can get a T-shirt sponsored by our friends at JobGet, but you can't win unless you play Chad, you gotta go to "chadcheese.com", click the free link, fill out the form, and then wait for the goodies to arrive. That's "chadcheese.com". Click the free link. Chad: Yes, and everybody loves the Chad and cheese t-shirts. Obviously, everybody loves free beer, they love free whiskey, I mean, obviously rum from Plum, especially in your birthday. How can you not love that? The big question is, do we have enough t-shirts for RecFest? That's the big question. Joel: Yeah, I'm gonna have to get my inventory manager, I.e my 13-year-old daughter, to give me a rundown of t-shirts that we have for that... Chad: Nice, nice. Joel: Also, I know we'll get to travel, but I'm headed to SHRM in a week or so, and I'll be at the Arin Booth. Arin is printing up exclusive SHRM t-shirts of that, so I might be able to get some Arin supply if they overstock. Chad: Do I have my big head on the front? Joel: Yeah, your big cardboard head we'll send that to Europe, so you can have a Portuguese copy for your records, but yeah. People love the t-shirts, we may have to get some more because the Europeans love them, some soft, supple, cotton combed, fabric in their dresser drawers. Do they call them dresser drawers in Europe? It's probably something weird. Chad: I have no clue, just where they put their clothes. So do we have birthdays? No Birthdays this week? Joel: Oh no, we have birthdays my friend... S?: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? Chad: Yes I can. S?: I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: That's right, that's right. If It's your birthday, and you're in our list, you could win a tasty bottle of rum from our friends at Plum. Celebrating another trip around the sun, we have Ander Storman, Andy Peterson, Rodney "don't call me Rodney", Martin Dangerfield, Reese Wessel, Jim Stroud. Our favorite cartoonist of the industry, Bosco Vojotovich... Chad: I love Bosco. Joel: Olga Nasreva, J. Arnold, Jane keeran and Matt "that British guy" Alder... S?: Happy birthday! Chad: Yes. Joel: Happy birthday everybody have one on us. Chad: Exactly, and well, we're gonna see that British guy, Matt Alder very soon at RecFest. That's right kids. RecFest, July 6th at Knebworth Park. You can't but be there, if you're in Europe, if you're in the listening of this podcast, if you're downloading this now, go get your tickets now, go get your tickets now, it's crazy. Joel: Matt Alder, Stephen McGrath, Cole Cheeseman, Liven... Chad: I'm sure Hung Lee is gonna be there, yeah. Oh, Liven? Joel: Our favorite porn star Hung Lee is gonna be there. S?: What are you doing step bro? Joel: That's right. Knebworth is gonna be off the chain kids. Chad: Amazing! Chad: We have topics. That's right. Joel: All right, we'll pick your headline, I guess. CareerBuilder sells Broadbean, or Veritone buys Broadbean, whichever you like. Our friends at Veritone... Chad: Flicking the Bean. Joel: Are acquiring Broadbean, a job distribution solution for $52 million. Veritone aims to combine Broadbean with its previous acquisition, PandoLogic to form Veritone HR solutions. Here's a soundbite from Veritone CEO and President Ryan Steelberg on the deal. Have a listen. Ryan Steelberg: We are obviously very excited about this acquisition. We expect it to close in just a few weeks from now. But a little background though, this is a target and a company that we've been looking at Veritone for over a year now. And actually we were hopeful to try to actually acquire this at the end of last year but at Veritone we had a move in a different direction for a period of time. So we are thrilled that Broadbean through Apollo's divestiture of different CareerBuilder assets was still available. We remained in close communications with Alex and his team over there, and we're obviously thrilled that we're able to get to this point of signing. This deal is very strategic for Veritone and our vision of how we intend to continue to bring AI-based automation and intelligence to the HR space and specifically the talent acquisition marketplace. Broadbean obviously has a very large installed base, thousands of customers spanning many countries with a large international presence, which is very complimentary to not just PandoLogic and in our, I'd say heavy skewed North American focus, but for all of Veritone. We look at HR based solutions as being ubiquitous, they're not limited to a single market vertical. And I think the combination of BroadBeans' broad-based job distribution platform and PandoLogic's. Ryan Steelberg: Programmatic job advertising platform is a perfect marriage. One thing that may not be obvious to many, is outside of the obvious of bringing more programmatic to the installed base of Broadbean customers is this very rich data sets that we're bringing together here. Which is obviously from our perspective of leveraging our expertise and know-how in the AI space and on the programmatic side is something that we're just so excited about. We are very confident that Pando and our solutions they're are gonna get better, they're gonna get smarter, they're gonna get more automated, and ultimately bringing more efficiency and benefit to our end customers. But we also think that there's a multitude of net new exciting product and services. As we take advantage of Broadbean's extensive integrations with over a hundred ATS platforms, we're envisioning a lot of exciting attribution and down funnel opportunities that we're gonna continue to investigate, invest in, and ultimately bring to market. Joel: And the sale of Broadbean and CareerBuilder's International Unit, which we reported on a while back, will leave the once mighty job board with just its core US based recruitment offering. Chad, there's a lot to unpack here, what you got. Chad: Yeah. CareerBuilder stands alone with a facilities manager. Pretty much Jeff he's sweeping up, he's getting ready to turn off the lights 'cause that thing's sold. Okay. It's sold. I don't know who bought it yet, but we're gonna find out. Okay, so why buy? It's fairly simple, from my standpoint, four major points portfolio, 3000 customers, access to Europe, which they didn't have before, five billion data points. Veritone is an AI company that means everything to them and for the future. And then integration into 100 applicant tracking systems. These are all points that are incredibly valuable. And to look at the $52 million deal at the annual revenue that they were looking at around 35 million seems like a deal, right? So the portfolio in itself, take a look at transitioning thousands of clients from duration based to performance where necessary. Then Europe slow to adopt performance driven recruitment advertising compared to the US, so they can start that nudging, the nudging with keeping the duration around, but yet nudging toward performance. Did mention Terry Baker is out, and Alex Fourlis is in. This is a well-deserved rest for Terry Baker, for god's sakes. The guy's been in the industry for fucking ever. Jesus Christ. I hope he finds an island somewhere and enjoys a year off the grid. Joel: Lot more Padre's games in Terry's future, I believe. [laughter] Lot more Padre's games, which is good. Chad: But Alex came to CareerBuilder through the Greek job site, which we talked about career.gr He moved up through the CareerBuilder ranks as managing director of the UK and then over to Broadbean in 2019 and was given the reins as president of Broadbean in May of 2022. So Alex has seen the CareerBuilder/Apollo shit show from the inside out and for a very long time. And Ryan obviously has faith that the post-traumatic CareerBuilder syndrome won't be a problem. If you think about it, you're looking at trying to transition a lot of these portfolio clients, right? So you want to be able to try to keep the same team, same faces, those types of things. Do you ever think that ex CareerBuilder employees wake up in cold sweats, screaming El Chapo in the middle of the night? Or is it just John Smith. Joel: Former CareerBuilder 'cause if it's current, it's like six people or something. [laughter], but yes. I know for sure a lot of the old guard at CareerBuilder. Just, yeah, have voodoo dolls of Irena and Company in their bedrooms that get stuck every night before bedtime for sure. Chad: From that standpoint, you take a look at the Veritone stack now, we've got performance-based recruitment marketing, duration-based recruitment marketing, chat with Wade and Wendy. And why that's important is because if you start to integrate chat into, much like we see with Paradox for the apply process, it's much easier, it doesn't have to be synchronous, it can be asynchronous. There's just a better way to collect data. It's just more fluid, it's better. Then you have Veritone's AI backbone with voice and video, I mean, that's just the tech stack that I'm covering now. I'm sure they have much more than that. So what are your thoughts on the actual acquisition itself, the portfolio and the things that I just ran through? Joel: Sure, Sure. So full disclosure, we love Veritone. They're a sponsor. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We've been on their boat, so take that for what it's worth. But I like to think that, we'd set that aside. We would both be very excited about this acquisition. And I can also probably speak for both of us in saying that, when Veritone first bought PandoLogic, there was a little bit of head scratching, a little bit like, "How is this supposed to work? Got this AI company with video and then we have this like job thing. How is this gonna fit?" [laughter] Joel: And it was a little bit tough, but you and I both know Ryan, Ryan sort of sees into the future like you and I cannot, he saw where this thing was going. And I find it really intriguing that as we come out of the pandemic, as we come into what is a challenging time for our industry, I mean, we're just, we're almost ready to say goodbye to CareerBuilder, like who woulda thunk that when we started this podcast six years ago? Chad: And Monster's still living. Joel: The old guard is going, Indeed's freaking the fuck out every week, we're gonna talk about layoffs and all of them are talking about challenging economic times, challenging with hires. There's an interesting picture here, where we come out of this season of our industry and Veritone is primed to be one of the major players in employment. And I find that incredibly exciting and the fact that they've embraced HR and hiring the way that they have with all the other things in their portfolio and all the other things they do. And how they've sort of been able to figure out, "We can combine this with hiring and it's an incredible opportunity globally to be an industry leader in that space." So we may come out of the end of this and say like, Veritone is right there with Paradox and whatever Indeed is doing at the time, and whatever Workday is... Whatever the major players are doing, Veritone is primed to be in that spot, based on what they've been doing. And I like to think that I would say that irregardless of the spicy cocktail shrimp that we had on the boat. [laughter] Joel: You mentioned all the in's and out's with Broadbean, the footprint that they have, the management team that's coming over I think is gonna be very valuable to Veritone. What was interesting was that the street, Wall Street, there was about a 10% decrease in stock when this deal was announced. Now what is interesting is it coincides with a downgrade that the stock had recently, which, based on the earnings call, there's a lot less Amazon dependency because Amazon is not hiring the way that it was before and there might have been a heightened dependency on Amazon dollars. So we don't recommend stocks on this show, and please don't buy this or sell it based on our recommendation, but it seems like a stock that, if this thing comes to fruition, is gonna be up into the right for the foreseeable future, if I had to guess. So, yeah, all around we know the people there are excited for them. I'm excited to see how this deal plays out. We talked before the show and I'm sure you wanna talk about competitive landscape now, this certainly shakes some stuff up. I know you have some thoughts around that. Chad: Oh, yeah. So think of this from a Stepstone standpoint. They invade the US with the acquisition of Appcast, only to find their US market weakened and their European, performance-driven flanks exposed. I feel like there's a marginal-line analogy in there somewhere. Anyway, Stepstone has missed a huge opportunity in solidifying a strong US market and then transitioning us slow to adopt European markets. They just couldn't pull it together. They just couldn't pull it together. They were retreating from France. They just couldn't get their shit together. They were... They're trying to get ready for IPO. They're firing CEOs at Totaljobs. I mean, all this shit, so that's the big name. And Appcast is still major, major fucking player, but they have not wielded Appcast like they should have. But then you have a small, a much, much, much smaller player like VONQ, and this is only going to ignite a fire under Stepstone and Appcast asses. So VONQ needs to find a buyer fast. They've been able to, while Stepstone's been sleeping and not using that big axe, which is Appcast, to be able to gain market share and do some things, but they don't have the firepower to fight a two front war. And then last but not least, you have Radancy, a player in the recruitment market in programmatic tech space in the UK. To me, in the UK and Europe, I'm sure they've been gaining, but it's nothing compared to these two powerhouses. Joel: And we talked about, in our visit with them, the number of sort of non-programmatic or just traditional job postings that go through Broadbean. It's... Chad: Duration. Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Like there's a huge opportunity to move a lot of these posts into programmatic solutions, which is a huge opportunity for Veritone now. And then you start thinking about, how do we plug in our conversational AI capabilities, our AI capabilities into that process? And it becomes really scary because this is something... We talk about how Google has things that Indeed can't compete with. Well, Veritone has things that none of them can compete with. So now that they're on a equal footing from the job posting programmatic perspective, how do they then take it to the next level and plug in all the other shit that makes our jaw drop when we see it and check it out. So exciting times at Veritone. Chad: It's amazing. And then we're starting to see these brands where Veritone is going to be not a house of brands, but a branded house. And so PandoLogic, the brand's going away, Broadbean, the brand is going away. And I think Ryan and team believe it's better to build a branded house rather than trying to manage all of those brands, just that simple focused tech, focused message, and they're gonna need that, because again, I really believe that Appcast and StepStone are... They're gonna get a fire under their ass after this because they were vying for... Everything that I've heard over the last 12 months, I've heard many companies who were trying to buy Broadbean. It was just way too expensive. I think this is a luck in timing kind of scenario, where Ryan and team were right at the table. It just didn't happen at the end of last year. Then this year happened, shit started to go south. Prices came down and they got a hell of a deal. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Ryan Steelberg doesn't play, people. Ryan Steelberg does not play around. And by the way, this is a great time to mention that Veritone powers Chad and Cheese in four additional languages, including Portuguese, French, German, and Spanish. So if you'd like to hear us in sexy Spanish... Chad: That's the kind of fucking tech they have. That's the scariest shit. Joel: If you want a little taste of what they can do, go check out Chad and Cheese in German. It's angry and fun, everybody. And have a sauerbraten while you're there. Chad: Yes. Joel: We'll be right back. Oh yeah. It's that time of the podcast Chad. S?: Layoffs. Chad: Layoffs? Joel: That's right. We got layoffs. ZipRecruiter is eliminating about 20% of its workforce and giving its top executive a pay cut due to a broad slowdown in hiring. They plan to cut about 270 roles, about half of which are in sales and customer support. CEO Ian Siegel will also take a 30% cut in his base salary, which was $550,000 last year. Meanwhile, DHI group, the parent company of Dice and ClearanceJobs is reducing its workforce by 10% in a move expected to generate annual cost savings of between 8 and $10 million. Your boy, CEO, Art Zeile said they must do what is best for the health of the business by managing their investment and expenses, adding, they don't anticipate hiring more positions this year. Chad layoffs. What are your thoughts? Chad: Does Art have pictures of everybody on the board doing crazy shit in like a donkey bar's or something like that? 'Cause there's no reason this guy should still be in power. Joel: Hey, there's no cost reduction in Art Zeile's salary, that was not in the press release. S?: All right. All right. All right. Chad: Oh, anyway, I'm gonna get away from Art just because there's just no reason to talk about Dice anymore. They had plenty of opportunities to evolve into what they could have been, for God's sakes, and they're still a fucking job board today. Anyway, when it comes to Zip, the question is why is Ian still there? I mean, wow. What a ride. Taking Zip from a little email blasting company startup to an innovative matching job board to IPO. I mean, that is a huge feat. What's he still doing there? Not all CEOs are meant to be in the seat past startup. He strapped in past IPO. Good for you, man. But I think it's more apparent than ever, "Stop taking fucking pay cuts and go enjoy some time with Terry on a fucking island somewhere. [laughter] You both deserve it." Seriously. Joel: Well, they both know the Southern California coast pretty well. They both know California pretty well. Chad: I'm sure. I'm sure. Joel: So stocks weren't hit real hard on this news, either way, in either direction. I mean, Zip has been a sideway stock since about February when they spiked and Dice was down about 2% on the news. This seems like perfect storm time for our industry. We've got inflation, we have fed rate hikes, we have no cheap money anymore, and those are all bad signs for any business, especially in our dotcom hiring businesses. But both of them talking about the hiring business being challenged is probably something that everyone in our industry should note because when hiring goes down, everyone feels the pain. So that's always a bad sign. And you and I lived through 2001, we lived through 2008, we've been waiting for a similar situation, which hasn't come. And remember my shoutout, which talked about the strong labor market. Joel: So we have tale of two cities, where one is strong labor market, but then we have companies in the industry that see the trends and see what's going on, talking about a challenged environment. So something to keep your eye on. I think another thing that's interesting that didn't exist in 2008 or 2001 was Google's influence in this marketplace. And I had a contact reach out to me, who will remain anonymous, but he had an interesting comment that I wanna read to you in regards to Google and sort of their activities around this. So, "I have confirmation, Google is still pedal down on job ads. General availability, which means for everybody, will be in 2024. Google is much smarter this time around compared to its original jobs mess. My unsubstantiated guess is Indeed is doing CPA to not just fleece their customers, but also to distinguish themselves from Google becoming the jobs CPC king." Which you and I have talked about on the show. Chad: Yeah. Joel: "From internal materials, Google sees advertising to passive job candidates as their next big advertising opportunity." Which we actually don't talk about a lot. Google has a lot of properties. If they start plugging in job postings on YouTube and Gmail and everything else that they own, like that's again, something that Indeed can't really touch. So Zip is on Google for Jobs. All these other sites are. They might be seeing the power that Google for Jobs has. I notice in my own usage of Google for Jobs that they're limiting the number of sites that they are showing when you can apply to a job. I don't know how that's impacting Zip and Dice and others, but there's a lot of things coming to a head here that's all negative. And these layoffs sort of encapsulate what's going on in the industry. We've also had Indeed, Glassdoor layoffs. We've talked about LinkedIn layoffs. I'm sure every small company that isn't public or big is having layoffs that we're not hearing about or talking about. But this is cascading into everybody's business and we're here to talk about it on the show. Chad: Yeah. As Google continues to focus on the top of the funnel and they will, that's just what they're doing, that's what they will continue to do 'cause that's what they do best. Indeed, they're playing the CPA game. They should be playing the next round of, instead of just sending you traffic, "I wanna be able to send you qualified traffic." They talk about that shit and it's total bullshit. They don't have the tech at the top of the funnel to be able... They give you these bullshit screener questions. Who gives a fuck about that? I don't care about what the person says or what's on their goddamn resume, show me what they can do. There's tech out there today that we've talked about over and over and over, they should be funneling, they should be siloing, they should be buying, but guess what? They're doing business like they did 10 years ago. They're trying to change the name of their product so that they can 10X it and try to charge a hell of a lot more, again, and fleece their clients, much like your contact said, we've gotta stop doing business like it was 10 years ago and just calling it something different. It's total bullshit and everybody sees through it. Joel: Yeah. You mentioned it's a good time to buy. And I think we've addressed that on the show quite a bit. Some of these sites, some of these companies are gonna be clearance rack-type opportunities and like you mentioned, Indeed should be acquiring these companies. Indeed, historically is a pretty good acquisition strategy with Workology and Glassdoor and some others. They've gotten away from that. Who's gonna buy CareerBuilder? Indeed kind of makes sense. Just shut it down. You'll kill a competitor or just... Chad: Do the SimplyHired model. Joel: Yeah, do it SimplyHired. Just put all the Indeed jobs on CareerBuilder. Funny enough, our friend of the show, Chris Russell, opined that ZipRecruiter could buy CareerBuilder. I'm thinking after the news this week, they're probably not in the market for that. I'm still holding out for a European company. I'm still holding out for a Jobandtalent or SEEK maybe, which is Europe South and Australia. Chad: Well, and if you think about it, we were just talking about Stepstone and being able to, again, solidify a foothold more than Appcast here in the US. You would get it for cheap. That's for fucking sure. But anyway, that's just a two guys who don't hold the purse strings. Joel: Yeah. Let's move on to AI. Shall we, shall we? Chad: Oh God. [laughter] Joel: All right. Experts, AI experts, I will add, issued a dire warning this week. "Artificial intelligence models could soon be smarter and more powerful than us, and it is time to impose limits to ensure they don't take control over humans or destroy the world." [laughter] That's right. Pretty sure North Korea didn't get the hold up development memo [laughter] Oh, North Korea. Love that. All right. But don't jump off the ledge yet, kids, 'cause Chad and Cheese are here. The National Eating Disorder Association has taken down its chatbot called Tessa, after concerns grew from a viral social media post revealing the bot was promoting unhealthy eating habits. End of humanity, go humans or somewhere in between. Chad, what's your take? Chad: Earlier this week on the Europe show, we talked about BT, aka British Telecom group, their plan to replace human employees with AI. Well, I'm going to refer to Mark Twain's embellished quote, "The tales of my demise are greatly exaggerated." And in this case, the tales of AI taking human jobs are greatly exaggerated. Here's the scary part about AI for those who don't understand AI, and here's a quote from the story that was actually on Vice, "So far more than 2,500 people have interacted with Tessa," that's the chatbot that they used. "And until yesterday, we hadn't seen this kind of commentary or interaction. We've taken the program down temporarily until we can understand and fix the "bug" and "triggers" for the commentary." This is where HR and talent acquisition professionals need to listen. When the CEO comes to you after hearing about BT and they want to install generative AI, here's the story that you need to have in your back pocket. Chad: It's one thing to install conversational AI, which has solid guardrails, but when you move into generative AI, that space, you better understand what the actual fuck you are buying, how the actual tech works, what safety mechanisms are in place. After 2,500 conversations, not a lot kids, 2,500 conversations, that chatbot went rogue. Can you imagine replacing all your human customer service positions or even half with AI and then it goes rogue. What happens? What happens when you don't have customer service anymore? Because you gotta shut the whole fucking system down. This is a story where BT, I think they were more pumping their stock than they were anything else. But still, if you're trying to think about this and you have the head shed coming to you saying, "Hey, what about this generative AI thing?" Pull this story out of your back pocket and say, "Look, this was only 2,500 interactions." Joel: This is a complex, deep issue, Chad, and I'm just not sure I'm ready to go all in. [laughter] S?: Just the tip. Joel: So every week we have a show about AI's gonna take over, AI's gonna kill us, and then we have another story. It's, was it Paul Bunyan who beat the machine with the Blue Ox? Chad: Yeah. Then he died after. Yeah, Blue. Joel: Yeah. Okay. That's apropo. But it feels, this sure feels like a constant tug of war between technology and human beings. Frankly, I'm gonna go with something in between. We're gonna have AI and robots that make a lot of sense, that don't hurt people, make my cheeseburger, love that, mental health issues, maybe it's not the right thing to throw into. Amazon was too early with hiring in their AI solution. Clearly AI, whether it's pumping stocks or legitimate or somewhere in between, it's gonna take jobs for sure. I'm confident it's taken marketing jobs and customer service and content jobs and social media managers. It's not hard to go, "Hey, write 20 tweets about Ron DeSantis entering the presidential election." It'll give you 20 tweets and seven of them are pretty good, so writing content is obviously taking a hit. College kids are using this ad nauseam to write papers, and there's literally programs that will put misspellings in your content to make it not look like a robot wrote it. Joel: This is the future that we're going into. None of us know exactly how this is gonna shake out, but I think it's important to look at mental health, eating disorders, children, for sure. Children is a huge one. And there needs to be age gating of social media. And that's gonna happen. One day we'll look back and go, "How the hell did we let 8-year-olds on Instagram or social media?" That's, it's like the smoking of today. So anyway, I'm opining, dragging this on, I don't need to, we don't know where this is going, but really smart people says, "AI's gonna kill us." And then really smart humans, "Push the pause button for mental health and eating disorders and caring for people." It's gonna be somewhere in between. It's gonna shake out. And Chad, we're gonna be here to talk about it every step of the way. Let's take a quick break. If all this doom and gloom AI wasn't enough, Chad, [laughter] can I interest you in Elon Musk in your brain? Chad: No. Joel: All right. So Elon Musk's brain implant company, Neuralink, how many companies does this fucker have? Like how much time does... Anyway, on Thursday said it received Food and Drug Administration or the FDA approval to launch the first in human, in human. Not in monkey, Chad, not in pig, in human clinical study. In case you missed it. Neuralink is developing a brain implant. It hopes will help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments. Musk said he'd implant a chip in his own children's brain. But what about your brain, Chad? Chad: Who in the hell would even think of putting a chip in their head? I understand spinal issues. I mean, the opportunity is so amazing. And those are the types of individuals that are going to be the guinea pig. Think about it. A chip in your brain. Have you ever, I mean, ever had a piece of tech that didn't get a little buggy? What happens then? We're talking about physiology here. Humans aren't made the same. Our brains are all different. I mean, we know that from just between you and our wives. I mean, there's a huge shift. They're much smarter than we are, that kinda thing. Anyway, so who would actually put a chip in their head? Well, guess what I did? Went to LinkedIn and I did a poll. [laughter] Joel: Yes. A good poll, baby. That's what I'm talking about. S?: What are you doing step bro? Chad: Well, after a 110 votes and I put it out there, and it hasn't been out long, but 75% said no fucking way would they put a chip in their head, but 25% said, "Sure, I'm down." So even more interesting, that was only 3% of the people who actually saw the poll. So the rest of them are just sitting around like lemmings waiting to see what everybody else does. So, I mean, this to me is an easy, hard no. I don't want somebody in my brain. Maybe I've watched too many sci-fi movies, but no. Joel: Oh, Elon. [laughter] We're so worried about AI going to destroy humanity. Have we ever considered the fact that Elon Musk might destroy humanity? Chad: Yes. Joel: Maybe he's a AI conduit to the end of mankind. Can someone check if Elon bleeds or not? Are we sure he can't transform into some cyber truck? Maybe he is the Twitter algorithm. This is not gonna end well, Chad. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap, because you'll be back like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, "You can't quit them either." We out.

Interviews kinda suck. There’s got to be a better mousetrap, right? That’s why we brought Stephane Rivard, CEO & founder at HiringBranch on the podcast. Proudly wearing a T-shirt that says “F*CK INTERVIEWS,” Stephane takes us through his plan to toss job interviews into the dustbin of history. No easy task, and Chad & Cheese are here to see if HiringBranch can actually walk-the-walk. MORE HiringBranch: www.hiringbranch.com Stephane Rivard: www.linkedin.com/in/stephane-rivard-entrepreneur/ Chad & Cheese: www.chadcheese.com PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. [music] Joel: This is another morning after hangover edition at Unleash America. Las Vegas Nevada. Chad: How you doing, huh, huh? Joel: Not too bad, but I'd rather be on a Lazy boy with a Parie right now than podcasting. Chad: Parie. Joel: Parie. That's for our guests too, is French Canadian. And by the way, that leads us to our guest today, Stephane Rivard, CEO and co-founder of HiringBranch. Stefan. Bonjour. Stephane Rivard: Bonjour. Thank you. Chad: Bonjour. Stephane Rivard: Bonjour. Thank you very much for having me here. I'm excited to be here today. Chad: Last time we saw you, we were up in a big glass ball, about 300 or 500 feet above Las Vegas. During the high roller HiringBranch event. How'd that go? Joel: Ferris wheel 2.0? Chad: Is that good? Is that good? Stephane Rivard: Yeah, that was exciting. We have one in Montreal, but it's of course, it's only about half the size. Chad: Oh, okay. Stephane Rivard: So everything's much bigger, more fun up here. [laughter] Joel: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Well, Stefan, what really stands out as we're talking to you and our listeners can't appreciate this. Talk about your t-shirt for a second. Stephane Rivard: So, yeah, so, I'm wearing a T-shirt here and it says, fuck interviews. And, I wish I was clever enough to come up with it, but we didn't, I know, I didn't come up with this, our customers did. So we went out to create a platform, [chuckle] Joel: Oh, stop it. Now wait a minute. Your customers... Okay, now carry on. Carry on. I wanna hear this. I wanna hear this. Your customers are like, fuck interviews. I get this. I can get behind it, by the way. Go ahead. Stephane Rivard: Yeah, they didn't come out and say that, but we went out to design a platform that evaluates people's language skills, communication skills, and employability skills. And I guess after a certain amount of time, the platform was working so well that they decided to completely skip the interview. And we did this to, a customer discovery says, so how's the platform going? This is great. We don't interview anymore. So hence the T-shirts. Chad: So you didn't even know that they were doing that. Joel: Was that the plan? Stephane Rivard: That wasn't in the plan. Joel: You just wanted to be a nice enhancement to interviews. You didn't want to kill them all outright. Stephane Rivard: Yeah, we wanted to leverage our expertise and we've been working in language training and language assessments for a long time. But and we knew that we could do more, especially adding soft skills into the mix. So yeah. So we had no plans to do this, but here we are. Joel: How does the product typically work? I apply to a job, they give me a link, and then you go through your tests and then that went into an ATS. Like talk about how this sort of step-by-step process works with the product. Chad: Ranking, scoring that kind of stuff. Stephane Rivard: Yeah, so I think they nowadays that's exactly what happens. The candidates, the first thing they'll do is they'll get an invite to do the assessment. And the way that the assessment works, it gives those candidates a job preview. So they actually get to do the job. And it's geared towards any customer facing role. So you can imagine that you were. Joel: Get to do the job how. Chad: Like a simulation. Stephane Rivard: It's a simulation. Joel: Is there a VR headset involved in any of this? [laughter] Stephane Rivard: There's no VR set. No. Joel: God damn it. Chad: Joel just got excited. Stephane Rivard: Oh, bloody hell no. Joel: Oh, well. Stephane Rivard: No VR headset, they actually interact [laughter], they actually interact with our platform. So they take mock calls. So they get to actually listen to a customer call that calls in and says, I just bought this telephone, and the internet doesn't work on it. And they're challenged to answer with their voice. They have to record, there's no correct answers, and you gotta use your best skills possible. And you do this for about 30 minutes depending on the vertical you're in. Chad: Okay. Stephane Rivard: And we evaluate how well you do. Chad: So is that done by AI? Is it like transcribed? How is that scored? Stephane Rivard: So a 100% AI. We have NLP, we have ML, we have a large tech stack that evaluates this in real time. And the interesting thing is that, why did this customers get rid of interviews? Well, it came through the correlation process. We looked at how well these new agents were performing and they were outperforming by large margin, their normal process. And what we mean by that is an increased revenue. So there's, one customer we had, they're due fundraising. So these candidates were raising 10% more money than the traditional process. Joel: Is there video involved in any of this? Stephane Rivard: No video. Joel: All the video interview solutions? Are they dead? Are they worthless? Like do they have a certain piece of hiring that does work? I mean, talk about video interviewing and the future. Stephane Rivard: Well, videoing interview, I'm not in that space and our customers, were in that... Joel: And you're not getting into video. Stephane Rivard: We're not, unless we can extract some interesting AI or interesting metrics out of that, it's not in our plans immediately, but the roles that we're looking at are really based around the skills, talking to people, understanding people, can you figure out what they want? How quickly figure out what they want and that's a question that makes sense. And answer that makes sense. Joel: And are these high frequency positions usually? Okay. Stephane Rivard: Yeah. We work mostly with high volume. So, it could be call center sales, telco, insurance, telehealth, anything that has to deal with, you want a successful customer outcome, you need great soft skills. So that's the crux of all we do. Chad: There's a couple of really cool aspects of this, first and foremost, not being able to do or need to do an interview cuts down the hiring process time wise. And in a sales position, when you fill a position faster, that means you have somebody driving revenue faster. Do they know what actually, I mean, obviously they're getting better people. That's what they're saying. But also what's the huge benefit? Do you know monetarily that 10% was won, but you're filling roles faster, which means you have salespeople in the seat faster. Stephane Rivard: Yeah. So we're filling these roles within 24 hours. Like literally you do the assessment. Chad: Stop it. Stephane Rivard: Yeah. So 24 hours you do the assessment sales roles, 24 hours. So they do the platform, the recruiter looks at a dashboard, figures out the skills that, do these match these benchmark sales that we want. Send them right away to training and job offers. So small organizations can do this within a week. Larger organizations which have a more complex training program. Could be a month. Our larger just customer takes about a month to get through the training process. And one of the challenges they have with the traditional process is that they were losing about 25 to 30% of the candidates through the training process. And our largest telco customer in Canada, they're down to like 1% or 2% because the screening process is so much more accurate. And, a lot of advantage, first of all, the candidate gets to know what kind of work they're gonna be doing. So they get to experience the actual job. Joel: So remote is a thing, I don't know if you've heard about it here at the conference. How does... How does... Chad: What is this you're talking about? Joel: Remote. Chad: Oh, okay. Okay. Joel: How does the product evolve into different languages, different parts of the world? Do I have to use English and maybe French, depending on where you're from? Chad: Can I hire Portugese salespeople? Joel: Yeah, talk about language and your global footprint. Stephane Rivard: Yeah, so we have customers that have global footprint, they operate in 30, 40 different countries. So for those customers, we've customized assessments and we support about 13 languages at the moment. But the crux of our business is still English. English represents 90% of the market. Chad: So is it specific just sales, that's where you're niched out? It's a humongous niche, by the way, but is it sales, customer service? Where do you guys actually touching right now? Stephane Rivard: Yeah, so right now, we're touching sales and customer service, but we have banks that are fascinated-ly. They're very interested in what we do. Imagine deploying a tech stack that can do a better job than what they're getting and increasing revenues by a few percentage points, and finding those candidates immediately. Even, I have a friend who hires all across Canada for salespeople at the financial sector, and he says, "At the end of the day, I look at CVs, I interview them, I don't know who's selling." So, we're adding science to this process. Joel: Science? Stephane Rivard: Science, yes. Chad: Performance as well. Is that right? Stephane Rivard: Performance, yeah. Chad: So I mean it's one of those things where you can take a look at somebody's resume, you can see what they did, or at least what's on the resume, where they worked, but you really don't know what their performance looks like... Stephane Rivard: No. Chad: Or how they work. Stephane Rivard: Correct. Chad: In this case, you're providing them with the opportunity to see actionable skills. Stephane Rivard: Correct. Yeah, so we have this framework we've designed, and each of these positions has multiple soft skills, and we can isolate those soft skills for those positions. So we've had actually candidates go in through the customer support queue, do the assessment, do phenomenally well. Then they say, "We're gonna patch you to the sales queue," and completely fail. So they come back to us, says, "Your assessment doesn't work." Well, you're supposed to tell me what level there are. You go back to the data and it's quite obvious that that candidate cannot position a product, they just can't sell, and we see this every day. Chad: Yeah. Or they're not comfortable closing. Joel: They're not comfortable closing. Chad: That's the hardest part about selling. You can talk about something that you love, this product that you've drank the Kool-Aid, but trying to close somebody when you get to that obstacle, that's a switch that not every customer service person can flip. Stephane Rivard: That's right. And we can measure that. Building rapport, active listening, fluency, the ability to know what the actual problem is, the objection is, identifying a statement, that's what the tech stack does. And trying to do that in a 10 to 50-minute interview is very difficult. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So we're in day two here at UNLEASH, in the expo. I'm always curious to hear founders, CEOs, leadership positions give their opinion of the vendors here, the startups. You're over there in the start-up alley or nearby, what's your take on what's going on here at the conference from a vendor's perspective? Stephane Rivard: Yeah, so from a vendor's perspective, there's a lot of interesting technology out there that, from point of view, from every single point... And I guess, when I look at it, I says, even for myself, I can imagine being a HR manager and being totally overcome, all these different separate tech stacks, and they all do solve one problem. So how do you put all those together? So that's the [laughter] over and over again. We do something that's super unique really well, it gets incredible outcomes, but if you're a large corporation, how do we fit into your tech stack? Joel: Your take on ChatGPT and what it's gonna do to the industry? Stephane Rivard: Oh, fuck, that's a great question. I think we're trying to raise money in that, so we're not gonna invest in to it because of ChatGPT. But I think ChatGPT, as Microsoft said, I think that human skills will still be the most important. I think that eventually we're gonna have co-pilots that's gonna guide those customer service, those sales agents around. And as Sam Altman said, I think ChatGPT is almost state of the art. We need to create new technology to accelerate what we have. So what it does, it does extremely well. We can see automation in customer service being augmented without a doubt. But at some point, you still wanna talk to a human, you still wanna be heard, and you wanna make sure that that human has good skills. Joel: That means we'll have this podcast for a while, Chad, because people still wanna hear people, apparently. [laughter] That is Stephane Rivard, everybody, co-founder and CEO at HiringBranch. Stephane, for our listeners that wanna know more about you or the company, where would you send them? Stephane Rivard: I would send them to hiringbranch.com. All the information is there. Joel: Bonsoir, bonjour and merci. Stephane Rivard: Merci. Joel: Another one in the can. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Chase podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, viable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

War games, worker woes and Cardboard Chad littered our news feed this week, so it’s fair to say this is one helluva show. Cardboard Chad is LinkedIn’s hottest trend in years (IYKYK) and is making its way to SHRM in Vegas next week. (Gotta listen to make sense of this one, sorry.) Indeed is still messing up, but they’re doing it on multiple continents this week. HackerRank plays Whack-a-Mole with ChatGPT and drones are going to kill us all. Unions and strikes are trending too. Oh yeah, Martha Stewart tells us why we should get back to the office. Recruit Holdings 2023 Shareholder Annual Meeting Notice Recruit Holdings Shill Story PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. It's National Donald Duck Day, you know what that means Chad, no pants. No pants. Daisy is a lucky girl, isn't she? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host Joel, it's not many, Cheesman. Chad: This is Chad, is a time for a coffee break, Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, war games, worker woes and cardboard Chad. Let's do this. [laughter] It's the hottest social media sensation. Chad: It's ridiculous. Joel: Said Tequila Tila or whatever her name was. It's cardboard Chad. Chad: It's cardboard Chad. Yeah, everybody else is getting replaced by AI, I'm getting replaced with cardboard. So kids get ready, cardboard is the new AI. Joel: What's old is new again with cardboard Chad. So, listeners that don't know, I'm gonna be at SHRM this week. Chad is living his best life in Portugal. So I said, why don't we get a cardboard version of Chad for the booth while I'm recording to make me feel at home, to make people feel like Chad is there. So, they ran with the idea, we sent over the picture of Chad in the bathrobe in Sweden with his Ray-Bans and a beer. And they have three cutout heads of Chad and a full body cardboard version. So I posted this on LinkedIn. Chad: Yes. [chuckle] Joel: And people are losing their minds. Like, people are re-sharing it, liking it. It really is the... We need to give these out for Christmas. [laughter] Cardboard Chad for all our fans. Chad: Oh, my God. It's fucking awesome. Yeah. Life size, I love how it says, "Life size cardboard Chad." [laughter] Joel: It is not healthy. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: It is not good for anybody. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Chad: Alright. Time for shoutouts. SFX: Shoutouts. Chad: Alright, first shout out goes to Remote Work, kids. A new survey carried out by LifeSearch has revealed that 77% of workers have said they've done, "something they shouldn't have," during working hours, including one out of 10 respondents who say they have sex during working hours. SFX: What are you doing, step bro? Chad: And I say, there's nothing wrong with substituting your coffee break with a sex break. And if you're Joel Cheesman, you can still have sex, still have your coffee, and a toasted bagel. Shout out to remote work. [laughter] Joel: That escalated quickly. So, from that remote work to this, so my shout out goes to Martha Stewart. That's right Chad, your favorite SI cover girl at Inside Trader has weighted into the hotly contested remote work debate saying, "America will go down the drain if people don't go back to the office." Adding, "You can't possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely. Look at the success of France and their stupid off for August blah blah blah... " Shockingly, and I'm shocked Chad, Martha Stewart has an estimated $100 million in real estate. Go figure that she wants everybody back into the office. Shout out to Martha Stewart. Chad: Stupid people everywhere, my friends. Next shout out goes to Lionel Messi, that's right kids, who is leaving Paris Saint Germain, that's Julie's favorite club. But not for the big dollars of Saudi Arabia. No, no, no. Not back to the wonderful tapas of Barcelona, but on the play in the MLS over at Inter Miami. Why? Well, here's a breakdown from CBS Sports. Speaker 5: Involves for him, Growler and why MLS do you think? Speaker 6: I think in the end, although it's Lionel Messi and you would think, "Okay, he's got a billion options." This was what it seems was the best one, obviously, because he chose it. But I think Saudi just represented a lot of money, and maybe not the big picture that he was looking to and Inter Miami presents to him profit sharing, a bigger picture, ownership, maybe similar amounts of money, better lifestyle. I can only speak to my experience of Miami and what Miami is all over the world. Speaker 7: You're right. Speaker 6: It's one of the best places to live. Speaker 7: You're right. [laughter] Speaker 7: So not as good as New York. Second best. Speaker 6: It represented more things than just money. And I think that's what made the most sense. And from what I understand, Barcelona was basically off the table. Speaker 7: Yeah. From a business side though, he's getting percentage of the club, I was just reading, and percentage of revenue for Apple. Speaker 6: Apple and Adidas. Speaker 7: That's incredible. It's, you get the money too, you get the lifestyle, your kids get to learn English. It's the best of all worlds. Chad: In Miami, baby. SFX: Alright. Alright. Alright. Chad: Miami. Yeah, so Apple, Messi share of revenue through the MLS season pass. That's the prospect that they're talking about. Adidas, offered a profit sharing agreement that could cut him into any increase that they see resulting in MLS profits within his involvement. So I'm sure there's some strings that are there. But yeah, Messi coming to the US. The greatest soccer/football player ever to play the game coming to Miami. Joel: And I'm sure he will finally make soccer popular in America. [laughter] Let's see, we had Wayne Rooney came to town, Beckham came to town, that Zlatan guy came to town. I'm not saying that correct. So, I'll give you this, if Messi can't do it, Pele couldn't do it either, by the way. Although that was 100 years ago. If Messi can't do it, maybe it can't be done. 'Cause if the best player in the world can't... Now, Ronaldo might have a better shot 'cause he's foxy like that. Messi doesn't really have that sex appeal that the Miami folks love. And Miami's kind of a weird fan base anyway, they kinda show up, they kinda don't. So, we'll see how this plays out. But hommie's getting paid, that's the bottom line. Chad: Oh, yeah. Ownership and then being able to get all that Apple and Adidas cash, there's some good options there. Not to mention, you're talking about Cuban food, great tans, hot chicks, and... What else, Miami? Welcome to Miami. Will Smith's there all the time, come on. [laughter] Joel: Sure. Sure. Chad: Cuban food. Cuban food. Joel: Come to America, baby. Come to America. The American dream is alive and well for Lionel Messi. Chad: Too awesome. Joel: Love it, love it. Alright. Well, from something that makes sense to something that probably doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot people. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: Alright. My shout out goes to Tony Fidel. Who the fuck is Tony Fidel? Well, you've probably heard about Apple's new VR headset dubbed Vision Pro. Chad: Yes. Joel: Reviews were mixed. But Tony Fidel, a guy who played a key role in the development of Apple's iPod, said he doubts the pricey gadget will gain wide acceptance. Saying, "Apple's Vision Pro is a technological tour de force, very impressive. But with the consumer apps and marketing for $3,500 with a two hour battery life, apple has truly 'jumped the shark'." ouch. Chad, I know you're a big Apple guy. Any opinion on Apple's new Vision Pro which doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever being owned by you, by the way. Chad: No. [chuckle] Have they been paying attention to Facebook? Now Meta. I don't understand any of this. It makes no sense whatsoever. So, the big thing right now is being able to automate ChatGPT. It's like, you find what is working and you roll with it. Google's doing it with Bard right now to be able to change search with generative AI, and then they come out with a fucking ugly pair of glasses. Yes, you can see through them. Wow, is that the innovation that we're going with here? A heads up display? I don't know, I will not own a pair anytime soon. Joel: I learned a valuable lesson in the early days of the internet, Chad. PPC drives the internet. PPC, not pay-per-click. Porn, Pills, and Casinos. The only way this deals work is if Apple partners with PornHub to create virtual reality porn that will be bought by every male on the planet for whatever price. [laughter] They want to ask for it. But until then, no. Looking at the stars with this thing on my head. Chad: Not doing it. Joel: Which is basically a ski mask. [laughter] Joel: Or ski goggles. I don't know, man. I don't know, man. I want VR to work, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Chad: Yeah. No, it's cool tech, I just don't think it's practical. My last shout out goes to Dina Perro for sending us some podcast love. She calls the, Chad and Cheese, "The most enjoyable real podcast," She listens to, and that she loves the new YouTube podcast. That's right kids, we are on YouTube now. You go to YouTube, all you have to do is search for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Click on the channel, subscribe, and Dina for all of that, you get a free T-shirt. Joel: Ooh, free t-shirt. Chad: That's right. Joel: She's gonna love that. Love that. So, we've gone from voice to audio. Basically we're going deep, Chad. SFX: Just the tip. Joel: Alright. So... Chad: Wait a minute, we got to give Serge Boudreau a little credit for that sound effect, 'cause he's feeling a little slighted, because he sent that just the tip sound effect to us that we use all the fucking time. And he's not allowed to on his show because Shelly won't let him. And we use the shit out of it. [laughter] So thanks Serge, we appreciate it. [laughter] Joel: It's pronounced Serge. Chad: Serge. Joel: And no love for Canadians. [laughter] SFX: Take off. We were doing our movie. Don't rick our show, you hoser. Chad: Carry on. Joel: Alright. So, speaking of... Chad: Free stuff. Joel: Great stuff. Whether it's YouTube, or stuff that you can drink or put on your body, you got to get some free stuff from us. We're giving away t-shirts from JobGet, Bourbon from our friends at Tex Colonel, Beer from Aspen Tech Labs. And if it's your birthday, we're giving away rum sponsored by our friends at Plum. But you got to play if you wanna win, you got to head to Chadcheese.com. Click the freelance. And you might get some really, really cool stuff people. [laughter] Chad: What time is it? SFX: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? [laughter] Joel: Sounds like it's time for some birthdays. [laughter] SFX: I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: Alright. You know what that means, Chad. We've got some birthdays this week. Another trip around the sun and some people that could win some rum from our friends at Plum. We're talking about Christina Bucci, Fishers Indiana's own. Mark Anderson. Scott Allen, Aaron Koteff, and Philly, Nancy, Baris Savo. Chad: There we go. Joel: All celebrate. SFX: Happy Birthday. Joel: Another trip around the sun. Chad: Nancy from Philly, guess what's next? Joel: Travel Chad. Chad: Time for travel. That's right kids. Joel: That's right. Chad: This is the 2019 Chad Cheese RecFest shirt. That's right. Joel: You can only see that on YouTube, kids. [laughter] Chad: We are going to RecFest in the UK in Knebworth, July 6th. All hands meetings happening there. That's right. Talent Acquisition Leaders taking their entire fucking team. Why? 'Cause you need time to get together. You need time to bond. You need time to learn, with little beer, a little Chad and Cheese, maybe little Hung Lee. That's just a tip. Joel: Oh, that is just a tip. [laughter] SFX: Just a tip. Chad: But you got to be there. You go to chadcheese.com. Upper right hand corner, click on events. Still time to register for that event. And plenty of time, well not enough time. You should go do it now. Register for the RecFest in the US happening on September 13th and 14th in Nashville, Tennessee. Again, RecFest is nothing but a party for your entire fucking team. We're gonna bring our whole team, Cold Cheeseman is coming to London. SFX: Alright. Alright. Alright. Chad: Leavin, coming to London. Joel, myself, and Queen Julie, coming to London as well. Anybody else from our team coming? Joel: Don't forget our favorite, Scott, Steven McGrath. Which is sure to upset all the Scotts to listen to this show because... Chad: We better have a t-shirts for him. Joel: So sensitive. Chad: You better have a t-shirt for him. Joel: Scotts are so expensive. Chad: Yeah, he's gonna be... He's sensitive. He's a ginger for God's sake. Joel: It's in the mail, Chad, and I'm tracking it. It's in the UK as we speak. Chad: Thank God. Joel: So, fingers crossed it will get to Stephen's barrel chested upper body by the time. Breakfast is there. Chad: Hairy little man. Joel: Yes. Yeah, yeah. So you're in Portugal, we mentioned this at the beginning. I will be at SHRM next week. Chad: Oh, that's a... Joel: I'll be in the Aaron Booth. Chad: Did I say Janet Jackson was gonna be there? Joel: Oh, yes, Chad. Not only cardboard Chad, but Janet Jackson will be there. By the way, Janet's married to me. She just doesn't know it yet. [laughter] Joel: And by the way, it's more like the 1992 Janet, with the hands over the boobs. But she's always that Janet in my mind. But anyway, hopefully I'll see her. If you're going to SHRM, if you're in leadership, I don't know how the tickets are being dulled out. Like, if someone can hook me up with some Janet tickets and some back backstage VIP passes that'd be great. But I will be there doing some interviews. Cardboard Chad will be there, I'll be there. The gang at Aaron will be there. Booth 2801, come say hi. And we'll have t-shirts, Chad, you know how people love them t-shirts. Some exclusive t-shirts from our friends at Aaron Booth. 2801 at SHRM, I'll see you in Vegas, everybody. I will see you in Vegas. SFX: Beaver, Las Vegas. Beaver, Las Vegas. Chad: That cardboard Chad gets back backstage tickets before you do. [laughter] Joel: Cardboard Chad will get much luckier than me for sure at that. Oh God, this is going south. SFX: Topics! Joel: We got to get to some news before this goes really south. Alright, let's... Chad: Too late. Joel: Let's talk about some Indeed News. [laughter] Joel: Alright. More tomfoolery at our friends at Indeed. A source shared a document from Recruit Holdings, Indeed's parent company, "I currently work@indeed.com and I'm a big fan of your podcast." We're a big fan of you too, Mr. Anonymous. "The intel is that after Indeed did their layoffs just last week, we found that their board of directors wanted to increase their own compensation. So, basically it was like laying off 15% of our workforce, just so the board of directors could get 15% more salary increase when they already earn close to a million dollars annually." [laughter] Joel: "Specifically, directors have an annual salary pool of 10 million and want to raise it to 11.5 million." But wait, Chad, there's more. Chad: Yes. Joel: There's more. Japanese media reported Recruit Holdings, apologize this week for employees posing as students and making inappropriate remarks during some 20 or more online seminars. Recruit acknowledged the dishonesty and inappropriate behavior and expressed its commitment to preventing future incidents. Chad: Sure. Joel: Another week, another fuck up in the Indeed family tree. Chad, what's your take? Chad: Yeah, they got caught. That's what's happening here. Whenever they get caught, they say, "Oh, I'm sorry." And then they try to fuck up again. Yeah, so we actually got a link to the Recruit Holdings 2023 notice of annual shareholders meeting. So, this is just the notice that's going out, what they're looking to talk about try to give a little preemptive idea of what the meeting's gonna be about. There are two categories of directors that they have on board. They've got the independent director and then they just got the plain old directors. From the report, "Compensation for independent directors consist of base salary only, not tied to performance." Chad: That's a nice gig. Currently, directors have an annual salary pool of $10 million and Recruit Holdings wants to raise it to $11.5 million. A 15% increase in tandem, Recruit Holdings wants to take those independent non-performing motherfuckers and take their potential from $720,000 to $2.2 million max compensation. Why the raise? Well, they say they need to be competitive, and also they're looking to raise the number of seats on the board. What the fuck? This is what happens when nobody is actually in charge of a board. [chuckle] They just get to do whatever the fuck they want, they hire their buddies. They get to add more seats, they chop some heads, they raise anxiety, and then they just go ahead and raise executive wages. From my standpoint, if I, and again, I'm not, but if I was in leadership at Indeed, this would be a huge... You can't do anything other than lead an uprising, immunity, a mutiny and get the fuck out. That's the only thing you can really do. [laughter] Joel: Yeah. Chad: I don't know what else you do. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: So, Chad, rich people are gonna do what rich people do, and remember buybacks? Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Buybacks were popular for a long time. And what happened was companies would get government bailouts and then do stock buybacks. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Which, gee, people don't like. So let's figure out some new financial engineering. Let's lay off some people and give ourselves a raise. Ooh, that's gonna bypass all the PR filters, isn't it? SFX: 60% of the time it works every time. Joel: Look, the disparity between rich and not so rich is growing. This is indicative of that. No matter what kind of laws or PR hits that you take, companies are gonna find ways to pay the rich people more money. This certainly isn't like, "Oh we're paying them more because we don't want them to be a board of director on another company and leave us." Like, people don't leave boards like that. This isn't like, retaining top talent. Chad: No. Joel: This is just rich people getting richer and it's just the way it is. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And fortunately, people like us can call it out because we have fans that are willing to give us the insight info on what's going on at the company. So, fuck indeed, again, as they cry all the way to the bank about about the news. Now, the Japanese story. Chad: Yes. [laughter] Joel: Now, this was like, you and I don't necessarily tune into the Japanese media. Chad: No. No. Joel: I had to translate this page. And even then, it didn't come across very well. So I can't really comment intelligently on what happened, but the comments that this story brought in, a thousand plus comments on what I would think would be a pretty mundane story about how upset people were about what happened with people infiltrating this webinar and asking stupid questions or kind of taking over like, this was a big deal from the commenter standpoint. So I can't talk intelligently, but the backlash from the comments that I saw and read, and like, people are really pissed about this. And I don't know a lot about Japanese culture, but I know when you apologize, like it's a big deal. Chad: Yes. Joel: And like they're really sorry about this. So I think in Japan it's a fairly big deal. Chad: Well, they were talking about having shills, which pretty much employees that were feeding into asking questions, and then also in the chat section starting to berate some of the individuals who were really supposed to be there. So, yeah. Again, in the US, I think, we're kind of used to this because of all the fucking trolls. But we don't quite have the respect culture that seems like Japan does. So this is a big deal. And again, like you'd said, when I started reading that, I'm like, sounds pretty common over here in the States, but apparently in Japan, not so much. Joel: Yeah. In the States it's called marketing. In Japan it's called rude. So there you go. Chad: There you go. Joel: There you go. All right, Chad. HackerRank has launched an advanced plagiarism detection system powered by artificial intelligence. The system analyses coding behaviour, submission patterns, and question features to identify potential instances of cheating with 93% accuracy by leveraging AI. HackerRank aims to ensure fair assessments and provide developers with equal opportunities while upholding assessment integrity. The company acknowledges the transformative impact of AI on the developer community, and is committed to continuous improvement in its detection system. Chad, what do you make of all this plagiarism? Chad: Remember playing the whack-a-mole game at Arcades or maybe even Chucky Cheese, that was more your style? Joel: Of course. Chad: Bravo to HackerRank for whacking this mole quickly. Now the challenge will be whacking the next one, then the next one. Or, will this even be necessary in a few years, especially since AI is becoming a part of the coding process. So, with the prospect of all coders being equipped with Gen AI as a co-pilot while developing, this whole thing seems good for now, it seems like it not really a band-aid, just kind of like a small bridge that we're just not gonna need. So the real question is, how fast will bots take over coding? SFX: Shall we play a game. Joel: Everybody listening and watching, we don't share notes before the show. I literally wrote Whack-a-Mole on my notes. So you stole my whack-a-Mole thunder, Chad. Thanks a lot. [laughter] Chad: Sorry about that. Sorry. My bad. Joel: So 82% of developers in a recent survey think AI will change the future of work. 82%. Well, no shit. Well, if developers who are at the front lines of this think it's going to change work, then it certainly... Chad: Easily. Joel: Probably is. And this is a whack-a-mole situation. This is the spammers and this is the black hats and the white hats fighting it out. Plagiarism... I mean, ChatGPT is on a whole new level. I'm hearing them talk about students. There are programmes that will put misspellings in your ChatGPT to make it look more human. And this whole thing is gonna go back and forth. Now, in our industry, what typically happens is, we say we have it, and people just believe that we have it, whether it's AI or ML or Big data, or... Chad: Yes, yes. Vapor ware. Joel: SEO or mobile. Like, people just say like, check it off because we have it. And nobody really takes them to task. So that's gonna be an issue in our space of people saying they have plagiarism detection and whether they really do or not. Who's gonna audit that? Nobody. People are just gonna I guess rely on their network and podcasts like ours to figure out who's good and who isn't. Now if you're a buyer of services like this, I think it's a totally fair question to ask, how are you detecting AI generated content? Whether it's a cover letter, whether it's... The resume may not as big a deal, but pre-screening questions, things like that, you need to be asking questions of your vendors because there's a chance that you're gonna fall prey to content that is AI generated, if there's nobody policing it. Joel: I'm sure there are already APIs out there that people will be able to plug this stuff into their solution which is a million dollar idea. By the way, Chad, if you can create an API to monitor all this AI content, then you've got a boat with some hose on it, if you will. Yeah. This is just something that's gonna be... This is the future. Like black hats, white hats, fighting it out. Like you said, big applause to HackerRank. Look, developers is where this stuff is gonna happen but it's gonna filter down to everything, whether it's PhDs, warehouse workers. Like everyone's gonna... Chad: It's gonna be expected though, don't you think? I think it's just gonna be expected where it's like, did you use AI to develop this code? And guy's, No. Was like, why not? Everybody else is doing it. Everybody's doing it faster, they're being more efficient, etcetera, etcetera. Why not? Joel: If you don't care, then sure. Chad: But why would we care? Like let's say in the next few years, I don't think anybody's gonna care. Joel: Well, you wouldn't hire a journalist that just submits AI generated content necessarily. Or you may not hire a coder... Chad: It's content wise. Joel: Whose job is to write code. Yeah, some jobs you won't care. But if it's, I'm writing code, I'm writing content, I'm writing papers or research, you may wanna think twice about AI generated content. Dude, this is the Wild West. We talked to Ryan at Veritone this week. Like, he even acknowledged, like this is just gonna be wild west stuff. Things will get figured out. But for now hats off to HackerRank for at least acknowledging this is happening and providing some guardrails to protect their customers from getting crappy developers into their system. Chad: Let's hope. Joel: Can I interest you in some Robot war games, Chad? SFX: Shall we play a game? Chad: It seems like every day. [chuckle] Joel: Alright. In May approximately 3900 job losses were attributed to AI. That's according to Challenger Gray & Christmas's monthly report. This is the first time AI has been listed as a cause in the report. The tech sector accounted for all the AI related job cuts. So no Shocker, HackerRank is the one that's providing some guardrails. The tech sector accounted for all of them but it's not just tech workers. Of course Paris based Teleperformance known for running call centers has reported significant benefits from integrating chat GPT into its operations. The AI powered solution reduces call links by almost 40% cut staff training time and half and decreases errors by 90% according to the company. However analysts express concern over the impact of AI on Teleperformance business predicting that up to 30% of its volumes may be automated within three years leading to potential margin impact barriers to entry and implications for the wider service economy and layoffs. Chad what's your take on robots? Chad: So, right outta the... I think it's funny because in the 4000 jobs lost article, other listed reasons for the job cuts were things like market and economic conditions, cutting costs, restructuring mergers and acquisitions. Reasons not listed for cuts; over hiring, shitty business models, and leaders who cut staff to give themselves raises. See what I did there? [laughter] It's amazing. So about 5% of the 80,000 job losses, I think that's under reported, especially listening to the teleperformance information. Teleperformance itself, here's some call center stats from Phone Olo, there are currently 15 million people employed as call center employees. Statista Global market for contract call centers will reach close to 500 billion by 2027. And then replicant, the call center turnover rate can reach 45%. Why is that all important? Margin. Chad: If I can scale with a chatbot, right? And we're talking about these chatbots today who are actually providing amazing efficiencies for individuals like you and I. I mean, they're really co-pilots, right? So they're 40% better at what they're doing. Their training time is faster by 50%. They can do all those things. What they're doing right now, listen to me kids, what they're doing right now is they're training these chatbots to take over. 30% of the roles [laughter] in, what was it? Four years? No, in three years. There's no way that that's not going to happen. So if you take a look at the 20 to 30% that they're predicting, I think it's gonna be more because Teleperformance is a shitty ass company. [laughter] They're monitoring employees, I mean, just... Anyway, we've talked about them before on podcast. They're going to be probably about by 50%, if not more, my prediction, in three years. Chad: Why? Take a look at all of the money that's gonna be saved, not to mention scale, right? They can stop hiring people. If they've got a 45% attrition rate, people keep leaving, the robot scales up. And then all you have are people that are actually monitoring and auditing, that is gonna be a much lower staff rate versus what they have today. Call center suck. It's a horrible job. The anxiety, the stress, I mean, it just sucks. So seeing these jobs go away I don't think it's gonna hurt anybody but we've got to be able to take a look at what's the next thing for these individuals to do. Plumbing, AC, maybe being the auditors or what have you, who knows? But we're going to have to create some jobs. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: So yeah, up to 30% of their volumes will be automated in three years. How about in five years? How about in 10 years? How soon before we get to a hundred percent or 90-80 plus percent? That's gonna be a lot of unemployed call center workers. Chad: Yeah. It's a lot of margin. Joel: Yeah. That's an incredible speed at which this shit happens. So, historically, change comes at a snail's pace, from walking, to the horse, to the buggy, to the car, that stuff took decades, if not millennia, in some cases. People had time to sort of adjust, figure it out, new industries came along, new businesses, new technologies. What I'm fearful of is, this is not quicksand, this is the floor crashing in on all of us. And there are a lot of things to consider here. Number one, how do people handle that? That's incredible change. People don't like change. They really don't like change that happens fast. Number two, how do governments handle it? Governments move at a snail pace, right? Like, checks and balances. Unless you're an authoritarian government it takes years if not decades for changes to happen. Right? Number three, how does the market handle it? You mentioned the stock prices in these articles, and we've talked about who is the company with the college courses that talked about AI taking... They're being affected by AI. Tregg... Or Chegg. Chad: Chegg. Chegg. Yeah. Chegg. Joel: So Chegg stock crashes from that news. Number four, whether or not job creation and upscaling can happen fast to keep the pitchforks at bay. These are all really important questions, because things are happening at a quicker rate than they ever have. And there's gonna be some bad consequences. You, on our newsfeed, our private newsfeed about the show had an avalanche gif as part of this story. Well, interestingly, Chad, you have about 15 minutes if you get caught under an avalanche to be saved before lack of oxygen, cold temperatures start really fucking your shit up. That's not a lot of time. And an avalanche I think is a perfect metaphor for what's happening here because we only have a short period of time to dig ourselves out of this before people start dying and losing their shit. So that's all I got on that. That went dark quickly. I'm sorry. Chad: I think the only ones that are gonna save us in this one, are the Europeans. They're the only ones who are actually looking to try to stifle. You might see the stifling progress, but there are guardrails that need to be put in place just in case. I mean, we have to work on those contingency plans. And guess what? Nobody's doing, working on fucking contingency plans. The US sees cash and that's what we're built on. Unfortunately, we're not built on... I mean, the people build the cash but that's not how we see things. So yeah, we're not going to be fixing this, I don't think anytime soon. We're going to have to look for Europe to actually fix this forest which really fucking sucks. Joel: Yeah. And then you get into the beta of well, government regulation slows up the process. Well, other countries aren't gonna slow up the process, so should we slow up the process? I mean, it's gonna get ugly, Chad. It's gonna get kind of ugly. Chad: Ooh. Here's some ugly. Joel: And speaking of ugly, let's talk about some worker woes. Well, hundreds of thousands of UPS workers in the US are considering authorizing a strike this week if a new contract agreement is not reached with their union, the Teamsters, by August 1st. The nationwide UPS strike would be the largest work stoppage in US history affecting the delivery of goods of households and businesses across the country. The union is seeking improved pay benefits and working conditions. But wait, Chad, there's more, there's more. Journalists at two dozen Gannett owned newspapers in the US are staging a two day strike to protest working conditions and criticize the chief executive of Gannett, who used to own Career Builder. Chad: Yes. Joel: Used to own Career Builder. Yes. We got Career Builder on the show. Thank you. You're welcome. The strike, which is expected to be the largest labor action in Gannett's history comes as journalists accuse the company of under compensation and increasing workloads. Workers of the world unite, Chad, what's your take? Chad: So, first and foremost, UPS drivers don't have AC. How the fuck does that work? I mean, yeah, they got the cute little shorts and stuff, but my God, how are they working in Houston, Texas without AC in those fucking trucks. Next. So let's go ahead and set the table for salary. UPS drivers, pay is about $24 and 30 cents an hour. So you're talking about over $50,000 a year. It's not a lot of money for a lot of hard work. UPS CEO made 19 million, which is 376 times that a UPS driver. UPS airlines CEO, didn't know they had that, 6 million. UPS International President, 6 million. UPS CFO 7 million. Chief Digital Officer 7.5. Total for all of that $45.5 million. Do I believe that leaders who have more strategic responsibilities should get paid for more? Chad: Yes. Jesus fucking Christ. Yes. But at a rate of 376 times, that of the people that are actually doing the hard work without AC. No, not even close. Since 1978, CEO compensation has risen 1500% while entry level and middle class wages have stayed stagnant at a mere 18%. How do we fix this? Do we reverse trickle down economics, or do we just make sure that CEOs can't get paid at estimated 30 times more than that of their lowest entry level worker? Right? If that was the case, taking the driver in this case, the CEO would make 1.6 million a year. Who can't live on 1.6 million a year? That's what we've become. Right? We've got to really focus on fair. And in the case of the journalists, it's free and fair press. This is scary, because, I mean, I was in radio before coming into the world of the internet, and we've witnessed the slow death of journalism over the last 20 or so years, because who actually funded the journalists? Chad: Well, when readership was high, advertisers pay. When listenership was high, advertiser pay. When local news viewership was high, advertisers pay. We stopped reading newspapers, listening to local radio, and watching local TV. Why? Instant access. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, 24 hours, instant access. Traffic reports that we used to watch or read or listen to on the radio, it's on my phone, instant access. Weather reports, instant access. Free news, free news on my phone. I don't have to pay for that paper anymore. Free and Fair Press has been strangled by free access. And that is what has killed journalism and kids out there. I can't say how much journalism, local journalism, and national too, but mainly local journalism holds politicians and community leaders feet to the fire. And if they're not there, they will continue to run rampant if we don't have journalism in a free and a fair press, that's the scary part of all of this. Joel: That was really good, Chad. You should run for president on that platform. I can't say it better in terms of local journalism. I will add that, you remember the Representative George Santos, who's maybe the house's biggest douche bag and liar. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: Was uncovered by local news. Chad: Yes. Joel: It just never got traction. That's the kind of shit that happens when you lose your sort of local media and your journalistic foundations. I do think it sounds a lot like the Hollywood writer strike, anything where corporations can replace people that do writing with automation, is gonna suffer. There's just no two ways about it. And money is not going into support headcount, whether it's... I mean, employers like Classify, it's had a huge impact on local news. Chad: Yes. Joel: And newspapers. Like we have some blame for that. But I don't see how the journalists win and come back in this. I just think it's a failed push to make Gannett or any newspaper company pay you more money. I do think that the UPS story... By the way, I love that we're bringing Teamsters on the show. We haven't had a Teamsters... Chad: Jimmy Hoffa. [laughter] Joel: Jimmy Hoffa reference in a really long time. And that feels to me like an old school labour versus capital sort of fight. And there's a perfect storm of, we're getting more stuff delivered to us than we ever have. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: We have logistical supply chain issues where the work is hard and it's more valuable than ever. And then you have the fear of competition. Now generally competition says, Well, okay you wanna quit? Go, we'll just hire FedEx people or hire other services 'cause they're workers. What's happening is people who have contracts with UPS are saying, "Well, fuck we're gonna go to FedEx, we're gonna going wherever if you guys can't do the job." There's leverage there that the labour unions at UPS haven't had in a long time. And this is just an old school labour uprising to say like, "Hey, the power is in our corner. We're going to fight for better wages, benefits, et cetera." So, I applaud them and hope that they get what they want, from that perspective. Journalists, history is not on your side. Like, it's not good for you. Kids who are looking to get into journalism, don't do it. Do podcasting instead, it's much more fun and there's probably more money in it. We'll be right back. Chad: Oh God. Joel: Oh yeah. Chad: Here it comes. Joel: Call Arnold. Chad: Damn it. Joel: All right. We got some military news here Chad. The US Air Force has denied a story that circulated at a defence conference. That's probably a party, right? Defence conferences? Claiming that one of its AI powered drones turned on its human operators during a simulation. The Air Force clarified that the story was a "thought experiment" and not based on an actual event. While the incident did not happen or did it, Chad? Or did it? It highlights concerns about the potential unintended consequences of AI in military systems. Chad, you were in the military, what do you make of this, "thought experiment."? Chad: I think this has happened many more times than we've heard right now. I mean, we've talked about it on the show many times. The military is easily going to militarize drones. They already have in the air. They're going too, for soldiers. Anything that can save, and this is gonna be the narrative, and I understand the narrative is somewhat true, save human life, save American life, then we should do it, right? And that is going to open Pandora's box to this kind of shit. Here's from the article from somebody who... They quoted, the system started realizing that while they did identify the threat, at times, the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat. But, it got its points from killing the threat. The system knew it got the points from killing this threat, much like war games, the movie, right? So what... SFX: Shall we play a game. Chad: Yes. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because the person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective. I mean, it's not thinking like a human being. It's thinking like a computer 'cause it's a fucking computer, kids. No real harm was done to any person yet. Joel: The Air Force says they remain committed to maintaining human control over AI systems and its operations. Well that's comforting, Chad. I'm sure our enemies feel the same way about controlling everything with humans. Someone call Matthew Brodwick and John Connor, because I'm getting a little nervous here about bots taking us out of the loop and just making decisions on their own. Somebody get me a perrier and a Theragun. I'm going to Vegas. SFX: Beaver, Las Vegas. Beaver, Las Vegas. Joel: See you at SHRM Cardboard Chad. We're out! Chad: We out. Outro: Wow, look at you, you made it through an entire episode of the Chad & Cheese podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favourite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away, and like Chad's favourite western, you can't quit them either. We're out.

Live from UNLEASH America in Las Vegas, James Appleton, director of talent acquisition at Harri, joins Chad & Cheese for a conversation about the other side of the coin … ya' know, life through the eyes of a practitioner dealing with an onslaught of solutions looking to make recruiting more tolerable. That’s because prior to Harri, James was head of recruitment for a variety of companies, which means he knows what he’s talking about. And now he’s on the other side, pitching to employers where he used to toss opportunities to job seekers. I know, it’s confusing, but it’ll make sense after you listen. MORE Harri: www.harri.com James Appleton: www.linkedin.com/in/james-appleton1/ UNLEASH America: www.unleash.ai Chad & Cheese: www.chadcheese.com TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: We are live at Unleash America. This is the morning after hangover edition of the podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman, joined as always, Chad Sowash. And today, we welcome James Appleton to the show. James is Director of Talent acquisition at HARRI and has an interesting story. Chad: Harri? Joel: Harri, H-A-R-R-I. Chad: Yes. Joel: It's no regular Tom, Dick, or Harry. Chad: No. Joel: It's a different kind of Harri. Chad: Yeah, this is more of a millennial Harri, I think. [laughter] Joel: James, save us with your English accent and make us sound smarter. Chad: Please. Joel: How are you doing? James Appleton: I'm very good, guys. I'm very good. I'll give it a go on that. Joel: Excellent. So listeners don't know who you are, interesting story. Give us who James is. James Appleton: Okay. So I've done a couple of different things. So, obviously, as you get from my accent, UK-based. So, originally, I worked for a big 45,000 people company in the UK that's focused on pubs and restaurants, in operations there as an area manager, that sort of thing. Ended up getting into talent acquisition, and led talent acquisition for the company. So bringing in that was my first introduction to Harri. Eventually brought Harri into the company. Joel: How many open reqs at one time are we talking about, this 45,000 person company? James Appleton: Open reqs, we're in the thousands. Joel: Oh, yeah, thousands. Alright. James Appleton: So yeah. Yeah. Joel: Little bit high frequency. James Appleton: Little bit. It's high volume. It's high volume. So that, loved it. But I had an itch to scratch, so I left that after a number of years and went and started my own pub restaurant in London. So owned, operated that. Joel: What was it called? Like the Salty Lion or the... They always have interesting names. What was your spot? James Appleton: There was no dog and duck. There was no badger. There was no... There were no crazy names. It was called Chalk Pit. Joel: Chalk? Chad: Chalk? James Appleton: Chalk Pit. Chad: Chalk Pit. Joel: Like, chalk, write chalk? James Appleton: As in you write. Chalk. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel: Okay. So dig deeper into this. Chalk Pit. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. James Appleton: So myself and my founder Tom, so one of my best mates, Tom, we started this together. He ran a craft beer merchants at the time. So between us, we put it together, and Chalk Pit was the road that linked where we grew up. It was Chalk Pit Lane. Joel: Ahh. Chad: Ahh. James Appleton: So there's no crazy deep story there but... Chad: That's the second road reference we've had in, because Cherry, Bennett's Cherry Lane. Joel: New Cherry. Chad: Or whatever. Joel: New Cherry. James Appleton: Yeah. Joel: Cherry Lane. Yes. Interesting. Interesting. Chad: Yes. So Roads. Roads. Joel: What's your favorite English beer? James Appleton: Oh, my favorite English beer. My favorite English beer is probably, if I'm drinking something every day, Thornbridge Tzara is probably the best craft lager that you can buy in the UK. Joel: Do you know that one, Chad? Chad: I do not. Joel: I've never heard of that one. Chad: Gonna have to try it. Joel: Is it regularly available or do I have to dig for that? James Appleton: You'd have to dig a bit. You'd have to go to the right pubs or the right places. Joel: Give me one that's easily accessible. James Appleton: Easily accessible. You're probably going with Carling. [laughter] James Appleton: Which is up there with Stella. Joel: Okay. 1664 is a good one. James Appleton: Pretty much. Joel: Okay. Alright. Alright. Let's get to work. Now, you're on the side that everyone that we typically talk to wants to be in front of. Talk about your experience as a buyer. [chuckle] I don't think people appreciate the clutter, the sales calls, the confusion. Talk about just that from your perspective, because I don't think a lot of vendors appreciate what a buyer goes through. James Appleton: And to be honest, my perspective kind of completely changed. So, because I had that side that I'll talk to, now I lead the product side at Harri, so sitting on both sides of those fence is, is quite eye-opening. So when I was buying is quite bewildering. And the way I liken it to people is if you bought a house once in your life and that was it, and you had very limited information to do it, that's what it's like being a buyer for a massive company. Chad: That's scary as shit by the way. James Appleton: But it's where you got loads of money, right? Chad: Yeah. James Appleton: So you're a big company, you got loads of money, so to torture the house analogy. People are coming to you and they're wanting to sell you everything right? And they show you all sorts of houses, and it is quite bewildering. I remember when we looked, we looked seriously at 25 different vendors, and it took a huge amount of time. Chad: Wow. James Appleton: Yeah. To get that down then to a shorter list and do it. Chad: How long did that take? James Appleton: Oh, months. It was months. Chad: Over a year. James Appleton: Yeah. And you go through all the crap processes of RFPs and things which are useless in many ways, of how you go through that. Joel: How vital were like review sites or your network and maybe, "Hey, have you guys used this?" How important was that? James Appleton: Hugely. Because same for most things in life, that word of mouth, getting recommendations from people of what was out there and people you'd worked with before, people you'd trust people, people you know in the industry to give you a recommendation will mean that you'll at least look at them. You'll open that door. Then you've obviously got the big ones, you've heard of, and that sort of stuff. The hard ones are knowing whether you're willing to take a punt on your shortlist on someone that's a little bit different. But it's that kind of thing where you're shown houses by a realtor and you're shown four houses and they go, the kind of mystery house, we think you might want to have a look at this. Right? Of how'd you get those into your mix, you know? Yeah. Joel: And some houses you can rent for a while, some houses you have to buy, others are lease to own. So there are different levels of commitment that you have to make. Not all houses are created different. Chad: Yeah. And it's hard to pilot a system that big. James Appleton: Well, that's the problem. And realistically, you can't. Chad: Yeah. James Appleton: Because the change management piece. At that sort of scale at 1700 locations, 45,000 employees, you cannot really pilot. The organization won't accept it, and that change management, because they expect you to try and they expect you to get it right. The operators expect you to get it right first time. So that's hard to do. And when you're bringing it in and you are speaking to people, you go through that process and that discovery piece, the discovery piece, both sides have sat on that fence, that's where it lose or wins, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. James Appleton: The discovery piece you'll go through... And again, back to this house analogy, sometimes you will speak to someone and you'll say, "I don't own a car." And they show you a house with a garage. And it's like, "Well, that's not helpful to me." Okay. Joel: That's garage for our American listeners. [laughter] James Appleton: It's a garage. You can translate it for me. Thank you. And so, that should be out of your process. Right? But the biggest thing I see now and I saw then was discovery. So, you get a lot of people on the buyer side. A lot of my friends who are still buyers who get annoyed, they get a bit pissed off at going through a discovery process. Show me, I want to get to that point. Chad: Yeah. James Appleton: But if you haven't done that, if you haven't done it properly, then you're never gonna get the right thing. Right. And I... Chad: It's called due diligence kids. James Appleton: Yeah, exactly. Chad: Jesus. [laughter] Joel: But that's work Chad. Don't make me work for God's sakes. Chad: It is work. But it's work up upfront that you're not gonna have to do for years. Okay, so let's talk about Harri, because you guys, obviously you're focused in a niche area. Joel: What is it? Chad: Hospitality. Hospitality, right? What do you actually do different? Because there are a lot of high volume systems that are out there that could say that, "Hey, we work for anything." But you guys specifically pinpointed in that area. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So talk about that. James Appleton: We zero in. So Harri is HCM for the frontline. We're employee experience led but with a real vertical focus. And for us, that is hospitality at the moment. So we go really, really deep in terms of how we meet the needs for hospitality right across the platform. So, whether that's TA that I look after, whether that's workforce management and getting into all the fair work week or all that sort of stuff that the compliance piece that people really want, we will do, and we increasingly branch into retail and healthcare. But if people will take us as we are now, we will go deeper and deeper into those over time. But for us, we are very very focused on hospitality. Chad: Well, and you also started out almost like a social network, right? James Appleton: Yes. Yes. Chad: So, it's like LinkedIn for the hospitality side of the house, which is an amazing... So it's a great go-to market, I believe because you guys own the database, right? Because, I mean, you're actually creating this LinkedIn with an applicant tracking system, onboarding everything that's like wrapped around it. So therefore, what we're used to for years back in the job board days is like, "Wait a minute, that's my candidates in my applicant tracking system." Well, no, you're buying us because of the entire ecosystem. How has that been different and/or an obstacle for some companies because they're used to my candidate, my candidate, my candidate. Right? That's an entirely different change for them. So, talk about that. James Appleton: Well, firstly, I couldn't really say it better myself, but in terms of how you described it there, it is LinkedIn... Joel: Only that it was in an American accent, is the only thing wrong, that's what you gave there. James Appleton: Yeah, smooth is American accent there it was. [laughter] Chad: I'll send you my invoice, don't worry. Joel: Smooth. James Appleton: That's fine. [laughter] Joel: Smooth. James Appleton: So, for us it is exactly that. It's LinkedIn for hospitality. That's kind of how we look at it. We've got 10 million people who are on that. So, one million in New York for example. So that is obviously... Chad: Holy shit! One million in New York. James Appleton: It's a lot of people. Chad: Alone. James Appleton: Yeah. So when people come into that, it's the thing we get asked the most, everyone wants to have their cake and eat it. Right? I want access to everyone. But I don't want anyone to have access to my people. Chad: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. James Appleton: So we put in a privacy shield for people in that sense. So, there are candidates that come to that client and they will be privacy protected so only they can see them. If people are coming generally into our pool or into a client that hasn't got that, then they can go into that broader pool. So we kind of bridge that piece. But for us, it comes into a big bit that I'm passionate about and that we're developing at the moment, increasingly is talent pooling, of where we want to take that. So one of the frustrations I used to have as an operator and used to have when I was leading TA is actually, we would spend huge amounts of money on recruitment marketing and it just goes in the bin. Chad: Yes. James Appleton: We spend money and we lose those candidates. Chad: Well, it's not just losing the candidates. You're buying them over and over and over. It's the same goddamn people. And you're spending money for the same people. James Appleton: Yeah. Exactly. Chad: Yeah. James Appleton: So for us at the moment, we are developing very deep auto tagging to put all of those candidates, caption them in the system but in a very deep targeted way with a lot of filtering. Chad: Yeah. James Appleton: If you can do that and then use our CRM so you can keep those candidates warm but also use it for employees as well. There's that bridge between, very big on that bridge between TA and L&D. How do you pull that piece in so that you keep... Because the biggest problem, the biggest driver that we've got within our industry is people leaving, obviously it's that churn... Chad: Churn. Yeah. Churn. James Appleton: That you're constantly getting. How do you keep those people? And it's actually by engaging them and showing them, recommending jobs to them. So one of the things we can take that to the nth degree and what we're building at the moment is you come, you spent once. You spent your money wherever you spend it, whether it's Indeed, whether it's wherever you've spent all and/or wasted your money and it's gone out and you bring those people in and then if you keep them... If you can keep them, you can tag them. And then what we can do is with our AI algorithm, so it's open, we'll match those people in, be able to say then, and this is what we're building towards at the moment. Chad: Yes. James Appleton: So is be able to invite them directly to interview. That's the flattering piece. If you can say to someone, "We've got these five people who have matched, we've got 500,000 people in our talent pool. These five people have matched and we want to invite you directly to interview." That's the piece. Chad: I think the most compelling piece for me is that you guys are so focused and disciplined in one specific area, that you can really understand how matching works because you are focused on just that one area. Unlike, like you had said, like Indeed who is everything and... Tries to be everything to everybody and they suck at matching and they suck at quality. So therefore, it's the difference between that generative versus domain specific knowledge. James Appleton: It's exactly that. And being able to be really focused. And personally for me, the knowledge that I've got, what I've done before, and when I speak to our clients, and we'll do some kind of consultancy for some of our big clients, whether that's KFC, whether that's Radisson, whether... Whoever that is. And actually it's bringing that piece because it is focused, because of how we're doing it. Chad: Right. James Appleton: And it's getting to that point. If you can spend your money once and you can spend it wisely, but the difference where I want to us to be able to flip people to is spending above the line. Recruitment marketing is not done like marketing. It's done by this 1, 1, 1. If you imagine you were doing that and you were spending money to market one burger sale, it's insane to think of it, like that point of view. If you were whoever and you're trying to sell that one burger and you were putting dollars behind selling one burger, it makes 0 cent. You should be going above the line. So where we'll be leading towards is the ability to apply to a talent pool. I wanna put myself in there and it flips it round. So if I'm the employer, my message to the candidate is, let me find you a job, let me become your recruitment agent because you put yourself in the talent pool for my organization because you like it, you might not be ready yet. You can fill different stuff out. We can match you, and then we can use the recommendation algorithm to invite you to interview. That's the dream. Chad: There you go. James Appleton: And then you spend your dollars above the line. Chad: Yeah. Joel: You had me at cheeseburgers. Why does this show always go to food even when we're not even trying. [laughter] Chad: And it's lunchtime. Jesus. Joel: Yeah. Let's talk about competitive landscape for a second. You mentioned Indeed, when I hear, your LinkedIn tag, I think of Jobcase saying, "We're LinkedIn for everyone who's not on LinkedIn." So there's some confusion there, which you've seen as a buyer, kind of differentiate the competitive landscape and where you guys fit in it. James Appleton: For us in terms of who we might see ourselves against, it might be iSIMS, it might be Paradox and those places, for different reasons. We have... Very similar from a Paradox point of view and Olivia, we have Carrie, and what we can do there, and lots similarities with different people. Where we bring it together is that focus that, that focus of what we can do and how we can bring it all together around hospitality and the depth that we can go into. And particularly around, what we're saying there, with the talent pooling that will increasingly is, but will increasingly become a real, real key part for us. Joel: Have you guys talked to Prince Harry about being a pitchman for the company? [laughter] James Appleton: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's in talks at the moment. Joel: Yeah. He might be discounted. Chad: We're trying to get his name changed officially to Prince Harry with an I. James Appleton: Yeah, with an I. Joel: That'd be even better. James Appleton: But it's difficult. Charles has just vetoed it. But at the moment, we've got the coronation coming up, so if I get a late invite. Chad: Go through Meghan, she'll get shit done. James Appleton: She will get shit done. She will. Joel: I love it. That is James Appleton everybody. James, for our listeners that want to know more about you or connect with the company, where would you send them? James Appleton: To connect with me, find me on LinkedIn, reach out to me, but otherwise either me or to Harri.com and we will come right to you. Joel: Did somebody say cheeseburgers? It's lunchtime, Chad. Chad: Yes. Joel: Another one in the can, we out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

Imagine for a moment the 1980’s classic, “Goin' Back to Cali” by LL Cool J. Now imagine the music video, and replace LL with Chad & Cheese, and you have a pretty good picture of our week with Veritone and iCIMS. Quality time with some quality people. Of course, news travels west too, so in addition to our Cali adventures, news from Hirevue, LinkedIn, Google, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Wendy’s and even Dice fill our show with tasty content. Enjoy … and pass the sunscreen. Links www.chadcheese.com www.youtube.com/@chadcheese VIDEO VERSION PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion.​ 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. Intro: Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the The Chad & Cheese Podcast. [music] Joel: Oh yeah, happy International Nurse Day. Studies say over 50% leave the profession within two years, so similar to people who start a podcast. You are listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel "Rather Be an OnlyFans Star" Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad "It's Time to Hydrate" Sowash. Joel: And on this week's episode, HireVue goes shopping, LinkedIn bids adieu to China, and Bard cozies up to Indeed and Zip. Let's do this. Joel: Clearly, a little sleep-deprived. Chad: Yes, yes, yes. [laughter] Chad: That was an amazing trip, but definitely have to hydrate. I did well hydrating, but there was so much alcohol consumed during this trip. But I gotta say, ending up with a delayed flight last night. Joel: Both of us. Chad: Both of us, yeah. You got up even earlier than we did to have to hit the airport. But yeah, we were supposed to go through Atlanta. That flight wasn't cancelled, it was just postponed, which means we would have to stay the night in Atlanta, so they flew us to LAX, and then my head didn't hit the pillow until 07:00 AM this morning. So I got a few hours sleep, feeling good, hydrating. Joel: Trust me, no one feels sorry for us, Chad. No one feels sorry for us. We had a fantastic week. Chad: Yes. Joel: In Southern California. Let's talk about that, shall we? Chad: Oh god, yeah. So Veritone, dude. So you came into John Wayne. Chad: Yup. Chad: Julie and I came into San Diego, we got a car. And we drove up. Always love doing those little trips, right? Joel: John Wayne is Orange County, for the kids out there that don't remember who John Wayne is. [chuckle] Chad: Shame on you if you don't know who John Wayne is. Shame on you. On the way up, it's hilarious though, we pass an In-N-Out Burger. And I look at it and I said, "I bet you... " Joel: You gotta jump right to the In-N-Out joke. Chad: "I bet you on the way back, on the way back we get a request from Cheesman, he's gonna come back with us, we'll get a request from Cheeseman, we will hit an In-N-Out Burger." [chuckle] Joel: It's like predicting the sun will come up tomorrow, that's like the easiest prediction in the history of predictions. "Cheesman will want In-N-Out Burger." Yeah, good for you, Chad. Good prediction. Good prediction. I like that. I like that. Much better than your usual predictions. SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: So you finally, you made it in. I was there first. Chad: Yup. Joel: Got some seafood. Some listeners will know my wife hates seafood, so whenever I'm in a locale with good seafood, yeah, that's where we were. The seafood is a-flowin, so we're talking sushi rolls, we're talking shrimp cocktails, we're talking... Chad: Everything. Joel: Clam chowder. We're talking everything. Chad: Everything. Joel: In my belly. Chad: Yes. So Veritone hooked us up, they invited us up. They're like, "Hey, you're coming to, you're coming to Cali. Come a few days early, we'll hook you up at the Lido House," which is posh as fuck, guys. Chad: We're hanging out at the pool. We go on Ryan's boats with Terry. Amazing food, amazing company. Not only Ryan Steelberg and Terry Baker out on the boat enjoying the bay and the ocean, but also we hooked up with Kelly Robinson and Don Barton as well, so. Joel: A little UK love in SoCal. [laughter] Joel: By the way, we used to be a podcast of the people. Now we're just two douchebags on a yacht. [laughter] Joel: I don't know what the hell happened to us. I need to go roll around in some nachos to feel better about myself now. Chad: We're gonna fix that in Nashville at RecFest. Joel: It's true. Yeah, yeah. Chad: We're going back. 'Cause we're gonna do a pontoon booze cruise, right? So we're gonna fix that, 'cause we are a podcast of the people, my friend. [laughter] Joel: We're gonna make it up in Nashville. That's nice, that's nice. I do think one thing that was interesting is big tech used to not give a shit about employment, whether it was Google or do you name it. But a public company like Veritone, kickass AI and solutions. Work tech, work whatever you wanna call it, is a major part of their future. Chad: Yes. Joel: And that's a major change in what we've known for the last 25 years. Chad: Yes. And their tech is so much more advanced than anything that we have in our space. Let's just go ahead and put that out there, okay? They've cloned our fucking voices, guys. They've translated our voices into four different languages. And that's just the tip of the fucking iceberg. It's pretty amazing. The generative AI that they play with, not just with voice, but also with avatars, video. It's fucking crazy. Joel: Yeah, I mean, what we were able to see and hear about under NDA. Sorry, kids. At some point you'll know as well. It just blows your mind that some of this stuff is coming to employment. A little bit scary. A little bit scary. But... [laughter] Joel: Little bit scary, but still awe-inspiring nonetheless. Chad: Well, then we went south, which is when we actually got to have the prediction come true. [music] Chad: We were in In-N-Out Burger for Joel Cheeseman. Oh my god, I was so stuffed with all the fish and seafood that we'd have that day. Joel: Who goes to In-N-Out and gets nothing? Chad Sowash, that's who. [laughter] Joel: That's who goes there and gets nothing. Chad: I tell you who was happy though, Julie Sowash. 'Cause she wanted some In-N-Out Burger, that's for sure. But we make it down to Coronado beach, iCIMS hooked us up, we were at the Loews, the resort. Again, first thing we do is throw our stuff down, go to the pool. It was a good time. Joel: By the way, if Julie Sowash says that she's bringing sunscreen, don't believe it. Bring your own sunscreen. [laughter] Joel: I was a bearded lobster by the pool for most of the time. Chad: Oh dude, Lido House and Loews both had their own, self-serve. Freakin shut up. Shut up, whatever. Joel: Fortunately my Mediterranean skin soaked up the... [laughter] Joel: Soaked up the sun nicely. Thank god we're on video now. You can go check it out for yourself, how savagely tan I am now. Chad: I've got a nice base. I'm ready, I'm ready for this next coming few months. So iCIMS hooked us up, Carlee did... I mean, I gotta give it to her. She was like, "Look, I'm gonna make a bet on Chad & Cheese. They might come up in here and fuck some things up, which is not good for me. Or they might just blow it out of the water." Which we did. Chad: So big thanks to Carlee. Super fans Will and Brooke. Megan, for helping us with the T-shirts. And just a long list of people that took care of us. I literally felt like royalty. It was a good time. Joel: I gotta say, so the T-shirts, Carlee at iCIMS said, "Hey, we love your t-shirts. Let's get some exclusive ones made for the show." I was like, "Cool." So it's our shirt with featured iCIMS and Spire. I think had a 150 made. Probably about 200 people went to this thing. I thought, "Man, we're gonna have a lot of shirts left over, no one's gonna want these things." Joel: They were gone before the first day was over. By the time we did our thing, I looked out and it was like they were gone. I looked under the table, nothing under the table, they were literally gone. So people ordered these shirts, loved 'em. Joel: I can hear Stephen McGrath right now. "Gone? Where's my t-shirt?" [chuckle] Joel: If Stephen's not happy, we're gonna have to do something to cheer him up a little bit. Chad: One of our favorite, probably our favorite Scot, who will definitely get a T-shirt, if not more, when we see him at RecFest. I promise. [chuckle] Chad: We had Christy Spilka and Loree Porter on stage with us. This is a very exclusive group of practitioners who were in the room. Great content, great parties. Joel, I thought you broke a hip on stage, but that was on purpose. Joel: The roll, we're calling it the "roll" now I think. The roll got a lot of attention. Chad: How could you not? Joel: All I did was I thought... It was a snap decision, I engaged with my inner Chris Farley and Chevy Chase, and I did like a roll on the stage. Someone got video of this. People thought I really fell, they were concerned. You were like, "He pulled a muscle." I'm glad 911 didn't show up. [laughter] Joel: But the roll got a lot of attention. If you haven't seen that, go to social media and check it out. Chad: And you got right up, grabbed a t-shirt, threw it into the crowds. So everybody's like, "He's okay, he's okay." Joel: "He's alright. He's alright." And then you forgot to mention Loree brought us some beer from Nevada. Chad: I wanted to get to that, 'cause that was... That was amazing. Loree Porter, she knows us, right? I feel like she's our people. Okay? She brings us four different beers from Nevada. IPAs, most of them hazy juicy IPAs. It's almost like we were in the same mind, it was beautiful. Chad: We asked Carlee, it's like, "Hey, we wanna take these on stage so we can drink during our thing?" And she throws up, "Huh?" [chuckle] And then she asked... She asked Ari, and Ari is like, "Yeah, of course. What else did we expect?" SFX: Alright, alright, alright. Chad: Christy did though. She had champagne on stage. So we... Joel: She's fancy. Chad: She is fancy. Joel: She's fancy. Chad: You know what also is fancy? That fucking iCIMS hoodie. It's so soft, and it feels like a hug from Brian Provost. [chuckle] Joel: Yeah, who made those? Aviator. I never heard of those before. Chad: They are like... They are like custom made, they're like 200 bucks a piece. [music] Chad: They're like 200 bucks a piece. Soft, light, embroidered. That was great. Great. I love seeing the swag game just get leveled up. Joel: Yeah, in my house we keep score between yeti giveaways and hoodie giveaways, and it's pretty close now. [chuckle] Joel: It's pretty close, it's about even. A lot of yetis and hoodies getting sent out. By the way, when you think about free stuff getting sent out, Chad. Our listeners, if they sign up, can get a chance at some free shit. Who doesn't love some free shit? Chad: Unless you're Stephen McGrath. [chuckle] Joel: Unless you're, unless you live in the Highlands. We don't deliver to the Highlands, unfortunately. We're talking about t-shirts, we have the custom that were made at the show. But you can have your very own t-shirt. Just go to chadcheese.comfree or click the free link. We got t-shirts from JobGet. Joel: You can win whiskey, my friend. You get a Chad and Cheese selection. That's from our friends at Textkernel. Aspen Tech Labs is helping us send beer to people. And our friends at Plum, if it's your birthday, you have a chance to win a fine bottle of rum sent to you on your birthday from our friends at Plum. SFX: Really? Could you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. I could feel it the all way down on my plums. [chuckle] Joel: Alright. That brings us to the birthday celebration. Last episode was a really long list, this is a really short list, so whatever was in the water back in the day at this time of the year, I don't know what it is. It's the early May or something. Chad: Taurus. Joel: Anyway, so celebrating another trip around the sun, we got Amy Butchcoe, good friend of the show. Michelle Bier. Maria Similton, Christoph Foley, Ward Chrisman. Jenny Rutt and Ed Neumann. SFX: Happy birthday. Joel: Happy birthday, everybody. Happy birthday. Chad: Yeah. And guess where we're going next, kids? It's RecFest. Holy shit. Early July, Knebworth Park. Just north of London. [applause] Chad: Joel and I will be MCing the Disrupt stage. It's all tech, all day. Beer, love, friends. Packed house. Guarantee you people. Joel: Nashville hot chicken all day. All day we'll... Chad: No, before that. We're going to Knebworth first, then we're gonna go to Nashville. [laughter] Chad: You were so excited about the Nashville hot chicken. Joel: I am. RecFest is everywhere now. Shit, I can't keep up. Chad: Yes, yes. So we do have, we have the RecFest in July, but we also have RecFest coming to America finally, in Nashville in September. All of these, you can find. Go to chadcheese.com, click on "events" in the upper right hand corner, check out where we're gonna be, register. Especially the RecFest Nashville, listen up kids, hey listener, 50% off discount code. No shit, 50%. [applause] Chad: So if you're new to RecFest, let me give you a little something here. It's much different than any of the other conferences that we go to. This is like an all-hands time for you and your crew. Chad: So if you're VP of TA or you're director of TA and you wanna have an all hands meeting, this is the place to have it. It's like, it's like the easy button, you go to Nashville, you bring the whole gang, and that's what this whole event, this carnival of TA master-ness... Master fullness? Whatever. Chad: That's what you have to do, right? So again, chadcheese.com, go to "events". Go get your 50% off tickets, bring the whole goddamn crew, man. It's gonna be a blast. Joel: Am I the only one that thinks the RecFest leadership team wants to spend a night in jail in Nashville? [chuckle] Joel: I feel like that's where this thing is going. And yes, as you see, Chad is sporting the Shaker Recruitment Marketing swag. All our travel is powered by the good folks at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. And for what I understand, Joe Shaker had a happy birthday. Chad: Happy birthday, Joe. Happy Birthday. Joel: The Cubs still suck. Chad: Last but not least, though, kids, guess what? That's right. Chad & Cheese have gone video. Yes, we're starting off, we're working with our friends over at SkillScout who can actually do this stuff and make us look good. Or at least try to make us look good. Chad: What did you need? More Chad & Cheese and our ugly mugs on YouTube. Video snippets coming. It's gonna be off the chain. We're gonna have a blast. And if we look bad, it's not our fault, it's SkillScout's fault. [chuckle] Chad: No, just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. Elena and Abby over there, they are fucking pros at what they do, and we're really excited to partner with them to actually get this done. Joel: Yeah, if anyone can make us look competent, it's them. But I can tell you the early shows will have some F-ups, so if you wanna get a real entertainment, watch the first few episodes of us on video. Chad: But it will not be as bad as our first podcast, I can guarantee that. [chuckle] Joel: Oh god, yeah. Yeah. [music] Chad: Topics. Joel: Talk about a meandering hour and a half of nothingness. Yeah, go listen to the first ever episode. Alright, here we go, kids, we got some topics to cover. Joel: HireVue has acquired Modern Hire. They intend to use the acquisition to accelerate the growth of both companies' technology and create new solutions to help organizations to understand and activate a candidate's potential beyond their background and experience. Joel: Modern Hire's CEO, Karin Borchert... Or is it Borchette? [chuckle] Joel: Said the combination of the two companies provides, " A tremendous opportunity to rapidly expand hiring solutions for customers and their candidates alike." Chad, what's your take on the HireVue news? Chad: Little back story, first and foremost. HireVue, around since 2004, okay? 93 million in funding, which seems like a pittance compared to the Eightfolds of the world. So you gotta give them some love because they are making money, 'cause they haven't gone over the edge with funding. Chad: Montage, that was what Modern Hire was. We'll talk about that in a second. They came around in 2007, about 28 million, 27.7 million in funding. Montage merged with Shaker International and then re-branded to Modern Hire in 2019. Chad: From my sources in the rumor mill, the merger didn't go very well. The cultures clashed, they were pretty diametrically opposed from a team and a culture standpoint. So you have the drama and then the drama doesn't play well to production goals, focus, sales vision, anything like that. Chad: Then in July of 2020, Modern Hire acquires Sonru, something we've never heard of before. Another interviewing tool. So a bigger fish eating a smaller fish. Chad: One thing that we did see, kind of like side bar, Modern Hire always did a wonderful job at conferences, showing a little leg, teasing to perspective buyers. "Look at my booth, come demo my product." It really felt kind of like an Eightfold's luring of the buyer strategy, just on a trailer park budget. Chad: Anyways, congrats to Modern Hire. It's a fucking hard game. And to be out there and knowing and hearing that they've been on the sales, I don't wanna say clearance rack, I think they ended up the clearance rack, but they've been looking to be sold for a while now. To me, HireVue, bigger fish eating a smaller fish, which a couple of smaller fishes in the food chain. Chad: So that's what we're saying. Consolidation, which we talk about all the time. Joel: Yeah, so Montage was kind of a cool brand. Chad: It was, yeah. Joel: They were sort of hip and cool had kind of a cool name. Shaker was this kind of weird Cleveland company that I knew from my time there, and they did like job testing, like you're on the site, they tried to pre-screen you for jobs. Joel: And these two got together, I'm not exactly sure why. I thought that was kind of a weird thing. And then they did the dumbest of all dumb things, they trashed Montage brand, and they create this ridiculous Modern Hire. When you have the show Modern Family, you have David Bowie's Modern Love, it just did not make any sense to me. They come out with these black and gold colors, which weren't the colors of any of the businesses that just paired with each other. Joel: I think there was this definite culture clash, if you will. I think that the tech was very different on both ends. I don't think it worked. I don't think consumers ever really embrace the Modern Hire brand. I think if... They should have remained Montage, bought Shaker, put in the tech as much as they could, benefit their current clients. Joel: But they created a lot of confusion in the marketplace. I don't think it ever worked. We made fun of them at their first HR tech, 'cause it looked ridiculous. Even the font was stupid, the font look like they were trying to launch a Hollywood production company or something. Chad: Or a furniture store. Joel: Pandemic happens and really... Pandemic video solutions. They should have thrived. Chad: Yes. Joel: They did not. And they lost real estate to startups that we've talked about on the show. I think they've lost some leadership and some people at the company over the last few years. Joel: Along comes HireVue, you know the story, two dinosaurs cuddle up to hope that they can withstand the meteor shower. HireVue clearance rack, great, sure. HireVue has been around a long time. If they would have... If they were gonna explore, they would have exploded by now. I think they just kinda chug along, found a discount, get some people, get some sales people, whatever. Joel: But to me, this is a big... This is a big old nothing burger. That's about it. We're not even talking... Let's just throw in the whole AI legal problems that HireVue has as well, and then it's just a whole recipe of why acquire another company and blah, blah, blah. It just, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Chad: Well, I mean, the market is just way too noisy and competitive. There are way too many cost-effective and viable options for interview, like BrightHire, Wedge, Honeit, our boys over in Scotland, Willow. Harbor, Qualifi, Interview.io. And even platforms like Woven, HiringBranch, and those crazy smart Israeli ladies over at TaTiO, that test for competencies, which allows you to skip interviewing entirely for some of those high volume roles. Chad: So I believe in some cases, companies know they are filling roles, just the process is way too long and they're losing people. So with the latest flurry of startups which we're starting to see with chatbot interviewing, or as I had said earlier, cutting out the interview process entirely for high volume roles, HireVue is going to have problems gaining market share. Chad: So how are they gonna get market share? They're gonna have to buy it. They're gonna have to buy. And as we talked about, they're also going to have to do one thing. One or two things. They're gonna have to get acquired, something's gonna have to happen there. And/or they're gonna have to get acquired or just die. [chuckle] Joel: Throw in the towel. Just cash it in. Take the money and run. Chad: Yeah. Because now, Modern Hire clients are gonna be, they're gonna be transitioned, I guarantee you, over into HireVue and then they're gonna see the bill and it's gonna be at least 2 to 3x that of what they were used to paying in the first place. So it's gonna be interesting, it really is. Joel: Everyone was driving a gas automobile, and then EVS came out and everybody said like, "I want some of that." Modern Hire, not so modern, they're more of a jalopy at this point that got acquired. We hardly knew ye. We hardly knew ye, Modern Hire. [chuckle] Joel: So from one fading company to arguably, another one? I don't know. LinkedIn is cutting 716 jobs, roughly 3.5% of its workforce as part of a wider restructuring plan. The company will also shut down its local jobs app in China. LinkedIn has been the only Western social media platform to operate in China since 2014. Joel: On the jobs front, LinkedIn is testing a new feature that uses generative AI to draft personalized messages that candidates can send to hiring managers. The feature uses information from a user's profile, as well as the hiring manager's profile, job description and the company of interest. Joel: The AI will create a personalized message that can be sent to the hiring team. The feature is available to the platform's premium subscribers, so no freebies, kids. Chad, your take on some of the news out of LinkedIn this week? Chad: So first and foremost, here's the quote from the article, 716 roles will go as a part of, "Changes aimed at responding to economic conditions." Economic conditions. "And making the business more agile." More agile. Chad: So classic CEO spin, blaming economic conditions and not addressing sub-standard product built on 20-year-old tech. We're seeing this from CEOS everywhere who are trying to create bullshit narratives to save their multi-million dollar comp packages. 716 people. That's about 3.5% of LinkedIn total head count. 3.5% will not make you more agile. Chad: At 20,000 employees, LinkedIn is an incredibly bloated organization, and 3.5% will not move the needle. Especially when it's the tech in the products that need to be more agile. The amount of tech debt they are paying on a daily basis, it has to be enormous, I can't even fathom. Chad: But the big story here, and you definitely touched on it, is the continued failed efforts in China. We've seen many companies try to crack into China, either by introducing products like we're seeing here with LinkedIn, or acquiring Chinese sites like Monster did back in the day. China looks like an amazing opportunity until you start throwing cash at it and it doesn't come back. Chad: On the generative AI side of the house, this is an easy plug for Microsoft. This is I think an easy bridge. Do I think that this is gonna save the archaic platform itself? No. I think there's gotta be something that they do to be able to change who they are for the future. Chad: They can't be the six degrees from Kevin Bacon focus, they have to be more fashion forward, and they're gonna need new tech to do that. I just don't know how they get there. SFX: Layoffs? Joel: Layoffs at LinkedIn again, 3.5%, 26,000 employees. Not a big story. I'm just surprised it wasn't more. Why they don't just take one big cut at it and get it over with? I don't know. Joel: So to me, that's not a huge story. I think like most tech companies laying off people is just par for the course. Replacing those folks with more AI solutions, which by the way, LinkedIn has the inside track. They're owned by Microsoft, who's a big investor in OpenAI. So that's much to do about nothing. Joel: I do agree that the China play is really interesting. Some history, Google got out of China over 10 years ago, I think. Just because China wanted so much control over the algorithm and the search results and who's searching what, and Google is just like, "We're out, we're not gonna play that game." Baidu obviously has taken over the search market there. Joel: Facebook never got in. I remember Zuckerberg over in China and palm pressing and playing nice. Never happened. Twitter never happened. LinkedIn was really the only social network, and they were basically LinkedIn as you know them, until I think 2014, they were the only player in town. Since China was being China and like, "Okay, we wanna know who are the dissidents, who's sharing stuff about China's government," or whatever. Joel: So then LinkedIn said, "Okay, we're just gonna be jobs, alright? We're just gonna be jobs and that's it." And I thought, "Well, how would... " That's okay. That's pretty safe, right? Well, apparently not. So now they're totally out of China. Joel: I think the regulations, the government, I just think it became too much of a headache. They probably weren't posting a ton of jobs anyway in China. I'm guessing most Chinese companies are encouraged to post their jobs on Chinese sites and not American sites. Joel: The TikTok drama, I think has some play into that. I think maybe LinkedIn is seeing like, "Look, this whole app banning censorship thing is gonna happen, we might as well get the hell out now while we can and not get caught up in the whole TikTok thing." Joel: So that to me is really interesting, and it goes to our division of like you're either on Chinese or team like Western democracy. Team authoritarian and the world is splitting up, and this is sort of indicative of that. Joel: The AI stuff for job seekers is pretty cool. I think making it only paid users, and I think we talked about this previously, like if you made it free, employers would freak out because of all the AI generated whatever applications they would have to deal with. Joel: So if you keep it to the paid members, it's a little bit under control, bots aren't creating profiles to spam companies. And I think the more that LinkedIn gets to monthly sponsorships by individual users, I think the better the business becomes. Joel: Because as you and I talk about, companies that don't love necessarily being on LinkedIn and are looking for an alternative, like it's smart to have more diversity in where money comes. Joel: So as far as I can tell, the Kool-Aid is still tasty. It maybe not have as much dim sum as it used to have in it. I don't even know if that's a Chinese thing or not, but it sounds like a Chinese thing. So less Chinese flavor, but I think the Kool-Aid is still tasty at my buddies at LinkedIn. Chad: I think they could easily put a cap on the usage, but I'm gonna go back to again, Monster, when they acquired the 6sense search back in the day. And then it was really cool, it was revolutionary, it was amazing, but then they made you pay for it. So it never got adopted. Chad: And it just didn't get... It didn't reach the adoption level that it should have quickly. We're talking about job matching that was really good, and it was ahead of its time. But they put that layer of you had to pay for it bullshit in there. This is another thing that LinkedIn, you've gotta understand history and how this shit works. Chad: Allow everybody to touch it, taste it, feel it. Put a cap on it, and allow those other individuals, right? You got this freemium model that's happening. Chad: And if you take a look at Microsoft's Copilot, some of these videos where it's actually embedded into the Microsoft Word, all the different Office products, and you're working with the Copilot to be able to generate PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, etcetera, etcetera. Imagine what you could do with that generative AI with all of my information? Chad: I've said it a million times, there's more information on LinkedIn about me and my job history than anywhere else on the web, okay? Imagine grinding on that data, being able to really have a search that could prospectively match me with jobs that makes sense, instead of trying to throw bullshit at me because their current search and technology is shit. But to be able to pivot into those types of things. Chad: I really believe from a strategic standpoint, this is all flash in the pan, because they're not taking a look at what OpenAI actually did. Had a freemium, "Come, everybody. Come in. Taste it, feel it, touch it. How is it? Okay, great. Here's your monthly fee." Joel: Freemium models, Chad, are the wave of the future. [chuckle] Joel: Yeah, either way, Microsoft and OpenAI, shit's gonna get bonkers. I wonder what Google is gonna do? We'll find out when we come back, everybody. Joel: Alright, so we're talking AI, which I know our listeners are gonna be shocked about. [chuckle] Joel: So we have a few stories to address here. So details are little sparse, but Google's answer to ChatGPT or Bard, apparently is coming to some clarity, if you will. They had a big presentation yesterday outlining what Bard was gonna do, what their plans were to integrate it with search, blah, blah, blah. You can google that if you wanna learn more. Joel: But interestingly, they talked about an integration with ZipRecruiter and Indeed. Not real clear what is gonna happen here. I did a search on Bard 'cause I am... I'm in the test group. I think more and more are. But I searched "sales jobs near me", it just gave me, "Go to CareerBuilder," which was interesting. One of the answers was like, "Go to Monster, Indeed or CareerBuilder." Joel: And then I said, and I did like "ZipRecruiter: Sales jobs" to see what happened. Nothing really happened there. So I'm not exactly sure how this is gonna play out, but the fact that they listed Indeed and ZipRecruiter as partners is certainly interesting. Chad, what are your thoughts on where Google is going with Bard and our job search brothers? Chad: Well, thanks to Rob and Alex over across the pond at Talent Nexus for actually turning us on to this. This to me is the antithesis of what should be happening with generative AI. Chad: Over the years with Google initiatives, we've seen incredibly lazy and uninformed moves in the job market. From Google Base to the initial launch of Google For Jobs, Google Hire, the Google Jobs API, and then the Military Crosswalk job search that they had, which was a fucking disaster. Chad: If Google has done anything in the space, it has demonstrated that it doesn't understand this space. So no matter how many PhDs they throw at it, it's just not gonna work until they start to get people who understand the actual industry. We're so much different than every other industry. Chad: So in this case, we shouldn't be training off of duplicative data points. We should be training on driving users to actually the actual source of the job. Is this a political positioning move for Google to try and build a defensive case and try not to get into legal hot water like they did in the EU? Maybe. Joel: Maybe. Chad: It's somewhat of a mirage though, and detracts from Google For Jobs. It's also a very lazy effort to consume jobs, because it's not going directly to the source. And Google For Jobs already has feeds that are marked up. So why are they doing this instead of just using what's already available to them? Chad: Once again, with Google initiatives, and we've seen this over and over and over, I remember back in the Base days, Google is so fucking big, they don't... The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. At all. And that's exactly I think what's happening here. Chad: So I think whatever we see out of this is literally just going to be... It's gonna be just trash. Joel: Yeah. It's really strange, and I was spending a lot of time on the flight or waiting for my flight more or less, thinking about this. So when Google For Jobs came out, Indeed was like, "We're not gonna play. We're not involved. We're not doing it. Fuck it." They obviously have since changed course and they are putting their jobs on Google For Jobs. Joel: So the fact that they would be sort of an early adopter or early partner in terms of this was really interesting to me. Also, what does this mean for the future of Google For Jobs? Joel: They just launched pay-per click, like they just started monetizing it. I don't know if they said, "Hey, we're not monetizing it enough, or there's not enough interest. We need to change course." So that was weird to me as well. Joel: I think what the real fear of Google is, is having their search leap frogged by ChatGPT. So if you even just say, "Hey, Google or Bard," or whatever, "I need a reservation at such restaurant on Friday night between 07:00 and 08:00. Can you do that?" And it just goes out to Opendoor, makes a reservation, and like you're done, it syncs in with your Google account or whatever, and that's done. Joel: So we've had news before about Apple being concerned about ChatGPT leap frogging the app ecosystem. I don't need an iPhone with apps anymore, I can just do it with voice or talk to my AI assistant and it'll just do it for me. Joel: Well, an obvious sort of thing to do is classifieds, and jobs is one of those things like, "Hey, Bard. I need a job, I need a sales job in Milwaukee that pays between 75 and 100 grand a year," dah, dah, dah. Okay, bam, it goes in there and it gives it to you. And it needs trusted sources to be able to deliver that stuff to you, because if Bard starts delivering stuff that's like Joey's Lobster Cabin... Chad: It's more like LinkedIn today. [chuckle] Joel: Yeah. It's from a job site called joelslist.com or something, and you're like, "This is bullshit. I'm not gonna use it." So to have these trusted sources where it's Opendoor or Zillow or whatever to search these things, I think that is where Google has to go. Joel: So maybe it has less to do about job postings and political stuff, it's just, it's fear that search itself is at risk. And if we don't create these collaborations with brands people trust, they're not gonna use us. And to me, that is the bigger picture for what Google is looking at. Joel: Now, how do you get in the door? And how don't you? Do users select, "Hey, I really love this job site, this local site, I want that part."? I think that'll be determined later. But to me, it's a real threat to the actual business of search that Google is making these partnerships, but it's very, very interesting and we're both excited to talk about it on the podcast. Joel: More of Google to come, but we don't talk about Dice very much, Chad. So let's... Chad: There's a reason for that. [chuckle] Joel: Let's throw them in the mix here in our AI block. Tech job board Dice has launched Dice AutoPen. AutoPen, an AI-powered tool developed on OpenAI to help Tech professionals generate cover letters when applying to jobs on the Dice mobile app. Joel: Chad, your mind is blown, I can see it. What are your thoughts on the news from Dice? Chad: Cover letters? For tech? Fucking cover letters? [chuckle] Chad: You wasted tech assets, PR and marketing assets on fucking cover letters. Dude, I got nothing. Art and the team have literally dug the hole and they're starting to throw dirt on themselves. I mean, cover letters? Dude, I got nothing. This is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard for the tech market. Cover letters? That's the best you got, Art? Yeah, fire yourself. Joel: You're saying they didn't go deep enough? SFX: Just the tip. Joel: And they branded it, which is the funny thing, Dice AutoPen. I got nothing. [chuckle] Chad: Again, they wasted assets on something that is this fucking worthless. Joel: I have to assume AutoPen will be a suite of features, one is cover letters, one is resumes, one is like a total auto-pen. Chad: For the tech community it's really not even necessary. The thing that they're missing are the testing, all of the things that bring community together. They just don't... It's much like Google, as we're talking about our space, Art and team, Dice is one of the oldest job sites in the world, and guess what, they just don't fucking get it. Joel: How many recruiters hiring tech folks bitch about, "Gee, the cover letters just aren't what they used to be. We need better cover letters on our tech, our tech applications."? [chuckle] Chad: Yes. Joel: Oh god. Dice, Dice, Dice. Alright, let's go to our third story in the AI block. About 35% of US workers believe that their job will become more reliant on workplace automation in the next few years, while almost 10% have already been impacted by it. According to a survey by our friends at SHRM. Joel: Additionally, 23% of workers are concerned that automation will replace their jobs in the next five years. That's almost one in four, Chad. Women were found to be less concerned about job displacement due to automation compared to men. I don't know where to go with that one. Joel: But Chad, what are your thoughts on all this concern about jobs being replaced by the bots? Chad: I think the last place I'm gonna go to try to do research on generative AI and replacement and all that other bunch, is SHRM. Okay? SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Chad: They do a survey. Come on, man. This is... Again, one of the things that we have way too much of these days is shitty content, worthless content that just presses a narrative that doesn't even fucking exist yet. Right? Chad: If we start to talk to people who actually get it, and there's data that goes along with that, then let's have that conversation. But this is just SHRM trying to get into the AI conversation, trying to look cool so that Johnny can get another really expensive suit or some shit like that. Who the fuck knows. I mean, it's just crazy. Joel: Oh, that's a red alert, Chad. My spidey senses have gone off on this story. What I wanna know is, with things like this, you got up-skilling companies, how many companies in this... I wanna know what companies is SHRM now going to invest in, that this data will support to make these companies more profitable? That's what I wanna know, Chad. Joel: Because you know deep down, we're gonna make more money because we're gonna be an education source for all these HR people who are scared of being replaced, and we're gonna make money on these companies that provide services for all these people that are scared to death, and SHRM is gonna look like Duck McScrooge on Duke Avenue in Old Town, Alexandria. And Johnny Taylor's gonna be cocaine and... Cocaine and hoes and boats and whatever. I got nothing. This is some funny shit. Joel: Anyway, let's talk about productivity. That is the end of our AI block, everybody. So the United States has experienced five consecutive quarters for year-over-year declines in productivity, which has never happened before, since the data was first collected way back in 1948. The low productivity is creating compensation pressures and pushing up unit labor costs. Joel: Research suggests that the current low productivity environment is due to the constraints that the pandemic has placed on the economy, such as supply chain constraints, labor constraints and capital constraints. Joel: Increased productivity would alleviate each of these concerns as well as cost pressures. Experts are optimistic that numbers will trend towards normal again this year. Joel: Sounds like a work from home scam to me, Chad, but what are your thoughts? Chad: Well, first and foremost, we put out a podcast episode this week with Andrea from Visier, that is focused on turnover contagion. And it's fucking hard to keep pace with when your positions aren't filled. Or new employees are onboarding, in training, and just not up to snuff with their predecessors. Chad: So this isn't a work from home problem, it's a continued workforce problem, and it won't be fixed until companies start changing the ways they're doing business, by focusing on employees first instead of just the outcomes. The outcomes will come, if you put the time and the effort into your people. Come on, this is basic shit. Chad: So when the employee trust the company, they commit to the company, they stay with the company and productivity happens. Morale won't increase with more beatings, iron fists, and less focus on humans doing the job. Chad: So the article says, EY's Gregory Daco, "Acknowledged hearing from clients that remote work could be making employees, well, work less hard." And that's completely anecdotal and builds a false narrative to divert away from the real problem. Chad: Again, one of the things that we have to do, and I'm glad that we do this podcast weekly, is we have to cut through the bullshit. Period. Take a look at the market, take a look at what's happening, what is actually impacting it? It's quitting, it's turnover, it's this turnover contagion thing that's actually happening. Chad: It's still happening. Okay? It is still happening. It's not remote workers. And if it is, it's a very, very small, small fraction of the problem. Joel: Sounds like another billionaire scam, Chad, from where I sit. So your buddy, Johnny Taylor... Chad: Oh, good god. Joel: From SHRM, he was a presenter at iCIMS. Chad: If what you wanna call him. [chuckle] Joel: And his take on this was that all the productivity news at the beginning of the pandemic, we're more productive working from home, or at least we're as productive as we have been. His take was, there was nowhere to go, everything was closed, everything locked down. All you had to do was sit home with kids that probably hated you and you were mad at them. So all you had to do is like close the office door and work. And now that we have places to go, everything's open, that people are doing stuff outside of that. Joel: I have no doubt that people were really productive at the beginning, maybe are taking a few more trips to Chipotle, the Dairy Queen, the Orange Julius at the mall, I don't know where it is. [chuckle] Joel: Or what they're doing in their local markets. But they're willing to be as productive as you are willing to lead them on the projects and things that the company needs to get done. Joel: I've had coaches, yes, I used to play sports, Chad. I know looking at me, that's easy to understand. But the best coaches out there were the ones that say, "Look, if we're not performing, if you're not doing what I need you to do, if you aren't producing at your highest level, it's not your fault, it's my fault." Joel: And the best coaches are willing to look in the mirror and say, "It's the buck stops here. If we're not doing what we need to do, it's on me. And I need to motivate you, educate you, get you in the right spot, get you on the right position that you need to be in." Joel: So to me, this is a failure on the part of leadership. Maybe there's a learning curve, may be learning to motivate in remote conditions is something we'll get through. But to me, to blame the workers is just short-sighted and really lazy. Joel: Just like the best coaches in the world, they look in the mirror and say, "It's on me if we're not producing," and the best managers out there and need to look at themselves and say, "If we're not producing, it's on me." Chad: Yes. Agreed. Well, it's funny too, because we just did a show a couple of weeks ago, I think it was, where Johnny's talking about the prospect of remote work not working. Chad: Well, that asshole actually outsourced, fired somebody who wanted to go remote, and then outsourced the job to India so he could pay 40% more. That's still fucking remote work, asshole. Chad: Again, it only makes sense to the CEOs 'cause it's in their brain as they're getting ready to go to the country club on Friday, and you should be home working. Joel: We'll be right back. Joel: Just in time for lunch, Chad. Let's talk about Wendy's. They're set to deploy an AI-powered chatbot to automate its drive-through service, powered by national natural language software from Google. Joel: Wendy's aims to streamline the ordering process and avoid long lines in the drive-through lanes from turning customers away. The AI chatbot is trained to understand the various ways customers order off the menu, and includes unique terms and phrases specific to Wendy's burgers, fries and other items. Can I hear someone say, "Frosty." Amen. Joel: Wendy's has been working with Google since 2021 in areas such as data analytics, machine learning and cloud tools. The customized language model is built and fine-tuned on top of Google's own large language model. Joel: Chad, the drive-through is about to get a lot more interesting. What are your thoughts? Chad: We've got McDonald's who, they're launching human-less stores. No people work at the stores, right? This is just a step toward that. And I remember being a kid working the drive through, that was probably the best job. Working the fire was not the best job. Right? [chuckle] So being able to actually talk to people, give 'em their food. That kind of thing. Joel: Get numbers from girls. Yeah, I know what you're saying. [chuckle] Chad: I mean, yeah, it's one of those things. But it just makes sense. And if I don't have to be on the mic and have to go through all the bullshit and I can just, again, take some of those tasks off and just interact human to human through the actual drive-through, it's interesting. But then that human's gonna be taken away from the drive-through and there's gonna be a robot that's handing the bag out sometime soon. Joel: Yeah. So you remember when we talked about the Walmart robots stacking shelves, and how long would it take for someone to pick up a Louisville Slugger to one of those robots? [chuckle] And so my mind, as awful as it is, goes to the games people are gonna play with AI at the drive-through. Joel: So a little story, one spring break, I went down to Texas, South Padre Island, with a bunch of friends. And one of the friends got kind of cute with ordering at whatever restaurant we're at. He ordered Paul smokes. Paul smokes, and I'll let you use your own mind in terms of what that is a metaphor for. Joel: So anyway, the cashier didn't know what that was, and he went on to say like, "Oh, we have them in the Midwest, you don't sell them here." She asked the manager like, "Do we have Paul smokes?" He got the joke and laughed, "Ha, ha," and then whatever. Joel: So anyway, the things are gonna happen. Chad: Seymour Butts. [chuckle] Joel: Yeah. So I'm really hoping for the day that I can go to the McDonald's near me and order my barber cold ball. That's what I want. SFX: Oh my god, I love Chipotle. [chuckle] Joel: It's time for a nap. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. Outro: No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't took away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. Outro: We out.

Everything Must Go at CareerBuilder! Who doesn’t love a good garage sale? Items that have outlasted their usefulness going for pennies on the dollar to a new owner. We don’t usually associate the garage sale with HR tech, but here we are (again) with the once mighty CareerBuilder giving us plenty of bargains and clearance rack specials to talk about. Lots to talk about. But the gold plated content doesn’t stop there. Twitter has made an acquisition in our space, Elon thinks remote work is a moral issue, Google just may crush half the businesses in our space with their new search, Qualifi continues to make us Hoosiers proud and there’s a new Caryn in town, and this one mints money while vacationing, well, wherever the hell she wants. Lots to digest this week; good thing Chad & Cheese are here to make sense of it all. TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcast. WATCH VIDEO VERSION [music] Joel: Oh, yeah. Oscar Mayer is changing the name of the Wienermobile to Frankmobile. Ironically, Frank is what I call my wiener. You are listening to the Chad & Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, all beef, Cheesman. Chad: And this is Chad, did Dwight from The Office just become CEO, Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, CareerBuilder burns. Who would you rather, pitting Twitter against Google, and CarynAI. Buckle up. Let's do this. Joel: So Chad, the new dynamic, you're in a happy hour in Europe, and I'm at lunch time in America. I'm not sure how that's gonna go. Chad: Beautiful. New beer. Local, local. Joel: Seneca? What does that say? Chad: Senescal. Senescal. Joel: Senescal. Chad: Yes, Senescal. Joel: Okay. Cardinal ALE. Chad: Cardinal ALE, religiously multi-ruby ALE. Joel: So monks are making it at the... Chad: The Templar knights. Actually... Joel: The temple down the... Yeah. Chad: No, literally, the Templar knights, one of their last strongholds is really close to here, and this is where they brew the beer. Joel: Okay. Chad: I shit you not. Joel: 'Cause when you're dying in the middle ages, it helps to be drunk, that's for sure. Chad: Well, it always helps to be drunk, c'mon. Joel: Especially podcasting, so drink on a drink, Chad. Drink on. Drink on. Well, I'm glad things are going well. Things are going well. Shall we get to some... SFX: Shout-outs. Chad: Shout-outs, let's do it. Joel: Alright. I gotta go first. So I'm in America, you're in Europe. I'm gonna see stuff on TV that you're not gonna see, or you're gonna see second hands. Chad: Thank God. Joel: So this week, CNBC had a big interview with your boy, Elon Musk, and he opined about work from home, and he framed it as a moral issue, which I found really interesting. So I'm gonna play this sound bite for you and our listeners, and we'll talk about it on the other side. Chad: Okay. Elon Audio: I am a big believer that people need to... Are more productive when they're in-person. Look, there are some exceptions, but I kind of think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Mary Antoinette quote, "Let them meet cake." It's like, really, you're gonna work from home and you're gonna make everyone else you made your car work in the factory? You're gonna make the people who make your food that gets delivered, that they can't work from home? The people that come fix your house, they can't work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? That's messed up. Elon Audio: You see it as a moral issue? Elon Audio: Yes. Elon Audio: I mean, I see it more as a... Elon Audio: It's a productivity issue, but it's also a moral issue. People should get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work from home bullshit, because they're asking everyone else to not work from home while they do. The laptop class is living in la-la land. Chad: Hello. Joel: The laptop class is living in la-la land. What do you think about that, Chad? Chad: Well, I think it's pretty simple. This is what the rich guys have always done. They've pit the middle class against the lower class, against the low wage class. They've always done that. So it's like, don't look at us and the million/billions that we're making and super yachts and all that other bullshit. Now, I know Elon likes to say that he sleeps in his office and that kind of shit. That's just 'cause he's a weird fucking nutso job. At the end of the day, what this is, is what he'd said right out of the gate, it's a belief. It's a belief in his fucked up head. He's pitting one class against the other, and then he sits back with the popcorn and he watches. And that's what rich dudes with a lot of money, who can get on big TV, can do. Either buy ads and/or just get on these interviews. Joel: Yeah. So to me, we've seen this evolve, at first it was a culture issue. It was, "Well, if we're not in the office, we're not hanging out at the water cooler talking about Seinfeld or whatever." And then it became a productivity issue. And, well, I think last week we talked about the new productivity report and productivity is down as people are working from home, and now it's a moral issue, which I find really, if that's not a reach, I don't know what is. But if we're like, "it's a moral issue." And he also said a few things that stuck out to me in the interview. One is that, I think he said 3.6 million applications came in to Twitter... Oh, Tesla. Sorry, Tesla last year. When you have three million applications, and he also said it's harder to get into Tesla than it is to Harvard, was one of the things that he said. And when you have the mentality that you're more exclusive than Harvard, then yes, you better come back to the office because I've got three million other people that are willing to do the job and come in the office. So his luxury is not everyone's luxury for sure. So he's in sort of a bubble from that end. The other thing that he said was that he and Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, hang out quite a bit, and I'm sure that he and all the gang at Silicon Valley hang out... Chad: Oh, sure. Joel: And have cigars... Chad: The yacht club. Joel: And bourbon or whatever, and I'm sure what they talk about is, it's costing us a lot of money in rent and real estate and whatever else, how do we get these fuckers back in the office? And they sit around and go, "Let's paint it as a moral issue. Maybe that'll work," and this is the latest thing. So I don't know. Moral issue is a real reach from my perspective. Chad: These are all... And again, one of the reasons why I love this podcast is we get a chance to actually break down the bullshit. Just these narratives, productivity, we broke that down last week. It's not fucking productivity, guys. It's the bullshit situation that you actually make people work in every fucking day. In this case, again, he's just pitting lower class with middle class so that they can sit back and watch those two fight it out. Yeah, the last thing I wanna do is listen to the richest man in the world tell me how we should actually fucking work. It's well beyond him at this point, not to mention, he's the guy who actually went into Twitter and had all of his engineering staff re-engineer his account so that he would actually be more popular than some of the other influencers that are out there. So this is where the guy's head is. It's all about him. Has nothing to do with anybody else. It's all about him. If you wanna worship Elon, great, you should, and you should work at Tesla. Joel: And for 3.6 million people, that's exactly what they wanna do. Chad: There you go. Joel: That's exactly what they wanna do. Chad: I'm gonna switch it up. I'm gonna give a shout-out to a start-up, Adsee. I'm going to shout-out to Adsee because, the organization, we literally just did a shred on them, and they were part of a laundry list of organizations that were in it. But Vlad, the Founder and CEO over at Adsee, who's in Kyiv, by the way, first and foremost, if somebody talks about you, amplify it. Fuck, get it out there. Amplify it, number one. No matter whether it's good, better or indifferent, you can actually turn a negative into a positive, or at least a perceived negative into a positive. And we see this from so many companies when we do by ourselves or we have opinions during our podcasts or what have you, where some companies, the smart ones, they want to help control the narrative. They reach out to us and they say, "Let's talk through what you're saying. We want to know more about what you're talking about and/or try to educate you on what we're trying to do in the market." To me, that's trying to control the narrative. Trying to be smart. We have big companies who have gotten unicorn cash, who we talk about, never reached out to us at all. Now, some have, don't get me wrong, but to me, it's a huge brand fail for an organization not to amplify what's being said about them, one way or the other. In this case, a little bitty company out of Ukraine called Adsee was like, "Holy shit, let's amplify." So big shoutout to them. Joel: Yeah, and by the way, what happens when that happens is Chad and I share it, we like it, and then you get to access our tens of thousands of followers on LinkedIn. So in addition to good practice, it's a pretty good marketing strategy. As of this recording, Adsee, that's A-D-S-E-E, has 14 followers on LinkedIn. Chad: Ratchet that up. Joel: Let's see if we can get that up a little bit, if nothing else, just because of what they did. And they went deep, Chad. SFX: Just the tears. Joel: They went deep on that marketing. My second shout-out and my last one is on LinkedIn. Chad, if you've noticed a dip in your LinkedIn follower account, this would be why. LinkedIn will no longer count inactive or restricted accounts in connection and follower stats. Chad: Really? Joel: So if you've seen your number dip, that's why. I frankly haven't seen much, so that's a good news. Being in recruiting, everyone that I'm connected to is probably on LinkedIn all the time. So I didn't see a dip, but if you have, that's why. Chad: No dip here, kids. Shout-out to Lauree Porter. You might remember Lauree because she's the director of all things cool at PENN Entertainment. She was on stage with us in California during iCIMS INSPIRE. Now, Lauree went above and beyond. She actually took the panoramic view of us on stage and she made that her LinkedIn background. And I just have to say, I saw it, I laughed my ass off and I loved it. Thanks, Lauree, and I can't wait till we see you again because you bring the best beer. Joel: That's right. If you don't know PENN Entertainment, they do gaming, Chad. And if you're not playing the game at Chad & Cheese, which is free shit, well, you are a loser, my friend. You are loser because we're giving away, get this, Chad, free t-shirts from our friends at JobGet, free bourbon from our home boys and girls at Textkernel, free beer from Aspen Tech Labs, and this month's winner for free beer is Britney Kaiser. Britney Kaiser lives in Michigan, but she's a State fan. She's not a Wolverine fan. That was important, but not necessary to win, to win stuff from us. And if it's your birthday, you can win rum from our friends at Plum, and this month's winner goes to Sean Campbell. Again, if you want free shit, if you wanna be a winner, you can go to PENN Entertainment, but you can as go to chadcheese.com, click the free link and sign up up. Chad: Yep, you miss every shot you don't take, kids. Events, guess what? We are getting ready to travel. Oh, that's right. I've got some travel already happening. But we're gonna be at RecFest in Knebworth Park. That's right. Courtesy of Shaker Recruitment Marketing and the lovely kids over at RecFest. We're gonna be emceeing the Disrupt Stage. And that's gonna happen early July. If you are in the UK, hell, if you're in Europe for God's sakes, and you've never been to RecFest, take your whole crew. It's all there is to it. Not to mention, if you're in the US, guess what kids, we're going to have RecFest in the US in Nashville. And Joel and I, we were two douche bags on a yacht. We're gonna try to do the two dudes on a pontoon again, podcast of the people, but that's in September. So you have time, in the US, go to chadcheese.com, click on events in the upper right hand corner, and the whole hero image says RecFest. Click on the button, register your whole fucking team, man. This is an all hands meeting. Learn, drink, enjoy, and come to RecFest. Joel: And by the way, Chad, I think at Knebworth, there's gonna be a Lieven sighting. SFX: Oh. Joel: Lieven, our European man on the street, is gonna be there and joining us. We're gonna drag him on stage at some point. Chad: I cannot wait. Joel: Yeah, but that'll be a ton of fun. And as you're in Portugal, I will be in Vegas in June with the gang at the ERIN app, that's E-R-I-N. In honor of you not being there, they've actually purchased some cardboard cut-outs of you, like three big Chad heads, and then one, I think, full body Chad, that'll be in the booth with me recording, so that'll be a lot of fun, and that's in Vegas in June at the SHRM National Show. Chad: It's me, my plush bathroom when we were in Sweden, because we actually walked to the Kattegat because we were gonna jump in and swim with your ancestors. Joel: Oh, we did, yeah. Chad: And we had it on, and we had the beer, and we had it all. So yeah, no, that's a great pic. Joel: Oh, thinking about you in a bathroom, Chad. SFX: Can you feel the tension in the air right now? I know, I can. I can feel it all the way down on my plums. Joel: That's right. Let's talk about birthdays this week, celebrating another trip around the sun, we've got Michelle Sergeant, Matthew Bringham, Kalm O'Quinnan, tell me you're Irish without telling me you're Irish. Jack Linadare, Janet Leeds, Matt Seroka, Sean Campbell, Madison Richard, Stephanie Trisick, Caitlin Phil, Sara Grossman, Bill Cudic, and the doctor, not Jay, not Detroit, not Strange, The Job Board doctor. Chad: Job board, yes. Joel: All celebrate another trip around the sun. SFX: Happy birthday. Chad: And don't forget, kids, the Chad and Cheese are now on video. That's right, video. You can go to YouTube or you can go to chadcheese.com, you can click on the YouTube logo on the header, and you go to YouTube, subscribe, check us out. You can listen to us, you can watch us. All that fun stuff. Joel: Literally, this video is new for us. SFX: Alright. Alright. Alright. Joel: But we are loving it so far. [music] SFX: Alright, let's peel the onion. Okay, CareerBuilder has reached an agreement to sell its international business to a recruitment marketplace in Greece called Kariera. The deal includes CareerBuilder sites in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Vietnam and India. Meanwhile, CareerBuilder has reportedly laid off a significant number of employees with sources estimating up to 60% of its workforce in the US. The company has appointed Jeff Furman as the new CEO, replacing Susan Arthur, all this to focus on growth in the US, where CareerBuilder is still one of the top five job sites. Chad, lots to unpack here. Let's start with the international angle. Chad: Yeah. So this is a real Moe Greene Godfather moment here. You don't buy me out, I buy you out. So CareerBuilder bought kariera.gr in 2007, but sold it back in 2020. So they bought it and then sold it back. They probably sold it for less. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Chad: I mean, they did the same thing with Texkernel. Kariera Group will have 300-plus employees in 10 different cities. The CareerBuilder sites acquired are in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Vietnam and India. Via SimilarWeb, there is only one of those, Vietnam, that is in the top five. So there's a lot of work for the group to have, and hopefully they got this on sale, they got all these sites on sale. SFX: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel: Gee, how often do we talk about Greece in the game of world employment technology? Not very often. Chad: Never. Joel: So here's our introduction folks, Greece. I'm guessing a TJ Maxx in Milan had CareerBuilder on the rack. I don't know what to make of this. Offices, employees, this feels like an acquihire. It feels like a total fire sale from CareerBuilder standpoint. I mean, why they... Whatever. Are we gonna be talking about this on the European show? I wouldn't hold your breath. We'll see what happens, but I don't see this new company that's putting a stake in the ground in all these countries making a big impact. I don't see Stepstone shaking in their boots any time soon. So I don't have a ton of commentary on the international piece other than let's wait and see. Chad: $30 million going into Greece. That's not a bad thing. I think they're definitely gonna try to spin what CareerBuilder was. Most of these sites were CareerBuilder branded sites. There's only one, I think, maybe one or two, Jobs.de, which is one hell of a domain to have, was the German site. Joel: Do they kick out the CareerBuilder ad? Do you think they become a house of brands? Chad: Yeah, I don't think that you can in Europe. We've talked to Lieven about that. You have to stay with a brand that is something that the community and the country aligns with, and I think that was one of the reasons that Monster had problems, that Indeed has had problems. It's slowly ticked up in some of the countries, but I think, I would say that's some of the reasons why CareerBuilder is having problems. Remember, and you still see it, when you go to a restaurant and you see a sign that says, "Under new management," I think they should, in every single one of these sites, put, "Under new management," and then actually put, "We're Europeans" on it. Joel: And they need to go back to the old CareerBuilder branding, and if there's a God in heaven, they'll bring back the monkey commercials. This time with CGI, 'cause you get cancelled with real monkeys in ads these days. So, they'll have to be CGI, but they can always bring... Chad: I don't know that they have that kind of budget, by the way, but, yeah. Joel: Bring the monkey. That's right. That's right. The CGI, let's use some puppets or some shit. I don't know. Chad: So, the question is US, what the fuck with the US? Joel: Yeah, US, still a top five site, still on auto-pilot. Most of their shit is email still. The number of email addresses they have and registered to the user site, they're still pumping out tons of emails to unsuspecting job seekers. The cash cow, they can eliminate most of the employees. Now, what I've heard is everywhere from 20%-60% of staff. I think 60% makes a lot more sense based on what's going on with what history and what we think the future is on this. So you've got better insight on this, so I'm not gonna steal your thunder, 'cause we talked about it in the green room, but other than the US is about it. We're both pretty sure Broadbean is gonna be off the table very soon, if not already. More insight on that is we know more or get approval to talk about that, but you have more insight on what's gonna happen in the US, and I don't wanna steal your thunder, so you go ahead and give your opinion and insights. Chad: Yeah, I think, right out of the gate, top five, from my sources, CareerBuilder is making over a million dollars a month in arbitrage alone. Arbitrage alone. You can effectively run the operation on a skeleton crew, just for arbitrage, depending on the amount of tech debt you're facing. Hell, you could switch to a job board in a box at that point. You can kill the tech debt and still get the cash handsomely. So, we'll talk more in-depth about the CEO change in a minute, but I don't think you bring in a guy like Jeff Furman to finish off a CareerBuilder USA deal or a Broadbean deal. I believe they're both already done. And that's one of the reasons why Sue Arthur walked out the door. There's no way in hell you let Dwight Schrute do this. I mean, that's all there is to it. To me, and again, this is mostly opinion and vibes that I'm getting from my sources and from the industry itself, there's a shit load of cash that's there. There is an asset. It could be almost on autopilot to some extent. I think both those deals are done and there's nothing but turning the lights off, kids. Joel: So, if it was an acquisition target, any guesses on who might come in and pick up the yard sale rubbish? Chad: Yeah, that's a good question because this is core CareerBuilder. Everything was built around this. So, the question is, does Apollo have fatigue after this? And I don't think that they would, because this is what they do. They carve up companies and they sell that shit. So I think they're gonna get a good price out of it. Who would buy it? To be quite frank, Indeed could smash it or they could buy it. I think that's smart. Anything beyond that, it's up in the air to me, because all you're doing, if you take a look at some of their acquisitions they've had over the years, some of the big ones, Career Mosaic, we know that name, 'cause we've been in the industry for a while. Career Path. You go to those domains today, they don't go anywhere. Joel: HeadHunter.NET. Chad: They don't go anywhere. They don't resolve. It's like, "Oh my God." So, there are all these domains and what not that they're not even doing anything with. I don't even know if they understand the value of those assets or even if there is a value anymore. Joel: Yeah, from my perspective, Indeed would be interesting. I think Indeed has enough problems going right now to deal with that. And we talk a lot about companies in Europe coming to America, a job in talent could come in and buy this thing up and have instant brand, instant user base. Chad: Stepstone. Joel: Stepstone. Yeah, if you're looking to come to the US, CareerBuilder seems like a really nice door to the market with customers, with users, regardless of what you do with the brand after time, no big deal, but if you can get a foothold through CareerBuilder, that seems like a pretty good strategy to me, and if... Chad: You're not buying the tech. You're buying the lists, you're buying the portfolio, because the tech, from my understanding, again, is shit. Joel: Yeah. Chad: 20 years old, it's shit. And they've juiced everything out of that tech they possibly can, so it's gotta be an operator, who already has tech in place. Joel: Yeah, slap their logo on your brand, and you're done, and you move over all their data and customers, and you're good to go. So, you mentioned your commentary on the CEO. I'll go ahead and mention, Sue Arthur who came in in 2021, she barely had enough time to put her stapler on the desk before this shit went down. And yeah, you're right about Jeff Furman. His LinkedIn profile, if you had white bread on a profile picture, that would be Jeff Furman. He was VP of Facilities and Real Estate before this position. Doesn't really inspire a vision for the future. Chad: No, no. Joel: At any rate, so more of the same with managing the... He's in the cockpit. Who's driving really? And this things on autopilot, whatever. Jeff, I hope you have a good parachute to jump out of when this thing goes down. But yeah, it's like they picked one of the few guys left and said, "You wanna be CEO?" Like, "Sure, I'll add that to my resume." And Jeff Furman, congratulations. Chad: Yeah, as soon as I heard this, I automatically thought of Dwight from The Office. It's like, who do you hand the keys to? 'Cause who's gonna be the only one left standing? It's gonna be that fucker. Yeah, so seriously, today, May 19th, 2023, Jeff Furman is their CEO. Going a little bit deeper into the LinkedIn highlights. He was the Director of Real Estate at Johnson Controls, the Chief Procurement Officer and Head of Global Real Estate at AmEx. Responsibilities were for all global real estate operations, including transaction, project and facility management, as well as strategic planning and lease administration across a global portfolio. Jeff was hired at CareerBuilder five years ago for this specific reason, to sweep up, turn off the lights and lock the doors because everybody's gone. Joel: If Jeff's profile page was a sound bite. So, lay-offs real quick, are you in the 20% camp, the 60% camp, where are you? Chad: They're definitely more toward the 60%. At this point, they're trying to lean out. Broadbean, CareerBuilder, I personally think they're off the table. I think there are done deals already, so those individuals, well, obviously those are individuals that will go with those organizations. So, yeah, I think it's closer to 60%. One way or the other, it doesn't matter. This is a plane that's going down and Jeff Furman was hired to be the Kamikaze pilot to put this baby in the dirt. [noise] Joel: And that is our CareerBuilder block, and after that, we need a quick break. But when we get back, we'll talk about Twitter and Google. Joel: Alright Chad, let's play a little, 'who'd you rather' with some heavy weights, Twitter and Google. These aren't two startups in HR tech. These are big companies. So two of them made news this week. Two have pretty big aspirations. We're gonna break it down and give who we'd rather pick in this decision. So, number one, we have Twitter. Twitter has reportedly made its first acquisition under your boy, Elon Musk's leadership, purchasing a fellow San Fran-based job matching tech startup called Laskie. Reports say the acquisition aligns with Musk's vision of transforming Twitter into a multi-functional super app. The exact acquisition price is not disclosed, but Laskie had raised $6 million. According to Crunchbase, founded in 2021, they employed 26 people. Joel: Now to Google. Gloves are off. That's right. Google announced new conversational features for its search engine and made its Bard chatbot accessible to English speakers. Google's updated search engine uses AI to provide detailed summary responses and allows users to ask followup questions in a chatbot-like manner, Google also announced upcoming enhancements to Bard, including image responses using Google Lens, image search and integration with partner applications like Adobe, KAYAK, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Indeed and the Khan Academy. Chad, who'd you rather? Twitter's super app or Google search enhancements? Chad: This is the worst superhero I think I've ever seen. It reminds me of the Facebook for jobs thing that happened. Twitter with jobs. Elon is all over the board. No focus, wants to be an influencer. Twitter is nothing but a hobby for him. But on the other hand, Google, with generative AI search, this is about survival for Google. Last week, you mentioned Google seeing OpenAI as really a huge threat to search and to their model, to their advertising model. OpenAI has created a subscription-based model, where Google Search entirely predicated on advertising. Instead of just packing up the search tent and putting everything into Bard, which they could have done, which more than likely would have been and will be subscription-based, Google was forced to evolve the search experience by folding in generative AI, which will allow for text and voice interaction, not to mention, as you said, image. But the result sets will be served up in a new generative AI model, instead of the old timey search algorithm that we've known since the 2000s. This will allow for a new and better experience with the ability to keep advertising and then start charging subscription, aka, freemium models, which are big again, through Bard. It's the best of both worlds and evolves more than just the UI of the Google Search product. This is what Google needed, to get away from the good old algorithm they've been tweaking for 20 plus years. Joel: So, you'd rather Google? Chad: A-Fucking-men. SFX: What are you doing step-bro? Joel: Alright, Twitter, okay, super cool and interesting that they bought a company in our space. Did not see that coming, but it's really weird. They basically shut it down. Usually, when somebody buys a company, the company's website is still up. There's a big thing on the header like, "Hey, acquired by so and so." And then, click here for the press release. You go to laskie.com today, and it's like, "We're not working anymore. We're just done." There's nothing there. So it's like, why the hell would you buy this thing? $6 million isn't a lot of investment. San Fran-based, for all I know, Elon hated the founder and wanted to buy him and shut him down. For all I know, he wants to hire everyone that's working there and make them Tesla employees or Twitter employees. Maybe he wants access to the database of tech workers to come work for his company, and he wants to just give them to his recruiter base as an ego or a quick way to get resumes. But if he's getting three million resumes a year, does he really need more profiles and resume? It's just really fucking weird. I wish I had an insightful comment about what the hell Twitter is doing buying Laskie, which we never talked about on the show by the way. Chad: No. Joel: So, I got nothing, man. Usually I have something to say. I don't know what the hell Elon is doing. The super app thing, could I see Twitter having profiles like LinkedIn, where they're more professional, maybe some basic professional information or degrees or credentials? Yeah. Is this that? I don't think so, maybe. I don't know. Payments are gonna come in. He talked about Tesla automated driving. So that could be done through Twitter maybe. I don't know. It's just really weird. Now, Google... Chad: Who trusts Elon with their credit card information? Joel: Google. Google, watching their demo. SFX: Alight, alright, alright. Chad: Fucking sexy. Joel: Okay. The gloves are off at Google. Somebody at Google said, "You know what, we've been scared to launch this shit. We've been thinking about humanity and our survival. Fuck it, we're dropping the bomb on everything." So, Bard is impressive. It's still not... What's cool about Bard is, OpenAI is, 2021 was the last time that they sourced content. Unless you feed stuff into it, it's old. Bard is like real-time. You can ask it news question and it knows, in real time almost, it can comment and tell you what's going on in the news, which is exceptional. Google is leveraging everything they have in their arsenal, which OpenAI does not have. They gotta build that shit up. Google's like, "We got a whole mansion of shit. We're gonna dump it in and fuck shit up." This is, step brother is walking into the interview. We're here to fuck shit up. That's what Google did with this demo. Now, what's interesting to me as well is, I'm always curious about, who are they gonna kill in our industry? Who's in trouble? The first obvious one, the Textio's, the job description things, I think anyone that helps you write a resume is probably fucked through what's going on now. Chad: Too easy. Joel: I was searching on Bard, what is it like to work at, name a company? It was able to tell me, Glassdoor style, Indeed review style, news and the whatever style, what it's like to work there, the good, the bad, the ugly. There's real potential to fuck Glassdoor and Indeed reviews and Blind and whoever's doing reviews is fucked. Because I can go in and find out what it's like to work at any company. I don't have to go to your site, which may or may not be true, and what's seeded, what's fake? I think that's a real issue with these sites. Google Bard will do it. It'll tell you what it's like to work at a company, and to me, that's a real threat to the review sites. That's one of my main insights. So yeah, I don't know what the fuck is going on at Twitter. It's fun to watch, and I'll continue to do so, but what Google is doing is, as a user, cool shit, as an industry, shake up. A lot of people are gonna be scared about this, Google for sure is who I'm picking in this debate. Chad: And as soon as they get their head out of their ass, with regard to job feeds, and they just go over to Google for Jobs, because all that content's already marked up, new fucking, game big boy. Joel: Yeah. If and when you can say, "Find the perfect job for me," and it could just give you shit, that's... Anyway, that may or may not be where we're doing. SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: Alright, let's talk about some company getting some bucks. Indianapolis-based Qualifi, has secured $4.5 million in funding to support its growth and development. This brings total funding to $7.7 million. Qualifi plans to use the funding to enhance its hiring platform, establish industry partnerships and address recruitment challenges. The company aims to streamline the hiring process and provide a memorable candidate experience through automation and asynchronous phone interviews. Chad, your take on the news from our, who's your brothers and sisters? Chad: Yeah, so Darrian was on firing squad about a year ago, and I believe we both gave him a big applause. [applause] Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. So, there's one thing I look at as a priority and align most of my weight behind, whether I'm looking at a yes or no decision when I'm assessing a start-up. It's not the domain name, it's not the colors, it's not the brand, it's not the tech. What matters is the founder, the CEO, the visionary, the voice box, and I think Darrian is a winner. He's personable, he's humble, moldable, but most of all, you can see the sparkle in the guy's eyes. The vision is clean, the platform is clean, and that's the reason they over-subscribed. I also think it's smart, that much like Adam Gordon day with crowdfunding, you set the bar low and then you blow it out of the fucking water. So in summary, for me, I don't like the koala. It doesn't matter. I don't like the colors. It doesn't matter. I really don't like that they don't have pricing on the pricing page. I'm gonna grit my teeth when I say this, but it doesn't matter. But what does matter is that I like the tech, the vision, and most of all, Darrian is a fucking winner, and he's in a space that is very crowded, very crowded, but I think they do have the guy at the head of the table, the vision and everything necessary to make this win. Joel: Yeah, we're a little biased. We've known Darrian for a while. Just a solid guy. Just someone you wanna hang out with. Chad: I think we only had beers with him once though. So we've seen him several times. Joel: Oh, he's been at shows, he's been at conferences. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: He's around. Chad: Everybody has. Joel: But, I wanna say a sweet kid, but that's maybe a little... Chad: He is amazing. Joel: Look, he's just a sweet heart. Chad: He is. Joel: So, Indiana, we're biased. He's a Black founder. We're biased. We love seeing that. We love seeing the organic growth. Like you've mentioned, they were founded in 2019. This isn't some one-year-old company getting $10 million. They've grown organically. They employ 25 or so people. Most of them are Hoosiers as well, so that's nice to see. They've just grown organically, done it right, and we just... That's always something that appeals to us. The thing is, the whole voice interview, chat interview, texting, there's so many companies doing that. I can't imagine the push and pull of like, "We should do this. We should do that. We need to add this because so and so just launched and has that." Qualifi's done a really good job of focusing on what they do best, honing that, making it as superior as possible, and you and I both love the focus with any start-up, and these guys showcase that as well. So I speak for both of us when I say like... [applause] Joel: Great for Qualifi. Keep it going guys. Darrian, yeah, we'll have to have drinks again soon, obviously. Chad: It'd have to be in August. Joel: When Chad's back in the States and he's salty and miserable again, we'll have to get him a drink. And it looks like you need a refill, Chad, so let's take a quick break and we'll talk about Caryn with a C. Joel: Alright, Chad. Caryn Marjorie, Caryn, spelled C-A-R-Y-N, is a 23 year old influencer with 1.8 million followers on Snapchat. Chad: Wow. Joel: She has created an AI-powered chatbot called CarynAI, which serves as a virtual girlfriend to more than 1000 individuals. Since we've seen this story, it's probably up to 5000. These virtual relationships involve conversations, ranging from discussing future plans to intimate and sexually charged chats. CarynAI closely mimics Marjorie's voice and personality, and people are willing to pay $1 per minute for interactions with the bot. During its private beta test on the Telegram app, CarynAI generated, you're ready for this? $71,610 in revenue from its predominantly male user base, no shit. Marjorie believes that having an AI doppelganger can enhance her career as an influencer. Chad, what you got? Chad: It's the new phone sex line. I remember, you'd be watching TV at night and like, "Call 800-CarynAI." Joel: It was 1-900, yeah. Chad: Yeah, 1-900, yeah, whatever. But you think of it though, $71,000 in a week. Joel: In a private beta. Chad: In a week, kids. Okay, just my mind's gonna explode here. Imagine coupling this with video, synthesized video, because this is already audio, OnlyFans would fucking explode with content, revenue and... Well, let's just leave it at that. It would explode. Several 18-25 year old males' heads would explode as well. I listened to the Hard Fork Podcast, which is, I think by the New York Times, from February, where one of the journalists/podcasters, went into a Fatal Attraction like hole with Bing's chatbot named Sydney for two hours. This stuff, it was eerie, fucking eerie. Because it sounded... He was reading the texts back, these were text. This is, we're actually talking synthesized voices, more humanized. Sucks you in. It is fucking crazy. But think of, again, we keep talking about these OnlyFans, $8000 a month, $12,000 a month, this is $71,000 in a week. Joel: And she did no work. A bot did the work. Chad: Guess how this could explode. She has a portfolio of pictures. You jump into the chatbot, it's $76,000 or $71,000 in a week, will be nothing compared to what OnlyFans and these influencers will make. SFX: Doesn't anyone notice this. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Joel: By the way, no word if it's in multiple languages, which she'll also be able to do in the near future. There is a lot of money in lonely men, Chad. Chad: Wow. Joel: There's a lot of lonely men and boys... Chad: Horny men, yes, or is that redundant? Yeah, I think... Joel: That need to be divorced from each other. I love the 900 number reference. Astrologers and phone sex lines. Chad: Oh, that's another good one. Joel: We're having a party, big boy. You wanna join the party? That was great. So, we've gone from $100 hookers to $9 a month OnlyFans accounts, to a $1 a minute AI women. It's become a commodity. What's next? I guess the sex robots will be a $1000 bucks a piece, and they'll eventually be, I don't know, $50 bucks at Walmart. That's kind of like where this thing goes. Chad: I would not want one of those. Joel: Well, wasn't there a movie where somebody got a sex robot out of the trash? It was like an older model. Anyway... Chad: It was probably Idiocracy, which is where we're going, by the way. Joel: That must have been Skinemax back in the '80s, when I was watching that on regularly. Chad: Skinemax, yeah. Joel: Dude, we're doomed as a species. We're totally doomed. Yeah, once video comes and she'll do whatever the hell you want, and then the VR headsets and the sex... We're just fucking doomed. Only Jeff Furman can save us, Chad. Somebody call Jeff Furman, otherwise our species is finished. Chad: Because he's so hot and sexy, that's why. [laughter] Joel: Save us, Jeff Furman. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow, look at you, you made it through an entire episode of the Chad & Cheese Podcast, or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soup because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away, and like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. So, it shouldn’t be a shock that some industry players are “out to lunch.” Google for Jobs search results have really been wacky for a lot of users around the world, and we’re here to break down why. Indeed, who’s apparently taking an extended vacation, throws some more spaghetti at the wall, and we decide if any of it will stick. And then there’s Goldman Sachs, who’s CEO is permanently at the country club (at least his lawyers are working overtime). It’s not all OOO, however, Instawork raised millions and MOD Pizza is looking to hire millions after doing away with background checks for entry-level workers. Plus, strippers unionize! God bless ‘Murica! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. WATCH VIDEO VERSION Intro: Hide your kids lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. It's world Dracula day. Commemorating Bram Stoker's famous novel, published on May 26th, 1897. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel, private dancer, Cheeseman. Chad: This is Chad healthy budget Sowash. Joel: And on this week's show, Google for Jobs, get sleepy. INSTAR Work makes it rain, and strippers unite. Chad: Yes. Joel: Let's do this. Portuguese Chad is in full effect today. We got the barb in the background, you are on some island and the tropics or some shit. Yeah, looking good. Chad: Madeira. Yeah. It's known as the Hawaii of Europe, and Americans don't know about it because the Europeans once again, like to keep the good shit from us. Joel: Let me guess, the DeSantis Twitter meltdown isn't much news there in funky cold Madeira. Am I right? Chad: Yeah. And nobody hears about that asshole. I did see them in my feed, and I thought it was hilarious because obviously Elon likes to make everything about him. Joel: Yup. Chad: DeSantis wants any stage he can find because he's pathetic, and they had a huge obviously melt down just that... Again, everybody's been talking about how Twitter has been staying up, upright with all the cuts. And it's like, Oh, I put it under a little stress, and I think that's what you're gonna see with DeSantis tude. He's gonna fold like a fucking cheap card table. Joel: So, I'm assuming you didn't tune in, I actually tuned in 'cause I just wanted to... I just wanted to be part of it. Chad: Were you wearing your DeSantis t-shirt. Joel: Yeah, my DeSantis t-shirt is in the mail. The mail is more efficient than Twitter these days, apparently. So I got up 400,000 and it was breaking, it got up to 700 some thousand, and then at 20 minutes people just started bailing and I got to like 150,000, and then he came on. I think it got up to maybe 300,000. But I just... It's hard to believe that Twitter can't handle 700,000 people at once. Chad: When you get rid of most of your staff and more than likely, they cut infrastructure, if you think about it, he was cutting everything, I mean hell, he wasn't even paying his bills for goodness sakes. So yeah, that doesn't surprise me. I knew that there was going to be an event where there would be problems, and this was a perfect event for a meltdown. Joel: And this is a perfect event for... S?: Shoutout. Joel: Let's get to some shoutout, shall we? So I'm gonna go into an industry, shoutout first. HiringSolved our friends, sponsor at one point is apparently out of business. The hiringsolved.com site is done. I haven't seen anything in regards to messages to customers. Chad: No. Joel: But it certainly seems official that they are done. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And for whatever reason, the URL doesn't even go do Allegius who basically bought the company few years ago. So what we know about HiringSolved, started in 2012, Shon Burton co-founder who we know really well, no longer with the company or hasn't been for a while, apparently. They got some investment, they made some good hires with Jeremy Roberts, Jackie Clayton, who then eventually left. We know they got sued big time by LinkedIn back in the day, these are what we know sort of publicly. I'd be surprised if Allegius isn't still writing checks to lawyers for cease and desist letters and LinkedIn shit. But surprisingly, they didn't sell the company apparently like it was just too much of a hassle, or they just didn't have the energy to do it. Joel: My guess is they probably Allegius took in some of the HiringSolved people that they wanted to keep and just said, "Shut the fucker down" But bigger question, the whole sourcing thing, they did a big pivot a year or two ago, higher tool became higher easy. And became sort of a platform for marketing. HiringSolved look to go into ATSs and be their search engine, and then seek out who has a good relationship with LinkedIn, apparently is still kind of chugging. To me, this is like invariably, to put it short, like LinkedIn won, again. They put Hi-Q out of business, and I think in a long-winded way, they've enabled to put... Or they've been able to put HiringSolved out of business as well. Chad: Yeah. I don't. I Think you give way too much credit to LinkedIn. I think you should give all the credit to Allegius. Their inability to actually manage technology, that's generally the biggest issue. They can't focus, and I've seen this in RPM when staffing for years. They think they wanna get into technology, they get into technology shit just fucking implode. So the LinkedIn thing for them could be a huge diversion as HiringSolved was really moving back away from that and they were trying to actually dig into, which I thought would have been perfect for Allegius, the database, their candidate database. They have a huge fucking candidate database. Now matching off of that to current recs, man they can be popping. I mean they could be easily. But again, the staffing in RPO world, they're so focused on the old world of doing business, the new world just kind of like just slips away from them. Joel: Well, irregardless of that, HiringSolved out of business. Chad: My first shout-out is to a movie. When we're talking about AI, what could be better than a movie that actually shows almost the extinction of the human race, it's called The Creator. The perfect timing for the AI extinction junkies out there. It's a movie about AI, how it lives with humanity, the perspective fights back and forth, the extinction possibility, just go to YouTube, search on The Creator, watch the trailer. It drops in September. We've seen these types of movies before. Where obviously AI takes over, the robots take over, so on and so forth, but this just from a timing standpoint. Nothing could be more perfect. Joel: Yeah, what's your favorite technology end of days movie. Chad: I think War Games, because again, you're talking about a computer that literally... And this is backing me shit in the '80s, right? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Where a computer hacks into the mainframe. And again, this is AI, way back in the day kind of like foreseeing, what's happening? So I love that movie, it has a lot of intrigue kid who actually is the hacker that gets into it, it's just... It's a really cool movie. So if you haven't seen War Games, dude, you gotta check it out. Joel: Ferris Bueller hacks into the national defense system. That's great, that's great. Great. Cameron's in it. It's great fun, it's a lot of fun. Chad: Of course. Of course. Joel: So 2001 was was great, Space Odyssey, that was sort of the first film where machine kills people. Terminator for me, like 13 years old... Chad: It's amazing. Joel: Go to see Terminator, scare the shit out of me. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That was Terminator, the first Terminator always is gonna be my favorite machines kills humans movie. Not a machine though Chad? Chad: Yes. Joel: Jim Brown. Chad: No, he was a machine, he was told being machine. Joel: He was the terminator on the football field, for sure. If you see some had old footage, he was the Terminator on line backers back in the day. So Tina Turner passed away yesterday. I know that's on top of mind for everyone. Chad: Best legs in rock and roll baby. Joel: As a Brown's fan, Jim Brown passed away football player and questionable three-time NFL MVP Rookie of the Year, eight times for a C mall pro, 8-time NFL rushing leader. Arguably, the best lacrosse player in college history arguably. Chad: They had to change the rules because of him. Joel: Played in a Syracuse basketball game where he scored 50 points. Like random and off the street, Hey, Jim you wanna play some basketball. Score 50 points in a game. He was a civil rights leader. Chad: Yes. Joel: It's a complicated history. But we've lost Bill Russell in the past year or so. Two years, Jim Brown, obviously, Muhammad Ali, before that Karim, is sort of the last of that group that's still alive. He was actually in MLK's funeral. He was one of the few that actually got to go in. He got Crips and Bloods together in the early '90s, the LA riots, got them together to chill on the violence that was going there. So football and icon, but also civil rights. Complicated history, there are a lot of podcasts on it, if you wanna listen, but Jim Brown gets a shout out for me, any Browns fan will know the greatest Brown of all time, Jim Brown will be missed, and if you haven't seen, I'm gonna get you Sucka from the '80s. Jim Brown was also a movie star... Chad: Yes. Joel: And a great scene with Chris Rock ordering ribs. Anyway, if you haven't seen, I'm gonna get you Sucka. I encourage you to do that as well. If you learn nothing else about Jim Brown, watch, I'm gonna get you Sucka. Chad: Watch the Dirty Dozen. Joel: And the Dirty Dozen. Chad: That is an amazing Jim Brown, he's one of the cast of characters, but amazing film watching. Joel: Left after nine seasons, similar to Barry Sanders, but he left because that movie, that movie was running longer, he was getting fine $5 a day by the Browns organization, and Jim felt dissed. Chad: He's like fuck off. Yeah am out. Joel: He felt dissed by that and said I'm fuck I'm out, I'm out and you could still walk late into his life, so good for him. Chad: Well, like they tell you the next shout-out it's gonna love coming after Jim Brown and Tina Turner. Mike Fit Simmons over at cross-check, so we didn't get a chance to actually sit down for a drink and chat at unleash in Vegas. So he sent me a fine bottle of Woodford Reserve double oaked Bourbon. I promise we will sit down for a chat as soon as I'm back, Mike, thanks. And I shout-out to we forget. Back in the day that we had to find different classy ways. I remember I did as a sales guy, just to be able to get in the door, just to be able to get a chat and appointments a call. Joel: What was your best like gorilla sales tactic? Chad: Best gorilla sales tactic. Joel: To get in the door. Chad: Yeah, easy, the stuff that we would do today. And we would send packages, we literally would find out depending on... I was in radio, in radio sales, so it was all about promotion. So we could actually put together packages and send them off, which nobody else did, and with a little card in it, Hey, we'd love to sit down some time and have a chat. Worked 100% at the time. Joel: FedEx is great 'cause you would be alerted when it was delivered and then you could call and say, Hey, I just wanna make sure you got the package anyway Still works today Kids. Chad: It's perfect. Joel: FedEx Still works today. Chad: It's perfect. Yes. Joel: So I gotta get this shout out in quickly, you've probably... Well, I don't know if you do fast food anymore, but in fast food restaurants now, they have like a juke box for soda and you can get any flavor of anything that you want, push a few buttons. So Heinz ketchup up in the Heinz company said, hold my beer and have released the Heinz remix machine. So now they have ketchup, buffalo sauce, barbecue sauce like anything you want the Heinz remix machine is coming to a fast food restaurant near you and I cannot be happy, oh my friend. Chad: Remember when we were young, we would take the glass and we would go for the soda. Joel: The suicide. Chad: And we would get the, Kamikaze right? The suicide. You could do the exact same thing with this right? Joel: I'm so excited. Chad: Last shout out to Kamikaze beyond. We're talking about brainfood, if you haven't subscribed kids to brainfood, you gotta check it out, it is a weekly curated list from our friend Hungley, who actually does a hell of a job, we were showcased on last weeks, but it doesn't matter if we're showcased or not. Great content. Go check it out. Recruiting brainfood with Hungley, do a search. Sign up. Joel: Always love the love from our favorite porn star. Thanks Hungley. And some of our favorite people are people listening to the show Chad and it's time to remind them that they can get some free shit from us. Chad: Oh. Joel: If they go to chadcheese.com and click the free link, we're talking teachers from job get bourbon selection from each one of us, from our friends at TextKernel. Aspen Tech Labs is helping us give away beer, and plum is helping us give away birthday Rum. Each month, so it would behoove me not to mention that to our listeners and... Did I just say. Did I say birthdays as well dude. Chad: I think yeah. Joel: I think I said, birthdays didn't I? S?: Did you feel the tension in the air right now. Chad: Yeah, I can. S?: I know, I can, I can feel it all the way down in my plums. Joel: Alright, birthdays are sponsored by our friends at Plums, celebrating another year around the sun is Bruce Carrie, who whined about not being a shout out last week. The Bruce... Chad: It wasn't whining. Joel: So Bruce there you go, buddy. We'll make you famous. James Maley, Tom Hunley, James Andrew Chuck. John Johnson, Travis Windling, I believe. Katrina Kaya, who shares your birthday, by the way Chad, and our favorite Canadian. That's right. Shelly Billing Harris of the flex podcast. Celebrating another birthday. And most importantly Chad you and I celebrate birthdays this weekend. Chad is May 27th. I'm May 28th, we're on the same year, little known fact about us on this show, you can send your e-gift cards from at wooden Cork to joelcheeseman@gmail.com, and I'll make sure that gets his bottles as well. But that is another. Maybe my favorite birthday shout out of the year because we're both on it. Chad: Oh, my favorite thing is events, you know I love to travel Joel, and we are going to RecFest in the UK, July 6th, knebworth park. Kids you gotta remember, if you've never been to a RecFest, you gotta be to... You gotta go to a RecFest, and this isn't just about you going and learning, this is about you taking your entire fucking team, take the entire team and it's an all-hands day, enjoy the day, learn, have some beers together, bond. This is good for what? Team cohesion. That's right, team cohesion. Not that kind of team cohesion, Cheeseman. Then in September RecFest is happening again in Nashville. Same motif, just changing the location. Both of these... Both of these Chad and Cheese are going to be MCing the disrupt stage all technology all day. So again, if you're in the UK, if you're in the US, go to RecFest, actually good at chadcheese.com, click on events in the upper right-hand corner. And this is the first year for Nashville in the US. So we have a 50% discount code kids click on register here or whatever it says on the header, you get 50% off for your entire team. Go make it happen. RecFest UK, US. See Chad and Cheese there. Joel: RecFest is going deep. This year Chad. And if you have to mention, Carl Cheeseman, Leaven and Steven McGrath are all apparently gonna be in the house by the way. Chad: You better have a T-shirt. Joel: How soft are the Scotts. We mentioned on a show that Steven is our favorite, Scott and the Scots came out of the woodwork to whine about how hurt they were, that they weren't our favorite Scott. Who knew the Scotts were so. Chad: Work harder. Gotta work harder. Joel: So soft and I Chad without you kinda... I'll explain why I'll be at SHRM National in June. I'll be in the Erin booth. That's E-R-I-N. The Erin app. They're getting cardboard cut-outs of Chad Sowash to make sure that I feel at home and that I feel like... That I'm warm and fuzzy in the booth, we're talking Chad heads, cardboard cut-outs and a full body Chad in a bathrobe with sunglasses in Sweden, so if nothing else, if you're going to SHRM, come by the Erin booth, take your picture with cardboard Chad and the real Joel Cheeseman. It's gotta be special Chad, it's gonna be fun. Chad: Well tell Mike after this, I'm going to trade mark my likeness, just so he knows. [laughter] Joel: Trade mark, my likeness. Good luck with that my friend. Chad: Topics. Joel: Alright, Google for Jobs. We've never talked about them before. Alright, what's going on at Google for Jobs? A listener in Germany hit us up this week with the following "Something weird is happening at Google for Jobs. Most clients I work with have seen a huge traffic loss, if you do a search for new jobs, you get zero hits, some smaller EU countries are hit really hard" Chad. What do you make of this? Let's call it a hiccup. Chad: Or just an app, first off, Dylan Buckley over it directly apply, he originally turned us on to this issue then Oras Al-Kubaisi, and then we got a post from Alexander Chukovski on LinkedIn. He actually went through and had some ideas, a hypothesis of what it might be, it could be an algorithm update, a technical issue. Google Ads roll out, so they're actually looking to try to roll those ads out or the killing or reducing traffic to Google jobs or what I think is they could just be fucking with everyone to be quite frank. I mean, seriously, this to me is nothing more than understanding that this product is still an alpha and we really feel like Google should have their shit together. We should know better by now. Google doesn't have their shit together. It's gonna take a while for them to get their shit together when they do, then they're gonna be dangerous, so there's no question. But they're in Alpha kids, not to mention, think about this, shifting resources to the future, which is now Google's new gen AI search doesn't quite fit in with the current Google for job search mechanism as they try to switch over the new generative AI, and you've gotta remember what they did with Google for Hire, Google for Hire was actually... Chad: Or Google Hire came up as an applicant tracking system, they were getting some great traction, and then cloud needed resources, they needed to focus because cloud was going to have a hell of a lot more cash coming in, so they took all of those resources, said, Oh, we're gonna shut down Google Hire, see you guys, and they push those resources to cloud. If you think about it very simply, they could easily be pulling resources and just leaving kind of like a skeleton crew, if that maybe 20% time with the Google for job search as they're focusing on this new generative AI engine that could have jobs associated with it as well, so those are just opinions, but you've gotta take a look at history and what they've done before, and all of this is true. So there's plenty of opinion, plenty of fun, but I've gotta say, no matter whether it's Indeed, Google, no matter, you can't put all your eggs in one traffic basket, kids, you gotta diversify. Joel: And don't forget to mention how much Google loves the, your EU and all the fines that they put on one you. Anyway. Yes, I don't think this is a shutting down of Google for Jobs, this is not a, we're back tracking. It's gonna be gone. There was a big updated march of the algorithm taking me a lot of duplicate content, a lot of crappy content that may just be filtering into their vertical search, which is jobs, and let's be honest, there was a lot of crappy job sites that were just created to spam the shit out of Google for jobs, a lot of shitty sites, a lot of just scams, a brief perusal of Google for Jobs this morning. Most of the application sites are reputable names now, it's LinkedIn, it's ZipRecruiter, it's a company website. So it may just have been like the Google update got into jobs and now a lot of the crappy sites or the spammy sites are now gone, that could be the easy explanation, maybe Europe trailed because they're not as attuned to what's going on there, the language differences, who knows, but it seems like Europe got hit a little more. Chad: The bigger question is, like you mentioned, the generative AI, the Open AI. The barred question, what are we gonna do in AI that's where the resources are going? My guess is this hiccup happened at jobs, a couple of days went buy and someone said Shit, we gotta get somebody on this to fix this shit, they went in and sort of dialed back and flipped whatever switch to fix it, but I don't think Google for Jobs is going anywhere, I think it is... I don't wanna say it's a side project, but when you think about the AI battle that Google is gonna have to fight, that's where their resources are, that's where their best people are, the people over looking Google for Jobs are probably 21-year-old interns out of Berkeley who knows? But they wanna monetize it. It's a decent product. People seem to use it. So I don't think there's anything to freak out over here about this thing, it's just a little hiccup with things that are going on at Google, which are getting curiouser during curiouser thanks to generative artificial intelligence. Chad: Yes. Joel: So let's go to another evil empire, company that we love, all right Indeed budgets. Let's talk about that. Starting June 1st, Indeed is implementing a minimum budget requirement for each job posted on their platform, previously companies could set any budget they desired, the introduction of "healthy budgets" means that advertisers must meet the minimum budget requirement for each job they post on Indeed. Don't come to Indeed with your measly $25-job posting budget, Chad, what do you make of this news out of Indeed? Chad: So it's interesting because we actually got this information from the, were critics blog, and from that blog post, I'm gonna do a little translation for everybody, it's out there, "Indeed aims to increase job posting budgets to effectively achieve hiring goals" Translation Indeed aims to focus or force higher budgets to increase revenues, they don't give two fucks about any of this, effective hiring goals. They don't care about any of that shit. They are doing nothing but trying to make more money, so what happened, we had cost per application took a shit, cost per started application took a shit because they didn't roll it out like they normally do in chunks, they try to do it all. They tried to jam it down everybody's throat. It didn't work, right? So in Indeed's plan to force employers to CPA and CPSA model failed, so they're looking for a new way to generate more revenue. It's just that simple. So to be able to try to put a spin, which I love how Recruitics does, 'cause they have to be diplomatic. Joel: Switzerland. Chad: I appreciate that, but that's not what's happening. They're just looking at different ways, squeeze, whether it's low-end, high-end, more cash, and remember the cost per started to apply that they're still gonna try to roll out kids, is literally just the repackaged cost per click for Enterprise. Because Indeed knows that Enterprise has much higher budgets, and they wanna soak those big companies with higher prices for no reason, so that's a long-term strategy, this is just a band-aid to try to get to that CPA, CPSA. Joel: Brother we have some footage from a Indeed strategy meeting around this decision. SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time. Joel: Remember the good old days when it was like 25 cents a click, that's like, that was the maximum per click, whatever your budget was, it could be a dollar, you get four clicks. Remember the good old days of Indeed. Yeah, so much of all they do is throw it at the wall, see it sticks if people freak out, let's throw some difference. We gotta hit the wall. I gotta think that in a per application, per interested candidate world, if people have below budgets, they're gonna get very few clicks, interest applications, whatever to Indeed business is small, smaller companies, mid-sized businesses... Chad: Transactional. Joel: People just wanna... Like they wanna test Indeed, they wanna give it a spin, see how it goes. How much of it is programmatic? Programmatic, we know is pay per click, we know that the budgets can be whatever, we know that there are a lot of flexibility and things are optimized to get the most bang for your buck. This seems more like, you're gonna give us X, whether you like it or not, there is no... We're the big 800-pound gorilla. What we say goes, and we're gonna get at least this much out of you, whether you like it or not, I don't know if companies will hate it. It depends a lot of what the minimums are, nothing I saw on the news was what that minimum would be. Is it $100? Is it $500? Is it $1000? They'll certainly probably screw that up and then go back to something lower higher, who knows what will happen there, but, yeah. Indeed continues to throw shit at the wall, it seems very desperate and confused as usual, it seems fear-based decision-making, panic maybe at this point, but yeah, whatever Indeed, it's another week and other weird sort of decision that you're making, the days of focus are gone at Indeed that's for sure. Chad: Oh, God. Dude, they're reeling, they really are. They're cutting shit to, come up with this shit to be able to come out and try to push the narrative of "healthy budgets" That's what this is all about. This is all about you. We're just trying to get you what you need to fill that role. Fuck you. That's total bullshit. You're trying to squeeze me for more cash, right? You're looking at the lower end, you know that the smaller companies, you probably have a little bit more wiggle room with, but you gotta be careful 'cause that she didn't work with CPA either. You fuck that up. So you gotta be careful going into it with these minimum budgets, which is exactly what what Recruitics is calling it, because that's what it is, it's not a healthy budget, so they're trying to play this narrative game on, we're trying to help you when no you're not. Joel: That's right, kids. Take it for me, anything healthy is bad, including healthy budgets, we'll be right back. INSTAR work. Chad: INSTAR POK. Joel: In the news, the San Francisco-based company that connects hourly workers with available shifts has raised $60 million in a series D-round to enhance its use of AI and machine learning, this brings the total funding for INSTAR work to $160 million with a valuation of $760 million. Oh, I wanted to play the unicorn sound bite, but I cannot unfortunately. INSTAR work plans to use the funds to develop AI-powered training and certification programs to help workers up-skill and access higher paid job opportunities, another win for the essential workforce. Chad, what's your take on the news. Joel: Do we really need AI for job matching in the hospitality space? Really is hospitality really that complex that we need AI. No, we don't, but that's where INSTAR work took advantage of an opportunity and went after the AI cash that's floating out around there, which might be smart, because if you need more runway and you can lean heavy on the, "We're gonna build AI into our platform" You're gonna find suckers out there with money. Everybody wants to spend that ChatGPT cash. How are we gonna do that? It's good for them, but you don't need AI for matching in the space because the requirements for those positions are very basic. Now, if they were focusing on conversational AI that would drive scheduling, engaging employees to pick up shifts and those types of tasks, then I would say that makes a hell of a lot of sense. But matching, no. To me, it was a cash grab it's they saw an opportunity for more money and they went after it, so good for them, but to be able to say that this is around matching is total and utter bullshit. SFX: That escalated quickly. Joel: So remember when Handshake raised money and said it was to take on LinkedIn. Yeah, sometimes companies need a reason to make more money from their investors. Look, this is one of those things that we've said for a long time, it's a good idea when Snagajob launched their app called Snag, that was basically like, Hey, look at opportunities today. And what do I wanna do today? And build credentials and badges around, Hey, I'm a great burger flipper or whatever, and I can go take my skills to any burger place in town and pick whatever hours I wanna do it. It's a good idea. It's flexibility, it's like, what I wanna do, I don't wanna drive and I wanna deliver food, like I wanna cook, or I wanna wash clothes or car. Whatever it is, right? It's a good idea that Snagajob maybe too little too soon or too late. I don't know. There are other services here that, this is gonna get competitive. Snapshift in our backyard here in Indianapolis, Quick is another one, obviously Uber, DoorDash, all of those are trying to get into the marketplace and build engagement and brand awareness. To me, this is simply, they need to consolidate these companies, and frankly, I think they're gonna use the money that they've gotten to go buy up a Snapshift or Quick or some of the smaller one, some are dedicated just to restaurants, some are dedicated just to certain things. I think the money needs to be used to start consolidating these competitors, 'cause ultimately... Joel: Just like with Uber and Lyft, there's gonna be a Coke and a Pepsi, and INSTAR work needs to make sure that they are at least Coke or Pepsi, otherwise they're Fanta. And nobody likes that unless they're on vacation in Madera, apparently based on the bar in your background. But anyway, yes, I think AI was ML whatever is a lot of like cloud cover for what their real aspirations are, which I think is the gobble up as much market share as possible. Maybe grow on internationally, they're still pretty much a US-based effort, and I think there's a lot of opportunity around the world, but yeah, they're gonna need a big boat to do that, and I think the money that they got is gonna help them do that. Chad: So I think there are great platforms that are out there that are doing this, right, one of them being Hairy, which is literally kind of like a point-to-point solution. They're building an entire ecosystem within that platform, and then our friends over at HourWork. But companies need to understand that it's not just about reaching qualified candidates, just ask MOD Pizza. Joel: Oh, great segue, Chad. Great segue, which leads us to our next story, MOD versus DJ Sol, or also known as Goldman Sachs. So it's a tale of two companies in one corner, we have Chad's friends at Goldman Sachs who have agreed to pay 215 million to put it into a long-running class action lawsuit that accused them of systematically under-paying women. DJ Sol and the legal team struck a deal with 2800 female associates and VPs. It's a feel good story, if you will, Chad, let's go to our second contender, the tail of two cities, if you will. Joel: One of our favorite companies, and certainly one of my favorite pizza makers MOD is eliminating background checks for entry level roles. Chief People Officer, Dayna Eberhardt recently told an audience that MOD's goal was "To Be The leading employer of individuals who face barriers to employment." Chad, your thoughts on Goldman Sachs and MOD and a tail of two companies. Chad: Yeah. Oh, I think this is perfect because this is definitely the Yin and Yang of companies, so you got the assholes over at Goldman Sachs, and then you have MOD Pizza. So you know where I stand. Let's dig into this. So 2800 women impacted. Overall 215 million is close to $77,000 per person. That seems pretty pretty big. $77,000. Still not enough kids. Goldman Sachs... Joel: Did you take out the legal fees on that calculation, did you take out the third that go to... Chad: Still reported net revenues of Goldman Sachs in 2022 was 47, over $47 Billion, and their net earnings are $11 billion for the year ended in 2022. So $215 million is fucking cash out of the coins, out of the Goddam couch for God's sakes. Joel: Yep. Chad: So we need to... If we're gonna take a look at actually providing... This isn't a fine. This is squaring up what Goldman Sachs fucked up. They need to square it up. That's awesome. They need another billion dollar fine on top of this from the US government going into the actual coffers to be able to stop companies from doing this stupid shit. Goldman Sachs isn't gonna stop. There's no reason for them to because you hit them with a little piss it fine. On the other side of the fence, you've got MOD Pizza background checks, they've taken around out background checks that hire individuals with criminal records, helping them expunge criminal records, individuals with disabilities, background checks slow down the process. Chad: When it's not necessary and it's a waste of money time, you lose candidates, when you lose candidates and you can't fill positions, you over extend your current staff, your current staff gets pissy. They treat customers like Shit. Churn starts happening, and the cycle of lost revenue gets worse, then you are a asshole owners be the phrase, people don't wanna work anymore. Well, MOD Pizza is only doing the logical thing, they're getting positions filled faster, they're extending their talent pools to Second Chance candidates and individuals with disabilities, just to name a few, so that they can fill positions and not over-extend employees, which keeps employees happy. Current employees happy, and it makes for a better customer experience, more return customers, more revenue. So it's a very simple. MOD is just being smart and they're taking advantage of talent pools that nobody else is even trying, they feel like there's too much risk for it, they're even helping expunge criminal records. The loyalty there is amazing, the individuals who have been involved in the justice system, that's what they call it, have a higher rate of retention, higher promotion rate, and higher engagement rate across the board. From a mobility standpoint, MOD is talking about things like Bachelor's degrees, High School completion. Chad: Career development and growth within the company and outside of the company. This is how you actually create a culture that wants to stick around loyalty because they feel like you give a shit about them and the actions of MOD actually demonstrates that they do, even though it's good for business, if you take care of your people first, and that's job one, then the revenue, if you got a great model, the revenue is gonna come. Joel: On the Goldman story, I'm convinced these big companies have a play book, whether it's Facebook or Google in Europe or... Chad: Okay their attorneys do. Joel: Yeah. They're... In law school, there must be a class of the bullshit guide book or something, where like if were sued, step one is the, step two is this, that three is this, and we keep hammering them and wearing them down, hopefully, and if they don't worry down and we know that we're gonna die or we're gonna be in trouble, then let's make sure the calculus around that and what we're probably gonna have to pay is in line with what we can do very easily. So there's very little fear with executives to do things, it's sort of like, Do whatever the hell you want, we at the legal team, we'll make sure that the fines will be negligible, that the backlash and the press won't be detrimental to growth or... Joel: And by the time this happens will be beyond this and whatever building and whatever in the database or our ad product will be far superior in return for the small fee that we're gonna have to incur. So I'm convinced there's Algebra around this and that companies just don't give a shit, and until their purp locks. Until DJ Sol's in an orange outfit, Orange jump suited the behind the DJ table, not much is really gonna happen, we're gonna have these stories going on and on and on. MOD Pizza. Big ups to them. We first talked about them, I think when their ad ran with actually an ankle monitor on one of their employees in the ad, like, Holy shit, a company actually did this, not in a press release, but I actually put it on network television, that was huge. And we continue to talk about them, I love the term they use justice involvement, someone who was justice involved or involved with justice. That's much better than like ex-con or whatever the hell language I've been using for the last senior, so I gotta get justice involvement in my lexicon. But you're right, in terms of retention, recruitment, think about how many people that have a record never even apply to a job, maybe they apply to a couple, and it's like, Well you're an ex-con, we don't hire them. How many of those people just say, Fuck it, there's no hope, right? Chad: Yeah yeah. Joel: And along comes MOD and says, We're not even gonna do a background check on our entry-level jobs, the number of people that that probably appeals to that have never even considered going into the workforce is huge, and it's an incredible community service really that MOD is providing, and it's unfortunate that we're not talking about more companies following MOD's lead, and we watch this stuff, so we would know, but yeah, big ups to MOD. Totally courageous, gotta get them on the show and talk more about this. Shine a light on what's going on there. And by the way, there's a Blaze Pizza and a MOD Pizza. The Blaze Pizza is closer to me, but I always go to MOD because of shit like this, so it does do something, and I spend a lot of money on pizza Chad. So it does do something... Chad: Oh, I know. Joel: It does do something to the bottom line, but yeah, major applause to MOD. DJ Sol, does he even know about this? Probably not, he probably got a little... Chad: It's... It wasn't a big enough blip on the radar for him to give a shit, Yeah. Joel: We'll be right. Alright, Chad. Chad: You have too many sound effects on that boy. Joel: Let's talking about that I need to prune the edges on the sound bites. Alright, dancers at the Star garden topless dive bar. That's a mouthful, pun intended. In Los Angeles have voted to become the only unionized strippers in the US. The National Labor Relations Board announced that the employees at the strip club voted 17 to zero. 17 to zero, it was unanimous in favor of joining the Actors Equity Association, the Campaign at Star garden highlights issues such as sexual harassment, unresponsive management, and an unsafe working environment, which I've never seen at a strip club that I have attended Chad, none of that is is present, it's very present in all of them. Anyway, topless women are people too Chad. What's your take on this news. Chad: Yeah, it's fairly simple, 17 to zero. There's obviously a problem in this place, in many places, the question is, can we actually get more of this happening from Unionizations standpoint, not just strip clubs, I mean, this is an opportunity for the people themselves to be able to get together and have some of a collective bargaining agreement, we know that wages and livability, I guess you can say, is incredibly low in this country in the United States, because the corporate machine which we've built GDP on for God's sakes, has been printing out cash, keeping it for themselves, pushing it to the rich stock holders and ladies like this, there's two things that they can do, they can continue this and get into a union, or they can go to only fans. They can go to only fans where they don't have to worry about that asshole who has had four tequilas and is getting grabby. They can scale what they do as opposed to when you're doing that dance on the stage, it doesn't scale what happens in the moment. That's it. But if you're doing only fans and you can record it, you can scale it. We're starting to see one of two things happening, that live show is starting to die and go to only fans, which I know is sad for you. Joel: It's very sad for me Chad. You're right, the local strip club is a staple in every community that should be cherished and the loss of it would be just detrimental to everyone, so this is a great retention tool, okay, if you can go to a strip club that's unionized, and you know that your brother not brothers, your sisters, I guess in this case, are fighting for you in a group as opposed to being on your own and you showing up. I think it's a great retention tool, it's not like scabs are gonna come and take your jobs, it's not as if strip club artisans go like, Oh, there's a whole group of strippers right here ready to take your place, so there's a real loss of money. If these owners don't sort of support unionization and support the strategy. And frankly, Chad, I don't care how attractive you are, if you're not happy in your job, the work is just going to suffer. And that's not good for anyone. These ladies are doing God's work, and I'm going to do all I can to commit my harder earn dollars to the unionized boobies. If I know a strip club is unionized, I'm gonna go support it, and I urge all of our listeners to do the same. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

A new study says for every woman stepping into a director-level leadership role at work, two are choosing to leave. Forty-three percent of women leaders reported feeling burned out, compared to 31 percent of men, according to Lean In and McKinsey data. Women leaders are leaving their organizations at the highest rate ever. What the hell is going on? Well, don’t ask two white guys, ‘cause they’re clueless. And that’s why we brought Tracy Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas, cofounders of Catalyst Constellations and co-authors of Move Fast, Break Shit. Burn Out onto the show to dive-in and find some answers. Uncovered was a lot of intriguing data, insightful commentary … and we all got in touch with our feminine sides. Grab the Kleenex box and enjoy. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions works with employers each step of the way as consultative recruiting and engagement strategists for the disability community. 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. If you don't know, just ask your mixologist. What's up everybody? It's the Chad & Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman, and as always, the Joey to my Chandler, we have Chad Sowash on the line and we are just giddy to welcome back to the show, Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas, co-founders of Catalyst Constellations and co-authors of the bestselling book Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out. Ladies, welcome to the podcast again. Shannon Lucas: So great to be back. Tracey Lovejoy: So excited to be back. Joel: Glutton for punishment. [laughter] Joel: By the way, for our listeners in the green room, this is interesting. So in our past interviews, you weren't able to see us. On our new platform you, can see us. And Tracey comes in, and Chad and I are talking and she goes, "Wow, Joel, you're smiling. Your voice sounds like you never smile." [laughter] Joel: So, God bless video. I'm not the bad guy that you thought I once was. [laughter] Chad: Well, he totally is. He just can smile when he's bad. It's okay. It's okay. Tracey Lovejoy: I know. Chad: So ladies, give us a... Again, for listeners who haven't listened to the other episodes, give us a little Twitter bio about yourself. Not about the business, anything like that. Just about you. Tracey Lovejoy: Hi, my name's Shannon. I'm a Catalyst, recovering Catalyst. [laughter] Tracey Lovejoy: Yeah, I've spent the last 20 years in large tech organizations, creating my own ventures and leading emerging business and innovation in some of the world's largest companies like Vodafone, Microsoft, Ericsson, and Cisco, and now I'm the happy Co-CEO with Tracey Lovejoy, building the Catalyst movement. Joel: So happy. Chad: There was emphasis on happy. It's like you're overcompensating here. What's going on? [laughter] Chad: Tracey, Tracey? Shannon Lucas: We really are happy, totally happy. My Twitter bio, Catalyst, co-CEO, researcher, executive coach, mom of two human children and five fuzzy children. [laughter] Joel: Frossy? Shannon Lucas: How's that? Intro: What? Fuzzy. Shannon Lucas: Farsi, fuzzy. [laughter] Joel: Fussy. [laughter] Chad: Jinks. Joel: Is that like Fozzie bear? We got Frozzie. Chad: Fozzie. Yeah. Have the Fozzie. Shannon Lucas: That's more my husband. He is a little on the bear side. Joel: Tracey's got a lot going on. Tracey Lovejoy: I have six real children and two fuzzy. [laughter] Chad: So does Shannon. Six. Six kids? My God. Tracey Lovejoy: Six kids, two fuzzy babies. Shannon Lucas: Six boys. Tracey Lovejoy: Six boys. Chad: Wow. Okay. So how old's the youngest? I've gotta... Tracey Lovejoy: Seven. Chad: Seven, okay. And the oldest? Tracey Lovejoy: Just got married in Melbourne, Australia a couple weeks ago. He's 28. Chad: Very nice. Now that's a hell of a span right there. Tracey Lovejoy: Yeah. My husband brought five to the party and I brought one. [laughter] Chad: So Joel, I threw this topic out to you around women in leadership leaving their posts and I thought, we need to get a couple of strong females who actually can understand this, we can't, we're just dumb dudes, on the show. And then your response was, "What? What's this article about?" [laughter] Joel: Was that when I said, "What's the title of this? Chicks that can't hack it in the workforce?" Was that our cancel title? Tracey Lovejoy: Keep listening people. Keep listening. It's gonna to be interesting. Push through. [laughter] Chad: Yes. So we've obviously been saying much to do about females leaving the workforce. Not just leaving the workforce, but getting into leadership positions. And we've been talking on this podcast for almost, what, six years? Shit, it has been six years. About getting more diversity into the C-suite, getting into the ranks. Well, that's starting to happen slowly. It's trickling, but it seems like it's become more of a revolving door than anything else. So what the hell is happening? What are you seeing in the market and with some of these articles, what were you able to extract from some of the studies? Tracey Lovejoy: I just want to say first, thank you for having this conversation. Joel: You're welcome. Tracey Lovejoy: It's a super important conversation and snarkiness aside, it is hard. It's hard to hang sometimes in these large corporate environments as a female exec. So thanks for creating this space. Joel: You're welcome, Shannon. Chad: It's what the space is for. So welcome to the space. Now, tell us what the hell's going on? Shannon Lucas: It's a summary as of the topic. To some extent, I'm pointing to the amazing articles that you queued up for us Chad, in talking about this. I think Jacinda stepping down in New Zealand has really created a global discussion point for us. This is related to also several key female executives stepping down. And then in last year, in 2022, there was a report put out together by McKinsey and leanin.org, Women in Work, that are looking at the phenomena that are happening. And this is something that you were pointing to us as well to circle this conversation around. Shannon Lucas: In that report, there are good things and then there are things that are showing that in a lot of ways, we're not seeing changes across the marketplace and organizational shifts. So we do see small, I won't call it quite incremental, but we do see small shifts in women in leadership at all levels when you look at the report. Even at the highest level of executive from 2017 to 2022, we do see about a 6% increase of women in those highest positions. I think what really leads to this conversation is a key finding that you do see double the women leaving at the director level than we see for men. And they point to a few key phenomenon that they saw in this study that they relate to that. One being, that it's really emotionally hard to be a woman in the workforce. Shannon, a nice way of talking about this is the emotional labor that we have to do. In the report they talk about microaggressions, they talk about having to defend yourself more as a woman. Joel: Can you define microaggression before we talk about it? Because I think, to a lot of people that's a new term. Shannon Lucas: Yeah. So it can be... Actually, I don't know the definition off the top of my head, like in perfect. So I can more talk about what it feels like when we experience it. Joel: Examples. Shannon Lucas: Yeah. It can be even unconscious statements that will come our way as women or people of color or anyone who's a minority in the moment that diminishes you and your value. So it could be, "Can you move over at the table?" It could be... Joel: Can you get us coffee? Shannon Lucas: Well, yeah. That's a very... That's a macroaggression. [laughter] Joel: Can you talk a little bit louder? I mean a little bit softer? Or, wow, you're so much, you're so emotional. These can be microaggressions that are happening. Another thing the study talks to which I think falls into the microaggression category as well, is not being recognized for the role we have in the company. Being assumed that we are more junior than we actually are. And so, someone walking into a room, perhaps, I'm actually senior to this person, but making the assumption because of my gender or my color that I play a role that may be lower within the hierarchical chain. So this is a key reason they point to. They also talk about the desire for more flexibility, and so as organizations are moving back to bring people into the workplace, women are leaving jobs saying, "I wanna go someplace that maintains the flexibility that I've come to really love, both because perhaps I still have a greater role in my home, which statistically is still true, but also because some of those microaggressions and the ways I have to justify my value aren't experienced as much when I'm in a remote-work world. And so I can remove myself from some of the things that feel bad and exhausting and the emotional labor if I'm not constantly in the office space." Joel: Either of you, your take on... COVID was brutal, just brutal for women in the workforce. Have we recovered at all from the pandemic? Tracey, you're nodding your head. Talk about the lack of progress after COVID, or your viewpoint on the state of women in the workforce after COVID. Shannon Lucas: Oh, I'm laughing because I don't think any of us are truly recovered from COVID. And as I see all these organizations that are calling people back, every coaching call that I get to do where someone says they're... Even though it's in my contract, they're starting to challenge me, they might fire me. And it is... People are still exhausted coming out of the pandemic, because we were working more and we're working under harder conditions where it became especially we work with change makers in the world, and change makers have to work through influence across silos, and that's actually harder in the virtual world. So we are exhausted coming out of the pandemic still. Joel: Is we women, or men and women? Shannon Lucas: I meant more globally as a workforce that just, as humans, yeah, that's what I meant. Shannon. Tracey Lovejoy: I think one of the things that the pandemic exposed to everybody, and it wasn't felt by everyone in the same way prior to the pandemic, is the challenges we have with basic access to childcare from a almost infrastructure perspective in the US. Now, European companies do this differently, and just because of the way that that... Access to that ends up impacting women's ability to be present and show up the ways they wanna show up in the workplace, if we don't have that infrastructure in place, it disproportionally affects women. The other thing that it disproportionally affects though, and we saw this 'cause so many places actually folded, there just wasn't great business models with care is, okay, as a middle-class White woman, I could have my kids in the other room and have them on an iPod, but if I was a frontline worker who didn't have access to healthcare, I couldn't bring them to the places that I was going. And so just the amount of managing that you had to do around that potentially up to losing your job. And so, while we have shed a light on this, I think that it's a pretty intractable problem in our US society which is unfortunate 'cause it also impacts men too. Tracey Lovejoy: There are single dads, they're also trying to lean in and help too. So it's like it impacts everybody, and I think we need to look at some of those structural things underpinning all of this. Chad: It seems, at least looking at the report from McKinsey, that there are three major reasons why females are leaving. Number one, there's more hurdles than there are for men. They're overworked, not compensated for some of the things they do, we'll talk about that. And then things aren't changing. So to boil it down for me when I was reading this, it's just that the old boys club still exists, and that the change hasn't happened, that's why there's more hurdles, that's why you have to work harder because it's hard to break into the old boys network. How do we get past this 1950s way of working and actually transcend into 2023? Tracey Lovejoy: I think it's interesting because when we talk about systemic prejudice, if you will, it's not like people are intentionally showing up and saying, "I want less women in the boardroom, or I want less women on the leadership team." As humans, we have a natural predilection to seek out places that are safe, like for like, all of those things. So I wanna sort of put that, and so what it requires is a deeper self-reflection, a deeper self-awareness, a commitment to lean into wanting to help which requires emotional labor itself. As we were chatting at the beginning, I think one of the problems that we're realizing is that third-wave feminism helped a lot of women lean in, develop the skills, stand in our power, all of the things. I can say as a mother of six boys, [chuckle] that what we didn't see after the fact was helping men also lean into some of the other traits that might... As women, we leaned into more masculine traits. The '80s, we saw the big shoulder pads and trying to be more man-like. Working girl, we can go back to that. Tracey Lovejoy: But for men, when I was sending my son to kindergarten, I literally cried for weeks because I knew what was gonna happen. I knew that his sweet precious self was gonna start to be told that it wasn't okay to have feelings in the classroom, that it wasn't okay to cry, that it wasn't okay to be vulnerable, that if he showed up that way, even if it wasn't normalized in the classroom, it would happen on the playground, and it did. And so we have this legacy now that these women are ready to lean in, but that men have been told that that vulnerability that could be their strength in helping to create this change wasn't wanted or desired, it wasn't powerful. So what that leaves then, is the women right now to do the emotional labor in the organizational context to help create this change. And that's one of the things that you're referring to, it's this other dimension. We show up twice as much supporting other people, trying to cultivate diversity, not just for ourselves but across. And that comes at a toll 'cause we also have to, as you said, prove ourselves a 10X factor that we're capable for the jobs. Chad: Not for the same pay either, by the way. Tracey Lovejoy: Not for the same pay. That's exactly right. Joel: How much of it is just learning to speak each other's language? 'Cause I think when you say, "Get in touch with your feminine side," that men automatically think, "I gotta be a big wussy if I wanna work with women." [laughter] Joel: And I think that's a false premise. And when you talk about, you go to the workplace and say, "I have to put my masculine hat on and I have to be bold and interrupt people and do that," I think telling men you gotta be emotional and cry at work, I don't know if that's the right message. I think it's more... And tell me if I'm wrong, it's more about just understanding your language as you guys have worked really hard to understand our language. Where am I right or wrong on that? Shannon Lucas: I think you're right, and I'll tag back to something Chad said and then bring it back together. Chad, you had asked the question, if the old boys club still exists, how do we come to a different world? I think starting with even shifting from calling it an old boys club is a starting point. Because when people hear that, it's really easy to create distance from that. And to say, "I'm not intentionally part of an old boys club." Instead, to begin to frame it as thinking about in any system, someone has power, any system. The systems we happen to be talking about, the power is predominantly sitting with older White males in this case, but in other systems, other people have the predominant power. To really shift from whoever is there, it starts with the people in power embracing that it is their norms that have become dominant within the system. That's just what's true, it doesn't matter... Any anthropological study you go back to, that's what has happened, and that's how we work as humans. And so to your point, Joel, as we think about, talking more like you, we first have to tap into what is unconscious bias. The system is built for the people in power, that's just how it's happened. And so if we all can actually agree, "Oh, there's ways I've learned to work in the system that I'm not even aware that I've learned." Shannon Lucas: And that's part of what Shannon was talking about in terms of the way that we've trained men and women from the very beginning. If we can say, there's ways of working and we can help people safely tune in to what's happening there and what the positive and potentially negative consequences are of the normal ways we're working, and not make it a blame game, and not be like, "You've created the old boys club." But create this way that we're all gaining awareness, that's where you can begin to see people safely change. And so really, solidly good unconscious bias training helps all of us see where we've adopted some of this thinking. I remember being in a training once and the woman openly admitted, she said, "One of the first times I looked at my gender unconscious bias is I got in an airplane, I was surprised to see a female pilot." Those are things that can be born into us. There's that old joke we've all heard of a man was with his son, they get in a terrible accident, they arrive at the hospital, and the surgeon says, "I cannot operate on this boy, it's my son." How is that possible? The surgeon is his mother. Right? Chad: Wait a minute, it could be his stepdad, it could be his stepdad, probably. Shannon Lucas: It could be his stepdad, it could be his gay dad. It's an old joke. [laughter] Shannon Lucas: We're in a very fluid, beautiful world today that's incredibly inclusive, but the joke's origin is around gender bias. And so if we can acknowledge like yeah, power comes with a set of ways that we behave and let's make those really explicit, then we can begin to have shared conversations, like you're saying, Joel. And I don't... You think that while emotion is certainly important and an important thing that we need to talk about, it's also just, "Oh, I might accidentally be doing microaggressions even if I don't see myself as someone who's aggressive, even if I know I'm actually not biased and I love having female employees, colleagues, bosses." Joel: Or one man telling another man, "Dude, no, that's not cool." That doesn't happen enough either. So I think having men understand that whole dynamic will help each other as well. One of the great discussions we've had doing this show is with Torin Ellis, Black man influencer in this community. We asked him what can we do to help as two middle-aged White guys, and he said, "Speak up. When you see bullshit, call bullshit." And I think the same goes for women in the workplace as well, in this example. Tracey Lovejoy: If I connect that back to your point though, 'cause I wasn't advocating obviously for men crying in the workplace, but it does end up with a certain amount of vulnerability. And in that moment you're making yourself vulnerable, you're monitoring yourself, there's a self-awareness that that thing was uncomfortable, and you're stepping into a space that you weren't invited to step into, and that can be really scary. And so there's this vulnerability that is like a precursor in a way to us being able to have these authentic conversations. The other, sort of call to action for that allyship though, is tapping into that vulnerability again in different environment. So one of the DEI leaders that I was just talking about said, "I got out of just having conversations about the traditional allies," which we can talk more about, and she said, "And I curated a group of White guys who are in leadership positions, but my job there is to create that safe space for them to ask the vulnerable questions." And I think we all know that even myself as I'm leading this DEI exploration, I have to own that I have nerves about maybe stepping in it or saying it the wrong way. My intentions are good, but that's not always enough. Tracey Lovejoy: We have to be curious and willing to admit like, "Oh, I'm sorry that that thing that I thought was okay is offensive to you," and listen and take that in. But again, there's an emotional ability to regulate there that helps us through this process. Chad: But there are instances, and I would say many, where guys like us, we sit back and we're like, "Well, looks like we've been the problem. We need to shut the hell up and just sit down." And so therefore, you don't get those individuals who could prospectively be great allies, but they're more pushed off into the corner. And they, I think, extract themselves from the situation more than anything else. What do we do in trying to evolve a workplace, which literally is still 1950s type of punch the clock, come in. We've just recently been able to talk about remote and hybrid because of a damn pandemic. But how do we start to take this 1950s thought process, Mad Men process and move it? How do we do that? Because every time we do, we spend millions of dollars, billions of dollars every year in DEI training. It's not doing anything. We're seeing barely any outcomes. So money is being spent, but we're not seeing progress. What the hell do we do? Tracey Lovejoy: As I have these conversations, I think it's, there's the two sides, and there's the call to action for the men to lean in more. Right? It's really easy to take two steps back. And I don't know how to fix that exactly. As we talk with Catalyst about creating any kind of change, right? So this is the work that we do, we work with these innate change makers who see better visions of the future and can't stop themselves from moving into action to realize that better vision. Tracey Lovejoy: And no matter what kind of change you're making, I've increasingly been talking about the emotional labor of change. With you're in an organization and you have a sort of big, bold audacious vision and the organization is resistant to it, you have to be really clear about how much emotional labor and your own energy you're willing to put in to move the needle at all, or you can scale back your vision and maintain some more of your own energy because you're closer aligned to what they want, and so you have to be comfortable with that. Tracey Lovejoy: The emotional labor of change agents doing DEI work, I think is 10X, because everyone is going into their corners and not knowing how to... Being afraid to step in it, not knowing how to be a good ally, not knowing how they might be contributing to it with that unconscious bias etcetera. So it's sort of a dual call to action. It's like people who are allies and on the DEI leadership track, be... You're gonna have to recognize that you're gonna need to do the emotional leadership. So how do you create a community and places where you can recharge safely? And then on the other side, we just need more people to lean into being vulnerable to have those challenging conversations. Joel: Chad mentions zero progress. But I wanna throw some numbers at you guys and you guys live this every day. For every man, almost two women are attending college, in the United States. 70% of high school valedictorians are women. Over 50% of grads are women. Almost 60% of professional degrees are gotten by women and even at MIT, 47% of the degrees are obtained by women. In 1995 we had zero CEOs that were women in the Fortune 500 and today we have roughly 10%. Is that progress or not? Shannon Lucas: Yes. Joel: Okay. Then what's the disconnect from the valedictorian to, I'm gonna get the hell out of the workplace. How do we bridge that gap? Or can we? Tracey Lovejoy: Can I come back to that question, Joel? Joel: Sure. Tracey Lovejoy: 'Cause I love Chad's question and I have five calls to action. Not for you guys to do all of them. [chuckle] Handpick and then we'll talk about the gap, I promise. Chad: Okay. Tracey Lovejoy: So it's like here's a menu, not a like everything. One, if you sit in an organization, ask folks in your leadership, what are our statistics around diversity? How do we measure them? How do we know they're working? Just ask questions, because the more that leadership hears these questions, the more they think people are serious about it. That takes almost no work. So it's like, set yourself a goal. Once a week, ask some leader in the organization about what's happening with diversity, but getting a little deeper in a meaningful way. Tracey Lovejoy: Number two, something else you can do. Take some training on unconscious bias. And there's so many great resources, like just watch a TED Talk. They're amazing TED Talks on unconscious bias. Go to Coursera, go to LinkedIn. Make yourself aware. Begin to make notes of where your unconscious bias pops up. Right? 'Cause when we're really honest with ourselves, we see it everywhere. Man, I lock my doors in certain neighborhoods. That is embarrassing for me to say out loud. And that totally happens for me. Total unconscious bias that happens for me. Number three, name it. You already said this, Joel, and I love it. Name it if you see things happening, right? Call it out and be like, "Hey dude, that's not cool or wow, that felt strange to me. What was happening for you?" And you can name it to the person. You can name it aloud, you can name it in different ways. Tracey Lovejoy: Number four, remember this is a menu, you don't have to do all of them. Mentor women. Statistically, women hear more feedback about their confidence and their soft skills. We have this dilemma of we are either too much of a bitch or we're too passive, and so we get a lot of feedback in that continuum. What men usually get mentored on are hard skills that are really valuable to the organization and help them move up in really concrete ways. So, mentor. All right. Fifth one, show up for activities around diversity. Take that this is... I put it on the list last because this one is maybe you already got a packed schedule. It's hard, but I already gave four other things that you can be doing that's really, they're somewhat easy. So that's my menu. And now, Joel... Joel: Tracey, you should know that if there's a menu in front of me, I'm ordering everything. [laughter] Shannon Lucas: I love it. Joel: Pick and choose, yes. Chad: He generally goes toward the buffet. Joel: Yes. Yes is my answer to the menu. [laughter] Tracey Lovejoy: We have the gender buffet for you there. [laughter] Tracey Lovejoy: Yes. Shannon Lucas: That's right. All right. Tracey Lovejoy: I wanna say something though about, Tracy just building onto that. I'm reading this great book about how to be an anti-racist and I think that the same is true. I actually hadn't thought about it, do we say anti-misogynist? I don't know what the gendered version of this is. Chad: [laughter] Yes. Tracey Lovejoy: But the position is really clear and I love it, which is there's no neutral here. Now in the racist world, we can have racist thoughts and ideas he moved away from categorizing a person as a thing 'cause we move through different things. And to Tracey's point, our prejudices might come up in some context more than others. But this goes back to if you're seeing something or you're participating in racist systems or racist policies, the only option to combat that is not to be neutral on it, but to be an anti-racist if we really wanna see change. And I think the same is true for women. Chad: One of the things that Joel said, I wanna hit because I think it is incredibly prevalent within our society, is that, well, we are seeing some change. Well, at the rate of change that we are today, it's gonna take 125 years, actually get to equity. Do you call that change that you will accept? Fuck no. Yeah. Has it changed? Yes, it's changed. Is it incremental? Is it almost worthless? Fuck yes it is. So the question is, how do we actually make change so that we can move more toward equity in our organizations without the government having to step in like they have with salary transparency, to actually force the issue? Chad: We're falling in traps left and right because we think we see progress which really isn't... It's not really there. And we're not gonna see it in our lifetime. So what do we have to do? I saw the menu, I get the menu, how do we not fall in these traps? Tracey Lovejoy: But this is my own personal opinion I will say that out loud, but I think unregulated capitalism is destructive for humanity and society. So if we're expecting corporations to do this out of the goodness of their heart, I think we'll be waiting a long fucking time. I think that's right. [laughter] Chad: Okay. Joel: Does that mean that we should go to regulating how many people should be on the board? Of what color and what gender? No, I don't think so either. Joel: Shannon, interesting point. So we interviewed Cindy Gallop a couple years ago, and I don't know if you know Cindy or her work, but she's pretty no nonsense. And one of her ideas was that if you're expecting the system to change, it's not. It's only going to change if we have more women founding companies. If we have more Black men and women founding companies, more people of diversity. Agree, disagree 'cause I sort of agree with her, there need to be more government programs, more money into education or people that are founding companies that are diversity. To me trying to fix what's already there is gonna... If not impossible, be really, really hard. And to Chad's point, you'll see incremental change and then everyone will point to that. But is it real change? Probably not. Tracey Lovejoy: I think it's all the things, Joel. I think we need to look at the healthcare system. I think we need to look at, like, California actually has regulated board compositions, so, well, in a few years we'll have some statistics about how that's playing out. Joel: And you mentioned Europe, maternity leave and things like that in Europe. But what are you guys seeing in Europe? Tracey Lovejoy: Totally because... But that's the other side. If the paternity was always even, then women could get more help in that place too. My personal belief in, and this is sort of my personal mission statement is around the power that the largest multinationals have. They have more money than most governments. They transcend national borders, they employ more people than the federal government can touch if we look at them collectively. Tracey Lovejoy: So I am not giving up on, I think we definitely need more female-founded, people-of-color-founded, that marginalized people founding companies. But in order to sit on a billion dollars of profit and have meaningful impact at a systems-level problem, I think we also need to be fixing the big companies. Joel: And is that government that makes the biggest impact? Is it customers saying, we demand this out of our public companies? Tracey Lovejoy: The customer thing is interesting. As part of our Catalyst Leadership Trust, we're actually looking at the impact of what up-and-coming customers are gonna be demanding of large organizations. And in that community, we have a lot of C-levels from some of these really large companies. And this is alive for them. And it's alive on a lot of different levels. Not just from a technology perspective, how they need to engage but what deeply do these new customers care about? And certainly sustainability and equity are big factors in that. Shannon Lucas: I have maybe a not popular perspective here. [chuckle] Joel: That's our show, babe. [laughter] Chad: Bring it. Bring it. Shannon Lucas: It's all you do, it's okay we are ready. Joel: We love to be unpopular. Shannon Lucas: Change takes time. Chad: 125 years, Tracey. Shannon Lucas: I'm not advocating for 125 years. Chad: Okay, okay. Shannon Lucas: But this is part of the work that Shannon and I do that, the title of our book Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out. Is the idea that the natural change makers among us wanna move so fast and we're doing it faster than people and systems are ready for. And that's how we're breaking shit. We're breaking relationships, we're getting ejected from organizations, we're burning out in the process. Shannon Lucas: So I'm not saying that 125 years as a woman, as a mother of a daughter, these aren't things that I'm saying, "Yeah, okay, we'll get there." But there's a reality of the adoption curve. There's a reality of the tipping points that happen. And something that has to happen as change is taking root, is people have to see the benefit of it. So we're beginning to have really good data that show us between the work that I don't remember, Gina, the actress who really looks at women in Hollywood, this work that Sheryl Sandberg does with Lean In, together obviously with McKinsey report, we're beginning to have really reliable good data. Shannon Lucas: We have amazing data on diversity that shows public companies that have diverse boards and leadership actually have a better financial return. And once you see those kinds of numbers, you're beginning to see organizations adopt it. Not just out of the goodness of their heart, but because it actually makes the right financial sense for them to do it. We're doing it badly, we're doing it as a checkbox, we're kind of half-hearted because it's not where the focus is for most companies. Shannon Lucas: And so as we're going through this change curve and as the adoption has to take hold, women are leaving and they're starting their own companies, and they're demonstrating the power they can have, and they're finding organizations that are more flexible and actually understand the power that women can bring so they don't have to fight the fight. That's what the statistics in the report show us. But it's happening. Yes, I want us to do more. Yes, I want more women-led businesses. Shannon and I are a women-led business. Tracey Lovejoy: I totally agree, Tracey and that was something I was gonna bring up earlier. Because humans also, our brains can't understand exponential change. And the beginning part of an exponential curve feels really fucking slow. [chuckle] But you do hit this tipping point if you, especially if you have all of those things in a system that becomes the flywheel. So I totally agree with that part. I have a question for you guys though. All right. So as White dudes, what are your answers to some of these problems? Chad: Get involved? I think right out of the gate, not taking the easy way out and extracting yourself from the conversation. Actually getting in, asking the dumb questions, and being a real advocate. I think it's really easy to feel uncomfortable, but guess what, as a White dude, I don't know what uncomfortable feels like compared to a female in a boardroom or a person of color in a boardroom or something of that nature. So I just need to suck it the fuck up and drive on as we've told everybody else to do. So it's kind of like we're starting to feel what everybody else around us has felt for years. And now we're like, "Oh, wait a minute I'm uncomfortable. I'm gonna get outta this." Shannon Lucas: I don't like it. I don't like it. Yeah. Chad: Yeah, I don't like this. So I think we just need to stop taking the easy way out. We need to actually get involved and it's gonna be uncomfortable. And that's good 'cause that's what... Change is uncomfortable. Joel: I think calling bullshit when you see it, is something that I'd have a more awareness of. I think to your point, Tracey as well is, I have a daughter 13 years old and I'm incredibly aware of not micro-aggressing her, I guess. [chuckle] Pointing out where leadership that women can be CEOs, that women can be leaders of countries. And where I see it in my own life to highlight that. Just as a parent with a 13-year-old, I know that my mother as a 13-year-old, the world and the opportunities that she had are much different than what my daughter, her perception of the world and the opportunities that she has. And if you look at progress, I can tell you my mom had a much more closed view of what her life was gonna be like than my 13-year-old daughter today. Joel: So to me I have to be a champion for her to say, "Women are awesome, they're leading companies." When I see a startup that's a cool idea. I'm like, "Look at what this woman is doing." I wanna point out and highlight to her that women kick ass. And if I can help her, and I'm a man saying women are awesome, to me, that is the ultimate gift that I can give to the world. If I'm getting in touch with my emotional side here on this podcast, which I think I can. Tracey Lovejoy: We haven't made you cry though, Joel. [laughter] Joel: Oh, it's coming. It's coming, Shannon. If I can elevate her, to me I've done my job. I don't work for a Fortune 500, I'm not in a position to make any sort of big swings from that perspective. But if I can make a difference in my daughter's life, to me that's kind of what I really focus on. Chad: Yeah and we're a couple of saps to be quite frank. I think, and Joel might disagree, but I think our favorite commercial, like Super Bowl commercials... Joel: No. Oh, God. Chad: Is that Audi commercial with the dad and the daughter and she's racing. They keep saying you can't do it. And he's there, and she does. And it's just one of those things where I have two daughters as well, so it's like, I want for them... Joel: And the dad's like, "What am I supposed to tell her? She's not gonna make as much as a man?" What am I supposed to... Yeah. Chad: Yeah, yeah. And it's like, no, fuck no. And I'm not gonna stand for that, and that's where I think we have to be as White dudes, but we've always just kind of faded into the woodwork when it became uncomfortable. Joel: And I see her falling into I guess the cultural trappings of, you're a woman, this is how you're supposed to act. And anytime I can pull her back to, no, you don't have to take that. You don't have to just... Tracey Lovejoy: That's awesome. Joel: Do what someone says because you're a female. Get out of that stereotype because you don't have to fall into that trap. I think I'm finding myself do that more and more with my daughter. Tracey Lovejoy: If I had one more call to action for people, I think it would be, thinking deeply about the equality versus equity. You're going back to the numbers, and it's like, if you all start from different spaces behind the starting line, then an equal race is not gonna be equal. And so equity is going back to the numbers that you were talking about and saying, look, when we're looking for a board position, we're looking for a woman, and our traditional criterion meant that they had to have C-level experience at a large public company. That funnel is really small because of all of the micro-decisions that were made before that. And so getting to equity is thinking deeply about where can we lift someone up where we know they'll still be able to do the job? We might need to be able to give them a little bit more support to fill in those gaps, but we're committed to the diversity and the equity. Joel: Tracey is clapping by the way, for listeners that can't see. [laughter] Shannon Lucas: Call to action. Tracey Lovejoy: I didn't get a Joel clap though. [applause] Joel: It takes me a while to catch up Shannon, and Chad will attest to that. And that is Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas, co-founders of Catalyst Constellations. Chad, another one in the can. And I don't know about you, but I'm a little smarter and a little more in touch with my feminine side. We out. Chad: We out. Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.